Biggest bullshit in a video game

At least the protection for Sid Meiers Pirates had some practicality what they did was make you answer by which port one of the two treasure fleets was going to be depending on the month.
 
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LA Noire's Truth, Doubt, and Lie prompts.

It's no wonder they kept changing the words between releases because they don't quite fit. Even if you think of it as Coerce, Force, Accuse or whatever, it's still excrutiatingly rigid. I know it's an old game, but it's a drag that there's only a "correct" way to question every NPC with no nuance or variance, down to that infuriating jingle whenever you select the right or wrong option. Wouldn't it have been sick if you could choose your methodology on a case-by-case basis, and there was a little more forgiveness before characters shut down and refuse to speak to you anymore? And no gamey indication that you said the wrong things also.

If it wasn't obvious, I've beeb playing it for the first time. I'm having fun with it, but this makes it a pretty frustrating experience when interrogations were what I was most excited for. I wish the modding scene was bigger.
 
FF9 expecting me to get to a certain point in 12 hours to get Excalibur.

Really great game though. I'll just have to force myself to "speedrun" some day.
Excalibur was always a funny meme in my opinion. Usually you get the ultimate weapon by beating the only enemies that are strong enough to require it, in this case you need to pretty much master the game with minimum resources and memorize everything which is even harder.
 
Games that hide information from you.

Sometimes this is from a misguided attempt to "avoid overwhelming or confusing a player" (Skyrim is infamous for this). This is of course retarded, as it often leads to further confusion due to players having almost no feedback or accurate info to go off of, which, for an RPG*, is a pretty horrible feeling.

Other times, asshole devs deliberately hide information to try and "make things trickier" or "prevent a meta from forming", like Helldivers 2, which sucks for the same reason as the first, except here it's the devs being assholes on purpose, which feels worse, because the devs know they're being shitheads.

*Yes, Scrolls purist, I called Skyrim an RPG
 
This may have had something to do with copy protection, to be fair. Since we're talking about adventure games, both Maniac Mansion ans Day of the Tentacle did this in the floppy version too, IIRC.
I can't remember the actual game any more, but I remember a game in the fucking '80s where you had these cardstock contraptions with holes in them where you had to spin them around and they'd give you a challenge and you'd have to solve it with this primitive ass bullshit by spinning around the top cardstock wheel with holes in it to answer the question.

I remember some crack team fixed this just by making it so you could just answer whatever.
 
What part? I played all the lucas arts games after the fact I wasn't a pc gamer at the time I was on console.
Some people have the impression that developers had some kind of racket going, where they'd deliberately put impossible puzzles into games so that the poor trusting public would have to go spend additional money buy guides or Nintendo Powers or whatever. This doesn't make a lot of sense if you stop to think about it even a little bit (e.g., Japanese 3rd party NES devs were not getting kickbacks from sales Nintendo Power in the USA).

Sierra would apparently just mail you the answers if you asked, and on custom stationary at that.

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It's just a little something called SOUL that you won't find in games today.

It's not a cope: old adventure games used to come with a number of "feelies" like decoding rings or big ass manuals full of info that the games would sometimes require to proceed forward.
That stuff is cool. I've grabbed a few things from GOG where I ended up having more fun with the pdfs than the game. Bring back 200-page manuals that contain a whole prequel story! Or 10-page manuals. Or any manuals. (:_(
 
Sierra would apparently just mail you the answers if you asked, and on custom stationary at that.
Sierra were one of the good guys even back then. EA has always been evil as fuck and did utterly evil shit. People took pride in cracking their shit.
It's not a cope: old adventure games used to come with a number of "feelies" like decoding rings or big ass manuals full of info that the games would sometimes require to proceed forward.
I'm not sure if Infocom invented this, but the first of these I remember is the Hitchhiker's text adventure game. They had these for most of their text games.
 
Some people have the impression that developers had some kind of racket going, where they'd deliberately put impossible puzzles into games so that the poor trusting public would have to go spend additional money buy guides or Nintendo Powers or whatever. This doesn't make a lot of sense if you stop to think about it even a little bit (e.g., Japanese 3rd party NES devs were not getting kickbacks from sales Nintendo Power in the USA).

Sierra would apparently just mail you the answers if you asked, and on custom stationary at that.

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It's just a little something called SOUL that you won't find in games today.

Well no it'd be the prima strategy guides.
 
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The last wall guardian specifically is the worst, though you could now probably cheese him with using a phone to record.
That's how I got past it back in the day. I used my T-Mobile MDA. I was very proud of myself for thinking of this.

You know what I fucking despise now? I fired up FF 16 again because I have some time to kill between jobs. I didn't notice this previously but fucking hell is it annoying that the vast majority of the game is a fucking cutscene. Especially in the beginning. Just let me play the fucking game. I don't care about your wannabe Hideo Kojima bullshit. If you want to make movies and have faggots like Geoff Keighley hysterically clamoring to suck your dick, you're in the wrong business.
 
That's how I got past it back in the day. I used my T-Mobile MDA. I was very proud of myself for thinking of this.

You know what I fucking despise now? I fired up FF 16 again because I have some time to kill between jobs. I didn't notice this previously but fucking hell is it annoying that the vast majority of the game is a fucking cutscene. Especially in the beginning. Just let me play the fucking game. I don't care about your wannabe Hideo Kojima bullshit. If you want to make movies and have faggots like Geoff Keighley hysterically clamoring to suck your dick, you're in the wrong business.
As long as it's a skippable cutscene. I fucking hate unskippable walk segments
 
It's just a little something called SOUL that you won't find in games today.
It's also more or less what people wanted. What zoomers don't get is that we didn't have an infinite sea of games releasing every month; it was fun to get stuck in an adventure game and be thinking on a puzzle for a few days or a week and trying new shit when you got home. Or sometimes you'd just boot it up and run around aimlessly looking at the pretty backgrounds, kind of the equivalent of just fucking around in an open-world game.

Point is, there was a time when magazines would actually slam a game that didn't throw some convoluted bullshit in. It was expected.

Hint books existed for some of the big games but those were actually pretty uncommon. I don't think I ever saw one in a store. And magazines had tips pages sometimes because what else are you gonna fill out a gaming magazine with besides that and letters, but yeah, none of those had any affiliation with the developers.

The zoomy understanding about NES games having "artificial difficulty" to "extend playtime" is similarly bullshit, since that assumes you ever expected to finish most of those games. But that wasn't the point; they were like that because of the arcade influence, where it was more about throwing yourself at it and seeing how far you could get. They might indeed have a final boss but if you ever got to see it your buddy watching on the couch would be going fucking apeshit, which was a special-ass thing.
 
Unskippable intros/credits/dialogues. I get it, you want to show who made the game and all, but I really don't care if I've paid for it already (I'll look it up if it interests me in my own time), and I'd like to skip any and all dialogues and cutscenes if I find them boring, no exception. I know that's how devs obfuscate loading screens at times, but I'd rather see a game tip and a loading bar than be forced to stare for a dev logo or listen to an NPC.
 
Dragons Dogma: Pawns refusing to heed your commands. Also wolves hunt in packs, masterworks all can't go wrong.

Dragons Dogma 2: Pawns are mentally retarded and having a system where they lose max up after suffering an enemy attack is annoying.

Phantom Dust: getting hit by an attack that removes a skill or an aura particle. It's still a fun game and I can understand why it's there but it's both fun and annoying.

Medusa Heads
 
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