Topic: Games you recently DROPPED

@rallydefault @FishyS
Sakuna's rice farming really challenges people to accept imperfection, at least for a big part of the game until you improve your understanding over time. The game wants you to fail, and to struggle with it for a while.

I think games these days pressure people to min/max, and to play optimally, and so now a lot of people feel uncomfortable with the perception of playing a game poorly. Embracing the failure and imperfection of your first few (or more) attempts is part of the experience in Sakuna, even if the feeling of doing everything wrong makes you cringe. Plus, leaning into failure is a good exercise in mental health if nothing else.

As for the action combat, the movement feels stiff and clunky at first, I admit. But the strict programming was intentional. The developers said that they wanted to emulate the feeling of a fighting game in the 2D segments, in the sense that there are specific inputs you have to respect in order to excel at combat. Joystick movement and button input can be very different in a fighting game than a 3D action adventure game.

It does take some time, but once you familiarize yourself with the rules of the road, the 2D action segments become pretty addicting.

The hardest part for me regarding Sakuna was figuring out what to do next to progress the story. I hit multiple road blocks and put the game down multiple times before going back and googling what to do next.

@Ulysses
Yeaaaaaaa.... but to me it's just not fun. I'm a fan of fluid-feeling and responsive side scrolling platforming and combat, not the stiff "fighting game" feeling that you reference.

And I certainly didn't care about being perfect or anything with the rice harvest. It was just boring and arcane, and I'm someone who plays games to just have some brainless fun and maybe challenge my twitch reflexes.

It just wasn't a fit for me, no matter how much the devs wanted me to "accept imperfection" lol

@dmcc0 I can see that. Yeah, although I am a fan of Rare's N64 games a ton, they have aged poorly visually and sometimes have pretty bad control schemes that make me not want to revisit them as frequently. Conker's Bad Fur Day was great IMHO and impressive technically, but I thought the controls were pretty bad and the camera was junky. I prefer the remake over it for that reason, and I boot it up more over the original.

I went back to Bad Fur Day over the weekend after playing the remake for so long and the jank present in the N64 version became even more noticeable, and, if I am being honest, was worse than the first time I played it. Because of how bad the control was, I only replayed this part of the game where you battle a bull (which, I would argue, is maybe the one part of the game that doesn’t feel too terrible to control) and once I finished it, I turned the game off and played something else.

I love the Banjo-Kazooie games too and I don’t mind the collectathon aspects, but some other parts of the games I am really not a huge fan of. The sequel was way harder and a little too big, which made completing the game take longer than it did with the first game.

Some older games by them, such as the SNES Donkey Kong Country trilogy, have aged better, both in controls and visuals. I still think that the games play well despite being from almost 3 decades ago, and the pixel graphics still look great and detailed.

You are right about the more simpler stuff tending to age better than most 3D games from decades ago; yes, they were impressive back then, but some aspects of it aren’t really that great nowadays, mostly regarding the gameplay and controls. I still love the N64 games mentioned above, but some parts of them are too tough and terrible, which prevents me from doing more playthroughs of them. I only play one specific part of them and stop afterward.

Thought I'd give Blue Fire a go, as it looked sort of like a a fun balance of 3D platforming and Zelda-like combat, but unfortunately I just couldn't find much motivation to play this after a while. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but the game just couldn't keep my interest. There's nothing really outright awful with it, but with the lack of polish, underwhelming combat, and uninteresting world. I had played for a couple hours, but in that time there wasn't really anything that grabbed my attention. I'm aware that had I kept playing for another hour or so, there very well could have been something that DID pique my interest, but I don't have that kind of time to gamble. Maybe someday I'll give it another shot and it'll click with me, but my backlog is piling up as it is. There's only so long I can be patient with a game before I cut my losses, shelf it and move on. Just wasn't feeling this one, unfortunately.