VOGONS


Most disappointing games?

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Reply 520 of 532, by gerry

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Eep386 wrote on 2023-05-07, 16:08:

For me, it's the plethora of hilarious, immersion-breaking bugs and glitches. 😆

maybe i got lucky with the slightly later half life generation release, don't remember anything too bad in terms of bugs etc

Reply 521 of 532, by appiah4

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HL1 is a product of its time, if you didn't 'get' why it was so revolutionary at the time it will not make any sense right now. I'll take HL1 over HL2 (which I really hate) any day.

Reply 522 of 532, by lowenz

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leileilol wrote on 2010-09-26, 16:41:

Battlezone 2

All the coolness of Battlezone thrown away for a throwaway scifi cliche plot and setting, all for that wanting to be "the Intel Pentium III SSE GAME" at the top priority.

Exactly.

Reply 523 of 532, by gerry

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Hezus wrote on 2023-02-15, 21:44:
Bruno128 wrote on 2023-02-15, 16:35:

Planescape Torment, but I'm not giving up on it just yet.

This is probably one of my favourite games ever made but you need to get deeply invested in it to really appreciate it.

i can see that with some games and will likely try this at some point, as i like the ideas around it

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a more general comment:

what i cannot stand is games that *insist* you invest deeply by having un-skippable and overly long 'story' scenes (and i forgive HL1 on this, the 1st time of playing at least) and/or overly long and unavoidable tutorials - especially ones where you seem to have to accomplish something in the tutorial to play the actual game

one example is the timed course in call of duty modern warfare, thankfully easy.

but the 'tutorial' in Driver is *harder* than the rest of the game, as a youtube commenter brilliantly put it: "When the final boss is at the start of the game."

Driver turned out to be great game, modern warfare turned out to be all very competent but annoying as you seem always to be 'teamed up' which just means chaos to amateur players like me 😀 (follow who? where? which one needs rescuing? I can't see anything, just get out of my way!)

oh, and assassin creed - guilty of overly long story and tutorial and of gameplay being somehow far less 'open' than i thought (and i wasn't good at it, any mission involving stealth means stepping on the wrong pixel and doing it over 5 times - because on the 6th the game is exited), lovely visuals though

Reply 524 of 532, by Eep386

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gerry wrote on 2023-05-07, 16:20:
Eep386 wrote on 2023-05-07, 16:08:

For me, it's the plethora of hilarious, immersion-breaking bugs and glitches. 😆

maybe i got lucky with the slightly later half life generation release, don't remember anything too bad in terms of bugs etc

My favorites were the chainsaw crowbar glitch, and how unbelievably stupid and poorly programmed the enemy solder AI was (they'll shoot any allies directly in front of them if it means trying to shoot at you, plus they will happily blow themselves up with their grenades 😂)

Life isn't long enough to re-enable every hidden option in every BIOS on every board... 🙁

Reply 525 of 532, by leileilol

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Hgrunt AI still does stupid stuff in the PS2 version including grenade seppuku. Note that Half-Life's hype was HIGH at the time of release that some called the AI 'indistinguishable from human deathmatch opponents'

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 526 of 532, by Eep386

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leileilol wrote on 2023-05-07, 21:03:

Hgrunt AI still does stupid stuff in the PS2 version including grenade seppuku. Note that Half-Life's hype was HIGH at the time of release that some called the AI 'indistinguishable from human deathmatch opponents'

One thing I liked to do when three were shooting at me, was try to line them up so that the rearmost guy shoots his way through the two in front of him. 🤣

Life isn't long enough to re-enable every hidden option in every BIOS on every board... 🙁

Reply 527 of 532, by Repo Man11

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I recently finished Half-Life Source, and I'm near finishing the original Half-Life (patched to v46/1.1.1.0). I had never played any of the Half-Life games prior to beginning Half-Life 2 late last year, and I'd never played an FPS prior to playing Halo last year. I'd say I'm a fan of the Half Life games, but there are plenty of bugs in Half-Life 1. There are several spots where you get stuck when riding an elevator where you have little choice but to exit and begin again with an earlier save, and I've found a number of spots where you will get stuck period. Another thing I don't like about the original is how your character can be immobilized while being attacked, such as by leeches and the immature head crabs the Gonarch launches at you.

Half-Life Source has a reputation for being buggy, but I've found that it's less buggy than the original HL. I'm playing the original release of HL Source (bundled with the HL-2 Game of the Year from 2004), not the version that is on Steam. My understanding (based on recent review videos on YouTube) is that the version of HL Source on Steam has more bugs than the old version! It's possible that the Steam version of Half-Life has fewer issues than the Steam version of Half-Life Source, but I like to play these old games on old computers, though I do have the Steam versions of Half-Life 2 and Black Mesa that I play with my main PC.

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy."

Reply 528 of 532, by lowenz

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No, the steampipe version just broke compatibility with very old mods and nobody updated them for HL Source.
But now there are few updated HL Source mods around.....still there's no sense playing it because you can play the Steam version of HL with tons of mods (like the new MMOD for HL *1* and not for Source).

The problem with HL Source is that everybody expected a Black Mesa like remaster, not a dull port.

Reply 529 of 532, by Repo Man11

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lowenz wrote on 2023-05-09, 06:20:

No, the steampipe version just broke compatibility with very old mods and nobody updated them for HL Source.
But now there are few updated HL Source mods around.....still there's no sense playing it because you can play the Steam version of HL with tons of mods (like the new MMOD for HL *1* and not for Source).

The problem with HL Source is that everybody expected a Black Mesa like remaster, not a dull port.

Two separate reviews of the Steam version of HL-Source on YouTube show graphical anomalies in Residue Processing that I never experienced. They also mention that the crowbar sound effect is that of striking metal no matter what you are hitting (not true with the older version). Also mentioned is the guard firing at the tentacles in the Blast Pit can't die, and the helicopter in Surface Tension cannot be shot down with the rockets alone because you run out (presumably have to finish it off with another weapon); I didn't experience any of these issues with the old version of HL-Source. HL-Source has its issues for sure, but so does the original when patched to 1.1.1.0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z74y3IVGHwo

I gave up on finishing the original Half-Life yesterday because at the very end of interloper you have to ride a spinning platform up one level, and every time when I'd reach the top the platform would stop rotating and Gordon would get stuck. The only way to avoid this the other times is happens is to repeatedly hop so that hopefully you're in the air when the glitch happens, but you have to be ready to fight as the platform raises because there's a Vortigaunt that will start zapping you as the platform rises, and one false move and you fall to your death from the platform, etc. I decided that it was close enough to the end to declare victory and leave it. But the original HL does have EAX as an option, which I did like.

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy."

Reply 530 of 532, by Bruno128

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Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-05-09, 14:35:

I decided that it was close enough to the end to declare victory and leave it.

If you made it to Interloper then you’ve been thru the best part of the game already, no worries. This level is dark corridors with lots of enemies and feels like any B-tier alien themed fps from late 90s.

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Reply 531 of 532, by Zup

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What about Megarace? Last week, I've played it for the first time and I think it is (very) overrated.

- Bad FMV. Lance Boyle is very overacted, and it doesn't get better on the sequels.
- Overuse of FMV. It seems that you can't do anything without seeing some kind of videos (I know that you can cancel the videos). I'd prefer to have the option to see some slides with the information about the track/enemies instead of FMVs.
- Gameplay seems to me a (bad) clone of Overlander. I've only played the first race, and the difference is that Overlander had enemies on the sides of the road and some obstacles.
- Also, the game moves about at the same speed of Overlander. In a ZX Spectrum, with 3.5MHz, may be justified; not on a PC.

I know that FMVs were all hyped on that era, but the gameplay is not good. I guess many people remember it better than the game really was.

(BTW, the sequels are much better... I've played only for a minutes and the only one that gave me some sense of speed was the third)

I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...

I'm selling some stuff!

Reply 532 of 532, by Kahenraz

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There was definitely some serious abuse of FMVs in the 90s. My guess is that no one knew what to do with all of the free space on CDs, so they would often just get filled up with video.

There were definitely some games that did FMVs right. The Wing Commander series, for example, was excellent.