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Shit parts of classic games.

Started by Fry, August 16, 2016, 05:51:05 AM

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Blinder Data

Quote from: davetheschizophrenic on August 16, 2016, 11:04:34 AM
Donkey Kong games in general: any time you see a fucking mine cart.

WOAH WOAH WOAH

Granted I've only really played Donkey Kong Country[nb]and I eventually gave up when it got too hard :S[/nb], but the mine cart levels were easily the most exciting bits. Frustrating but frenetic and fun as fuck.

+1 for any Flood levels in Halo. I bet the developers thought they'd created this amazingly scary mythical Big Bad that completely changes the atmosphere of the game, when really everyone who's playing it is just desperate for those sections to be over so we can go back to doing fun stuff like driving big vehicles over squealing enemies.

Obvious one: sailing on Wind Waker. Why they made the map so enormous with so few interesting islands to explore I'll never know. Definitely feels like they were scared players would complain about how long the game was after OoT and Majora's Mask, so padded it out with interminable travelling.

Cerys

Quote from: Captain Poodle Basher on August 16, 2016, 10:47:26 AMI hated the "Identical Daedric tunnels that twist and turn until you're utterly lost" element to it.

I quite liked them.  They were a good place to find cool shit.

Quote from: Blinder Data on August 16, 2016, 11:29:43 AM

Granted I've only really played Donkey Kong Country[nb]and I eventually gave up when it got too hard :S[/nb], but the mine cart levels were easily the most exciting bits. Frustrating but frenetic and fun as fuck.


You're probably right, actually. I'll exchange it for the cloud jumping levels, specifically on the Gameboy. I don't think I made it past there, but I was younger than double digits at the time.

fit bird

Hot/Cold cards in Metal Gear Solid.

fit bird

Oh, and the fucking owl in Metal Gear 2.
Stupid shit.

monolith

Rock/Paper/Scissors in Alex Kidd. Fucking ridiculous (although with online guides you can at least check the correct answer (although am I remembering correctly that one of them is random?)).

Anybody remember that period of platform games around the early 2000s where every single level had to involve bottomless pits as opposed to interesting, clever design?

That was shit.

madhair60

Quote from: monolith on August 16, 2016, 11:55:28 AM
Rock/Paper/Scissors in Alex Kidd. Fucking ridiculous (although with online guides you can at least check the correct answer (although am I remembering correctly that one of them is random?)).

After the first one you can find the Telepathy Ball which lets you see what the bosses are thinking. And yeah, they go in a specific order, but it changes if you lose.

Quote from: A Car With No Doors on August 16, 2016, 11:56:04 AM
Anybody remember that period of platform games around the early 2000s where every single level had to involve bottomless pits as opposed to interesting, clever design?

That was shit.

Bottomless pits in a platformer? WELL I NEVER

samadriel

Never had a problem with the train or the toy plane missions in San Andreas, but I had a massive problem with 'Nap of the Earth', where you had to fly a plane below the treeline, despite flying so fast that you smashed into the trees BEFORE THE GAME COULD RENDER THEM. It wasn't the fault of my PC - hell, I had the game hacked to increase draw distance, but this didn't affect the rendering of trees.

QDRPHNC

I've said this before, but fucking underwater levels in platformers.

GTA: San Andreas. Having to eat food.

Quote from: madhair60 on August 16, 2016, 12:58:30 PM
Bottomless pits in a platformer? WELL I NEVER

I clearly meant the overusage of bottomless pits you fucking melon.

Not a "classic" example by any means but Sonic Heroes seemed to be full of them back in the day.

madhair60

Quote from: A Car With No Doors on August 16, 2016, 01:41:28 PM
I clearly meant the overusage of bottomless pits you fucking melon.

Not a "classic" example by any means but Sonic Heroes seemed to be full of them back in the day.

;) Sorry.

Sonic Heroes is gash.

Harpo Speaks

Flight School in San Andreas.

Protecting Lance Vance in Vice City.

The backtracking in Metal Gear Solid.

lazarou

Quote from: Fry on August 16, 2016, 10:21:09 AM
I feel like old adventure games like Monkey Island and Grim Fandango deserve a thread on this subject all of their own. I tried to play through Day of the Tentacle and I just couldn't do it. I have a rule for those sorts of games: if, when you consult a walkthrough to solve a puzzle, the answer doesn't make you say "Duh, of COURSE" or "Eh, clever!" but instead "Oh fuck off." It gets a strike. Three strikes and I stop bothering.

Speaking of three strikes and "fuck it", the kicking-the-wall puzzle in Full Throttle.

Escort mission classic: "Protect Natalya" in Goldeneye. Urgh.

FredNurke

Quote from: lazarou on August 16, 2016, 02:31:07 PM
the kicking-the-wall puzzle in Full Throttle.

A THOUSAND TIMES YES

Quote
Escort mission classic: "Protect Natalya" in Goldeneye. Urgh.

Also known as 'Shoot Natalya repeatedly in the head' from time to time.

Blinder Data

Quote from: QDRPHNC on August 16, 2016, 01:28:06 PM
I've said this before, but fucking underwater levels in platformers.

With you 100% - and, to a lesser extent, desert levels.

lazarou

Quote from: Blinder Data on August 16, 2016, 02:42:12 PM
With you 100% - and, to a lesser extent, desert levels.

Was about to add slippy-slidey ice levels, but it looks like a tagger beat me to it. Bears repeating, there's never been a good one.

"Walking Dead" puzzles in old adventure games, where you'd get to a point where you need a specific item but have no possible way of returning to get it. Sierra bloody loved those. Also items that can be consumed before the point where you'd actually need it or just get flat-out destroyed. Classic example would be Fantasy World Dizzy having an item you could pick up being a "hole in your pocket" that would cause you to lose everything you were carrying at that point. And you don't even know what it is until you pick it up first. Nice one.


NoSleep

Quote from: QDRPHNC on August 16, 2016, 01:28:06 PM
GTA: San Andreas. Having to eat food.

Having to eat food and then having to go to the gym to work it off.

Nobody Soup

Quote from: Kelvin on August 16, 2016, 10:05:15 AM
Another reason why many games of that era were particularly hard or obtuse was to encourage replay value. Generally speaking, people had much bigger gaps between getting new games back then, so unlike modern games, they were often designed so that players had to play through them over and over and over again, for weeks on end, getting better, learning levels, learning enemy patterns, ideal routes, etc.     

I agree it ages them in 2016, though. I play through loads of old games - including ones I never experienced at the time - on Wii U virtual console, but if it wasn't for save states, there's no way I'd complete most of them now. You're having a uniquely authentic experience.

I think though there must have been a point where it just became convention and designers never really gave it much thought about whether it was good game design. Flashback was mentioned earlier, which was a fantastic game, but you had a finite set of lives and at points it would throw in deadly obstacles that required pinpoint accuracy and timing to pass. you'd spend 3 hours working through the game, just to fall down the same pit 3 times in a row and then have to start again. it just seemed out of place and more of "that's how all games work." decision.

no one's mentioned the infamous driving level in mafia yet, which is almost too obvious but might as well get it down here for posterity.

Van Dammage

Quote from: Nobody Soup on August 16, 2016, 04:14:48 PM

no one's mentioned the infamous driving level in mafia yet, which is almost too obvious but might as well get it down here for posterity.

I think they even released a patch to make that easier.

Still Not George

One that apparently only I disliked: The fucking boat level in Half-Life 2.

"Here's this apparently ground-breaking shooter. It's OK, though, the first levels are just some dumb sewer tunnels. The good stuff is coming later. Ah, but first... guide this stupid fucking dinghy through some crap-looking docks and then try to manage dumb pixel-level jumps over pipes like we think it's a skateboarding game. Yay! Ground breaking!"

Bhazor

Quote from: fit bird on August 16, 2016, 11:47:29 AM
Hot/Cold cards in Metal Gear Solid.

The Twin Snakes added in a quasi cheat for that part, in the hanger room there is a little ledge you can drop down to that has a steam pipe and liquid nitrogen pipe which you can shoot to freeze or heat the key.

Kelvin

Quote from: Still Not George on August 16, 2016, 04:29:06 PM
One that apparently only I disliked: The fucking boat level in Half-Life 2.

"Here's this apparently ground-breaking shooter. It's OK, though, the first levels are just some dumb sewer tunnels. The good stuff is coming later. Ah, but first... guide this stupid fucking dinghy through some crap-looking docks and then try to manage dumb pixel-level jumps over pipes like we think it's a skateboarding game. Yay! Ground breaking!"

Actually, I think the whole start of HL2 is a bit rubbish. All that stuff in the train depots, endless grey and brown rooms and the sewer tunnels you mentioned. It gets great later on, but initially I was very underwealmed. 

Bhazor

#53
All you had to was follow the damn train CJ.

https://youtu.be/PUBnqS1qcvk?t=43s

Bhazor

Quote from: Kelvin on August 16, 2016, 04:33:55 PM
Actually, I think the whole start of HL2 is a bit rubbish. All that stuff in the train depots, endless grey and brown rooms and the sewer tunnels you mentioned. It gets great later on, but initially I was very underwealmed.

I've always thought the opening to the original Half Life was shit. A solid ten minute long unskippable cutscene with nothing interesting to look at. Even at the time I thought that was all bullshit.

chand

Quote from: Still Not George on August 16, 2016, 04:29:06 PM
One that apparently only I disliked: The fucking boat level in Half-Life 2.

"Here's this apparently ground-breaking shooter. It's OK, though, the first levels are just some dumb sewer tunnels. The good stuff is coming later. Ah, but first... guide this stupid fucking dinghy through some crap-looking docks and then try to manage dumb pixel-level jumps over pipes like we think it's a skateboarding game. Yay! Ground breaking!"

I do like the bleak atmosphere of the waterways and the feeling that you're actually leaving a real city, but yeah, I replayed Half-Life 2 recently and that section did really drag, all the stopping to deal with some annoying physics puzzles. I never liked the repeated Strider battles either, after the first one they just got annoying. I gave up on episode 2 right at the end when it gave me some new weapon and sent me into the forest to kill another shitload of fucking Striders.

Thomas

Quote from: Bhazor on August 16, 2016, 04:35:50 PM
All you had to was follow the train CJ.

https://youtu.be/PUBnqS1qcvk?t=43s

A friend told me there'd been some poll recently about the most annoying dialogue in a videogame, and I immediately correctly guessed this. I'm not even one of you gamers. I have a PlayStation 1 several hundred miles away.

Always avoided the flying levels in Spyro but I reckon I'd quite enjoy the challenge now.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: Still Not George on August 16, 2016, 04:29:06 PM
One that apparently only I disliked: The fucking boat level in Half-Life 2.

"Here's this apparently ground-breaking shooter. It's OK, though, the first levels are just some dumb sewer tunnels. The good stuff is coming later. Ah, but first... guide this stupid fucking dinghy through some crap-looking docks and then try to manage dumb pixel-level jumps over pipes like we think it's a skateboarding game. Yay! Ground breaking!"
I didn't hate it, but it certainly outstayed its welcome.

Quote from: Bhazor on August 16, 2016, 04:39:24 PM
I've always thought the opening to the original Half Life was shit. A solid ten minute long unskippable cutscene with nothing interesting to look at.
Batman: Arkham Asylum was even worse, as you remain in control during the intro, so you can't even go away and make a cup of tea or something.

Osmium



The bastard water wheel in Ico. Didn't like the escort mission much either.

NoSleep

The only point in Ico that I was halted/stumped was that pump that you have to jump on to spring you up to the roof. I had actually tried it several times (and probably just missed the timing) so had eliminated that as the point of exit. After trying everything else I could think of, I eventually gave up and read a walkthrough, tried it again until I got the jump (still several times).