Why does Jeff hate Shootmania so much?

I think it's a really great FPS gameplay wise, it is just let down by the horrible ManiaPlanet mess, which also killed off Trackmania. It reminds me a lot of the Quake/UT days where you'd get those one hit kill railguns and it was so fast and twitch based. You just don't see it any more because Analogue sticks on consoles cannot move at that speed and the industry for awhile went so AAA console focused, so every FPS was like COD or whatever.

I really like the game, like Trackmania, sadly I wont be playing because ManiaPlanet is crap.

It killed Trackmania.

@scaramoosh: He doesn't like that you can only take a couple shots before having to wait for them to recharge. In every Quick Look ever, Jeff states his distaste for sniper rifles, because he doesn't like so much importance being on one shot.

Even in Quake, if you got the rocket launcher, you could just fire off a half dozen or more rockets in the span of a few seconds, plus they had splash damage. The main weapon in Shootmania has the travel time of a rocket launcher, with none of the splash damage, and an ammo capacity of a sniper rifle. Some people are fine with playing a shooter where you have to learn how to lead targets incredibly well, but Jeff is not one of them. He'd rather be playing a shooter where you fire bullets, and as long as you line up the crosshairs with somebody, you generally hit them.

Honestly, it looked like a game that would be really hard to like. Very barebones attempt in a genre that is full of games with high production values and tight controls. Even if Shootmania does what it wants to do fairly well, it's in such a flooded genre that it's hard to find a niche of players who are not getting something closer to what they want from another franchise. Jeff happens to be getting what he wants from Battlefield on the PS4, it sounds like, though at the time he was more into CoD.

You can't say he didn't give it a chance.

The game mode seemed incredibly interesting and full of potential, but the mechanics let it down.

RIP Questmania.

It's a bad game.

Because he likes to always be shooting, and how dare you put a limit on the amount of bullets he's allowed to shoot, sir. How dare you.

You beat me too it!

It just plain sucks, there's no reason not to hate it.

no accounting for bad taste

Jeff loves to dump.

Take that as you will.

Probably because it seems like poorly designed hot garbage. I'm honestly not sure what they were thinking with that game. Trackmania makes sense because of the customization. Shootmania is just a very limited shooter that stripped away most of those options and had no chance of competing in a market with tons of games that do everything it does much, much better.

@excast said:

It's interesting, because it feels like they were trying to single-handedly revamp the entire shooter genre, since it appeals neither to the current way of doing things (modern military shooter or space marine shooter) nor does it appeal to the wackier shooters of old (Quake, UT, etc.). Instead it's this weird thing with ONE gun, and even that one gun is missing the features most people like about modern shooters (the bullets almost immediately go where you are pointing the gun, and also the ability to shoot many, many bullets).

So yeah, you can pull that off if your idea is incredibly good, but Shootmania kinda wasn't, and what they're doing is the textbook definition of making a game that is going completely against current consumer demand, because I really don't know anybody who was saying "Yeah, if only they'd make a shooter where I have to lead targets and shoot several seconds ahead of where they're going to be, and also the ammo capacity of my primary weapon was completely terrible." So giant surprise, it's failing super hard.

Yup. Be it guns, poops or bad thoughts on games (although in this case he is right).

The game doesn't even have fucking weapon models.

I haven't played it, but every time I've seen it, it just looked totally pointless and kinda crappy.

@flacracker said:

Also, this.

if only it was on par with Trackmania, if only.

Beat me to it.

Jeff thought its mediocrity hurt the Mania brand, although anything after Canyon seemed to hurt Maniaplanet in his eyes.

You know, he might be right!

The master dumper

You're leaving out that the consecutive releases literally did hurt the previous ones. Seems like each time something new came out in that franchise the older stuff got more broken. It wasn't like a bad sequel came out and he suddenly started hating the previous games. That series trades hard on its open-endedness and online functionality, two things that started taking serious blows during the lead up to and release of Shootmania.

Also, Shootmania is entirely mediocre when it's functioning at its best.

It's whack.

Why do you care so much?