Biggest bullshit in a video game

[Bender]

Remember when there weren't save games so instead of saving a game, you'd write down a giant bunch of letters on a piece of paper and have to enter it to "restore" your game? Some of them were actually coding for things though so you could use them to cheat by making up codes that gave you stuff or moved you ahead.

That was still a thing on the PS1 for some reason, even though they had memory cards to save your progress to. I remember getting cheat books with PS1 magazines that had codes you could enter to skip to certain levels, make yourself invincible or make Lara Croft blow up, those were the good old days.

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

Long in-game passwords you have to write down IRL and use later in the game. Like a password to open a door, or an access code.

I usually take a screenshot, and when I need the password I quickly alt+tab and open it on a different monitor.
Still I prefer if the game just does away with this and if you find the password in-game it will be automatically there where you get to the doors.

 

[JektheDumbass]

Remember when there weren't save games so instead of saving a game, you'd write down a giant bunch of letters on a piece of paper and have to enter it to "restore" your game? Some of them were actually coding for things though so you could use them to cheat by making up codes that gave you stuff or moved you ahead.

Remember how O looked like 0, and 1 looked like l and I? That shit still gets on my tits even 30 years later.

 

[Book Thief]

Remember when there weren't save games so instead of saving a game, you'd write down a giant bunch of letters on a piece of paper and have to enter it to "restore" your game? Some of them were actually coding for things though so you could use them to cheat by making up codes that gave you stuff or moved you ahead.

That's actually pretty much all of them. However, most games that did this tended to have what's known as a "checksum" appended at the end so that you couldn't just enter random characters and wind up at a random point in game with a random assortment of weapons.

Metal Gear for the NES demonstrates the potential danger/fun that could be had by exploiting the incredibly weak checksum system in the game's password system.

By entering in "FUCK" in the first section, you are spawned into the final area. Everything else in the password is modifying your weapon and equipment slots. If you were to type in "FUCKM E1111 11111 11111 11111" into the password section, you would be spawned into the same area with absolutely no weapons or equipment.

Here's another video showcasing a number of interesting passwords the game will gladly accept.

It turns out that Metal Gear's checksum is literally one character long, so as long as you can accurately guess the final digit, you could probably make the password spell anything you wanted, within certain limitations.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I usually take a screenshot

Couldn't do that with a DS game and no camera available then.

you'd write down a giant bunch of letters on a piece of paper

That's different - and in a way, it can be more reliable. No need to worry about losing saves because of dirty cartridge contacts.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

That was still a thing on the PS1 for some reason, even though they had memory cards to save your progress to. I remember getting cheat books with PS1 magazines that had codes you could enter to skip to certain levels, make yourself invincible or make Lara Croft blow up, those were the good old days.

A lot of people didn't have memory cards. Despite not being an uncommon thing to lack in the PS2 days, passwords died out in the 6th console generation. Yeah, broke kids who liked RPGs were up many creeks without a paddle.

Want to brick your 3DS? First, you need pre-2016 firmware. Next, you need the virtual console version of Metroid. Got those? Fun time!

Enter the following password: ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER FUCKER

This is the only version of the game known to outright brick the hand that feeds. Every other version reacts by crashing. It causes the game to generate numbers it can't handle.

 

[Bender]

A lot of people didn't have memory cards. Despite not being an uncommon thing to lack in the PS2 days, passwords died out in the 6th console generation. Yeah, broke kids who liked RPGs were up many creeks without a paddle.

I could've sworn new PS1s came with a memory card...

 

[Pissmaster]

I could've sworn new PS1s came with a memory card...

Not the one I had. In fact, I think the only console I've ever had that came with a memory card was the PSP, since early ones came with a 32mb card.

Though I think the only PS1 games I ever played with passwords were Crash Bandicoot and Twisted Metal 2.

 

[A Grey Cat]

Some people commented this on the avgn review of Castlevania 64 but if you play the game on easy mode, you can only progress halfway and there's no way to progress past the nitro and mandragoria puzzle.

Some games actually stop and make you play on higher difficulties just to see the whole game another example of this are the Sega Genesis games for the punisher and Spiderman.

 

[sasazuka]

Remember when there weren't save games so instead of saving a game, you'd write down a giant bunch of letters on a piece of paper and have to enter it to "restore" your game? Some of them were actually coding for things though so you could use them to cheat by making up codes that gave you stuff or moved you ahead.

I think the manuals for a couple of Sega Master System games, and I want to say Wonder Boy III might've been one of them (or maybe it was Spellcaster?), had pictures of the password screens as illustrations with the password shown in the photo being a super cheat code that unlocked everything.

I remember at least one game having that clever hidden-in-plain-sight manual feature. I know it wasn't Phantasy Star, however, because that one had battery save.

 

[Overcast]

Some people commented this on the avgn review of Castlevania 64 but if you play the game on easy mode, you can only progress halfway and there's no way to progress past the nitro and mandragoria puzzle.

Some games actually stop and make you play on higher difficulties just to see the whole game another example of this are the Sega Genesis games for the punisher and Spiderman.

Superman 64 also did that if I recall correctly.

As if they expected most people to play past the first ring stage playable moment where you actually get to use the controls.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Some people commented this on the avgn review of Castlevania 64 but if you play the game on easy mode, you can only progress halfway and there's no way to progress past the nitro and mandragoria puzzle.

Some games actually stop and make you play on higher difficulties just to see the whole game another example of this are the Sega Genesis games for the punisher and Spiderman.

Yep, Castlevania 64 pulled that on me when i was 8. That was my first horror game and it was pretty spooky for my infant self so it felt really bullshit that i got to beat the scary ass giant bull and it ended abruptly with no Dracula in sight.

The nitro thing were you had to take some explosive to blow up a wall was hard enough to figure out for me when i didn't even speak english well, so it pissed me off knowing i would have to do all that again, i should have not been such a pussy and played normal but i did end up beating it again after that, i never played another game on "easy" ever since, always assumed it was a trap, so i thank the game for teaching me that being a wuss means you don't get a payoff.

 

[Borax Bozo]

related to these: region-locked difficulties. The most infamous example is Castlevania 3, where the western version is full of bullshit (your dagger is thrown screen distance in JP, but becomes a tiny stabbing shiv in the western version, enemies become health sponges and bite off a chunk of your hp out of nowwhere, bosses fires walls of pain instead of patterns, the lists never ends) and the JP version is normal. Contra had a few games where the game is stuck on Easy mode on western release, while the JP versions got actual difficulties selectors. There's a bunch of other games like this but why the fuck did that exist

IIRC this was due to game rental being legal in the US and illegal in JP. So the idea was that kids in the USA couldn't complete the game in a 3-day rental and it would be too expensive to rent it until they were done, so they'd buy the full thing.

 

[I got rabies]

Some games actually stop and make you play on higher difficulties just to see the whole game another example of this are the Sega Genesis games for the punisher and Spiderman.

Monster Hunter games do a variation of this. You don't have to start a new game on a higher difficulty to see the whole game, instead you're told that you were doing "low rank" quests all along and now you are ready to tackle "high rank", which is pretty much a copy-paste of low rank but the enemies have higher stats and give "higher quality materials" (ie. you get Scale+ instead of Scale) to craft and upgrade "powerful gear" that's mostly identical to the ones you already have except it has higher stats.

In some games, High armors had a different appearance than Low armors, and monsters actually gained a new attack move or two, but in most games it's just copy-pasting with increased values for fake longevity. Some monsters are exclusively in low rank, so if you want to fight them at all, you are forced to play a higher difficulty. Honestly, although you can see the developers being lazy, the game would be too easy and too short if you only had low rank to play, there's no difficulty spike so you can climb a smooth curve. I wish they made more effort in making High Rank different though.

Spoiler: more sperging about difficulty levels

The bullshit comes with G rank (and Arch Tempered in Monster Hunter World) which is another copy-paste with higher values and it feels much more jarring this time. The difficulty increase is pretty steep and instead of being more challenging, it comes off more as removing your error margin and you take a shit load of damage, while monsters become spongy. It's made even worse because G rank quests are exclusive to the multiplayer area (another bullshit thing). Because the game expect you are playing with friends, the multiplayer quests buff the monsters' attack and HP, even if you're playing solo. So you get the multiplayer buff AND the G rank buff. Some monsters are also exclusively fought in G rank so if you suck or just want to fight them at a lower difficulty, you can't.

The Arch Tempered monsters are bullshit because they do insane damage (they usually have a move that become a one-hit kill even at full health) and are literally fucking damage sponge you can hit for 30-40 minutes.

I'm willing to git gud and try, but all my friends want to stop after high rank so I end up alone. You can get random people joining but actually getting help from random is completely luck-based and the good teammates can leave your lobby so you're alone again. Also remember that games made with multiplayer focus in mind won't age well if you want to play them after their player base is gone.

The multiplayer area is bullshit because of the aforementioned double buff, but also because it makes you start over quest progression. Like imagine you are only playing "offline" and you have a full set of Tigrex armor, then you go to the online/multiplayer, the game tells you you are too weak to fight a Tigrex and you need to prove yourself by unlocking the quest. What the fuck? They actually fixed this in MHW by making the offline/singer player quests and the online/multiplayer quests the same quests so you don't have to do every quests a second time, but why did they take over a decade to fix this, I don't know.

Spoiler: more sperging about quests

The games also advertise having a lot of quests to do but if they tell you there's 400 quests, it's actually more like 100 quests but they're copy-pasted a lot. A lot of "original" quests are also copy-paste themselves, like fighting a Tigrex in the desert and fighting a Tigrex in the tundra count as two different quests.

Monster Hunter Generations (and MHG Ultimate) also introduced playing as a prowler (basically a cat with armor and a weapon). You can play the whole game as a cat if you want, but there are a few prowler-exclusive quests you can only do as a cat, but they're just more copy-paste, only you're forced to be a cat if you want to do them. "Gather 10 mushrooms" is a quest, "gather 10 mushrooms but as a cat" is a different quest, but you can do the normal quest as a cat too, so why did they even do this?

Lastly, a lot of "new monsters" are re-colors of existing monsters (called Subspecies, sometime Variant). They sometime have a different element and 1 new move. They're advertised as a different enemies. While this could be considered an unpopular opinion because it can be argued that they are technically a bit different, some of those alternate versions aren't different enough and it comes down to laziness. "It uses its tail attack more often and we painted it" is bullshit. Some of them don't have a different attack pattern and are just palette swap.

tl;dr I like this franchise but gotta point out all the insane amount of copy-pasting, increasing enemy hp/atk and calling it higher difficulty, and hiding monsters behind higher difficulty because it's all bullshit.

 

[{o}P II]

Not being able to go to all the islands at the start of the game in GTA

 

[Bender]

Not being able to go to all the islands at the start of the game in GTA

To be honest I quite like that as a feature, it gives you time to get accustomed to each area and learn where the important things, like paint shops, are before opening up another area you get to learn.

 

[A Grey Cat]

Harder than Nintendo hard difficulty two prime examples are dantate must die in the later devil may cry games and mien liber difficulty in the recent Wolfenstein games. The enemies can kill you in one hit but they're tougher than ever and there's no saves continues or checkpoints you die even at the final boss and it's all over.

Has anyone ever beaten these difficulties aside some zen masters of gaming?

 

[{o}P II]

To be honest I quite like that as a feature, it gives you time to get accustomed to each area and learn where the important things, like paint shops, are before opening up another area you get to learn.

Most people just play gta for the sandbox and don’t give a shit about the tedious missions (though the mission structure greatly improved in V)

 

[Bender]

Most people just play gta for the sandbox and don’t give a shit about the tedious missions (though the mission structure greatly improved in V)

It's not like there's anything extra to do on the other islands that you can't do on the first though, the only thing that really changes is the scenery.

 

[FuckedUp]

Some games actually stop and make you play on higher difficulties just to see the whole game another example of this are the Sega Genesis games for the punisher and Spiderman.

That's the opposite of bullshit, as I said before you should always be playing on the highest difficulty anyway.