Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[mrs thickness]

...Such as?

Well, on top of the one that I fucking said already, Streets of Rage 4, Final Fantasy 6, Castlevania SOTN as well as Bloodstained, any Kirby game where he wears a headband, literally anything that Platinum or Treasure have ever been involved in, Sifu, pretty much every game where you ride a skateboard and can do a special trick, Megaman Battle Network, I'm sorry, is this more than literally no other genre of game yet or no?

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Final Fantasy 6

Called it

 

[Matt Damon]

aside from maybe Saban's inputs in FF6

Which, fittingly, is generally agreed to be an annoying pain in the ass.

pretty much every game where you ride a skateboard and can do a special trick

They had half and quarter circles in Tony Hawk? I'm not sure I remember any of those, unless they were in the later ones.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

Dead or Alive is better for that.



For racing games, it can be the opposite. One thing I love about Gran Turismo, and many other games, is starting off in economy shit boxes and working up to LeMan prototypes. That doesn't really exist any more in part because publishers are so afraid that kids will drop the game if they aren't racing Lamborghinis within the first ten minutes.

Other games, like Need for Speed, driving dream cars is the point, so it makes sense you start with high end sports cars.

The real problem I think is the middle is gone. It would be like if your only options for films were Dora the Explorer and French art house films where a woman sits in a cafe for three hours. Or if your only options for a FPS were Ground Branch and Duck Hunt.



It can be good. Moment 37 is legendary for a reason. But there are certainly high end skill videos for Smash Bros. Though I'd argue playing Smash Bros hyper competitively is missing the point.

Dead or Alive is weird in that I wonder why there are even male characters in it at all. It is waifu fighter. Soul Caliber is more about weapons than waifus, so they can have more of an international style.

 

[Pissmaster]

They had half and quarter circles in Tony Hawk? I'm not sure I remember any of those, unless they were in the later ones.

THPS' special tricks were executed by doing two quick directional inputs followed by a corresponding face button, but you could remap them. The way to go was to assign them to up-down and down-up, as you were pressing up-down-up-down a lot anyway, in order to manual after landing to maintain your combo. Any other button combo was unnatural for the flow of the game. I think you could only have two assigned at any given time, too, so there was no reason to use anything but up-down and down-up.

There were no half or quarter circles movements in THPS.

Megaman Battle Network

Mega Man Battle Network had nothing like fighting game inputs. You moved around stiffly on a 3x3 grid, picked cards with different attacks, and tried to aim them just right in order to hit your opponent. It was more strategy than action.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Dead or Alive is weird in that I wonder why there are even male characters in it at all. It is waifu fighter. Soul Caliber is more about weapons than waifus, so they can have more of an international style.

I pick Ryu Hyabusa whenever I play DoA, which is rare because I suck at it.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

I pick Ryu Hyabusa whenever I play DoA, which is rare because I suck at it.

Oh yeah, he is in this series. It's easy to forget when he's better known in Ninja Gaiden.

 

[X Prime]

Mega Man Battle Network had nothing like fighting game inputs. You moved around stiffly on a 3x3 grid, picked cards with different attacks, and tried to aim them just right in order to hit your opponent. It was more strategy than action.

No, they are correct. The Variable Sword chip allowed you to input fighting game motions to use a specific type of sword slash.

 

[Matt Damon]

The Variable Sword chip allowed you to input fighting game motions to use a specific type of sword slash.

This is getting awfully obscure to be used as evidence of "see, lots of games use fighting game inputs".

 

[DavidS877]

I don't do well with any game requiring timing or button sequences. So while I enjoy story games like Ghost of Tsushima, the controls, parrying and combos meant I just ignored them all and poked enemies with my sword until they died.
Given that the trophies always include "Parry 37 times' or "Do all the melee training." I've given up on bothering to collect all trophies these days.

 

[Calandrino]

I thought they died out for a while around the PS2 until SF4?

One of the better observations to emerge from this absolute mess. This whole spergout would make a little more sense circa 2007, when there hadn't been a mainline SF sequel in like 10 years (and it flopped), MK was a laughingstock scraping by as a broken Tekken clone, KoF was a full-3D game nobody liked, and Evo was five guys playing MvC2 on Dreamcast. By then, 2D fighting games had already been dead longer than they had ever been alive. You could point at Guilty Gear and smugly say, "ah ha, archaic overcomplicated 2D games like this killed the once-profitable fighting game genre with their limited appeal and unwillingness to evolve". Anybody would have bet money that there would never be another Killer Instinct or Samurai Shodown, ever. Or maybe even another Street Fighter. Certainly not one confined to a flat plane.

Nowadays Guilty Gear of all things is somehow actually alive and liable to get another sequel. Within ~5ish years or so there will absolutely be new 2.5D fighters from Capcom, NRS, and SNK (!), plus other miscellany like DBZ and niche anime fighters or whatever. 2.5D fighters are going to have a foot in the AAA door for at least that long. The post SF4-wave has already outlived the entire original lifespan of 2D fighting games in the mainstream (it only took MK like 5 years to go full 3D, with sidesteps and everything). Seems to be in better straits than 3D fighters, to say nothing of certain other genres. Reading this thread, you'd think SF4 were the game that killed the genre, not the one that got it back on its feet.

The whole slapfight about fighting game inputs is academic and utterly pointless. Truth is, when fighters do provide simple inputs (as an alternative or by default), they don't hit it big with this supposed silent majority of people who can't do a QCF. Smashfags do not care about not-Smash. Nobody plays Fantasy Strike or whatever. Capcom craves the normalfag audience and the "pros" vocally hated SF5 and SFxT. If nothing else, SF4+ and nu-MK are trading on familiarity, and removing special motions would alienate more customers than it would attract. ofc they could be made easier to execute, but they already did that and the whining persists, as it tends to.

You think they just don't want your money? It's never that. Actually, Warner is bold enough to be floating their own Smash wannabe at the moment, Multiversus. Apparently they're not worried about it cannibalizing the MK base, or creating brand confusion with the same characters concurrently appearing in Injustice. I'm sure tearing kids away from Smash is the bigger concern.

In point of fact, special move inputs were an innovative feature that contributed to SF2's immense popularity. They were imitated because people liked them. Smash didn't become Smash because Nintendo finally built a better mousetrap, they were selling a different kind of game to a different audience, with their brand backing it. Without that logo and those IPs, it would be as obscure as e.g. Outfoxies and Power Stone. We could have a whole trivia challenge of digging up all these ancient not-bad-at-all fighting games with simple movesets and weird features that never went anywhere. Meanwhile you all know about Geese and his pretzels, because it found its audience.

tl;dr pissing off everybody who actually plays your game to satisfy people who never will does not have the strongest track record. Might as well suggest that StarCraft read the room and retool itself into a Plants vs Zombies clone.

Okay, so, we've got fans of three very arcadey genres in this thread: Fighting, rhythm, and racing.

These things are not alike. The plastic guitar fad went the way of waggle, if there were an audience GH would be back tomorrow and no shut-in could stop it. Forza is like the most normalfag infinite money spigot in the universe, it's not "dying", it's just pissing off blueballed Burnout fans. And troublingly, fighting games were normalfag by the standards of 8-year-olds in 1992, but here we are.

They're so obvious, so intuitive, and so simple that literally no other genre of game employs them.

This is getting awfully obscure to be used as evidence of "see, lots of games use fighting game inputs".

You know what dude, if you don't mean literally then don't say "literally".

I like Soul Calibur because of the hot characters in skimpy clothes.

I actually don't even know how to play.

This cuts to the heart of the matter. A lack of hot women with big tits is the only thing that can ever truly kill fighting games.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

You know what dude, if you don't mean literally then don't say "literally".

I don't think one character in one Final Fantasy game having a few attacks that sort of resemble fighting game inputs defeats his point, nor does a few gimmicky chips in Mega Man Battle Network.

The shitty, strict, obtuse inputs are standard in 2D Fighting games. No other genre purposefully locks in-game actions behind such inputs as a standard control scheme, even if a tiny few outliers arguably exist to varying degrees.

 

[ArthuriusMartyrius]

You want a hot take?

Metroid: Other M's story is not that bad. Dialogue? Sure, hilariously bad at times. Voice acting? Samus' VA couldn't emote convincingly to save her life. Controls? Awkward.

But whenever I see people go on massive rants about how it ruined Samus' character and whatever, I mostly get the impression they didn't pay attention, they just saw Samus taking orders from a senior officer who is intended to be her surrogate father figure and kind of an asshole and chimped out. Granted, it does suffer from having supplementary material that you need to read to understand some plot points.

 

[X Prime]

I don't think one character in one Final Fantasy game having a few attacks that sort of resemble fighting game inputs defeats his point, nor does a few gimmicky chips in Mega Man Battle Network.

What would have been fun to mention is the fact that the Final Fantasy 6 example actually goes against what silly point they were trying to make.

The inputs there are lies and are simplified: the diagonals do not need to be performed and are actually a duplicate of the previous directional input. In other words, Up + Up-Left is actually Up + Up.

 

[Matt Damon]

Given that the trophies always include "Parry 37 times' or "Do all the melee training." I've given up on bothering to collect all trophies these days.

I think I can count on one hand the number of games I've attempted any kind of "achievements" or "trophies" or the like.

 

[Raging Capybara]

Dead or Alive is better for that.

I'm a fag, bro. I'm talking about the dudes too.

 

[The Feline Solution]

Also, the single worst design philosophy ever created was the popularization of Rogue-lite mechanics.

I agree so much but i am hopelessly trapped in that genre, especially if its tied to deckbuilding. I suck so much in anything with twitch gameplay these days thanks to almost exclusivly playing turn-based rogue-likes, i am disgusted with myself. Nothing seems to suck me in anymore except those autistic type of games and i feel how fucking autistic they are while i am playing them. It's terrible. "Rogue-like" and "Metroidvania" are the bane of modern indie gaming. "Auto-Battler" is another thing that shouldn't exist but fuck me, i already put in double digit hours into Hadean Tactics ever since it had its 1.0 release. At least i'm not paying for this shit.

Edit:

I’ve never played a fighting game that inspired me to care enough to sit down and actually try to get good at it. I think, if there was one thing that nuked my desire to play them, it was someone telling me long ago that playing against the computer could make me develop bad habits early on when playing against other people. And then I look at the retard corral that makes up the fighting game community, and then I look at these games I’m not really enjoying anyway, and I wonder why I’m thinking about this at all.

The only times i ever enjoyed fightan' games and where i got good at some (mostly the Soul Calibur series) were the times of couch vs. against my friends in my wasted youth. I really like the early SNK era (SamSho 2, KOF 94 up to Garou: Mark of the Wolves) for the character designs and general art direction but it seems way too much of a chore with way too high of a skill ceiling to ever get back into on like Fightcade or something.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I think I can count on one hand the number of games I've attempted any kind of "achievements" or "trophies" or the like.

The only game I ever tried to get all the achievements on was Spider-Man PS4.

And it was literally because I played it for a weekend, and near the end of the weekend I noticed I only needed to do the basic ass challenges on Gold to get it and thought "Why not?" since I was basically there.

Achievement Hunting is for suckers

 

[Judge Dredd]

pissing off everybody who actually plays your game to satisfy people who never will does not have the strongest track record.

That is correct, but neither does pandering to a ever shrinking pool of autistics and nostalgia bait.

Look at super hero comics. Before wokeshit killed them off completely, the genre, hell, the entire medium of US comics was dying because nobody wanted to read 50 years of backstory just to know what's going on. They kept doing gimmicks like Infinite Crisis on Infinite Earths of Crisis Infinite or 52 new 52s, but it never sticks because they can't stop with the cross over events and continuity shit, because the few autists who have ready every comic love that shit.

Then manga comes along, which doesn't even have colour, but completely destroys the industry.

Harley Davison is a dying brand that makes glorified mobility scooters for old people that want to look tough. From the 80s onward they exclusively pandered to boomers who grew up Easy Rider, and now their demographic is too old to ride motorcycles and they're completely fucked. Younger people are riding Japanese brands and Harley's efforts to pander to young people are pissing off both the few old farts that remain, and are rejected by young people as insincere corporate pandering, which it is.


This is the problem with pandering to die hards and leaning on nostalgia exclusively, you have no one to replace those who leave.

if there were an audience GH would be back tomorrow and no shut-in could stop it.

I've seen many genres die because a single failure makes the company abandon them. Where's all the AAA survival horror games? Stealth games? Racing games? How many times have big companies like EA, Activision, and Valve declared that single player games are dead and they're just making multiplayer games from now on? The answer is a lot. Look at how long Metroid was dormant because after Other M failed, Nintendo decided that Metroid games don't sell.

Achievement Hunting is for suckers

I miss when achievements first appeared and were cool. People passing around King Kong and Avatar because they had easy points.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

You want a hot take?

Metroid: Other M's story is not that bad. Dialogue? Sure, hilariously bad at times. Voice acting? Samus' VA couldn't emote convincingly to save her life. Controls? Awkward.

But whenever I see people go on massive rants about how it ruined Samus' character and whatever, I mostly get the impression they didn't pay attention, they just saw Samus taking orders from a senior officer who is intended to be her surrogate father figure and kind of an asshole and chimped out. Granted, it does suffer from having supplementary material that you need to read to understand some plot points.

Even if you boot out the fact that Adam Malkovich was Samus' surrogate dad, bounty hunters have to obey their clients to the letter. That's how they get paid. Adam forbidding Samus from using heavy weapons was akin to Darth Vader getting up in Boba Fett's face and telling him not to disintegrate anyone. It's no different from Star Fox Adventures having General Pepper forbid Fox McCloud from bringing his blaster to Dinosaur Planet.

Bounty hunters are professional contractors. And they get their bread by following orders to the letter. If they're hired to rescue some scientists or capture a target alive, and they accidentally vaporize them, there's no payment, and there's a possibility of jailtime.

@Judge Dredd
The problem is, unlike capeshit fans whose revenue for comics dwindled, fighting game fans continue to pay money. And since they keep paying money for things to remain the same, things will remain the same. That's the difference between them and capeshit; comic book revenue dwindled to a tiny drop to the point where the comic book companies decided to sacrifice comics to the SJWs to get good press from SJW rags, whereas fighting game companies are paid well to keep things the same as the old days.

And again, like I said before, some fighting game companies experimented with easy-button inputs. Netherrealm Studios did for their Mortal Kombat and Injustice games. Blazblue experimented with it in their first game. So did SF4. But aside from Netherrealm, who had no problems telling the OG MK fans to piss off by changing the story to the point where the old fans got pissed, the other companies don't want to alienate their old fanbases when they complained, so they went back to doing things the same way they've done it in the old days.