Zomg said:
I'm the only person on the codex that would wreck it and I haven't gotten new game itchy enough to play it. My big angle for shitting on hack and fags would be that the hardest single player game is pretty fucking easy and/or the challenge, gameplay, whatever is illegitimate. Tthe stuff they jerk off over is so immeasurably better in earnestly competitive multiplayer games it's like they're downing shots of Listerine to get drunk.
Clock Wizardry 4 without a faq and get back to me. I might stop laughing.
You need to remember that the hack/tactics crowd is coming from a time (a) before the internet and (b) when games where designed so that only a very few people would finish them. Finishing a game wasn't standard then, but a rare achievement, even for those who poured massive gamehours into it. It was a time when it was standard in adventure games to hit multiple insta-death impasses in some latish section of the game, each requiring that you did some incredibly unintuitive combination of actions earlier on, with absolutely no indication of what it is you needed to do/not do, and no way of going back for it (and usually only one saveslot, so you had to start from the beginning). Yes, in some cases they actually intended for you to solve it only by trying every single combination of weird actions, movements, orders of events, from which a small and very dedicated percentage might luck onto the right combo. And those games weren't 'ultra-hard' by standards of the time.
Wiz4 in particular is - by modern definitions - quite impossible to finish without a walkthrough (and those weren't around then). Even to those used to playing games which required months of 'learning-by-iteration', doing something marginally different each death to see what happens, mapping and re-mapping areas by hand on graph paper, with all the tricks (mirrors, teleports, squares that rotate your direction without you knowing, false walls, rooms that change between several designs as you go, teleports that put you into another room without telling you and where you can't see the different when you first port in, etc), its map-puzzles were truly absurd. You couldn't even pause the game to think for too long, as there was an insta-death enemy that moved in real time (while you go in turn-based) who started on a random level and killed you when he reached you.
That genre of gaming wasn't killed by multiplayer challenge. A higher proportion of counterstrike players go competitive than the proportion of dedicated Wiz4 players at the time who beat the game (let alone the best ending) without help. That genre of gaming was killed off primarily by automap (the map puzzles was where most of the challenge was, the combat was just a logistics exercise except when you got ported/trapdoored to a different level and the combat was there to wear and kill you for taking too long to find your way back to the surface), then by multiple save slots and quick-load (often you had to pull the disk out of the drive at the right time, risking ruining it, if you wanted to avoid the game writing over your savefiles when you died), then by the need to actually give players info about the combat system rather than having the 'figure out by trial and error (no internet, remember) what each spell/class/stat does and how you increase them' as part of the puzzle, and then finally and completely by the internet making puzzle-games irrelevent.
