I have an education in videogames and i've played them forever, but i hardly feel an urge to analyze them( unless it's for the sake of analyzing), like some of the dwerps in the tv/movie sector of the school who after a week started hunting reasons to hate everything popular and praise things niche. I play games for entertainment and learned to appreciate all kinds of different genres for various reasons.
Anyway, i'm with adam, the cut-scenes or chatter never bothered me, quite on the contrary. I see very little harm in taking control from the player if it's done in a well controlled manner and conscious of it's effects on the player. There are things you can do still retaining the player in control, but it's not the one and only way of doing it right. Cutscenes can be a cool break or just a fest of awesomeness that is the one thing some gamers are after.
My one big gripe with the MGS series is how strict and formulated it is gameplaywise. There are certain things you can and have to do at certain times with certain weapons and abilities and there are plenty of things you can do that may seem logical but make you fight windmills. The player is wrapped in tightly and a wrong move can suddenly break the barriers of the virtual world, reminding it's a game with MGS rules, breaking the immersion. Your regular gamer (that is not a gamedesigner) embraces this type of gameplay glitches as a part of the game and accept it as a part of a puzzle. I'm not saying it's a good element, but it's not bad enough to be gamebreaking for most people.
If you're not ment to do something by design, then don't half-assedly integrate that in the game. If you're not ment to shoot people in MGS, don't give the main character a weapon. Or if you're caught, make the game game-over. If you ARE going to put shooting in the game, then make it right. We both know it's better to not implement something than implement it badly in a game.
The weapons are integrated in a way that lets you use them effectively only in a manner that is designed, but you can use them in various ways that make you and the games design stumble... windmills. It's more and more evident in the sequels and i don't like it either. Though it never bothered me in MGS1, cause i only used them the "right" way.
Btw, on the harder difficulty settings it's GAME OVER the instant you're spotted, so i guess your overpower is overruled in part.
As for the battle with Fortune in MGS2, i never met any difficulties so that was well designed for me, but the windmill thing is very present all the time and there's a possibility that some players encounter them now and then. It's well designed, but not extensively enough, accounting for different patterns that different players might attempt. So a random player can bump into every single obstacle like this and curse the game for the rest of his life... major suck points for that.
Now for max payne....
hire a WRITER to write the game
They did. The same guy gave his likeness to payne as well as acted him in the cutscenes due to lack of moniez, no pro actors. The photoshop filtered comics were awesome and one of the reasons a lot of people like the game. Also a very good way of conveying things without using much moniez. The guys were working with very little pay too. I'd say a pretty darn good achievement for a company that mostly did demo stuff and the somewhat famous shareware game Death rally.
Both games are masterpieces even if flawed in some ways, praised by critics and brainless fans alike. Personally i'm no HUGE fan of either, but one can't overrule things that make them awesome. Now i didn't finish Max Payne 2 and i put down MGS3 near the end of the game due to a nasty shooting part that made me handle the controller in novel ways. I might give it a try or make my brother play past that part since i'd like MGS for Snake's manly voice alone
soo.. uhh.. i agree with some points helm,But like has been mentioned, mountains out of molehills, little details most people don't even care about. It's a shame, cause if you can overlook minute mishaps, they're quite entertaining... a lot of games can be. I got God Hand just a while ago and it has some of the WORST things ever made, like huge mountains of monkeydong, but the good things make up for all that. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people totally loathe it.. it's hard to appreciate. Same thing with the demoscene type games that were the sh*t ten years ago, things similar to that N game. It can feel really cold unless you've somehow first grown to take the most out of it. N is quite nice, but not that special compared to the vast sea of demoscene games from ages past that spawned like rabbits here in my country. Maybe i'm missing something and should just try more? dunno.
OMG Kingdom hearts. I actually finished that pile of shit. That game is sooooooooo stupid and not challenging at all and the last bosses are all jokes. All you need is heal and shield and just thrash the fuck out of them, no thinking needed at all. It's all brute force. All it has going for it imo is presentation, but then again all square games have good gfx and sound.
Haha, can't argue with that
, but it had cutesy characters, soothing music and very simple and easygoing themes going on(like the themesong name suggests "simple and clean"). I felt quite relaxed playing it. I'd probably enjoy making a game like that myself. You know, something simple for a younger audience, something that might give loads of happy for all the kiddies.
Oblivion
Weird weird weird.. because when i watched my brother play it, i laughed at the random dungeons that seemed very similar to each other. The countless fights and obsession over the agility stat. I thought there was no point whatsoever in the whole game and that most characters look silly. Then i tried it for myself and played 20 hours in one weekend... SCARY cause i got so very addicted i couldn't stop playing. I guess it's the amount of free choices as well as the regular RPG stat hunting thing. I did put down the game after that and haven't touched it since. I'm not sure if i like it
