Your biggest gaming let down

Originally posted by JCTango@April 22 2002,13:20

i resented purchasing Kid Chameleon for the Genesis. I had no idea how badly the graphics were until I played it at home. I have no idea how i conviced myself that it was worth buying... i think i read somewhere about the million helmets and personae you can exhibit...maybe that's why i bought it. It was fun though....for like 5 minutes.

Actually that raises another point - do graphics make the game?
 
Originally posted by JCTango@April 22 2002,13:20

i resented purchasing Kid Chameleon for the Genesis. I had no idea how badly the graphics were until I played it at home. I have no idea how i conviced myself that it was worth buying... i think i read somewhere about the million helmets and personae you can exhibit...maybe that's why i bought it. It was fun though....for like 5 minutes.

Actually that raises another point - do graphics make the game?
 
RE: HL

I thought the ending of Half Life was fairly intriguing - however they need to bust out a HL2 for it to make sense.

At first it was kind of a let down, it's true - but once you play it again, that dude showed up at so many places it makes the ending all the more better (that's just me though).

Depressing overall - Zombie Revenge, on what it could have been (SOR4).
 
It really depends on the game. In a competetive genre with lots of derivative visual designs (like, say, side-scrolling beat-em-ups), a more innovative and well-implemented visual style could add to the game substantially, even if improvements in the gameplay are only marginal. Of course, adding new and interesting gameplay elements (Guardian Heroes) or refining the existing ones (Final Fight) doesn't hurt either... graphics are not everything, but they are part of the experience.

I think it's worth noting that on older home consoles, graphics capability and gameplay were actually linked, as the older graphics processors could only handle 4 or 8 sprites on a line. Sure, you can tell the VDP to put more than that many on a line, but the graphics processor just won't draw them after it hits the limit on a line, so you have to make the player put up with sprite dropout, implement some kind of ugly flicker system to make everything sort of visible, or design your game to not need that many horizontally aligned sprites. Since arcade systems of the day typically had nicer sprite hardware, gameplay complexity sometimes had to be scaled down to work well on the home hardware; take a look at the NES version of Gradius/Nemesis, for instance - you're only allowed two options/multiples rather than four, the laser is substantially altered, and enemy formations are less complex and tend to move faster (particularly in whatever direction gets them off-screen fastest). And after all that, there's still flicker in places, due to the nature of the game. I had a point when I started writing this paragraph, but it evaporated sometime between the first sentence and when I fired up Gradius in FCE Ultra for a refresher on what they changed.
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