The good, the bad and the ugly

[RageBurner]

I had a thread idea with the title being inspired by that spaghetti western classic that starred Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and and Eli Wallach.

The idea is to take a game you like and break it down in these three aspects, the good aspects, the bad aspects and the ugly aspects.

I'll start, then:

My pick is Shining Force 3 for the Saturn.

The good: It is a massive, sprawling and spanning 3 discs (more if you count the Premium Disc extras) and it has the most content in the franchise by a long shot. In general terms, it is a masterpiece.

The bad: Because the game is divided in chapters, areas cannot, as a rule, be revisited and, along with other mechanics at play, it also means the potential for missables is immense; playing blind is best, but FOMO rears its ugly head. As a corollary to this, character recruitment requirements being missed could lessen the potential of each squad somewhat.

Also the official English version is a joke, as it only contains 1/3 of the game, thankfully Shining Force Central has translated the other discs and lovingly polishes them to this day.

The ugly: The game eschews the beautiful spritework from previous entries for a combination of two things I hate: pre-rendered sprites on the map and blocky, ugly 32-bit 3D models during combat scenes. They animate well, but I'd rather have had great looking sprites with little to no animation instead.

 

[Yousef]

It was a good movie.

 

[RetroLaw]

Great topic idea

 

[Waffles]

Very interesting idea!

The Good: Extraordinarily funny and easy to pick up and play. You'd be blasting your way through hellish battlefields after maybe two minutes of learning the controls.

The Bad: The difficulty is all over the place, and losing a seasoned soldier that you had spent hours building up (and maybe getting attached to) to a flying piece of scenery is neither fun nor fair.

The Ugly: Incredibly punishing after easing you up into the first few missions. You'll be running your own military cemetery in no time and still come back for more.

 

[χKai]

I'd like to talk about my favorite game.
A game for PC from Korea, called Gem Fighter.

In other regions, this game Rumble Fighter has been out for years swapping from several companies along the way.

The good:
It is a massive, multiplayer online mixed martial arts game that focuses on but doesn't rely on PVP to have a fun time. It is free to play and there is cash-purchasable stuff to buy that is not necessary to win or be good at the game. A lot of cool stuff to outfit your character with.

The bad:
The game is known for having a horrible community, and it gets to some people after a while. When someone wins a game, that person has the option to kick people from the room, and while the idea is great for people who would use it responsibly, people are given the option to kick you out for no reason. Also all the equipment is expensive.

The ugly:
Having been a game that's been out for awhile, gaining new fighting styles with every update release for over 10 years, there is way too much equipment to even keep up with anymore for an older player who took a short, few year break from the game, let alone a new player who doesn't have a clue what they're doing. If they were to start when the game had only a small amount of styles, they would have the opportunity to learn the new ones as they came out. This makes it difficult on new players entering into the game, and there isn't much of a culture or community left for it outside of hackers private servers.

 

[Zooey]

The good: atmosphere here is top notch. A beautiful mix of FPS and horror, you will jump scare yourself while playing. This is a year older than Fallout 3, but I think if you enjoy Fallout 3, and you want something a bit darker and more serious, then you will likely enjoy this too. Multiple endings. The artifact system is awesome here, giving you a great way to improve your characters stats. Enemies are a mix between humanoids and mutated uglies. The world really feels alive and uninviting. You will absolutely dread going into certain places, especially at night.

The bad: gunplay can feel really bad at times with well aimed shots going into the void, or just tracing a silhouette around your target. Also, most of the game is quite good, but the ending kinda rushes you thru some story beats, and the final dungeon can be a slog.

The ugly: Recommending the vanilla game is a bit tough because it was seriously buggy on release. Overtime its gotten a bit better now with the fixes that came shortly after release. But most will recommend you to try one of the overhaul/redux mods such as Radiophobia, or the very popular Zone Reclamation Project, to get the best experience possible.

 

[RageBurner]

I'd like to talk about my favorite game.
A game for PC from Korea, called Gem Fighter.
View attachment 12486
In other regions, this game Rumble Fighter has been out for years swapping from several companies along the way.
View attachment 12490
The good:
It is a massive, multiplayer online mixed martial arts game that focuses on but doesn't rely on PVP to have a fun time. It is free to play and there is cash-purchasable stuff to buy that is not necessary to win or be good at the game. A lot of cool stuff to outfit your character with.
View attachment 12491
The bad:
The game is known for having a horrible community, and it gets to some people after a while. When someone wins a game, that person has the option to kick people from the room, and while the idea is great for people who would use it responsibly, people are given the option to kick you out for no reason. Also all the equipment is expensive.
View attachment 12492
The ugly:
Having been a game that's been out for awhile, gaining new fighting styles with every update release for over 10 years, there is way too much equipment to even keep up with anymore for an older player who took a short, few year break from the game, let alone a new player who doesn't have a clue what they're doing. If they were to start when the game had only a small amount of styles, they would have the opportunity to learn the new ones as they came out. This makes it difficult on new players entering into the game, and there isn't much of a culture or community left for it outside of hackers private servers.
View attachment 12493

The graphics are really charming, reminds me of what a 3DS game could look like. Barrier of entry is always a problem with long running franchises, and so are toxic communities, sadly, but the general idea seems great!

View attachment 12487

The good: atmosphere here is top notch. A beautiful mix of FPS and horror, you will jump scare yourself while playing. This is a year older than Fallout 3, but I think if you enjoy Fallout 3, and you want something a bit darker and more serious, then you will likely enjoy this too. Multiple endings. The artifact system is awesome here, giving you a great way to improve your characters stats. Enemies are a mix between humanoids and mutated uglies. The world really feels alive and uninviting. You will absolutely dread going into certain places, especially at night.

The bad: gunplay can feel really bad at times with well aimed shots going into the void, or just tracing a silhouette around your target. Also, most of the game is quite good, but the ending kinda rushes you thru some story beats, and the final dungeon can be a slog.

The ugly: Recommending the vanilla game is a bit tough because it was seriously buggy on release. Overtime its gotten a bit better now with the fixes that came shortly after release. But most will recommend you to try one of the overhaul/redux mods such as Radiophobia, or the very popular Zone Reclamation Project, to get the best experience possible.

I'm not sure if this is the first Stalker game, but I heard Gamma is one heck of a mod that goes on top of Anomaly and makes the game incredible (but very difficult).

 

[Num]

I'd like to talk about my favorite game.
A game for PC from Korea, called Gem Fighter.
View attachment 12486
In other regions, this game Rumble Fighter has been out for years swapping from several companies along the way.
View attachment 12490
The good:
It is a massive, multiplayer online mixed martial arts game that focuses on but doesn't rely on PVP to have a fun time. It is free to play and there is cash-purchasable stuff to buy that is not necessary to win or be good at the game. A lot of cool stuff to outfit your character with.
View attachment 12491
The bad:
The game is known for having a horrible community, and it gets to some people after a while. When someone wins a game, that person has the option to kick people from the room, and while the idea is great for people who would use it responsibly, people are given the option to kick you out for no reason. Also all the equipment is expensive.
View attachment 12492
The ugly:
Having been a game that's been out for awhile, gaining new fighting styles with every update release for over 10 years, there is way too much equipment to even keep up with anymore for an older player who took a short, few year break from the game, let alone a new player who doesn't have a clue what they're doing. If they were to start when the game had only a small amount of styles, they would have the opportunity to learn the new ones as they came out. This makes it difficult on new players entering into the game, and there isn't much of a culture or community left for it outside of hackers private servers.
View attachment 12493

cool beans. game looks sick im interested

 

[χKai]

The graphics are really charming, reminds me of what a 3DS game could look like. Barrier of entry is always a problem with long running franchises, and so are toxic communities, sadly, but the general idea seems great!

I find it very Gaia meets MapleStory, but pulled off in a cute way that isn't blech.

Long story short; premise and gameplay work amazingly while the terrible community and new to old player skill ratio kills it

Post automatically merged: Jan 14, 2025

cool beans. game looks sick im interested

I'll hit you up sometime after I get my computer fixed, I'll help you carry.

Can't do a thing for your ass as it is now, though.

 

[RageBurner]

Long story short; premise and gameplay work amazingly while the terrible community and new to old player skill ratio kills it

Yeah that's a common symptom of long running franchises in general. The community tends to be gatekeeper-ish and inhospitable to newcomers which further entrenches the community, stunts growth and makes for an overall bad time.

 

[χKai]

Yeah that's a common symptom of long running franchises in general. The community tends to be gatekeeper-ish and inhospitable to newcomers which further entrenches the community, stunts growth and makes for an overall bad time.

I teach people to play it, which is a strange concept in and of itself.

There's a few glitches that act as skills, one of them was patched awhile back which broke the whole game for me. I think that's why I stopped taking my life seriously.

 

[Bakuma1997]

Cool concept, a impartial mind is a healthy mind

The good: Expansion of souls and tuning of souls, making more of them useful, great music and weapons feeling more unique, characters get better rounding and enemies are by far the varieder in the duology with returning ones getting tweaks that makes them more interesting

The bad: The soul upgrade mechanic escencially being RNG (You need nine souls of the same for it to be at maximun) The soul-weapon craft force you to decide if you want a unique powerful weapon or to keep that rare soul because it's powerful or for the 100%, the characters are fine, the plot wastes some plotpoints that could be great

The Ugly: TOUCH CONTROL SHOEHORNING!
The only game of the DS trilogy that forces them for progress and for a good reason, not only the seals will make the harder bosses cheaply harder, the ice puzzles requiring to rapidly swap between touching and regular play will make you rage

 

[RageBurner]

Cool concept, a impartial mind is a healthy mind

View attachment 12501
The good: Expansion of souls and tuning of souls, making more of them useful, great music and weapons feeling more unique, characters get better rounding and enemies are by far the varieder in the duology with returning ones getting tweaks that makes them more interesting

The bad: The soul upgrade mechanic escencially being RNG (You need nine souls of the same for it to be at maximun) The soul-weapon craft force you to decide if you want a unique powerful weapon or to keep that rare soul because it's powerful or for the 100%, the characters are fine, the plot wastes some plotpoints that could be great

The Ugly: TOUCH CONTROL SHOEHORNING!
The only game of the DS trilogy that forces them for progress and for a good reason, not only the seals will make the harder bosses cheaply harder, the ice puzzles requiring to rapidly swap between touching and regular play will make you rage

Ah, so true! I love this game on a conditional basis: if you patch it to remove touch controls, then I love it, otherwise it is strictly inferior to its predecessor. Actually it needs other patches too, like fixing luck calculation, and (though this one might not be an objective improvement to some, unlike the other two) I like the patch that removes those slot machine doors; it's a super annoying idea.

 

[Glimbo]

Just finished this game so it's fresh in my mind. Goodboy Galaxy is metroid-vania GBA homebrew.

The Good: Charming art style, funny dialogue, polished gameplay, and good music. It gets all the basics right. Plus it has animated cutscenes. Sample.

The Bad: Lack of combat upgrades or upgrades to speed things up. I only got faster shooting, charge shot, and a sword for combat upgrades. Didn't get any movement upgrades. I was at 70% clear rate when I finished so maybe I missed it.

The Ugly: Tedious moments. On each planet there are gates that when you go through, you temporarily lose one of main items. Your gun, jump pack, or shield. This is the game's main gimmick. But when you lose your shield you die in one hit so you might end up repeating segments over and over if there's a lack of checkpoints in a area. A teleport to ship button would've helped too when you just want to leave a planet.

 

[Inkingsama]

The good: The gameplay has been further polished after MMBN2, the navicust allows players to customize megaman to cater to their style of gameplay, alongside styles (which have been expanded), you can try out different styles of play to make out the most of the wide selection of chips. The story its at it's peak, keeping you interested all the way through.

The bad: Some scenarios exist just to make you suffer: Bubbleman.EXE and Flameman.EXE scenarios force you to play with a specific program installed in the navicust just to progress, so you have to hamper your playing style in order to advance. Although the chip selection has been expanded greatly, some chips can only be obtained by switching styles and leveling it up, which takes very very long, good luck completing the library.

The ugly: The grind in this game is real. Don't expect to get anything good out of battles unless you S rank. No, rank 10 doesn't cut it because it doesn't give you the chip code that you want. It's S rank or nothing.

Post automatically merged: Jan 14, 2025

Cool concept, a impartial mind is a healthy mind

View attachment 12501
The good: Expansion of souls and tuning of souls, making more of them useful, great music and weapons feeling more unique, characters get better rounding and enemies are by far the varieder in the duology with returning ones getting tweaks that makes them more interesting

The bad: The soul upgrade mechanic escencially being RNG (You need nine souls of the same for it to be at maximun) The soul-weapon craft force you to decide if you want a unique powerful weapon or to keep that rare soul because it's powerful or for the 100%, the characters are fine, the plot wastes some plotpoints that could be great

The Ugly: TOUCH CONTROL SHOEHORNING!
The only game of the DS trilogy that forces them for progress and for a good reason, not only the seals will make the harder bosses cheaply harder, the ice puzzles requiring to rapidly swap between touching and regular play will make you rage

I felt that the castle this time around was somewhat weaker. Didn't leave as much of an impression compared to Aria. Also, the final boss was lame.

 

[juan19]

I had a thread idea with the title being inspired by that spaghetti western classic that starred Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and and Eli Wallach.

The idea is to take a game you like and break it down in these three aspects, the good aspects, the bad aspects and the ugly aspects.

I'll start, then:

My pick is Shining Force 3 for the Saturn.

View attachment 12474

The good: It is a massive, sprawling and spanning 3 discs (more if you count the Premium Disc extras) and it has the most content in the franchise by a long shot. In general terms, it is a masterpiece.

The bad: Because the game is divided in chapters, areas cannot, as a rule, be revisited and, along with other mechanics at play, it also means the potential for missables is immense; playing blind is best, but FOMO rears its ugly head. As a corollary to this, character recruitment requirements being missed could lessen the potential of each squad somewhat.

Also the official English version is a joke, as it only contains 1/3 of the game, thankfully Shining Force Central has translated the other discs and lovingly polishes them to this day.

The ugly: The game eschews the beautiful spritework from previous entries for a combination of two things I hate: pre-rendered sprites on the map and blocky, ugly 32-bit 3D models during combat scenes. They animate well, but I'd rather have had great looking sprites with little to no animation instead.

View attachment 12475

Jak II
the good: it makes some improvements compared to jak and daxter like a kinda smaller but more alive map and it have a lot of good missions, also the characters are very good and it has cute waifus
the bad and the ugly: any mission related to vehicles and that damn torret mission where a lot of enemies appear everywhere and you cant shoot with such a sensitive control of the torret

 

[Cu-Neo]

- the good: easily one of the best written stories in the whole franchise

- the bad: the game is incomplete, is not unplayable but a lot of content is missing, to the point that Wookieepedia has a whole bible of article about that

- the ugly: the only way to fully enjoy this game at his maximum is on PC. Thanks to the excellent "content restored" mod. But if you are on a console like the switch or the OG xbox then you are screwed also Aspyr promised a full DLC to restore the content but they cancelled it and I don't know how they didn't get a demand for false advertising because they did the DLC announcement in the trailer of the switch version.

 

[RageBurner]

View attachment 12556
- the good: easily one of the best written stories in the whole franchise

- the bad: the game is incomplete, is not unplayable but a lot of content is missing, to the point that Wookieepedia has a whole bible of article about that

- the ugly: the only way to fully enjoy this game at his maximum is on PC. Thanks to the excellent "content restored" mod. But if you are on a console like the switch or the OG xbox then you are screwed also Aspyr promised a full DLC to restore the content but they cancelled it and I don't know how they didn't get a demand for false advertising because they did the DLC announcement in the trailer of the switch version.

Having the complete experience would have been amazing. Also I wish they kept going with this style.

 

[Clippy]

Specifically, the Amiga port I grew up with but some of my points are universal to all versions.

The good: It's Mortal Kombat - the characters, the specials, the fatalities, the only fighting game series with an overarching plot worth following. All of that is here and then some. Also, possibly the darkest vibe in the original trilogy.

The bad: Some concessions had to be made to make it work on the Amiga. The color palette can look particularly drab sometimes. Another thing is the loading times and floppy swapping. You have to swap floppies and wait a couple seconds when a fatality happens. This gets old pretty quick.

The ugly: First of all, the AI that reads your inputs and is absolutely relentless if you want to play the game normally (with the exception of the first fight which always happens to be Kung Lao who will just let you beat the snot out of him). You simply have to cheese the game to beat it and I never liked that. Second of all, the controls. You know how there is some debate as to whether the SNES or Megadrive port of the first game is superior because the SNES version is censored but has enough buttons to cover everything you need while the Megadrive version is uncensored but the standard 3-button controller just isn't enough to play the game comfortably? Well, try having 1(one) button like the standard Amiga joystick. Esoteric mappings that involve holding the Fire button and yanking the joystick in all directions are about as intuitive as integrals and about as fun as a funeral. There are games that managed to pull it off like IK+ but MKII is not one of them.

In general I love the game, just not the Amiga port.

 

[kanesha]

This is a year older than Fallout 3

I had to look this up cause I couldn't believe it, it definitely feels like a much much older game, I would've said older than Half Life 2, and reading about the development history I'm starting to understand why.

 

[Yousef]

Alright, @RageBurner , it took me a hot minute, but I found the PERFECT answer for this. I needed to think of something that really fits the bell for what you’re asking about, aka something with strong qualities, strong negatives and strong oddities. My favorite games and my most disliked games neither really fit this. I needed something with an equal balance of Strenghs and flaws so without further ado here’s my pick, have fun reading.

Max Payne 3: A Flawed Masterpiece​

• The God: Max Payne 3 is a stellar game mechanically, graphically, stylistically and the such. It is one of the smoothest, most fun, most dumbest, most batshit, most bizarre games out there gameplay wise. It’s a game that could literally exist in the 7th gen and NO other gen which is why the gen was so wild. This is like if one of those hyper realistic story driven games said FUCK IT let’s go full BAZINGA and just… rolled with it. It actually still remains one of the most satisfying games to play to this day and I wish I could fully enjoy a replay one day when possible.
• 
• The Bood: right, sooo… MP3 is not a very good game, actually. I know this sounds contradictory. I’m a gameplay freak and I still am! What’s wrong here? Well… all respect to Dan Houser the goat but this was not his finest hour. GTA? Stellar story. Max Payne? He just simply doesn’t get the character the same way Sam Fisher. This is what happens when you have an esoteric mind like Sam Fisher give his esoteric characters to a fellow esoteric writer like Dan Houser. Sure, Dan gave us Niko Bellic and Micheal De Santa, but he clearly didn’t know what to do here. To make matters worse, the story being so bad has the WEIRDEST explanation you could think of… it’s because… he was accidentally used as a prototype for Micheal De Santa? No, really, think about it…they even… look the same…. MIND BOWN!!!!!!!
  
  
  
  
  
• THE UGLY GUGLY: oooook, I alluded earlier to max Payne 3 being a very… ungood game. A very not-so-good game, baddy bad game, the ungoodest of ungoods, butt why? The story? Cmooon, I can skip this, right? Riiiiigt?
  
  That’s the neat part, you don’t. Why do you think I harped so much on the story? Because I can’t skip. Sooo… that’s it? That’s why I can’t replay it despite being one of my favorite games gameplay wise? Yup… I wish… I wish I had a better reason than that….
  
  thanks for reading.