Neverwinter Nights has three quickslot bars with 12 slots each, which might seem like a lot, but in reality it's not nearly enough for high level characters, especially spellcasters and characters with a lot of magic items. Who wants to go through all the roundabout radial submenus for casting a single spell every time? The game could have done with a fourth quickbar at the very least, and/or a quickspell menu like NWN2 has (thankfully there is a mod for the EE now, but still, integration into the main game would have been better).

I'm playing LAD right now. (Never played a Yakuza before) and loving it. Only issue: too many mini-games. But most can be ignored from what I can tell.

Screenshakes are a fun effect, but they shouldn't be used in active gameplay situations. An Untitled Story takes it to a logical conclusion, having an entire puzzle platforming section take place while swaying the entire play field. It'd be quite terrible if the character didn't have access to jump corrections.
...You know, there's a part of me that even wonders the point of character unlocks at times.

Well, SaGa 2 is an RPG, with random encounters and turn-based combat, and since the screen shaking effect doesn't actually occur during battles, it doesn't interfere with the gameplay for those who can tolerate it. The problem, however, is that the screen shaking effect continues for the rest of the game, rather than just being used sparingly (as such effects really should be), and as a result it's just a bit much, particularly if one still needs to fight enemies to boost human/esper stats, or if the player is hunting Haniwa for the elusive Seven Sword. (Haniwa is a rare enemy, only encountered on the very last level of the game, the level where the final boss is.)

(The SaGa 2 remake uses visible enemies that move in real time, making non-combat exploration an active gameplay situation, whereas it isn't in the original. Then again, the remake is the version that *doesn't* have this issue.)


Speaking of screen shaking, Celeste Classic shakes the screen whenever you dash, which is quite annoying. Celeste also does that, but shortly after release someone asked the developers to add a setting to disable the screen shake, and they actually did that, so that's no longer a serious issue.

Sometimes, even adding just *one* option to the game's configuration menu can make the game so much more playable for some players.

(Celeste also has an option to reduce the amount of flashing, as well as a nice assist mode.)

To each their own, I suppose, I love those minigames.

Sometimes minigames are ok, but in games like Horizon 2 they just are completely out of place. If I want to play puzzle games or board games, I buy puzzle games and board games. In HZD2 however you get combat skill points by playing a board game. You can't fill your skill tree to 100% if you don't play that board game.

In AC Valhalla there is a dice game, that "people loved so much that we had to create a real life verion of it" ... Sure.
But then again this is the one community task (all players together must win x dice games in one week) that hardly ever gets completed. Everything else is done after 3 days, but no one wants to play that dice game.
And who would ever play that domino game in Far Cry?

Immagine you buy a puzzle games and one level requires you to finish a first person shooter section ...

Luckily I read about that when I started playing the game.

On the other hand, then there are some of those passive (furry?) creatures in JK as well, which are not fighting you (at least in e.g. levels 9 and 10 and thereabouts).

I first thought I should avoid killing them as well, but many times they were located in places where it was either very hard to fight your enemies without killing them, or .e.g. blowing up some canisters to reach a secret would mean some of those creatures would die too.

But then I recently learned from some JK youtube video that apparently those passive creatures don't count as civilians. You can kill them freely without affecting your light/dark path. I still try to avoid killing them, but at least I don't have to actively fret about them.

This is more in general as many games share these "annoyances";

- Unskippable cut-scenes and unchangeable controls. Nothing is more clear than a developer telling you you can't make your own choices... and does what we have to endure by Microsoft already. Same goes for timed attacks and motion blur et cet. you can't disable.

- Empty / dumbed down / censored sequels, remasters and "remakes". The Witcher 1 also is more than likely going to be more concerned about what is culturally popular these days, creating puerile characters, and removing any older and wiser characters, rather than focusing on quality and treating the gamers as an adult. Didn't the writers already destroy the Netflix series by pissing on both of the source materials that was already highly popular?

That written - I'll happily eat my own words if it doesn't, but the wording from CDP doesn't make me hopeful.

Examples; Plenty, just look at "Phonywood" as they feed off of each other like vampires.

- Perverse loot-mechanism. Filling up memory, computing power and screen space with utterly nonsense just to make it seem like the game has more of something with little to nothing special you can invest in. It's like filling your stomach with white bread (vs whole-grain) and leaves you empty and hollow after a moment or two. Animals, like us, needs proper building blocks to grow; proteins and fat!

- Endless (and forced) puzzles and backtracking. Especially in action/walking games just to cover up the abysmal length it would have had if it wasn't for all of that.

- Prolonged battles. Tactics is one thing, but to buff an enemy to insane heights and/or needlessly make the combat slow to (yet again) drag the game out more than it really have to.

- Unfinished games. Nothing is more detrimental to the joy of playing a game when you get hooked like a worm and suddenly realize after some time; "is this all there is?" This is one of the reasons I skip unfinished games because I usually end up with a hole that can not be filled because, yes, it's not finished. And that also tends to ruin future gaming sessions even if the games really does get finished. Or rather, I try my best to not spoil myself too much but it isn't easy. :D

Though, there are huge differences depending on where the developers are in the process of course and the kind of game; a game like Satisfactory (even very very early on when it came on Epic) and EverSpace can be viewed as an already finished game by any measurement and can essentially be "endless", also Cultic, however, not Space Haven and TasteMaker.

Even Selaco, InfraSpace and Railgrade feels more like a complete game than Space Haven, even after all those years.

About Jedi Knight... Are there any tips to the lightsaber boss fights?

I was ready to abandon the game due to the first boss sword fight, was it level 7 or 8? I just couldn't figure out how exactly I was supposed to fight him. If I just tried to move around him hitting with the sword, he would quite soon hit me more and I'd lose. The manual mentioned you should change to 3rd person view for the sword fights, which I did, but even that didn't seem to help my sword fighting much, if any. It increased my spatial awareness a bit, I guess.

After countless of tries, the only "tactic" that partly seemed to work was that I was just running like crazy around the level at full speed (so that he would not reach me), and then occasionally run past him waving my sword, hoping I hit him at least once while passing him.

Rinse and repeat, and finally I managed to beat him before he had managed to hit me to death. I felt it was more about luck than skill, and it felt and looked kinda stupid how I was just running around the level in all directions, waving my lightsaber like crazy. Not very jedi-like, at all.

I keep hearing this game implemented the light sword fights the best of all Star Wars games, and I am starting to think I am just missing something. I didn't find anything in the manual about how to block sword strikes or anything...

Heck, I feel even e.g. Ultima Underworld and System Shock sword/melee fight made more sense in its simplicity, ie. you keep distance, step forward and hit the enemy with the sword, then instantly step back so that enemy can't hit you, etc. At least that simple tactic didn't seem to work in JK.

Note that I am playing JK at the hardest difficulty level, which isn't a problem otherwise, but maybe it is for these sword fights. I saw some Youtube video of someone playing that sword fight in normal difficulty, and he made it feel very easy, he just hit the enemy twice with the sword and the boss was defeated.

Not really, Evading and timing are the whole thing.
Note that you can control the direction in which you hit. For example you can strafe to the right and execute a single blow and the swort will go to the right. This way you can try to run past the enemy and hold for a second to hit him sideways.

And do yourself a favor. Don't pay with mouse. Use keyboard only, that gives you much more control.

Dark Forces was made for keyboard and so was Jedi Knight. While both games support mouse controls as well, there is just too much to do for one hand and the mouse controls in DF just don't feel right anyway. Once you get a feeling how the auto aim works, you'll be fine. In DF I would use the number block, in Jedi Knight I used the arrow keys + the pad above them for some of the force powers. The left hand handles attacks, kneeling/jumping, force jump, weapon select and items/interaction.
Also know that attacking head and feed or from the side has a higher chance to succeed than attacking front on.

The sword fight in Jedi Outcast is much faster, more intuitive and designed for mouse use, but in JK you have more control. It's definitly not easy, but possible to learn.

Sounds about right. I think I experimented after my first failure, see if the dark/light bar went down when I killed some.
I did love that game. I even wrote a complete german translation for others (it's long gone by now, hardware crash, but maybe one can still find it on some pages).
It was also the reason why I bought my first Voodoo, after I saw the demo on a friends PC with Voodoo compared to my own PC with S3 Virge. And it also convinced me to try Windows gaming rather than playing everything on DOS.

This sounds like a different list. Do you have GAMES YOU LOVE that employ these? Examples if you do. Or, these are generally things the stop a game from becoming a beloved game for you?

The game is indeed marked as not finished.

Not at all. I don't know about you, but I don't waste time on games I really don't like/love.


People interpret what they want I guess... Read the last line again.

Yeah the integration of minigames and side content into actually game progression can really affect my attitude toward a game. It really depends on what I think of the game and what they affect in the actual game. I enjoyed almost all of the minigames in Watch Dogs, for instance, so I got all the upgrade rewards really early.

Minigames can also create accessibility barriers. Specifically, it's easy to create a minigame that has an accessibility issue that the main game does not, and that can result in the player not being able to play any part of the game that's gated by that minigame, at least not without help from someone (or some cheat) to get past the minigame.