Post your unhappy gaming down in here.

[Exhuminator]

Last week gave birth to the "happy gaming" thread. To balance out the yin with the yang, I think we should have this thread too. Howabout a place with the sole purpose of griping about your bad times with gaming? This can be tragic memories, or your most recent infuriating gaming experiences. Or just negative thoughts on gaming in general. If you're an unhappy gamer and you know it, then fist sized holes in your walls will surely show it.

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I'll start stuff off with a bad memory. One day when I was 9 years old I had spent hours trying to beat Alex Kidd in Miracle World. I finally made it to the final boss of the game. My dad and a friend of his had been watching me do this for a while, off and on. Right then though at the final boss, my dad asked me to go do a favor for him. So I paused the game, and went and did it. When I came back, I saw the Alex Kidd in Miracle World title screen. And my dad and his friend were laughing. Apparently my dad thought it would be hilarious to reset the game after I worked so hard to get there. Hilarious!

From that point on, I never played video games around my dad again.

[ElkinFencer10]

WOW that's a dick move.

My most recent gaming frustration (actually made me rage-quit last night though I'm going to keep playing tonight) was with Project Zero 2: Wii Edition and a few of the sub-boss ghosts in one of the chapters. I'll stick it in a spoiler tag in case someone hasn't played Fatal Frame/Project Zero 2 and doesn't want some Chapter 6 fights spoiled.

So there's this one battle where you fight these two little girl ghosts except that one is a doll and, therefore, takes no damage. The problem is that they're COMPLETELY indistinguishable from one another. You've got some crappy film that has unlimited ammo, but it does next to no damage, so your options are take like half an hour fighting her and probably taking some damage in the process or waste a lot of your better film fighting her because at LEAST half the time, you're going to hit the doll instead of the actual ghost.

After that, I had to fight a dollmaker's ghost. Now he doesn't actually attack, but he animates anywhere from one to three doll ghosts at a time that attack you, and they move pretty fast. You also can't damage or slow them down at all. The only way to prevent being hurt by them is to deal enough damage to the dollmaker to make him flinch, but since they move so fast and there are so many of the, it's almost impossible to get any kind of charge built up before you take a picture, making it really hard to deal enough damage to stop the dolls.

After THAT, I had to fight the damn girl and her doll doppelganger again. Same shit except with less space to run away, making the fight even more obnoxious. None of these fights are all that hard, per se, but GOD, all three of them are unbelievably obnoxious and annoying.

[MrPopo]

Pretty much the entirety of the last half of Odin Sphere. The game is gorgeous, but your attack animations are overly long and many times enemies resist hit stun, leading to you beginning a combo and the enemy recovering in the middle of your attack chain and knocking you out of it. Oswald and Velvet suffered the most from this because of the nature of their combos. And Velvet has the single most awful boss ever in her penultimate boss. You fight a dragon and his mage companion and the dragon likes to toss a ton of junk in the air that then sits on the ground before being sucked back in his mouth to be spat out again. It turns out the PS2 can't handle that much spritework, so the game turns into a slideshow whenever the junk is involved. And in the meantime you have to deal with the mage who has low HP but is one of the most infuriating enemies to fight. The mages can only be hit when they're stunned; otherwise they teleport away before you can do damage. The only way to stun them is for them to use an attack where they conjure four swords around you that drop into the ground (in an attempt to hit you), then you smack those swords with your weapon to hit the mage with them. Their usage of this attack is random, with several other attacks that are harder to dodge and deal a lot of damage being common. And did I mention the large rampaging dragon that likes to block your attempts to land the stun even when the mage cooperates? That boss took me multiple days to try and beat, with my PS2 left on while I was sleeping/at work so I could stay outside the boss stage (since you get infinite continues).

[Sarge]

For years, I felt guilty about something I did to my brother gaming-wise. He was playing The Guardian Legend, and for some reason, he had to leave to do something right at the final boss. Me, being the impatient and Nintendo-obsessed drip of a brother I was, got tired of waiting and took over and beat it for him. He wasn't very happy, as you can imagine.

Of course, for whatever reason, it came back up about a month ago... and he didn't even remember that it had happened! How about that. Been carrying that around so long, and it didn't even faze him.

I also feel terrible about jumping on a friend that didn't hold reset while turning off the system after playing Zelda. I felt even worse when I found that the saves weren't wiped. I had to apologize, of course, and I meant it, too.

Moral of this story? Being obsessed with video games brought out the worst in me.

[Exhuminator]

Being obsessed with video games brought out the worst in me.

If that's the worst of you, you've got nothing to worry about chief.

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Here's a gripe. In Sleeping Dogs you've got a smartphone, it's useful, you use it for things. But one thing you can't use it for, is to call a taxi! Instead you have to stand out in the middle of the road, and wait for a taxi to nearly cream you, and then you can hire the taxi. Would it have been so hard to just let the player call a taxi to their position? I mean, using the smartphone? This one little thing would have saved me so much time. Not to mention all the times I've been run over by trucks while I'm waiting on a taxi facing one way and can't see the other lane behind me.

[ElkinFencer10]

I also feel terrible about jumping on a friend that didn't hold reset while turning off the system after playing Zelda. I felt even worse when I found that the saves weren't wiped. I had to apologize, of course, and I meant it, too.

How often does that actually wipe data? I almost never remember to hold reset, and I've never lost data on any of my NES games. Have I just been extraordinarily lucky, or is the likelihood of that overstated?

[Key-Glyph]

Here's a gripe. In Sleeping Dogs you've got a smartphone, it's useful, you use it for things. But one thing you can't use it for, is to call a taxi! Instead you have to stand out in the middle of the road, and wait for a taxi to nearly cream you, and then you can hire the taxi. Would it have been so hard to just let the player call a taxi to their position? I mean, using the smartphone? This one little thing would have saved me so much time. Not to mention all the times I've been run over by trucks while I'm waiting on a taxi facing one way and can't see the other lane behind me.

Although I am sorry for your frustrating experiences with this, this write-up made me laugh. Thanks.

I'm enjoying imagining that the taxi portions are actually Crazy Taxi mini-games, with the tables turned on the player.

[Exhuminator]

I'm enjoying imagining that the taxi portions are actually Crazy Taxi mini-games, with the tables turned on the player.

That's not far off.

I mean literally this is what I do:



If everything goes right, I stand there and wait for a taxi. It shows up and honks. I walk over to the driver and pay up for a ride somewhere else in Hong Kong.

When things go wrong, I'm creamed by a double decker bus I didn't see from behind me. Which sends me flying as a reeling spinning bloody mess where I land bone crunchingly into a crowd of screaming onlookers. Sometimes this causes a massive accident with cars piling up and then the cops and ambulances show up and it's just chaos.

There's probably a better way to hire a taxi in Sleeping Dogs. But damned if I know.

[Sarge]

How often does that actually wipe data? I almost never remember to hold reset, and I've never lost data on any of my NES games. Have I just been extraordinarily lucky, or is the likelihood of that overstated?

I find it depends on the game. Tecmo Super Bowl and Dragon Warrior III, for example, always seemed to bite the dust really easily. Heck, just getting the blinking light was likely to kill my TSB save, which sucks. Other games seemed to handle it a little better. It may have to do with how redundant the save data is (I don't know if NES games do this, but I'd think it a good idea), or how small the area it actually occupies in the SRAM. In fact, it's probably the latter that really determines how easily it gets nuked, and when it doesn't pass the checksum test, depending on how robust the code is, will either recover or just pretend it's in an uninitialized state, effectively wiping it. Given the sheer amount of statistics in Tecmo Super Bowl in particular, this seems to make some sense in my head. Zelda doesn't actually have to store a ton of data, I'd think, compared to that.

I really should take a look at the save dumps I made for those games, and just see what's going on in there.

EDIT: Apparently Super Metroid has some redundant data going on, so it's entirely possible that some NES games were doing so as well.

EDIT 2: Yep, Dragon Warrior (the original!) only uses 224 bytes for each of the three save slots, but even that is just seven 32-byte copies of the data, with a simple checksum embedded within each of the seven, so you would have a pretty good chance of not losing your data in that scheme. (Thanks, RHDN!)

[MrPopo]

For the original Zelda you'd need to track the collected status of every fixed item in the game, plus number of rupees and bombs. A super rough estimate is it's on the order of a hundred flags to track, with rupees being eight bits and bombs being five bits. So round up to 128 bits which is 16 bytes, so even if I'm off on the number of items it's still on the order of needing to save a bare handful of bytes of information. It would be very easy to store duplicates of that information for redundancy.