Biggest bullshit in a video game

I could excuse games like Dark Souls from bullshit death traps because at least it is justified plot-wise with you being an immortal undead that can learn from trial and error.
But when you have the plot somehow have the protagonist surviving through what can only be precognition, then it's complete bullshit.
What about dangerous mute psychopaths who seemingly fight only for headpats and Capri Suns? Is that bullshit?
 
No, I’m just saying the difficulty isn’t unfair, because while you are expected to die repeatedly and learn that way, the game actually DOES give you all the clues to avoid all of the (non-mimic) traps, and even if you don’t pick up on all of them (which you absolutely won’t), you’re going to notice at least some.
You don't remember playing Dark Souls it seems. Because no. No to any of this.

Dark Souls is the most recent example absurd difficulty spikes and unfair difficulty. The fighting mechanics are not enough to carry it. The series will not age well...
 
You don't remember playing Dark Souls it seems. Because no. No to any of this.

Dark Souls is the most recent example absurd difficulty spikes and unfair difficulty. The fighting mechanics are not enough to carry it. The series will not age well...
Dude, I literally started playing it for the first time about two weeks ago, with no familiarity at all with the series. When I wrote that post I had literally just finished Sen’s Fortress for the first time a few days ago. That’s about as fresh and unbiased a perspective as you could possibly hope for for a 10 year old game. I was going in with massive preconceived notions about how difficult the game was going to be due to its reputation, and it’s funny how much it didn’t live up to that. If the difficulty was “unfair”, I would have quit playing.

The only thing I’ll grant you is that the first two proper bosses you encounter, the gargoyles are a MASSIVE difficulty spike and the Capra Demon is straight bullshit. Most of the bosses are not like that at all. Based on your descriptions I’m not even sure we played the same game. It's clearly not a game that everyone is going to enjoy, but just because you didn't like it doesn't make it "unfair".
I could excuse games like Dark Souls from bullshit death traps because at least it is justified plot-wise with you being an immortal undead that can learn from trial and error.
But when you have the plot somehow have the protagonist surviving through what can only be precognition, then it's complete bullshit.
My fan theory is that the only reason Gordon Freeman is able to one-man-army himself through the Black Mesa facility is that every time he dies, the G-man just brings him back again and gives him another shot, because that is literally the only justification for how he manages to make it out alive.
 
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Dude, I literally started playing it for the first time about two weeks ago, with no familiarity at all with the series. When I wrote that post I had literally just finished Sen’s Fortress for the first time a few days ago. That’s about as fresh and unbiased a perspective as you could possibly hope for for a 10 year old game. I was going in with massive preconceived notions about how difficult the game was going to be due to its reputation, and it’s funny how much it didn’t live up to that. If the difficulty was “unfair”, I would have quit playing.
We must be playing different games then. Cause I've been playing it right now and... It's bad.

I'm usually don't appreciate standards in games, but DS is 30 years behind in difficulty and jank.
 
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Am I the only one who's bothered by DS's jank, poor camera control, poor enemy placement and exaggerated difficulty spikes?

I know it's possible to do souls games without these, cause Hollow Knight did it!
Youre not, but that aint the popular opinion from what ive read
 
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Started playing the Yakuza franchise and wanted to start with the original game. Holy. Shit. It's too late rn to type out a long detailed rant about everything but oh god the combat. The way it controls and auto-aim you just miss a lot of attacks, change direction in the middle of a combo and sometime do a 180 for no reason. Enemies blatantly cheat all the time with dubious invincibility frames. They will become invincible while getting punched to charge up their attack. One boss's animation for falling down on the floor doesn't have him actually touch the floor, instead he teleports back on his feet and unleash a long combo on you. What's even more terrible is that it occurs a lot more with minibosses and bosses, meaning it has to be on purpose. Thankfully you also have a lot of health, but I'd rather have a game that gives me less health, but isn't cheap.

Also the camera is ass. I don't mind the constant loadings while running in the streets but the camera during combat really likes close up on Kiryu. I can get hit by offscreen enemies who are a foot away. I can look at my minimap but looking at the minimap in a beat'em up doesn't sound normal to me. It's comparable to Resident Evil (which is a decade older) but at least in RE it wasn't random and it was done for a creepier atmosphere.

People constantly picking fights is also annoying af. Imagine playing Pokémon if tall grass was covering the entire game except the inside of buildings and you couldn't run away.
 
The fact that I can't play multiplayer Minecraft. Decided the $8 for a small server for a month was worth it to try one more time (last time I tried server was run by "friends" who were of no help at all). Nope, same java socket error that no one knows a 100% way to troubleshoot or correct.
What made you think paying for a server was a good idea when Mojang provides server executables for you to set up for free? All you need then is a port-forwarding service like Hamachi.

I've ran a few private servers like this, so if you need any help getting it set up, toss me a DM.
 
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The fact that I can't play multiplayer Minecraft. Decided the $8 for a small server for a month was worth it to try one more time (last time I tried server was run by "friends" who were of no help at all). Nope, same java socket error that no one knows a 100% way to troubleshoot or correct.
Yeah, it's annoyingly finnicky, and that socket error tells you nothing about what's actually wrong. The only hope in diagnosing it is cranking up the logging verbosity level and watching the logs as you try to connect, which is impossible if you're using a dedicated "Minecraft hosting" service of some kind.

The companies that rent out Minecraft servers aren't exactly reliable either. Like most old-school hosting models, they oversubscribe their hardware and each individual Minecraft server instance on any given host ends up resource-starved anyway. You were probably dealing with a memory-starved server and Java (and Minecraft especially) doesn't cope well with low-memory situations. Configuration is also easy to goof up (access controls/permissions, memory usage, all sorts of random crap) and that can cause the dreaded socket error too.

Best luck I've had hosting Minecraft servers is by spinning up a Linux VPS (Linode has been pretty good so far; $10 a month rents an instance that can run a vanilla Minecraft server to comfortably accommodate about a dozen people; small AWS EC2 instances can handle it with ease as well) and using msm ("Minecraft server manager") to spawn and manage it. Hit me up in a DM if you'd like to give it another whirl; I'd be happy to help.

Fun fact: the server will actually run on something as wimpy as an ODROID-XU2 (think Raspberry Pi only, like, good) and it's even playable (a few players max) despite the comparatively weak CPU. Except for world/chunk generation. That shit crawls. That first spawn into a "virgin" world ... whew that takes awhile. But it's kinda funny to look at a little credit card-sized computer blink its little activity/CPU speed heartbeat light like a meth addict's EKG.
 
Am I the only one who's bothered by DS's jank, poor camera control, poor enemy placement and exaggerated difficulty spikes?

I know it's possible to do souls games without these, cause Hollow Knight did it!
I’m not saying the game isn’t janky, or that it’s a perfectly designed masterpiece. There are a LOT of issues I have with it, the biggest being the long, boring treks back to boss rooms after you die, the god-awful UI navigation, and how the map design after Undead Parish goes for scale over substance with lots of large environments and no way to boost your movement speed so you can run though the empty spaces faster. Outside of a few specific instances of bullshit though, supposed “unfair” difficulty is NOT one of these issues.

I’m actually pretty sure even most fans of the series openly acknowledge that DS1 is a janky game, because when I asked what order to play the series in, it was almost universally recommended to start from DS1 - not because it’s important for the story or anything, but because if you start with one of the later games with all of their QOL improvements, it’ll be REALLY hard to go back to DS1. But you’re making it out as if it’s this Nintendo-hard game when it’s really not. Difficulty and jankiness-wise, I’d put it about on par with Castlevania SotN - the interface is outdated and it’s missing a lot of QoL stuff we’ve come to expect from games, and there’s some areas that are clearly bullshit, but by and large it’s still a fun, challenging game you can enjoy as originally intended if you’re willing to work with its quirks.
 
I will say this over and over again but the best Yakuza game in the entire series is Zero and you could comfortably end the series on that and you'd feel satisfied.

Absolutely EVERYTHING after that features bullshit to the highest degree: from the entire story falling off a cliff in terms of tone, to bullshit mechanics (there's an early boss in Kiwani 1 or 2 that legit takes half an hour to defeat if you picked the wrong upgrade) to other shitty things like atrocious enemy spawns (7 is legit the worst and even at 3x speed with a trainer it was a fucking joke to fight three sets of bad guys walking down one street). The plot just gets more and more retarded and unfun and the little girl situation is so fucking bad that it's hard to take anything Yakuza related seriously at face value ever again.

Zero is the most grounded with the best combat and the best story and I'm straight up furious they haven't managed to top that since. Even Mr Shakedown, while annoying wasn't as annoying as the random encounters in future games, mostly because even if he stole everything you could still win EVERYTHING back + more if you beat him just the once.
 
I will say this over and over again but the best Yakuza game in the entire series is Zero and you could comfortably end the series on that and you'd feel satisfied.

Absolutely EVERYTHING after that features bullshit to the highest degree: from the entire story falling off a cliff in terms of tone, to bullshit mechanics (there's an early boss in Kiwani 1 or 2 that legit takes half an hour to defeat if you picked the wrong upgrade)
Ive played from Zero to Kiwami 2 and Like a Dragon, not gonna lie, i loved all of them so far, but yeah... Zero was the best one, it's kinda sad to know that the general consensus is that it doesnt get as good as that again

That early boss beginner's trap in Kiwami 1 is bullshit tho, iirc nowhere before that fight do they mention you need that specific upgrade to end fights, and even if they did, how the hell are you supposed to guess it's the Rush finisher out of the three available?? Isn't that usually reserved for the smaller, faster bosses?

And again, i love the series, loved Kiwami, but man... Zero was so much better in every way
 
I’m not saying the game isn’t janky, or that it’s a perfectly designed masterpiece. There are a LOT of issues I have with it, the biggest being the long, boring treks back to boss rooms after you die, the god-awful UI navigation, and how the map design after Undead Parish goes for scale over substance with lots of large environments and no way to boost your movement speed so you can run though the empty spaces faster. Outside of a few specific instances of bullshit though, supposed “unfair” difficulty is NOT one of these issues.

I’m actually pretty sure even most fans of the series openly acknowledge that DS1 is a janky game, because when I asked what order to play the series in, it was almost universally recommended to start from DS1 - not because it’s important for the story or anything, but because if you start with one of the later games with all of their QOL improvements, it’ll be REALLY hard to go back to DS1. But you’re making it out as if it’s this Nintendo-hard game when it’s really not. Difficulty and jankiness-wise, I’d put it about on par with Castlevania SotN - the interface is outdated and it’s missing a lot of QoL stuff we’ve come to expect from games, and there’s some areas that are clearly bullshit, but by and large it’s still a fun, challenging game you can enjoy as originally intended if you’re willing to work with its quirks.
Arguments with fans usually go like this:
Yes, you are technically correct
Yes, you can give examples of that throughout the whole game
Yes, it's consistent throughout the series and I hate it when DS or any other game does it
BUT THIS DOESN'T APPLY TO DARKSOULS AS A WHOLE AND DARKSOULS IS A GOOD GAME REEEEEEEE
 
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