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[umiman]

Hey hey. I just finished playing Persona 4 and while I'm left with the "just finished an 80 hour long game that I loved" feeling of doom and disaster, I'm also left with the "this game doesn't really make much sense if you think about it" feeling of doom and disaster.

I wish a lot of gaming plot stupidity, and in effect, entertainment media stupidity in general, didn't exist. But out of all of them, the one that irks me the most is this:

Why is it that the cast members who possess incredible healing magic that can bring the dead back to life or heal mortal wounds can't be arsed to say... cast cure on that dying character who was until recently, vital to the story?

I know that sometimes, characters need to die. I know it's a good plot technique. But it's not good if it makes no sense! How can their deaths be justified when the other players in the field basically commit assisted suicide by not doing the best of their ability to help? This is mostly a game thing, but you can see it in anime and some sci-fi shows as well. It doesn't make sense, it's stupid. Characters should not die of bullet wounds when you can heal someone who got competely eviscerated by a sword the size of your mom.

I could buy it if say... there was some magic in the kill that made it impossible to heal or if there wasn't anyone there to heal them but seriously. People need to put more thought when killing off characters.

Do you have any pet peeves that just irk you completely when you see them?

[Duke 2.0]

 There are actually a few games that have the healers of the game use those heal skills before learning for some reason it does not take, and it makes a lot more damn sense.
 Oh Tales of Fantasia, memories you bring me.

 My peeve is when people like to talk a lot but don't really listen. Either they are spouting an hour-long speech, or they are in their own little world.

 GAAAAHHHHHHH!

[Heron TSG]

I hate it when side characters stand there wondering what to do while a main character gets shredded into tiny little gut-chunks by a giant meat grinder thing moving towards him at a foot per hour.

[sonerohi]

I hate when people start doing the dramatic talking in the middle of a fight, and both sides stop fighting to listen to their little speeches before continuing the battle. If your opponent lowers his sword to give you some shitty little lesson on morals, stab him in the face while his gaurd is down!

[Org]

The enemy has a giant weapon of mass destruction, then waits to show it off to you. Showing you the POWER DOWN or SELF DESTRUCT button is just a bonus.

[Duke 2.0]

 I suppose this thread will be about game peeves, then.
 One thing is sacrificing realism in games where graphics were worked on extensively to be realistic. Like the female character sliding across pavement on her exposed knees. That just looked painful. Or jumps from really tall heights. Or that string containing those massive silicone chesticles.

 So really physics problems in games that strive to look realistic. It makes the game enter a strange uncanny valley of game design.

[Aqizzar]

Call me a heretic, but I hate cheesecake armor.  From the dawn of time to the far future, apparently the only armor made for or of use to women (always ridiculously full figured women) is the Battle Bikini.

Basically, I hate any kind of cheesecake.  Not really for any reason inherent in itself, I just consider any attempt at overt sexual appeal to be a gross insult to my intelligence as a gamer or viewer.  And the more out of place it is, the worse.  Anyone else remember the sound test screen from Imperium Galactica?  That's what I'm talking about.

I also hate gun-fu, be it a pistol proving a better melee weapon than genuine weapons, or people dodging bullets with physically ludicrous acrobatics.  When such cartoonish acrobatics combine with cheesecake potential, I'm pretty much gone.

[Gunner-Chan]

What I don't like is the tendency of guns to go BANGBANGBANG! rather then their more real pop and crack noises. It prevents me from taking them seriously and I end up getting shot up.

[umiman]

Hmm... I'm not a big fan of the overly sexual battle armor as well. In fact, some of my favorite games, and many people's favorite games, completely eschew this. I much prefer Valve's female characters to say... that of Dead or Alive. What disturbs me more is when robots and other such things need to carry sexual characteristics.

Though I love gun fu. I'm a sincere proponent of "the rule of cool supercedes all".

[JoshuaFH]

It needs to be linked to, there's no way around it.

Someone complained, but I think it's really great how the characters talked about the game mechanics in FF8 as though they were the laws of nature. There's Seifer wanting to hog the Exp, the junctions being referred to as creatures and being prominent to the plot, the run feature being explicitly told to you as it should be used, Selphie trying to heal the little lion thing when in Jail, and a bunch of other things. It made the world they were in feel less fake by extension of no one treating the world as fake, because what they're perceiving and what you're perceiving are the same thing.

Mostly, anyway.

[Aqizzar]

What I don't like is the tendency of guns to go BANGBANGBANG! rather then their more real pop and crack noises. It prevents me from taking them seriously and I end up getting shot up.

As long as we're both talking about realism, this doesn't bother me at all.  Guns, especially pistols, are fucking loud.  A lot louder than games or movies ever show them to be.  At least anything larger .22s, which do make more reasonable 'crack's instead of big whopping bangs.  Believe me, there's a reason pawn shops are always flooded with slightly used .44 pistols, and it ain't the recoil.

[umiman]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Glaringly apparent, however, in the ending to Fallout 3. Project Purity must be activated but the person who does so will receive a lethal dose of radiation. This completely ignores the fact that players, at this point in the game, have enough items/perks to render themselves nearly completely resistant to radiation. Oh and your super mutant and robotic party members (who are completely immune to radiation) and your ghoul party member (who is healed by radiation) won't step in to save the day either.

Heh...

[Mephisto]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Glaringly apparent, however, in the ending to Fallout 3. Project Purity must be activated but the person who does so will receive a lethal dose of radiation. This completely ignores the fact that players, at this point in the game, have enough items/perks to render themselves nearly completely resistant to radiation. Oh and your super mutant and robotic party members (who are completely immune to radiation) and your ghoul party member (who is healed by radiation) won't step in to save the day either.

Heh...

Stuff like that pisses me off, which leads into something I think should never exist: Things that happen in the game should happen for a reason. Yeah, the whole scene that happens above?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Just kidding! We brought you back from the dead through undisclosed means so we can get you to spend another ten bux on this expansion we just tossed together.

[Keiseth]

One word: Bethesda. Actually, Morrowind wasn't bad in the story regard. Hrm. Not particularly excellent, you were basically...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 Jesus.

My old, RPG game project solved this by having Roguelike difficulty. Positive health: you're alive and councious. Negative health: you're uncouncious and further damage hits your life, which in turn lowers your max health for quite a while. Zero life points: You're dead, dead, dead!

That makes story writing difficult when Joe McMaincharacter dies to a goblin five minutes in.

The funny thing about modern RPGs though, is that they completely undermine the point of the game itself. Since most epic battles finish with a fancy cutscene, the fighting you did actually feels like filler, and the outcome was irrelevant anyway as long as someone survived. I didn't get the same vibe from older RPGs, probably because virtually every boss battle simply ended with the boss not being there anymore and half your party being eviscerated.

[umiman]

Fallout 2's final boss fight for me usually goes like this:
1. sneak sneak sneak
2. hack turrets
3. main boss is shredded