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Post by Samildanach on Dec 28, 2009 21:15:26 GMT -5
There's always something that's getting on my nerves at any given moment, and I know I'm not the only one. Sometimes it's a relief to be able to vent about it. If something's rubbing you the wrong way, feel free to drop it in here. What prompted this? I just watched a serious video review of a game on a fairly reputable website. It made use of something that's been niggling at me for weeks. This was the last straw. The offending item is 'addicting' - as in 'this game is really addicting'. It was bad enough when the generic chumps on websites like Yahoo Answers used this non-word, then it got slightly worse with the arrival of the amateurish free game website Addicting Games - but now I keep seeing/hearing it in proper reviews. Game reviewers have taken to describing things as 'addicting'. It's pathetic. I know what you're trying to say, reviewers; you're trying to say that the games are compelling enough that they seem almost like an addiction. There's already a word for that, you semi-literate ape farmers: addictive. Yes, addictIVE. And it's not like this is an archaic and long-forgotten word that would be completely unknown to those who live on the cutting edge of technological entertainment. Back when I used to buy games magazines like Nintendo Magazine System and Gamesmaster, they frequently had an 'addictiveness' component in the score breakdown. It wasn't 'addictingness'. In fact, try to say that aloud: 'addictingness'. It's horrible. In case anyone demands more solid proof than the products of a basic education, try typing 'addicting' into the online branch of the esteemed Oxford English Dictionary. You'll get the same answer I did: So, TotSers, what's getting on your nerves lately, or what always winds you up?
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Post by crysis on Dec 28, 2009 21:20:12 GMT -5
Whoo hoo! Go Sammy!
Nothing really bothers me right now except the phrase "brain fart." That is my least favourite phrase of all time. Never say it. Ever. Even typing it has injured my sensibilities.
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Post by jan on Dec 29, 2009 6:53:05 GMT -5
Actually, British National Corpus ( www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/) gave me one (!!!) solution for "addicting" ( sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=addicting&mysubmit=Go) - I couldn't believe it so I looked at this result more closely and it's from a school essay! Now, I'm kind of shaken - I've always believed that BNC was the best source for finding (non)existing words and for other English-related disputes, but they're using also school essays! Now, as Archimedes, I have no "place to stand"!
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Post by Doomy on Dec 29, 2009 8:09:59 GMT -5
"Brain fart" appears in the manual for the original Fallout and is therefore cool. Sorry Zipp.
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Post by Ghost Bear on Dec 29, 2009 9:24:00 GMT -5
Ye gods, where would I start?
Posh shops that include the place names London, Paris or Milan underneath the main name of the shop - when the shop is not in London, Paris or Milan. There's one of these in Cardiff. It's just blatant lying in an attempt to make the shop seem cool and sophisticated. I know I'm not in London. Stop trying to tell me that I am, you morons!
Bars named with numbers or postcodes. Bar 33, CF10, SA1, etc. It doesn't make the bar seem cool or trendy - it just tells us all that the landlord has a distinct lack of imagination.
I know for a fact that there're more. So thanks Samil for giving us a place to vent!
Merry Christmas everyone!
-GB
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Post by Simey on Dec 29, 2009 11:33:39 GMT -5
Am pretty chilled right now - typically I'd think of many things, I'm sure - but the word 'Bromance' is kind of ghastly. What it's intended to mean - so far as I understand - is a cool thing, but why does there have to be a trendy word to label it with!? Grrr....
(I will now most likely start to think of other trendy word-labels of old that I use myself without thinking about it.)
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Post by zipp on Dec 29, 2009 12:44:34 GMT -5
I've got some game related ones, just two for this morning.
First of all, I hate unskipable cutscenes. They are a hold over from an era when graphics were new and trendy and no one in their right mind would want to skip them. But we're past that, now. Any game that doesn't let me skip its cutscenes gets a sideways glance of death from me. If it combines that with checkpoints that start you right before the cutscene, then the game instantly loses two points off of my review.
Another thing that drives me crazy is the "semblance of choice." It's a sneaky bastard, too.
This describes those games like Persona which give you converation choices at every turn of the game but then just blindly continue with the same script no matter which choice you've made.
However, it also appears in a more convoluted form in games like Fallout 3, which purport to give the player meaningful choices at every step of the adventure and yet doesn't. Not really. Think about it. You can't sneak through the game, you need to boost weapon skills at least to some higher degree. None of your choices change the overall plot, only tiny stupid things about it like whether your dad likes you. Even then, doesn't matter if he likes you, he'll still entrust you with his master plan, dumb bastard.
Those two are egregious flaunting of these peeves, but there is also a more basic version that is similarly annoying, if not quite as game breaking for me. I can't stand it when you go up to something like a key item or a lever and the game says "do you want to pick this up?" It doesn't make sense. Like, do I have a choice here? What are my optinos? Pick it up and move on with the adventure or don't pick it up and just chill in this room forever? The only games it still has any purpose in are survival horrors, where the prompt makes you wonder just exactly WHAT is waiting for you to pick it up.
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Post by Beowuuf on Dec 30, 2009 12:57:19 GMT -5
The trouble is, players HATE choice really. Give them clear choices they have to make that are cumulative, and they invariably dither around because they don't want to miss anything. So you can include real cumulative choices, and the narrative will probably keep a shade of 'meh', or the player will feel 'punished' when they meta-game non-work actions just for the heck of it. The best way is to give you clear cut big choices so you get a very obvious result. But then you have to make sure that the big obvious choice doens't really ruin the game. And it's very hard to have all the cut scenes and story points that goes along with that, so you kinda need to minimise choice's effect. So you get Bioshock's If you want choice to matter, you really need to play something like Dwarf Fortress where the persistent world, and ascii characters means your choices and gameplay decisions have procedural consequences so the world lives
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Post by zipp on Dec 30, 2009 13:41:58 GMT -5
I think Blade Runner the game was a great example of choice done well. Hopefully the upcoming Heavy Rain will be another prime example. Majora's Mask was another good example. It's resetable clock allowed you to make different choice and see their outcomes before resetting and trying everything again. Radiata Stories gave you one big choice in the middle which totally changed the game. These were all well-done games.
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Post by Beowuuf on Dec 30, 2009 13:44:40 GMT -5
Oooh, did not realise such a thing existed as a Blade Runner game!
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Post by zipp on Dec 30, 2009 14:16:02 GMT -5
Oooh, did not realise such a thing existed as a Blade Runner game! It's an adventure game and one of the best of the genre. You could probably find an emulator for it no problem these days. I can't remember who published it. West... something.
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Post by Doomy on Dec 30, 2009 14:29:04 GMT -5
Westwood Studios of Command and Conquer fame!
And yes, it's a bloody good point-and-clicker, with an almost gamebook-like nonlinear narrative that changes depending on your actions.
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Post by zipp on Dec 30, 2009 19:06:38 GMT -5
Westwood Studios of Command and Conquer fame! And yes, it's a bloody good point-and-clicker, with an almost gamebook-like nonlinear narrative that changes depending on your actions. The only complaint about the game that I have is that they never got their targeting range inside the police station working right. It doesn't crash the game or anything, but it just won't activate the targets. Other than that, though, which is a totally optional activity in the game besides, there's so much going for the game. Lots of very different endings and playthrough opportunities, lots of cool things like combat and administering the Voigt-Kampf test, random encounters with NPCs, and tons of tie ins to the movie (the game takes place at the same time as the film, but follows a different blade runner on a different mission). It never gets old visiting locations from the movie or hearing the signature music.
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Post by Doomy on Dec 30, 2009 19:48:05 GMT -5
The only complaint about the game that I have is that they never got their targeting range inside the police station working right. It doesn't crash the game or anything, but it just won't activate the targets. That problem isn't intrinsic to the game itself - it's a CPU timing issue relating to playing on more recent PCs than originally intended. So the easiest solution is to dig up an old Pentium from somewhere. As you say, though, it's not massively important. BTW, Blade Runner is set less than ten years into the future. Where are our flying cars, androids and off-world colonies?
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Post by zipp on Dec 31, 2009 12:12:22 GMT -5
The only complaint about the game that I have is that they never got their targeting range inside the police station working right. It doesn't crash the game or anything, but it just won't activate the targets. That problem isn't intrinsic to the game itself - it's a CPU timing issue relating to playing on more recent PCs than originally intended. So the easiest solution is to dig up an old Pentium from somewhere. As you say, though, it's not massively important. BTW, Blade Runner is set less than ten years into the future. Where are our flying cars, androids and off-world colonies? They are there, they're just using stealth technology.
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