are these sort of games actually fun?

[TrevHead (TVR)]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fn_COjyRVU

I wonder if most of the ppl who play these games are having fun or just so they can brag to their mates?


ps im just a bit curious since ive never seen things like those pop up in a forum but what are those google and yahoo bots / spiders that are showing up as visitors?

[crithit5000]

When I played through I Wanna be the Guy, half the fun was just me yelling and pleading incoherently at the game to just get through whatever part I was currently stuck on. These types of games can be fun, if you're a sadistic bastard I guess.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

ive never played iwbtg but i wouldnt mind giving it a whirl but some of those mario hacks take things a bit too far imo, but i suppose whatever floats youre boat.

It almost seems to me though that the mario hacks are getting harder and harder in a bit for the hardest title.

[worstplayer]

Would Garegga or DDP DOJ be as much fun if they were easy? Some people like extremely hard shmups, and some people like extremely hard platformers. Nothing surprising here.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

im all fine with hard games but my point is that hard shmups are usually fun to play. From what i see from the lets play vids is that they seem not to be having fun.

but maybe like chrihit5000 said its a sort of a s&m sort fun

[crithit5000]

chrihit5000

Cute bastardization of my real name and my online handle.

[Ganelon]

Smart hard is good. Like Image Fight just plays on your bad tendencies and forces you to (besides memorizing) always be on guard and not get lured into anything, which will always result in death. But these type of games (besides memorizing) just take insane muscle memory. Amazing if someone can do it in one sitting though.

[linko9]

The hardest platformers I've ever had the patience to play are the "Jumper" games. They're actually quite good, and for some reason I never got too frustrated with them, even though I'd die up to 500 times on some stages.

http://mattmakesgames.com/games.php

On an unrelated note, I highly recommend "An Untitled Story" by that same guy (it's in the link above). One of the best metroidesque freeware games out there.

[saucykobold]

They're no fun at all. The ones I've tried are borderline unplayable (at best).

[Battlesmurf]

short answer- yes they are fun (to the right people). Same way that our Shmups might not appeal to others- some people have a blast with this stuff.

Somewhat related- I have never gotten the "mile high" achievement on Call of Duty 4 (despite loving the game to death). I found that part not fun at all and got mad. Friend of mine tried on and off for about a week or two- and got it. He's much less experienced with shooters than myself- he had the patience and claimed to have fun while doing it. To each their own

[Elixir]

Amazingly atrocious idea pops into pasty white American teenager's head; "I want to make a game!", so they hit up the internet and proceed to make ridiculously unplayable piles of sewage.

Once in awhile one will catch on, like Kaizou Mario or IWBTG, but in reality they probably can't even beat their own games.

[t0yrobo]

I'm fine with hard platformers. But when it's so broken that you need constant savestates to make any progress there's something wrong with it.

[doctorx0079]

IWTBTG made me LOL at first because it's so outrageous and unfair. (Apples falling UP?!?) Then I got bored with it. I've never come close to finishing it. Rayman 1 is about the hardest platformer I still consider fun, and I consider it borderline ridiculous. End of story.

[neorichieb1971]

Thank god for FF>

[lgb]

Of course it's fun, there is almost no such thing as a game that is "not fun" because it's fun to particular people; yes I would love to punch those would do the whole "how could this possibly be fun" mess of bullshit opinions that aren't really opinions at all but there's too many of them captain

[BryanM]

I Wanna Be The Guy is easy as cake. There are two save points on every screen for Christ's sake.

Here are the flaws:

* The program it uses as its engine is kind of cruddy, even the creator rues it.
* Some boss introductions take FOREVER to get through. A big deal when it might take around 20 tries to down a couple. There was functionality added to 's'kip past most of them thank the christ.

Some people are happy slaughtering helpless goombas for their entire little lives. That's just fine and super, but sometimes it's nice to play something that you have to try to win.

* Not to say I'm a fan of bullshit hacks that require save states to get through. A game should be completable beginning to end.

[Warp_Rattler]

Jesus, that video made me frustrated just watching it.

I think there's a huge difference between something designed to be challenging (DOJ was an example above, so let's run with that) and something designed with the idea of "LETS MAKE THE HARDEST GAME EVAR LOLZ" in mind. That just seems to be a kinda twisted way of going about game design. As has been said before, if it's technically completable but realistically doable only with save states or other shenanigans, my feeling is you're probably doing something wrong whether that's intentional or not.

[Udderdude]

Trial-and-error fests like this are just retarded. Worth a laugh once, but after that, just toss it. Didn't people get sick of shitty insta-death traps in games back in the 90s?

Oh well, no accounting for the tastes of zillions of random internet tards who can't tell the difference between well designed and crap difficulty.

[BulletMagnet]

Didn't people get sick of shitty insta-death traps in games back in the 90s?

At some point between then and now unavoidable deaths and other crap became "hardcore", and anyone who avoids games with such blatant time-wasting mechanics in them need to "stfu + learn2play".

[doctorx0079]

there is almost no such thing as a game that is "not fun" because it's fun to particular people

But there is. There are games that are just painful. Some of those CD-i games for example.

I Wanna Be The Guy is easy as cake.

I got bored with trying to figure it out and quit. If you like it, great, but I have a hard time imagining you. I don't know anybody around here who would like it. Then again I haven't 1CC'ed DDP or anything.

[D]

holy;everything that's holy, that is one hard bizaatch.
It's like the game is saying O'rly! like that owl somebody has in their avatar.

[Ed Oscuro]

It seems that every time IWTBTG comes up, nobody remembers this superior game (also good for your internet cred score).

Anyhow, why the hell are people playing IWTBTUBBMAWMT (BLARRRGH) instead of Gravity Force Metal Storm (alright, I admit the expert mode is still more of the same, especially level-wise) or Surprise Attack, or something, that's my question.

[BryanM]

Pedobear does have his charm.

IWBTG's creator's let's play series.

I finally played through Super Mario Brothers 2 last week, the easier All-Stars version. I wanted to get through it legitimately... but 4-4 man. Screw that level.

The physics in the game are cruelly capricious - there's one or two shafts you have to fall down and move three pixels or more to the right to avoid a pit. JUST A FEW PIXELS. Sometimes Mario will move to the right in midair... sometimes he'll just decide to continue down into the hole of death. Having a lot of momentum when you run into the wall helps better the odds, but similar controller inputs won't always give a similar outcome. It's like Shrödinger's cat.

Having to run through a 1.5 minute long, easy level over and over again, with two or three points where the random number generator determines whether you live or die, it's just as bad as three chomp-chomps tied to bouncy blocks of death.

As an interesting aside, TVtropes brings up the idea that Miyamoto was depressed when he designed this game.

Christ, do I hate those hammer brothers.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

ive never played iwbtg but i wouldnt mind giving it a whirl but some of those mario hacks take things a bit too far imo, but i suppose whatever floats youre boat.

Damn i really need to improve on my grammer, unfortunatly i was typing at armley prison with shower time comming up and my turn to pick up the soap

chrihit5000

Cute bastardization of my real name and my online handle.

Sorry but i had other things on my mind

[damakable]

Didn't people get sick of shitty insta-death traps in games back in the 90s?

At some point between then and now unavoidable deaths and other crap became "hardcore", and anyone who avoids games with such blatant time-wasting mechanics in them need to "stfu + learn2play".

This. These games are worthless beyond being some sort of practical joke. There's nothing left once you get past the novelty. None of it is hard the way a puzzle or strategy game is hard, or even the way a shmup is hard. In fact, I wouldn't use that word -- instead, I would call this difficulty "arbitrary". It's "hard" the same way it's "hard" to avoid being struck by a bolt of lightning on a sunny day. This is why I prefer manic shmups to the kind that require a lot of memorization, but even those games at least give the player a chance to react, or some clue that danger is fast approaching. These games just seem to say "Oops... should have been a pixel to the left!" over and over and over and over again. It's trial and error, and it's kind of funny to watch videos of people playing but that's as far as it goes for me.

Come to think of it, it would be easy to demonstrate that a shmup could be this arbitrary. Have enemies come from all directions and fire insta-kill lasers (the kind that instantly cover the entire screen from top-to-bottom / back-to-front) as soon as you get within a single pixel's range. Make parts of the background suddenly turn into collidable spikes when you're right over top of them. Make the bullet patterns so tight that they require a single specific, arbitrary sequence of tap-dodges to avoid. Suddenly it's not a game any more, is it?

Edit to say: Jumper seems a bit different, in that at least I know what to expect and can see what needs to be done. But in this case, it all requires so much precision that any time I can't jump in mid-air (because I jumped too late off a moving platform, say) I get pissed at the game's own inaccuracies. I mean, if I'm on a moving platform and up against a wall and I jump, I hit the wall and don't go anywhere. This results in death. Also, any time the music restarts there's a pause that usually kills me, since you're midair most of the time. There needs to be a bit of breathing room for this to be fun, I think, even if there weren't technical issues to be addressed.

[Never_Scurred]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5STkndT8nfQ

[damakable]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5STkndT8nfQ

Perfect timing, this is going on in about fiiiiive minutes.

[BryanM]

Just beat Syobon Action. Now that's a game where skill doesn't matter as much as knowing how things will work - a series of sekrit traps. Extremely easy with foreknowledge.

I am in awe of how bad people are at games. Being able to step out of the way of a Meteor Shower isn't as hard as 1cc'ing Dodonpachi, you should be able to figure it out in seconds. Not figuring it out after years - that is tragic.

[xris]

I second the question about the baidu spider thingy. I'm picturing some anti spam bot that is secretly collecting info to build the ultimate shmup, to turn us all into hikikomori.

[Zeether]

IWBTG is not fun, the maker of it cannot play games for shit, and the next person to do a Let's Play of it is either begging to get Retsupurae'd or trying to be a view whore on Youtube.

End of story.

(Really, I thought it was funny when I played it and I never bothered to sink 5 hours into it like Cloud8745 or some other guy did but FFS doing LPs of it just gets old)