WTF?! Why did they do that?!

[Forest Dweller]

On topic though, I wish they had improved running on water in Ninja Gaiden. Real pain having to keep repeatedly tapping the button over and over. Just simply having to hold the button down instead would have been an improvement.

That's how it was in Sigma.

So are you basically spending money in NG2 on upgrades then?

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

@on the topic of ghost fish

I don't know what the command is for Sigma, but in Black you can tap A to jump, then when you're in the air hit X (quick attack) using the Dragon Sword. You'll do a forward moving spin attack that has priority over the fish. Once you hit the ground roll, then jump again, press X, repeat. The fish won't be able to touch you, but it takes longer than with the flails (which take practice to get good at). This move is also good for extending your jumps in the platforming sections.

And I just played Black on Normal a month ago (RROD + removal of HD = no more NGB saves ) and had so much more money than I could possibly spend. Only missed 1 or 2 scarabs as well I think. Not bad for not having played in a year or two.

@on topic:

That stupid exploding Armadillo in NG2. :evil: That shit was sooo dirty. You fight the boss, and then it goes to what you think is a cutscene... and wait... you died? Must have been a glitch. Nope happened again. What the fuck? Repeat. Then I go online and I find I need to block during the cutscene? Pretty much the definition of intuitive, since it's the only time you have to do anything in any of the games immediately after dispatching a boss. The flying fortress level was hilarious though, where they comment on the CIA chick or whatever (The pilot: there's an intruder! And she's hot! Oh god~ *explosions*) and also I think they talk about deploying the Armadillo. Also, I was not fond of the water sections at all. There was also that really lame part by the waterwheel where there are hordes of the respawning mine jellyfish that are incredibly pointless and lame since they respawn so fast, literally right in front of you for no apparent reason.

The jungle/Vietnam level with the loads of rocket soldiers/rocket shooting hovercraft was a bitch as well, and the cave boss fight with the worm was also downright terrible. Just stand in a side cave and hold down Y. Fun.

@ Dicksmoker:
In NG2 the number of items you can carry scales with difficulty. I believe this is true for the other games as well. On normal I want to say you can carry at least five partial heal potions. There are a lot more weapons for you to spend money on in this one, and I think there are more frequent merchant stations, so if you are using a ton of gear, you can buy more provided you have the cash. On the Normal and Hard difficulties this should be a non issue if you've played Black. Moving to Very Hard, however, is a huge ramp up in difficulty.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

X-Com: Apocalypse. I just remembered how much of a design clusterfuck this game is.

Let's start with the vehicles. They basically come in two flavours: Ground-based and flying. It doesn't matter what ground-based vehicle you send out, if the road underneath it is destroyed, the vehicle is insta-killed. Even the tanks. And seeing how roads have fewer hitpoints than your averagely-sized rat, that renders all the ground-based vehicles useless.

Then there's the personnel management. Somehow they managed to turn a decently capable game element from a previous game in the series into micromanagement hell. Armour now comes in parts, for example. It got really tiresome to manage the people stationed at one base, which might explain why so few players built a second base.

The enemies, with a few exceptions, are dull (they even come in dull colours) and somehow seem less lively than in both previous X-Com games. Though you will be shitting your pants when you meet your first Megaspawn, and again if you ever came across that King Kong-sized alien that usually lay waste to half the city.

Even though the game brags much about its AI, the last place you'll encounter it is in the Alien enemies. Their combined intellect is a few points higher than a sack of bricks. But if you go up against human opponents, however, you're in for a fight.

One of the monster types were the infamous Brainsuckers, a Facehugger wannabe* that would try to latch on to your agent's head and permanently take control of them. I can't remember exactly how it was done, but by either laying on the ground or flying, you could make it impossible for them to "hit" with their attack - they'd just jump around like ugly bunnies.

And, of course, having both Real Time and Turn-based in the same game. We all know how wonderfully that's worked out, don't we?


*They're actually far more akin to Headcrabs, but X-Com Apocalypse came before Half-Life, so they can suck it hard.

 

[Dark Matter]

There's a lot of essense but I never found a way to collect any of it without getting bitten. At least until all the fish were dead. Any pause and I would get bit.

As for the money, I'm a firm believer that if a game keeps giving it to you you should be able to keep spending it, except maybe at the very end. Otherwise it is just pointless. If they want to avoid item spam they should just give you less money.

For the ghost fish: Equip Dragon Sword. Jump in any direction and press X while in the air. Keep spamming that attack till they're all dead. It works flawlessly, you won't get bitten a single time.

 

[Fat Dragon]

So are you basically spending money in NG2 on upgrades then?

Weapon enhancements, arrows and knives, health and magick restoratives, and occasionally they'll sell an amulet (or piece of an amulet) that increases your health bar. I don't remember if they sell anything that increases magick slots or new spell scrolls, or items that increse spell level, been a while since I've played. NG2 also doesn't have any armlet accessories like the previous game to buy.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

They released episode 2 of the new monkey iland game today.

They came with a control scheme in which you have to hold on the mouse button to walk, or use WASD on keyboard. No clicking were you want to go anymore.

BAD decision. They could easily implement BOTH styles.

 

[Shannow]

I just remembered another WTF?!? game: Sadly I have to admit that this time kc is mostly right and I didn't like it (whereas I liked FO3 better than expected).
Warhammer: Mark of Chaos: Now I hadn't been following its development but Dark Omen is one of my favourite games and any game even half as good would have been worth playing. I didn't expect too much from MoC, nowadays you simply can't.
But the game had quite a few WFT? moments/decisions:
Played the demo on my old system and it c r a w l e d ... with all settings set to minimum. A PC game that doesn't scale well and isn't a shooter is a big no no. My system wasn't that bad. Played the full game on my current system, though, and that was fine.
But the big WTF was that they'd done away with the Warhammer rules! Why? And why substitute them with vapid dross? The whole units-experience scheme was also fucked up. Units had only 3 experience levels, gained them incredibly fast, got larger with higher exp and got some meaningless stat-improvements. In DO an improvement of 1 was significant and you'd notice it in battles. In MoC they also had improvements of 1 or 2 for level-ups, but those changed the stats from 50 ---> 52 There were other bad design decisions but they aren't as much WTF.
What is were the loading times. It had loading times of 1 - 3 minutes. That compares to Gothic loading times. Only in Gothic the whole world would be loaded and unless you fucked up you could play for a few hours without further loading. In MoC few battles would take more than 30 minutes. The duels would usually take less than one minute ---> 2 minutes to load the duel, another minute to load the campaign map again after the duel. 3 minutes of loading for less than a minute of gameplay (which sucked, too) WTF!?!
Then there are the heroes: They were nerfed in later patches but they are still totally overpowered. The average hero could beat 1 - 3 elite units. When I played through the game my firemage nearly beat the last mission by himself. WTF? And the balancing between the heroes was bad, too. My endgame demonprince was actually significantly weaker than my endgame imperial soldier. WTF? In DO heroes were powerful but they could hardly take on enemy units by themselves and leveled very slowly. Especially the wizards could become very useful but it was a challenge to get them there and they still depended very much on luck.

Oh, characters and campaign story were crap too, but the visuals were ok and I liked the VOs.
/WTF-rant