games

Rimworld encourages you to perform Eugenics on any undesirable colonists, especially with the biotech DLC. Also encourages cannibalism and harvesting your opponents organs to sell on the market for greed and profit.

Also too many quality of life mods should be in the base game.

Dwarf Fortress has a very silly difficulty curve consisting of an initial cliff followed by not that much, and all of its options just increase the size of the initial cliff.

Earthbound has some quest chains that can get stuck in really obtuse ways, particularly in Twoson and Fourside.

Crosscode's DLC has that fight where Apollo is way too damn hard all of a sudden.

UFO 50 has ~5 perfunctory games in genres that clearly nobody on the team really cared for, and it's worse for it. That's Fist Hell, Star Waspir, Caramel Caramel, Campanella 3, and Block Koala. There are worse trash fires in the collection, like Hot Foot, but those are at least bad because they tried something interesting and failed.

In Super Metroid, the entrance to Kraid's hideout is poorly telegraphed.

Mario Odyssey giving you moons for every silly little accomplishment is great, but giving the same reward for korok-tier stuff and actual challenges cheapens the reward feeling of actual challenges, and they should've done a tiered system.

Morrowind should have a start that gives just a little more direction and reason to keep playing.

Morrowind's combat sucks even if I got very good at making it work for me. I get what they were going for, but it's a very weird thing to allow you to aim at people in first person and still have your accuracy determined by dice roll.

Life is Strange has a lengthy stealth section in a dream sequence near the ending which doesn't really add anything to the game but tedium.

Shadow Empire's user interface is quite possibly the least intuitive I've ever used, and I play Paradox games.

Xcom 2 shouldn't be so demanding of my video card and it gets worse as the campaign goes on. Not a big fan of the chosen either, especially with the long war mod - they're either unfairly overpowered and unfun or just a bullet sponge and unfun and neither the mod nor vanilla can hit the right balance to make them fun. Also not particularly fond of the story, but that's kind of secondary to what actually makes the game fun.

The first Dead Space was magical (the remake is also really good) and then everything afterwards falls off hard. Dead Space 2 is still worth playing I guess, but it's not the same - the way the markers effects manifest as hallucinations and psychological conditions makes more sense and works better in the first game, but in the second one, idk, the final boss fight just feels like an overdramticization of mental illness (literally going into your own head and having a gun fight with your hallucinations? Idk just feels gaudy compared to DS1's reveal). The only thing that makes DS2 strong is how it expands on the theme of religions mimicking cults and causing damage to society and people's psyche, something that was mostly junt hinted at in the original DS1.

All that to say everything that comes after DS1 makes it feel worse in retrospect and I really wish they'd finish the story in a more satisfying way. The only other criticism I'd offer is that DS doesn't need so many weapons and, in fact, it both makes the game harder and removes tension if you carry more than one. Multiple types of weapons work best in games where each weapon fills a role or purpose that the others can't (this is accomplished with stasis and telekenesis, the other weapons have nothing else to do besides do damage) and it might actually create MORE tension in the game if you're only offered the plasma cutter to fight with and nothing else.

Why the fuck do so many enemies have elemental weakness before you ever get access to anything that uses an element. Wasted ideas that hopefully wilo be fixed in the re-release

(OFF)

Final Fantasy X, a game with heavy enphasis on death and mourning, didn't feature the death of a party member. Sin is terrible and named characters die to it, but it's not the same. In fact there were few on-screen deaths.

Also, I wish the world didn't feel like it had a population of 200. I get the population was dwindling after the thousand years, but it just felt so small. I think this could have been solved by having a larger unexplored world or by explicitly stating there are villages dotted all over Spira that the protagonists cannot explore on their journey.

Also also, over the course of 1000 years only five people performed the pilgrimage to the point of defeating Sin. The practice of the pilgrimage would have fallen out of favor with such a low success rate. I'd sooner expect Spirans to move underground in tunnels as mole people.

Also also also, there was no water Aeon. Leviathan deserves justice. More Aeons in general could have explored more heroes who defeated Sin in the past.

Prey (2017)

• Poorly balanced in some ways. The Typhon Neuromods give you some nasty diminishing returns, requiring more and more Psi to the point that it's not worth it to max them out. Same with some of the standard Neuromods. It's to the point that I always recommend the Core Balance mod you can find on Nexus.

• Really blows its wad with the mindfuckery early on and doesn't take more chances to layer it further, ending notwithstanding. When I first broke out of the apartment my jaw genuinely dropped. It surprised me in a way few games or even other pieces of media have. Then it just kinda peters out. It had the potential for more.

• Poor pacing on the plot. It kind of herds you through every sector of the station and implies an urgency that can undercut the exploration if you take it at face value. It also locks you out of half the station for half the game. Not a great thing to have in an ImSim.

• Visual variety on the Typhon is lacking. The Weavers look super cool and the way the Phantoms move is pretty unsettling, but the Telepaths and Technopaths are just big black blobs that kinda float around mind-controlling other enemies and hurling annoying projectiles at you. Likewise with the variant Phantoms just being tougher versions of the base one with different damage type auras.

Still my favorite goddamn game it is so fucking amazing

The gameplay loop was developed in the 80s for the sole purpose of munching quarters and dick all has changed despite how much gaming has evolved

I love Portal but I would vehemently disagree with anyone who says it's a better game than Portal 2. Even just ignoring all the stuff like plot structure and graphics, Portal 2 is way ahead in terms of puzzle design. Also Portal 2 does better job at fully exploring the concept of portals, while Portal 1 feels like a tech demo in some parts

Stormworks: I think overall I'm pretty happy with it. There are some things where they don't change stuff because too many people's creations would break if they changed (e.g. parallel jet turbine bug). Also, the actual overworld game is pretty undeveloped. I think people would really appreciate a semi-live economy, though simulating the physics of that would be wild.

My main frustrations with the game are usually because I want to make things by myself, instead of downloading other people's engine controllers and ballistic computers >.>

Also having a creation tip over outside of the de-spawn range and having to restart a game because there isn't enough money to re-make it.

Then there's just a pile of parts that are either too big (pivots, sliding connectors) (usually from the early era of the game), only in one size despite it being quite a broad range of products (pneumatic piston), or just missing.

It would be nice if you could simulate/control things with hydraulics without an intervening electrical component (e.g. carburetor, piston control units), but I also get that that might be rather complicated.

It would also be nice if there was a way to have parts on non-cardinal directions at the start without shenanigans.

Also, I always play by myself and wish my friends would come join me and say "Oh wow, you're not a complete idiot" or something. :(

You think those fuckers would have let me boil the rice before coming out of early access... DayZ

Baldur's Gate 3 can be too safe art direction wise. I get they are trying to do the DnD aesthetic and I'm sure WotC had a specific view on what it wanted the Forgotten Realms to look like, but it feels a bit too generic fantasy.

Final Fantasy XIV needs new quest design for the main story. Dawntrail suffered because of the quest design.

Path of Exile is ubermensch slop with the same morals as gambo or whatever name UlyssesT had for GoT.

Idk if it's my favorite but it's one that I've played a lot recently:

Cassette Beasts would be better without fusion. It's so strong that it is necessary (sans grinding) for a lot of boss fights, and it's very cool and dramatic when the combat music's lyrics start, but going from two to one party member reduces the complexity of fights so much that they become less enjoyable.

Kenshi: after hundreds of hours put into the game and going thru multiple cycles of starting a new game, struggling to make money, fighting, losing, fighting again, building and automating a base, etc, and all the emergent storytelling that comes out of that -- I feel like it was only the combat-related systems that were fully fleshed out and ultimately, the only way to interact with the world in a meaningful way is through combat. Though the visuals and worldbuilding do great of offering the promise of a lot, the dialogue system is not developed enough to allow for any dialogue mods that integrate well with and impact the world or player characters. Animations systems are similarly limited, with the system allowing for minute customization and replacement of combat animations, and very little room for any animations not combat-related.

Binding of Isaac can be unfair, and while yeah that's kinda the point and mastery can overcome most of that, some rooms are laid out in a way that it's impossible to avoid damage. For example, a closet filled with spikes and a large troll bomb spawning and immediately homing in. This never feels good even if damage is avoided through pure luck (such as flight or explosion immunity).

Also most bosses are fine but they do love to add at least one bullshit boss per version. Rebirth brought us the dreaded Bloat, then in AB they added Hush, a bullet hellish, tanky completion mark boss that can only be attempted if reached within 30 mins or less. That wasn't bullshit enough, so in AB+ they added Delirium, another mark boss that is hidden somewhere on the largest map in the game among 6 other bosses (which included other end bosses). Before Rep there was only 1 way to guarantee access and that was by killing Hush (2 bs bosses in a row!) Oh and the fight itself is a disorienting chaotic nightmare and honestly never fun.

I don't think anything added in Rep compares to Delirium, though I'm never happy to see Scourge or Colostomia. Mother is difficult, but honestly getting to that fight is more annoying than the fight itself. Then Rep+ added the most devastating boss of all: barely functional online co-op that can delete your save.