Re: The Ranting/Debate Thread
Evil Genius, which is in almost all other aspects a really good game, which keeps me playing. The music for example, just the music on the first menu perfectly sets the mood for the entire game, and the game itself is really good at making you feel like the evil genius, nearly all aspects besides the ones I'm ranting about are at least an 8.5/10.
When playing, you can find out a few things while playing, such as why not to capture a superagent, they will most likely blow up half your base, starting with the cells you kept them in. And just as you believe your room designs were perfect, small, but everything fits perfectly, research gives you a new item to put in there. (Also, I assume it's because it's a fairly old game, there is a kinda low amount of maximum units you can have, but that can be modded to have more)
As said, the game is great until you make that one first mistake, and then you either fix it, or start a new game with your new knowledge, and enjoy it much further then the point where you made the mistake.
This works up till when you find the european superagent, which has the mentioned pausing ability, sure, opening all doors and changing your base's alert level makes sense on paper(As well as randomly torching some things, I guess overloading the powergrid or something), but in reality, all you need is to press the pause button, reset the alert level, and then manually go over all your 30++ doors to set them right again, and by the time you find him you probably already knew about fires, and placed extinguishers everywhere, so there you have it, his entire main ability has just been balanced out by you finding the "p" button, then spending 5-10 minutes on all the settings, and then unpausing just to do it all again 30 seconds up to 3 minutes further.
Not fun, and it definitely breaks all the immersion the rest of the game had build up.
At least you can permanently get rid of him eventually, and since you're the evil genius, it will be a slow, painful, and overly elaborate death, I assume it will include giant lasers and evil laughter, but till then, pausing every few minutes.
And since I'm writing now, I also played a bit of painkiller, and in general, well, it's a good game, but this one boss.. I like how they were creative when they placed the location, I like the idea behind it, I also like watching the entire thing fall to pieces and dodging those pieces, but then..
The boss sucks. You only have to look at him funny(With a crappy minigun, or even a starting shotgun) and he just dies, the only thing that makes that boss hard is that when he dies, he breaks the ground, you fall down a few floors and get falling damage, and then he gets up again. (Goes on till ground floor, which is enough to kill the player by falling damage alone)
While I like the idea of blowing the entire place up during the boss fight, and I like going down floors like that, I do not like being defeated by the environment rather then the boss, it felt more like that marioparty game where you tried to get on the right platform because the others would fall down, except that you got a gun and there's a giant demon trying to beat the crap out of you. And instead of having one safe platform where the others fall(Like mario party), they all fall down and you die anyway.
If the area you're fighting in is more likely to kill you then the boss you're fighting, then something has gone terribly wrong.