games

Warcraft 3’s legacy is World of Warcraft instead of Warcraft 4

Balatro is very fun but the replayablitiy of it hits a limit after 25 hours. The general strategy becomes less interesting once you have a deeper understanding of the game, and it leads into higher stake battles being dependant less on skill and more on just luck of the jokers you get. Winning or getting high scores loses its enjoyment quickly, especially if you try to farm gold stakes

9/10

KSP has a lot of really bad physics bugs, collectively called the kraken. My most hated one is that surface bases, as they grow or even just continue to exist, will gradually and inevitably floating point error themselves into the ground and then explode.

Pokemon should of been taken out back old yeller style, revived like that ben garrison marx comic, and then given to somebody crazy like kojima or swery. Pokemon games are fun in theory, they just need somebody who doesn't know fucking anything about pokemon to make these game

I want Norman Reedus playing patty cake with a quagsire and pissing on himself when he gets stung by tentacools and getting to battle all of kojimas celebrity friends.

Y'all got infinite money, do something with it!!!!

Fallout 4 is a terrible disappointment of a game. The writing is downright awful, especially following New Vegas. The factions are nonsensical, most of the companions are not interesting and the world building is so lazy (the institute just so happened to simultaneously invent FEV on the other side of the country from the Master). The combat is clunky at best. The base building is far to limited and inconsequential. Why can't I stop playing this game.

The bossfight at the end of Sonic 2 is a bullshit difficulty curve, you should be able to get at least one ring

New Vegas could be even more trans. Also, i've never liked the look of the games done with that Bethesda engine.

Dark souls 1's second half low-key sucks ass.

Cs2 is a game. Idk how to properly critize it though, cause it does exactly what it says on the box. Very competative team objective based shooter. Most of the criticisms I'd have would be around valve and how they created an underage casino but thats not the games fault.

The community is kinda shit, fps games tend to attract chuds in droves

Team Fortress 2 is a money printer and valve should have kept updating it regularly with new weapons. The bizarre turn to a ranked esports scene sucked and made it way harder to find community servers, the best part of the game.

Elden Ring's community sucks ass. The best way to beat the game is however you want and it's really not that hard unless you intentionally cripple yourself by not using half the tools the game gives you and screams at you to use.

Sekiro's dragonrot mechanic is really confusing and seems like a tax on progressing quests if you die too much, which is already the most punishing part of the game since you lose skill point progression when you die as well as money and there's no way to go pick it up like every other Souls game. However the combat is better than any Souls game has ever been and nothing is more satisfying than perfect deflects.

Deep Rock Galactic's escort and drillevator missions are really repetitive and boring. The game is at its strongest when you're exploring the caves and terraforming to give yourself better odds against swarms. Those two types trivialize and completely remove the value of all the classes movement tools so you're left standing on the point gunning down bugs until the timer runs out. At least they had the sense to randomize core stone phases with season 5.

Heat Signature really good but some mission types are impossible without self-charging tools and those are so vanishingly rare from crates that you end up doing dozens of Soft Target missions to roll the dice on the overpriced mystery crates for good gear. And the really really high glory score missions are frequently impossible. Time limit warzone hijack, and there's defenders and predators on board the ship? Nah.

Disco Elysium kind of throws you in the deep end. What's a thought cabinet? Why am I mulling on this tie? What do any of these stats mean?

Digimon world 1's digivolution requirements are so obscure that there is not a single guide for the system that is completely correct lmao
this includes the printed one, which is the most incorrect

dwarf fortress is still kinda unplayble at times without dfhack scripts. spend too much time down in the caverns and the nature aggro system kicks in and pretty soon there's hundreds of invisible enemies dragging down your fps to a painfully slow crawl because the game just has to keep track of their sightlines, a calculation that also inevitably grows more complicated as the map fills up with trees.

also the farming system is a bit silly, you only need like half a hectare of land to feed a small city.

rolling people up into a ball does bring them closer together, but it's rude to abduct people in the middle of their day (katamari)

The level design of Super Mario 64 is a messy directionless jumble of 3D assets with pasted-on themes.

ok, disclaimer, these criticisms are only refreshed as far as my last playthrough, which was late 2023, so they may be half-remembered

CrossCode's level graph very much assumes you're champing at the bit to do a good chunk of the quests in each area before you move on (or an annoying amount of grinding), which–especially in the early game–can be a bit of a slog due to the amount of backtracking and/or fetching you have to do. The justifications I've heard for this is that it's supposed to be a part of the general satire of MMOs–however, if you make something that drags on purpose and I have to play it, I may or may not feel the purpose but I definitely feel the drag.

The bit after Red Area^TM^ and before Japan^TM^ honestly drags a little. I see the vision but it feels like it ballooned in scope relative to its importance to the story. Don't get me wrong, after Red Area^TM^ you absolutely need to have downtime, but I remember a bit before you get to the temples feeling like we should either be getting back into the plot action or at least be in another area by now, and then there's two temples. Cool idea, a bit much, especially on replay.

I think the puzzles are a design strength of the game, especially the final puzzle, but it very much constitutes a barrier to entry, especially the very long puzzles (including the final puzzle) where sometimes I just want to get back into the combat (the most fun part for me). It's more in retrospect that I like some of those longer puzzles.

I don't like the stealth sections at all. They're insta-room resets (annoying), and Lea feels too floaty to work with it. Her fluidity is great for combat but it just doesn't do precision. I'm glad that there's like, two in total, but I think they should have nixed it. CrossCode is a very active game, and IMO it thrives most when it allows you Metal Gear Rising/Sekiro levels of pure activity in gameplay. It's like if you were mid-Titanfall and they hit you with turn-based menu combat (shoot at options)–funny bit, kills the momentum, frustrating to control.

Lastly, platforming is generally fine but there are some bits where the isometric layering is poorly communicated, and it's rather frustrating when that happens. Also, I'm generally not the biggest fan of auto-jump platforming (currently first-timing Ocarina of Time so this is rather fresh) but it's implemented well-enough to not be annoying in a way that I remember.

your turn

Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Manages to feel like one of the most packed Fire Emblem games while also feeling incomplete. It has 4 routes, but the first half of the game feels very similar in all routes, and two of the routes are also very similar in the second half. Master Classes are horrible, as are gendered classes. The game should have done Divine Pulse via save points instead of a turnwheel, and should have left the weapon triangle in the game. The graphics/animations are not great, and considering what they did with Shadows of Valentia it's shocking how a switch game feels like a downgrade compared to a 3DS game. Last thing I'll mention is Byleth and queer representation. Should have been more queer people in the game, and while Three Houses is better than the rest of the avatar characters in terms of characters being avatarsexual, it's still present. I feel like the game would have been better if Female Byleth were the only Byleth (I do not like Male Byleth), could not have her name changed, and was made more of her own character who's one of the co-protagonists to the other 3 protagonists (depending on route choice), rather than being a (not so great) stand-in for the player. Also the story, while pretty good, leaves things to be desired (they did Edelgard DIRTY).

Tears of the Kingdom: "Demon King? Secret Stone?"

This was not a well-researched post, and I'm not going to try to make one. I haven't played through either of these games too recently, I could be forgetting things or misremembering things.

literally not one of them are good without mods, and those mods aren't good until i've fucked with them myself

The most popular WoW streamer is a champion of Nurgle who has roaches crawling on him while he screeches about DEI, the people that like him are typically even worse.

Ocarina of Time was TOO perfect and ahead of it's time, so the water temple was very difficult on the low resolution CRT screens that was the technology at the time.

The pacing in Half Life 2 is sometimes off. Specifically, going from Route Kanal to Water Hazard is bad pacing, there needs to be a change in scenery. Also, the helicopter fight on the airboat sucks and is an absolute slog. My most controversial opinion perhaps is that the episodes are where Half-Life fell off, not the lack of Episode 3. Yes, the gameplay is good but the story is convoluted and doesn't make as much sense. It makes the ending of Half Life 2 worse in my opinion.

i dunno what my favourite game itself is (current or all time), but I'll gladly shit on the battlefield franchise because there is no greater example of a continuous, slow motion, generational bag fumble culminating with 2042 killing the last vestiges of good favour DICE ever had.

while there are a few nonsensical chud criticisms of the franchise in the last decade (V getting bombed before release because customised woman skin existed), the consistent elimination of game mechanics specifically on the tactical/team management side to try and chase the COD/Fortnite moneybag through simplification and monetisation left everyone eventually realising that the only thing moderately 'battlefield' about 2042 was conquest being a mode and vehicles being usable. but the downward spiral started years before.

everyone knows about EA enshitification, given that they've cratered almost all of their non-sports IP at this point (and even the sports fans hate the games but keep buying that garbage), so i'm not going to write an essay on what we already know. but my boomer-ass contention is that the removal of the commander position in BF3 is like one of the core blunders for the whole franchise, the attempts to re-add it were half-baked in 4, and it subsequently killed the overarching layer of (optional) tactical teamwork that actually kept more players invested.

BC2 not having it can maybe be forgiven, as Bad Company was specifically console-focussed, still had decent squad-order mechanics and the destruction physics in Frostbite at that point were amazing. But then they nerfed the destruction, the commander role, the squad orders, the fucking class system, the availability of vehicles and even making the maps boring flat fields with fuck-all assets left anyone playing 2042 thinking "what are we actually doing here? what's the point?"

honestly, if BF1 wasn't the absolute marvel of sound design (and arguably graphic design & tech) or untapped setting that it was, the franchise would have died over a decade ago. the "love letter to fans" PR and overpromising for 2042 didn't help things. we've basically been watching EA and DICE uppercut themselves over and over for 15 years at this point, and no amount of begging for them to stop has worked.

it honestly makes me sad, which is so lame... but 1942, Vietnam, 2 and 2142 were just so engrossing for my formative online gaming years that i can't help it

DotA 2: Should have had random items as rewards from matches based on the hero you are playing, instead of entirely random. Also, they should have had in-game currency for their stores rather than just barter and RMT.

Disco Elysium: Thought cabinet should not cost a skill point to remove an already internalized thought.

EU4: More internal realm management/struggle.

WoW: Raising the level cap is always a mistake. Obsoleting content is always a mistake. Worst storyline imaginable.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Conflux in HoMM 3 was lame

Had to recreate this one because I refreshed instead of posting

For Undertale, I disagree with the final Chara scene at the end of No Mercy. It muddies the waters on an otherwise very-deliberate thematic overtone of the whole route (you are engaging in a gameplay strategy that is designed to be extremely tedious and grindy in a continuous slog of deliberate cruelty so banal that it’s probably for no other reason than wanting to experience everything). I’d honestly prefer that the game continued to specifically lambaste me and reinforce my culpability rather than give room for anything else.

Like, okay, let’s spitball. Chara is the only entity in the game that has enough natural determination to step in and override you. Instead of being just ‘evil child’, let’s have them be an entity that is generally non-interfering but wants to enforce 'responsibility for deliberate acts' to counteract the godlike nature of SAVE/LOAD. Maybe Chara is the intermediary who allows us to interface with SAVE/LOAD and/or Frisk, or maybe they’re just an observer of beings with high determination, or something else entirely. Instead of the consequence in Tainted Pacifist being 'evil kill bad now spooky haunted' at the very end, have Chara make a show of them seizing control in the middle of the ending sequence (at the most unresolved moment possible) and leverage the metanarrative elements of the world to inflict a depth of dissatisfaction that can only come from a game—back to title screen, save wipe. Instead of 'you experience true pacifist but game haunted oh nooo' it would be 'you can never experience true pacifist in full again. live with your choices.'

Alternatively, let’s take another option. Don't involve Chara. Don't give a true 'conclusion' in that sense. Just end with a black screen after killing Flowey that persists until you manually go into the files and unfuck the save—i.e. 'What are you still doing here? The monsters are all gone. There’s nothing left. Isn’t that what you wanted?'

Instead, it really just kinda serves to make talking about the route annoying (no Patrick, you were not possessed to do evil, you chose what buttons to press) and feels a little hackish in retrospect. 'wow evil child monster haunts the game kill everyone and you too ooh wow' is a bit of an eye-roller when tailing one of the most otherwise ludonarratively-consonant gameplay routes in an RPG, IMO.

Moving on, encounter and non-encounter area differentiation is a bit unintuitive. Pokémon solves this by having special encounter tiles, and Deltarune solves this with roaming encounters. Properly adds to the tedium of No Mercy, annoying elsewhere.

Speaking of Deltarune, you can feel the lack of a run button on replay. Rather annoying now that I’ve been spoiled with having it.

Lastly, I don’t really like Muffet’s heart mechanic. Idea is cute, but it feels like it'd give me RSI if played for a good bit.

More criticism, indie game edition

OneShot: having a hard time thinking of criticism for this one, maybe the music could have been improved in some parts but I generally like the soundtrack. I think this game's gimmick is something I'm a sucker for, but not everyone finds it appealing or engaging as I've experienced with people I've tried to share the game with.

Hyper Light Drifter: Also hard to criticize, but I am ambivalent towards the lack of dialogue or solid explanation of what is happening in the world. A lot of lore explanations stipulate that what they're saying is sort of up to interpretation because lore just happens through pictures (ignoring some of the coded sections, which I'm not fond of either). I'm still lost as to what happens to "drifters" that leads to their demise. Some of the pacing is also off in the game, namely the crystal forest/west section (I think). I'm also not a fan of the artistic direction of the sequel, but that's another game.

Katana zero: Amazing concept, but the ending is unsatisfying and leaves too much unexplained. (not sure if we're getting a sequel or not). Also makes no sense how Headhunter is killable even though she's also NULL, but you're not. Maybe I misunderstood something. Also don't really like the vehicle chase/helicopter fight level, doesn't feel like it fits with the rest of the game.

Undertale: Chara's motivations don't make sense

Signalis: YOU COULD HAVE BEEN SO FUCKING GOOD, BUT YOU JUST HAD TO BE ANTICOMMUNIST SLOP, FUCK OFF

The atmosphere and ballistics are the only things in Shadow of Chernobyl that aged even remotely well.

The canonical explanation for what the zone is and how it works is sorta dissapointing because running (incorrect) theory that the NPCs talk about is tight as hell "Oh yeah its a totally unprecidented organism brought about by people fucking with psychic energy in some secret experiments and btw it hates us and the emissions are its immune response and also the zombies and monolith dudes are basically the zone hijacking the nervous systems of other organisms to act as extensions of itself"

while the actual explanation is basically "Nah yeah after the meltdown a bunch of government scientists were like 'yo lets do some fucked up experiments in the abandoned nuclear place' and shit kinda got crazy with the genetic modification and it all went nuts after we tapped into the psychic field that surrounds the earth... so anyways we're literally just five or so dudes hanging out in tubes of goo, we got a spot open if you wanna join the goo gang... please join the goo gang"

(though i may be misremembering/misinterpreting a lot of stuff here)

Touhou player, I just suck ass at getting anywhere past stage 3/4 in every game

Rimworld encourages you to perform Eugenics on any undesirable colonists, especially with the biotech DLC. Also encourages cannibalism and harvesting your opponents organs to sell on the market for greed and profit.

Also too many quality of life mods should be in the base game.

• Ratchet and Clank 1 (PS2) has tank controls that make zero sense.
• Streets of Rogue 1's NPC AI is super easy to exploit that using items isn't necessary for most runs.
• Fallout New Vegas isn't actually that deep narrative wise, the NCR have the most quests while everyone else is underdeveloped. On closer examination a lot of it is libshit sophistry apart from chasing down the guy who shot you in the head and some companion quests.
• Hitman WOA's NPC AI is extremely exploitable while also being frustrating to babysit, some levels are a snoozefest.
• Mother 3's rhythm mechanic was annoying because I could never actually do it (probably because I was playing on a emulator with a patched fan-translated ROM)

Dwarf Fortress has a very silly difficulty curve consisting of an initial cliff followed by not that much, and all of its options just increase the size of the initial cliff.

Earthbound has some quest chains that can get stuck in really obtuse ways, particularly in Twoson and Fourside.

Crosscode's DLC has that fight where Apollo is way too damn hard all of a sudden.

UFO 50 has ~5 perfunctory games in genres that clearly nobody on the team really cared for, and it's worse for it. That's Fist Hell, Star Waspir, Caramel Caramel, Campanella 3, and Block Koala. There are worse trash fires in the collection, like Hot Foot, but those are at least bad because they tried something interesting and failed.

In Super Metroid, the entrance to Kraid's hideout is poorly telegraphed.

Mario Odyssey giving you moons for every silly little accomplishment is great, but giving the same reward for korok-tier stuff and actual challenges cheapens the reward feeling of actual challenges, and they should've done a tiered system.