Cracked: Worse than HG101

[Specineff]

I know, Ed. I'm not being antagonistic in any way. I asked because it genuinely went over my head and wanted to know more.

[Ed Oscuro]

I know you don't mean anything bad but that really looks like autism from here 'course I can't even guess what most of my posts look like to most people (insert rage face I guess)

[Ruldra]

You know, if they're so willing to bash gaming, might as well make an article about all the problems of today's gaming.

- QTEs
- Forced tutorials
- Handholding
- DLCs
- Cutscenes everywhere
- Ship first, patch later

and etc...

[Ed Oscuro]

I'd add to that list "Can't see shit, captain" at least (which has many delightful variations, from "let's go hunting for COG tags" - it's the modern incarnation of adventure game pixel hunting, except now you're running around empty streets and not getting your ACTION game on, wrong genre dumbasses! - to "what is a man? Just two or three pixels if you get far enough away." Granted these things have been problems since the early 3D FPS era but they were generally contained within certain contexts. I believe this problem with visibility has tended to get more widespread with newer releases.

Oh, and modern collectathons are at least as obnoxious as they ever were in DOOM, let alone the typical platformer. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that well over half of my time spent playing Red Dead Redemption was spent getting on and off my horse and picking plants.

The fudge factors and magic eye meters (Tenchu!) added in to try to manage this kind of complexity...unavoidable, I'm sure, but still often regrettable.

[Specineff]

I know you don't mean anything bad but that really looks like autism from here

Nah. It was just curiosity. See below.

'course I can't even guess what most of my posts look like to most people.

Oblique.

[Ed Oscuro]

Oblique.

Well, yes, I know this, but that's the joke...drauch got it anyway
OK! I agree with you, no more random digressions for today.

[Neathyr]

You know, if they're so willing to bash gaming, might as well make an article about all the problems of today's gaming.

- QTEs
- Forced tutorials
- Handholding
- DLCs
- Cutscenes everywhere
- Ship first, patch later

and etc...

Forgot to add Regenerating Health on the top of that list, since (to me) it's far more insulting than forced tutorials and its sole existence is a big reason why the FPS and TPS genres are destroyed beyond repair.
It single-handedly kills any interest I could otherwise have to play a game that decides to use this feature.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

Forgot to add Regenerating Health on the top of that list, since (to me) it's far more insulting than forced tutorials and its sole existence is a big reason why the FPS and TPS genres are destroyed beyond repair.
It single-handedly kills any interest I could otherwise have to play a game that decides to use this feature.

I don't think regenerating health is inherently a bad thing. No doubt it gets used lazily a lot of the time, but like any other game mechanic, it works well when used properly (like in Vanquish).

[BryanM]

Limited lives were pretty awful, but so is having to begin from the start of a game every single time.

Let's take Dangun Feveron. There's zero chance I'll lose a life on the first level. That's not fun. There's a 15% chance I'll die on the second level due to some fluke, that's a little fun. There's maybe a 35% chance I'll die on the third level at those regenerating turrets, that spot can get a little dicey. That's fun. Level four has an 80% chance of eating at least one of my lives, it's no joke. And then level five has maybe a 50% of killing me before the boss.

My point here, is there's nothing for me to get better at in the first couple of levels. There's no fun whatsoever for me to be had there.

A thing many don't appreciate is how goddamn genius the original Super Mario was. The little mushroom rebounding off the pipe so it's more likely to hit you to teach complete newbs that they're good, exactly how tutorials should be made. Warp zones that are effectively a level select feature, letting you skip the levels you don't like or feel like playing entirely, which adds that all essential gift of variance to the game?

That is the gift of fire that SMB gave us.

(And the article linked to is pretty tepid and rehashing very old lessons we've all long since grasped. There are much better cracked.com vidya game articles you could be spamming us with sir.)

I mean okay, point #2 and point #1 might be fair gripes depending on the game, but seriously, hating LADDERS?!

Ladders are the worst. Absolute nadir of design. They're where the hours of your life go to perish and die.

"Oh the ladders in this game are great they're so fucking awesome" said no one ever. Just move very slowly in a vertical direction. Down or up. And you can't use any attacks because that would give you something else to do besides count away the precious seconds of your life irretrievably flowing by.

For a similar reason, swimming is often just as bad. Moving faster with more choices is better than moving slower with nothing to do.

Mega Man has fun water levels

Mega Man doesn't have water levels. It has low gravity levels.

irl super robots would not be able to jog at full speed in the blue.

looks like they picked the most annoying example EX. Megaman 2 for purposes of comedy and/or humor.

Megaman 2 would actually be one of the better examples of ladders. You move fairly quickly, you can jump onto/off of them and you can still shoot. And the music is a joy to just listen to. Mario World too. They're basically handholds you keep jumping rapidly up with. They might as well be a series of platforms, functionally.

Castlevania is a more typical example of the average amount of fun to be had with ladders. There are much worse ones out there.

[cj iwakura]

Uh... what's wrong with HG101? I wrote some articles there(Shikigami, Deception, etc.) so color me biased, but it is a pretty solid resource for obscure stuff.

[BIL]

Uh... what's wrong with HG101?

Depends who's writing. Taromaru article is pure Gamespot-tier shit that manages to be wrong about everything. OTOH the Wild Guns article is quite well-informed and a good primer, a few basic errors aside. Let luck decide what standard of article you receive!

[BryanM]

I mean how can a ladder stage be all bad with such catchy lyrics?

[BIL]

I'd always pegged Flashman as the one who liked men, somehow. Perhaps because I subconsciously read his name as "FlashGordonMan." And the sexual connotations of "Flashing." And because while everyone else had generic murder weapons he could potentially do some pretty alarming things to poor Rockman with his Time Stop ability. Like feel up his balls.

[Squire Grooktook]

Limited lives were pretty awful, but so is having to begin from the start of a game every single time.

Let's take Dangun Feveron. There's zero chance I'll lose a life on the first level. That's not fun. There's a 15% chance I'll die on the second level due to some fluke, that's a little fun. There's maybe a 35% chance I'll die on the third level at those regenerating turrets, that spot can get a little dicey. That's fun. Level four has an 80% chance of eating at least one of my lives, it's no joke. And then level five has maybe a 50% of killing me before the boss.

I personally feel that that's an issue with the stage 1 design more than anything else. A good first stage should still have a lot of stuff that forces you to pay attention, whether it be legitimately difficult, randomization, or just preparing resources for later areas.

It's part of my philosophy for games that all gameplay based excitement has to come from some sort of risk or punishment for failure. You can't have excitement without tension, and you can't have tension without the threat of something bad happening if you go wrong. It shouldn't necessarily be something unfun, but I do feel the player has to have some sort of thing that they're afraid of and is forcing them to play good. In a shmup, it's the thought that if you game over, you're run will no longer be "legit" if you continue (no score, and who cares about a 2cc?). For a speed run, it's failing to beat the time you want. In a Roguelike, it's perma death. For a fighting game, it's letting the other player attain superiority for that moment. To some, the idea of punishing a player for failure might sound like inherently bad game design, but for me personally every single moment I've ever been excited in a game, there was some sort of risk there.

This is why I loath "bite sized" level design in games like Super Meat Boy. I feel legitimate excitement is completely impossible in that kind of set up (perhaps engagement at times, but not true edge of your seat heart pounding moments), and the whole experience becomes more and more mindless and repetitive the longer you spend grinding on one "level". It also feels less like an actual adventure and more just something you play for 2 minutes on the bus. I'd rather play the first stage ten times over in Dodonpachi DOJ than that honestly.

irl super robots

...would be able to do whatever the hell they want.

[Drum]

HG101 is pretty bad, broadly speaking, but the constant stream of shit they get from certain quarters is a little much because there really doesn't seem to be a better alternative. Which is a tremendous shame.

[evil_ash_xero]

I like HG101. Don't like everything they say, but hey, that's going to happen no matter what.

[Ghegs]

I like HG101 because they uncover some games I've never heard of before. I ended up buying the PCBs for Bay Route and Aurail thanks to their articles about them.

[Edmond Dantes]

Admittedly I don't really hate HG101 either, just all their damn typos and the times where they make a woefully ignorant statement rather irritate me.

For example, yesterday I saw they actually had an article on X-Multiply. Naturally I had to read it, and right in the second paragraph, there's a hilarious gaffe:

The enemies of X-Multiply are alien parasites, who have infected and taken over the body of a human host. The only way to destroy it to by miniaturizing a space craft, the X-002, and injecting it into the body, in a scenario vaguely similar to The Incredible Journey.

The Incredible Journey? The book about two dogs and a cat who go on a cross-country trek in search of their owner (later adapted into Disney's Homeward Bound)? I don't recall miniaturized space craft fighting aliens in that!

Yes, yes, I know he's actually talking about the 1960s movie The Fantastic Voyage, but... well, that's one hell of a brainfart.

Then at the end, when they're describing the port included in Xing's Arcade Gears series:

There are a few minor glitches, as the game occasionally drops sound effects, and the bottom part of the status bar is cut off due to the change in resolution, but nothing major.

I don't know if this is true for the Saturn version, but in the Playstation version you can actually manually move the scoreboard with the shoulder buttons--L makes it lower until its off the screen, R makes it rise until its at its natural height, and you actually have to remove it to see the entire screen since it overlays the field. This isn't some obscure fact--its the very first fucking thing anyone who played that port will notice. Nice "research" there.

[evil_ash_xero]

Maybe it was written by this guy.

[ciox]

HardcoreGaming does have random made up facts in some articles, especially shmups, it's just nice as a quick reference sometimes, like having all the "post-mortem" DC shooters on one page.

[Jockel]

HG101 is considered shit now?
Did you ever read kotaku or IGN, son?

[Ed Oscuro]

Yes, there's definitely degrees of badness.

IGN (at least the classic stuff I tend to look at) is definitely somewhat uneven. I am not sure but I think that much of their more recent coverage is improved, although we're talking about a huge focus on trendy/popular games. I don't have a problem if a site defines its focus that way.

I will say that their wiki guides sometimes annoy the living hell outta me. I looked here and there at the Eternal Darkness one, and apparently one of the IGN staff helped with it. I would really like to know who's responsible for all the fucking horrible, ignorant and mean-spirited comments about the characters - the Venetian guy is "a Super Mario Bro" and they decide to be "funny" by listing all his attributes as some kind of Italian food; there's a lot of sexist comments about the female dancer character, and the list goes on...I'm hoping that represents a dark pit for IGN and not what's typical. It makes some of the "awful" jokes GameFAQs users insert into their guides look almost hilarious in comparison.

About their normal coverage I don't have anything on my mind to point out right away.

[BrianC]

Mega Man doesn't have water levels. It has low gravity levels.

Mega Man swims in Mega Man 8 and MM3 PC, though the latter wasn't designed by Capcom. I kind of liked it in 8, but thought it was odd at the same time.

I'm kind of mixed about HG101. Some articles are nice, but others miss things and are often uneven. GB and 2600 games, as well as games for some others like 7800, are often given a bum rap there, as well.

[Jockel]

And the now infamous Dead Space 2 review.

[Ed Oscuro]

Nobody bats 100% all the time, and IGN isn't edited by a small team, is it? (Now that I think about it, there's also something dodgy in trying to compare reviews from a Wii game with a PS2 title.)

There's also this positive element from the God Hand debacle:

Despite IGN scoring God Hand 3.0 out of 10 during its original release, the website ranked the game at #100 for their "Top 100 PlayStation 2 Games" list in 2010.

There's some solace to be had in their original review's summary:

Clover Studio delivers its oddest game yet, but unfortunately the joke's on us.

Indeed, IGN has rightfully been reaping a rich harvest for that one.

I guess the core element of my complaint here is that a site like HG101 has the enthusiasm and a manageable size to offer enthusiasts a more consistent editorial tone than a sprawling site like IGN which is trying to cater to everybody who wants to look up game reviews.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

And the now infamous Dead Space 2 review.

What's so bad about Dead Space 2 or that review...? (I've not played any of the Dead Space games yet.)

[Skykid]

And the now infamous Dead Space 2 review.

What's so bad about Dead Space 2 or that review...? (I've not played any of the Dead Space games yet.)

Just read it.

[Mischief Maker]

(Now that I think about it, there's also something dodgy in trying to compare reviews from a Wii game with a PS2 title.)

Indeed! Mad world was intended for a completely different audience and age group than God Hand and should therefore be held to wildly different standards. After all, we wouldn't want to hold the site that gave God Hand 3/10 then did a later about face with their top 100 games list to "dodgy" standards!

[drauch]

The beginning of that Dead Space 2 review gets me every time. "I'm going to write about..."

[Ed Oscuro]

(Now that I think about it, there's also something dodgy in trying to compare reviews from a Wii game with a PS2 title.)

Indeed! Mad world was intended for a completely different audience and age group than God Hand and should therefore be held to wildly different standards. After all, we wouldn't want to hold the site that gave God Hand 3/10 then did a later about face with their top 100 games list to "dodgy" standards!

I'm saying it's naive to expect that a site that employs dozens of writers is going to have consistency from review to review, especially when you leap across a gap from one console known for its deep library, like the PS2, to something like the Wii where you even have to consider reviewing shit like Party Babyz. There's also the matter of them reviewing huge numbers of games. God Hand and Party Babyz may well be the strangest outliers across thousands of game reviews.

Basically, you need to read every IGN article on its own terms (or any article that has a different byline than another).

Now, I will blame IGN for trying to pretend that they do have some kind of standard, as I recall years back there was a change on either IGN or GameSpy (perhaps both) to explain their grading standards.

Speaking of things, the guy responsible for that review was eventually laid off (although it's a mystery why).

If you're dead set on fighting that old war, though, you can always ask him about his God Hand review at his Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/chris_roper

Don't get me wrong, though - I've got a whole bucket of bones straight from Colonel Sanders to pick with the old-school method of game journalism, which is light on real content and heavy on stupid conventions cemented in unthinkingly over the years. Failing to report things that might be uncomfortable to gaming companies! Pressing for answers! Using stupid "here's a decimal-accurate score for the game!" systems when you can't compare games from the same reviewer accurately! Not having stupid fiefdoms led by blind fanboys or reviews being meted out to people who don't have time or patience to review the games that leads to shit like the Party Babyz/God Hand debacle! - and on it goes.

But my argument here is that it's unrealistic to believe that there actually IS a standard that IGN could use, even if it wanted to, to ensure that God Hand, MadWorld, and Party Babyz would get the exact same treatment, let alone a standard that could be taught and applied in that setting. It's just not happening in this world. BTW, IGN's MadWorld review was written by Matt Casamassina, a name I think I recognize from some good reviews over the years.