Biggest bullshit in a video game

In chapter 11 of Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, the black knight will spawn at the end of your turn and he can immediately move when it becomes the enemy turn. He will absolutely buttfuck any of your character that is within range in one hit with 100% accuracy, and if they were able to tank it, they will die from the second hit because the black knight is fucking quick. You cannot anticipate him or know he's coming until you see him, and there's a recruitable character and a visitable house nearby so you're likely gonna lose someone and want to start over.

Even if you played the game before and know he does this, you might not remember that he's gonna move as soon as he appears. FE has a history with enemy spawning and being able to move right away but this takes the cake for fucking bullshit.
 
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Cardenio said:
I mean these things did have a psychological effect on gamers. If you're old/retro enough to remember the PS1 era you probably saw Final Fantasy 8 with it's bigger case hold not two but FOUR CD-ROMs. More CDs = Bigger and therefore more Epic of a Video Game.
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On games like that the cinematics were stored on different CDs while the game itself was small enough to be replicated across the discs. You had to switch to disc 2 for the blah blah Sephiroth but you could still return to areas from disc 1 without having to swap. This is why the amount of discs increased, they had to keep the game itself on every disc.

This is in stark contrast to something like Monkey Island on Amiga where bits and pieces of the game were scattered across many floppies.
Dumpster dived waifu said:
Back in the day, there was a hard limit on file size, and game makers had to get creative to get around that shit. Nowadays, optimizing and reducing redundancy isn't required basically at all.

It also doesn't help that PS3/PS4 (and possibly Xbox, I do not know) had a built it cheat to make the games load faster; store assets in multiple places on the HDD and grab whichever version of it is closest. It's a big reason why properly optimized versions of PS4 games with a PS5 version have the PS5 version weighing in significantly lower despite the much higher quality assets.
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That's not a cheat, CD/DVD/HDD is like a record player. It's a record, there's one or more read heads, thrashing kills performance by strangling not only transfer but spiking disk access times. It creates a log jam and nothing gets done. That means more time will be spent seeking and moving the read heads than is spent reading/writing data. Think of it like being a DJ trying to play a 2 minute song that is in 38,000 pieces scattered around a vinyl record, you will spend way more time moving the stylus around than the song is long.

The preferred solution on both disc(CD/DVD/BD) and hard disks is to have everything laid out in straight line to read even if that means replicating data otherwise (mostly graphical) elements of the game won't have time to load. Naughty Dog and Crash Bandicoot was an early masterclass on how to do this. It's what they now call "streaming" environments as opposed to load the whole level and assets into memory at once.
 
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I got rabies said:
In chapter 11 of Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, the black knight will spawn at the end of your turn and he can immediately move when it becomes the enemy turn. He will absolutely buttfuck any of your character that is within range in one hit with 100% accuracy, and if they were able to tank it, they will die from the second hit because the black knight is fucking quick. You cannot anticipate him or know he's coming until you see him, and there's a recruitable character and a visitable house nearby so you're likely gonna lose someone and want to start over.

Even if you played the game before and know he does this, you might not remember that he's gonna move as soon as he appears. FE has a history with enemy spawning and being able to move right away but this takes the cake for fucking bullshit.
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IIRC Path of Radiance has a few missions with that kind of thing which is absolute bullshit. For a game that incentives methodical progress so as not to get screwed up they toss in missions where an enemy spawn on turn 10 or whatever decimates the fragile units you were keeping back away from the main action. You have no way of knowing it will happen and basically have to restart.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
On games like that the cinematics were stored on different CDs while the game itself was small enough to be replicated across the discs. You had to switch to disc 2 for the blah blah Sephiroth but you could still return to areas from disc 1 without having to swap. This is why the amount of discs increased, they had to keep the game itself on every disc.

This is in stark contrast to something like Monkey Island on Amiga where bits and pieces of the game were scattered across many floppies.
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This made me wonder if there's some autism project out there focusing on porting Final Fantasy VII to N64, by compressing the hell out of whatever they can and trying to squeeze it all down to under 64mb.
 
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Livecorpse said:
I was playing Age of Empires II and holy fuck Bayinnaung's final mission is some shit.

So it starts as a baseless mission where you have two big armies on both sides of the map. You've got a shitton of units, but the only ranged units you get are Arambai, which do a lot of damage but can't hit fucking anything. Other than them, you get a ton of elephants, a handful of decent cavalry, and a bunch of mediocre swordsmen and siege units. The problem is, your enemies use a ton of ranged units and pikemen, none of which you get a great counter for. Pikemen will rip your elephants apart, and the AI is smart enough to kite your elephants with archers. It's micromanagement hell and I hate everything about it.
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So here's a follow-up, because I discovered something else fun about this mission.

The first objective is to escort Bayinnaung to four shrines so he can meditate, after which you can build a base. The mission says that if Bayinnaung falls in battle, it's game over. Common sense, right? If you lose the hero unit you need to complete the mission, the game should end and save you the trouble.

So you get to micromanaging two armies on either side of the map by pausing every five seconds, and after entirely too much of that, you've finally pushed the Rakhine and Portuguese back enough to open up the four shrines and start working on the objective to finish this awful level. "Hey, where's Bayinnaung? He's not with my forces. Did I garrison him in a castle somewhere? No, don't see him there. Did he wander off and end up stuck on scenery? Can't find him. Weird."

That part about the game ending if Bayinnaung dies? That's not actually true.

:cryblood:
 
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Bloodstained has no autosave. This is fine.

It also crashes every half fucking hour, with no clear rhyme or reason, which is horse shit of the highest calibre. A game with this much money behind it should not be so unstable that the mere act of accessing your inventory or crossing the map, in a game about inventory management and map crossing, messes with the experience this badly.

I shouldn't have to keep saving my progress when I'm crafting in the goddamn hub.
 
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Articles and Nudes said:
Bloodstained has no autosave. This is fine.

It also crashes every half fucking hour, with no clear rhyme or reason, which is horse shit of the highest calibre. A game with this much money behind it should not be so unstable that the mere act of accessing your inventory or crossing the map, in a game about inventory management and map crossing, messes with the experience this badly.

I shouldn't have to keep saving my progress when I'm crafting in the goddamn hub.
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I've played this for hours on PC and it never crashed on me.
 
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Duncan Hills Coffee said:
Raycevick did an interesting video on this. The problem is games will include multiple high-quality language tracks, uncompressed audio, gigantic modes, and higher quality textures. Essentially, games are stuffed with shit few people really care about (Raycevick himself points out that very few people will be able to run those fancy higher quality textures on certain games, and yet they're still forced into a 175 GB download) but they're forced onto everyone, final file size be damned.


It's a good watch and certainly explains why games are getting too big.
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Case in point: download Mount and Blade and then download Mount and Blade II Bannerlord.

Part 2 is like a 100x bigger. And while yeah, there's more stuff in part 2, there's not that much more.
 
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Honka Honka Burning Love said:
You know what is real bullshit? Bullshit in an otherwise good game

Shadow nopeing out randomly in the first couple of times you get him in Final Fantasy 6.
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Shadow, and how he can just leave the party might just be the worst thing about Final Fantasy VI. Every situation is a beginner's trap, with no warning that he'll do what he does. The last example even locks out some interesting exposition near the end of the game:

If you don't wait for Shadow at the end of the Floating Continent, as in, wait until the very last second on the timer,
you lose him permanently. The entire world gets nuked, the entire party is strewn all over, there's a year-long time jump, and the rest of the game is an open-ended series of quests to find everyone, and face Kefka once and for all. So, it's possible to miss characters and complete the game without them, though there's no confirmation anywhere that Shadow is missing. There's also a well-hidden bit of exposition concerning some dream sequences he can have, if you stay in a particular inn with him in the party, that showcase how Shadow's the long-lost father of Relm. That's even foreshadowed with how Relm and Shadow's dog, Interceptor, get along so well.

But, every single other character can eventually be found and recruited. Shadow is absolutely nowhere to be found, and is gone for good.
 
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Pissmaster said:
Shadow, and how he can just leave the party might just be the worst thing about Final Fantasy VI. Every situation is a beginner's trap, with no warning that he'll do what he does. The last example even locks out some interesting exposition near the end of the game:
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The plot related ones are okay, like when you get to the falls and Sabin/Cyan just start talking about Jumping down them and Shadow is just like.

"Uhhhh, I am gonna like..go now okay, Ya'll have fun leaping to your deaths."

It is when he leaves in the middle of Zozo that really pisses me off.
 
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Honka Honka Burning Love said:
The plot related ones are okay, like when you get to the falls and Sabin/Cyan just start talking about Jumping down them and Shadow is just like.

"Uhhhh, I am gonna like..go now okay, Ya'll have fun leaping to your deaths."

It is when he leaves in the middle of Zozo that really pisses me off.
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Oh, I was thinking about how he can abandon you right before you get to the Phantom Train, making that sequence a little harder for no reason.
 
Pissmaster said:
Oh, I was thinking about how he can abandon you right before you get to the Phantom Train, making that sequence a little harder for no reason.
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Well if you make it to the train itself then you are golden, he won't leave on the evil train, but FUCK I would get triggered if he left in the forest the screen before.
 
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How the boulders rolling downhill can suddenly change path a dozen times in an unpredictable and bullshit manner you can't really predict in FE: PoR chapter 25. There's not really any way to dodge except wait a few turns out until they waste them, but it only drags the pace. Flying units can ignore them by completely going off the path but there's a ballista that could do serious damage and you only get a single Fullguard in the whole game (makes a unit lose its weaknesses when equipped). Ironically it's one of the few chapters where the boss actually moves, but instead of being a threat, he's a mere annoyance that's just tanky enough to survive and run away to get healed.

Also noticed longbows can't be used by anything except archers and snipers but nothing tells you so until you try it, and in other FE games anyone who can use bows and has the required rank with bows can use one. Doesn't help the matter that you only get 2 archers in the game, one sucks ass and the other is two-thirds into the game.
 
Pissmaster said:
Shadow, and how he can just leave the party might just be the worst thing about Final Fantasy VI. Every situation is a beginner's trap, with no warning that he'll do what he does. The last example even locks out some interesting exposition near the end of the game:

If you don't wait for Shadow at the end of the Floating Continent, as in, wait until the very last second on the timer,
you lose him permanently. The entire world gets nuked, the entire party is strewn all over, there's a year-long time jump, and the rest of the game is an open-ended series of quests to find everyone, and face Kefka once and for all. So, it's possible to miss characters and complete the game without them, though there's no confirmation anywhere that Shadow is missing. There's also a well-hidden bit of exposition concerning some dream sequences he can have, if you stay in a particular inn with him in the party, that showcase how Shadow's the long-lost father of Relm. That's even foreshadowed with how Relm and Shadow's dog, Interceptor, get along so well.

But, every single other character can eventually be found and recruited. Shadow is absolutely nowhere to be found, and is gone for good.
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I still can't understand how I figured that out.

Something that is absolute bullshit is spells that don't work on bosses. Or spells that doesn't work on bosses except for one(the guy you could X-zone in Cyan's castle iirc).
 
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Fighting the Nidhogg parasite as Vergil in Devil May Cry 5 on Dante Must Die difficulty is absolutely miserable. It says a lot when the only strategy people have for this boss is just to spam judgement cut.
 
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