Tanukitsune

Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

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Ugh, the instant death spell had no business being in the game... All this is reminding me how much I get put off when a game will make you redo sections you've proven you can do, but happened to die in the next bit. Like when you reach the final boss, but lose and then still have to go through a floor of random encounters before you can try the boss again. That repetition's really not worth my time,

 

I think that's why I'm ditching Cave Story. I didn't realise it was actually going to be a hard game for one, I just wanted a mildly quirky platformer. But then I also accidentally did something that made one area the version that's extra hard to traverse, and when I resorted to a guide for help I discovered I'd need to fight a boss right after going through the area that'd sap most of my health. So I think I'm leaving it, and just gonna watch the ending on youtube rather than throwing my little robot dude at the tunnel of spikes over and over again.

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Ugh, the instant death spell had no business being in the game... All this is reminding me how much I get put off when a game will make you redo sections you've proven you can do, but happened to die in the next bit. Like when you reach the final boss, but lose and then still have to go through a floor of random encounters before you can try the boss again. That repetition's really not worth my time,

 

I think that's why I'm ditching Cave Story. I didn't realise it was actually going to be a hard game for one, I just wanted a mildly quirky platformer. But then I also accidentally did something that made one area the version that's extra hard to traverse, and when I resorted to a guide for help I discovered I'd need to fight a boss right after going through the area that'd sap most of my health. So I think I'm leaving it, and just gonna watch the ending on youtube rather than throwing my little robot dude at the tunnel of spikes over and over again.

 

There's like 3 endings to Cave Story. If you managed to get to the hell ending without a guide, I'm impressed. You have to jump through some really esoteric hoops in order to get that ending that I never figured out on my first run. You can just finish the game without going to hell (even if you got to it) if you just keep going left after killing the core.

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There's like 3 endings to Cave Story. If you managed to get to the hell ending without a guide, I'm impressed. You have to jump through some really esoteric hoops in order to get that ending that I never figured out on my first run. You can just finish the game without going to hell (even if you got to it) if you just keep going left after killing the core.

 

It actually wasn't hell, just a cavern place that you get to after

 

you build the rocket. I had gotten the Booster 2.0 because I got stuck at one point because I was meant to talk to someone that I hadn't, and in that spot it mentioned not to talk to Professor Booster if I wanted the better jets later, so I did not realising it affected the difficulty later.

 

It wasn't terribly hard, but I was pretty bad at it to be honest.

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I played about an hour of Landmark (better known as Minecraft: Everquest Edition)last night before realizing how gross it is. I came by a temporary beta pass, and I initially liked the look of the game. Little things about it bothered me from the start, like how you have to click every time you swing your pick, or how the game reverts to windowed mode every time you alt-tab out of it. Still, I was kind of enjoying it for a little while. I found a plot of land on top of a cliff to claim as my own, and I started sketching out plans for a House on the Rock sort of thing. Then, I realized how many materials I was going to need to make even a small version of the house I was planning (it was a lot). 

 

Since this is a free-to-play game, you can buy materials: a big bundle of wood will set you back some amount of real money, or some of the rarer gemstones (which you need to make all of the better tools for some reason) will cost a considerably larger amount of real money. I was really hoping they would make their money off of cosmetics or other similar things, but the idea of a Minecraft-like that seems tuned to make you pay for materials is just more than I can handle.

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If you treat it like a normal $15 per month MMO, how far would that budget get you?

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Hard to say. It gets really messy since in addition to the always wonderful multiple currency things that free-to-play games tend to do, all the resources have multiple levels of refinement which left me feeling like I had more resources on me than I did. For example, I had about 5000 dirt. Just to lay out the outline of my house, I thought that would be enough. The problem was, it takes 27 dirt to make each small cube of dirt, so the 5000 dirt I had ran out far more quickly than I expected (I didn't even get to outline two sides of the house). For wood, you take your axe to a tree, and it spits out raw wood, which you then have to refine into planks (which can only be done at a central hub, which is probably really far from your claim, since spots near it tend to go first). Those planks then have the same 27/cube ratio, and they get used up really quickly too.

 

As far as how much money it would cost to actually do the things I want to do, I have no idea. It seems like a game designed to allow for spending unlimited money if you are short on time, or none at all if you have unlimited time. For me, the fact that the cash shop is there as an option will just make me suspicious of the game's whole economy. The cynic in me assumes the resource system is tuned to be tedious to encourage purchases, even if that isn't the case.

 

Other stupid things: Your claim expires if you don't pay an upkeep fee of 300 copper a day. It actually doesn't take too long to gather that much, but it just feels like the sort of thing meant to inconvenience players further (and likely will be a thing you can pay to turn off). Ultimately, the game's economy has robbed the resource gathering part of the game, which I sometimes enjoy in a meditative/mindless way in games like Minecraft or Starbound, from any fun it might have had. Video games, I guess.

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Done with watch_dogs, if I had to sum it up in one word I'd use 'ugly'. God I hope they don't make a sequel, in fact someone please tell me Aiden penis dies horribly at the end.

WHEN YOU BUY A DRINK FROM A VENDER, YOU LOOK THEM IN THE EYE AND SAY THANK YOU

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Quitting Don't Starve.  Cool game!

 

There's a pretty satisfying sense of mastery to the game, but it's just a bit too open-ended for me.  I'd set myself some long-term goals, accomplish them, then be stuck at that point of wondering what to do next.

 

Inventory management felt cluttered.  Crafting menus were unbearable.  It was always a chore to remember which tab certain items came from.  The way the list of items appears locked out didn't inspire me to craft more.  Usually I'd scroll through the list of possible things to build, and just be overwhelmed by a bunch of stuff I had no idea why I'd want to make.  The upgrades up from the basic items didn't feel worth the effort, especially when I seemed to be surviving just fine.

 

That said, the art really grue on me.  Something about the snow falling while standing near the campfire and warming up my egg felt magical.

 

It's a wonderful game.  Loved my time with it.  Just felt my interest waning, and with no end game it seems like as good a time as any to move on.

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Don't Starve is one of those games that's unquittable to me. Even if I don't play it for months I feel like there's a chance I'll come back and play for a few hours.

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Inventory management felt cluttered.  Crafting menus were unbearable.  It was always a chore to remember which tab certain items came from.

 

Yeah, inventory is a bit of a nightmare in it.  If you ever decide to dip back in, I'd suggest taking a look at the mods for it.  My wife would likely refuse to play at all if she couldn't mod the inventory and stuff to make it a little friendlier (it's still not perfect, but there are some things that make it better).  If nothing else, having a larger inventory and being able to carry multiple backpacks lets you organize everything better. 

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Don't Starve is one of those games that's unquittable to me. Even if I don't play it for months I feel like there's a chance I'll come back and play for a few hours.

 

True!  I will most likely come back, especially since I got it for free on PS+, I'll probably try that version when I resubscribe....

 

Yeah, inventory is a bit of a nightmare in it.  If you ever decide to dip back in, I'd suggest taking a look at the mods for it.  My wife would likely refuse to play at all if she couldn't mod the inventory and stuff to make it a little friendlier (it's still not perfect, but there are some things that make it better).  If nothing else, having a larger inventory and being able to carry multiple backpacks lets you organize everything better. 

 

I know they were going for an unobtrusive interface, but I'd really prefer that they had a customizable "quick craft" menu as the sidebar, and then have a full-blown interface that covered the screen (it could remain unpaused for added drama) for crafting.  Bigger icons, easier to find items.  If I ever do come back to the PC version, though, I'll definitely look up some mods!

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Usually I'd scroll through the list of possible things to build, and just be overwhelmed by a bunch of stuff I had no idea why I'd want to make.  The upgrades up from the basic items didn't feel worth the effort, especially when I seemed to be surviving just fine.

 

I did not get very far in this game at all. I would get some basics up and stable, and then look at all the items, and have no interest in them. I could have taken forever to figure them out individually, or looked them up online, which would have been super boring. I wanted to do neither, so I just quit.

 

I think part of the problem for me was how short the day/night cycle is. I felt almost constantly pressured / interrupted from what I was naturally interested in doing - in Minecraft, I was almost always acceptably safe exploring the game and its systems in whatever direction I was interested in at the time.

 

That said, the art really grue on me.

 

lol

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I think I'm going to put down Planescape: Torment. I didn't think I'd mind all the reading, but after a while I found myself skimming more and more. Since the writing is apparently the best thing about it I figure there's not much point if I can't be bothered to read it. I've heard enough over the top praise for it that I'll probably give it another shot later, but right now I just don't want to deal with an entire city of NPC to talk to and no idea where to go. It's so hard to filter out significant thing from insignificant ones, it feels like any NPC could be super important and I wouldn't know. Maybe I'm just too tired to play it right now.

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I think I'm about to quit 1001 Spikes, I knew it would be brutal, but... it's verging on "I Want To Be The Guy" brutal and despite what people will say it can be unfair and sometimes death is not your fault.

 

Like in the the level I left (on which I just realized I spent over an hour without beating it), now every level has spikes in vital positions so you can't really stay in place for a nano second, but the worst? There is a section where you must ride a platform over lava and jump on a platform with crushers, back onto the platform, get the key and avoid the crushers again on the way back. This is the point I realize the crushers won't rise in time for me to make it or worse, they'll crush me.

 

It's one of the games where I think I can do, but do I really want to? It's kinda against my own rules to keep playing if I die too many times and get stuck in the same place... Specially for this long. :|

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I think I'm done with Saint's Row IV. I thought the beginning was pretty funny...but nothing Im doing is really that enjoyable to me, and I'm losing interest in pushing through to see a couple crazy cutscenes. I feel a horrible compulsion to just do everything on the map even though its all really bland....so yeah...I don't think I'm gonna go back to it unless I just need something that is incredibly mindless. I see what people like about it but I don't think it is for me.

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Played I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream yesterday, and was quite interested in the setting and thought the voice acting was good. Picked Benny to begin with, but failed to do what I was supposed to and triggered an event which meant I had to restart. Second time around, I'm doing things a bit differently and think I'm making better progress, but accidentally (and irretrievably) lose an item which I need, and so suffer the same fate as before.

 

Fuck this. Now I remember why Lucasarts adventure games are the best there is. You can't die and you can't get into an unwinnable state.

 

(Thought I may return to this later on, with a walkthrough to hand)

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Gave Warhammer 40k Space Marine a good shot after enjoying the demo a while back. It's a really solid game, the combat is good fun for a while, but there's not enough there to keep me coming back. You've seen once orc horde, you've seen em all. Needs more jetpack levels, also. The first one's so good and then they just vanish for ages so you can walk around a bland underground environment.

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I enjoyed that game, but it was rather forgettable. I think I bashed it out in one day, and fortunately the last level was a jetpack level. I'm pretty sure that's all I remember about it though. It had the potential to be really good though, however it felt incredibly safe, with no risks taken at all.

I like the warhammer 40k universe. It doesn't take itself seriously at all and I think some good games can be made out of it. However I really don't blame you for quitting (although it's a pretty short game!).

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Fuck this. Now I remember why Lucasarts adventure games are the best there is. You can't die and you can't get into an unwinnable state.

 

I don't think you could do IHNMAIMS in a way where every possible action you could take was neutral at worst.

 

I'd like to try an old-school, Infocom/Sierra style adventure game where your first solution isn't necessarily the best one, with a modern design understanding, and then realised that basically what I want is The Last Express. Or possibly a game that generates a mystery and each puzzle has several solutions, so you can't get perfect information first time through and there's a strong failure state. Lucasarts adventures suffer heavily from the 'rub everything on everything else' problem where the game is too limited to allow players to use their skillset in creative ways.

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Think I am quitting Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. It's pretty for an on rails thing, the story is fun and the pacing is nice but I keep bogging down on the boss fights and stopping there. So every time I come back to it it's at a terrible point and honestly it's just not quite interesting enough for me to care to continue or push through it.

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Played I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream yesterday, and was quite interested in the setting and thought the voice acting was good. Picked Benny to begin with, but failed to do what I was supposed to and triggered an event which meant I had to restart. Second time around, I'm doing things a bit differently and think I'm making better progress, but accidentally (and irretrievably) lose an item which I need, and so suffer the same fate as before.

 

Fuck this. Now I remember why Lucasarts adventure games are the best there is. You can't die and you can't get into an unwinnable state.

 

(Thought I may return to this later on, with a walkthrough to hand)

 

Out of curiosity, have you ever read the short story its based on?

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Yeah, a couple of times, but not recently. I liked it, I liked the grotesque imagery. I think I'll read it again tonight.

Edit: I wouldn't have minded alternative solutions and sub-optimal outcomes, but it seemed to me (please correct me if I'm wrong) that there was one correct way to solve that scenario and any deviation would mean that I "lose" and then have to restart. I do agree about Lucasarts games that sometimes the puzzle design is undercut by the fact that you can just throw any solution at it and see what sticks.

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Yeah, a couple of times, but not recently. I liked it, I liked the grotesque imagery. I think I'll read it again tonight.

Edit: I wouldn't have minded alternative solutions and sub-optimal outcomes, but it seemed to me (please correct me if I'm wrong) that there was one correct way to solve that scenario and any deviation would mean that I "lose" and then have to restart. I do agree about Lucasarts games that sometimes the puzzle design is undercut by the fact that you can just throw any solution at it and see what sticks.

 

I've barely touched the game, so I can't say much about what the fail states are like in it.  But thematically, it would seem to match the themes of the story.  It's one of my favorite short stories ever though. 

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