Tanukitsune

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

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The original Harvest Moon is the only Harvest Moon I've ever enjoyed! I couldn't get into any of the others I tried. Although I've only tried two others, I think. One of them was on Gamecube and the other was... I don't remember.

 

Anyway the original is one of my favorite games ever.

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Didn't the Gamecube one take a page from Animal Crossing and run in real-time or something?

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Time to quit Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag.  They missed an opportunity to have had an Assassin's Creed character set in the early 80s, where the Assassin's are all the SST Records bands.  Pretty easy foil would be new wave templars, with the record execs on top.  Hüsker Dü would eventually double-cross everyone and sign to Warner Bros.  Minutemen's D Boon bus crash was due to a car chase with the templars to get to the crystal tower (or something).  And, uh, you get to do psychedelics with the Meat Puppets (where you chat with people from the first civilization).  Most of the game, though, is spent on tour.  You use rock band instruments and play the exact same setlist for every show.  You watch your income incrementally increase with each show.

 

Played AC4 on the PS4.  Graphics were pretty good.  Some of the sailing moments were stunning, and standing on an islet and framing my ship just offshore had an amazing sense of scale (and ownership).  That said, the swimming animation. WHOA.  He looked like he was floating above the water with low-res splash effects.  It'll be nice when developers stop straddling the generations.

 

AC4 has too many things to do.  Underwater diving, dice games, templar hunts, chests, mayan statues, catch the courier, save the pirates, shards, chasing shantys, building your pirate den, upgrading your ship, upgrading your person, hunting, harpooning, ship fighting, ship boarding, fort capturing, fighting, climbing, managing your fleet, assassination contracts, breaking into warehouses, doing stuff outside the animus, and the main storyline.  Those are just off the top of my head.  There's probably more.

 

I'm on Memory 9, I think?  Just got my first mission inside the rank 3 fort area.

 

The game just goes on for too long.  I've fallen past my threshold for diminishing returns.  I had made a "push" in the past few days to try to get through it, but I just don't have it in me.  Enjoyed my time with it, though.

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Time to quit Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag.  They missed an opportunity to have had an Assassin's Creed character set in the early 80s, where the Assassin's are all the SST Records bands.  Pretty easy foil would be new wave templars, with the record execs on top.  Hüsker Dü would eventually double-cross everyone and sign to Warner Bros.  Minutemen's D Boon bus crash was due to a car chase with the templars to get to the crystal tower (or something).  And, uh, you get to do psychedelics with the Meat Puppets (where you chat with people from the first civilization).  Most of the game, though, is spent on tour.  You use rock band instruments and play the exact same setlist for every show.  You watch your income incrementally increase with each show.

Well, it's a Ubisoft game, so they could make you actually play the sets using the Rocksmith stuff.

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I'm going to quit Jamestown, a little indie shmup/bullet hell game.  It's the first time I ever remember quitting a game because of the final boss.  So congrats indie dev, on a personal first for me.

 

I get that bullet hell games are supposed to be hard, but the progression in Jamestown just feels like artificial bullshit.  The game is super short, like someone good at shmups could beat it in 30-45 minutes.  There are only 5 levels.  The first three have 5 difficulty options.  The fourth has 4 options and the final level only has 3 options.  You have to play the first four levels on the third difficulty setting in order to unlock the last level.  Being generous, the dev might have thought this structure was training a player to get through the 4th and 5th levels.  Being honest, I think they ramped up the difficulty artificially, particularly in the final level, to compensate for how short the campaign is. 

 

It's also a bad co-op game, which is the main reason I had picked it up in a bundle of other co-op games awhile back.  It is the very rare game that is harder with another person than it is solo.  Alone, you get 9 lives to get through a level.  No health bar, one hit kills you.  In co-op, you get 2 continues, that are used if all players die at the same time, but otherwise infinite lives, as players respawn after a bit.  The problem is that we tended to both die at the same time at certain bottlenecks or difficulty spikes, resulting in an experience where in co-op we functionally had 3 lives versus the single players 9 lives. 

 

Not allowing players to play the final level on the difficulty of their choice just feels like some real crap.  For bullet hell enthusiasts, all those other difficulties are there for them.  Let the casual shmup player get through your game, have some fun and leave it as a positive experience. 

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Trying so so so hard not to quit You Have To Win The Game. I'm at 99.2% and am losing hope in being able to find the last little money bag somewhere in this tiny game. The only thing that keeps me going is that I'm amazed at how fluent I've become with the mechanics after playing through the thing over and over for 3.8 hours.

 

I think it's the title of the game that's doing this to me.

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Oh man, I burned through so much time as a kid playing Harvest Moon 64, though I've never played the original. I can see why not being able to grow crops in Autumn would get really boring though.

I tried playing later Harvest Moon games, but I just was never able to get into them quite the same way as with HM64. Does anyone know if any of the portable ones were any good?

 

I've enjoyed pretty much all the Harvest Moon games I've played including the original on SNES. In my opinion, Harvest Moon Magical Melody on Gamecube was by far the best one. I think I even mentioned it on these forums as one of my F-GOATS. Not sure about the quality of the portable games though.

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In my opinion, Harvest Moon Magical Melody on Gamecube was by far the best one.

 

Really? Why? I was never really able to get into that one.

 

My favorites are A Wonderful Life and Friends of Mineral Town.

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Really? Why? I was never really able to get into that one.

 

My favorites are A Wonderful Life and Friends of Mineral Town.

I feel like it had the best selection of crops, the ability to plant orchards, multiple options for where you could place your house, extensive house upgrade options from the carpenters, a lot of interesting villagers to romance and make friends with as well as a clear indicator for how well they like you, a good layout for the land, a good mining system, and a decent built in achievement system.

A Wonderful Life just didn't work for me. I felt like Magical Melody was much more open ended and allowed greater freedom to have an impact on the environment and the villagers.

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Packing it in for NaissanceE.

 

NaissanceE does some fascinating things - it's I think the only game I've played where I've explored an alien environment that felt genuinely alien, that there was an inner logic to it that was ungraspable. It's got two tricks it uses for this: lots of regularly spaced, repeating geometry interspersed with very irregular geometry, and an impressive disregard for putting the most effort where players will see it, with great detail spent on buildings the player only ever sees from the other side of an abyss, and massive environments tucked into corners that players don't need to visit. I'm constantly on edge, unsettled and unsure, because I've managed to jump to this ledge and there's clearly a puzzle there but this corridor goes into a room which goes into a corridor that goes into a massive room. I also really like the run mechanic - you need to press a button to breath every five seconds or so, which is just enough thought that it's inconvenient to just run everywhere, while not being too much work that it's inconvenient to run at all.

 

(Also of note: the first recognisably human thing you find is a strip club. Video games.)

 

Anyway, I'm done with it because in the back half it starts squandering what it does well for an extended jumping puzzle in a ventilation shaft, and then an abstract area that's supposed to represent 'madness' for some reason, and YouTube suggests that abstraction sticks around. I think I got most of what it had to offer, and it was two-thirds unique and fascinating which is more than most games. (☆)

 

I'm pretty sick of Rogue Legacy but it occurs to me that maybe the reason I keep dying so much is that I need to stop investing in new classes and start investing in health.

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When I got the shinobi class in Rogue Legacy, it was plain sailing. Good thing too, because by that point I was sick of it. It just doesn't have enough variety.

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My favorite was the spellsword, especially with the chakram.  That combo let me clear the entire map on NG+++ in one life.  But yeah, once you see all the enemies/areas/classes that's basically it.  After a while all the rooms are mostly the same.

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I think I beat mario kart 8 today. I got a star in all the cups and unlocked the golden kart. It's a fantastically fun game, and probably my favourite mario kart since double dash. The online capacity isn't perfect (I get disconnected a lot, and I'm not sure if that's my internet or the wii u) but it's great to race against other people.

All in all, it got me to buy a wiiu and I don't regret it one bit. Really enjoying everything Nintendo has to offer, and mario kart is still the only racing game that gives me even the slightest bit of excitement.

Couch coop with people is the best way to play it, and I really wish I could muster 3 other people (I always play 2 player with my girlfriend and sometimes one extra person) to see it.

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I haven't even seen the tower or the hell area, I keep dying in the forest.

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I think I'm officially finished with Shovel Knight. Every long, tedious level is the same tired, repetitive bullshit over and over again outstaying its welcome every time. And regarding the Famicom aesthetics, this is definitely one of those situations where I'd much rather play the real deal than something that pays lip service to it. What a waste of fifteen bucks that turned out to be.

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Really? I've been watching Game Grumps play it and it seems like a blast.... I was kinda depending on it being good to have something to play on my upcoming trip... Bummer. :(

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I don't think you have to take their opinion as gospel. Many people, including myself, think it's just fantastic. Even at the end where I was dying at a much greater frequency it wasn't too bad. Just enough of a taste of the old games.

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I'm not quite as down on Shovel Knight as Tegan, but I'm not nearly as up on it as most others seem to be.  I think if it did exist in the era it's trying to evoke it would have become one of my favorite games.  It does emulate that feel and style very well, but to me this is actually to the game's detriment.  I think it tries too hard to be faithful and as a result ignores some more modern game design that would have made it more fun to me.  I can't quite pin down any specifics, but in general feels old in a way I'm not particularly enjoying and I'm normally nostalgic as hell.

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Probably giving up on Mario and Luigi: Dream Team Bros. There's something about the game that just doesn't work for me - between the slightly overtuned achievement system that just makes me feel bad for not being able to predict monster movements I've never met, to the series of collectables, to the handholding, I'm just not enjoying playing it.

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I managed eight hours of that and thought I'd done really well. Not fun.

 

I'm a little disappointed in myself but I don't think I can play Majora's Mask after the opening two hours. I play a lot of 2D retro still but early 3D retro is way harder to accept it turns out, the controls and camera are awful. Additionally I hate the save mechanic and for however good the game might be the reuse of assets and music from Ocarina is just weird, cheapens the experience and is a lot more prevalent than I'd imagined. I might give it one last go but so far it feels very much like I'm forcing myself, there's nothing to like at all from what I've seen other than Skull Kid is pretty rad.

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I feel like everything until you finish the first dungeon in Majora's Mask is a slog. It took me a long time to get past that, but I enjoyed it after I got rolling. It's not my favourite zelda, though.

 

I feel like I need to give The Last Remnant one more go before I finally give up on it for good, but so much of it is counter-intuitive and poorly realized that it's going to be hard to play without a guide. I got spoiled on a few plot points the last time I played and I am glad I did, because certain characters that I was leaning on as the backbones of my party were only a couple quests away from dying. I'm hoping that since I have more JRPG experience now I'll be able to beat it, but if I can't get into it I'm probably never going to touch it again.

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I gave up on Dream Team too. It was the over tutorialization and constant babying just got on my nerves. The combat was pretty fun, but it was so sparse. The game felt like walking and then getting a tutorial followed by some really lame exposition (seriously, did they think people would care about the story?) I think played for about 5 hours and they were STILL explaining to me what to do. 

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I'm a little disappointed in myself but I don't think I can play Majora's Mask after the opening two hours. I play a lot of 2D retro still but early 3D retro is way harder to accept it turns out

What?!?!? You obviously need one of these bad boys:

expansion_pack_n64_4mb.jpg

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I managed eight hours of that and thought I'd done really well. Not fun.

 

I'm a little disappointed in myself but I don't think I can play Majora's Mask after the opening two hours. I play a lot of 2D retro still but early 3D retro is way harder to accept it turns out, the controls and camera are awful. Additionally I hate the save mechanic and for however good the game might be the reuse of assets and music from Ocarina is just weird, cheapens the experience and is a lot more prevalent than I'd imagined. I might give it one last go but so far it feels very much like I'm forcing myself, there's nothing to like at all from what I've seen other than Skull Kid is pretty rad.

 

I think Majora's Mask is one of those "acquired taste" games. It's not for everyone, but it has some interesting mechanics that set it apart from OOT and upped the difficulty (or at least the agony). I have yet to beat it even though I've played through OOT + Master Quest multiple times. I recently started a play through of MM again though, and I've found the 3rd or so time seems to be a charm. I echo the sentiment that the beginning is incredibly boring, the later dungeons are really well made.

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No Zelda beginning is worse than Skyward Sword, so there's always that to keep in mind!

I'm waiting for the 3DS remake. It'll happen. Faith. ):

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