Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

I think the horror analogy is apt. I enjoy horror to some extent. Part of the reason why I love Metroid Dread so far is the horror aspect, but had it been any scarier I wouldn't have been able to play it.

Sure, saying a horror game shouldn't be horrifying is silly, but there are some of us who enjoy horror to an extent, but can't deal when it becomes too horrifying. I'm missing out on interesting games, series and movies because they're too frightening for me, although I do enjoy the genre to a certain degree.

This applies to almost any genre. You might enjoy romantic movies, but there comes a point for everyone where it becomes too mushy. You might enjoy action flicks, but there comes a point for everyone where it becomes too dude-bro. Every genre has their extremes, the same goes for every medium.

I think game developers should keep accessibility in mind when developing games, with that said many artists adhere to the "9 people's favourite thing, rather than a 100 people's ninth favourite thing" mindset. That's okay. Artistic freedom is a human right. The same as your right to criticize game makers for not including accessibility modes.

@Sunsy im kinda the same way. I'm Animal Crossing and Studio Ghibli films by day, and Xenomorph chest bursting cosmic horror by night. Gotta have a little variety in life.

@kkslider5552000 well said. I feel a lot of sympathy for people who physically cant play games. I mentioned my grandpa a few pages back and that was no joke. He speed runs Resident Evil 1-3. Had to stop because the games after that got too complicated and fast.

@Pizzamorg It does if they set out to make a hard game about unending death. Some creators actually have visions for hard games, like Hollow Knight, where a character literally tells you to "Git Guud", since it's a hard as hell metroidvania, and is meant to be challenging by design. Same with games like Metroid, where the game was built to be challenging to those playing it. Adding a difficulty mode to games like those would ruin the fun.

No, that's a myth. Team Cherry have clarified in interviews that it's actually just a gibberish word, like most of the dialogue in the game:

It's certainly an uncompromisingly hard game though, so I'm not surprised that many players have interpreted it as such. A 'happy coincidence', that's all.

Oh man, Hollow Knight is so much more difficult than Dark Souls imo. Top notch game, but woof is it mean.

@Matt_Barber Ah. thanks for clarifying. It's still a pretty hard game though, and adding an easy mode would kind of jeopardize the feeling the game has.

@Losermagnet Gonna have to get to that one day.

Well, it certainly looks like there's a few things that have been changed a bit from previous games, @Losermagnet .... I've pre-ordered, so I'll let you know what it's like when it's out! I died about a billion times playing Dark Souls Remastered, so there's some sort of benchmark for it

You have to see the difference though. To make something less scary would require them to physically change the text itself. You can make a game easier, without touching any other aspect of the game itself.

Especially as someone else explained, difficulty itself is also completely relative.

This goes out to @VoidofLight, too. Some people are arguing that an easy mode would take away the artistic intent of an encounter, say. However, they are making the base assumption that a person is going to cruise on easy and lose out on the experience. This is a fallacy, as I may need as much effort on easy as another may on normal.

To me, easy may feel like the right balance between challenge and fun. This is why an experience should always be tailored. Creating just a catch all difficulty setting is an inherently flawed idea, because it assumes everyone is of a base skill level/at a base level of physical ability.

I am not personally aware of how hard Dread is. I sort of get the general idea behind the incremental progress you make in a Metroid style game. I also understand there are instadeath stealth sections - probably the thing I like the absolute least in gaming, as I am total ass at stealth. The ability to turn off the instadeath would be nice, if not included, but I do feel like a change like that would meaningfully alter the text itself, so I wouldn’t necessarily push for that. I’d just accept the game is not for me. I do see a line between that and say being able to tailor a Dark Souls game to my skill level.

Speaking generally, I would say that if there isn’t a balance of pick up and play and of greater mastery, then I would suggest it needs an easier mode/experience tailoring. This is of course assuming you can still keep the experience intact.

No need to feel ashamed to play a Baby level of video games.
I have finished Pocoyo Party Switch version in straight 2 hours. Straight 2 hours and i finished the game. 😆
The games was too easy like it was a game for baby and toddler, but I enjoyed that baby game as I like to have experience in different games / obscure games as there are their beauty from them.

@Snatcher Hollow Knight comes highly recommended. But it's more of a twitchy old-school challenge imo, and I'm miserable at those types of games. Maybe that's why I gravitate towards Dark Souls - it's challenging but really slow lol. In any case Hollow Knight is probably the hardest game I've played and actually finished.

Reading all of this about Hollow Knight, my seemingly unpopular opinion is, am I the only one who didn't think it was THAT hard? Sure, I died quite a few times, but not once did I fail to get back to my shadow and re-collect my things, so it only wasted a couple of minutes to then try again. Maybe growing on the NES and having to restart the entire game if I died three times makes me think all the modern trappings make games easier, but I just didn't find HK to be incredibly difficult.

@Xyphon22 it may be me. I'm really bad at fast-reflex games. Fighting, hack 'n slash (i'd probably be able to play them, but i dont have the patience or will to learn). It was the bosses in Hollow Knight that usually blocked me. Contast that to Dark Souls, where I think the difficulty of the bosses is usually overstated and the hardest part of the game is actually just getting from point A to point B (but that I can do).

Follow up question: what game do you find hard? Now i'm just interested in the subject lol.

I found Hollow Knight fairly hard but not as hard as Super Monkey Ball 2.

Hard to describe. I felt like Hollow knight(never finished) was only harder than cuphead(actually finished) because the length of the game. Being that cuphead was a much shorter game, it was somewhat manageable. I'd say cuphead was twitchy as well and you had to have nerves of steel along with quick reflexes to finish it. Having said that, I can tell you I'd never go back and play cuphead again but I'd gladly give HK another shot. I also beat zelda 2 the traditional way with no save States and rewinds, but HK just felt like it was on another level for me.

@CactusMan @Dogorilla unexpected answers! But appreciated 😁 i wouldn't have expected either of those games to be remarkably challenging. Thanks for the input.

@NintendoByNature i forgot about Cuphead. I never finished it. Got to the last area and decided that was good enough for me. You make a great point though: Cuphead is brief, but exhausting. I felt like the game was always on you know? I would've liked more of the platforming levels added in to break up the fact that it's a boss rush game that looks and sounds amazing. Hollow Knight probably requires more effort than Cuphead (longer game, more bosses, items to find, yougettheidea) but at least part of that is relatively chill. Also - kudos for the Zelda II. I can't complete most S/NES games without save states (unless I played them a bunch as a kid) so that is quite the accomplishment.

To add to hard games I beat:
-DK Tropical Freeze on hard. It wasnt too bad. Levels are really long though, so not having checkpoints was a bear.
-Shovel Knight on hard. I don't remember much of it actually. I think the hardest part was the boss gauntlet towards the end but other than that it wasnt too spicy.
-possibly the single hardest boss I've beaten in a game was Agent 3 in Splatoon 2. That took an afternoon. I kid you not, i one-shotted Kalameet in Dark Souls but Agent 3 used me like a sponge.

@Losermagnet It's hard to say. I don't think I've really played any of the modern games that most people consider hard (the Souls games, Cuphead), except I guess for Hollow Knight. I remember in Xenoblade Chronicles there were a couple of places that there was no chance I was going to beat until I finally gave up my ideal of always playing as Shulk and changed my controlled character, and then went and grinded for a few levels. But mostly old-school NES games. I could never beat either Zelda when I was a kid, but I finally did when I grew up because you could actually save in those. Blaster Master I could never beat until it came to NSO with save states, or Gradius. And like @Dogorilla said, I could never beat the later levels on the early Monkey Ball games.

Well there you have it, folks!

What are people’s thoughts on the Far Cry 6 discourse? While the game is doing just fine, scoring high 7s to low 8s, many “critics” and “journalists” took it upon themselves to criticise Far Cry 6 for how similar it was to past entries in the series. Something which has seen a lot of backlash, in a lot of different directions.

How much innovation do you want out of a sequel and how much do you want it to stay the same? Is it fair to criticise Far Cry in this way, when countless other games have been iterating on the same formula for decades? Or given there has been a wave of games in recent history which are designed to feel exactly like a game from decades earlier, make a point to have no modern quality of life improvements and are then praised for it.