Found this on Gamespot...

[symbioidlj]

Man, take that newest Zelda game--y'know, The Wind Waker. For a while, you're thinking, "This game is all right. It plays a lot like the old Zeldas. I'm raiding dungeons, finding the hookshot--it's all good." Then bam, toward the end of the game you have to spend a good few hours collecting a ludicrous number of rupees just to pay off that lousy elf Tingle to decode your maps. As if fetching the cash wasn't bad enough, then you have to sail all over the place, tracking down pieces of the Triforce and dredging them up from the bottom of the ocean. Do you know how we got our Triforce pieces back in my day? By golly, we slashed our way through the dungeons, kicked the crap out of those boss monsters, and we took 'em! Now we have to fetch-quest our way to power? Snooze.

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This is EXACTLY why I stopped playing Zelda: Windwaker.... Bullshit running around. I beat the dungeons, now give me a simple way to the boss, I don't wanna fucking sail all over the fucking world to find maps to find maps, etc... bullshit.

Right on old man!(it's a spoof of the old man, and "back in my day, video games were fun!" sorta thing)

Comments

[rflagg.livejournal.com]

If you'd have found the fairies that increase the size of your rupee carrying capacity, you'd have no problem with the cash flow, and while the triforce hunt is a little too boring, you'll have plenty of fighting in the end, trust me. Hell, at least they're still making the games where you're rewarded (or required, in case of Windwaker, Metroid Prime, etc) to play through twice or more - from what I hear in GTA4, after playing through 3+ times or so the cars armor's double, and it gets a lot harder.

And if you think the games of old weren't repetitive and more about timing, load up Mega Man 1 or Kid Icarus. Man, are they pissing me off now! :)

-m.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm sorry but the Megaman series is the absolute greatest series of all time.

No, I just hated WindWaker. I liked it until the pointless quest.

Seriously, there was no direction at all after defeating that last dungeon(what the earth god temple or whatever?) before the TriForce Quest.

I dunno, I just felt lost.

AND... Looking at the "On Game Design" book that I just bought this week it says:

"Stagnation is generally as unpleasant as it sounds and smells almost as bad in a game design as it does in water. Stagnation occurs when players are playing a game and reach a point where they appear to be stuck, with no way to go on. There is nothing worse than running around a level of the latest and greatest first-person shooter trying to find that last hidden switch that opens the level exit. Of course, it's not just that type of game that is guilty of this offense(although it is a persistent offender). Any type of game that leaves the players in a position where they simply do not know what to do next is stagnating.

"In some cases, this is very difficult to avoid. A sprawling action-adventure has so many different combinations and configurations that it is difficult to anticipate exactly what the player may or may not try and do. However it is still possible to give the players positive and negative feedback as they progress. The problem of stagnation cna be tackled passivele; that is, the designer can make sure that the clues about how to proceed are hidden in plain sight. The other alternative is to tackle stagnation actively: Have the game work out whether the player has been wandering around aimlessly and provide a few gentle nudges to guide him in the right direction.

"The key point is never to let the player feel bewildered. The players should always feel as if they know what their next move should be. It is no fun to bang you head up against a brick wall simply because you are completely and utterly stuck in a game. This ties in with our earlier piece of advice about making sure the player is adequately provided with information. If a player has to resort ot outside assistance - whether by cheating, reading a strategy guide, or looking up the answers on the web - the game designer should view that as a failure of design."

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And that's pretty much how I feel about Zelda(at the end part... The beginning half was fucking awesome)

1) I was lost. When I did take a while to get somewhere, King said "Let's get the tri-force"... OK, so it was a pathetic attempt at active nudging. BUT... HOW the fuck do I find the maps?

there seemed to be no indication of how to go about doing this. I didn't want to have to go to every single fucking square on the map.

How did you find out about the fairy? Did you have to go aimlessly to places? Did you look it up in a FAQ? Were you informed of this somehow, and if so, how did you get to that information? What was the trail that led you there?

There were no trails, no clues, no hints no leads... And if there was and I missed it. The game should present the information again, once I seem to be lost. But it didn't.

That is why I quit playing, and though I loved the first half, I absolutely hated the second. I dont' give a shit if the boss battle is fun at the end, if it's a pain in the ass to get there, I'll simply give up.

I'm not as bad as my friend Brent who's sort of gone soft(he stopped Metroid Prime once he got to the boss and didn't carry through... I dunno why) And I'm sure everyone has their own reasons for stopping a game if they have to. But Zelda shouldn't have been that way. It could've been a hell of a lot better.

Feh.

[rflagg.livejournal.com]

While I completely agree with the stagnation argument - and if you feel disappointed with zelda, so be it, nothing can be done to "win you back" in that aspect, so I hope you don't feel I'm jumping on you to do so, or anything...so with that in mind... :)

The problem is that the other side of stagnation is feeling a game is way too easy, especially in the aspect of how to perform the next task. Hitman was a revolutionary game, I feel, in as much that it was one of the first to truly present many different options for finishing missions. You are a hitman, and you can go in gunning and kill everyone, but you have to pay for cleanup. So, it's healthier for your funding to not do so, and it's figuring out what to do. It's being able to pick up on slightly noticable things, or perhaps feeling the need to check something out, etc.

For example, when I first got the windwaker in the game, and the sail and all that, I did nothing with the main quest - I wanted to explore the whole world! Fuck the main quest, main quests are always overhyped in my mind anyway (Morrowind, I haven't touched the main quest, I'm more into interacting with the corners of the world). So, I went out exploring, and I found a fairy that gave me a bigger purse, and another that increased my magic power, etc., I found islands I couldn't yet interact with because I didn't have certain objects - thus making me want to continue with the main quest.

However - going back to the Hitman example, in Hitman 2, which I couldn't get into, it felt like - too much they gave you too many options. The real key in making an exciting fun game is to make the world feel limitless, but keeping fairly strong limits on the player. For example, Metroid Prime - you can see areas that you can't get to without say, a grapling hook. And while it bothers you, it at least encourages you to find the grapling hook so you can see what's 'over there'. One of the reasons I've never touched the main quest in Morrowind is because as becoming a thief, I was more interested in getting the highly expensive sought after objects in the game world, and selling them at large profits - it took me a while to do, it was lots of fun doing it, but after playing with the most expensive items in the game and having riches beyond my belief, I'm not interested as much in following my 'path' in the game - but I still enjoyed it, so I don't think it necessarily hurt the game, it's just more of a game where two people won't ever have the same experiences. Alas though, morrowind took years to program, like the previous Elder Scrolls game (I so wish Daggerfall wasn't so buggy), and unless you're a well set company that can afford the time and money into games that take 5 or 6 years to release, you can't get that kind of interaction in a game elsewhere.

Let me tell you something that pissed me off about Zelda myself. I couldn't get the damned sail. The eskimo guy you talk to who just gives it to you - if you talk to him on the side, he won't give it to you there - so I looked and looked and looked over that island for days unable to figure out what to do.

And I loved mega man too - I think the first was by far the best, but seriously, load it up now with Nesticle or Nestopia or one of the rom emulators and play the iceman level, and recall the frustration of having to jump from the disappearing slippery blocks, and the stupid moving shooting platforms that can kill you quickly, and thank your stars we don't have that kind of trivial repetitive pain in the ass timing shit as much anymore. :)

-m.

[vesicular.livejournal.com]

We've been thinking on the same lines about gaming lately. I agree w/ that game book snippit as well. My beef w/ Wind Waker was the same, I had no clue what to do, as well as there being some assinine stuff I had to accomplish that did nothing to further the game itself. The hardest part about WW, is that I would take a week or so between plays, and when I picked the game back up I had no clue what I was supposed to do (didn't remember). And there was no mechanism for me to find out.

The problem I have w/ games is if it needlessly wastes my time to get further in the game, I just won't play it. Add on to that games that simply have parts that are annoying for the sake of annoyance and that will turn me off as well. I didn't finish Metroid Prime because I tried forever to beat the last boss but couldn't. I needed more energy tanks. I could have wondered around to find them, but 1) I didn't want to read a FAQ to do so, 2) the game is huge and would take forever for me to find them all, and 3) it's just not worth it to me to take all that time to find them. I spent countless hours to get to the boss, I should have enough tanks playing through it normally to beat it. Perhaps not easily, but it should be doable. Same thing w/ Metroid Fusion, but there I would have gone to get the extra tanks, I was just kept from doing so by the game! That's lame.

What games really need more of is a good reward system for playing. If a game gets hard or frustrating, there should be a reward for finishing these parts that is enough to give the player incentive for going through the trouble. This is why I love Mario Golf. It starts out incredibly easy, just so you can pick it up to see how it works. Then it slowly cranks up the difficulty and gets very hard. But even in the hard stages, you feel like you can win, because you know you've done it before, and you know once you do, you'll be rewarded by getting extra stuff unlocked, etc. It's perfect. Annette thinks the game is bad for me because I curse at it constantly, but really its so good I want to do well, and it gets me going. It's also one of the few games that makes me want to come back and play it, instead of feeling like a chore to do so.

The other good thing about games like Mario Golf, or Ikaruga for that matter, is simple control schemes. It doesn't take much to learn how to play, but the games can be quite difficult and very deep. I think this is the same reason I like old school games so much, they're under a similar philosophy. So many times in 3D games the camera or controls get in my way. It happened in Zelda, and in Metroid to some extent, and especially in Mario Sunshine. Bad controls = bad game, I don't care how good the game is designed otherwise.

[rflagg.livejournal.com]

mmm, I'm loving all over Mario Golf right now. Never played the 64-version of it, but I had Mario Tennis, and I can't wait for the suped up version of that to come out as well.

I'm all about Yoshi, he's been henceforth dubbed Yoshi Woods in this household. :)

-m.

[renwick.livejournal.com]

Play this:
http://www.wizardware.org/view_game.php?inc=view_game.inc&ID=4

[rflagg.livejournal.com]

As an aside, you need - NEED - to download the XIII demo and play it - I was on the top of the anti-cell shaded game list, but when you show me amazing things with the new format, such as windwaker did with it's superb graphics, then I'll take to it. XIII is a fairly revolutionary FPS that's very comic book like - and is coming out next month, I believe. At any rate, it's something that must be played.

The new Tron demo is pretty good too - light cycles are definately a fun distraction, I dunno if the story line for the main game will be too silly or not, but it's still fairly cool, what with the tron world and all. I'm glad to say both demos purr at high resolution on my 256ram 8x agp card. :)

-m.