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[Mephisto]

While we're on the topic of nonsense, how about adventure game logic? I can't remember the name, but if you search on Youtube for Retsupurae, they played through this game. In it, you catch a fish with rope, glue, a banana, and a knife. Glue the knife to the rope and stick the banana on it. Instant fishing pole. (Found it! if you're interested)

This is kind of off-track, though. The original purpose was for good games that have bad parts in them. This game was just plain bad.

[Draco18s]

While we're on the topic of nonsense, how about adventure game logic?

Soup Cans

[smjjames]

Ssssllooowww waaaalkiiinnggg prroooottaaagggooniiiiissssttsss. Who have to walk all the way back and all the way forward again to pick up a nonsense item (The Experiment, which is otherwise a decent game).

I usually just make them run instead of walk. Sometimes though, the protagonist will have to walk or run an absurdly long way to exit a scene. The adventure game Journey to the Center of the Earth (the one available on Bigfish games) has several scenes like this where the character just keeps walking into the background a long distance away before exiting the scene.

If its a really large scene that the character has to walk through, thats one thing, but just walking into the background along a single path is just annoying.

[Draco18s]

Ssssllooowww waaaalkiiinnggg prroooottaaagggooniiiiissssttsss. Who have to walk all the way back and all the way forward again to pick up a nonsense item (The Experiment, which is otherwise a decent game).

Borderlands averted that by providing cars near most zone transition points (heck, you could teleport to the car if you died, but the car was still out there), though restricted where the cars could go, because the vehicle weapons are more powerful than the characters, so running over the boss isn't a viable strategy (although running over things does damage the car, based on its hitpoints).

So there was still a fair amount of traversing over a featureless wasteland to be had (esp. if your car blew up, but you kill all the baddies).

Which both averts, subverts, and exemplifies the trope.

(As for running places, there was one zone just before the end of the game I bum rushed and killed almost nothing because they simply had too many hitpoints and did too much damage--thank god for Brik's Berzerker Mode speed boost and health regen)

[quinnr]

Ssssllooowww waaaalkiiinnggg prroooottaaagggooniiiiissssttsss. Who have to walk all the way back and all the way forward again to pick up a nonsense item (The Experiment, which is otherwise a decent game).

Agree'd..


Also, SUPER hour long cutscenes. Has anyone here played Xenosaga?
You play the first ship, (which is nasty, invisible creatures attack you, and you can't hurt them until you find KOS-MOS, a robot made to fight these aliens, and bring them into your dimension)

Then there is a hour long cutscene. And if you skip it, you won't have any idea of the story.

The cutscene is so long it has 3 SAVE POINTS throughout it.

EDIT: The gameplay makes up for it though, I LOVED the battle system.

[smjjames]

@Sean back on page one: True, Spore has its faults, but its also a trailblazer in procedural programming, so it isn't perfect.

Just something I wanted to say even though the OP I'm referring to was back in December.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Heh, trailblazer. Just demoscene on an industrial scale. And/or integrating modelling software into a game (which is a neat achievement in and of itself - which is why the creature creator is 90%-95% of the game's fun), since metaballs and metaedges can be found in many commercial modelling packages, like Lightwave.

I mean seriously, Earth 2150 was more fun, with much less customizing options for units. (or, in a sense, much more - considering all Spore's City Stage has to offer in that regard is "replace big cannon with BIGGER cannon").

[qwertyuiopas]

Counter to the annoying cutscenes:
Though it is very hard to notice, Metroid: Zero Mission will let you skip cutscenes(maybe just the most recent) if you passed it and got sent back by death, and chose continue.

Better than nothing, at least, though if you quit, reset, or shut it off, you have to endure it again, next time you come across it. Still, if more games took that approach, or allowed you to skip it from the start...

[quinnr]

Counter to the annoying cutscenes:
Though it is very hard to notice, Metroid: Zero Mission will let you skip cutscenes(maybe just the most recent) if you passed it and got sent back by death, and chose continue.

Better than nothing, at least, though if you quit, reset, or shut it off, you have to endure it again, next time you come across it. Still, if more games took that approach, or allowed you to skip it from the start...

Oh, you can skip them, but you will have no idea what the hell is going on at all.

[Asehujiko]

That game also suffered from having one overpowered character, one character overpowered in a different way and 4 useless ones. There's W+Q Delgado that kills everything but bosses and for the rare examples where he can't target anything, there's Black and her ammo free extra damage hyper agile bullet time redeemer sniper.

Really? I thought the genius and her boyfriend with the shotty were pretty good. I was looking forward to using them on the last boss, but...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

the designers didn't think they were worth being alive and killed them off. Delgado, Black, and SuperPriest were the only ones that could damage it.

Her abilities are to pump things full with a ton of bullets in a really short time and to cause explosions, something Delgado and Black can do better and at much greater distances. As for the albino afro american(afro british?), his shotty is inferior to the noobtube for spash damage, his rifle is inferior to the gatling gun for sustained dps and his ranged tele/pyrokinesis or ranged stun ball are less effective at taking enemies down then either remote controlled bullets or that goddamn homing missile dragon thing, not to mention incredibly sluggish to use.

[JoshuaFH]

Something about the word "Noobtube" makes me chuckle on the inside.

[Asehujiko]

Something about the word "Noobtube" makes me chuckle on the inside.

For added effect, pronounce it as if you were a foghorn. "I am camping with da noOOOobtoOOOob"

Back on topic, Bioshock 2. Yes you play as big daddy now. Yes they sound impressive when you occasionally hear them roam about. No, it's NOT fun when you hear those loud banging footsteps ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

[Sowelu]

"Return to Zork" was a point-and-click adventure game.  There's one thing you can do that makes a vulture swoop past you.  And there's a minor fact revealed earlier implying that vultures have magnetic talons.  How do you progress past a certain point?  You click a magnet on the vulture as it's flying by.

Problem is, up until that point, the player was never expected to interact with cutscenes in any way, so I always figured vulture swooping by was a cutscene.  Probably took me a year to figure that out, and I had to look it up on the internet even then.

[Puck]

While we're on the topic of nonsense, how about adventure game logic?

The entire "gobliiins" (number of "i" indicate how many goblins you control in each game) series tried to make fun of that. Up to that point the most well known adventures were probably monkey island/maniac mansion/zak mckracken. Riddles were whacky sometimes, but there was some logic to them.

And while those games might have been good, I hated them, and I still do, because most of the time, you just pick up shit, rub it against other shit, and hope it stinks right.

Then came gobliins, which made an effort to provide the most illogical and most stupid riddles, just to ridicule a whole genre. I seriously think the programmers didnt really want to make a whole lot of money with their goblin games, I was convinced they just hated adventure games with the same passion as I.

The weird thing was... after a few minutes the "gobliiins" riddles were kind of logical... and actually fun. And it seemed to be a success. They made 2 sequels or so.

[Neruz]

It's called 'Lateral Thinking', getting a result which is near impossible to figure out normally, but once revealed is ovbious.


One of the best examples of Lateral Thinking i can think of is an old adventure game who's name i cannot remember atm, you find a statue holding a bow pointed over the head of another statue of a child. The solution is to take a misshapen pear (which looks like an apple), paint it red and then put it on the child statue's head so the statue with the bow can shoot it off.

You'd never work that out normally, but once it's explained to you the answer is pretty ovbious.



The problem arised when the devs threw lateral thinking completely out the window and went with dream logic. Dream logic in games is fine if you make it clear that is what you are doing; the game then becomes a game about trying to work out what the developer was thinking, to work out the rules that operate within the game world. If done well, you get a tricky but fun result.

If done poorly, you get this.

(Long story short, the solution to that puzzle starts out by making a mustashe out of cat hair caught on masking tape to disguise yourself as a man who does not have a mustashe. And you stick the cat-hair mustashe on with maple syrup.)


The problem with good lateral thinking and proper dream logic is that both are really really hard, if you cannot think laterally normally then you'll never be able to write an entire game requiring it, and proper dream logic requires huge amounts of paperwork. It's much easier to just stupid the whole thing up and end up with an unplayable mess.