- Joined
- May 13, 2009
- Messages
- 27,245
(Or how I rant about horrible games while waiting for my data retrieval program to save my hard drive.)
The art of trolling is a time-honoured tradition on the Kodex, and save for a thread on The Witcher some months back, I personally have never trolled anyone, at least not intentionally.
Recently I got to thinking about games that, as you continue playing them, they only frustrate you as you keep on playing. Games that seem to have been intentionally designed in a manner to leave you either disappointed, frustrated or even both. Even though I have been gaming for almost 25 years, I can only think of a handful of games that actually do this as a full-time venture. Oh sure, I can think of countless games that have "moments" of trolling, but the art of being a full-blown trolling game is obscure and hard to master. In fact, I can only think of three games at the moment, which all share the sad fact that they were made in recent years. And mind you, trolling is partly based upon personal preferences, so your mileage may differ.
The third worst trolling game I've come across is Serious Sam 2.
The Serious Sam games (First and Second Encounter) were not exactly top-of-the-line FPS games, but they were a throwback to the early days of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom: Pure mindless fun. They weren't afraid of trying new things, or just ignoring some de facto FPS standards and doing things differently. The result is a pair of classic FPS games that have endured so well that recently they got revived in High-Def editions. So a sequel was inevitable.
What we got was a slap in the face.
Croteam took just about everything that was cool about the first game and threw it out the window. Well-known historical settings gave way to generic gaming settings, be they primitive tribal villages, medieval castles, sewers, a volcanic wasteland, a swamp and some futuristic cities and buildings. Of these, only the level where everything was giganticly huge reminded people of the prequels. Well-established weapons were replaced with weapons that were either too exotic to be likeable or did not perform as they should. The best weapon of the game is a six-barrelled rotating shotgun that is unnaturally accurate (and deadly) at long ranges. The minigun seems to lazily spit out its bullets and takes forever to run out of ammo. At least the Cannon works as before, but that's about it. All the other weapons make you go "WTF?" to some degree or other.
Serious Sam had some unforgettable enemies... which were either completely removed or replaced by poor comic caricatures. The Sirian Werebull was replaced by a wind-up mechanical rhino. The kamikaze bomber is still there, but is nowhere near as scary-dangerous as he used to be. The Mechanoids have T-Rex heads on them with cigars in their mouths. For no reason whatsoever. And of course, the worst enemy from the original, the Kleer skeleton, not only returns almost unchanged, but gets 4 whole levels devoted to it! The prequels also had gigantic bosses to fight. The only part of those boss-fights that carried over into SSam 2 is the "gigantic" part. A giant gorilla, a giant bee, a giant sumo wrestler, a giant skeleton, a giant dragon, a giant robot and a giant pyramid on wheels. Those are your bosses, and except for the gorilla and the dragon they're also mind-numbingly dull opponents.
The ultimate "troll" moment of the game, though, is the end, where instead of us seeing Mental finally defeated, he flees in a spaceship and a "TO BE CONTINUED" message appears after the end credits. It's like getting kicked in the teeth after having been kicked in the nuts. It's a shit game, a de-evolution of everything from the first game(s).
The second worst trolling game I've ever played is Prey.
Prey has one of the best demos available for a game. It has a story, a plot, some really cool sequences and effects, and is just bursting at the seems with promises of "I'M SO FUCKING AWESOME! BUY ME NOW!" Which is exactly what almost everybody did. And what almost everybody got was a game that, right after the moment where the demo ends, degenerates into a bad Doom 3 clone. Corridor after mindless corridor, monsters popping out again and again. Occasionally something different came along, like a boss fight or a vehicle sequence, but can anyone here really recall anything about the game after the scene with the spirit-thingies possessing the kids?
Prey abused to the very limit a concept I call the "Loaded demo", where the game's cool content is delibaretely loaded into the part of the game that's available in the demo, while the rest of the game is mindless, banal, boring filler material. I haven't seen that many Loaded Demos, but then again I've steered clear of most games released after 2003, especially the mainstream ones. Hopefully other Kodexers can name (and shame) more examples.
But the worst trolling game I've ever played is a small indie title called Tecno: The Base.
Most of you have probably not heard of this game. It's a FPS/Adventure hybrid where you control 2 human survivors of a robot uprising on a base on a distant planet. A good comparison to how it plays are the early tech-demos of Penumbra. It has a vehicle section, boss fights, some very complex puzzles and some of that survival-horror vibe going on.
So which part of the game does the trolling? How about...everything?
The interface is clunky, but that is due to how the game is programmed (it's all programmed in some obscure and restrictive coding environment) and is probably the only part of the game that can be excused. The rest I can only attribute as being deliberate trolling. I'll be frank, I've forgotten some of the things about this game that irked me, but that's because I've been trying to forget them. Let's start with the demo.
The demo (and first part of the full game) has you playing as Alexia, whose plan for escaping the base seems to involve a prototype teleporter. Fair enough, except that the demo, while not being a Loaded Demo, instead pulls a Bait and Switch on us. The demo ends the moment Alexia steps into the teleporter, and the full game hops over to Mika, another survivor who must find a different way to escape the base. Alexia is a non-issue in the game from here on, she isn't even mentioned until the end sequence. Mika also has a completely different equipment set, so no more shotgun and night goggles for you. Mika as a character is also completely devoid of personality, at least Alexia had some personality.
Combat is 90% of the time just killing random spawns of enemy robots. But here's the catch: Your only option is to kill them. You can't run away from them. Due to the game's technical limitations, robots can't follow you everywhere. Getting onto a lift and to another floor is a sure-fire way to escape them, for example. So what does the game do? It "magically" moves the spawned robots to the section you're entering. Without ever explaining how they got there. You could be coming from a dead end set of empty offices, heading down in an elevator and encountering a spawn of enemies, immediately going back up in the lift, only to find the robots waiting for you in the aforementioned empty offices. So much for immersion. The game does this every time, all the time.
What's worse, there are a few sections where you need to perform some action or solve a puzzle to advance the game, and you're having a hard enough time just working the puzzle without being bothered by distractions. Guess what the game does almost without fail? Throws a spawn of enemies at you right there. A brilliant example of this is the camerabot puzzle: You must guide a camerabot through a ventilation system via remote control to be able to read an access code for a locked door. Said code is, of course, written on the wall right by the door... on the other side. And those camerabots are made out of paper, touch a wall somewhere and they're destroyed, redo puzzle from start.
An even better example of trolling is the vehicle section. Eventually you find a tank, and after solving a lot of pointless puzzles getting the tank to run, you finally reach the exterior section of the base. Your first stop is a supply depot where you must manually re-arm your tank with 2 missiles. OK. A little further on is a heavily guarded structure, and you must take out the turrets with your missiles. How many missiles do you think you'll need? If you think 2, then you're wrong. You need 3. (At least an odd number greater than 2, I can't really remember.) That means firing the first two missiles, then going back to the depot, manually re-arming the tank again with 2 more missiles, then going back to the structure and blowing away the last turret. All this while being CONSTANTLY barraged by enemy spawns, because the exterior section has the spawn rate set at ludicrious levels.
Another "brilliant" puzzle is the test laser. There's a room where a giant laser, operated by a motion-sensor targetting system, is constantly shooting clay pigeons that are released into the room. You must enter the room with the laser, reach the laser's manual controls (located conveniently behind the laser) and make it fire at a set of gas canisters in the corner of the room to blow a hole that you must then go through. First off, you must reach the laser control room to activate the clay pigeons, or otherwise the laser will target you first and kill you in one or two shots. Second, you must run from the laser control room to the laser room itself before the laser is done shooting all the clay pigeons. Third, you must creep-crawl through the laser room itself to avoid becoming a "primary" target for the laser. Fourth, even though the laser can and WILL hit the gas canisters in the corner while hunting for the clay pigeons, it won't set them off until you reach the manual controls and tell it to fire there. Finally, the laser is actually quite capable of finding you while standing still and frying your ass, and will do so at random intervals, even twisting and turning itself into possible positions to accomplish this, like firing behind itself. It took me DAYS to solve this puzzle, and it's actually quite early on in the game.
Then there are the oh-so ever-predictable turns of events. You're in Quadrant X of the base and need to reach Quadrant Y. To do that you need to extend a walkbridge across between the two sections. That involves restoring power to the walkbridge (a puzzle) then finding the controls to extend the walkbridge (another puzzle, of course), then finding that the door to the walkbridge is locked and you have to find the key, which is over in Quadrant Z somewhere, which is where you STARTED the game, so you have to trek all the way back there and access a previously inaccessible room, get the key, go back to Quadrant X, open the door, cross the walkbridge and cross over to Quadrant Y, Yay! Until, a bit later on, you realize you have to get back to Quadrant Z again. Well, at least the walkbridge is there to quickly get you back... oops, looks like the game thinks that's too easy for you, so you get a nice little cutscene showing some robots shooting the walkbridge down for no other reason than to annoy you. Now repeat that for EVERY. SINGLE. PART. OF. THE. GAME. If you think that a previous action would make subsequent required actions easier for you, you're wrong. The game will see to that.
The boss fights are all about just surviving against invulnerable überbots, until that exact one moment comes up where there's a weak spot exposed, and then hitting that spot once before repeating the sequence until the überbot finally dies. It gets boring really quick, which is why it's repeated about 4 or 5 times throughout the game. The last fight actually has you killing the end boss twice, and was so tough that I gave up at that point and turned the god mode on. I cannot see anyone beating the last boss without cheating, really. He's too tough.
The end sequence, though, is what made me rage the most. You beat the final boss (twice) only to get a short message that tells you... that you failed. Neither Mika nor Alexia succeed in escaping the base. All your efforts are for naught. I contacted the author of the game and he confirmed that yes, this is how the game should end. There is only one ending. Had we been in the same room I would have decked him then and there. There are Rules about how NOT to make a game. This game breaks pretty much all of them.
The only "upside" I have from playing and completing this game? According to the author, I was, at the time, one of a handful of people to ever have completed the game. I doubt that number has risen much since then. But even that makes me feel like I've been told that I failed the IQ test.
So... anyone else know of any other games that only seem to exist to troll gamers?
EDIT: Typos.
The art of trolling is a time-honoured tradition on the Kodex, and save for a thread on The Witcher some months back, I personally have never trolled anyone, at least not intentionally.
Recently I got to thinking about games that, as you continue playing them, they only frustrate you as you keep on playing. Games that seem to have been intentionally designed in a manner to leave you either disappointed, frustrated or even both. Even though I have been gaming for almost 25 years, I can only think of a handful of games that actually do this as a full-time venture. Oh sure, I can think of countless games that have "moments" of trolling, but the art of being a full-blown trolling game is obscure and hard to master. In fact, I can only think of three games at the moment, which all share the sad fact that they were made in recent years. And mind you, trolling is partly based upon personal preferences, so your mileage may differ.
The third worst trolling game I've come across is Serious Sam 2.
The Serious Sam games (First and Second Encounter) were not exactly top-of-the-line FPS games, but they were a throwback to the early days of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom: Pure mindless fun. They weren't afraid of trying new things, or just ignoring some de facto FPS standards and doing things differently. The result is a pair of classic FPS games that have endured so well that recently they got revived in High-Def editions. So a sequel was inevitable.
What we got was a slap in the face.
Croteam took just about everything that was cool about the first game and threw it out the window. Well-known historical settings gave way to generic gaming settings, be they primitive tribal villages, medieval castles, sewers, a volcanic wasteland, a swamp and some futuristic cities and buildings. Of these, only the level where everything was giganticly huge reminded people of the prequels. Well-established weapons were replaced with weapons that were either too exotic to be likeable or did not perform as they should. The best weapon of the game is a six-barrelled rotating shotgun that is unnaturally accurate (and deadly) at long ranges. The minigun seems to lazily spit out its bullets and takes forever to run out of ammo. At least the Cannon works as before, but that's about it. All the other weapons make you go "WTF?" to some degree or other.
Serious Sam had some unforgettable enemies... which were either completely removed or replaced by poor comic caricatures. The Sirian Werebull was replaced by a wind-up mechanical rhino. The kamikaze bomber is still there, but is nowhere near as scary-dangerous as he used to be. The Mechanoids have T-Rex heads on them with cigars in their mouths. For no reason whatsoever. And of course, the worst enemy from the original, the Kleer skeleton, not only returns almost unchanged, but gets 4 whole levels devoted to it! The prequels also had gigantic bosses to fight. The only part of those boss-fights that carried over into SSam 2 is the "gigantic" part. A giant gorilla, a giant bee, a giant sumo wrestler, a giant skeleton, a giant dragon, a giant robot and a giant pyramid on wheels. Those are your bosses, and except for the gorilla and the dragon they're also mind-numbingly dull opponents.
The ultimate "troll" moment of the game, though, is the end, where instead of us seeing Mental finally defeated, he flees in a spaceship and a "TO BE CONTINUED" message appears after the end credits. It's like getting kicked in the teeth after having been kicked in the nuts. It's a shit game, a de-evolution of everything from the first game(s).
The second worst trolling game I've ever played is Prey.
Prey has one of the best demos available for a game. It has a story, a plot, some really cool sequences and effects, and is just bursting at the seems with promises of "I'M SO FUCKING AWESOME! BUY ME NOW!" Which is exactly what almost everybody did. And what almost everybody got was a game that, right after the moment where the demo ends, degenerates into a bad Doom 3 clone. Corridor after mindless corridor, monsters popping out again and again. Occasionally something different came along, like a boss fight or a vehicle sequence, but can anyone here really recall anything about the game after the scene with the spirit-thingies possessing the kids?
Prey abused to the very limit a concept I call the "Loaded demo", where the game's cool content is delibaretely loaded into the part of the game that's available in the demo, while the rest of the game is mindless, banal, boring filler material. I haven't seen that many Loaded Demos, but then again I've steered clear of most games released after 2003, especially the mainstream ones. Hopefully other Kodexers can name (and shame) more examples.
But the worst trolling game I've ever played is a small indie title called Tecno: The Base.
Most of you have probably not heard of this game. It's a FPS/Adventure hybrid where you control 2 human survivors of a robot uprising on a base on a distant planet. A good comparison to how it plays are the early tech-demos of Penumbra. It has a vehicle section, boss fights, some very complex puzzles and some of that survival-horror vibe going on.
So which part of the game does the trolling? How about...everything?
The interface is clunky, but that is due to how the game is programmed (it's all programmed in some obscure and restrictive coding environment) and is probably the only part of the game that can be excused. The rest I can only attribute as being deliberate trolling. I'll be frank, I've forgotten some of the things about this game that irked me, but that's because I've been trying to forget them. Let's start with the demo.
The demo (and first part of the full game) has you playing as Alexia, whose plan for escaping the base seems to involve a prototype teleporter. Fair enough, except that the demo, while not being a Loaded Demo, instead pulls a Bait and Switch on us. The demo ends the moment Alexia steps into the teleporter, and the full game hops over to Mika, another survivor who must find a different way to escape the base. Alexia is a non-issue in the game from here on, she isn't even mentioned until the end sequence. Mika also has a completely different equipment set, so no more shotgun and night goggles for you. Mika as a character is also completely devoid of personality, at least Alexia had some personality.
Combat is 90% of the time just killing random spawns of enemy robots. But here's the catch: Your only option is to kill them. You can't run away from them. Due to the game's technical limitations, robots can't follow you everywhere. Getting onto a lift and to another floor is a sure-fire way to escape them, for example. So what does the game do? It "magically" moves the spawned robots to the section you're entering. Without ever explaining how they got there. You could be coming from a dead end set of empty offices, heading down in an elevator and encountering a spawn of enemies, immediately going back up in the lift, only to find the robots waiting for you in the aforementioned empty offices. So much for immersion. The game does this every time, all the time.
What's worse, there are a few sections where you need to perform some action or solve a puzzle to advance the game, and you're having a hard enough time just working the puzzle without being bothered by distractions. Guess what the game does almost without fail? Throws a spawn of enemies at you right there. A brilliant example of this is the camerabot puzzle: You must guide a camerabot through a ventilation system via remote control to be able to read an access code for a locked door. Said code is, of course, written on the wall right by the door... on the other side. And those camerabots are made out of paper, touch a wall somewhere and they're destroyed, redo puzzle from start.
An even better example of trolling is the vehicle section. Eventually you find a tank, and after solving a lot of pointless puzzles getting the tank to run, you finally reach the exterior section of the base. Your first stop is a supply depot where you must manually re-arm your tank with 2 missiles. OK. A little further on is a heavily guarded structure, and you must take out the turrets with your missiles. How many missiles do you think you'll need? If you think 2, then you're wrong. You need 3. (At least an odd number greater than 2, I can't really remember.) That means firing the first two missiles, then going back to the depot, manually re-arming the tank again with 2 more missiles, then going back to the structure and blowing away the last turret. All this while being CONSTANTLY barraged by enemy spawns, because the exterior section has the spawn rate set at ludicrious levels.
Another "brilliant" puzzle is the test laser. There's a room where a giant laser, operated by a motion-sensor targetting system, is constantly shooting clay pigeons that are released into the room. You must enter the room with the laser, reach the laser's manual controls (located conveniently behind the laser) and make it fire at a set of gas canisters in the corner of the room to blow a hole that you must then go through. First off, you must reach the laser control room to activate the clay pigeons, or otherwise the laser will target you first and kill you in one or two shots. Second, you must run from the laser control room to the laser room itself before the laser is done shooting all the clay pigeons. Third, you must creep-crawl through the laser room itself to avoid becoming a "primary" target for the laser. Fourth, even though the laser can and WILL hit the gas canisters in the corner while hunting for the clay pigeons, it won't set them off until you reach the manual controls and tell it to fire there. Finally, the laser is actually quite capable of finding you while standing still and frying your ass, and will do so at random intervals, even twisting and turning itself into possible positions to accomplish this, like firing behind itself. It took me DAYS to solve this puzzle, and it's actually quite early on in the game.
Then there are the oh-so ever-predictable turns of events. You're in Quadrant X of the base and need to reach Quadrant Y. To do that you need to extend a walkbridge across between the two sections. That involves restoring power to the walkbridge (a puzzle) then finding the controls to extend the walkbridge (another puzzle, of course), then finding that the door to the walkbridge is locked and you have to find the key, which is over in Quadrant Z somewhere, which is where you STARTED the game, so you have to trek all the way back there and access a previously inaccessible room, get the key, go back to Quadrant X, open the door, cross the walkbridge and cross over to Quadrant Y, Yay! Until, a bit later on, you realize you have to get back to Quadrant Z again. Well, at least the walkbridge is there to quickly get you back... oops, looks like the game thinks that's too easy for you, so you get a nice little cutscene showing some robots shooting the walkbridge down for no other reason than to annoy you. Now repeat that for EVERY. SINGLE. PART. OF. THE. GAME. If you think that a previous action would make subsequent required actions easier for you, you're wrong. The game will see to that.
The boss fights are all about just surviving against invulnerable überbots, until that exact one moment comes up where there's a weak spot exposed, and then hitting that spot once before repeating the sequence until the überbot finally dies. It gets boring really quick, which is why it's repeated about 4 or 5 times throughout the game. The last fight actually has you killing the end boss twice, and was so tough that I gave up at that point and turned the god mode on. I cannot see anyone beating the last boss without cheating, really. He's too tough.
The end sequence, though, is what made me rage the most. You beat the final boss (twice) only to get a short message that tells you... that you failed. Neither Mika nor Alexia succeed in escaping the base. All your efforts are for naught. I contacted the author of the game and he confirmed that yes, this is how the game should end. There is only one ending. Had we been in the same room I would have decked him then and there. There are Rules about how NOT to make a game. This game breaks pretty much all of them.
The only "upside" I have from playing and completing this game? According to the author, I was, at the time, one of a handful of people to ever have completed the game. I doubt that number has risen much since then. But even that makes me feel like I've been told that I failed the IQ test.
So... anyone else know of any other games that only seem to exist to troll gamers?
EDIT: Typos.
