(Regarding ways to kill the "Big Daddies" from BioShock)
"I start them off next to a hacked camera, or an RPG turret if I can swing it. From there it's a straight charge down a hallway of electrified trap bolts, ending with a proximity mine in a pile of oxygen canisters. So put some effort into it."
"But, I like my shotgun. It has lightning bullets."
"I start them off next to a hacked camera, or an RPG turret if I can swing it. From there it's a straight charge down a hallway of electrified trap bolts, ending with a proximity mine in a pile of oxygen canisters. So put some effort into it."
"But, I like my shotgun. It has lightning bullets."
#5: Realize about halfway through the game that you've been using the same weapon non-stop...then realise you don't care, because you're having fun rather than fretting over weapon-juggling.
"My usual instinct in your standard multifaceted combat system is to find one or two things that generally work and keep hitting those until something tells me to stop. But I had to unlearn that. Cunningly, Transistor withholds story documents until you use all three modes of each function in combat, which is good design as it encouraged me to experiment — and discover that yes, the 'Switch' power was as fucking useless as it had first seemed!"
"I hate Alioth, dude. I hate him so much. He's the absolute worst. It's like, 'Oh, oh! You have 2-power and 2-power? Congratulations! You just win the game! Congratulations!' I just win with two and two, because that gave me priority. It's so dirty, dude. And - I - some people think it's hypocritical to say this, by the way. 'Well, you, Regis, why are you running the card?!' Because my job is to show you guys good, capable decks. And a lot of good, capable decks need to have Alioth because he's such a powerful endgame force. It would be irresponsible of me not to play Alioth in decks. I hate it. I wish it wasn't the way it was. But that doesn't change the reality of the situation. We still have to acknowledge his existence. And sometimes we have to win games with him. Annoying as it might be."
"I listen to the album Guilt Machine a lot. Well, not the 'album.' I listen to the first track over and over again. Maybe I would like the other tracks as well, but I'm fine with what I've got. This, or the equivalent of this, happens in multiplayer games also. When you give me the choice via a traditional browser, I'll play the same ten percent of a game over and over again. I don't think this is a localized phenomenon, either. Dust. Facing Worlds. E2M1. Blood Gulch. You know these places. Unless there's a new gametype that requires a specific map, it doesn't change for most people. If you could play Team Fortress 2's Payload on Counter-Strike's de_dust, believe: that's what people would do."
— Penny Arcade creator Jerry Holkins describing this trope
"It's true that Street Fighter IV has a wide selection of characters, and that the highly skilled players serve to demonstrate how skillful and well balanced the game is. Playing with any number of combinations is challenging and interesting online, with the exception of any fight involving Ken, which, as this helpful flow chart perfectly illustrates, is horribly lame....As you can clearly see, the game is 100% fun as long as there are no Ken fights. However, by the time 50% of your fights are against Ken, the fun has dropped down to about 25%. Note that this is regardless of your win ratio or time spent playing; a short losing streak against Vega and Sakura is still 100% fun, while a long winning streak against 75% Ken players is still 0% fun. This is because Ken players — unlike any other type of player — are stupid pieces of shit who need to be strangled in their sleep."
— Ken Fighter IV line graph
Pat: What's with the Ken Brigade?
Matt: What do you mean, "what's with it"? It's always BEEN THERE!
"NO ITEMS! FOX ONLY! FINAL DESTINATION!"
— A general description of any given Super Smash Bros.. Melee match.
"Y'see, there is this little thing in game theory called 'dominant strategy'. It tells that if you're given an ultimate method of disposing of obstacles in a game, you're always going to use it. Why even make this complex moves list when you can just one-button-mash your way through the game?!"
"Let me show you something."
[Summons a pie chart that's approximately 4/5 SPYRALs and 1/5 blank]
"This part, the part with the SPYRALs? That's the people who play to win. See that other part? That's me. I went to Worlds. I had my Reactor deck. I spent months on it. And I lost before I even knew what happened. You and me, we're in that little slice right now, playing Metallizing Parasites and Gemini Turbo. The rest of the world is playing SPYRALs."
[Summons a pie chart that's approximately 4/5 SPYRALs and 1/5 blank]
"This part, the part with the SPYRALs? That's the people who play to win. See that other part? That's me. I went to Worlds. I had my Reactor deck. I spent months on it. And I lost before I even knew what happened. You and me, we're in that little slice right now, playing Metallizing Parasites and Gemini Turbo. The rest of the world is playing SPYRALs."
— The One Whose Shape was Snatched, Rank10YGO, "Archetype Archive - Vampire"
""Recipes aside, adding codes to a weapon does nothing but boost its attack power a bit. A Dog Sword is the same as a Justice Sword is the same as a Freedom Sword, and so on. Therefore, due to their higher base attack power, metalized weapons are almost always more powerful. They often have special properties as well."
[...]
"Experiment and see what you can come up with. Then quit fucking around and use a metalize recipe, you idiot."
[...]
"Experiment and see what you can come up with. Then quit fucking around and use a metalize recipe, you idiot."
—Didja Redo, on Avalon Code [1]
"The reason that I think many people find the battles in 13 unengaging, is because the game does not do a good enough job of incentivizing efficient play. Simply put, it is too easy to fall into the trap of COM/RAV/RAV to stagger, COM/RAV/COM to kill, COM/RAV/MED if low on HP, maybe SYN/SAB/MED for buffs and debuffs in tough battles and SEN/MED/MED to withstand powerful enemy attacks. Playing ultra-defensive or without much regard for efficient buffing and debuffing will get you through most of the game, but the battles will take a long time and be far less engaging if you do. A friend of mine once described the problem as: 'Final Fantasy XIII is a game that has a lower skill floor to beat it than it does to enjoy it.'"
—Mrzwanzig, on the combat system of Final Fantasy XIII
, on the combat system of Final Fantasy XIII"In this game you get to control all four turtles and draw use of their different abilities ― or, at least that was the intent, but Donatello has both better reach and damage than the others, so he is used more or less constantly."
—TASVideos on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989)
"The only reason Rationalism isn't broken is because everyone uses it."
— The Civilization Game Breaker page, on Civilization V.
"Now, playing on PC with a mouse and a keyboard, I could just barely, after about 700 deaths, just barely squeeze my way through this game on Legendary. It was fucked up. Halo 1 on Legendary changes a man. Then I went back through on Heroic and whooped the game's ass, but this is my problem: which difficulty did I enjoy more? Legendary was more challenging, but guns like the Assault Rifle became obsolete. Most of the time, you're forced to use the Plasma Pistol, which is... I hate the Plasma Pistol, this shit is stupid! On Heroic, however, you have much more freedom on how you approach the game, but after playing on Legendary, it just feels like a cakewalk! And a lotta games have that irritating gap between "kind of hard" and "fucking annoying". You want the game to push you to your absolute limit and force you to experiment and find out what works, and what sucks is when you find out what actually works just isn't that fun. Variety and options are sucked out of the game, you have these severe difficulty spikes that feel overlooked by the developers, and what happens... is the player starts pushing back. You notice the cracks in the game's design. You, uh, abuse the AI. You learn how to stop enemies from spawning. And when you push the game to its limit, sometimes it cracks, and your enjoyment is ruined.
"Now, you might be wondering why a card that's the staple is such a bad thing, and that's because Konami doesn't want everyone's deck to look exactly the same, which is what half of the decks used to look like before there was a ban list. Everyone would just play half their deck full of nothing but staple cards like Pot of Greed, and in the other half of the deck would be the actual archetype that they were supposed to be playing. It basically creates the game state where everyone's playing the exact same deck, because the exact same deck is always just using the exact same best cards, which is just boring for everyone."
— TheDuelLogs, "Top 10 Broken Cards that Draw More Cards in YuGiOh"
""Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
— Soren Johnson, one of Civilization IV's game designers
"For the vast majority of missions, it doesn't matter who you're playing as — police officer, ice cream man, goldfish in a bowl on a skateboard — because all of them can be equipped with a spider droid, and this game might as well have been called Watch Dogs: Just Use the Fucking Spider Droid. The spider droid is fast, agile, hard to spot, and it can open doors, take down enemies, pick up collectibles, hack most systems, play audiobooks, dice vegetables, and, in short, can do everything a human can do with the significant exception of die. Even if the enemies spot it and blow it up and start hunting around for its controller, as long as you're outside the building, you can stand in front of their windows with two middle fingers up and your knob pressed against the glass, and they won't do shit. So if you're the sort of person who just wants to beat the game's challenges as efficiently as possible, there's not much point in recruiting a range of talents, 'cause everyone's equally talented at being a spider droid delivery system."
"This is what games are for. They teach us things so that we can minimize risk and know what choices to make. Phrased another way, the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination."
— Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun
"So, did I learn anything from this? ...No. Should you do it? ...Also no. Go get Rivers of Blood, and Mimic Tear, and Comet Azur, and Rotten Breath, and play the game like everyone else for God's sake. Don't be like me."
— Baron's Castle, "Can You Beat Elden Ring As Sonic The Hedgehog?"
""Will you play a stealthy archer, or will you be a mage this time for twenty minutes before re-speccing to be a stealthy archer?"
"They always start you off with a silenced tranquilizer gun and then, over the course of the game, give you a bunch of cool toys that are nowhere near as fun or efficient as the silenced tranquilizer gun."
