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[Cyroth]

The decline of split-screen console games.

Here, have all my YES
That used to be the only reason me and my friends even bought the damn things.

Now most things that have split screen or other multiplayer-on-one-console modes are... Mario Kart... bad Mario Kart clone... Mario Party... bad Mario Party clone... that and fighting games

Where is the Mashed, Micro Machines, Timesplitters or heck, even Return Fire.

[Neonivek]

Hmmmm... Way of the Samurai the first

And... that is it.

If only because the only way to the best ending in the game REQUIRES you to receive the hints and knowledge the other paths give you. (or spoilers) The only paths that are oddly a complete waste of time are the "Citizen" paths but they have special bonuses you can't get anywhere else (such as the best sword in the game)

But let me add another

Games with multiple paths that turn out to have exactly one path

Now the exception to this are games where the different paths give you different pieces of information and you can explore all the paths to get the full story. Yet otherwise it is rather annoying to flaunt the idea of multiple paths when really they are either slight alterations or they all merge into one path.

[MaximumZero]

People who come into my store and don't know what fucking console their idiot kid owns. Wait, does that count?

[notquitethere]

Now most things that have split screen or other multiplayer-on-one-console modes are... Mario Kart... bad Mario Kart clone... Mario Party... bad Mario Party clone... that and fighting games

Yeah, and there's a real lack of decent co-op one-console rpgs. It's a fun genre and it's basically neglected on newer consoles.

Hmmmm... Way of the Samurai the first

I think I vaguely remember this series. I'll check it out sometime!

Games with multiple paths that turn out to have exactly one path

There's very practical reasons why this is often the case. Basically, long-form narrative games with branching choices need those choices to merge back in to some degree otherwise the work required to write them would become impose (due to combinatorial explosion). The best ones manage meaningful branching in their final act where the branching is based on the cumulative effect of all your previous choices. This is why final choices in games can often feel arbitrary, because they make irrelevant what you've been choosing in the game up until that moment (Mass Effect for instance).

[Neonivek]

Way of the Samurai isn't that good. It is just the only game I know that has anything similar

As for "Practical reason" fine... but then don't pretend like there are multiple paths, don't spruce up something that isn't there.

[Shadowlord]

Spoiler: not sure why not in spoilers anymore (click to show/hide)

The most ironic part being that the article flat out says that the shitty people pushed it into the light but that other people run it now. You've probably heard of these other people as "ethics cucks".

I haven't, no. I've mostly been ignoring everyone involved unless they somehow managed to show up in my news feed, or on a show I watch(ed). Overall, that has given me a strongly negative opinion of #gamergate and its participants. Also, since wikipedia's articles are written with a neutral point of view, I just read through the wikipedia article on gamergate to see how accurate my understanding was, and to get some clarity on the subject.

The decline of split-screen console games.

Here, have all my YES
That used to be the only reason me and my friends even bought the damn things.

Now most things that have split screen or other multiplayer-on-one-console modes are... Mario Kart... bad Mario Kart clone... Mario Party... bad Mario Party clone... that and fighting games

Where is the Mashed, Micro Machines, Timesplitters or heck, even Return Fire.

I played the predecessor to Return Fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Power_(video_game)) on the C64. It wasn't bad.

I wonder if it's possible to play MULE with four 360 controllers. Hmm. Looks like one wireless receiver (for PC) can handle 4 controllers... This looks useful. There's an altered version of MULE that uses a (virtual) adapter, and VICE supports the (virtual) adapter, so... PS3 controllers (or XBox One controllers) would work too, I think, and not need a special receiver. Of course with either of them, there's 15 buttons and two sticks, and MULE only needs one button and one stick.

I have no idea what the PS3, PS4, and XBox One can get as far as split-screen goes. The 360 has the Halos, CoDs, and some of the Worms games are available for them. I haven't found anything else particularly good but it's entirely possible I've overlooked things.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

People who come into my store and don't know what fucking console their idiot kid owns. Wait, does that count?

It's good enough for me.

How many people come in a day completely obvious to the difference between the Wii and Wii U?

[Bohandas]

People who come into my store and don't know what fucking console their idiot kid owns. Wait, does that count?

It's good enough for me.

How many people come in a day completely obvious to the difference between the Wii and Wii U?

If the person owns a Wii they'll probably be equally disappointed whether they get a game that works on their system or not.

EDIT:
also:

Tutorials that treat me like I'm an idiot, but don't teach anything that might be worth teaching. Especially if they can't be skipped.

Yes I know that I can walk forward by pressing "W", and even if for some reason I didn't there is a control chart in the DVD box. Which also teaches me the basic controls about 30 times faster then any tutorial ever could.
And why does "insert unique semi-complex mechanic here" only get a small, easiely missed, popup and nothing more when you wasted 5 minutes on telling me that spacebar makes me jump anc ctrl makes me duck?

On a similar note I'm sick of the idea that a tutorial is an acceptable substitute for a manual and/or help screen. And I'm sick of the idea that an online manual is an acceptable substitute for an integrated manual and/or a pdf.

People/devs that think splatter=horror.
Monsters that jump out of air ducts and explode into gibs on death are hilarious, not scary. Stop trying to sell comedy as horror.

To be fair, there's a lot of overlap between the two genres

[Shadowlord]

If you go back to RPGs in the 80s, and look at the first Gold Box games, there's no help screen, no tutorial, and a lot of the text you'd expect to read in the game is in the manual, with the game only telling you to look it up at "journal entry 15" or the like. (It also claims to include fake entries, so you can't tell which entries are real and which ones aren't until the game tells you to look one up)

[Sergius]

I know Wasteland had a lot of fake entries. After finishing the game, much of the fun was reading the whole booklet in order to find a whole plotline about martians that wasn't actually in the game.

[miauw62]

The decline of split-screen console games.

Here, have all my YES
That used to be the only reason me and my friends even bought the damn things.

Now most things that have split screen or other multiplayer-on-one-console modes are... Mario Kart... bad Mario Kart clone... Mario Party... bad Mario Party clone... that and fighting games

Where is the Mashed, Micro Machines, Timesplitters or heck, even Return Fire.

Yeah, I absolutely love split-screen co-op. It's just so much fun to play games with a friend on one screen.
Whenever I visit my best friend or he visits me, we run through R&C: Gladiator together.

[Bohandas]

If you go back to RPGs in the 80s, and look at the first Gold Box games, there's no help screen, no tutorial, and a lot of the text you'd expect to read in the game is in the manual, with the game only telling you to look it up at "journal entry 15" or the like. (It also claims to include fake entries, so you can't tell which entries are real and which ones aren't until the game tells you to look one up)

A printed manual is an acceptable type of manual. The important thing is that it be local to the player.

[MaximumZero]

People who come into my store and don't know what fucking console their idiot kid owns. Wait, does that count?

It's good enough for me.

How many people come in a day completely obvious to the difference between the Wii and Wii U?

A day? About 4 or 5, but I work in a really slow store in comparison to the rest of the nation. We're killing budget, though, for what that's worth. (I am indeed driving a massive overage on our sales, how'd you guess?)

It mostly pisses me off that the parent is saying, "I just bought the thing, I don't know anything about it," and then being a smug asshole to me because their kid has a hobby that they have no interest in. These are the same type of people who rail about sex in video games they've never played, and think "50 Shades of Grey" is acceptable media.

[Neonivek]

Cheerleader, So and so, Whats her face, The Boring One!

Ok Homestarrunner references aside. I actually really dislike when a game has a selection of classes, races, or what have you... and one of them is the boring choice. Like they go out of their way to make each race or class extremely interesting and intricate, yet the boring one is so vanilla it might as well drink whole milk and eat white bread while it is at it.

Humans and "Fighters" often get this bad.

Average to a fault

In all my life there is only one game I ever felt where being perfectly average was an actual advantage and that game wasn't even a videogame but a card game called Red Dragon Inn.

Games seriously over compensate for being average by making them truly dreadful. Usually by giving them no real advantages, while thinking "well they have no weaknesses" but "being terrible" is frankly the biggest weakness of all. When a character who can do both magic and physical can't do either well, start over.

Why does this peave me? Because frankly I love tackling things on the basis of being able to do everything, to never truly be disarmed, and to need to combine your own talents to achieve something great. Versus basically being a magic nuke. Yet boy do games just want you to be a magic nuke or a skill nuke or a physical nuke. Or they want you to concentrate on one tree right down to mastery period...

[Sergarr]

How could a "perfectly average" character have "an actual advantage", anyway? Especially in games where you command a whole array of characters, where you can build up a team of specialists which cover each other's disadvantages.