Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

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Every time somebody complains 30 fps is unplayable, I replay Turok 2 in Hi-Res mode.

(Okay that actually was unplayable)
 
This is an unpopular opinion among the niche but:
Even on sim-games there's a limit that should be maintained in regards to realism in order to uphold a game's primary objective, being fun.

I enjoy sims.
But I'm currently playing War on the Sea and having to deal with the dogshit early war American torpedoes is a pain.

If you're unaware, early war American torpedoes were a total clusterfuck and ungodly unreliable (fun rabbit hole albeit infuriating to dive down).
Just now I was setting up an ambush on a Japanese convoy with 2 submarines, launching 12 torpedoes to get 8 hits, but 6 duds that just straight up do nothing, it absolutely sucks.
Hell, there's a singular Japanese Mogami class heavy cruiser in my current campaign that has achieved mythical status because despite being hit by a dozen torps total, they all managed to be duds.
Sims operate on a Scale of Harness, similar to the one that governs sci fi. On one end you have worlds where everything must be 100% realistic, even if that realism is very far in the future. In the middle you have Star Trek, where most things are somewhat realistic but with some fantastic elements to keep things from getting dry. Then on the other end you have Star Wars where there's barely any explanation for anything that happens because that gets in the way of pyoo pyoo kaboom.

But they're all, nonetheless, sci fi. Sometimes you're in the mood for one type, sometimes you want the exact opposite.

With sims, sometimes I want some hyper autistic shit like kerbal space program where you have to manage the weight distribution of your solid fuel rockets and calculate your inclination so your periapsis isn't too strongly affected by gravity. Other times I want Battletech where my weapons overheating is realistic enough for me.

No 60 is the bare minimum. Get your 50fps pal nonsense outta here.
It really depends. Does Civilization need to run at 60 fps? Probably not. Does Doom? Absolutely.
 
The "player is helpless against chasing/hunting monster" gameplay gimmick was never and never will be fun. Its the gameplay equivalent to a jumpscare, and doesn't have the "OH FUCK" tension that sticks with you like in situations where fighting back takes resources.
 
It really depends. Does Civilization need to run at 60 fps? Probably not. Does Doom? Absolutely.
I do find turn based RPGs feel better at 60fps. That's more due to me being used to 60fps after gaming on PC since 2013, though. I could play Trails of Cold Steel at 30fps just fine, just don't want to.

For some reason, I find Morrowind unplayable at any FOV above the default. I usually play first person games at an FOV of about 95, but Morrowind feels wrong like that.
 
Doom was locked at 35 fps.
I meant Doom 2016. That game is so twitch based you could die if you hesitated for half a second.

Also, I played gzdoom which interpolated the frame rate to 60 for the original. Gotta say, it really does feel a million times better.
 
I meant Doom 2016. That game is so twitch based you could die if you hesitated for half a second.
That game is so gay you could die if you are heterosexual

The "player is helpless against chasing/hunting monster" gameplay gimmick was never and never will be fun.
git gud

Remember to group the ghosts before eating a power pellet
 
I tried out the Soul Reaver remasters and my teenage self feels totally vindicated for getting bored and giving up on the PS1 game - it was a tedious slog of a game with puzzle design and general gameplay mechanics that had become dull and dated even by 1999 and then the sequel somehow managed to be substantially worse in many ways while I struggle to think of any way that it improved upon the original. Going from terrible simple combat to terrible, more complex combat isn't exactly a giant leap.

Diehard Legacy of Kain fans still act like it's some great injustice that the series died when in reality, it's hard to think of a gaming IP that got (and squandered) so many chances to become a top-tier franchise.
 
The "player is helpless against chasing/hunting monster" gameplay gimmick was never and never will be fun. Its the gameplay equivalent to a jumpscare, and doesn't have the "OH FUCK" tension that sticks with you like in situations where fighting back takes resources.
It's silly when a turn-based JRPG does it.

I think the best way to handle it is make it technically unwinnable, but obtain a reward for some kind of survival milestone.
 
The "player is helpless against chasing/hunting monster" gameplay gimmick was never and never will be fun. Its the gameplay equivalent to a jumpscare, and doesn't have the "OH FUCK" tension that sticks with you like in situations where fighting back takes resources.
The worst ones are when the "scary unkillable monster" that you're supposed to run from are not scary or threatening in the slightest.

The Amnesia games do this a lot, the scary spoopy invincible monster is this frail Gollum looking thing that I could probably kick to death if the game would let me
 
I tried out the Soul Reaver remasters and my teenage self feels totally vindicated for getting bored and giving up on the PS1 game - it was a tedious slog of a game with puzzle design and general gameplay mechanics that had become dull and dated even by 1999 and then the sequel somehow managed to be substantially worse in many ways while I struggle to think of any way that it improved upon the original. Going from terrible simple combat to terrible, more complex combat isn't exactly a giant leap.

Diehard Legacy of Kain fans still act like it's some great injustice that the series died when in reality, it's hard to think of a gaming IP that got (and squandered) so many chances to become a top-tier franchise.
I think people like the plot and acting and sort of tolerate the rest.

I'm currently trying to get into Resident Evil and I just realized something: Resident Evil is stupid. It keeps jumping between Night of the Living Dead and one of those awful zombie parody movies you see on Netflix. Not that stupid is bad, Capcom has made a living out of goofy action games after all. But I think I actually prefer the grounded take that the Remakes are doing because the tone is all over the fucking place in the originals.
I always thought it was a lot closer to anime/weebshit than any western low-budget horror movie. "Raccoon City", "S.T.A.R.S.", 20 year old female special agents, "ultimate lifeforms", plots for world domination, etc. Silent Hill, Clock Tower, and Splatterhouse all nailed the homages to their western sources in a way RE never did. But I will say that the Italian horror movie Shocking Dark is uncannily close to the tone of RE cut scenes. They even have a similarly absurd ESL name for the evil organization ("the Tubular Corporation").

I timestamped the not-STARS team meeting up but the whole movie is like this:

 
I think people like the plot and acting and sort of tolerate the rest.
That sounds about right. The second game in particular feels like they completely ran out of ideas and just filled the time between cutscenes with a thousand identical and unavoidable combat instances.
 
Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home was probably the quintessential wrestling game that could have competed with WWE Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain if it was marketed correctly.
 
The worst ones are when the "scary unkillable monster" that you're supposed to run from are not scary or threatening in the slightest.

The Amnesia games do this a lot, the scary spoopy invincible monster is this frail Gollum looking thing that I could probably kick to death if the game would let me
The encounter with the Dimensional Shambler from the Call of Cthulhu game is a perfect example of how shitty that kind of game design is.
 
Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home was probably the quintessential wrestling game that could have competed with WWE Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain if it was marketed correctly.
Honestly that game was way more fun than it had any right to be and you never hear shit about it it seems like, it was pretty uniquely fucking late 90s/2000s vibes, like IIRC you could play as the guys from ICP lmao. Also a staple of the wrestling games of the era was being able to create your own characters, no idea if the newer Smackdown vs. Raw games even do that. I quit watching WWE around the time Stone Cold started to become a rare sight but I still enjoyed the hell out of the games despite not knowing half the fucking wrestlers. My friends and I got probably hundreds of hours of entertainment out of Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth over the years because we spent so much fucking time making people we hated from school in the character creator and beating the shit out of them or having those same characters face off against the Slim Jim guy and Goku among other whacky characters in a Royal Rumble. Shit was hilarious, watching Triple H pick up the fattest black man custom character on Earth and throw him off of a ladder or Stone Cold beating the shit out of Peter Griffin.
 
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