posted
Many of the people on this board probably don't particularly care about video games one way or another. Others don't particularly care to listen to others vent, particularly about something as unimportant and stupid as a twelve-year-old video game. The majority of those remaining are probably going to say, "Yeah, I get it, it's too hard... For you..."
If you're still reading, you've been warned.
So in my valiant efforts to prevent myself from buying a Game Boy, several months ago I picked up a doodad on clearance from Target. Manufactured by Coleco, it contains twenty old Sega Game Gear and Master System games, none of which are any threat to Nintendo's command of the handheld market, but most of which are at least good enough to kill some time on a bus or at a doctor's office.
Thus: Super Columns, one more in the ever-mounting line of Tetris-wannabes, involving descending lines of different-colored stones and trying to line up the ones that match horizontally, vertically, or diagonally to make them disappear before the onslaught reaches the top of your well-space.
Super Columns has a "Story Mode", with all the richness and narrative depth you might expect from a Tetris knockoff. You play against various computer-controlled "opponents"; vanishing lines of four or more stones, or destroying stones which cause others to chain into disappearing subsequently, causes rows of junk to appear at the bottom of your opponent's playing field, while causing such lines at the bottom of your own field to disappear. The opponent scoring similar combinations has the same effect on your own field.
So far, so good, and if that were all there were to it, it would be a fine little Tetris-wannabe.
But starting from your very first opponent, the opposition has advantages the human player does not.
While playing your first opponent, you periodically have to deal with a receiving a couple of lines of "stones" which don't match with themselves or any other color. In other words, you have to find some place to put them where they'll do minimal damage, and then they hinder you for the rest of the game... Not to mention that having to deal with pieces that can't possibly benefit you is a waste of time.
Facing your second opponent, you will periodically have to deal with five such "blocking" pieces in a row.
The third opponent randomly and without warning prevents you from rotating your pieces. Comparatively speaking, that was one of the easier matches.
The fourth randomly and without warning causes your rate of descent to quadruple.
And the fifth (and I'm guessing final) opponent does all of the above.
ARGH.
Did I mention that there's no option to continue once you lose to any of the opponents (which involves losing three matches?)
It truly boggles my mind that this ever made it through playtesting without someone complaining. Fair, symmetrical play, at least on early stages, seems like it ought to be a given in any sort of "competitive" game. It can be interesting to have "final bosses" whose abilities turn the player's expectations on their head, but starting at an inbalance and getting worse?
At the least, one has to wonder if the programmers were chronically insecure about the competitve abilities of their AI.
I think one of the foremost signs of a bad game is when you feel bad even when you're winning it. I like to think I'm reasonably good at the "well drop" genre; in this case, I feel like somewhere between half and nine-tenths of the game are going not towards success, but towards overcoming my opponent's unfair advantage.
Okay, end of rant, barring reply; feel free to bring up one's own bad game experiences, and my apologies if you've read through and found this tedious. Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
Speaking of steam, the steam engine thing on my cmoputer doesnt work.
Which means, apparently, that I can't even bring the video games I bought that use it onto my computer, as whenever I try it just says steam isn't working, try again.
I bought the Orange Box for $50, and I can't even use it... I can't even download it onto my computer, and I don't even WANT to go online with any of it!
Posts: 1577 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Try opening the steam install file and have it repair installation. I have to do that often to play portal.
Your rant does remind me of battleships for the game boy. When it was the computer's turn it was impossible for it to miss. It's choosing reticle would move around the screen until it fell over a ship and then it would choose that spot.
Posts: 2489 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
Can you play a versus game of Super Columns against the computer outside of the story mode, i.e., in which both you and the computer have the same abilities? If so, I don't see why the story mode can't make you play against extra-powerful opponents.
I can see that it would be annoying for the opponents to randomly mess up your game. Maybe the opponent could have a (visible) meter that charges as you play, charging faster the better you're doing, and let loose its power when its meter is full.
Posts: 781 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:It truly boggles my mind that this ever made it through playtesting without someone complaining. Fair, symmetrical play, at least on early stages, seems like it ought to be a given in any sort of "competitive" game.
But Sterling, how will you defeat the Buggers is you're trained in a fair arena?
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by 0Megabyte: Speaking of steam, the steam engine thing on my cmoputer doesnt work.
Which means, apparently, that I can't even bring the video games I bought that use it onto my computer, as whenever I try it just says steam isn't working, try again.
I bought the Orange Box for $50, and I can't even use it... I can't even download it onto my computer, and I don't even WANT to go online with any of it!
Luckily, Steam's inability to work on my machine prevented me from spending money on anything. I couldn't even get game demos to download.
I WANT PORTAL, DARN IT!!!
Posts: 3486 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Omega M.: Can you play a versus game of Super Columns against the computer outside of the story mode, i.e., in which both you and the computer have the same abilities? If so, I don't see why the story mode can't make you play against extra-powerful opponents.
Story mode appears to be the only mode that plays against an opponent. Since I'm not playing on an "actual" Game Gear, any options for playing against a human opponent are omitted.
I think what frustrates me most about the "feature" is that there's nothing you can do about it (it isn't like similar drop games where creating a set adjacent to "blocking" tiles makes them into something useful) and it seems to occur more or less independently of either your or your opponent's performance.
quote:Originally posted by Teshi: But Sterling, how will you defeat the Buggers is you're trained in a fair arena?
Apparently, by dropping columns of multi-colored stones on them... Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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I remember constantly being annoyed when the AI in RTS games starts cheating. It's completely blindsided me more than once when I play Civ 2 or AoE. There are other ways of making it difficult that at least leave you able to plan properly, without trying to account for randomly created uber-units flooding you.
I've never minded excessively hard games. I enjoy a difficult game, when it's well-designed, and you lose on your own mistakes, not on glitches or bad control. However, something that bothers me about certain RPG's (most notably Final Fantasy 4) is the way bosses are used as a way to counteract simplicity in the rest of the game. I got to the very end of the game, and my characters were at very high levels, high enough to easily kill any of the random monsters in the game. Then the final boss floored me. I seriously had to spend at least 2 hours level-grinding to finally beat the boss. No matter what strategies I came up with, the boss always ended up beating me on hit points and attack power alone. The worst part is that up until that point in the game, I'd gone through everything quite easily, with very little level-grinding. I had the same problem with Pokemon.
Posts: 1594 | Registered: Apr 2006
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posted
Yeah, I noticed that in Pokemon, too. In all of the Pokemon games I've played (Fire Red, Emerald, and Diamond), I've had to spend around 10 hours repeatedly trying to run my Pokemon through the final series of five trainers until the Pokemon were powerful enough to beat them all. It almost seems like each trainer in the final five is tougher than the previous one by the same amount as each boss trainer in the main game is tougher than the previous one in the main game---but there's no exploration, puzzle solving, or Pokemon capturing interspersed among the last five trainers.
But at least in those games, after your party's defeated you're able to keep the experience it gained (and you can do it so that you don't even have a net loss of money or items). In
SPOILER
Final Fantasy III, at the end you have to face six bosses, each spearated from the next by a monster-filled dungeon level (which you may need to explore to find a useful item), with no way to save or keep the experience you've gained in this gauntlet if you're defeated. (But you wouldn't want to save if you could, since once you start this boss sequence you can't leave to heal or get more items.) After spending too long getting to the last of these bosses and being defeated easily, I gave up and looked at a guide for how to get to the end.
Posts: 781 | Registered: Apr 2005
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