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[Classic]

Access to my Wii's information is only slightly disconcerting, but only because I can't conceive of a game where my credit card numbers would be relevant. I'm not sure how much of my privacy they can invade without some clever (and illegal?) network-working.

SecuROM sounds like the sort of douchebaggery that I wish Sony had gotten punished for on the PSP.

turning on the TV and seeing ads for Maxi pads.

That's the best part, because it reminds me not to watch TV anymore.

[Brentai]

Access to my Wii's information is only slightly disconcerting, but only because I can't conceive of a game where my credit card numbers would be relevant.

Have you ever purchased from Wii Shop before?

[McDohl]

Avoidable by purchasing Wii Point cards from a third party.

[Kazz]

The only thing wrong with Nintendo Channel is that the icon doesn't have Wario leering out of it like Big Brother, watching your every move.

[Thad]

[Rico]

Not quite game design, but I am getting sick and tired of bad mechanisms for downloading games.  My current gripe is the Age of Conan beta client downloader, which is some sort of god-fucking-awful P2P system which doesn't tell you it's P2P at all, has no bandwidth controls at all, and occasionally will happily saturate your upstream so much that it limits your downstream doing so.

If you're going to specifically code a download client, why the fuck would you make it so terrible?  Even Blizzard's WoW downloader looks like a gem compared to this.

Even Steam is kind of ridiculously low-featured.  Where's the queue system, people?

T Dimoxtines:
At least with everything but CPU you can put it all in your case, plug everything in, and then drop and go.  Everything but case is much more hilarious.

[Niku]

metal gear online is probably the first console game i have ever seen that requires P2P patching (and i say requires because my direct download simply DID NOT START).  i for one hate our cold and peer-requiring future.

[Kazz]

I'm imagining a scenario in which a game enjoys early popularity, gets patched a few times, and then falls into obscurity.  Following a budget-title re-release, there's a new influx of consumers, but as none of them have the patches, and the original players are long gone, their copies remain eternally outdated, perhaps even crippled by bugs.



AND THEN

[Thad]

At least with everything but CPU you can put it all in your case, plug everything in, and then drop and go.

Depends.  Does AMD still use those godawful hook things that you have to lever onto the pegs with a screwdriver?  Because if I were dealing with one of those, I would absolutely wait for the processor and seat it while the mobo was still outside the case.

[Brentai]

Forcing the player to endure several levels of getting his or her ass kicked before finally unlocking an ability that's pretty central to the gameplay and honestly should have been available from the start.

Square seems to be loving this sort of thing lately.  Crisis Core doesn't let you fully use materia fusion - the real growth system of the game - until 2/5 of the way in, meaning that you end up grievously underpowered on Hard Mode (to the point that bosses will happily one-shot you) and then suddenly can overpower and crush everything after getting the Item Fusion Tome.

WysiEWYg seems to be even worse, locking you out of so much shit in the beginning that you can't even tell what your partner is for, besides draining all your HP, until you finally get to the fusing tutorial and even after that you can't use half her crap yet, so you set her to Auto and hope for the best.

This has been going on for a while, really.  How long did it take you guys to get your first limit break trance overdrive whatever the fuck it is in FFXII?

I understand the need to ease players into complicated systems (especially with DR.WEWY, in which I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the whole Army of Two battle system thingy) but when the game expects you to be able to jump, and you haven't gotten that power yet*, it tends to lead to suffering.


* No, seriously, you have to earn the jump button in tWEwY.

[Zaratustra]

The player has to SWEAT to earn the fun gimmick of the game!

[Friday]

Zelda 23: You Get The Sword As The Dungeon Item in Ganon's Tower

[François]

...I could see this being awesome actually.

[Niku]

The worst thing about TWEWY isn't that you have to unlock the ability for your partner to jump

It's that when you get a new partner, they are busted down to BROKEN ASS BITCH WITHOUT THE ABILITY TO JUMP AND ALSO NO DEFENSE OR ATTACK UPS ENJOY YOUR SUDDEN SPIKE IN DIFFICULTY just when you've gotten used to your partner being pretty badass.

i don't wanna turn it off of haaaaaaaard fuck you square

[Brentai]

I haven't even gotten that far yet.  Something to, uh, look forward to I guess.

[Niku]

it happens at least twice 

[Brentai]

Just to be perfectly clear, this is not something that's entirely Square's fault.  Even god-damn Portal is guilty of keeping the main gimmick away from you for way too long (it's not really that long, objectively, but it's a good chunk of the entire two hours you get with the main game).

Yeah, you heard me.  Portal has a flaw.  Wrap your brains around that, entire game-criticism industry.

[Saturn]

TWEWY pulls a LOL THIS ITEM IS ACTUALLY INCREDIBLY FUCKY TO GET IF YOU ARE DUMB ENOUGH TO RUN OUT OF THEM, BUT WE DONT MENTION THAT UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE

Scarletites are REQUIRED to get all the pin slots/ultimate difficulty/ability to eat more than 24 bytes a day/more fucking defense or attack stickers/lots of other crap.
BUT IF YOU NEED MORE YOU HAVE TO GRIND REALLY FUCKING HARD TO KILL ENEMIES ON ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY (even with my level dropped by 30 the drop rate on said drops you need to trade in for scarletite is like 1.05% (you need like 3~ of said drop per scarletite and the things you trade scarletite for almost always want 2 scarletites) and then you still have to have bought enough crap at a certain EXPENSIVE store for the quest item to even be available

not to mention that if you mistakenly spent all the crap you get before newgame+ on the wrong things you are fucked out of 100% completion

[Friday]

Just to be perfectly clear, this is not something that's entirely Square's fault.  Even god-damn Portal is guilty of keeping the main gimmick away from you for way too long (it's not really that long, objectively, but it's a good chunk of the entire two hours you get with the main game).

Yeah, you heard me.  Portal has a flaw.  Wrap your brains around that, entire game-criticism industry.

Keeping the gimmick of the game out of the player's hands is not automatically a flaw.

I've played Portal like everyone else and it didn't bug me that I had to earn it.

Jedi Knight 2 made me jump through incredible hoops and play through 6 levels of the worst fucking FPS shooter ever made and THEN go through the stupid Jedi powers tutorial before I got to be a Jedi with a plasma stick.

Kingdom Hearts 2 made me shit on myself and then eat the shit that was mixed in with Roxas's shit and then kill several puppies before I got to have fun.

Portal made me... shit, I don't even remember. Run through a few rooms. If I can't remember being annoyed, then it wasn't annoying. Granted, if I played the game again I'd probably want to skip right to the full shebang, but yeah. I wasn't NOT having fun, and that's really what counts.

Also, Portal is more like 3-5 hours, and you don't have the entire gun for maybe 30-45 minutes. At most. I remember getting it in maybe 15.

Unless you take fucking forever to figure out the initial rooms and then blaze through the rest of the game, I guess.

[Kazz]

I went through Portal in 3 hours.

I consider that a flaw.

HOW CAN YOU MAKE THE COOLEST GAME EVER LAST THREE FUCKING HOURS