Yeah, I don't want to derail the thread so I'm not going to link everything he's ever said but for starters MILF has a very in-depth (and imo fair) post about why he dislikes FF IX right here.
As for Resi 4, yeah I'm not seeing the hate. It's been ages since I've played it (and this thread reminds me that I need to play it again) but I recall it being great fun.
Nope, just never actually saw a thread where you said more than "FFIX/T is bad. Prove me wrong."Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF
Son, are you high?
You have a funny definition of action.But it's literally one of the best action games of its entire console generation. It's not perfect and it has flaws, but it's still absolutely amazing fun.
That's kind of funny seeing as it had better controls, a better setting, better enemies, better story (though when you're comparing something to RE4's story that's some seriously low hanging fruit), and was just all around better than RE4 in every way that a game could possibly be better than another game.Things Dead Space did right:
- It was in space
- That part where you can kill Isaac by getting him stabbed in the eyeball
Things Dead Space did not do right:
- Every other metric by which one can judge a videogame
I was hoping to avoid getting into this, because I've honestly broken down why RE4 is terrible so many times since it's release that it's getting a bit tedious, but you seem to be in need of a reminder so here we go:
1) It's not a horror game: it tries to pretend a little bit in the beginning with the village which also happens to be the only decent part of the game, but that goes out the window right around the first time you get swarmed by a mob of enemies. Any illusions that this game is a horror game on any level are gone in that instant, never to be seen again for the entirety of the rest of the game.
2) Tank controls: for some reason people complain about these with the originals quite a bit, but never have a problem with the fact that RE4 has the exact same movement controls. Cognitive dissonance much? But the difference is that in the older games, most enemies were slow and easy to run past since there were rarely more than a few on screen. But RE4 is supposed to be an action game? Why does it control like a slow paced survival horror game then?
3) Can't move while aiming: oh that's why, because it's not really an action game. It's a stand in one spot and shoot at the slowly advancing wave of enemies game. Gee, that's really interesting. So what do you do when that slowly advancing wave of enemies is getting too close? Stop aiming, run to the other side of the area and do it all again of course. If that's your idea of action then you must be on some good drugs my friend. Please tell me where you got them because I'd like to try some.
4) Doing it wrong one quick time event at a time: I don't actually have a huge issue with quick time events when they're done right. They're not great in and of themselves, but they can be done in ways that aren't annoyingly bad. Sadly no one told Capcom that. Not only will failing quick time events in RE4 often end in your immediate death, they frequently change the button you need to press the second time around basically guaranteeing that if you fail a QTE once, you're going to fail it twice because Capcom wanted to have some lulz at your expense.
5) Aiming: by far the worst offender in the game, the laser sight. It's not a terrible idea really, except that it only shows up on objects and enemies that you can shoot, meaning it won't show up on the ground, on buildings, or walls, or anything else that might be standing in front of or behind the enemy you're trying to hit. So until the laser sight is on the enemy, you don't really know where it is at all. Now, it would be something you could compensate for if the camera was always centered in the same place over your shoulder while aiming, or if the laser itself always centered in the middle of the screen, but it doesn't. So what ends up happening is that you spend even more time running from enemies because you spend more time trying to find where the damn gun is pointing, making the already long waves of enemies even longer, and for absolutely no reason other than Capcom were too stupid to realize that the laser showing up on levels which are being rendered in real time might be a good idea. There's no excuse for it. There's no technical reason this wasn't possible, and no logical reason to leave it out. They just didn't think of it and it makes battles even more annoying than they already are because of the rest of the troutty controls.
6) It's at least twice as long as it should be: this game is long. Very long. I think I clocked in somewhere between 15-20 hours when I played it? I might be a little off since it was years ago and the game wasn't worth the one play through, let alone a second. And what is most of it made up of? Slowly killing off long slow waves of enemies. The same trout you're doing in the first hour is pretty much the same trout you're doing in the last hour, with no real changes except to make the enemies even more annoying to finish off. Sure they break it up a bit here and there with some dogs, or an enemy that's a confused mix of Jason Vorhees and Leatherface, but the gameplay really isn't that different by the end compared to where you started and most changes to the enemies make things more tedious rather than more enjoyable. Shooting thrown axes out of the air or trying to kill guys wearing helmets that prevent headshots isn't really making the already annoying and dull combat any less annoying and dull. Even worse, some of the things they throw in to try and change things up make things actively worse. Good luck with that part where Ashley is walking along a ledge pulling leavers for you and you have to shoot the guys that try and attack her if you haven't bought a scoped rifle. And odds are you haven't bought a scoped rifle because it was never required up until that point (unless you just have some sort of fetish for reducing your visual field to match your lack of mobility). Hope you have enough money saved to buy one or a save from earlier in the game to revert to.
I could probably go on, but that's more than enough and it's been a while since I played the game so I may be forgetting a thing or two. Might as well throw in a quick mention for the boss battles though since they tend to be faster paced than the regular enemies you fight, which inevitably leads to you taking damage simply because it's not possible for you to move out of the way or aim fast enough. Simply put, RE4 is a third person shooter made by people who didn't actually know how to make a third person shooter. And pretty much every single issue I just named was fixed in the first Dead Space. It played like RE4 would have if it was made by a competent development team.
I really don't get why you're comparing it to Dead Space a game which came out 3 years and a console generation later during a period when pretty much the entire industry had a raging hard-on for FPS or TPS games so development for those types of games was a lot more refined.
It's like arguing that Destruction Derby sucks because Burnout did everything better. Or that the original Gran Turismo sucks because the original Forza Motorsport did everything better. When both of the aforementioned were fantastic games in the context of what was on the market at the time they were released.
Had RE4 come out after Dead Space then maybe I'd understand the avenue you're coming from which coincidentally is also one of the many reasons why RE6 got universally slammed by critics.
(also to add to the uncannyville in this thread, the things me and MILF agree on are quite numbered... perhaps this is Freaky Friday...)
Last edited by Aulayna; 05-15-2013 at 03:55 PM.
You act as though shooters with better controls didn't exist when RE4 came out. This is patently false. MINOR EDIT: In fact, a quick look at release dates shows me the original SOCOM was released about 2-3 years before RE4. A third person shooter which didn't control like ass I might add. Dual analogue stick movement and aiming isn't something we magically got down after the 360 and PS3 came out. We pretty much had it down more than a decade ago.
You'll also notice that nothing which I criticized RE4 for would have anything to do with being developed three years earlier for a previous console generation since none of it's problems would have actually been solved by simply throwing more advanced hardware at the problem. Case in point being RE5 which not only didn't fix a single thing I mentioned, but actually made other aspects of the game worse than what was in RE4.
Another edit: I just want to be clear here that RE4 isn't something I played a couple of years ago and didn't like when viewed through the lens of having played everything that came after it. I pre-ordered it on the Gamecube, I played it when it came out, and all of these problems I had with it were problems I had with it from day one. Not only could I think of ways to improve pretty much every issue I came across as I went through, I had already been playing third person shooters that played better than it did for years. Even comparing this game to its contemporaries does it no favours except maybe in production values because looking better than most other games of its day was the only thing it had going for it. The first time I played Dead Space, and part of the reason I liked it and mention it so much in comparison is because it's the sort of game RE4 should have been in 2005. It controlled the way RE4 should have, it had aiming that wasn't completely broken, it wasn't twice as long as any sane person could justify it being, it had enemies that weren't completely tedious to fight, and it wasn't broken up by some absolutely moronic game sequences.
First person shooters did yes - there were a lot of them. Third person over-the-shoulder shooters that handled well and involved cover mechanics were still very much in their infancy then. (just like QTEs weren't exactly widespread back then either)
The only ones I can really think of are MGS2 and possibly Siphon Filter and those are hardly comparable when I assume as you're using Dead Space as a point of comparison we're referring to similar third-person views to the likes of Mass Effect.
Go back and read my edit. Third person shooters were absolutely not in their infancy unless you were a Japanese developer and years behind the west already. Also, cover mechanics have nothing to do with anything since RE4 didn't actually have a cover mechanic.
Also, the argument that FPS titles had controls down but TPS didn't is utter bulltrout at face value. The only thing separating the two is that in a TPS you can see your character and the camera rotates around them. Even if it weren't for the fact that there were third person shooters getting right years before RE4 came out, there's still no excuse for a developer not realizing that you could just lift those FPS controls that work so much better than your TPS controls pretty much as is and end up with a better controlling game. In fact the only excuse I can come up with for not figuring that out years after other games did is sheer incompetence.
1) Yeah fighting big colossal monstrosities or having enemies heads errupt into parasites isn't horrific or anything. Nor is the general concept of humans being controlled by parasites. And really, NONE of the Resident Evil games were actually that scary apart from that one bit in RE1 where dogs jump through a window which subsequently then has you twitching every time you walk past any window. That's about it. Resident Evil was always ironically the B-Movie in the genre it originally created.
2) Because said tank controls actually worked better on an environment you could move around freely for the most part rather than pre-rendered back drops where most of the tank control issues came from the forever switching camera angles when the backdrop changed?
3) You mean just like the vast majority of other games at the time which often involved simply hiding around a corner and taking pot shots as the AI predictably came toward you?
4) This isn't something specific to RE4 really. You either like QTEs or you don't. RE4 didn't really have them in abundance either and I think more modern games are far more guilty of doing botch jobs of them than RE4 ever was.
5) I don't really recall anything being particularly hard - let alone due to potentially cumbersome aiming and I found the controls responsive enough that aiming was never really a major issue. Infact, if anything, I recall the laser making aiming such a non-issue that it was actually hard to actually miss a target.
6) This is such a generic complaint that is more a matter of personal taste than bad game design. This criticism could be leveled at a whole host of games that have you doing the same trout from start to finish and RE itself always got a bit of rap for being too short - so heaven forbid they tried to tackle that one. As for the sniper rifle thing, really that game threw so much money and ammo at you that space or weaponry was never really a massive concern and in a game about killing things why wouldn't you make sure you have various tools of killing things at your disposal.
I honestly must've played a completely different game to you as I really don't remember the controls being at all cumbersome or tank like for me back then and the one thing that did annoy me about that game (Ashley) had nothing to do with controls. The rest of your criticisms sound more like actual personal preference issues than RE4 itself being a bad game.
SOCOM, cool, find me 5 other third person shooters that handled well and didn't switch to first person view when aiming. I legitimately can't recall there being that many of these types of games on the market at the time. As for the cover thing, yeah you're right, I was getting that mixed up with the whole barricading doors with bookcases thing etc
You do realize that prior to RE4's release Capcom was playing it up to be the scariest RE ever right? And then it, well, wasn't anything like that. And I will fully admit that the earlier RE titles are not scary, but they still had great horror atmosphere. Lot's of exploration, long stretches of nothing really happening, great music. Sure they fell more into the Texas Chainsaw massacre slasher type jump scares horror than something like Silent Hill or Amnesia does, but there's certainly a place for that in the market. But RE4 wasn't even trying to be horror on the same level as the older RE games anymore, and that's some low hanging fruit to fail to live up to. And all because they really wanted to try and be an action game. As it is, the only horrific thing about RE4 is playing it for five times as long as it takes to beat RE2 and realizing you're only half way through.
Just because you weren't running into walls quite as often doesn't mean that the tank controls worked. Turning and evading enemies was still a pain in the ass. Actually, probably a bigger pain in the ass since the games entire focus was now on combat rather than on exploration and puzzle solving like the earlier games. In fact, I have to say that the older games (at least after the addition of auto-aim in 2) actually control better because the controls at least made some sense with how everything else in the game had to be designed, and they didn't dramatically hinder your ability to move in the tight spaces of earlier titles. But controls that cumbersome have absolutely no place in an action title.2) Because said tank controls actually worked better on an environment you could move around freely for the most part rather than pre-rendered back drops where most of the tank control issues came from the forever switching camera angles when the backdrop changed?
Bad AI is one thing. An action game designed with the intention of the player just standing still and shooting everything as it slowly walks towards them is another. Let's be honest here, a game based around standing in one place and just shooting enemies as they slowly walk towards you is about as boring a design as I can imagine for something that's trying to be an action game. There is no action there, there is certainly no real challenge (aside from fighting the controls when you do have to move and aim), and it's just not fun. Granted, combat in the earlier RE titles wasn't that fun either, but at least they didn't base their entire games on it.3) You mean just like the vast majority of other games at the time which often involved simply hiding around a corner and taking pot shots as the AI predictably came toward you?
Other games do QTE's as bad or worse so I should give RE4 a pass? No offense, but that's the silliest argument I've seen in days. RE4 had terrible QTE's, end of story. I don't care if others did it worse or if modern games still do it poorly. It doesn't make them suck any less in RE4.4) This isn't something specific to RE4 really. You either like QTEs or you don't. RE4 didn't really have them in abundance either and I think more modern games are far more guilty of doing botch jobs of them than RE4 ever was.
When did I say hard? Sure, aiming was easy once you managed to find the red dot, but finding it was the problem. That was the only tricky part about aiming. But there was no reason that problem needed to exist in the first place, so any time I was waving the screen around trying to find it instead of quickly centering on my target and shooting didn't have to happen at all. It's a stupid mistake on Capcom's part and it absolutely detracts from the experience for me. Not because it makes the game harder, but because it's cumbersome and it wastes time making most fights take longer than they need to. And given how long most fights are and how often they come up throughout the game, it's an unforgivable mistake as far as I'm concerned. And that they repeated the exact same mistake in RE5 tells me that it was probably the result of developer stupidity than simple oversight.5) I don't really recall anything being particularly hard - let alone due to potentially cumbersome aiming and I found the controls responsive enough that aiming was never really a major issue. Infact, if anything, I recall the laser making aiming such a non-issue that it was actually hard to actually miss a target.
"This complaint could apply to all kinds of other games so it must be silly." Yeah, sorry, no. I've already stated exactly why I feel the games combat is boring and repetitive. In fact, it changes very little over the course of the game. Now that's not such a big issue for a game that you can beat in a few hours. Hell, even if RE4 was 10 hours long, it wouldn't be as much of a problem. But we're talking about a game which is 90% combat, and where 90% of that combat never really changes or gets more difficult. More tedious as enemies get harder to kill thanks to armour and shields? Absolutely. But never does it get harder because you actually need to learn any new skills. In fact, that thing I said about most fights being a case of stand in one place, shoot enemies as they advance, run away and start it over again in another part of the room? That pretty much never changes from the beginning of the game until the end. Every battle plays out the same exact way, the only difference is they just get longer as they throw tougher versions of the exact same enemies at you. That's not something that holds up over the length of a decent RPG. That is not something that stays interesting 20 hours in. That is something that simply is not good game design.6) This is such a generic complaint that is more a matter of personal taste than bad game design. This criticism could be leveled at a whole host of games that have you doing the same trout from start to finish and RE itself always got a bit of rap for being too short - so heaven forbid they tried to tackle that one.
And yet when I got to that part I had to go back to an earlier save in order to have enough money to buy it because I'd spent everything at the last point the weapon seller showed up and didn't have enough for the rifle and the scope. As for why I wouldn't buy it, why would I buy a weapon I had no use for rather than buying better versions of the ones I was using as well as ammo and everything else? None of the battles before that happen at a range necessitating a scope and I'm not the sort of person who is going to spend half the game staring at a zoomed in circle in the center of my screen if I don't have to. Arguing that it's somehow my fault for buying a weapon I neither needed until then, nor even wanted is laughable. Not surprisingly, I also spent the rest of the game with said rifle in my inventory only to never really need it again. Again, that's just bad game design. Either make it doable without or make it so there's no way I can screw myself. I literally tried that portion several times with a pistol and shotgun just so I wouldn't have to go back to an earlier save and redo a sizable chunk of the game.As for the sniper rifle thing, really that game threw so much money and ammo at you that space or weaponry was never really a massive concern and in a game about killing things why wouldn't you make sure you have various tools of killing things at your disposal.
Since I've technically already proven you wrong about this part I'm really not under any obligation to prove you more wrong, but what the hell, I'll play along. Here's a list of third person games that included such wonderful things as moving while aiming, strafing, and used two analogue sticks instead of one. I'll even include the years they were released so you can see just how far behind the 8 ball RE4 was already in 2005.SOCOM, cool, find me 5 other third person shooters that handled well and didn't switch to first person view when aiming. I legitimately can't recall there being that many of these types of games on the market at the time.
Max Payne - 2001
SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs - 2002
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - 2002
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne - 2003
SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs - 2003
Kill Switch - 2003 (also invented the cover system used by Gears of War interestingly enough)
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow - 2004
Red Dead Revolver - 2004
Star Wars: Battlefront - 2005 (this one's more contemporary to RE4 since it was released a few weeks before I suppose)
Anyway, not all of those are what I'd consider the best implementations of dual stick movement and aiming in a third person game (Kill Switch and Red Dead Revolver I don't remember being very amazing. Not bad, but not great), nor are these the only ones by any stretch (just the ones I'm most familiar with). But the point is, games had this stuff largely sorted out as far back as 2001. And I would gladly go on record as saying that when it comes to controls, I would rather play any one of these than RE4. RE4's control scheme is slow and cumbersome compared to any of these. And the worst part is that they can't even say they were just too far along in development to do anything else considering they scrapped the version of RE4 they showed at E3 as late as 2003 and started over from there.
Anyway, I think I'm going to need a break from debating this further. I'm not sure we're going to convince each other of anything really and these long posts are exhausting.
May 9, 1998
At night, we played poker with Scott the guard, Alias and Steve the researcher.
Steve was very lucky, but I think he was cheating. What a scumbag.
May 10th 1998
Today, a high ranking researcher asked me to take care of a new monster. It looks like a gorilla without any skin. They told me to feed them live food. When I threw in a pig, they were playing with it... tearing off the pig's legs and pulling out the guts before they actually ate it.
May 11th 1998
Around 5 o'clock this morning, Scott came in and woke me up suddenly. He was wearing a protective suit that looks like a space suit. He told me to put one on as well. I heard there was an accident in the basement lab. It's no wonder, those researchers never rest, even at night.
May 12th 1998
I've been wearing this annoying space suit since yesterday, my skin grows musty and feels very itchy. By way of revenge, I didn't feed those dogs today. Now I feel better.
May 13th 1998
I went to the medical room because my back is all swollen and feels itchy. They put a big bandage on my back and the doctor told me I did not need to wear the space suit any more. I guess I can sleep well tonight.
May 14th 1998
When I woke up this morning, I found another blister on my foot. It was annoying and I ended up dragging my foot as I went to the dog's pen. They have been quiet since morning, which is very unusual. I found that some of them had escaped. I'll be in real trouble if the higher-ups find out.
May 15th 1998
Even though I didn't feel well, I decided to go see Nancy. It's my first day off in a long time but I was stopped by the guard on the way out. They say the company has ordered that no one leave the grounds. I can't even make a phone call. What kind of joke is this?!
May 16th 1998
I heard a researcher who tried to escape from this mansion was shot last night. My entire body feels burning and itchy at night. When I was scratching the swelling on my arms, a lump of rotten flesh dropped off. What the hell is happening to me?
May 19, 1998
Fever gone but itchy. Hungry and eat doggy food. Itchy Itchy Scott came. Ugly face so killed him. Tasty.
4.
Itchy.
Tasty.
I don't mind the new Resident Evils. Resident Evil 5 was the first RE game I had ever beaten. Resident Evil 6 is wicked fun too, but that may be because I'm taking it at face value and not trying to find a fault with the game.
RE4 haters...
4 was not trying to be Dead Space. 4 was trying to be a barely-serious action game that reveled in the nonsense of the RE universe. The old RE games tried and failed miserably at atmosphere and storytelling so Shinji Mikami said "well...no one takes this crap seriously anyway. Let's just have a ball with it."
And so we got midget Spanish Napoleon and a giant robotic statue of himself and a room full of lava.
Think of it this way. Go and watch the Code Veronica opening cutscene if you don't remembe it. Maybe also watch the scene in CV where Steve blasts through a window and shoots a Bandersnatch about 30 times...with two Lugers.
Resident Evil was already heading clearly towards Action but it was still trying to tell a serious story. RE4 realized that was stupid.
I used to be a huge, huge fan of the RE series but I am totally burnt out on everything except Zero. That game has a nostalgia bonus for me. Plus Billy Coen and Rebecca Chambers > all the other male and female leads.
Resident Evil Zero Soundtrack: Safe Haven (1080p) - YouTube
I enjoy classic RE tremendously, despite being god-awful at them. Gotta get through RE3, CV and Zero at some point.
I also enjoy the new generation ones - no, they're not the same, but I still have fun with them.
Matt and I got burnt out of RE6, but we'll be going back to it. When you get the little tag that you've played for like 30 hours and you've not even finished all the main campaigns once through? That feels p good. xD Although, having such a lengthy play time probably just means we suck at the game, tbh. Which is fair enough. We have fun while being awful!
I think with the classic RE games, the slightly clunky controls and the moving camera angles sort of make it that much scarier. That, and the fact that ammo is often in short supply.
With the 'modern' RE games, controls have, in general, improved, and ammo is more action-orientated and more plentiful. Also, there's alot more outdoor environments in these games which lessen the scare factor. Think of RE5. It's damn well sunny and bright, which sort of lessens the scare factor. That, and the fact that you have a second partner to help (or not) you. Classic RE games relied on narrow corridors, indoor, spooky environments, scare ammo and the fact that you're generally all alone.
Maybe Matt and I are just trout but in RE6 we often found ourselves fairly low on ammo. Now that we've finished it a twice we have unlocked some unlimited ammo, but there was often times that we'd be struggling on our first time through.RE5 never had this issue at all, that was really over-filled with ammo.
Resident Evil 5 was the best of the series, I think. I'm probably one of the few people in the world to think that but I've sunk more hours into that than the other 5 combined. Loved every second of it.I think I've played through the entire story with like 5 different EoFFers! Mercenaries was the best on that one too, cracking fun.
4 was darned fine and 6 was not bad. I still have a huge place in my heart for number 2 though. Oh, and 1. Barry smurfing Burton, let me tell you.
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