Yes! I thought I was the only person who noticed that.

Spiderweb Software, a large part of my childhood is basically a one man operation. This does not make the games immune to having the flaws gently picked over.

Genforge: The UI in the early Geneforge games looks like utter butt. Garish colors, no consistency between games, not even the message display was centered. Thankfully Jeff figured this one out by the end of the series.

Exile: The spell list, probably lifted from AD&D contains many useless and redundant spells. Like location, when the game is presented from the top down with an automap. And I've never thought of using "spray barriers" or "Sticks to snakes", either.

In general: Jeff tends to make puzzles which require out of game skills and knowledge.

Avernum 4-6: These games felt like the map had been taken to a trash compactor and squished.

Low Rated for liking Diablo 2. XD

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/critique_a_game_you_love/post3

Oh yeah, nothing wrong with the rep system. :P

I can only imagine what would have happened had I praised a bad game.

Star Wars: Empire at War. A really great RTS game with really good space combat, but the land missions can be just such a slog in comparison. Every land mission feels slow and boring and not very satisfying. It's hard to explain exactly other than the units moved slowly and when they enter into combat against each other it never feels all that strategic or engaging, unlike the space missions. Playing the Galactic Conquest mode means you can kinda skip the land missions, thankfully. The game is actually available here on GOG, and it comes with the Forces of Corruption expansion, which adds a lot of fun stuff to it, so if you like Star Wars and RTS games, I recommend it, even with the lame land missions.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Final Cut: Despite allowing you to respec everything about individual characters, the developers somehow thought it was a good idea to not allow respeccing of Glory, the game's endgame progression system. For those not familiar with the game, after level 100 your experience goes towards Glory, which allows you to spend points on various bonuses. Not only can you not respec it, but to make things even worse it affects all of your characters universally with no way to use the points differently for different characters. It's completely stupid, and I cannot understand how a developer actually willing to include full respeccing in their game could mess this up. So close, Neocore. So close.

Shadow Warrior 2: While the Orbs of Masamune are a neat addition to the game, everything you do with them is ridiculously expensive. I can't imagine ever fully upgrading one stat of one weapon, let alone fully upgrading all stats on all weapons. Other criticisms are that the sorting of gems still needs work (you can only filter one effect at a time, and some effects can't be filtered properly at all) and that the Christmas content being removed after the holidays was a poor way to handle it. Instead, it should have been tied to system time like Halloween and Holiday content in Terraria is.

Stardew Valley.
The dev used to have butchery in the alpha version, then decided against it for a more idyllic feel. So rabbits drop wool and rabbits' feet (???), and pigs dig up truffles.
And then... the recent patch introduced, among other things, a way to undo one's marriage. Divorce by itself isn't bad (except the ex is permanently pissed at the player character, so, wut?) Then there's a way to wipe the ex's memory (so they could be befriended, romanced and potentially married again) - that's messed up. And you can also get rid of children. By, uh, turning them into doves, which is effectively murder. Holy fucking what.

RAGE

It's a Borderlands/Mad Max kind of game, set up in the wasteland of the future; first person shooter from creators of Doom and yeah, you get ride awesome buggies. I love the game. This, however, makes me sad about it:

- Since free-roaming with a buggy most definitely is not enough, developers created races. They are awesome. You race, win certificates, upgrade your buggies for them. All is good until you meet a cocky guy, who you can't avoid. You are forced to race him. All is fine and you actually want to make him eat dirt behind you on track. But the few races with this guy are like an absurd joke - you can beat the guy blindfolded. Races with this rival should have been made hardest/most difficult, maybe even to an extreme. Opposite happened.

- Free-roaming in the world is possible. But... Imagine it like this: you got a map with checkpoints (cities, stations, etc.) scattered around, where action happens; in between the checkpoints - roads. On the roads - bandits with their buggies. Ever tried to stand in front of a shooting armored buggy, to blow it up with your guns? Possible if you got a rocket launcher and you are hiding behind a rock. Otherwise - you are meat. Lack of any kind of exploration areas and enemies only in cars or towers makes walking in between the checkpoints very unsafe, very long, very uninteresting, very pointless. Sure, you get used to driving buggy and it's fun, but... That's about the only option you are given.

- Final boss is oooh, soo... There is no boss. Game ending sucks. You play, you acquire awesome weapons, build yourself cool gadgets, you get final mission. Before the mission everybody warns you to prepare, you expect something fantastic. After all, you have been preparing for that all your game. It's final. And? You are introduced to a slightly altered new kind of enemy that you can meet only in this mission. Other enemies are nothing new and you can handle them like nothing. No boss. You just fight through as if you were doing groceries in the shop, press the button, congratulations - you won. Game leaves the player confused, unsatisfied, angry and with a sense of no justice left in this world. Solution? Completely re-done/overdone last mission with something epic. DLC "Scorchers" is a good example of what should have been in the main game.

- More. More! MORE! Of everything. Game is too short. It has all the good and right little details, events, expressions, whatnot. But there is too little of everything. I guess, at that time creators didn't expect much, I don't blame them. But more would be better. One solution... Could be more random events, like bandits attacking settlements? Enforcers attacking settlements? Sewers filling up with mutants again and again? That crazy mutant game made extremely difficult with ability to replay it again and again? More lively dialogs with some sort of infinite repeatable quests. As in, something to do after the game to keep you happy enough to explore and use to let you actually use those latest most powerful guns that you got.


To sum it up: what was supposed to coolest races ever, turned out to be utter, flumsy, flimsy joke. Huge potential, lack of stuff.

No problem, although I prefer for the game to stay anonymous. I hope I'll be tough enough.

Critique to a game I loved.

I loved you and I spent countless hours, even days with you. You satisfied me. I felt complete. I know it was just a dream, an illusion and a cheap one too. You were just a game. Even a simple game at that. But I was infatuated with you, I wanted to be with you all the time and truth be told, I wanted to beat you. And you, you let me beat you, although only every so often. I played with you. Ha! You played with me. You made me happy or cry in despair at your will. You had your flaws, you were far from perfect (sometimes you were difficult to handle and your looks weren't that great to be fully honest) but then, I'm far from perfect too. So I guess that is okay.

So here is my critique: I loved you but you never loved me in return. You were just a game in the end. You would please anyone. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind about that. I just realized, you stole my life. In the end, you didn't have what I was looking for. I don't blame you at all, I blame myself for not realizing it. But now I don't love you anymore. I look at you with mild interest. I can even laugh again and turn away and devote myself to other, more deserving, things.

Okay, weird thing just happened in Persona 5.

One of my player character's friends sent an invitation to go to the movies with them. Doing that increases affinity with that character and gives you some stat buffs. These movies you can make your character watch usually have silly sounding names, like "The Cake Knight Rises" and are just a little joke. However, the movie they went to see was described as: "a yakuza movie called 'Like a Dragon' by that famous director". Here's the thing. I'm pretty sure watched this movie. For real.

The Yakuza series of games is named Ryū ga Gotoku in Japan, which sort of translates to "Like a Dragon". That is a series made by Sega, who purchased Atlus a few years back. Also, the first game in that series was adapted into a movie by a big shot japanese director called Takeshi Miike. I watched that movie. It is literally the movie I hate the most in the entire world. It's not the worst movie ever. I don't deny it is technically competent, but good God how I hate it. It's 90min long but it must have taken me 3 hours to finish because I had to keep taking breaks to pace around the house and cool off.

The movie starts in media res, but never bothers to go back and explain who the characters are, their motivations, or how they relate to each other. The only reason I understood anything at all is because I was drawing from my memories playing the game years before. The blame for this is not its short running time, because even though they didn't tell a fully fleshed out story in the movie, they still found appropriate to have half of the movie be comprised of the most pointless subplots ever known to man. While they were destroying the game's story with one hand, they decided to translate the most literal aspects of the gameplay with the other, like having the main character get beat up for an entire fight, then drink a restorative item to refill his hp and make him glow like he's ready to use his super move. Miike just didn't understand what it meant to adapt a game like that. I've heard good things about his Phoenix Wright adaptation he made since then, but after that movie I vowed to never watch any of his movies ever again.

Apparently the characters in the game loved the movie though.

Well, their opinion is wrong. Total disconnect with the characters. 0/10 Worst game ever.

Alpha protocol:

It sucks. Levels reload Wong - sometimes forgetting to load enemies. The DRM was horrid and stopped purchased games from working. It's a broken mess.



... But man is it a great game!