If I’m being honest, I probably do to. There’s definitely some games that I’ve had a very simple bad time with. But what’s important is what I aspire to.
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I honestly think I can convince myself to like most things, and this tendency has only gotten stronger since I joined the forum. Whenever I level with myself about the fact that I don’t like something, I’m more disappointed than anything.
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I also think it’s important to definitively not like things and define your taste — if you like everything you don’t like anything, as it were. I’m sure you feel that way too, especially if you take extreme examples like AI slop games.
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Clover rules and it’s part of the reason I think Platinum’s output is so mediocre. I guess it’s not unanimous (@samderboo) but God Hand kicks ass, Viewtiful is fun and Okami is breathtaking.
Okami is about twice as long as it needs to be, but still more enjoyable than any platinum game I’ve ever played. That included MGR:R. To be honest, I think that game is platinum at it’s most platinum when it comes to how they handle action games, and I really think their action games feel really bad.
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liking stuff is cooler than hating stuff
that being said, you can’t like everything
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I think too often critique is taken as hate (not that that’s what being said here) and creates a need to avoid criticism in order to avoid blowback. I blame Gamers™️
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Evergreen quote. Just default to this and everything makes more sense.
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Yeah good points, there is definitely a limit to it. A better way to put it is that I’ve observed that I’m willing to cut massive amounts of slack to things that honestly might not deserve it. I do think this hinders my ability to take a step back and come to terms with something being crap. On the other hand, being patient with stuff you initially bounce off of has payed off immensely.
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This is the first thing said in here that actually hit me hard.
And yes, liking is better than hating, but it’s harder, ok. I’m a goblin and my goblin brain defaults to the negative.
Also, I have incredible taste, so all the things i love everyone loves, so they aren’t hot takes. No I won’t reflect on that statement.
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Like, if I play a game and find myself bored or not liking it or whatever, I’m much more willing to set it aside and wait a while before playing it again, or just take a break from gaming altogether, than putting it away “forever”. I do sometimes wish I weren’t like this lol.
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I have similar thoughts on fighting games.
There are a handful I like, but I mostly like to play them alone.
Maybe a little similar, I think the options to turn off items and events and the like in smash bros are bad.
They are what makes the game fun.
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The best solution I’ve seen for this is to treat a fighting game like badminton at a backyard cookout. You set up a Virtua Fighter 5 instance in a corner of a party and two moderately interested people go poke around in it for a while. You don’t track wins, you just putz around with your opponent for a while as you wait for the corn to be grilled.
Most people don’t feel inspired to get really good at badminton after they play it at a barbecue, and most people could probably enjoy engaging in a fighting game in the same way. This is basically how arcade fighters got popular in the first place and feels like a very normal, and rarely discussed, way to engage with the genre.
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Ecco the Dolphin has great vibes, and great sprites, and great music, and lord I cannot stand playing it. Absolutely everything about the level design feels antithetical to what the movement mechanics are trying to accomplish. I have never failed to like a game as many times as Ecco. Someday I’ll probably fail again.
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I’ll echo what other people have said in here:
You need a group or community for fighting games to be good. You don’t have to be good at fighting games to have fun, you just need competitive matches. Unfortunately, ranked (or even casual) matches in modern fighting games are only welcoming to newcomers at the launch of the title. After 6 months to a year, low ranks are a bizarre place that is full bad match opportunities and smurfs.
If you have two people that are looking to get better at the game and are at a similar level, they’ll have a great time.
But it’s really hard to find a person interested in the same game as you with the free time available when you’re available to sit down and play a couple hours a week when you’re an adult.
Unless you got your foothold in the scene when you were a teenager or in college, it’s really hard to get into the genre
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The Witness is a masterpiece. Full Stop
Final Fantasy is Boring
Dragon Quest is Boring
Games are all bad
Games are all good
Open World gaming was a mistake. Maybe 5 games have Open worlds worth exploring
Collecting things in a game is not rewarding. (I still do it)
2D Zelda is easily > 3D Zelda
2D Metroid is > pretty much everything else
Vibes are more important than gameplay 9/10 times
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I’m not really into fighting games. That said KOF is cool because you get lots of cool characters and if you want to practice or try out one you can keep a main as a backup
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this is somewhat of a modern mainstream opinion now.
the sprites/animation lead to the platforming feeling quite ‘loose’, especially if you are used to the modern ‘hard/kaizo’ genre of platformer like celeste, vvvvvv, super meat boy, etc.
I do think DKC2 has some inventive level design if you can get past the kind of tedious first world, but the ‘blindly jump into gaps/stumble into walls’ to 100% the game has really not aged well.
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i think with your analogy, the issue today is that no one is going to the barbecue except badminton freaks who watch badminton online, discuss players, and angrily post on reddit about shuttlecock brands. it’s pretty tough to wade into those waters.
contrast this to the arcades/game centers, and yes, at one point it was very normal to just stumble into one of these games with very little intention. there was no hours long downloads and the price was 100¥ and 5 minutes of your time while you were walking home from school / waiting for a friend to show up. everyone was bad and even if you had a printout of some gamefaqs guide even that was likely to be filled with half-true information and inscrutable diagrams. no one was playing ‘footsies’ and everyone was just trying to make the special moves come out reliably.
all games sort of function with a shared vocabulary, but ftg seem to rely a bit more on years of experience and being ‘fluent.’ you can look at a game like divekick, and even though it’s mechanically very simple, the ftg community people will always dominate the casuals.
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Yeah, whether real or imagined, it feels like they don’t make fighting games for people who just want to hang out and have a few matches. Like, I have friends that will load up a fighting game and just play training mode for the whole session. Training mode for hours and hours. That’s not a way I can have fun.
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well, there is one very big one made specifically for this reason
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