I'll share mine. I absolutely hate FPS games, I probably wouldn't care too much if they weren't everywhere, but they are. I just find the whole concept of "Run around and shoot things" dull and uninspired. Okay, now I'd understand if the genre was created as a tech demo in the late 80s or early 90s to show off 3d, and nothing more, but the market has been flooded with these games, and so much to the point where the Video Game stereotype is violent shooter game with blood edgefest. This stereotype is so widely believed that ignorant parents believe all Video Games are violent and don't let their kids play Video Games at all despite the fact that there is such a thing as a non-violent video game. The overall concept of an FPS game itself is nothing more then tech demo worthy, maybe an indie game at best.
On the other hand, my favorite genre is platformers. They don't try to be too much, they're family friendly, and they're overall just fun. They provide the perfect amount of challenge, when you die, it's the players fault. I mainly like Mario and Sonic. of course, to be honest, I'll bet that the main reason I don't like FPS games, or really any modern games for that matter, is that they're too realistic. They're all too dark and gloomy, just look up Video Game screenshots and you'll see. I honestly find myself much more attached to brightly colored, cartoony games, because they pop out more.
Modern? Yeah, I totally agree with you on the FPS thing. If we're talking about retro games though, I'd have to say RPGs. I can't possibly understand how anyone can see the insanely repetitive task that is fighting the same enemies over and over (using menus, instead of proper character control!) just to "level up" as a fun thing to do. Back when the GB Pokemon games were big and emulation started to become popular, I often saw friends speeding up every single fight, so they obviously didn't find the fighting any more fun than I did, so why play a game if you feel like you have to fast forward most of it because it isn't fun? I don't get it.
Here are some of the things I dislike in games: realism, repetition, text, tutorials, waiting, menus. RPGs have a lot of those things, as do modern FPSs, so it's no surprise that they're my least favorite.
As for my favorite genre, it's definitely platformers, retro and modern. The more cartoony, the better.
Yeah, tutorials are just boring and annoying. You should include how to play in the instruction manuals and have that be all you need to play the game. As for the RPG fighting, that's just flat out tedious, I mean, imagine playing Space Invaders, but every time you shot an alien, you had to go through an RPG like battle sequence.
I would say those strategy games with a world map, like "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" or "Shingen the Ruler". They seem the most boring to me.
tokumaru wrote:
Modern? Yeah, I totally agree with you on the FPS thing. If we're talking about retro games though, I'd have to say RPGs. I can't possibly understand how anyone can see the insanely repetitive task that is fighting the same enemies over and over (using menus, instead of proper character control!) just to "level up" as a fun thing to do. Back when the GB Pokemon games were big and emulation started to become popular, I often saw friends speeding up every single fight, so they obviously didn't find the fighting any more fun than I did, so why play a game if you feel like you have to fast forward most of it because it isn't fun? I don't get it.
Here are some of the things I dislike in games: realism, repetition, text, tutorials, waiting, menus. RPGs have a lot of those things, as do modern FPSs, so it's no surprise that they're my least favorite.
As for my favorite genre, it's definitely platformers, retro and modern. The more cartoony, the better.
I agree with you 100%.
I like some multiplayer FPS's (Overwatch) but can't stand the single player ones.
I've got to agree about menus and waiting. The worst is towns. Nothing worse than having to talk to a million people who say nothing useful, and having one of them send you on some stupid side quest ("save my chickens!") when you should really be out saving the world.
I think the subject in the original question to too general.
In my opinion you can take any genre and do making something cool and unique with it. I'm speaking from a game designers point of view here. It's not that the genre itself is boring, but maybe the developers failed to do something interesting with that said genre.
Here are some games from different genres that I personally like.
Racing: Super Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing
Fighters: Street Fighter 2, Garou Mark of the Wolf
Puzzle: Bubble Bobble, Tetris
First Person Shooter: Goldeneye, Halo
Shooter: Cosmo Gang the Video
RPG: Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana
Action Adventure RPG: Zelda 3
Real Time Strategy: Populus PC version from Bullfrog
I feel like I could design a cool game for any genre. If you are a developer, why not pick your least favorite genre and then code a really interesting game in that genre that you actually like. Then all of a sudden, its not your least favorite genre anymore!
Erockbrox wrote:
If you are a developer, why not pick your least favorite genre and then code a really interesting game in that genre that you actually like.
Probably because the developer doesn't understand what players of that genre find fun.
I too, don't like FPS and also don't like tutorials, and prefer if the instruction is written in the book (or documentation file, if you are not purchasing the game in a box).
Platformers, plain racing games, and sports games. Hard time deciding which is worst.
I don't have the patience to play RPGs anymore, and the classic JRPG formula never seemed well-designed to me, so RPGs are probably my least favorite.
Platformers and FPS always seemed overrated to me, but I do enjoy playing them in small spurts so I can't say that I hate them.
The only first person shooter I'll actually play is the original Doom, can't stand the rest of them. Not even Metroid Prime.
Typical JRPGs and other non realtime things where grinding seems to be most of what you're doing don't do much for me.
I don't care for most RPGs, but I do enjoy the SRPG sub-genre like Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, or Valkyria Chronicles.
Racing games with realistic physics, visual novels, beat-em ups, and rhythm games bore me.
But I do love me some Unreal Tournament
I don't really have a least favourite genre, but my Least Favourite Thing In Video Games has to be Shiny Pants Syndrome.
Stop. Putting. Shaders. On. Everything. It. Looks. Awful.
calima wrote:
plain racing games, and sports games.
Same here, with the exception of Midway's sports games.
I remember at a local game store, they wouldn't take sports games as trade ins unless they were by Midway.
What else?
• I don't like platformers with seriously long sections of areas where you fall and instantly die.
• I don't like RPGs that require you to grind.
• I don't like simulators that... simulate... boring things... like piloting a Luftwaffe, without destroying things.
• I don't like fighting games that have you memorize long buttons combinations to pull off moves.
• I don't like bullet hell shooters.
Just don't see the point in realistic sports games. I grew up with Double Dribble and Tecmo Bowl, but I mostly liked those because it was how me and my dad bonded over games. Anything else that's not arcade-like or cartoonish really doesn't seem like fun. People get super-competitive over NBA and NFL games too much for my liking at any rate.
Other than that, I can't play most WRPGs. To me, it's always the same, boring, medieval stuff. Only difference is that the graphics get more realistic every year. It's cool that I get to make my own character, but even after all the customization options, I still find myself being a bland, unrelatable nobody who just happens to be strong enough to beat the game.
Probably symptomatic for anyone drawn to retro game sites and boards, but i don't care much for 3d fps games either. I enjoyed wolfenstein 3d, doom and quake when they were relatively new. Of the three, quake is the one i think holds up best to this day (much due to extremely good level design and consistent tonality), even if the single player bosses were lacking. Else, i don't find this type of game much interesting.
I liked metroid prime 1, 2 and 3, but more because they were explorers and puzzlers as much as they were shooters (mostly a tedious task that i thought detracted more than it added from what i thought was the core experience). I think metroid prime as a concept would do well to take notes from the myst series (yet keep the puzzles a bit more casual).
I also liked resident evil 4 (okay, mostly an over the shoulder shooter) for the most part as far as game mechanics go - it's one of the few games where limited ammo manages to enhance the game. It's all due to many of the "stages" being really well made. In this sense, re:4 has something in common with puzzle platformers. It's about timing and moving to proper spots.
I generallly do not enjoy sports games unless they have that arcadey, nonrealistic feel. Same goes with racers.
I used to love sim city 2000, sim tower, civilisation, etc but wouldn't want to play something like that today. Takes too much time across too little content, and once i begin to see through the mechanics, i start to wonder why i'm playing.
JRPG:s are a mixed bag. I'm easily bored by final fantasy games' way of handling battles, but something like chrono trigger is interesting for the most part. The difference is subtle when you look at it, but it makes all the difference to me.
I hate pretty much every FPS since Modern Warfare, where single player is a scripted bore and where multiplayer isn't about out-aiming the opponent (admittedly, many early shooters aren't either, particularly console ones because of the intense auto aim to alleviate awful controls) making split second decisions, resource management or anything that takes any actual skill, but is rather solely about getting the jump on the opponent, which often comes down to luck because of the extreme number of flanking points on the maps in these games or the adoption of cheese tactics like camping. Turning on the radar alleviates much of this, but then you can often get kills just by randomly shooting in the opponent's direction because you can shoot through walls in most of these games. Then, you need to set health to 200%, and then the weapon balancing is completely broken, so there's ultimately no way to salvage most of these games.
...Then there's Overwatch and it's clones.
Somehow, these feel even more BS to me then all the recent CoD and Battlefield games, but not for the same reasons. You're not dying from somebody shooting you out of nowhere; from my admittedly really limited experience playing Overwatch, people just kind of walk up to other people, and someone ends up dead on seemingly a coin flip; the combat is so incredibly slow and simplistic to where I felt I had pretty much hit the skill ceiling in ten matches. At least I felt CoD took some semblance of skill with having to memorize the maps. I absolutely despise the atmosphere of the game as well; they made the cast as diverse as possible, but for seemingly little reason other than that it's the new thing and I think the characters are actually pretty uninspired individually. You've got a run of the mill fatass Mad Max biker guy, a big robot with a minigun, and a super skinny woman in tights. A few stand out to me, particularly the gorilla in the robot suit, but these characters are far and in between. I'm not a fan of the trend of gritty realism in CoD and Battlefield, but I'll take it over second-rate Western anime easy.
It's not an FPS, but Splatoon is the probably the first shooter I've actually liked since the inception of the modern military shooter. The main gimmick is covering the arena with ink, but I think that even the core shooter mechanics are better than that of those in almost all FPS games from the last ten years, even if they don't hold a candle to something like Quake. I can't say I really like Splatoon 2 though; it's pretty much a downgrade on every front other than the amount of content, but there's still no contest between it or CoD and Overwatch.
From Final Fantasy to Chrono Trigger to Pokémon, I think JRPGs all feel completely pointless. The only ones I'll exempt are ones where you also have to move characters across a board, as I feel they require at least some strategy.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
I generallly do not enjoy sports games unless they have that arcadey, nonrealistic feel. Same goes with racers.
Same here. I can't say I care much for racing games, but F-Zero GX is actually one of my favorite games from any genre.
Jedi QuestMaster wrote:
I remember at a local game store, they wouldn't take sports games as trade ins unless they were by Midway.
That's actually very smart... At my local game store, there are just huge stacks of Madden for every system that they don't know what to do with. They give you shit for selling games, but if the store can't sell these games, then they're actually just losing money.
Jedi QuestMaster wrote:
I don't like RPGs that require you to grind.
So all of them.
Jedi QuestMaster wrote:
• I don't like bullet hell shooters.
I was waiting for this comment. Bullet hell shooters are more of an exercise in hardware dick stroking than having actually good gameplay, even though an N64 could pull of any 2D bullet hell ever made so what's the point.
Rahsennor wrote:
Stop. Putting. Shaders. On. Everything. It. Looks. Awful.
???
never-obsolete wrote:
beat-em ups
I don't think anyone will deny that the gameplay is awful, but I think they're a testament to how far good graphics can go for games.
Espozo wrote:
...Then there's Overwatch and it's clones.
Somehow, these feel even more BS to me then all the recent CoD and Battlefield games, but not for the same reasons. You're not dying from somebody shooting you out of nowhere; from my admittedly really limited experience playing Overwatch, people just kind of walk up to other people, and someone ends up dead on seemingly a coin flip; the combat is so incredibly slow and simplistic to where I felt I had pretty much hit the skill ceiling in ten matches.
I'm crazy defending something on this thread, and I have no problem with not LIKING the game, but.....no. It's like me saying that Smash Bros is just about button mashing and no skill. It feels that way until you understand the game, at which point you realize there's actually a ton of skill involved. Part of it is that Blizzard's matchmaking is good enough that you usually play against people of your skill level, so you don't immediately realize how bad you are and how much better the good players/teams actually are (and I'm saying that as a pretty terrible player myself)
- First person shooters
- Dancing games (seriously... what the fuck invented this ... if you want to dance do real dance without a game console)
- Western RPGs (JRPGs are fine)
- Educational games
- Non-racing sport games in general (racing games are fine)
gauauu wrote:
It's like me saying that Smash Bros is just about button mashing and no skill.
Post Melee it is, so...
gauauu wrote:
It feels that way until you understand the game
You can say that about any game. We're not here to debate how good one game is, so I'm willing to agree to disagree.
I haven't played any bullet hell shooters, but they are really fun to watch on YouTube.
To me, it looks like a ship just traveling through some giant mass of slow-moving ugly bright pinkness. It's obviously very difficult, but I still don't find it very entertaining to watch or play. This is much, much more impressive to me, even before knowing that the game doesn't use a one pixel hitbox:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOmQxClp7kQ Supposedly it's not TAS, but I don't quite buy into it.
It's probably an acquired taste, but thrill of finishing a run without getting hit (especially in games that don't have a fixed pattern, so it's not just muscle memory) is pretty addictive.
Then again, you could say the same about perfect play in any genre.
tepples wrote:
Erockbrox wrote:
If you are a developer, why not pick your least favorite genre and then code a really interesting game in that genre that you actually like.
Probably because the developer doesn't understand what players of that genre find fun.
The end result could very well be a game enjoyed by those who normally don't enjoy the genre though.
For instance, if one didn't enjoy platformers for reasons x, y, and z... and set out to make a platformer that removed those issues, suddenly you have a game that could be marketed as "a platformer for players who hate platformers."
This is actually the starting prompt for one of my lesson plans. Students need to design a new sport. To get them started, they're given the following questions:
1. What's your least favorite sport and why?
2. What could be done to change the reason you dislike it?
(Or for younger students: What sport doesn't have that problem, and how could you combine them?)
Then we go through all the logistics of the changes and related changes needed to accomodate them.
Would make a good game jam: design a game for a genre you hate.
Ties in to what
this guy says. Summarized:
-Innovative games doesn't come from heavenly inspiration
-It comes from taking a conventional game
--Knowingly or unknowningly breaking it into its smaller subgames
--detract some subgames, or add some subgames from a wholly different concept, context, or genre.
He also states:
-Most innovative games aren't successful
-They might not even be good
-But there's a chance of it being golden.
Okay, another "least favourite" genre
flight and farming simulators in general
problem: too detailed, i feel like i'm in school without getting a degree for my efforts (or accurate knowledge for that matter as it's still a fantasy). Also, i grew up on and worked a farm. No need to simulate work.
Detract: realism
Flight simulator sauce: Discovery, be able to explore interesting places. Fantastic landscapes, including canyons and sprawling caves.
Farm simulator sauce: Ward off an alien invasion, or survival from eldritch horrors. Mad max your tractor.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Farm simulator sauce: Ward off an alien invasion
In other words, make
Body Harvest Moon.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Also, i grew up on and worked a farm. No need to simulate work.
That's one thing I could never understand... My mother-in-law used to love those frenetic little games where you work in a restaurant and have to make food and serve people. I tried it a couple of times and found it stressful as hell! I can't imagine why people would choose to experience the stress of work during their free time!
Quote:
Would make a good game jam: design a game for a genre you hate.
Actually this is pure genius.
So now after thinking about this question for a little bit more I know have an answer. One of my least favorite genres is the point and click adventure games. I just don't see the point in clicking a bunch of things on the screen and making them do things or getting clues.
However, I just thought of a fun point and click game which of course eliminates all of the BS that I hate in them. I might even make this game for real now.
tokumaru wrote:
That's one thing I could never understand... My mother-in-law used to love those frenetic little games where you work in a restaurant and have to make food and serve people. I tried it a couple of times and found it stressful as hell! I can't imagine why people would choose to experience the stress of work during their free time!
Because it's a game, there's less issues if you do something wrong. Typically for driving or flying, you'll be very happy that you only did an accident in your simulation and not in real life !
For me, I have no problems with FPS games in general, but I can see why a lot of people hate it.
The first FPS I can imagine was probably Unreal Tournament 2004, or one of the MoH games, and I remember having a fun time with those.
I have absolutely no interest in JRPGs regardless if it is retro or modern, strategy games (with the exeption of Age Of Empires 2 - The Old Edition, becuase HD just failed to work for me, and I kinda like the NES port of Overlord too), and considering the fact that almost every single game that used expansion audio in Famicom titles are either RPGs or weird text-adventure games.... :S
I also don't like sports games. You do sports outside, not inside.
Not to mention that I saw in a GoodNES set about 500+ hacks of online Tecmo Bowl hacks outta there and I was like:
*why is this exist...*
I also hate *insert random thing here* - simulator games which are mostly joke subject nowadays.
My favourite genre is platformers. My favourite game series is Adventure Island.
MrNorbert1994 wrote:
and considering the fact that almost every single game that used expansion audio in Famicom titles are either RPGs or weird text-adventure games.... :S
You're learning me that Castlevania III and Gimmick are either RPGs or weird text-adventure games.
Quote:
I also hate *insert random thing here* - simulator games which are mostly joke subject nowadays.
I find them rather funny myself, especially those infamous ones with a lot of glitches - although if I bought them I understand I'd feel scammed.
Quote:
Not to mention that I saw in a GoodNES set about 500+ hacks of online Tecmo Bowl hacks outta there and I was like:
*why is this exist...*
My first toedip into nes hobbyism was a romhack of Volleyball to be set it in Poland, 1955 - based on a photo i saw once and that students from around the world would gather at so called youth for peace conferences and youth festivals, of which one was held in Warsaw 1955.
I think it's the same reason you'd hack any team sports game - you want to update, vary or customize the teams, nations or rosters
Bregalad wrote:
You're learning me that Castlevania III and Gimmick are either RPGs or weird text-adventure games.
Obviously those are exeptions, but games like Megami Tensei II or Metal Slader Glory are kind of in the unplayable area for me at the moment.
I wish if they would have included Erika To Satoru's soundtrack in a game like Xexyz - hence same developer.
At least we have Mappy Kids for that matter.
MrNorbert1994 wrote:
I also hate *insert random thing here* - simulator games which are mostly joke subject nowadays.
I know what you're talking about with respect to things like
Goat Simulator. But are you including
SimCity ("City Simulator") and
Spore ("
Intelligent Design Simulator")?
Bregalad wrote:
MrNorbert1994 wrote:
almost every single game that used expansion audio in Famicom titles are either RPGs or weird text-adventure games.... :S
You're learning me that Castlevania III and Gimmick are either RPGs or weird text-adventure games.
Those are the few exceptions. Let me look through FamiTracker's expansion select:
- VRC audio games other than CV3: Mouryou Senki Madara, Esper Dream 2, and Lagrange Point are RPGs.
- Sunsoft 5B: Gimmick is a platformer.
- MMC5
Non-RPGs: Gunsight (called Laser Invasion elsewhere) is not, as it's a Zapper game.
Simulator of traditional tabletop game: Shin 4 Nin Uchi Mahjong is Eastern rummy and thankfully had enough ROM to make the 人 (person) kanji on the title screen not look like a dildo.
RPG, strategy, or graphical adventure: Just Breed is a tactical RPG. Metal Slader Glory is a graphical adventure, which I assume MrNorbert1994 meant by "weird text-adventure games". Literally everything else is a Koei war sim.
Audio use: Just Breed uses audio, but I don't know which others do and don't. - Namco 163: I'm least familiar with this catalog. I ran down the Namco 163 list on NesCartDB and searched the web for their genre, but I'll let others fill in their audio use.
Sports: Famista '90 (aka RBI Baseball), Final Lap (racing; sequel to Pole Position II), Namco Classic (golf), Namco Classic II (golf)
Other non-RPGs: Dragon Ninja (a beat-em-up called Bad Dudes elsewhere), Mappy Kids (platformer), Rolling Thunder (side-scrolling action, also released by Tengen), Youkai Douchuuki (platformer)
RPG, strategy, or graphical adventure: Battle Fleet (strategy), Dokuganryuu Masamune (war sim), Erika to Satoru no Yume Bouken (graphical adventure), Hydlide 3: Yami Kara no Houmonsha (action RPG called Super Hydlide elsewhere), Juvei Quest (RPG), Kaijuu Monogatari (RPG), King of Kings (turn-based strategy, not Wisdom Tree's similarly titled platformer), Megami Tensei II: Digital Devil Story (RPG), Mindseeker (graphical adventure, feetured in HG101's "Your Weekly Kusoge"), Sangokushi II: Haou no Tairiku (strategy), Sangokushi: Chuugen no Hasha (strategy)
Quote:
My first toedip into nes hobbyism was a romhack of Volleyball to be set it in Poland, 1955 - based on a photo i saw once and that students from around the world would gather at so called youth for peace conferences and youth festivals, of which one was held in Warsaw 1955.
I think it's the same reason you'd hack any team sports game - you want to update, vary or customize the teams, nations or rosters
I can understand that, and I have no problems with that. The problem is that these Tecmo Bowl games doesn't seem to change anything besides text (tough I could be wrong about that), nor even gameplay mechanics for that matter.
Is Super Bowl such a big thing in the US even today, that it needed more than 200 ROMHacks of that? : P
Quote:
I know what you're talking about with respect to things like Goat Simulator. But are you including SimCity ("City Simulator") and Spore ("Intelligent Design Simulator")?
No. Only modern "simulator games".
Quote:
Shin 4 Nin Uchi Mahjong
Speaking of that... I heard that this is the only game that uses the MMC5 PCM audio.
I have two NSFs for it, and I never saw via NSFPlay that the music tracks would enable the MMC5 PCM.
I'm guessing that it was used for SFXs or something else? I tried to play the thing, but I have a general tendency to suck at Mahjong games.
Not to mention... the composer for that game is unknown, but when I saw the memory usage, it kinda reminded me of Yoshio Hirai, composer of Startropics.
It's a little weird what genre of games ended up with expansion sound. Maybe it's to simulate a more orchestral soundtrack?
But the games that really could use extra channels are space shooters and run'n'gunners - so that the pew pew doesn't interrupt the soundtrack.
Case in point:
Nemesis for game boy has an excellent score on its levels (and a few other tracks are really good too), i think they're some of the best in the commercial era for game boy. A matter of personal judgment and a little nostalgia of course. But it seems to have been overlooked because half of it has been more or less unheard due to sfx.
Probably strategy style rpgs, those kind where you advance characters across a map. real time strategy games too. I kinda liked Warcraft 2 ages ago, but it's not something I ever quite got a handle on.
Both Metal Slader Glory, Uchuu Keibitai SDF and Shin 4 Nin Uchi Mahjong uses expantion audio only for sound effects, not for music itself. In other word, they use it to avoid having to steal a music channel to play sound effect, which is the "standard" way to do it on the NES and which doesn't always sound very good.
Fair enough - all the more weird it wasn't more popular on shooters, Uchuu Keibitai SDF being the exception.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Nemesis for game boy has an excellent score on its levels (and a few other tracks are really good too), i think they're some of the best in the commercial era for game boy. [...] But it seems to have been overlooked because half of it has been more or less unheard due to sfx.
That and channel stealing is necessarily cruder on Commodore 64's SID and Game Boy than on other PSGs because of their lack of software volume envelopes. This means you can't resume an interrupted note so easily. But on Game Boy, which uses piecewise-linear hardware envelopes, I'll admit it can be worked around by tracking in software the progress of each envelope piece and restarting the remainder of that piece when the sound effect becomes less loud than the instrument. SID, not so much.
Gimmick! uses expansion audio because, according to the developers, the producer was very passionated about making the perfect action game and knew exactly who to have composing the music. But the composer's chords didn't go well with only the 4 channels so they wanted to have a sound chip in the cart to help with this.
Back to topic, I'm a real omnivore and like about any genre. I'd like to say FPS as my least liked genre but even that genre have fantastic games like Goldeneye 007. Generally they are seldom aesthetically appealing though, and gameplay is also often boring. I never liked the genre from the start be it Wolfenstein 3D, Doom or Quake.
I'm a big fan of Adventure games, simulation and RPGs (even some Western RPGs). I understand that going through a simple menu to fight simple enemies without any required strategy is boring, and RPGs would be pointless if that was all there was to them. Thankfully that's not all there is. Although many older RPGs do contain little variation and lots of grinding which often means little strategy in most battles. The strategy isn't just battles though, it's about counting herbs and torches and taking decisions for survival. Another important part of RPGs is the world it takes place in. Even with simple or no graphics the world is painted in the player's imagination through the text on the screen, much like when reading a book without lots of pictures (I admittedly don't read lots of books though).
I don't really care for FPS, driving games with much realism, or sports simulations, and open-world RPG type games are pretty low on my list. However, I don't think all these games are necessarily bad, but they do not excite me.
I'm not a fan of most belt-scrolling "beat em ups", and this a genre where I
do think the vast majority of them are bad games from a design perspective. Some people describe this genre in its original arcade form as "quarter-sucking" and "button-mashing". I can't say they're wrong, because even the ones with high presentation value by Konami seem to do little to introduce situations that reward a skilled player, outside of exploiting design errors in enemies or emergent behaviour from programming bugs. Very quickly in a game like The Simpsons it feels like the primary challenge is that you've been overwhelmed with too many enemies.
Here is
my opinion of the fairness in DJ Boy, a (lovably) terrible game.
I think Double Dragon II for NES/Famicom is a defensible game, as the enemy behaviors are unique to their types, there are certain moves and combinations the player can do after building some familiarity, and the stage designs have a lot of interesting variations and inherent challenges. I won't defend some of the flaws in the game, like the extremely sensitive hit detection and stiff controls for platforming sections, but I will say that I prefer it over the entire remaining line-up in the Double Dragon series.
A lot of what I said about DD2 (NES) can be said about Battletoads. I wonder if having less sprites forced developers to move away from the "throw more enemies at the player!" paradigm, forcing them to think about creating an actual game.
I suppose if I had to summarize my thoughts on the beat em up genre, I'd say that it has the lowest signal to noise ratio compared to other games from the '90s. There are good titles, but there are
piles of shitty games that get praised over and over by people who are okay with credit-feeding through a game, dying fifty times in the process.
mikejmoffitt wrote:
I suppose if I had to summarize my thoughts on the beat em up genre, I'd say that it has the lowest signal to noise ratio compared to other games from the '90s. There are good titles, but there are piles of shitty games that get praised over and over by people who are okay with credit-feeding through a game, dying fifty times in the process.
Yeah, most of those games are pretty awful when you go back and play them now, particularly on your own at home. In the arcade with a few friends (particularly for the 4-player ones) the social atmosphere was what made them fun. (I still have fun playing through TMNT in the arcade with some friends or family)
I tought a lot before answering this.
Looks like I'm very fickle about game's genre...
Just a few examples:
I don't like FPSs much, although I had lots of fun with Counter Strike, Doom, Duke Nuken and 007 Goldeneye on the interval between classes and after exams at school.
I also don't like sports games, but had a big time playing The Kings of the Beach and NBA Jam with friends back in the day.
RPGs too, I didn't liked it, but started playing Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Xenogears, Alundra and loved it.
Damm!! I even didn't liked Castlevania, Mario, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat when I first saw it!!
And now, most of the games I talked are on my favourite's list!!
I think gauauu is correct!
It's not solely the games I like to play, but the memories they bring with them.
The memories of having a great time socializing with old friends when I was a kid and had not much things to get worried about.
A time that will never come back, we growed up and life had hit hard most of my friends.
Fortunatelly I have my family and can have fun playing with them too!!
I think that's it...
DementedPurple wrote:
I'll share mine. I absolutely hate FPS games, I probably wouldn't care too much if they weren't everywhere, but they are.
The question itself is a little too open-ended and subjective.
Like many people on the forum, I'm not fond of FPS games, BUT, they're not hateable. Sports games (Eg football, soccer, baseball, etc) on a game console are basically canned boredom. The developers of these games are trying to milk their licensing, and thus they release a new game every year, full price. You know, in an age of DLC.
The subgenre of FPS games I'm not willing to play for any reason, are WWI/WWII type of war reenactment/based military warfare. There is no joy in being a soldier in real life, and why anyone would want to inflict that upon themselves is mind boggling except for the shooty-mcshootyface type people who like guns more than they like people.
I'll play a FPS game if all of below are true:
a) It's in space/space-faring
b) I can customize the avatar's gender/skin/hair/etc
c) It's not a military-driven story of conquest. Either the aliens are invading and are bad, or we're up against a type of entity seeking to destroy all civilizations.
I made an exception for Mass Effect. But I just can not get into a FPS game were you play as a souless space marine.
The next kind of game genre I don't care much for are the "Ugly Medieval fantasy RPG", eg Skyrim/Oblivion/Dragon Age/etc type of games where the game is full of interactivity, but every interaction with a character is just a repaint of another. I have to hate on Skyrim especially, because the game gets far more credit than I believe it deserves when every character has a balloon-face on top of identical human-shaped bodies.
Which leads me to mention Fallout (3 specifically.) Fallout kept my interest despite not being either of the above subgenres, and even produced by the same company as Skyrim which I kinda loathed. How was this different? Well you didn't have infinite ammo, so a completely valid strategy was using stealth. But, IMO it's very difficult to produce an engaging game in a "dsytopia" type environment primarily due to the fact that so many RPG games rely on crafting garbage as a way to artificially inflate the play time.
I hate crafting garbage in all current FPS and RPG games. With the move to day-1 DLC, and later lootboxes/gachapon style monetization, the games started intentionally wasting your time, and then dangle a carrot with a price tag in front of you to skip the garbage crafting grind. Crafting should have some manner of logic to it (eg grow the grain, mill the grain, make bread, eat bread, don't starve) not this current generation of "collect 5 rats, exchange for 1 bird cage to collect birds, that you exchange 12 birds for bow and arrows, that you need to kill deer, and if you miss the deer, repeat everything, then make leather armor out of deer hide" Like, even MMORPG's crafting has become pedantic busywork to keep paying subscribers from quitting between major updates.
I'm sorry, but no, the the minute you try to monetize a single player game, I'm looking elsewhere. So I've been looking at Indies before I look at AAA games.
The kind of games I have a preference for right now are short Platformer/Metroidvania type of 2D games, eg the Shantae series, mario games, sonic games, and games with more focus on story.
Some commentary on hated genres:
KOEInaga's Three Kingdoms: these behave mostly like board games (early) and simple spreadsheet sims with obfuscated mechanics posing as "complexity" (late), but I still like it. I got to admit that the enjoyment I take from those KOEI strategy games is to begin with the weaker fiefdom, survive the unfair dice rolls and progressively conquer Japan/China bit by bit. Once you get as powerful as the 2nd best player in the session it starts to get boring fast since there's little depth to the strategy, being mostly a numbers game. I guess it's kinda like Civilization where it gets really boring when you have to micromanage thousands of units, including air and sea, every turn.
Adventure games (the "point and click" kind, text based adventures, etc.): in my opinion these are only enjoyable if you're taking an active role as a player. I mean, if it's a murder investigation game you have to really try to create hypothesis and figure out what happened instead of just letting the game guide you through the story. For example, I played JB Harold: Murder Club on the Turbografx-CD some time ago, and the game is simply boring and Encarta-like if you're approaching it passively (just clicking on everything until the game spells out the plot for you), but if you really try to think and theorize before you act it's a lot of fun and the game's true potential opens up. I literally bought a little physical notebook just for this game, and the experience was one of the best I had on the console... the story had a lot of realistic characters, red herrings, side cases that feel related to the main one but go nowhere, unresolved plot points that are left open to interpretation and never explicitly solved (Archived Rape at Downs Hill Cemetery case), and a finale reveal full of twists that you could have only guessed if you payed REAL attention to the game.
Of course these are going to be very boring if you're just passively playing it, aka thinking about which action in the game you should do next to proceed the story instead of focusing on the real meat of the game (THE STORY YOU DINGUS!!!). A modern example is LA Noire, the game just pushes you along into the story if you do poorly anyway, the difference from action oriented games being not having an imposed mechanic by the game, but only the penalty of not figuring out the subplot cases fully.
Well if the adventure game has a good plot and interesting characters you don't really need to take an active role, you are sucked in automatically I think. I don't really make a lot of effort to become part of the story anyway, it's more like I have no choice and gets intrigued by it, it's like when you are reading a very good book. Famicom Tantei Club and Gyakuten Saiban series are written like that, although Gyakuten Saiban also forces you to figure out many things yourself before you can proceed (unless you want to do tons of trial-and-error and lots of reloading), especially in the courtroom battles.
I've played lots of belt-scroll fighting games and had tons of fun with them so I can't agree that they are poorly made from a game design point of view. The genre is not very common nowadays and the games may not have aged as well as for example platform games and shooting games (although I personally still enjoy them). The games are often about martial arts and being old games they are simple and don't allow so many moves which is why they are not so varied as modern VS Fighting games are.
Also they games are not about button mashing but you need to learn the timing and distance of your moves and opponents.
One great example of the genre (although it might not strictly be belt-scroll since you can only move in one axis) that has aged really well is The Ninja Warriors Again for Super Famicom.
I think it's important to separate enjoying something and it being objectively well-designed. I've had fun with TMNT: Turtles in Time, but I won't defend its gameplay design decisions. I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed the Bubsy SNES game, but its gameplay has not helped it. I think most games that "didn't age well" turned out that way because they aren't well designed.
Yeah, I was never friends with that term. I can't think of one single game that "hasn't aged well" that I would argue was ever a good game at any time. And if anyone think they have an example of it, I'm very curious to hear it.
I remember Bubsy being quite interesting when it came out due to the high pace and colorful graphics, but I don't remember anyone actually liking the game.
Sumez wrote:
I can't think of one single game that "hasn't aged well" that I would argue was ever a good game at any time. And if anyone think they have an example of it, I'm very curious to hear it.
The original "The Legend of Zelda" is probably the classic example for this, in my opinion: Back in 1986, it was revolutionary.
But while the first "Super Mario Bros." is still very enjoyable today, despite its sequels introducing much more stuff, with "Zelda" it's different.
I think if you play "Zelda 1" now without a nostalgia factor, then it's an average game at best:
A tiny world map. (They could at least have used a 16 x 16 grid and abolished the second quest instead.)
No in-game story whatsoever for a game that tries to tell an epic tale in the manual's backstory.
Frustratingly hard.
Stiff movements in only four directions.
Anti-climactic bosses.
Horrible, ear-piercing dungeon music. (And let's not forget that annoying heart sound.)
"The Legend of Zelda" hasn't aged well. Unlike the two sequels/prequels for Super Nintendo and Game Boy that stand the test of time.
A find a lot of that at least somewhat debatable:
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They could at least have used a 16 x 16 grid and abolished the second quest instead.
I'm not sure spreading what content there is over a larger map would've been the answer - not too much interesting challenge variation you can provide on the course between objectives with the current set of screen structures, enemies, etc.
I agree the bosses are a bit underwhelming - that's something i thought even back then. This is at least a little symptomatic for the NES library though.
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Stiff movements in only four directions.
Flaw - or feature? not being able to move diagonally can be an interesting ruleset.
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Frustratingly hard.
Tough balance. Frustratingly easy would've been worse.
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No in-game story whatsoever for a game that tries to tell an epic tale in the manual's backstory.
Also a feature. Read the story in your own time. Don't get interrupted by it while playing. Zelda 1 as a game doesn't need more than a premise to function. I think it's a good rule of thumb to be at least careful when inserting interruptive story elements in an action game.
DRW wrote:
The original "The Legend of Zelda" is probably the classic example for this, in my opinion: Back in 1986, it was revolutionary.
This one is hard for me to argue about, since I never liked the first Zelda game that much. It's an alright game, but I feel like its flaws are very obviously apparent, though I don't agree with everything you're saying (FrankenGraphics made most of the points I would have). Abolishing Second Quest for a bigger world map sounds extremely pointless to me. I wish some of the other, better, Zelda games had something like the original's Second Quest.
However, most of the people who dig Zelda 1, seem to still hold it in very high regard. I've never actually seen anyone else claiming that it "hasn't aged well", so I see it more of as a different strokes for different folks thing.
Zelda 2 on the other hand, I hated back in the days - but nowadays I realise how great it is (and always was). It's a game that's grown on me.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
I'm not sure spreading what content there is over a larger map would've been the answer
Yeah, they could have designed a more interesting map to begin with. Like the one from "Final Fantasy Adventure":
http://www.finalfantasykingdom.net/ffa/map.pngFrankenGraphics wrote:
Flaw - or feature? not being able to move diagonally can be an interesting ruleset.
The fact that it is a feature doesn't contradict the statement that it hasn't aged well. Everything that isn't a bug or an oversight is, by definition, a feature.
But it still feels old-fashioned and stiff, especially since the later games do allow diagonal movement.
This is the top-down-game equivalent of the inability to control your jumps in sidescrollers.
Also, it makes no logical sense: The game doesn't use a map view. Why is Link only able to use the four main directions?
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Tough balance. Frustratingly easy would've been worse.
Again: Later games are not as hard. According to your logic, you would have to accuse "A Link to the Past" that it lacks the "tough balance" of its predecessor.
"Zelda" is not an arcade platformer. A game that is about exploration and adventure doesn't need
that kind of difficulty.
Sure, too easy wouldn't be right as well, but there's a reason why later "Zelda" games don't use the same difficulty anymore.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Also a feature. Read the story in your own time. Don't get interrupted by it while playing.
Again: The fact that it's a feature doesn't automatically mean that it has aged well. Later "Zelda" games do have a story and those games in general have a lot of character interaction. Playing "Zelda 1" today feels like you're playing a very bare-bones game of this genre.
Again, I have to refer to "Final Fantasy Adventure":
That's how to do a plot in a game.
Sumez wrote:
However, most of the people who dig Zelda 1, seem to still hold it in very high regard.
As I said: Nostalgia factor.
But is there anybody who didn't grow up with it and only discovered it in the past years who says: "Yup, that's exactly the kind of action adventure that still stands the test of time. This game doesn't need to shy away from later titles of this genres or of its own series"?
DRW wrote:
FrankenGraphics wrote:
I'm not sure spreading what content there is over a larger map would've been the answer
Yeah, they could have designed a more interesting map to begin with. Like the one from "Final Fantasy Adventure":
http://www.finalfantasykingdom.net/ffa/map.pngNot that it fixes anything for Zelda 1, but did you play Link's Awakening? It would have been a good example - or maybe even Oracle of Seasons which was originally intended to be a remake of Zelda 1, and retains slight hints of its geography.
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According to your logic, you would have to accuse "A Link to the Past" that it lacks the "tough balance" of its predecessor.
That is absolutely that game's biggest flaw...
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Again: The fact that it's a feature doesn't automatically mean that it has aged well. Later "Zelda" games do have a story and those games in general have a lot of character interaction. Playing "Zelda 1" today feels like you're playing a very bare-bones game of this genre.
But being bare-bones in terms of story doesn't mean it's aged poorly. That pretty much implies that telling more story throughout a game makes it better, which I believe we can find plenty examples where it's absolutely
not the case.
Imagine a modern remake of Ninja Gaiden where the cutscenes aren't skippable. Or maybe a modern remake of Metroid, where Samus has a ton of dialogue with her superior officer after each boss fight. Would that make the games better? Maybe some people would think so, but it's definitely
highly subjective, at best.
Sumez wrote:
Yeah, I was never friends with that term. I can't think of one single game that "hasn't aged well" that I would argue was ever a good game at any time. And if anyone think they have an example of it, I'm very curious to hear it.
I disagree, the whole point of a game that "hasn't aged well" is that at some point the game was, if not a masterpiece, at least somewhat good at some point, and then stopped to be really enjoyable. Games that were already bad on their release are just bad games, not games that "haven't aged well".
Early 3D games such as Star Fox or Super Mario Kart (SNES), they look absolutely awful by modern standard even compared to regular, 2D SNES games, and it's really hard to enjoy those games without having your eyes in tears due to the horrible low quality 3D graphics. But back when they were released such graphics were revolutionary, and those games were considered great and enjoyable.
Bregalad wrote:
I disagree, the whole point of a game that "hasn't aged well" is that at some point the game was, if not a masterpiece, at least somewhat good at some point, and then stopped to be really enjoyable. Games that were already bad on their release are just bad games, not games that "haven't aged well".
And I believe the former doesn't exist, and in most situations where people use the term, they are really talking about the latter. I've heard so many people talk about games that "didn't age well", when the game in question is obviously crap, and they are just blinded by their own nostalgia.
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Early 3D games such as Star Fox or Super Mario Kart (SNES), they look absolutely awful by modern standard even compared to regular, 2D SNES games, and it's really hard to enjoy those games without having your eyes in tears due to the horrible low quality 3D graphics. But back when they were released such graphics were revolutionary, and those games were considered great and enjoyable.
Those games are still great and enjoyable, and you better believe Star Fox was dead ugly when it came out! That goes for pretty much all early 3D graphics during the 90s - I know I'm far from the only one who lamented the switch to 3D graphics with the following console generations, since the new games were remarkably uglier than what we already had.
Sure, Starfox was impressive for a SNES game, but that didn't influence how it played, apart from the whole thing with the terribly slow framerate, which was annoying back then too, and pointed out by most reviewers. Graphically, I think it holds up because it's stylized enough to work - it's not great looking, but it isn't trying to be either.
Sure, there were also people blinded entirely by the advances in technology, and judged the games on that instead of the game's own merits, but we are still seeing that happening today, and it doesn't make the games any better.
Well Star Fox had a new type of gameplay feeling that I hadn't experienced before so it was cool that way, although it was blocky graphicwise.
I'm not so sure about games aging. Super Mario Bros 1 doesn't seem to age at all gameplaywise because it had no real flaws to begin with. Peoples opinion changes over time and of course if someone plays an old game now the society is different from when it was released and not the same hype around an old game exists anymore. Also a game that was new for its genre was cooler when it was released than after thousands of clones have flooded the market for years. People tend to dismiss games too fast though if they are old or from before their own time, without even trying to play them with the right mindset so that they'll be able to judge them properly. Also I think many games that are said to not having aged well where just flawed to begin with.
Sumez wrote:
Zelda 2 on the other hand, I hated back in the days - but nowadays I realise how great it is (and always was). It's a game that's grown on me.
Yes it was always a masterpiece although it tends to be overshadowed by other games in the series. The controls and battles are just so much better than the first game in the series.
DRW wrote:
Sumez wrote:
However, most of the people who dig Zelda 1, seem to still hold it in very high regard.
As I said: Nostalgia factor.
But is there anybody who didn't grow up with it and only discovered it in the past years who says: "Yup, that's exactly the kind of action adventure that still stands the test of time. This game doesn't need to shy away from later titles of this genres or of its own series"?
I can't say I discovered it in the past years but I grew up with Zelda 2 instead of Zelda 1 and I didn't get a chance to play Zelda 1 properly enough to beat it until after A link to the past was already out. I can say I had a hard time with some parts of it as there are lots of things that you can't discover yourself so easily (unless you do tons of trial and error), but over the years it becomes easier and easier because I already remember all the secrets so it really grew on me. Actually one reason I love Breath of the Wild is because its vast nature landscapes reminds me of Zelda 1, and the old man in the beginning reminds me of the old men in Zelda 1.
I agree with DRW about Zelda 1's stiff 4-direction movement though. It's an action game so you need a bit more freedom in your movements or you feel like you are needlesly constrained. This is why battles in Zelda 1 are not very fun at all. It's mostly about dodging beams and swinging the sword when you face the right direction and quickly move away again. For turn-based RPGs or puzzle games like Sokoban or Eggerland, limited tile-based movement is preferred, but not in action RPGs.
Still not convinced on the non-love against non-diagonal topdown movement. The game, at least as-is, would be something of a cheese fest if you could approach enemies in a diagonal fashion, because it's an angle where they have no defensive and generally very little offensive capabilities. You could further argue that, well, if they had designed it to be an eight-way mover, they could've adopted enemy behaviour to match. Which ok, they could. But they didn't, even in A link to the past. Player moves in all directions. Enemies are easily defeated by not having offensive actions in diagonal directions.
I could totally see TLOZ be 8-directional movement based. But you'd also lose (or best case replace) a lot of:
-identity
-strategy
The strategies might be few in the game as it were, but they'd be even fewer with diagonal movement and attack.
Some personal principles:
-It's in the players' natural order to not like imposed restrictions - they tend to look for the path of least resistance.
-But at the same time, those restrictions are the real meat and bone of the game design which will guarantee the long-term satisfaction.
-It's the designers' goal to come up with an interesting combination of game rules.
-It is not necessarily the designers' goal to come up with a set of rules that players will find more agreeable just because they make a game leaner, even though it's an act of balance.
-And sometimes, players don't know what's best for them. You can fly all through a vast number of stages in smb3 circumvening any substantial challenge, but that's fast carbohydrates which won't yield a lasting impression or qualitative experience, and risks leaving you with a sugar rush hangover.
-This broadly open invitation to cheese it leaves the player with the hard choice to discipline her/himself while playing in order to not "ruin it", which generally isn't a pleasurable experience when not actively chosen and involving a new real challenge (like, for example, setting out to do a no death run).
This is all linked to Lacans' term jouissance:
"[...]a jouissance which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle.
Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this "painful principle" is what Lacan calls jouissance."
[1]-(imo) a good designer aims to allow for the right amount of such transgressions. Not too little (creates a feeling of inagency), not too much (creates what the process describes above).
-Furthermore, everyone has a subjective and personal experience where the balance of that threshold is. For me, ALTTP allows for too much cheesing against many enemy types. As does Super Castlevania, mainly because they didn't care to balance the whip length against the multidirectional feature, thus overriding the much of the need for subweapons and a portion of the need strategic positioning by the player of the player character.
Perhaps ironically, i was at the other side of the argument table (4 vs 8-directional) when we started pinning down feature sets for the topdowner i've been working on together with rahsennor. I think it goes to show how sensitive any "general principle" is to practical context.
As for the "age poorly" concept. I think it is this simple:
-The games in themselves don't change
-Their context does, though, which plays at least some part.
-Fading nostalgia plays a strong part, but it's not all.
-the personal, human "pleasure apparatus" changes as we gain more experience, we grow older and change, and as life takes us in new directions.
-Most importantly (i think), our conceptions and the general discourse of what "good design" is is perpetually changing over time.
Really, the only thing with the original Zelda that I feel didn't age well is the "burn and bomb everywhere" method of finding things. (Which at the time was fun because it added a social aspect where you'd get together with friends and ask what they found).
I actually think the world map is near perfection. It's not huge, but it's interesting, and connects together in interesting ways. Final Fantasy Adventure's map looks more interesting on paper, but was a lot less interesting to play through. It just didn't have everything as connected in interesting ways.
Similarly with combat (except for the anticlimactic bosses) -- I think the 4-way movement combined with the different enemy types is amazing. I've played very few old games that required so many different types of tactics in dealing with different types of enemies.
The game isn't perfect (particularly the hidden secrets that I mentioned above), but the rest of it has aged AMAZINGLY well in my opinion.
I'm sure die-hard fans of the game will defend the 4-axis movement, but people are entitled to different opinions, and I don't think it has anything to do with the age of the game.
I agree with DRW and Pokun that it's a flaw of the game, and I'd dare claim it also was that when it was released. A better example of a game that completely benefits from 4-way movement is Startropics, as evident by its sequel which I'd consider noticeably worse - though for more reasons. In general, though, the stock NES controller isn't too great for 8-way movements.
Funny, i was going to mention StarTropics but didn't want to bloat my post any more.
Anyway, StarTropics is of a quite different topology than Zelda, because movement is grid-based, rather than freeform.
Coarsely, the topdown topologies i can think of are these as far as a square based "game board" is concerned:
-Turn based, grid based (either take-turns or simultaneous action phase turns)
-Grid based
-Free positioning, 4-way cardinal direction based movement
-Free positioning, 8-way cardinal direcction based movement
-Free positioning, rotation based direction
I suppose you could also have:
-Turn based, with free rotation based direction
like how many red baron/aviator/dog fight/war games (warhammer etc) operate. (picture example:
x-wing)
Though i'm not sure i've seen this in a video game. You deploy and move units a bit like warhammer in the Myth series, but it is also real time based.