I gave up after Ripley because when I died at the final boss I was spawned before those rooms of metroids and just couldn't be arsed. Also, having forgotten to rescan some bosses after dying, I couldn't get 100% scans so I was a bit downhearted anyway. I basically gave up at that point but didn't feel short changed as I had played 99% of what was on offer and spent a long and enjoyable time doing so.

From what I played of RE4 recently, it's a big improvement over previous RE games, but the controls are still a bit awkward, and it still has Capcom's awful interface design ("Would you like to take the ammo pack? YES/NO" when you have 3 bullets and nothing much in your inventory) and unfathomably bad voice acting. What the hell is it with that? I gave it back to the mate I borrowed it off just because I know it's a game I am very likely to get pissed off with and I have a lot of other games I've yet to play much of (Zelda!) that I would rather play.

You are unlikely to warm much to the start of Twighlight Princess if Wind Waker pissed you off. Whilst it is great, there are some annoying laws of three things that annoyed the fuck out of me, although Nintendo have learned and do try and make it stay interesting. The Twighlight Realm is also exceptionally lonely, and the battle music is quite grating after the 4th or 5th time you hear it. I hear it gets REALLY good after the third dungeon though :) 

I never managed to beat the final boss, either. That really annoyed me since I was really impressed with the rest of the game, which was mostly pretty easy, and of all the games I've ever played, there are only 2-3 that I've never finished. 

Beating the Metroid Prime wasn't half as difficult as Omega Pirate or that ice boss. 

and if you loved all the fucking BOSSES in metroid prime, the sequel has about 3x that many.

...but i really liked the first one. Bosses were hard, but there were relatively few of them, and most of the game was exploration which is what it's all about anyway. They must have had a focus group tell them there weren't enough bosses in the original, so they had to add more. 

creating a Console Gaming Thread was UTTER BULLSHIT! This is beyond stupid.

Dammit, please someone locked that one and rename this one?
There is not a 100% difference in game art, game design or whatever. There in fact is NOTHING justifying a split of PC and Console games here. 

I finished it a few days ago, and I found it to be very good.
The start is a bit slow, like most 3D Zelda games I think, I guess it suffers a bit from trying (and succeeding) to be completely accessible to any player.
After the first dungeon, things get much better in my opinion. The dungeons are really great, every room has it's purpose, and the layouts and puzzles are really nicely thought out, as are the boss fights. I just wish the combat was a bit more challenging at times...
Oh and I was sceptical about the Wii controls at first, but now I really enjoy them, adds a bit of extra immersion to the game. 

czg: yes, the ice boss was an absolute cunt and utterly impossible to defeat unless you had at least a certain number of health tanks at the start. The only way I got past him was to trawl back through the entire game to uncover secret health tanks which took ages. I eventually had to use a guide �_�

I don't remember the omega pirate being that impossible, but then by that stage of the game I was pretty p1mped up with all the secret shit I had uncovered earlier.

Metlslime: ugh. I hope the bosses are somwehat fairer this time round :/

Than: the only thing that really sucked arse about RE4's interface was the retarded inventory system not giving you a quick way to change weapons during combat. The game would be so much cooler if you could map items to a button, like a hotkey, to use in realtime.

Spirit: Hear hear. This retarded split only exists because Shambler got out of the wrong side of the bed one morning 

I'm hoping Metroid Prime 3 is gonna be the Wii's "killer app" (jesus I hate that phrase).

Metroid Prime on Gamecube would have been the perfect game if:

1) The lock-on targeting control system was ditched and replaced with Halo-style dual analog controls for moving and aiming. Seriously, what were they thinking? This would have made combat a tad more challenging, but about 100x more satisfying.

2) The bosses were toned down a bit. I mean come on.

As it stands, non-boss combat in metroid prime is a bit boring, thanks to the dumbass lock-and-strafe tactics. Bosses are basically brick walls that bring the whole game to a shuddering halt.

Exploration and puzzle solving elements (the bulk of the game) are already really cool and chillax and don't need to be changed.

I played a little bit (the beginning) of Metroid Prime Hunters on my brother's DS over christmas and was really impressed that they had implemented the proper mouselike control system using the stylus :D It actually felt like Quake in terms of the speed and wide FOV. I didn't care much for the level design at the start though :/ I'll have to pick up a DS and play it properly... 

I hope MP3 has proper online multiplayer, that would help the Wii quite a bit I could imagine.
The multiplayer in Metroid Prime Hunters is nice, although very hectic, and lacks proper options when joining games and stuff, which is a shame. 

I don't remember the bosses in MP being that hard at all, apart from ripley, who was a cunt. The final boss was easy in its first form, but when it turned into the floating head thing I couldn't figure out what to do, died, and then couldn't be arsed to traipse through 2 or three rooms of platforms and metroids to get back to it.

Didn't bother playing MP2 because of the time the first game ate up, and I'm not sure I will bother with 3 because I have access only to the Japanese version, and I am not sure how kid/foreigner friendly it will be. Zelda is ok in this regard, but I require a lot of help from my electronic dictionary. 

I liked the aiming in Metroid Prime because it allowed me to relax a bit more than I would have if it were dual analogue (on a fucking GC controller? no thanks!) and concentrate on exploring and not get bogged down with insanely difficult fights. I also think that it let them be a bit more creative with the bosses. I honestly can't think of any other FPS with bosses that cool. 

As far as I have heard other people say, the boost ball guardian is fucking impossible, but it was pure joy compared to the fucking spider ball guardian a bit later, which is possibly the most insanely difficult boss ever.

Bomb jumps are ok to pull off to progress, but pulling off several jumps in a row with split second timing while constantly taking damage is infuriating.

I liked the lock on aiming bit of the Prime games. It made the combat more of a timing/spatial puzzle instead of a test of aiming skill. 

3) Note to the designers of MP3: At least use a modicum of common sense when deciding how to distribute the save points. Having twenty minutes of navigation gameplay and jumping puzzles between the last save point and a frustratingly difficult boss battle is BAD DESIGN. Just make sure there's one right before each boss, you cocks.

As a side note, I have just played enough of Metroid Prime 2 to realise that the designers have learned nothing in this regard since the original game. 

yeah. My year-old savegame is right before one of those bosses -- where you have to travel 10 minutes to get to the boss room after loading. It's the boss that swims in a circle and has endless mosquitoes coming at you. 

Stop whining you toddler.

It would have been more useful if that lot had been posted in the console thread. Would have saved some of us skipping over it at least. 

Is that the one, Metlslime? I play Echoes every so many months hoping I've accumulated enough mustard to get past it but, alas, I have given up hope and am considering hiring a twelve-year-old to get me past that boss :) 

could be... there's like an energy tank or something missle expansion or something right before it... you stand in a middle platform and he makes waves sometimes? I think... 

Especially since he has a somewhat difficult first form as well, and then when you get to the second form (already weakened by spending so much time in the damaging atmosphere) it just becomes a stressing hell to navigate around the thing in the precious seconds when it's dazed.

And Quadraxis! Jesus!

Metroid Prime 2 has generally been a complete pain in the ass, and I never bothered finishing it once I got the final suit and I just needed to do the last key hunt.

Posting just to annoy Shambler here. 

than: I also found the controls annoying when starting but now I've gotten used to them and it's definitely a game worth playing. Have to agree on the voice acting and that they should have made weapons/items switchable/usable with some button instead of having to pause the game and bring up the inventory screen.

When I've finished re4 I'll probably write a bit more of what I liked and what I would have liked to see done differently.

The thing that kind of puts me off about zelda is that after finishing the first temple I've spent four hours on it and haven't really had any real challenge at all wich means that my brain has only gotten very small bits of stimulation from appreciating some of the designs (wich btw seems to range from awesome to blah). 

playing fear now, writing down thoughts:

1) There are no locked doors. Is the common conception in games such that locked doors i NEVER get a key to are 'irritating' or 'misleading'? Or why would a pretty realistic game like fear not use the concept of locked doors to make their levels more realistic?

2)This brings me to the next point: the leveldesign is pretty... obvious to me. That may very well have everything to do with me own level design experience and nothing with how much fun the game is, but most levels up to this point felt.. like built from a certain formular. Maybe that will change.. ?

3) Don't just completely refill the player after and before each fight(-ing area). that makes 'being good' at the game so fucking pointless it's a shame. (that just stopped though, so maybe the first levels were like that to make life easier for newbies?

4) Why have fighting areas at all? The game could feel much more tense if there weren't these supposedly completely saled off areas with about 5 enemies in them.

5) points for the enemy ai: it's just stupid, not ultra-mega-duh like most other games. Still feels stupid though.

6) having 3-dimensional layouts is awfully important for fpses. The amount of fun of an area is almost proportional to the degree of how much the third axis is put to use.

7) long quicksave times are pretty annoying

8) What's up with the player speed? It's ok for fights, but hello, even diablo introduced running...

9)only one way (or one way camouflaged as a fork to two ways) is always bad. Always. Seriously. In a game where you're up against a huge numer of enemies that act in a team, having more than an entrance and an exit to a room is vital to have more interesting gameplay and more afraidness of the player.

10) It just crashed in idle while i was writing this. hrm. 

Well, the enemy AI is pretty good. I haven't seen enemy AI done better in an FPS or 3PS to date, and I've had to look at these things in quite some detail.

Other than that, I found the game somewhat unimaginative and boring. Recommended as an AI case study only. 

11) Autosaves should be intelligent: if i just saved 2secs before the auto, it's much less confusing to just use that savepoint when i load.

12) Don't make enemies fall down stuff when they die via scripting. looks bad, and every enemy on a ledge does this. it's old.

13) we need an alternative to hard hitboxes. something that fits more into the way humans move through obstacles. i just bumped my head and got stuck under a 5cm metal thingy.
Maybe you could make this into a realistic falling damage model: when you jump against a door with your shoulder, your shoulder hurts / is slower. this would put an end to ledge crawling, too, i guess. And rocket-jumps... :/. But this is for realistic games anyways.

13) while you're at that, put hitpoints to rest, and model real injuries.

14) oldie: consistency. In fear there's numerous valves everywhere. about 2% ofthem are important to the game (ie. you can turn them). it'd be cooler to have all of them functional and make me figure out when there's one that's actually useful

15) love the way you can destroy grates with two hits in this game.looks so cool. 

hrm, they sometimes try to get in your back. what else is good about it? They mostly just run stupidly into my fire. They feel pretty lifeless, ie. like computer players.

Game with best AI is still descent2 for me ;). of course the robots didn't really react in swarms, but each kind had their own behaviour and felt unique. I personally hated those green small fuckers with laser lvl4. i don't feel hate against the greyish anonymous soldier in fear. and some robots tried getting behind your back, too. also, they hid, were defensive and then suddenly came at you. the smaller, faster enemies tended to come at you in groups. Also, there were dumber and more intelligent (evil) robots. oh, the joy of a homing robot hiding in lava filled passages... </fanboism></nerdiness. 

Essentially, the FEAR AI uses an implementation of Jeff Orkin's GOAP architecture. I'm not an AI programmer, but those that I work with never get tired of telling me how good GOAP (Goal-Oriented Action Planning) is at producing emergent looking behaviour in AI with no scripting, far superior to more traditional systems such as finite state machines. FEAR probably doesn't show off the potential of GOAP as well at is should because the enemies have a pretty simplistic set of goals and actions (get to cover, kill player etc.)

The reason they run stupidly into your fire is because the designers chose to make them exposed all the time, so you can see all the cool animations of them running around, jumping through windows and vaulting over boxes.

In this case, sophisticated AI does not amount to "intelligent" looking soldiers, but it does give the illusion of fun dynamic combat, with enemies running around all over the place and flanking you etc.

This is why unless you're making some kind of neckbeardy realistic tactical shooter, where the enemies stay in one place most of the time behind cover and occasionally pop out and headshot you, enemies will seem dumb. After all, you've got to give the player a chance to shoot them sometimes. 

gril