HAY GUYS

Solis · Local time: May 30, 2006, 08:56 AM

Unfortunately, my obsession with getting cheap games sometimes backfires on me. While I sometimes end up getting games that I absolutely love and are more than worth what I paid for them (Phantom Dust, Breakdown, Monster Hunter, Shadow Hearts Covenant), I also end up getting stuck with quite a few duds. Most notably:

Commandos 2 (PC) - Saw it was on sale at Best Buy for $20 a number of years ago right after it came out, and the concept sounded interesting and it got quite a bit of praise...after playing it for 30 minutes, I realized it was not a game for me in any way, shape, or form. I don't think I really got any enjoyment out of it, except for seeing the trees blowing in the wind in the title screen.

Star Fox Assault - Ugh, I'm sorry, but this one just sucks. The first mission was fairly fun (not as good as the earlier Star Fox game's shooting missions, but not bad), but then the rest of the game is just terrible. The ground combat is just poor, level design is atrocious, controls are frustrating no matter which control method you use, and the rail shooting sections were far inferior to those in games like Panzer Dragoon Orta. $15 down the drain, but I have to say that the soundtrack was excellent and would've been well worth the price had it been released as a music CD. Instead, it was wasted on a terrible game.

Metroid Prime Pinball: WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I SAVE?!? It wasn't really a bad game, as I did have a bit of fun with it, and it did have the rumble pack which was kinda cool, but omg, why in the world would they make an "objective-based" pinball game where there is no way to save your game? The biggest problem is that most of the deaths are going to be due to random chance: maybe your ball slipped right between the pedals or your ball got cornered and an enemy took away half your health. This, combined with the fact that the game has objectives AND no saving system is just a recipe for disaster. I can handle games that force you to play through it in one sitting, just...not ones where your success is measured by random chance. Plus, I was informed that Pokemon Pinball lets you save at ANY point...so why not Metroid Pinball? But as I said, I did get a DS rumble cart with it, so at least my $15 wasn't a total waste.

But anyway, I'm pretty sure I have a ton more games like this, these were just the most prominant ones I could think of right now. Thankfully, my list of games that I've gotten for extremely cheap and ended up enjoying is longer than me "games I never should've bought at any price" list.

How ya doing, buddy?

Solis · Local time: May 30, 2006, 12:14 PM

Originally Posted by Grubdog

You want to save in the middle of a score based game? That seems pretty silly to me. Just close your DS, sleep mode can last days. Plus, if you don't want to be playing for half an hour or so just don't do the multi mission mode.

Oh the problem isn't that you can't pause in the middle of a game, it's that you have to go through the whole random collecting artifact thing every time you play it. It's just annoying as all hell having to go through the task of collecting the artifacts over and over again, even if you get as far as the last boss and then lose because of random luck. Checkpoints or savepoints would've made the process flow much more smoothly. If it weren't for the fact that you can lose so easily because of bad luck (even after collecting every single artifact), the lack of save points wouldn't have been so bad.

I still don't understand why they decided to turn an adventure game into a pinball game. There's a hell of a lot of better ways to make a pinball game than "hey, lets stick a bunch of vaguely familiar elements into a game about hitting a ball with paddles and slap a name on it". Adventure games where you can save are fine. Pinball games are fine. Adventure pinball games where you can't save are not fine.

How ya doing, buddy?