Beating Games, Ending Games, Or Not

King of Posters
#28

I have a backloggery page in part to keep track of what games I have, but also in part to remind me of how many I own and have not yet played or beaten. Because of this I probably finish 95% of the games I start and don’t drop within the first half hour or so. That’s probably not healthy! I also feel more satisfied this way and feel bad about certain games I started and never finished, so it is probably the best for me.

The one thing I have been trying to get better at is picking the right time to walk away. There is this horrible deal in gaming where they are putting the credits roll in along with a false ending for reasons I can’t quite fathom and I end up grinding through all sorts of bonus crap just to get to a real ending they hid behind all of it. I look at games like the Witness and MGS V where I went through so much stuff I didn’t enjoy just to try and see what they were really hiding, the result being me having rather mixed feelings towards things that at one point I was enjoying a good deal. Someone told me that Mario games now have as much stuff post-ending as before and I almost hate them on blind principle because of it. I may just adopt a “once the credits roll put the game down no matter what” rule.

#29

I stopped the witcher 3 an hour in because it seemed like it was just going to be sad and upsetting and knowing what the hell the battle system was felt like something I could put on a resume.

MGSV and Automata I am taking notice because those are two games I enjoyed the whole way through. I didn’t stop having a bad time with them. Same thing with BotW and Moddesy.

Hearing y’all didn’t like those I said to my screen “oh no you should definitely stop.”

On the flip you frequently hear about someone “getting” a Souls game after trying for years. And then they suddenly love it. That also makes me go hmm. There is a way to play those games that absolutely rewards and is maybe impossible to explain. Once you attune to it is yours and I am getting off the train.

#30

Also I am not even halfway through TIS-100 and I already had to toss away over 90 minutes of work on this most recent puzzle and I won’t be able to walk away until I consider this game beaten and send help.

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#31

Isn’t that one of those games that’s supposed to be a Rubix Cube while listening to Led Zeppellin?

#32

def. not the silver bullet, but:

https://make-primary-monitor.software.informer.com/download/ look this weird .exe may be some kind of data mine bit coiner home phoner I can’t find it anywhere else I make no promises

but I use it on rig with 3(4) displays spread across a room and it has been a big help - the real bonus is putting a shortcut on your desktop and then you can assign a keyboard shortcut in the shortcut properties - it will swap primary to wherever your mouse is floating.

u made the right choice

#33

I hope not, I can’t stand Led Zeppelin…

It does look like this though:

tis-100-preview-program-1024x576.jpg1024×576 121 KB

So… yeah probably?

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#34

the curse awakened when we learned that a disproportionate amount of sales are driven by the minority that will obsessively play your game forever, telling their friends to play with them, and our actions to serve both them and the other 70% of the audience by splitting that baby right in half

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#35

I rarely finish games, but I’m trying to get a bit better about that. it’s not usually the game’s fault that I stop, because I’m pretty good by now about only playing games that I’m real sure I’ll like, but what happens is my current tastes swing wildly. so I’ll be all about playing RPGs for a while, and so I’ll play some RPGs, but then my interests will swing the other way much faster than my playing speed does, because I’m slow as hell with everything. I recently beat divinity original sin, which was a game I first started playing last june. before that, the last two games I beat were nier automata and dark souls 3. so I’m beating like one game a year, here. I’ve been playing baldur’s gate 2 for about two months now, and I’m maybe half way through it. that represents a mild success for me.

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#36

i sometimes play games i don’t like to completion or at least way longer than i should have when i’m not into them at all solely because they’re The Zeitgeist or whatever and it sucks

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#37

I do this too, but my relationship with it is less negative I think. Even if I don’t “enjoy” the thing per se, I like having a comprehensive personal experience with it to help form an opinion. I do the same thing with movies; sometimes I watch movies I know I won’t really like just so that I can articulate what exactly is wrong with them. And a lot of times I come out surprised that I liked a certain aspect of the thing, even if the whole on average was bad.

I suppose if it were more of a compulsion or affected my mood it might be a problem, but I try to frame it as a healthy curiosity. Like neggy, I find my tastes swing wildly with the weather or moods or whatever and sometimes I find good things this way that at first blush I didn’t think I would enjoy at all.

#38

When I see the credits roll, I consider it done.

I play fighting games by going through the arcade mode with every character to see their ending.

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#39

credit rolls definitely seem to give the best sense of completeness for me, or at least are the most satisfying point to put the game aside. There were some extra things I was thinking of doing in RDR2, but once the credits ended I was like “Yeah I think that’s enough for now”

Games like Skyrim on the other hand, completing the main quest feels no different than any random fetch quest, and so I typically just keep playing until like hour 70 when I artibrarily decide enough is enough. There’s no sense of closure to a story, just an empty feeling of leaving a meaningless list of chores unfinished

#40

Is it possible to make a game that ends in 5 minutes with the same sort of impact as a Final Fantasy? The struggle to complete a game lets you relate to the protagonist’s struggle, and by reducing the difficulty when given a choice you are reducing the game’s emotional impact.

I think a discussion of difficulty factors in here. I can’t count the number of games where I reach some boss who’s like “You did well making it this far!” and I’m thinking “no I just held down forward and the fire button.”

I consequently turned up the difficulty on Zone of the Enders 2 to the max, couldn’t get past the mobs in the first non-prologue level for an hour, and dropped the game.

#41

You need to tap into universal, mythic themes, I think. Characters as archetypes a player can quickly cast themselves in; Passage embodies this.

Or we look at microfiction techniques, which…I leave it to others whose knowledge extends beyond Hemingway (who of course preferred abstract characters for this reason)

#42

I think there’s something to this.

For Final Fantasy.

And probably other RPGs.

But–

Games can have many different kinds of large-sized impacts and I don’t think they’re always correlated to length. They’re definitely not always correlated to length.

An issue with some short games–like some short indie RPGs–is they are stuck in the narrative and systemic confines of the epic scope of, say, a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, but don’t have the resources or skill to pull of something that matches that. They haven’t appropriately recalibrated their aesthetics (mechanical, visual, narrative, whatever) of the form they aspire to (a lot of small games languish in mimicry of larger games). A boss who you face after a game’s one dungeon and five cakewalk mini-goon fights acknowledging your skill because you’ve made it “so far” after your quest began just 8 minutes ago is ridiculous. If the game properly contextualizes such a fight by using the myriad tools for emotional engagement available to the game-maker (including judicious uses of generic and intertextual formalistic references), perhaps they can make it feel earned though.

And then, the mere form of RPGs are structured as such to deliver their emotional impact as a result of struggle with the same party of characters against the same foe. Games that set their sights elsewhere can and should have an entirely different valence. Struggle might not enter into it at all.

(I just posted about Ghosts in the Shortwave in the itch thread, a game that takes <10 minutes to “beat” and is entirely absent of challenge, but I think is going to stick with me as an impactful emotional experience for longer than games I’ve spent weeks with (and is 100% bound up in its form as a game).)

Asking whether “a game that ends in 5 minutes with the same sort of impact as a Final Fantasy?” feels to me like asking whether a short story can land with the same kind of impact as a novel. Or a series of novels. Or whether a short film can deliver the same kind of emotional experience as a feature. Maybe not, but, actually also absolutely yes.

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#43

Barkley and Space Funeral have emotionally affected me more than any other jrpg short of maybe the Mother series.

It’s not about length.

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#44

Oh, yeah, in case it sounds like I was trying to say RPGs have to be epic in length and scope to be affecting, I didn’t mean that. But that the network of texts in the genre tend toward people producing small RPGs that don’t properly cope with their smallness. But Space Funeral and Barkley absolutely do.

#45

Me too and I feel like this has helped me develop a healthier relationship to finding games that I actually want to spend time with and playing them and engaging with them to the level that I want.

There are a handful of big games I’ll pick up the year they’re released (Nier Automata or Sekiro), but, Idk, I kind of didn’t play games much between 2003 and 2008 and only bought a PS2 in 2008 and there’s SO MANY cool and interesting games I never played to catch up on.

#46

A follow-up for this topic:

I “beat” TIS-100 today in that I finished the final puzzle and got what the game considers to be an ending. The thing is that the game allows you to skip a few puzzles and still be able to take the final challenge; I never make use of this. That said, the second to last puzzle looks like a cruel joke and checking online the impression is that it is the one “main quest” puzzle that takes things a bit too far (apparently creating a sorting algorithm in such a limited toolset is considered by some to be more work than fun, I don’t even know what a sorting algorithm is). I spent some time pondering how I’d even start to tackle it, said fuck it and just did the final one instead.

The creator of the game thinks this is fine as he put in the ability to skip some puzzles and still have things unlock as long as you don’t skip too many. Even most of the fans of the game are in the “it’s a game, skip any that seem like too much or no fun” camp.

Me? It leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. What I learned from The Witness, a game I loved until I forced myself to play through the final few hours I spent with it that I hated, is that one has to know when to step away. And yet…

So I spent about an hour afterwards working on that skipped puzzle, my personal rule being that if I ever stop making real progress or hit a point where my rough idea isn’t gonna work or would require a major rewrite then I say “oh well” and leave it be. I stopped earlier today at a point where I missed something in accounting for a second loop that I think I can fix by making use of a nearby empty node (don’t ask), but the fact that it even worked a little bit so far is almost a kind of bad news.

Meanwhile I played through the first season of Hitman, beat each mission only once (well I did one a second time as I wanted to try something) and am doing the Sarajevo Six extras that came with it. When they are done I will put the game down despite not seeing most of what it can do without a second thought.

My brain is weird.

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#47

That sorting puzzle was a doozy for me (and for my non-programming buddy); I had to rewrite twice because I kept running out of space. I think my buddy had to rewrite once. Hope you get it easier than that!

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