Shit parts of classic games.

[madhair60]

Yeah I know. I mentioned it again for all the readers who have an autoblocker configured against posters with aids.

FUCK OFF FRY

[mook]

Yeah I know. I mentioned it again for all the readers who have an autoblocker configured against posters with aids.

haha, fuck that made me laugh. ta fry

[chand]

Haha oh god yeah good shout. Growing up I never managed to pass that level. I did once, though, a few years ago when I was at uni. My mate brought his chipped ps1 up with a bunch of games. We sat and got high and just played  that first level for about 2 hours until we got it down. The rest of the levels are so much easier, and guess what? You don't need any of the stupid fucking "skills" you have to perform perfectly in the first.

I don't remember having that much trouble with it when I played it on PS1 originally, I know I finished the game. I would've been about 18 at the time. Downloaded it again on PS3 a couple of years back and wasn't even close to getting out of the damn car park.

Most games I've replayed from the 80s and 90s or so seem really hard now, I'm fucking rubbish at Golden Axe as an adult but as a ten-year-old I played it through multiple times. You could complete it start to finish in well under an hour, I remember doing a run-through one morning before going to school. I've replayed stuff recently like James Pond II: Robocod and Sonic and wondered how I ever managed to complete them as a kid with no saves. Guess I must've just repeated them over and over again until I got really good.

[The Roofdog]

But 10 unskippable cocking minutes? Where the most interesting thing to look at is some guy knocking on a door.

Did you ever play the Blue Shift expansion pack? You play the security guard trying to get through the door and if you turn round you see Freeman going past on the monorail. That's the pay-off my friend.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Talk of the new Deus Ex game reminds me that, while it's great to have games that let you play in a variety of ways, I do wish they didn't go on for so long. After sinking 80-odd hours into playing through Fallout 3 as a bloodthirsty sledgehammer wielding moron, I really can't be bothered starting all over again just to see what it's like as a smooth talking computer hacker.

[lazarou]

Haha oh god yeah good shout. Growing up I never managed to pass that level. I did once, though, a few years ago when I was at uni. My mate brought his chipped ps1 up with a bunch of games. We sat and got high and just played  that first level for about 2 hours until we got it down. The rest of the levels are so much easier, and guess what? You don't need any of the stupid fucking "skills" you have to perform perfectly in the first.

Driver is actually bookended by absolute bastards of missions. It's not quite as infamous as the training level as a lot fewer people got to it, but the final mission "The President's Run" is legendarily hard, requiring a mix of perfect driving, expert navigation and pure blind luck. On higher difficulties it will reduce you to a gibbering wreck as you're constantly plowed into by cars from all directions.

A spot-on description from over at GameFAQs:

If you're playing on hard mode, this strategy is mostly useless and so is any other strategy. There is none, no matter what anyone says; it's entirely a matter of luck and nothing you do will consistently get the enemies off your tail. One time it'll work; the next, they'll charge into you and essentially ruin the whole thing. When you get hit, the car automatically turns either left or right and the steering will get locked this way for some 2-5 seconds. In this time, anything you press will just make the car spin even more the wrong way.

After crashing, your car takes forever to start moving and in that time, the enemies will more than surely crash into you over and over, ensuring you're planted in the same spot until your damage meter is shining red. Meanwhile, the enemy cars can recover from a crash in less than 5 seconds and speed-boost back right behind you as if nothing had happened. Your car being more armored than usual means NOTHING with all these issues in mind.

Getting to the end of the mission on hard mode is almost completely dependent on luck: hoping the enemies will not smash you into oblivion, hoping idiot civilian cars won't turn or cross intersections right into you, hoping your car doesn't inexplicably lose control (which it does all too often), hoping your car doesn't tip over for no reason when other times in the same situation, it didn't. The only input on your end is not deliberately hitting anything, not slowing down, not going the wrong way, etc. So just a bunch of obvious things, which means there is no real skill. When you're near the goal/destination, nighttime is very prominent and it gets so dark, you will not see the black mob cars at all.

Have fun if you're playing on hard mode, because it is bar none the hardest mission in all of the driver series and I dare say one of the hardest parts in any game ever made.

[Replies From View]

Fantasy World Dizzy on the ZX Spectrum gets a bit boring once you have to do the beanstalk climb and keep falling through the clouds.  And once you complete the questline with the objects you have to click on every pixel on every screen to find the 30 coins.  Quite annoying.

[Hangthebuggers]

Sorry to dredge up an old thread...

But recently been replaying Skyrim. And then thing that REALLY fucking irks me about this game are the quests that trap you into committing  evil actions. I'm currently trying to RP a good hearted female mage. But I remembered there's a handful of quests that require you to commit evil deeds. I'm not talking about joining the Assassins guild, more so picking a quest that has no alternative option to doing something evil. And by the time you realise it, there's no way out. No alternative path (at least in some cases).

1 - The haunted house quest in Markarth - Okay there's a witchfinder outside asking questions about the house. Fine. But when you go inside you're forced to kill this guy as the house locks up and the weird spooky shit occurs, there's no way out of the house besides murdering the bugger. Worse still you're then expected to capture and bludgeon a goodly priest repeatedly until he gives up his soul to the Daedric gods. There's no warning at any point that this quest will involve you murdering and torturing people. And once you're inside that house you HAVE to kill the witch finder. I mean YES, you can avoid this quest if you so happen to know that this quest exists, but it also locks you out of the achievements and gives you no forewarning, which in my opinion is bad game design.

2 - Thieves guild. You HAVE to join them as part of one of the main quest missions. In previous Elder scrolls games the thieves guild were grey characters, Robin Hood types. Whereas in Skyrim they're all horrible cunts.

3 - The Daedric quests (most of them), again optional but at least one or two aren't advertised as Daedric quests and pretty much force you into doing cunty things without any real option of an alternative.

4 - Killing the good dragon to continue the Blades quest and accessing content that is gated off if you choose NOT to kill the good dragon.

5 - One or two other things that I can't remember.

--

I'm fully aware that people enjoy having the option in-game to RP as an evil dude. You can be a werewolf or vampire or cannibal or assassin. Fine. But I don't like way that a game that prides itself on giving choices actively forces you into being a cunt. Even worse, some of the very best equipment is only accessible via the evil paths, such as the daedric weapons, the invincible mount etc.

Annoying. It just breaks the immersion when your goodly priest character has spent 15+ levels of saving the world from dragons, rescuing people and killing evil monsters, to suddenly be stuck in a quest that has no other option than beating someone to death.

GTA V did something similar with the torture mission too. But GTA V never advertised itself as an RPG.

[Phil_A]

Fantasy World Dizzy on the ZX Spectrum gets a bit boring once you have to do the beanstalk climb and keep falling through the clouds.  And once you complete the questline with the objects you have to click on every pixel on every screen to find the 30 coins.  Quite annoying.

I've been replaying all the old Dizzy games recently, the obligatory coin/diamond/cherry/star hunt is the worst part of all of them. It's pure filler to pad out the length of the otherwise very short games.

The reward for finishing most of them was so minuscule anyway, you might as well have just stopped after you'd solved all the puzzles.

[Thursday]

I'm fully aware that people enjoy having the option in-game to RP as an evil dude. You can be a werewolf or vampire or cannibal or assassin. Fine. But I don't like way that a game that prides itself on giving choices actively forces you into being a cunt. Even worse, some of the very best equipment is only accessible via the evil paths, such as the daedric weapons, the invincible mount etc.

Annoying. It just breaks the immersion when your goodly priest character has spent 15+ levels of saving the world from dragons, rescuing people and killing evil monsters, to suddenly be stuck in a quest that has no other option than beating someone to death.

GTA V did something similar with the torture mission too. But GTA V never advertised itself as an RPG.

Fallout/Elder Scrolls  in general does suffer from the quite binary morality systems. I always want to play as someone that's kind of a neutral pragmatist, but the game always seems to be at war with how I want to imagine my character. I don't necessarily want them to be chivalrous knight, but also I don't want to be on the side of slavers/torturers. But as you say instead it just means your character behaves in an incredibly inconsistent manner.

I want them to be Geralt, I suppose.

[Van Dammage]

The Elder Scrolls / Fallout games seem to be giving less and less choice with each new game and becoming a bit more linear. Along with this you really don't see much in the way of any substantial consequences for being good or evil. There are some consequences, but not enough to really stop you in your tracks and think about what you're doing. I was playing Fallout 2 recently and realised that if you join the slavers guild you get attacked on sight by some characters and a lot of quests are locked off, as they should be to a slaver character. In Fallout 3 if you take part in the whole slaving business you get the vault boy popping up in the corner of the screen saying "You've lost Karma" and that's that.

[TheWoodenSpoon]

That one jump in The Revenge of Shinobi.

[mobias]

The whole prostitute and strip club thing in GTA is well past its sell by date. Back in 2003 they kind of got away with the novelty value of it all but by the time GTAV came around its was probably the most depressingly bleak part of any computer game I can think of. It seems only to be there to appease gamergate type pubescent boys. I suspect it won't be in future iterations of the franchise.

[An Actual Propeller]

In IK+ (at least on the Spectrum; dunno about other platforms), you had two levels of ass-kicking action where you have to down two other guys with your fists and feet that lasted about two minutes, and then you had to endure a level where you have to deflect oncoming balls with a dustbin lid or something at very-slightly increasing speeds which took about eight years to finish.  This level would constantly reappear and really dragged everything down.  Fuck that.

[Obel]

PS1 Metal Gear Solid
"if you want to talk to Meryl you can contact her on the code written on the back of the CD case"

So the game gives you a CD case as an item that sits in your inventory. No amount of close examination resulted in finding the code. Fuck you and your fourth wall breaking nonsense, Kojima.

[hewantstolurkatad]

It's quite difficult for a first level, but they're all pretty useful skills within the game. Plus it sets you up for the "70's car chase" vibe (as opposed to a "driving game" vibe); tear those cars up and make a movie of it (I was into the director mode).

It's not so much the skills as the unforgiving time limit. You need to figure out an effective order to do them in and there's two or three where if you mess them up it'll take too long to do again. It's an awful lot of bullshit to throw at someone who's expecting a fun driving game, and even though you don't need the skills later, it certainly feels like a tutorial that leaves a very bad impression.

iirc I didn't have a notion what slalom even meant


Forced tutorials, fetch quests, complicated actions on engines that aren't equipped to deal with them

[TheWoodenSpoon]

PS1 Metal Gear Solid
"if you want to talk to Meryl you can contact her on the code written on the back of the CD case"

So the game gives you a CD case as an item that sits in your inventory. No amount of close examination resulted in finding the code. Fuck you and your fourth wall breaking nonsense, Kojima.

I absolutely fucking hate this shit. They did it again with Twin Snakes (the GCN remake), something which I thought they'd do away with the second time around but nooooo, let's be a cunt and immediately take the player out of the game. It's not clever, it's not funny, it's just stupid fucking immersion-breaking bullshit. Kojima needs a slap for this self-important idiocy.

For a series that tries to drum up a load of drama with its storylines and such guff, it sure dropped many bollocks with all this fourth wall shit. Like, thanks, Kojima. Now I don't give a fuck about your silly fantasy events.

[Bazooka]

Every summon FMV in the Final Fantasy Games, yes I have enough mana to spam summons so don't bloody punish me with 30 sec videos.

[Cerys]

2 - Thieves guild. You HAVE to join them as part of one of the main quest missions.

No, you don't.

[TheWoodenSpoon]

The AI in the original Command & Conquer. Part of the charm I suppose but once you realise that it's stumped by simple obstacles such as sandbags -- fucking sandbags -- you can just fuck around and break the game.

Also the fact that the AI would completely fill up their refineries/silos no matter how much tiberium a Harvester brought back from the field. Just a shitty fake difficulty thing going on to cover up how crap the AI was at not wasting credits on a string of shit units that would just march into a killing field.

[Obel]

Not considered a classic, but I think Max Payne 3 could have been considered a classic game if not for the cutscenes. I know they're there to mask the hilariously long loading times, but they end up being a massive hindrance on replaying the game. It's probably the finest third person shooter, mechanics wise, but I don't want to rewatch the cutscenes on replaying the game and they go on for SO long, plus they're very regular.

Also does the thread title specifically refer to sections of games that are shit? Like the prison in Final Fantasy VIII. Or just shit elements? I went with elements this time but I can stick to the script in future, no problem.

[Bazooka]

The AI in the original Command & Conquer. Part of the charm I suppose but once you realise that it's stumped by simple obstacles such as sandbags -- fucking sandbags -- you can just fuck around and break the game.

Also the fact that the AI would completely fill up their refineries/silos no matter how much tiberium a Harvester brought back from the field. Just a shitty fake difficulty thing going on to cover up how crap the AI was at not wasting credits on a string of shit units that would just march into a killing field.

Age Of Empires was similar, on the hardest difficulty there was no way you could get enough lumber/meat/gold before the bloody Turks were giving you shit at an advanced level of civilization.

[TheWoodenSpoon]

Age Of Empires was similar, on the hardest difficulty there was no way you could get enough lumber/meat/gold before the bloody Turks were giving you shit at an advanced level of civilization.

AoE II was notorious for this shit; even a 3Pv2AI game turned into a fight for survival because of cheating bastard AI just getting resources out of fuckin' nowhere. Thankfully this sort of stupid gubbins has been fixed in the HD rerelease though! On the subject of AoE, the first game has aged unbelievably horribly. I had fond memories of it up until about a week ago when I tried playing it and fuck me it's just bad now.

[thecuriousorange]

That one jump in The Revenge of Shinobi.

In the pier level? Absolute bastard.

[The Roofdog]

The AI in the original Command & Conquer. Part of the charm I suppose but once you realise that it's stumped by simple obstacles such as sandbags -- fucking sandbags -- you can just fuck around and break the game.

Oh yeah, that was the trick where they'd ignore sandbags so you could just wall them into their own base wasn't it. I liked building a line of them into the middle of their base then suddenly sticking a gun tower at the end of it.

[Captain Poodle Basher]

The AI in the original Command & Conquer. Part of the charm I suppose but once you realise that it's stumped by simple obstacles such as sandbags -- fucking sandbags -- you can just fuck around and break the game.

Also the fact that the AI would completely fill up their refineries/silos no matter how much tiberium a Harvester brought back from the field. Just a shitty fake difficulty thing going on to cover up how crap the AI was at not wasting credits on a string of shit units that would just march into a killing field.

Yup. I used to build something cheap, surround it with sandbags and then link off that to the extreme limit with a line of sandbags, build again, link again and away as far as I could get towards the enemy base. Then I'd lock them in with sandbags. It was also great for using sandbags as an 'airlock' system when sending engineers out to capture stuff. Load up an APC, remove a sandbag, drive through, replace sandbag and you could do what you liked as the AI assumed you were unreachable.

The Settlers series is terrible at AI realism as well. While the human player is limited in the number of troops that can be created at any one time, the AI can churn out as many as it likes and isn't limited by the finite resources (iron mostly) as the human player is. Seeing as every scenario requires you to take over the entire map, lay siege to the enemy city and then reduce their fortress to rubble, all the while with limited resources, a very extreme supply route (only your home base can store resources), a time-consuming troop replenishment system and enemy AI constantly popping up, I never bothered finishing any battles as it was a waste of time.

[TheWoodenSpoon]

In the pier level? Absolute bastard.

That's the one. I can breeze through the rest of the game without even thinking but that one fucking jump invariably gets me. I was streaming a playthrough once and spent a good couple of minutes prepping for the leap, then bit my tongue and went for it.

Went for a swim too. Cunt.

The Settlers series is terrible at AI realism as well. While the human player is limited in the number of troops that can be created at any one time, the AI can churn out as many as it likes and isn't limited by the finite resources (iron mostly) as the human player is. Seeing as every scenario requires you to take over the entire map, lay siege to the enemy city and then reduce their fortress to rubble, all the while with limited resources, a very extreme supply route (only your home base can store resources), a time-consuming troop replenishment system and enemy AI constantly popping up, I never bothered finishing any battles as it was a waste of time.

Fucking hell, sounds less like a game and more like a form of torture. (Low) Population caps in strategy games is something that really fucking gets on my tits; the original AoE, with its population cap per player maxing out at a colossal 50 units (potentially 100 with a certain tech researched but not every civilisation could research it) is one such example. Another shitty thing about AoE one is the pathfinding. It's the only RTS game in which I have seen a line of units get blocked by a tree. Just one tree. Said units marched up to it, then just stopped in their tracks and made no effort to move around it. Fucking incredible.

[St_Eddie]

In Fallout 3 if you take part in the whole slaving business you get the vault boy popping up in the corner of the screen saying "You've lost Karma" and that's that.

I've found the consequences of my actions be much the same, here on Cook'd and Bomb'd.  However, some of the AI of the NPCs around these parts is questionable at best.  Fix that for us in v.2.0 would you, Neil?  Ta.

That one jump in The Revenge of Shinobi.

I'm pretty sure you'll find that was the ending to the game; Shinobi purposefully jumps in the water and drowns himself because he comes to realise that violence against his fellow man is not the answer and yet ultimately we, as a race, are doomed to destroy one another.  The world remains ignorant and Shinobi never got his revenge.  It was a terribly sad ending but a bold one, on the part of the developers.

I tried many, many times over as a kid, when playing that game, to alter events and achieve a happier ending for our hero; to attempt to avert tragedy; to alter the fate of such a brave and noble man but alas, it simply can not be achieved.  Clearly the developers had a story to tell and that story ends with the death of our hero, Mr. Shinobi.

R.I.P.

[chand]

It's not so much the skills as the unforgiving time limit. You need to figure out an effective order to do them in and there's two or three where if you mess them up it'll take too long to do again. It's an awful lot of bullshit to throw at someone who's expecting a fun driving game, and even though you don't need the skills later, it certainly feels like a tutorial that leaves a very bad impression.

iirc I didn't have a notion what slalom even meant

Yeah, it's really complicated. You have to figure out exactly what you need to do to complete each task, every skill can take a few goes to perfect, and then you have to chain them in all in a really tight time limit. I think it gives you one minute in which to do nine tasks close to flawlessly. I struggled to do it even with tutorial videos like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BmlhwUmQG0

Those other cars really fucked up my slalom, I remember I kept thinking I'd completed a slalom but it wouldn't register. It's a really hard tutorial for a game that wasn't incredibly hard in general.