I've never seen my inbox so full of messages. Looks like I angered a lot of people and have some explaining to do...
For the record, I didn't hate Portal at all. I thought it was a really great game. As far as the game concerned, my only criticism of it is that it's pretty short, and I felt that the end of the game could have offered more of a challenge. I felt that towards the end, they didn't really force you to make much use of stuff you had learned earlier. I think it's good to test gamers at the end with more of a cumulative challenge where all the skills and techniques they learned are put to the test. Also, I wasn't too crazy about the final boss battle. I loved a lot of the game, though, and thought all the cake business was seriously awesome. I had a blast with most of the game, but found GLaDOS to be really overrated. I didn't think she was all that funny. I found the general craziness of the gameplay to be a lot more amusing and had plenty of laughs just screwing aroudn in the game.. Like I mentioned earlier, I did have a hard time understanding her most of the time, which was annoying, and dude, subtitles can really kill humor. Maybe if I were to play through it again, I'd be less critical. I am a pretty big critic as it is. As someone who didn't like GLaDOS, it's a given that I wouldn't like the end song. I thought it was very nerdy, cheesy, and above all, it made me feel shame for having played the game. Maybe that's a bit much. Whatever. If that bugs you, I'm sorry to hear it. Seems most people disagree with me on that one, and that's fine. I also don't like Transformers at all. *GASP!* Oh, man! Am I just digging my grave deeper or what? Alright, alright. Maybe I should move on here before this leads to more angry responses.
@Hailinel: Well, I suppose I should explain what sort of problems I had with Twilight Princess. I think a lot of it was marred by some bad decisions by the designers. I've explained some of these issues quite a few times in several threads. I'm starting to think I should just make a few blogs detailing what I didn't like about certain games. You know, for quick reference, so I don't have to write it all out and explain myself every time. Maybe I should start writing some user reviews or something where I can detail these problems. Anyway, onto the point. Oh, and I should warn you now... I don't think you know exactly what you just got yourself into. Be strong, this may get excessive.
As one example, there are a lot of puzzles thrown all over Hyrule in Twilight Princess. There will be chests that will taunt you throughout your adventure. I'm sure most people will try multiple times to try to find a solution, though a lot of them actually end up being pretty simple and just require you to have a certain item, and don't really require much thought. I will say that I found some to be good, but let me get to my point.... You'll be tempted to find a way to get these chests open, and I think that's cool and great and everything, but what happens when you finally get to open the chest? Most of the time, you're just rewarded with rupees. That doesn't sound so bad unless you're pretty familiar with Zelda games. A problem I've noticed among several of the latest Zelda games is that you get rupees everywhere and ideally want to collect as many as possible, but there's hardly ever anything to buy with them. Most of the stuff you'll purchase with rupees can be collected for free just by playing the game. So what happens? You end up with a full wallet, and whenever you're rewarded with rupees in a chest, you can't pick them up so they just vanish forever. Someone at Nintendo was aware of this and thought of dressing the issue, but what they did was made the problem worse. In Twilight Princess, if you can't get all the rupees in your wallet, you're forced to put them back. Clearly this was done as a way for you to be able to come back to them later when you could carry them, but there's one thing it lacked. When this happens to you, I think the chest should clearly be marked on your map so that you know that you opened it already and it had rupees you couldn't carry. So let's say you're in a dungeon, or revisiting one, trying to open all the chests. Well, you're not going to know which ones you already opened that had rupees when you look on your map. Heck, when you get to that chest, you might not remember either, and might even end up repeating puzzles only to reopen these chests with money you can't carry. It happened to me more than a few times. It's truly frustrating and also pretty annoying. So then outside in Hyrule, I'd finally be able to get those displayed chests open, and would be excited that I had finally succeeded in solving the puzzle, but again would be slapped in the face with rupees I couldn't carry. There's a few ways this can be addressed in future games. Firstly, it should be indicated on your map. Have the chest appear as a different color or something, or have a picture of a rupee appear on it. Heck, maybe they could lift the wallet cap entirely. One thing that I think would be appreciated is allowing you to long-shot yourself onto chests you've opened before. You've obviously already been there before, so why should you have to go through the hard work to get there again? Let me use my longshot to get there quicker and without the headache. Preferrably, though... dude... just find better stuff to reward us with. There's not much of anything good you can buy with your rupees anyway. Let me get some cool items, or perhaps stuff that can lead to sidequests or something. Anything but this, or other than that retarded third outfit you pay a whole lot of money for only to discover it's really stupid.
Okay, there's a lot of stupid objectives in the game. Downright stupid. Undeniably. One that I always like to bring up is the cat and the fish in the beginning of the game, but truthfully, I encountered several other dumb goals too throughout the course of the game. Anyway, the cat thing. You're trying to get the cat to follow you into that shop, remember? Yeah. So ideally you're probably going to first try to chase it in there, and that doesn't work. You pull out your fishing rod and it follows you... but not into the shop. What the heck? It was following me up until I opened the door... why didn't it go in? Kind of dumb, but I guess I'm doing something wrong. So whatever, eventually I try catching a fish, and I do. Okay, nothing happens. The cat still follows me but won't go in. Annoying. That would lead any reasonable person to believe that catching a fish is not the answer and you must do something else. Well... there's not a whole lot going on at this stage in the game. I was stumped. I was stuck there for probably an extra hour as a result. I didn't know what to do because nothing I tried worked. It turns out you need to catch like two fish in a row. Dude, c'mon. That's dumb. If it didn't work the first time, who would expect it to work the second time? I think that's a very solid example of a stupid design decision. Then there's the Goron that is thirsty and wants hot mountain spring water, which only stays hot for a limited time. So what do I do? The same thing I'm sure everyone else did. I go to the hot spring, get a bottle of water, and hurry my butt over to that Goron. You know what happens as you approach him, regardless of how fast you were? The water turns cold because it's not the actual solution. Why isn't it? I don't see why it couldn't be. Instead you have to do a completely unrelated task to please this guy. That's lame. I found a more practical solution and I'm punished for it and basically just wasted my time. Truthfully, the game is filled with instances like that. So there, that's what I'm talking about.
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