So Apparently I Suck at Video Games...

Started by LunarSage, September 09, 2012, 03:10:12 PM

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LunarSage

*Makes this it's own thread*

So I beat Arkham City on Easy but I wanted to unlock the "+" mode (not sure what it is but it sounds nifty).  I've been playing the game on Normal and criminy, it's kicking my ass!  Every site I look at says Normal is pretty easy.  Do I suck at video games that much?  >.<

Like 5 bullets will kill you even with full ballistic armor on Normal!  Are others really breezing through Normal difficulty or are folks exaggerating?

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Hemingway

If you're having problems with getting shot, you're just taking the wrong approach. You're the Bat! Stealth and fear are your friends. Also, ledges. Because enemies aren't very smart, and have very poor eyesight. And when you're in a fight and there are guys with rifles, always take them out first - then try to prevent the others from picking up their weapons while you take out the rest. I do remember that as being occasionally somewhat challenging, but that's how you have to do it.

LunarSage

I guess I got used to being able to soak up a good amount of bullets while I kicked like three or four gunmens' asses on Easy. 

Still... the part I'm having such a hard time on is...

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide
...going back to the Steel Mill after fighting Freeze.  It's not a 'standard' Predator gargoyle type room so it's hard to know how to handle it.

It's just disheartening to see how many people boast that Normal and even Hard is "a breeze".

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Hemingway

I remember having trouble getting there ... Well, not trouble, but I kept getting spotted on my way over. I can't really remember what it was like inside, though.

Still.

Fight dirty! ;D You've got all those delicious toys for a reason, too. Just, you know, in case you're not using them to their full potential.

Koren

You do not suck. Trust me. The people who post that are people who either like to troll others or just happen to be good at that particular style of gameplay. I personally find it very difficult to play Arkham City on Normal, while Arkham Asylum I found quite easy on normal. A lot of it is just to do with the way each room comes and goes.

But yeah pretty much, its to avoid getting shot as much as possible. Normal and Hard modes on Stealth games are more trial and error then anything else, something I learnt over years of playing Metal gear solid.

The trick to that room really is to use your tools as much as you can to their full potential, even though half of them I found fairly useless. I think I know the room you are talking about and if so, its all about moving the guards were you want them to be with distractions and the like so that you can take them down in a manner you want, its also a very slow room as well.

But yeah, its not as easy as people make it out to be .

Hope that helped

Chris Brady

Normal is easy?  Hard is a breeze?

*Crawls under a rock*

I have problems on Easy...
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

Koren

Quote from: Chris Brady on September 09, 2012, 05:34:15 PM
Normal is easy?  Hard is a breeze?

*Crawls under a rock*

I have problems on Easy...

That too. I share that pain. I tend to get my head beaten in by the shield guys a lot of the time. especially if there is also stun guys around, I remember it was the same in the first game. But I think the first game was a lot better put together. I enjoyed it a lot more then Arkham city

A tad off topic but still kinda relevent:
One thing that got me is that ...okay... I suck with FPS, bad eyesight means bad aiming, BUT I got through bioshock 1 on normal without dying once. i died about sixty times in bioshock 2 on easy. something clearly changed between the development of thsoe games. Something that really shouldn't have

Callie Del Noire

It's okay.. some folks have a harder time than others.. My fight with Freeze was the point where I actually started getting good. Having to get sneaky and never use the same method twice made me look for other methods I hadn't been using.

Heaven Sent Blossom

Slow and steady man, slow and steady.
Take your time to survey the room and see what environmental advantages you've been given, watch the thugs patrol (if I remember correctly they have a set route until you initiate first contact, then they get slightly more random) and look for the gaps and stragglers, basically approach the predator rooms like a puzzle...it's just a puzzle that generally ends up solved with liberal application of bat-foot to criminal face. Oh and don't be afraid of detective mode (or whatever they call the vision mode in Arkham City), it's an invaluable tool that you should rely on as much as possible until you become one with your inner Batman.
Secondary "oh and", don't sweat the gadgets so much. Other than when you need to use them to advance you can pretty much get through every predator room without having to use anything other than the aforementioned union of face and foot. I look at them more as an icing on the cake kind of deal that you use when you want to seem totally awesome and very, very Batman.

Honestly I would say it just boils down to time and patience. You've probably picked up some bad habits from playing on easy and it will just take a little time to get into the different pace that is expected from you on normal.

Also never believe anything you read about the difficulty of games on the internet, we're mostly freaks who spend way too much time honing our video game skill set since by the time we realised how useless those skills were in a practical sense, it was too late;-p

Shjade

#9
Point the first: not everyone is good at every game, even games in the same field. For example, while I am pretty dang good at L4D/L4D2, I am the terribles at TF2. Two multiplayer FPS games, even made by the same people; wildly different performance. Maybe this just isn't your game.

Point the second: expecting not-easy difficulty levels to allow you the same slack in gameplay as easy did is always, always, always a mistake. You should not grow accustomed to getting shot just because you can take it on easy; the only reason they make you capable of sustaining that kind of damage without immediately losing on easy is so that you can learn how to start avoiding that kind of damage without the frustration of constant You Lose screens, not so you learn that it's okay to get shot.

As for whether Arkham City is actually an easy game or not, couldn't tell you, I haven't played it yet (installed, but not played). That said, given its wealth of similarities to Arkham Asylum, which I must say I did find to be a very easy game, yes, it's probably on the low end of the "overall" difficulty spectrum as games go. In AA the only thing I found challenging at all were the challenge modes, and even in those it was only challenging to do the combos required to rack up a high score, not to just "win" a given challenge (exception: the one with the insta-lose electric floor timer; that arena was bullshit).

That said, AA's battle system plays to one of my strengths, that being counter-attacks and chaining combat. I really enjoy counter systems, so the Batman games are basically designed for me, so of course I'd find them easy to play. That's just me, not necessarily indicative of their "objective" difficulty.
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Chris Brady

For the record, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are my two top favourite games, period.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

LunarSage

Quote from: Chris Brady on September 10, 2012, 01:18:56 AM
For the record, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are my two top favourite games, period.

Mine too.  Which is part of what made hearing that it was apparently 'easy' all the more disheartening.

I really don't play video games much anymore.  I own Arkham Asylum, Arkham City and Ghostbusters... (and Skyrim for PC).  That's the extent of my video game "collection".

But I seriously rocked at playing them back in the 80s and 90s.

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Koren

Quote from: LunarSage on September 10, 2012, 09:31:28 AM
Mine too.  Which is part of what made hearing that it was apparently 'easy' all the more disheartening.

I really don't play video games much anymore.  I own Arkham Asylum, Arkham City and Ghostbusters... (and Skyrim for PC).  That's the extent of my video game "collection".

But I seriously rocked at playing them back in the 80s and 90s.

I find the old video games much more appealing then games tehse days. Sure we get some amazing stuff like journey, Portal, and even some classic style games like darksiders and the like, but I much prefered the older games

I have the original tomb raider on playstation disk, and i took it into my game design uni, and watched them all freak at how hard it was to play those sorts of games back then. Bring back more old games would be awesome.

I cant say that the batman games are in my favorites list (i actually dont like arkham city much for some reason) but they are definitely amazing games

Shjade

Quote from: LunarSage on September 10, 2012, 09:31:28 AM
I really don't play video games much anymore.

That'd probably be the source of your "sucking." If you stop playing games you can't expect to retain your level of proficiency. No big deal! =D
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meikle

I found Arkham City a lot easier to play with an Xbox 360 controller than KBAM.

At its heart, Arkham City's combat scenes are a combo-stringing game; you just need to press the right buttons at the right pace in the right order.  Remember your counters, remember to stagger heavies, and remember to aerial attack shield-carriers.  Give preference to enemies with guns; beat them up before they can shoot you.  Your character will move quickly toward whatever you want to attack as long as you're pointing at it, so even if they're on the other side of the room, just make your way over there, hopping from one bad guy to the next until there's nothing stopping you from jumping across the room to pummel a gunner.
Kiss your lover with that filthy mouth, you fuckin' monster.

O and O and Discord
A and A

Aiden


Chris Brady

My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

Shjade

Quote from: Aiden on September 10, 2012, 10:41:54 PM
I felt this comic was relevant.  ;D

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/03/04

Thanks for reminding me I finished Dante Must Die! mode. That felt so good. ^.^

@meikle: I bet. Doing those long arena combos with the mouse aiming was SO fucking awkward. ... Oh hey, I did get that controller working with my computer finally. I should try that when I finally get around to playing AC. Awesome! =D
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LunarSage

Quote from: Shjade on September 10, 2012, 09:27:05 PM
That'd probably be the source of your "sucking." If you stop playing games you can't expect to retain your level of proficiency. No big deal! =D

I'd play more if the games didn't cost $60 each!  >.<

It's crazy... that's like 1/5th of the price of the whole system!

*Remembers when video games, systems included were a hell of a lot cheaper* 

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Chris Brady

Quote from: LunarSage on September 11, 2012, 12:00:21 AM
I'd play more if the games didn't cost $60 each!  >.<

It's crazy... that's like 1/5th of the price of the whole system!

*Remembers when video games, systems included were a hell of a lot cheaper*

Seriously?  When was that?

Playstation games used to sell for 79.99 over here.  And before that, the carts used to run about the same, maybe 5 bucks less for a 'cheap' game.  And I really started gaming in the mid NES days, although I had access to a Atari 2600 and computers, I never owned one until the SNES, but I used to rent the NES all the time.

60 bucks is CHEAP compared to what we used to pay.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

LunarSage

*Has never seen a video game new in the store for $80*

$60 is the highest I've ever seen a video game.

When the NES first came out it was a little more than $100.  Games were around $25 to $30 with the really popular new releases being $40 (maybe).  At least where I grew up (Washington State) they were.

Compare that to the PS3 ($600 when it first came out and $60 a game)... I can't afford this stuff. 

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Trieste

* Trieste doesn't know what the current exchange rate is, but...

That sounds about right for the last decade or two - the Canadian dollar was worth less than the US Dollar and therefore the same product would cost more in Canada than the US due to the exchange rate.

Not sure if that's how it still is.

Shjade

Yeah, games have always been pretty pricey. The consoles themselves have gone up in price, but the games have been more or less steady.
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LunarSage

Eh, maybe I'm looking at it as "back in the day" I didn't really have to buy video games (my mom bought them for me since I was a kid) and nowadays $60-$70 is not something I can casually spend on entertainment. 

I still maintain that systems are ridiculously expensive nowadays.  When I was a teenager, if I had $600 I'd have been using it to buy my first car, not buy a video game console.

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Koren

Quote from: Shjade on September 11, 2012, 02:58:15 AM
Yeah, games have always been pretty pricey. The consoles themselves have gone up in price, but the games have been more or less steady.

tell that to the australian market. A new game here is about $80-$90 and for a while it was up as high as about $120 which is just bullshit. Its just because we are in the PAL region so all our games have to go through expensive distrubtors twice and stuff. I hate it. I remember when it was $60 when I was a kid, and two or three years ago it was $120, even when the US dollar was lower the ours. Absolute crap. One of the few times I have gone and brought pre-owned games and waited to buy games for years for them to get cheap