How would you fix your favorite flawed games?

[prfsnl_gmr]

Beyond Good & Evil - more forgiving photography requirements

Blaster Master - add a password or save system

Donkey Kong Country - add a widescreen aspect ratio permitting a larger field of view (and, therefore, fewer blind jumps and surprise enemies)

Double Dragon (NES) - get rid of the falling rocks in the cave at the end of level 3

God of War - get rid of Kratos’ lame facial hair

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door - remove the late-game fetch quest

[opa]

Glad to see there are others not okay with Comix Zone's health loss. I've never understood it and haven't gotten far because of it.

Harvest Moon - SNES

• - clean up the translation
  - more festivals during the year
  - extend the daytime clock
  - an inventory to collect crops/milk/eggs
  - maybe a couple more crop options
  - limit cow/chicken numbers to like 4 max; anything beyond that is unnecessary and slows the game down
  - have something to do during fall/winter other than take care of animals

[marurun]

Chillax, man. You’re reading meaning that isn’t there and certainly wasn’t intended.

[Sload Soap]

This is an interesting thread idea but I'm kind of the mind that flaws can make a game unique or give it personality an otherwise technically superior game doesn't have. Morrowind is janky as hell and has terrible signposting (aside from the literal signposts) but I wouldn't update it with Skyrim's excessive fast travel system or quest markers.

On the other hand, as much as I appreciate the patches for Simon's Quest that's a game that I think is fundamentally flawed. So while speeding up the day/night cycle or making gainig XP a bit faster helps, it doesn't really address what I see is an ugly looking game that lacks either the solid level design of its predecessor or the intelligent open ended design of say Metroid or Dragon's Trap. It'd have to be a completely different game at that point. It'd be Symphony of the Night basically.

But, I can think of a few proper ones. I'd probably want the skip feature Shenmue II introduced added to the first game. Last time I played Shenner's 1, I spent a lot of time flicking through my phone just waiting for Charlie's goddamn tattoo parlour to open.

I guess I'd fix the latter NES Mega Man games by having fewer Wily stages.

I'd fix the Uncharted and Last of Us games by actually attaching some gameplay less suited to a PS2 era shooter to the outstanding cinematics.

I'd make Alien: Isolation about 10 hours shorter and have you play as some random space janitor instead of Ripley's daughter.

I'd ban Cat Mario or Pink Gold Peach from ever appearing in a Mario Kart/Tennis/Golf/etc game ever again. Baby Rosalina? Piss right off.

The Lego games need a dedicated button for the character select menu. I've had to watch Hulk/Superman transform roughly 14,000 times recently and not sure why such a basic series of games still has this issue.

F1 Challenge needs the ability to skip the lap replay when you win a race. Two minutes of time wasted after every race.

This sort of falls into the loveable jank scenario but Rare really needed to cut back on how much stuff you needed to collect to see the end of their N64 platformers. I'm not saying cut it all out, some mad bastards love that stuff, but do like Mario 64 did and let the player get about 50-60% of items to see the ending.

[marurun]

I don’t know how many of you have played a TurboGrafx SuperCD game called ShapeShifter, but it’s a platformer where you get the ability to change into animal forms. It has a hub town and looks and sounds pretty good, but one key problem sinks it as a game: platform edge detection. The game tries to be “realistic” about where you stand on a platform. If you get too close to the edge you “slip” off the platform, and the point as which you slip off is when just one foot starts to edge off, making for very finicky jumping. It’s even worse with panther form, because you are a low, wide character, and as soon as you start to overhang the edge even a little you slip out and down. Some platform areas are replete with small platforms such that if you are in panther form even one mistake further up the screen has you slip and slide like a pachinko ball down to the bottom to your death. Every platform that might catch you in any other game simply sloughs you off and your downward slide continues. Simply replacing this with more “standard” platformer edge detection and letting you less realistically hang off the edge of platform would improve accessibility and fun greatly and redeem this game. I’ve read interviews with some of the team that made this game and they blame a German programmer they contracted who was apparently a good programmer but insistent about unforgiving mechanics.

[Gunstar Green]

Blaster Master - add a password or save system

The remixed port on Game Boy Color actually added passwords though the screen size makes it a little rough to play.

Off the top of my head I wish there was a quick save option in some of my favorite old sim games like Wing Commander, X-Wing/TIE Fighter and MechWarrior games, or at least a checkpoint system. I'm at the point in my life where I don't want to replay half-hour or longer missions because I screw up at the very end.

[marurun]

Chillax, man. You’re reading meaning that isn’t there and certainly wasn’t intended.

Yeah you're not in a position to tell people to chill when you pull out the ban hammer and start deleting posts if someone says the same to you . And no, telling people they're imagining things when calling you out doesn't make it better.

I'm telling you, while perfectly chill btw, what to avoid in the future since the behavior is toxic and it's not exactly the first time.

Yes, I can see that you’re inclined to read anything I post that disagrees with you as hostile. That doesn’t make it toxic or inappropriate. What I posted was not toxic. It was simply disagreement. Disagreement is not toxic. It wasn’t denigrating or dismissing. It wasn’t insulting or lazy. It wasn’t something you need to call out because I need to be “corrected”. Your tone this entire exchange has been condescending. So yes, please take a step back and ask yourself if your responses are appropriate or warranted. Mine are, and they were then, too.

[marurun]

I see both love and harsh words for Castlevania II, and I guess that's to be expected. I think if Castlevania II really rubbed you the wrong way it would take quite a bit to fix it such that you'd enjoy it. For those of us that gel with the game, however. I think there are a number of things that could make the experience smoother. My personal preferences for Castlevania II would be, as already mentioned, better signposting (that's a bit general a suggestion, but could probably be accomplished largely by having more useful clues in NPC dialogue and eliminating the misleading or outright false information from NPCs). It would also be nice to eliminate all the illusory floor tiles that you just fall through. I don't really think they accomplish anything except to pull the rug out from under the player and pull a Munson. If there's a place you need to get through the floor to somewhere below, simply make the floor tiles ones you can clear away with holy water. While more and/or more interesting bosses would certainly be welcome, I think changing NPC dialogue to provide more clear clues and direction and eliminating those illusory floor tiles would have a pretty big accessibility impact on the game. One additional possible enhancement could be making a minor graphical distinction for blocks that can be cleared with holy water. Not something super obvious, but some subtle visual clue.

[Sload Soap]

It's interesting scanning through the reddit thread PrezLev started as it seems a lot of people have some major issues with their favourite flawed games. For example one user has this list of issues with Assassins's Creed 4:

• remove trailing missions

• remove espionage missions

• remove current-day walking-simulator missions

• remove the whole assassins aspect

• make combat less repetitive and more challenging

• more enemy types, not just soldier, skilled soldier, and fat soldier

• game needs to be more challenging over all, naval combat too

If I had those sort of issues with a stealth game where I play as an assassin, I'm not sure I'd be able to consider it a favourite. This guy/gal wants to remove roughly 50% of the actual content of the game and its unique branding.

I also saw a few people saying they'd like to make the horses faster in Red Dead 2 but to me the flaw isn't that the horses move too slow, it's that Rockstar were too busy showing off the realise they'd made their gameworld bloated and unfun to explore. See, when you say that you want a faster method of travel what I read is that you want to get from point A-B quicker and the game either doesn't want you to do that or isn't interesting enough to make exploration worth it. Smaller flaws like this can point to much bigger issues with games on the whole and I'm not sure ironing them out sort of automatically fixes the base underlining problems some games have.

[pook99]

I see both love and harsh words for Castlevania II, and I guess that's to be expected. I think if Castlevania II really rubbed you the wrong way it would take quite a bit to fix it such that you'd enjoy it. For those of us that gel with the game, however. I think there are a number of things that could make the experience smoother. My personal preferences for Castlevania II would be, as already mentioned, better signposting (that's a bit general a suggestion, but could probably be accomplished largely by having more useful clues in NPC dialogue and eliminating the misleading or outright false information from NPCs). It would also be nice to eliminate all the illusory floor tiles that you just fall through. I don't really think they accomplish anything except to pull the rug out from under the player and pull a Munson. If there's a place you need to get through the floor to somewhere below, simply make the floor tiles ones you can clear away with holy water. While more and/or more interesting bosses would certainly be welcome, I think changing NPC dialogue to provide more clear clues and direction and eliminating those illusory floor tiles would have a pretty big accessibility impact on the game. One additional possible enhancement could be making a minor graphical distinction for blocks that can be cleared with holy water. Not something super obvious, but some subtle visual clue.

There are a few hacks out there that address these issues, I believe the one I played was called simons quest redaction and the game speeds up the day/night cycle text, doubles heart values to lessen grinding, changes clues to things that are helpful, and removed all fake blocks so you can just jump over pits instead of inching along tossing holy water everywhere. If your going to play the game, fan of the game or not, that patch is the way to do it. Personally, I will never play the original again since the romhack is superior in every way