The worst moments in PC gaming

Gravey wrote:

Was the Wikipedia article vandalized? Am I reading this right? The Precursors were almost wiped out because they made themselves too delicious?

It was terrible in many ways. I haven't a clue as to the actual plot because I was only able to bear playing for a brief period. All I remember was that a handful of races got dragged into an alternate dimension at the beginning. I think. It was a long time ago.

Gravey wrote:
Concave wrote:
gewy wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Oh man, Star Control 3. Puppets? Really?

Haha... yeah. It was especially lame how they had a puppet for the human.

I just read the plot of the game on Wikipedia. Amazing.

Was the Wikipedia article vandalized? Am I reading this right? The Precursors were almost wiped out because they made themselves too delicious?

It sounds ridiculous, till your people are living in pens and your slave master is eating your children.

Spoiler:

Moooooo.

Its Europe in the mid 20th century. Americans, Brits and others have united against a regime bent on European domination at minimum. Only your group of mercenaries can penetrate deep behind enemy lines and win the day. You can hire demolitions guys, snipers, even a ninja and you proceed to enjoy a wonderfully crafted turn based tactical game like you've been craving. The game goes on for hours with a semi linear plot, giving you branches to enjoy to extend the pleasure.

Then you assault a lab and some exposition starts to hit you a little more bluntly than it has during the previous 10 hours of gameplay. It doesn't make much sense so you just complete the objectives and continue on. The next mission seems thankfully more mundane again, until you're forced to fight an 8 foot sort of mech with a Nazi inside. This bend to the fiction is unwelcome. Except for the ninja, this has essentially played out as an historical simulation. Well fine, lets beat the mech. 20 minutes and hundreds of rounds later you've defeated the Nazi and you can take the mech for yourself. Well thats kinda neat I guess, except now all the skills you've been building are useless, because this uses none of them.

You fight more mech things, getting more of your squad equipped with them. There's no more tactics to the game. You're just moving your mechs up and slaughtering theirs. Even more ludicrous things are being added. Now there's lasers that slay the mechs pretty nicely. No they dont use skills you've been progressing either. Now there's... there's.. there's a space ship crash. There's an alien...

Ok I'm done with this sh*t.

Silent Storm, you had 2/3rds of an amazing tactical military game the likes of which hadn't been seen since Jagged Alliance and you finished up with 1/3rd of pulp magazine reject science fiction. WTF happened? If there were an alien on the front of the box at least I could have been mentally prepared for this to turn into cheesy historical fiction.

At least there weren't greaser monkeys in it. I guess.

polypusher: The one thing that somewhat redeems the game (in my eyes) is the inclusion of powerful anti-mech infantry weapons (the laser from the alien ship being one of them). However, they are rare and nearly impossible to find without knowing how to find them.

There are also mods to stop the mechs from being unstoppable juggernauts, as it is their near complete invulnerability to normal infantry weapons that made them such a godawful design decision.

An amazing game plagued by some of the most pants-on-head- {ableist slur} decisions ever.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

An amazing game plagued by some of the most pants-on-head- {ableist slur} decisions ever.

Now there's a box quote.

Gravey wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

An amazing game plagued by some of the most pants-on-head- {ableist slur} decisions ever.

Now there's a box quote.

Yeah, and yet I still love it. Made a mod for it and its sequel to fix all the lousy English localization of weapon & ammo names.

Spore

An insanely awesome idea by an insanely awesome and well respected designer. That ended up having virtualy every cool science aspect ripped from it like a heart being knifed out of a mayan sacrifice. It was, in my mind, the first game truly meant for the PC, that could truly use a PC, that got infested with the limitations of a console mindset and was, ironically, a PC exclusive.

Aside from that the first idiot who though cross platform design was a good idea for games. Which instead turned into a 10 year black hole coming out of the golden gaming age of the 90's. Taking us right into a world where the money makers realised they could pay one dev to write a piece of code that worked on consoles and PC's and doomed us all to lowest common denomiator console ports that were still struggling to get away from. Not to mention the loss of AAA mech games, space shooters/traders, and deep complex RPG's.

jam3 wrote:

Spore

An insanely awesome idea by an insanely awesome and well respected designer. That ended up having virtualy every cool science aspect ripped from it like a heart being knifed out of a mayan sacrifice. It was, in my mind, the first game truly meant for the PC, that could truly use a PC, that got infested with the limitations of a console mindset and was, ironically, a PC exclusive.

And there was the whole DRM debacle.

Silent Storm, you had 2/3rds of an amazing tactical military game the likes of which hadn't been seen since Jagged Alliance and you finished up with 1/3rd of pulp magazine reject science fiction. WTF happened?

Preach it, brother. That was the best game in YEARS, probably a decade, until the first mech showed up, and it all went to sh*t.

And then they did the exact same thing in the sequel. Maddening. Pants-on-head {ableist slur} design is exactly correct. It was so close to being one of the all-time great games, and then they lost their minds.

AUs_TBirD wrote:

Quake 2 is a personal worst moment.

Yes.

AUs_TBirD wrote:

Age of Mythology

No.

jam3 wrote:

Spore

Aside from that the first idiot who though cross platform design was a good idea for games. Which instead turned into a 10 year black hole coming out of the golden gaming age of the 90's. Taking us right into a world where the money makers realised they could pay one dev to write a piece of code that worked on consoles and PC's and doomed us all to lowest common denomiator console ports that were still struggling to get away from. Not to mention the loss of AAA mech games, space shooters/traders, and deep complex RPG's.

+1