South Park: The Stick of Truth

[Decado]

They lavished the game's combat with pretty high praise: "Also, while I'm telling people what to do: hey Obsidian, send copies of this game to every RPG developer in Japan, along with a note saying "LEARN FROM THIS." It'll be worth it."

Well this could be true, since JRPGs tend to suck.

 

[PlanHex]

If you aren't stacking bleeding with chakram, darts or batarang you're playing the game wrong. Secret service and everyone mook in the game can be one/twoshot with that.

You don't really need those that stack bleeding inherently. All you need is one of the strap-ons that stack bleeding on perfect attack and anything that hits multiple targets. I got good use out of that ball that bounced between targets up to 9 times. Perfect hit was just a single click of the mouse and it proc'ed the bleed on all hits. Worked well with the strap-on that gave +4 bleed on perfect attack. Good thing to throw out in the first round of every battle, regardless of whether it would hit maximum or minimum times.

 

[pakoito]

I had chackram at +5 on hit, bounces 6 times. The patch was available for the most part of the 3rd day.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

How the hell do you get past the anal probe mini-game? You have to mash the "s" button and I can't push it fast enough no matter how hard I try.

 

[Duraframe300]

Is Ubisfot still holding that second patch back ffs.

I absolutly detest the modern patch politics due to consoles. Now patches have to go through multiple testing processes which take weeks. Wasted money and the only thing it actually helps with could be fixed in a hotfix on the very same day a game releases.

And PC Gaming suffers despite having nothing to do with this bullshit.

 

[Zombra]

How the hell do you get past the anal probe mini-game? You have to mash the "s" button and I can't push it fast enough no matter how hard I try.

I don't know if this will help, but I also found that pretty much impossible. I exited the game in disgust and didn't touch it for a few days. When I went back and tried again, it seemed much easier. Maybe there's some kind of MGS-style metasystem at work here.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I got past it. I literally had to get on my hands and knees over my keyboard and put my whole body weight into it. The shitting mini-games are still impossible for me, though.

 

[Xor]

I suspect somebody forgot to re-tune the QTEs for PC players, or they couldn't make the settings change depending on whether the player was using a controller or a keyboard and just kept it tuned for a controller over the keyboard.

Obsidian's minigames have always been awful, though; they were my absolute least favorite part of Alpha Protocol.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Obsidian's minigames have always been awful, though; they were my absolute least favorite part of Alpha Protocol.

The only thing worse is their programmers (or lack of).

 

[J_C]

I can say that the pooping minigames are near impossible even with a 360 controller on PC. Took me at least 10 tries and a sore thumb for just 1 success.

I don't really get how can people have such bad finger movement that they can't do a simple minigame as this. Seriously, use your pointing finger.

Obsidian's minigames have always been awful, though; they were my absolute least favorite part of Alpha Protocol.

The only thing worse is their programmers (or lack of).

Alpha Protocol had the most creative minigames ever. You people are just suck at hand-eye coordination.

 

[Name]

I can say that the pooping minigames are near impossible even with a 360 controller on PC. Took me at least 10 tries and a sore thumb for just 1 success.

I don't really get how can people have such bad finger movement that they can't do a simple minigame as this. Seriously, use your pointing finger.

Obsidian's minigames have always been awful, though; they were my absolute least favorite part of Alpha Protocol.

The only thing worse is their programmers (or lack of).

Alpha Protocol had the most creative minigames ever. You people are just suck at hand-eye coordination.

The point of Alpha Protocol is if you don't invest points in your character, you will have a hard time shooting at point-blank range or minigaming.
That's role-playing to a fault.
I like it and but most people are butthurt, seen in various mainstream reviews.

 

[Xor]

Alpha Protocol had the most creative minigames ever. You people are just suck at hand-eye coordination.

I seriously hope you're trolling.

The point of Alpha Protocol is if you don't invest points in your character, you will have a hard time shooting at point-blank range or minigaming.
That's role-playing to a fault.

Congratulations. This is the dumbest thing I've read on the codex in months. I'm not even sure how to repsond to this except to say, you clearly have no idea what role-playing actually is. Also, did you ever bother not taking the minigame skills? Because having done both, I can honestly say I didn't notice any difference. The timers are the same, and you're still given way too many pins to clip on that one minigame after a certain point. The mouse still sucks for controlling the lockpick minigame and the hacking minigame. The minigames in AP were fucking terrible, and the game would have been better with just a static skill check to open locks/hack computers/etc.

 

[Name]

Alpha Protocol had the most creative minigames ever. You people are just suck at hand-eye coordination.

I seriously hope you're trolling.

The point of Alpha Protocol is if you don't invest points in your character, you will have a hard time shooting at point-blank range or minigaming.
That's role-playing to a fault.

Congratulations. This is the dumbest thing I've read on the codex in months. I'm not even sure how to repsond to this except to say, you clearly have no idea what role-playing actually is. Also, did you ever bother not taking the minigame skills? Because having done both, I can honestly say I didn't notice any difference. The timers are the same, and you're still given way too many pins to clip on that one minigame after a certain point. The mouse still sucks for controlling the lockpick minigame and the hacking minigame. The minigames in AP were fucking terrible, and the game would have been better with just a static skill check to open locks/hack computers/etc.

I have started with no minigame skill and have tasted how butthurt it can be. Taking minigame skill definitely lowers (lowered, I played that game in the past) the difficulty level setting down to the point of beatable by general human populace (including me), maybe you are not investing in it enough? User experience such as mouse control not included though.
And by codex standards nobody has any idea of what role-playing actually is, but we can agree on what role-playing can include. Character attributes/skills directly dominate shooting/minigaming definitely can be part of the role-playing system.
Also they provide gadgets exactly for you to skip minigames if your character is not up to it.

 

[Lhynn]

Xor is right and wrong at the same time, as usual. The minigames difficulty does go down when you invest skillpoints on them, but unless you unlock and cap it to the max, the near end game minigames will have the highest nearly unbeatable difficulty, as if you had invested no points into the skill in the first place, which is shit.

 

[Tigranes]

Investing points has a significant difference in minigame difficulty. They become piss easy if you invest a lot of points. Or you invest points to bypass them with EMP. Endgame minigames are also affected, just not quite as much because they are still meant to be fairly difficult. I don't think you'd want a mechanic which makes them trivially easy with skillpoint investment, that would also be unbalanced. They just needed better controls on the PC - the control lag on the lockpick and hacking minigames were what made them too hard / frustrating. Some of that is now addressed, and for me, after the first playthrough, they're all quite easy.

 

[Lhynn]

Investing points has a significant difference in minigame difficulty. They become piss easy if you invest a lot of points. Or you invest points to bypass them with EMP. Endgame minigames are also affected, just not quite as much because they are still meant to be fairly difficult. I don't think you'd want a mechanic which makes them trivially easy with skillpoint investment, that would also be unbalanced. They just needed better controls on the PC - the control lag on the lockpick and hacking minigames were what made them too hard / frustrating. Some of that is now addressed, and for me, after the first playthrough, they're all quite easy.

Nope, imagine they have a difficulty from 1 to 7 (not sure how many degrees of difficulty there are). Points in the skill lowers the difficulty, game progression ups the difficulty. if you dont pick it as a main skill you will run into difficulty 7 minigames in the late game. Even if you have invested points in the skill to max the first unlocked tier. Its not for all of them, but the harder ones will be like this, so its always wise to keep items with you to sort those out.

 

[Tigranes]

Maybe I remember wrongly, since I now never put points in minigame related skills (or it just becomes trivially easy). Still, I'd argue that's actually good design, since those trees also give you lots of other perks - they shouldn't make minigames too easy. Again, the problem at release was the horrible mouse lag that affected the entire game and made everything feel much worse than they were.

 

[RK47]

Alpha Protocol had the most creative minigames ever. You people are just suck at hand-eye coordination.

This is something to be about?

 

[J_C]

Alpha Protocol had the most creative minigames ever. You people are just suck at hand-eye coordination.

This is something to be about?

I'm just saying that although I'm as average as anybody when it comes to gaming skills, I could do the minigames in the game. I failed at them sometimes, yes, but I could manage them overall without frustration. The only problem with the minigames is that the PC controls were shit and that affected the minigames, maked them harder. But the concept of the minigames were good.

 

[Stokowski]

But the concept of the minigames were good.

 

[RK47]

OK I get it J_C
Grats on being good at mini-games.
I didn't like the mini-games TBH, but yeah not putting any points on tech would make hacking frustrating in AP. That's the point.
Not a perfect design but makes sense.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

South Park minigames were a breeze, you guys just need to play more .

 

[J_C]

South Park minigames were a breeze, you guys just need to play more .

We are talking about Alpha Protocol mini games. :D

 

[SuicideBunny]

alpha prot minigames and thief 3 lockpicking were the only minigames i ever enjoyed and thought they fit the actions they were trying to represent pretty well...

the button mashing in south park is just meh and the emo dancing should feature long empty sequences interrupted by a single button press and be a total pushover to fit what it tries to represent.

 

[Xor]

I have gamer reflexes. That is not the issue here. The last time I played AP, I literally couldn't beat the lockpick minigame with more than 3 pins because the pins would move so slowly that time would run out around the 3rd pin regardless of how fast I moved the mouse. Mouse lag made the pin minigame harder than it needed to be as well. The hacking minigame was just tedious. I ended up using cheat engine to freeze the timer.

I don't know if that was just an issue with my setup (I was playing on a shitty laptop with low framerate) or what, but I remember having similar problems (although not to the point where I needed to cheat) on previous playthroughs. And after doing a quick google search, it's easy to find several people complaining about the same issues I was having. Even if the minigames worked flawlessly for some people, the fact is they didn't work for everyone. Just saying "well I had no problems" or "just use EMPs" or whatever doesn't excuse these problems.

Back on topic, I had no problems with the south park minigames except for the DDR one which I expected to work with WASD and it was mapped to the arrow keys instead (I still think that's awful design - the arrow keys aren't used for anything else AFAIK and there's no indication that you should use them rather than WASD).