Zeusthecat

The way I feel about this is about the same way I would feel if Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn showed up to the giant battle in Return of the King in a Mercedes... actually that would be awesome.

Chocobos poop, cars don't. And yeah, the hair is pretty sweet.

But he rides a Chocobo, not a car. There is a big difference between Chocobos and cars. And he's also not a dude, he's a monkey. Now if this was a game where these guys are all just modern day dudes who just dropped a bunch of acid and then go driving around in their car, hallucinating a Final Fantasy adventure, I would be 100% behind that. Edit: That was a reply to YOU TWIG!

Sure, except none of the other Final Fantasies are dudes on a road trip.

So I've taken some time to let some of the new ideas behind FFXV sink in and I think I hate it. The whole Broad trip concept just looks too incredibly stupid and cheesy. The rest of it seems fine I guess but I have zero faith that dudes on a road trip will mesh well with a Final Fantasy game. Can someone please map out a path for me where this somehow works and makes for a compelling game? Now if they are going for the stupid cheese factor and are purposely steering Final Fantasy in that direction, then I can get behind that. Somehow though, I get the feeling that they are taking it very seriously.

Hey, that's actually not a bad idea. Is that a thing a game has done yet?

One thing that's really been bothering me since playing Cart Life is how poorly games often handle the passage of time. It seems like the way it is commonly handled is that 1 second of real life time is equivalent to 1 minute of in game time, meaning that a full day/night cycle takes 24 minutes. I hate this system and I think it is garbage despite the fact that a lot of my favorite games (namely Harvest Moon) implement the passage of time in this fashion. It's not so much the length of time that is the real issue for me, but rather, how poorly all of the in game activities scale to this type of system. The problem is that a lot of trivial things that would only take a minute or two in real life end up taking like an hour or two of in game time, creating a situation where you can never get enough done before the day is over because every little thing eats up precious time. This is then exacerbated even further when NPCs or shops have some kind of set schedule and you have to make sure you consciously block out enough time to travel to them, talk/interact with them, and travel back while still leaving enough time to get your other mandatory shit done (like watering crops, feeding livestock, etc.). On the other end of things, I'm not really a big fan of games that use real-life time like Animal Crossing. I like to sit down and play for a few hours at a certain time of day usually and I feel like I am missing out on a lot by never being able to play at odd times. I'm not really sure what a good solution to this problem would be. Maybe dynamically slow down or speed up the passage of time based on the type of activities you are performing or allow the player to just freeze time when they want or automatically freeze time whenever they are standing still. I'm sure there would be pros and cons to all of those approaches. One game though that handled it in a pretty satisfying way for me was the original Harvest Moon for SNES. In that game, time flowed at a pretty brisk pace from 6AM to 6PM and then just stopped as soon as 6PM hit. Additionally, whenever you went inside a building, time stopped. This took away so much of the stress that I experienced in the later games. I could take my time feeding my livestock and perusing shops and was able to spend most of the day just gathering stuff in the forest and talking to townsfolk. Then, when night hit and time stopped, I could go through and water all my crops (even though this meant repeated trips to the hot springs to replenish my stamina), clear out any weeds, and visit the village bar to talk to drunk people. As much as subsequent Harvest Moon games improved on a lot of the mechanics, the way time worked in the first one is something I've always missed.

I finished Psychonauts. It had a really unique and charming story, a good soundtrack, great voice acting, and solid gameplay to back it up. Thanks to the awesome variety of areas and unique gameplay elements in each one, the gameplay stayed fresh from beginning to end and was pretty much always enjoyable. I liked all of the different areas a great deal but the three that stood out as my favorites were the bull charging area, the milkman conspiracy area, and the Napoleon area. Leading up to the end of the game, I was definitely dreading the Meat Circus that I had heard so much about. Thanks to whatever patch they issued to make this area less frustrating, I found it to be a pretty decent segment and got through it fairly quickly. I'm assuming the checkpointing must have been tweaked or something because unless they actually fundamentally changed how it played, the only major frustrating thing I could imagine about this area would have been having to repeat large segments of the level whenever you fall down or otherwise fuck up. That happened to me quite a bit but once I reached certain thresholds, I would hit a checkpoint making the whole thing pretty manageable.

Not in my case. Most of them are <5 hour games and I kind of want an excuse to play them again anyways. Arkham City is really the only longer one but it's been awhile and I always meant to play it again on PC.

Dead Thread Redemption! My 360 backlog is cleared. My PS3 backlog is cleared. My Wii backlog is cleared (pretty much). Not including some games on older generation systems, my Steam backlog is all that remains. I am within striking distance and if I can keep at it, I will finally be freed of all gaming guilt and will truly reach gaming nirvana. My criteria is a little OCD. I consider any Steam game that I have not played and completed through the Steam client to be a part of my backlog. So several of these games have been completed before whether it was separately in ScummVM or on another console. Any games I have already completed through Steam or external shortcuts I added have been crossed off. For games that don't really end, my goal is to at least log 5-10 hours of playtime.

Yeah, I also liked the Disco level. One thing I don't like so much though is how a bunch of shitty animals show up to catch me on fire at night time. I liked it better when I could just freely explore the whole camp area without having to worry about that stuff.

No but I think that might be the next area I do. One of the guys I work with has been encouraging me to play this game for awhile now and he mentioned that that is his favorite part too.

Just figured I'd pop back in here to say how great Psychonauts is. I'm about 12 hours in and it has just been wonderful. As I've come to expect from a Tim Schafer game, the voice acting, dialog, and music are all pretty stellar but I'm a little surprised to find that the gameplay also has a very satisfying feel to it (I wasn't sure what to expect control-wise after experiencing the tank controls in GF). I just finished the milk man segment and the Mexican themed charging bull segment and after doing those, I pretty much want to have babies with this game. The milk man area was a surprisingly difficult puzzle to solve and I found myself stumped a couple of times as I tried to find the right items to get into each of the restricted zones. But even being stuck, the layout of the world was so unique that I found it quite enjoyable to just run around and experiment with different items and abilities until I figured out what I needed to do. I ended up getting through it in the end by sheer accident when I tried to light a mailbox on fire and ended up catching a keypad on fire, causing a guy to come out who I then had to use my remote vision ability on to see the password he entered into the keypad. But I think my favorite area of the game so far has been the bull charging zone. The music, the neon, and the overall theme of that area came together in such an outstanding way and made for a beautiful experience. This game just oozes style and I love it.

I'd say for me it just feels like unnecessary tedium that sometimes kills my momentum. There have been a good number of occasions now where I get to a spot that requires eggs to get through and I have to do some backtracking to get back to where there are some enemies or an egg block to replenish my supply. I don't think there is anything about the egg collecting mechanic that adds to the experience and in every case I have come across, I would have preferred to just know that I can count on having what I need.

I played a lot of this with my daughter over the weekend and just hit world 6. World 5 definitely stood out as the most interesting to me so far. It was all snowy and cloudlike and had several levels that I thought were much more unique than anything I had seen in the previous areas. It is definitely a solid platformer and I am having a fair amount of fun with it but even so, there is a constant feeling of frustration just under the surface with some of the stuff I mentioned above. At this point, the two things that are continuing to bother me the most are the egg throwing/collecting mechanic and having to get baby Mario back whenever I get hit. With the eggs, it has just become such a tedious chore to have to constantly go find an egg block or a bunch of enemies to swallow to get the eggs I need. Combine that with the egg aiming mechanic and it makes for a lot of needlessly annoying sections in the game. I cringe every time I come across a piranha plant that shoots the fuzzy spike things because they take 3 eggs to kill and I almost always miss with a couple of them, even when I try to lock the crosshair where I want it. If I could just have infinite eggs it would make some parts of this game so much more enjoyable. And as far as baby Mario goes, seriously, fuck that. That is just the worst way to handle health in a platformer like this. In these later levels, I have ended up in so many situations where I get hit at a bad time and I just can't get to him and have to watch that stupid timer slowly go down. And with the baby crying sound, this might qualify as the most annoying mechanic I have ever encountered in a game.

Can't tell if this thread is a joke or not but most of my collection has come from second hand shops. I have picked up countless classics including Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasies 3 through 9, Punch Out, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, all Zeldas from NES through SNES, all Donkey Kong Countries, shitloads of Mario games, and at least 100 other games from the Atari to the Dreamcast. So yes, I don't think you are alone in finding this type of stuff in second hand shops.

Yes. I'm not saying it is a bad game, I just think it is at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Mario games. Here are some of my reasons for not liking it as much as the Mario games that preceded it: I much prefer the aesthetic of all of the other Mario games to Yoshi's Island. It is nice and colorful but the screen just feels so busy that it takes me a few extra split seconds to spot an enemy sometimes. I have died a good number of times because it takes me that little bit of extra time to recognize what is coming at me. Baby Mario sucks. It grates on my nerves every time I get hit and I get to hear him crying and floating off. And there is nothing worse than getting hit in a spot where it is impossible for me to get over to him before those bastards come and carry him off. The vehicle sections are not enjoyable. Some of them just don't control right and even when they do, I feel like these segments are kind of lame and I can't wait to just get back to controlling regular Yoshi. I don't like the egg throwing mechanic. It would have been nice if you didn't have to wait for the target to pan to the position you want. When there is a bunch of shit going on, it is frustrating to have to dance around and avoid shit until the target ends up where you want it. The platforming just isn't as satisfying to me as it is with all of the other Mario games. Coming off of Super Mario World, the levels just don't feel as fun to me. I actually do like this game in general, I just like the other Mario games better. I would actually be curious to hear what other people did like about this game because I was under the impression that a lot of other people also took issue with how it played.

Nope, definitely objectively one of the worst. I challenge anyone to name a Mario platformer that is worse than this game that also isn't a "New Super Mario Bros" game.

About a month and a half ago, I graduated my daughter to Super Mario World and we ended up playing through the whole game including all of the star road stuff and secret levels. Her skills have continued to improve and I was even able to teach her how to fly with the cape and do the little bouncy parachute maneuver to stay airborne. A lot of the levels are still too hard for her but she is at least able to consistently beat most of the levels through the Donut Plains and she seems to have a full grasp on all of the controls including running, spin jumping when appropriate, ducking to avoid things, and ejecting from Yoshi to save herself or get something that is out of reach. So I decided to throw in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (which I have owned forever and never played more than a few levels) next and she is freaking obsessed with it. She refuses to play it but every day for the last week or so she has begged me to play so she can just watch and deliver her little 5 year old commentary. Honestly, the game is probably the worst of any of the Mario games I've played but having my daughter watch and comment on everything I am doing has made it a much better experience than it otherwise would be.

For me, the worst offender was the courthouse. It took me forever to figure out that there was another screen if you walked all the way to the right-hand side of the Downtown district and that that was where the courthouse was. Most other areas seemed to just be one screen that took you back to the map if you walked past either edge of the screen. One thing I will give the game credit for though is how awesomely I got scolded when I neglected to pick my daughter up on the first day (again because of how stupidly fast time runs). I tried to just play it off to my sister like it was no big deal and her response made me feel like such a horrible parent. Man, if only the game went on long enough to give more experiences like that...

I started Psychonauts. I really like it so far and it's got such a unique style. I'm still a little confused by all the random stamps and items I keep picking up but I'm sure it'll become more obvious what they do as I get a little further. It's also cool to see that this game was doing some of the stuff Mario Galaxy did years before Galaxy came out.

I recently finished Cart Life. Going into it, there was so much about this game that I liked and I was almost sure I was going to love it. Unfortunately, it didn't quite pan out and in the end I didn't really enjoy it at all. The first issue I had was with overall stability. The game either crashed or froze on me multiple times and each time I had to restart from the beginning of whatever day I was on. In a weird way, this turned out to be a good thing in some cases because of the second issue I had with the game: time moved too goddamn fast. I actually had to restart about 4 times because of all the trial and error that went into finding out where I needed to go to get to whatever store/building/person I needed to get to. Even after multiple restarts I wasn't able to start actually selling anything until day 3 or 4 because of all the time it took to take my daughter to school, pick her up every day, and travel between all the places I needed to go to get the various things I needed (which was incredibly vague until I had played through enough times to pick up on everything I would need). The more I played it, the more frustrated I got with the shitty time scaling. If this is supposed to be a retail simulator it would be nice if time actually ran at a pace where it was actually only taking 30 minutes of in game time to do something that might take me 30 minutes in real life (instead of the 3 hours that pass while I do nothing more than ask a character a few questions and buy a couple of items). I seriously cannot stress enough how much this aspect of the game soured my experience. The most glaring issue, however, was the overall length of the game. Even with the other issues I mentioned, I felt like I was almost to a point where everything was going to start falling into place and I would really be able to start 'living' in this world. I finally got the ingredients I needed to have a good variety of items, I had had a couple days of successful sales and was really digging the mechanics behind getting to know the customers and getting their shit prepared in a timely manner, and I had more or less figured out what routine I needed to follow to pick my daughter up every day and make whatever other stops I needed. And then it just fucking ended on day 7. I never would have even gotten close to being able to upgrade my cart, I had barely talked to like 4 people because it ate up so much of my already limited time, and I barely made maybe $150 dollars. I am still utterly confused as to why this game was designed to give the impression that there would be all these great systems and people and different products and equipment to experiment with only to give me a giant middle finger in the end. I am honestly still wondering if I played the same game that got so much critical praise because I can't imagine anyone going through this and feeling like they had anything resembling a complete experience.

Thanks Jon. If I can muster up the motivation, I'll jump in there and post my list.

Props to you all for keeping a good discussion going. There is just so much unbearable shit going on and I can't bring myself to spend the energy necessary to get involved in this debate or whatever you might call it. The one thought I did have though is that it would be kind of nice to have some kind of message board out there where gg'ers can clearly identify themselves as such (so there is no ambiguity as to what banner they fall under), state what it is they take issue with, and provide 3 specific examples that demonstrate that what they take issue with is actually a thing that is happening. This sure would be a good start at bringing into focus exactly what the hell they are fighting for and why they are fighting for it. I think the fact that there doesn't seem to be anything like this out there says a lot about what their goals are. And I suspect if there was some kind of place to put their grievances out there, whatever examples they might come up with would probably be exactly what we would all expect. Zoe this, Anita that, blah blah blah... Okay, now back to hiding.