Bay Ninja Turtles Obligatory Bitch Thread

[Gomess]

I think the fact kids could connect the images more readily to real life was a big draw, yeah, it's just a shame the direction it took. You ever check out the 'realistic martial arts' of the later 3D games like Deadly Alliance? I've never seen judo performed with so many punches and kicks! I think an issue is that almost all of the techniques were motion captured by the same guy, who claimed to be a "martial arts expert". =|

At least the 2D games had a wide cast with a variety of skills.

[Shockwave]

The unlockable crap is what really started to get to me in MK. Like, even in 9, there's this Kombat Krypt with like over a thousand different unlockable things for various things. Some of them are game affecting, like full characters, outfits for characters or in some cases, their finishing moves. And that's the part that really annoys me. The game play affecting content should be readily available from the start. I have no problem going through an unlock process for crap like concept art or what have you but to have playable parts of the game be inaccessible is really inexcusable in my opinion. And it really started to get the worst with UMK3 where they had at least three unlockable characters that you had to pull off impossible feats to unlock. It just got so frustrating. I think that's when I started to lose interest. *checks collection* Oh, ok. I have every MK game ever (except Sub Zero for some odd reason). Guess I never really did lose interest. Hm. Special Forces was the worst of all of them though. The game wasn't even finished. It was playable but there were obvious things missing. It's really evident when you open a secret room and find nothing in there. What was the point of the room then? gah.

[BWprowl]

Hey, Shock could go the happy medium route, and check out the Saturn Street Fighter Movie game, which had the actors captured and digitized, MK-style!

On second thought, that game was so awful, that maybe not.

One very basic reason I prefer Street Fighter is that its special moves all employ the basic motions of quarter-circles, 'Z's, charge-back-forwards and what-have-you, with little deviance, so 'figuring out' a given character only takes a few moments of experimentation. The motions for characters in MK are all over the map and just seem so arbitrary in comparison, there's no way you figure those out without the manual in front of you.

[Shockwave]

Damn, that's a good point too. The complexity of some of the moves annoyed me as well. And some of them were almost nigh impossible to pull off. It wasn't really that way in MK I, but II and on just got ridiculous. Because you not only had a regular set of moves, but then you had fatalities, babalities, friendships, and pit fatalities. And on top of that, the dead pool had it's own finishing move. Ugh. The first one each fighter just had one finishing move and that was it. It was a lot more simple and I think it was a lot better for it.

[Gomess]

I remember playing Guilty Gear with my MK-familiar mate, as I pointed out a few posts back, and when he asked me how to do a character's Instant Kill, his face when I replied "it's the same for every character" was priceless. My ideal for MK would be a combination of the original game and Armageddon; each character basically has one finishing move (either with VERY simple inputs or all done identically, like Guilty Gear) but which then branch off in a variety of directions depending on subsequent button inputs. So, Sub-Zero's freezes the opponent, but then whether he lifts them up, grabs their head, etc etc is up to the player.

I think my favourite arbitrarily complex MK move is Cyrax's time bomb. Hold LK (A button on a SNES pad), then tap f, f (for long-range) or b, b (for short-range) and HK (X button). Absurd! I think they realised that anything less fiddly would make the move more broken than Scorpion's spear, though.

And yeah, unlockables in fighting games in general... ugh. How bad is it to buy a new fighter, take it home all full of excitement to play it with your mates... and find a select screen with four characters and 20-odd pictures of padlocks. -____-

[BWprowl]

And yeah, unlockables in fighting games in general... ugh. How bad is it to buy a new fighter, take it home all full of excitement to play it with your mates... and find a select screen with four characters and 20-odd pictures of padlocks. -____-

This was the biggest issue with the original version of SF4. At least unlocking all the characters in Soulcaliber 4 could be breezily done in an hour. SF4 would have you there for weeks slogging through to unlock everyone. Thankfully all the subsequent Super SF4 releases corrected this. I've got no problem with working to unlock costumes or even stages, but at least let me PLAY as everyone from the get-go!

[Gomess]

Artificially extended game lifespan can suck a butt. I really hate the thought that even the *designers* are acknowledging the gameplay itself hasn't got enough to it to keep you coming back.

It's especially annoying when you DO love the gameplay, because then it's just like torturing you for something you like, and when you finally unlock something all you feel is, "Well, now the game's in the state it should've been from the start".

Oh, and Shockwave, I think I know what you mean about UMK3's hidden characters. If you mean the Saturn version, where you have to unlock Mileena (a palette swap), Ermac (a palette swap without a story at that point) and Classic Sub-Zero (a palette swap who wasn't even his own character). Yeah, that felt worth it 8|

And thanks for then porting UMK3 to the SNES and goddamn *Mega Drive* with almost EVERYTHING that was in the Saturn version and MORE. Games, man

I think the only game I don't mind unlocking stuff in is Dynasty Warriors, because there's just soooo much of it. You get like ten new weapons every battle you fight, and there's so many starting characters you really don't notice when you unlock the hidden ones.

[Onslaught Six]

If you mean the Saturn version, where you have to unlock Mileena (a palette swap), Ermac (a palette swap without a story at that point) and Classic Sub-Zero (a palette swap who wasn't even his own character).

That's actually how it was in the 'arcade!'

And Mileena is worth unlocking. Her teleport kick is boss.


Anyway, I don't share the frustration you guys do with unlocking characters, because unlike all of you, I am terrible at fighting games. Absolutely horrible. So when I get a game and there's only a few characters to start with, I'm *relieved* because that means I'll be playing through the story mode to unlock some dudes and 'learn how the game plays' and learn some guys' movesets and stuff. It's not "forcing" you to unlock anybody, it's teaching you how to play the game. Master Using It And You Can Have This, kind of thing.

My father used to buy racing games and then bitch that he didn't have all the cars at the start. It made sense for him, because he was 35 with three kids, a full time job and a band. But if you have those kind of responsibilities, then racing games aren't for you! Fighting games aren't for you! Multiplayer shooters probably aren't either! You're good for platformers and puzzle games and single player FPSes.

[Shockwave]

I didn't have the Saturn or any Sega for that matter. About 5 years ago I bought a Genesis on the cheap but I only got, like two games for it, Truxton and Gargoyles. The MK games I have are all on either Nintendo or Playstation. But yeah, UMK3 had the unlocks in all the versions I played of it. This is why I liked the PSX version of Trilogy so much, it was all just right there and you could just casually enjoy it from the get go. And the other feature I liked was that if you finished it, you got to see every finishing move in the game. 20 minutes of seeing moves that sometimes you're not good at pulling off? Awesome. It was a well worth it pay off in addition to the story screen.

I suck at fighting games too, I always have MK on the easiest setting and still get my ass handed to me by about the 3rd or 4th match. But that doesn't stop me from playing them. A bit like chess.

The only racing game I ever really got into was Burnout 3 and that's just because I'm really good at causing huge accidents. Both in game and real life. ZING!

[Sparky Prime]

So some images have leaked online...

Honestly, the Turtles are not as bad as I was expecting albeit unnecessarily Hulked up.

Shredder's mask... yikes.