VideoGame_Discussion

So I also decided to participate in this farce... and my Satan wrecked me.

They sent me books: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and I am the Girl with the Nah Mate), and Inheritance (way to go Satan, sending me the last book in a series that I might actually read).

Then they sent me a rather nice wooden box with games in it:

1st: Spice World an indecipherable Wannabe of DDR that definitely did not Spice Up My Life. IT STINKS
2nd: Smurf Racer not terrible, but the sound clips and slippery controls got on my nerves.
3rd: Sesame Street Sports This was actually the best of the lot. Again, the sound clips were annoying but points for creativity for having a variety of events and Ernie's Bathtub Boat.
4th: Deal or No Deal 2011 Special Edition Craptacular The nicest thing I can say about this is that I now have a replacement DS case.
5th: The Dukes of Hazzard: The Return of the General Lee Rated E for Ex-Boyfriend. This is exactly the kind of gun-oil-and-armpit-scented macho bullcrap I thought I got away from many years ago. I have to wash my brain out now, you jerk. Thanks for the (bad) memories.

Crapfully yours,
sailorneorune feat. Valtteri Bottas

I got this package weeks back from a certain @citizen_zane It had very interesting artwork on the side, so I knew it had to be my gift from Satan!

Opening the box, I was greeted to a Brain Age 2 tote bag. Jokes on Satan, I love crap like this!

Inside of the tote bag revealed what looked to be some weird as hell Famicom game.

Jokes on me, turns out to be a bunch of seeds. Those were immediately eaten disposed of. Cudos for including the manual. I'm a packrat and will likely save the box to torture another unsuspecting soul.

Underneath the seeds?? Oh no, a Sega CD game. But I don't own a Sega CD!

@citizen_zane was kind enough to include a selfie with my package!

The cling wrap was a pain :P

Fool me once, shame on you! I knew as soon as I saw it, that it was another ruse.

Now this... this shocked me. This was LITERALLY the game I was considering buying for him but ultimately went a different route. I figured Spyro being bad is a bigger blow, since it's a good franchise. This... looks awful. You know what to expect right away.

This is hilarious that I ended up with it. I'll update when I am able to play.

Since Satan and I's top picks were same... does that make us equals?

Frank wrote:

The only way to find out is a tetris + urban champion match

sailorneorune wrote:

After sailorneorune played this one I tried it with a goal to get either the $1 million case or the $0.01 case. With 26 cases, then i should have a 1 in 13 chance of getting one of those two if the RNG is fair

So far, no luck. I'm still well within the margin of error, but i also suspect it's probably not the truest RNG out there. Given the somewhat shoddy touch controls in the game, I don't think QA was the highest priority here, and they probably also slapped in the quickest rng generator they could find or make.

@Frank - I was heavily considering getting you what you got me, but had to get Charlie's Angels because of how ridiculous it truly is. Even though the game that you blessed me with will take me three times longer to beat, your punishment is almost ten times worse than mine, so I believe I win this round!

BTW, I did play Charlie's Angels for a little while and have just started playing the superb Spyro game. So far, I'm not impressed, but it beats the hell out of Charlie's Angels!

I won't really be able to put some time into playing this until Wednesday, so I give my thoughts on it after I have done so.

citizen_zane wrote:


I disagree. At the end of the day, Charlie's Angels won't ruin anything for me. Your game has real potential to ruin the entire franchise for you.

sailorneorune wrote:
Bows
The Satan Sommelier thanks you for your patronage. Come again next year!

PTSD FTW

@Gypsy @ryanflucas @Heavyd814life

If your games weren't so bad they sent you to your Graves, please share your feelings on them!

benstylus wrote:

Objection.

Sorry about that @benstylus I've been way too busy.

That said I did fire up the game. Battlemage on PS1. I will say it is truly awful. I struggled at first to even figure out how to start the damn game because it wasn't very intuitive. The initial menus make sense it's after I went in to try and start a campaign that I had issues. Almost had to look it up.

In general this game would be more playable on PC. It wouldn't be good there either but holy hell the console controls are bad. The game makes no damn sense though...it's...an rts???

An actual good version of some of the concept here ended up being made when Shandalar happened. That game is actually fun. This game is...horrible. I ended up playing some Shandalar after lol.

@sailorneorune
One of the little snippets on the TV channel (I think?) was the line “What does Nelson Mandela think of the Spice Girls?”

I just burst out laughing, lol. Didn’t find out what was said there though…I just moved on.

@benstylus
Does that make me the most evil Satan this year? The fact that someone got PTSD?

Sorry, Gypsy. I was your Satan :).

Gypsy wrote:

I got a game called Agony for the PS4. I gave up after about an hour. Awful, awful game. It may be the ugliest game I've ever played and I'm not even being hyperbolic. It's also needlessly graphic. Like some of the imagery is disturbingly explicit. I guess that must have been the selling point. The survival horror genre is one of my favs and I've put up with plenty of mediocre and even bad games, but this is something truly special. Only played it for about an hour and it crashed on me 3 times. The gameplay is buggy and glitchy and there are stealth sections that either don't work or I was too stupid to figure them out. The game makes you hold your breath so enemies don't detect you. You hold your breath and they still detect you. Add to that the terrible level design, unintuitive controls, bad voice acting, and environments that all look the same because it was just a copy/paste job. Honestly just a bad time.

The only thing it has going for it I guess is that it's conceptually a pretty interesting take on Hell. But the execution is so poor and I don't know if I've done justice to just how poor it is. It's all shock and zero substance. I went and looked through some reviews on Steam and Metacritic. Anyone who gave this a positive review was paid off or something. It's honestly that bad.

The game has a PS4 Metacritic of 37 and that's too high. Nice work, Satan. I'm actually worked up about this lol. I was going to make some playful puns but this game doesn't deserve it. It belongs in the trash which is exactly where it is going.

Bleed_DukeBlue wrote:

Well done. This is the worst thing related to MTG that I've ever experienced lol.

Heavyd814life wrote:

I knew I had to pick something truly horrific for you. Muahahaha.

benstylus wrote:

Hey, Ohio isn't so bad after some changes passed in the fall. Almost became one of the worst states in the country though had things gone the other way.

Heavyd814life wrote:

Or maybe it is a perfect representation because of the poor execution.

I’m still waiting for my victim to post. I put a fair bit of work into mine, and the game choice will make @benstylus shudder.

SupremeSarna wrote:
It's not bad...liken it to the GB LoZ games and you'll have an idea of what it's going for. Not my speed, but not terrible.

I'm playing my Flatout 3 now, so far its crashed on me 4 times just booting it up and finally got it running. I hate racing games.... and i think i hate them even more now so mission accomplished.

SupremeSarna wrote:

I'm intrigued.

Hoo boy does this look like a stinker...

image

image

Oh man you are in for a treat. King's Knight was the stuff of legends when I was in grade school.

Think of the clunkiest scrolling shooter you've ever played, slow it way down, and add easily missable hidden items that are required to beat the game.

ryanflucas wrote:
I…kinda want that…>_<
(If only for it being a Square title)

Not pictured are the wax seals imprinted with skull images that sealed the scroll and game. I had a lot of fun decorating this one!

If you need a translation, I can provide one.

ryanflucas wrote:
Was that handwritten?

"Leveleth up by collecting as many items as possible in one runneth" 😆

Leveleth up is making me smirk.

benstylus wrote:

Further details emerged in mind. I also remember this game was the reason we created the fictional KSOB radio station. They just played the sound of people sobbing 24/7 (except for the unsettlingly upbeat station identification stingers. K-SOB RADIO! GET SOBBING! 🎶)

Hunt Down the Freeman: Imagine someone made a fan game based off Half Life and it's nothing like Half Life. There are cut scenes, an actual story of some kind and it's sort of probably like CoD with level design. It's pretty bad, I've had to look at a guide a couple of times to figure out what I'm supposed to do to progress. It sucks. Might just call it quits, put 2 hours into this abortion.

Thanks for playing everyone. I'm gonna have to step it up next year, some people were really satanly.

Kommie wrote:

All I know about it is that they cheaped out on hiring actual voice actors and instead resorted to getting YouTube personalities (many of which had novice voice-acting experience) to read character lines. The most embarrassing I've heard was that they requested a YouTuber with a thick British accent to voice an Asian character.

benstylus wrote:

Thanks for hosting this! I had a blast!

With the exceptions of Charlie’s Angels and Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly, I haven’t heard horror stories about most of these. Perhaps that’s for the best—it would get stale if everyone sent out the agreed-upon worst games ever. Finding King’s Knight in the wild made this more fun on my end. (@ryanflucas My next choice was Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool , but my local store didn’t have it. Lucky you.)

For next year, I recommend a minimum price of $8 for a single game. If that’s too low, it could be $8 + another game to reach a $10 value overall. There’s a ton of garbage out there in the $8 range that should be considered.

Whoever gets me next year had better pray they don’t have an original Xbox!

I wanna see a high roller Secret Satan =).

SupremeSarna wrote:

That came off during shopping but it was a cool touch!

Bleed_DukeBlue wrote:

Wata graded crap games.

I've already started plotting for next year.

If there is actual non-joke interest for a high roller version, let me know. I can't imagine too many people would want to get the Golden turd.

I should clarify that I really did mean that I want to “see” a high roller version (not participate) :)

benstylus wrote:

Regular Secret Satan is enough for me, High Roller I'd have to participate from the sidelines.

Bleed_DukeBlue wrote:

I suspect most people feel the same way. But just in case I'm asking well in advance so people can't say they would have participated if they had more notice.

So I've spent some quality time with Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. While this is really a bad game, it isn't too bad. Thankfully, the controls are okay (with a few odd decisions), which I"m okay with. I've played four levels so far, which have been okay, but overly simple. The only real challenge comes in the form of, well, challenges that the game let's you partake in if you so choose in order to obtain dragonfies. Which reminds me, each level contains 10 dragonflys. It's kinda like the stars in Mario 64. You need to obtain enough dragonflies go get access to different areas. Also, there are a butt-load of gems just scattered around every level. It's a huge collectathon with those, but I've only spent some of that sweet mula like one time. I've got over a 1,000 of whatever this currency is and no where to spend it as of yet.

The camera in this game messes with me a bit, especially if I'm rotating it. I don't know how to explain it, but it's as if the world is slightly warped sometimes as I rotate the camera. Not a problem, but just something that I've noticed. The framerate can really suck at times, which is one of my biggest gripes. The sound is stupid and unforgettable. I was playing a flying challenge, when all of a sudden, I noticed that the music had stopped. A few seconds later, it restarted again. Another sound issue I noticed is that when you break vases, sometimes they simply don't make a sound. It actually happens quite often. Overall, this game seems rather rushed.

A few other things: Never having played a Spyro game, I don't know if this particular mechanic was present in the previous games, but there's one that bothers me. When you jump in the air, you can then press and hold the jump button in order to glide, which comes in handing with trying to jump from one platform to another. This would be fine, except for the fact that there are some edges you won't be able to make it to unless you tap the Y button at the very end of your jump, which gives you a little upward movement necessary to complete to jump. It's kinda stupid and unecessary. Another thing that I've noticed is the voice acting. I swear, every set of NPCs that you interact with have distinct accents. The first world had an oriental theme and all the masters that I rescued had stereotypical Asian accents. Plus, they were all named after movie martial artists! (Jacki, Jet, Bruce, etc...). There's one level that is a farm setting with super-hick farmers who's cows were being abducted by aliens (actually a pretty fun level). I've also come across tourist pigs who sound like they may be from New Jersey. I wonder what other accents I will come across next.

As annoying as the voice accents can be, the dialog made me laugh a couple times, which is much more than I could say about Charlie's Angels! So, @Frank , How far have you gotten so far? Have you at least completed the first level? I'm curious as the how your experience has been so far.