Game cliches, at their worst...and best

This is a thread for calling out shit that goes on all the time in games even though nobody likes it, ever....then recognizing those one-in-a-million games that manage to make the sucky not suck so bad. I have a feeling there's already a thread like this but, oh well....

1. ICE BOARD. Need I say more? Turn a game with good control into a game with shitty, slippery control...and a game with bad control into an unplayable mess. Worst offender: Ultima Underworld II, which features an ICE MAZE in primitive 3D. Hours of fun as you skid around aimlessly in a maze where everything looks the same, including the thing you're trying to find (but will sail past anyway).

I honestly have never played a good ice board, but I will concede that Mario 64 (as with so many other things) kind of pulls this off, with not one but TWO basically enjoyable levels set in icy situations. One would be better as a non-ice-board for sure, but the other has you racing a penguin down an ice slide which is hard to screw up I think.

2. PROTECT SOME HAPLESS FOOL FOR THE DURATION OF THIS LEVEL. This sucks, whether it's the woman in Goldeneye who gets shot every three seconds or the stupid lion cub I just had to patiently lead past elementary monsters in Terranigma. When I started typing this I had an example of a game where this didn't suck but I already can't remember it. Any takers?

cliché be damned

ico

haha:

(have we done this before?)

― czn (cozwn), Wednesday, 26 November 2008 13:35 (9 months ago) Permalink

i read this title as game glitches, and then spent two minutes being baffled by the first post.

worst ice level i played was Dark Forces, which had additional torturous element of having to jump on and off a conveyor belt for most of the level.

2. PROTECT SOME HAPLESS FOOL FOR THE DURATION OF RESIDENT EVIL 5 :(:(:(:(:(

ice levels that involve like sledding and sliding in a fun way can be good.

i think a certain portion of commonly-identified game cliches are really just, idk, tropes or idioms or some other word. basically the I/IV/V of the medium.

amnesia

ice level

― some know what you dude last summer (Jordan), Wednesday, 26 November 2008 21:27 (9 months ago)

amnesia in nethack is classic

the one that bugs me the most in the other thread is the arithmetic progression of RPG difficulty, i think that's the main reason why my recent attempt at an RPG binge only lasted one and a half games

that said for one point two games i was totally enjoying the grind

amnesia

Or games where at the beginning of the final quarter, your character gets knocked on the head and loses all the spiffy weapons you've collected so far, leaving you to fight your way out of a heavily guarded cell block with a plastic fork.

i will always love the capture-and-take-your-shit moment.

i think it depends on the game finding an interesting set of challenges for you to do on the way to recovering your shit - if they redo the type of enemies you're facing, or make it so you need to sneak around, that's one thing, if it's just "lol use yr pistol again now" it's pretty tedious

like in MGS i think you get your stuff taken but there's like two guards between you and the one stockroom it's all in, as opposed to picking it all up piecemeal again

though even that gets done pretty well in half-life 2 and then episode one (and that spends pretty much a whole game making you pick up all your same equipment again) just by virtue of making sure you get things just in time for a particular set piece where you have to get used to using them again

Ice floor level(s) of Etrian Odyssey are reason #342 why it is such a mean, mean game (tho not near as bad as the first).

2. PROTECT SOME HAPLESS FOOL FOR THE DURATION OF RESIDENT EVIL 5 :(:(:(:(:(

i was the hapless fool :(

the captured-and-lose-your-gear part in fallout 3 was ridiculous, i didn't even have to do anything (maybe that's because i passed a "speech challenge" though).