What Are You Currently Playing? 6.65: Neighbor of the Beast

[Foggle]

So I never got to finish playing through the Steam release of RE4 due to some weird crashing bug like five other people had. Now that I've gone back, suddenly the difficulty appears to have been nerfed beyond belief. Enemies are dying in one hit from the handgun and literally every baddie/box/barrel is dropping ammo, health, or money. I checked the save screen and it definitely hasn't switched me to Easy mode. What the hell is going on? Did Capcom randomly decide to completely ruin the game's challenge in a patch? Guess it's back to the PS3 version for me.

I really hope they don't pull something like this with the REmake HD port...

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Perhaps you should play it on Professional mode?

I'm not sure how they could make it too much easier, anyways. The XBOX360 version was already pretty easy on Normal, IMO.

[Foggle]

Perhaps you should play it on Professional mode?

You can't play on Professional until you beat Normal. I was never able to finish the PC version because of a weird bug.

I'm not sure how they could make it too much easier, anyways. The XBOX360 version was already pretty easy on Normal, IMO.

I still don't agree with this. I think Normal mode in RE4 is one of the most perfect difficulty settings of all time. It's neither too hard nor too easy. It epitomizes "just right," for me.

Maybe the 360 version is easier than the others as well, I dunno, but enemies should not be dying in one or two hits on Normal, and item drops are supposed to be a lot sparser.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

It wasn't that they died in one or two hits on the X360 version, but rather that they were mostly super slow, and I always found a good spot to shoot them from. Also, I quickly discovered that shooting enemies in the legs was way more effective than head shots, since you could let them group together, knock more than one of them down with a spin kick, and then knife them to death before they could even get back up. It saved me a ton of ammo. Though, even before I discovered that (which was about halfway through the game), I was honestly never hurting that much for ammo.

In terms of item usage, I am naturally in the habit of avoiding them completely outside of health upgrades, if I can. I'll cave and use items sometimes, but if I screw up and don't feel like using an item, I just tend to restart and do that section over instead.

Also, this game is surprisingly lenient with checkpointing, IMO, so the relatively few times that I did die to actual enemies, I wasn't punished too severely for it. Other than that, I honestly had more deaths from context-sensitive moments where I either didn't react fast enough or couldn't figure out what to do in time.

As for the different versions, the HD ports were the same for the X360 and PS3, so the difficulty between those 2 should be the same. From what I've heard, they are somewhat easier than the GC and PS2 versions of the game, but the Wii version is generally considered to be the easiest version of the game due to the aiming mechanic with the Wii-mote.

I don't know. In terms of difficulty, I'm sure that Professional mode could give me a run for my money, but I didn't find Normal to be that bad. Certainly not Gears of War 1 (on Hardcore, which is that game's normal mode), Max Payne (without quick saves), or Vanquish levels of difficulty. Especially with Gears 1, which is excruciatingly hard on later levels due to how many enemies can easily one-shot you.

[Foggle]

I'm not saying the game is hard, I'm just saying I don't think it's particularly easy, either. It can be difficult for me to avoid enemy attacks sometimes, and I'm not very good at aiming, so I find RE4 to be a great experience on the default setting. I'm sure if I had played Gears single-player on Hardcore or Max Payne using a gamepad and without quick saves, I'd find the the standard difficulty to be easy, too. I don't die too often on Normal anymore, but at least I can find enjoyment and feel challenged while playing the console versions. Whatever they did to the Steam release has made the game so easy that I can't even have fun attempting a personal challenge run.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Well, with Max Payne, to be clear I do use quick saves, but I make a conscious effort not to spam them. I try to only use them where I think a checkpoint should be, like before or after a cutscene, or before a big firefight. That said, on my first run through the game I basically spammed them, which made it too easy, but I was a kid back then and absolutely sucked at games.

Perhaps calling RE4 easy isn't exactly correct, but it's more that I hardly die in actual combat on that game, whereas in the other games that I mentioned I've died countless infuriating deaths, but I also like RE4 more than those other games (except for Max Payne, which is my personal favorite TPS) because it's so well designed and just feels fun. Vanquish is fun too, but I won't deny that some sections are just more frustrating than fun, which is a problem that I just never had with RE4 on Normal mode.

[Foggle]

Well, with Max Payne, to be clear I do use quick saves, but I make a conscious effort not to spam them. I try to only use them where I think a checkpoint should be, like before or after a cutscene, or before a big firefight.

Ah! That's what I do too. Except in the last three levels, where I've pretty much always had to save scum due to a massive difficulty spike. Thankfully, for my next playthrough, I've discovered why this is from somebody on the Steam forums; apparently, Max Payne has an adaptive difficulty system, and the better you do at the game, the harder it gets (this also works in the other direction, too). If you manage to beat large stretches of the game without dying, it becomes harder over time, effectively raising the difficulty slider up one notch after a set number of levels. If you can manage to get to the last part of Max Payne without dying, it basically turns into the highest non-timed difficulty setting. However, this system is bugged. When you die, if you choose to press F9 to quick load instead of clicking to reload your most recent save, it will never register as you having died at all across the course of your entire playthrough, and well, guess what I do. Since I'm not very good at Max Payne, I always keep getting killed and immediately quick loading after, so I've been effectively playing the last few levels on the hardest difficulty setting since my first playthrough.

Perhaps calling RE4 easy isn't exactly correct, but it's more that I hardly die in actual combat on that game, whereas in the other games that I mentioned I've died countless infuriating deaths, but I also like RE4 more than those other games (except for Max Payne, which is my personal favorite TPS) because it's so well designed and just feels fun. Vanquish is fun too, but I won't deny that some sections are just more frustrating than fun, which is a problem that I just never had with RE4 on Normal mode.

That's why I think RE4's Normal mode is perfect! At least for me, it has a few tough parts and can still feel be a challenge, but overall, as long as you're actively attempting to do well, you'll always feel like you're making progress and not dying obnoxious cheap deaths. So it's not exactly easy per se, as it doesn't practically play itself or anything like that, but it generally makes you feel like a badass while still putting you in tense situations. It truly is one of the most "normal" difficulty settings ever. I think Vanquish is mostly the same way, though a couple of the enemy types can be pretty frustrating at times. And The Evil Within, despite being much harder, still feels really fun and is almost never irritating due to well-balanced design.

[talonmalon333]

I hope they fix that. I was hoping to get RE4 on PC someday.

[gunswordfist]

i don't know what i did back then but when i started doom 1 and 2 a few years, i only used quick saves at the start of stages. the only exceptions were sometimes during hard stages or special parts like right before secret level exits.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

It's been a couple of weeks, but I finally got some more time to play and went back to Max Payne 3 where I last left off. I'm now on chapter 11 in the game's third and presumably final act. I'm honestly not too keen on the police enemy type, since most of them wear helmets, making skilled headshots considerably less effective. Also, I should mention how the animation-heavy nature of this game, while cool to look at, can be a serious hindrance at times. Sometimes it needlessly slows down Max's movements, causing me to take unecessary damage, and other times it causes me to lose those scenarios where you have a chance to kill the guy that last shot you before you die, so that you can revive yourself, and I've failed that sequence numerous times because Max literally took too long to aim his gun at the target due to the slow animation, even though I had my reticle right over the enemy. In other cases an enemy ends up falling down and I just kind of assume that he's dead because I'm literally too busy fighting a dozen other guys to confirm the kill, and then that other guy gets back up and takes me out when I'm not looking his way. When enemies fall down, it should only be when they are dead. And in general, I feel that enemies on this game have way too much health. I understand that it rewards skilled headshots, but so did the original games, and even then they still didn't require that many body shots to put a normal enemy down.

None of these are too major, but they are noticeable problems that obviously the different play styles of the first 2 games never had. Still, the game itself is fun, and I've gotten a lot better at it since back when I first started it and was getting my ass kicked at every encounter.

[gunswordfist]

this week on dark souls i got the lordvessel, became a princess' guard, killed the hydra, went to duke's archives, found the crystal ember, got killed by scaleless and thrown in prison multiple times and found some secret areas and mmm guy's daughter and got repeatedly owned by the tomb of the giants boss. luckily i went back to new londo ruins yesterday and figured out what to do there. after i got the seal key and drained new londo, i got massacred by the dragons. i came back pissed and with my dragonslayer bow and over 40 dragonslayer arrows. they all died and i recovered. i went on to lose over 30000 souls anyway though. i found the very large ember along the way. anyway, i traversed the white light there and went down the stairs. i ended up falling down the edge on purpose and dying. since i had nothing to lose and wanted my souls back, i went back, looked around and decided to fall down again but this time with the ring equipped. i thought i would die again but i noticed i was falling for too long then the game said i made it to the abyss. then i saw a health bar for the four kings. sheesh, when they said four kings, i didn't think they meant i had to fight them at the same time. i spent most of the time running around in darkness and died.

[gunswordfist]

i killed one of the four kings twice. i need to come better prepared. i did give andre the very large ember and leveled up my heavy crossbow.

[gunswordfist]

yes! around 1:25 pm today, i finally beat the four kings. i had to get the door twice when i was at the abyss so i turned off my game and restarted twice in front of the white light already recovered. i was hit by a ghost the last time i went down and i already used some of my healing stuff. i decided to go fight the four kings anyway. i ran out of (heavy) bolts but most of their health was gone so i two handed my sword and started swinging and to my surprise i didn't lose despite being surrounded by 3 of them.

[gunswordfist]

aaanndd i beat nito about 30 minutes ago.

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I've done it. 101% completion in Donkey Kong 64. All golden bananas, small multi-colored bananas, battle crowns, fairies, blueprints, and (as far as I can tell) coins collected. After almost 15 years, what my six-year-old self thought impossible has finally been achieved. My opinions are mixed.

There's a good game buried somewhere deep within Donkey Kong 64, but the longer it drags on, the more you realize just how... lacking it is compared to the Banjo titles. It definitely isn't bad by any means, but it certainly becomes terrible at times. DK64 is proof that a game can actually have *too much* content.

While I was having fun at first (and at various other times throughout the later levels as well), on the whole, DK64 somehow manages to feel both lazy and overstuffed at the same time. In a good collecathon - like Banjo-Kazooie or Jak & Daxter - you generally spend most of your time exploring a level looking for new platforms to jump on, puzzles to solve, or unique mini-games to play that will earn you a reward necessary for further progression in the story. Along the way, you also pick up currency-like items to buy things, such as new moves that will enable you to do more main challenges. Unfortunately, Donkey Kong 64 fails to present the player with a healthy variety of things to do, and boredom sets in before too long.

One of the biggest problems with this game is the presence of five playable characters. There is literally no reason that Donkey Kong and perhaps Diddy Kong could not have done everything themselves, as I believe Banjo-Tooie has even more character techniques than this game... all of which are easily handled by a single character (two if you're feeling pedantic). You basically have to play each level five times, and collect 500 small multi-colored bananas in the process. This is complete overkill. 100 notes per level already felt like a lot in Banjo-Kazooie, but 100 bananas per character per level is just ridiculous. It forces you to backtrack through nearly the entire world every single time you finish it as one Kong, lest you consistently head to a tag barrel every two minutes (which is no fun at all). The worst banana collection is done via popping balloons; beginning with Fungi Forest, there is at least one per level that is almost impossible to see without either hardcore pixel hunting or utilizing a walkthrough.

But collecting all the small multi-colored bananas is more boring than awful; it mostly just amounts to busywork that should have been toned down before release. What's really annoying about DK64 is the godawful mini-games. There are, what? 10? maybe 12? of them, and you will play them all at least three times each. Not a single one of them is entertaining. They all utterly lack challenge, but many are still difficult due to broken mechanics. The music is the same every time, and it is grating. You will hear "Welcome to bonus stage!" over and over and eventually wish your ears could just stop working for three second intervals. Beaver Bother and Minecart Mayhem are among the least enjoyable and most poorly-designed things I've ever done in a video game. Each mini-game is oppressively timed, too, requiring the player to become perfect at performing menial tasks that could never hope to pass for fun gameplay.

The core platforming is usually enjoyable, but in the second half of the game, most of the normal challenges start to end in mini-games instead of properly rewarding you with golden bananas, causing the player to experience frustration rather than satisfaction at a job well done. And the ones that don't end in mini-games are usually dreadful in their own right, like irritating races that feel unfair and timed combat scenarios where the camera, frame rate, and knockback effect are more dangerous than the actual enemies. The game also a propensity for making the player do everything at least twice, including completing the original Donkey Kong arcade game, which is included for some reason, and cruelly made more difficult than usual. Hey, they had to reach 200 "different" challenges somehow!

The worlds themselves are actually pretty well-designed, especially Creepy Castle. They're fun to explore the first (and second, and maybe even third) time around, and the background music/sound effects are as infectious as you'd expect from a Rareware game. However, they all feel a bit samey in terms of feel. DK64 trades the cartoonish whimsy of B-K and lighthearted strangeness of B-T for an odd, somewhat dark mood. Every level after the second one is characterized by dismal colors and bleak atmosphere, with barren environments often bereft of anything resembling joy. (Even the first two levels have their moments of - for lack of a better word - creepiness, including the terrifying "GET OUT" sniper dude who made me and my friends shit ourselves in elementary school.) Unlike other collectathons, the world of Donkey Kong 64 doesn't feel particularly inviting, and isn't really one most people would want to explore. The lack of humorous dialogue and likable characters also makes it feel very lonely compared to other entries in the genre. All of this adds up to create an experience that's strangely oppressive and unhappy for a game ostensibly aimed at children.

The boss fights are generally exciting, if a bit too easy, but the final battle against King K. Rool is one of the worst I've ever experienced. He has five forms, and you have three minutes to beat each one. If you die, you have to restart the entire fight and watch all the unskippable cutscenes again. His first form changes near the end and tricks you into thinking you're supposed to do one thing when you're really supposed to do another, while his fourth one is prone to obscuring the camera in such a way that you may need a walkthrough just to figure out what to do. But the real shit show occurs during his third form. Every aspect of it is frustrating and borderline broken, and it's nearly impossible to beat without getting at least somewhat lucky. I haven't gotten this legitimately angry at a video game boss in years.

Overall, Donkey Kong 64 feels like a poor man's Banjo-Kazooie. The early levels are promising enough, and the core gameplay mechanics are fine, but the endless recycled content, frustrating mini-games, lacking presentation, and pointless character switching take what could have been a nice "Banjo 1.5" and run it into the ground by the halfway point. Even the grindiest RPGs rarely manage to wear out their welcome before the credits roll, but Donkey Kong 64 would have legitimately benefited from being about half as long. That said, it isn't really a bad game, just one marred by silly design choices in an ill-advised effort to extend its total playtime. Rareware really should have known better, and it's obvious that they learned their lesson by the time Banjo-Tooie released.