Is there any truth to the idea that you need to have played genuinely bad games in order to appreciate genuinely...

Yes.

Truly shit games should be experienced so that people have some frame of reference for all the average ones that are at least competently programmed. I'm talking about the ones with game-breaking glitches or difficulty that is literally impossible for a human to beat because it never went through QA testing, the ones where bizarre camera angles prevent you from seeing anything ever, the ones that delete your save when you do some innocuous thing a certain way.
It irks me when people say an average, competently programmed game is the worst thing they've ever played, because their mental scoring system is massively skewed if that's the case. If you can actually complete the game, it's at least ahead of a few hundred unfortunate shitpiles that exist out there. If it has fun moments and isn't brutally punishing you the entire time with bad controls or spastic camera, it's ahead of several thousand other truly bad games that have existed. Gamers today are gifted by the presence of the internet and other peoples' opinions so they can avoid things like this. They'll never know the pain of picking up a game on a whim because the cover art looked cool, not knowing it's awful or good because the magazines never covered it, and being forced to play a genuine pile of shit because you spent the money on it already.

Nah, you don't have to play The Surge to appreciate non-shit games.

I've never actually played a truly bad game. What is one?

Limbo of the Lost
Alone in the Dark, the last two games
Bad Rats
Brink
Any early access survival game made by Russians or chinks

Not really, I wouldn't say I played any of the really bad games but I happened to enjoy flawed yet fun games like some of Spider's Studios games and Cyanide's games.
The surge is pretty gud but it falls short in a few ways. It's a real step up compared to Lords of the Fallen though

Off the top of my head,
Superman for the N64
Drake of the 99 Dragons for Xbox
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
Bubsy 3D
CDi games using Nintendo characters (Zelda, Hotel Mario)
the historic ET for Atari

There's loads of other shit games from the 90s and early 00s that you just never find because nobody bought them and they didn't get any kind of media or word of mouth coverage, but when you accidentally pick one up, oh boy. The PS2 and DS were filled with crap. Thankfully most of them were obvious from the low-effort cover art.

Drake of the 99 Dragons was some of the most fun hours of torture me my and brothers suffered. I'd recommend it to ANY gamer!

Are you quoting X-Play or something?

Also I thought of one I played myself, Too Human. I buried it so deep I had trouble remembering the name. It wasn't actually BROKEN but it was boring as shit, had awful controls, and they used the right analog stick for combat which removed the ability to control a camera, so the game was split up into sections with the camera in a different static place each time. When you walked off-screen you moved to the next "room," but sometimes it was just pieces of a long hallway. And the death animation was long as fuck which made ragequitting much more likely. It also was in development hell for a decade.

A mediocre game will always be a mediocre game, but I must say I felt a whole new level of appreciation for the original Yoshi's Island, an already excellent game, when I replayed it after Woolly World.

Anyways, I think it's better to play shit games with redeeming qualities rather than pure shit games. At least then you'll have left wondering how a genuinely good idea could have been better implemented, rather than feeling like you've just wasted your time.

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It's amazing to see a dev actually improve and the surge was a nice surprise, I'd give it a 7/10. Let's hope they keep improving

The fuck is x-play?
Me and my younger bros had an xbox and a demo for the game and enjoyed trying to complete the damn thing. That's it.

Terrible games can at least be entertaining to rip apart or try to best, or even have some good idea lurking in them that deserved better. Mediocre games are just a waste of time to me.

Randomly roll anything on NES, GBA, or DS and you'll have a good shot at finding one. Got this once when doing PC Engine and it's just awful.

Playing lots of games, good and bad, helps you to develop a frame of reference and eventually develop a sense of taste. It's also not a bad way of understanding why you like things that are bad or inferior to others, and why games can be "good" but still be bad. Normalfags will often only ever play the games that they've already been told are good, so their perspective is skewed in such a way that Fallout 4 and Skyrim can be considered the greatest games they've ever played, and when it comes to judging other games, they have no means of interpreting better game design or games that respect their intelligence, so they default to the gamejournopro school of thought that says: "it's too hard, it makes me feel dumb, it's a bad game."

While a lot of this is true, you are overselling it quite a bit. The Surge is still a surprisingly good game. Better than it has any right to be, and worth a playthrough of two.. but it's not THAT good.

I found the game extremely clunky and the controls to be frustrating, with long un-cancleable attack animations that leave you open or can send you right into threats like pits. Despite the variety of options the game gives you for combat, only a few are viable as the dev's idea of difficulty was to make enemies kill you in several hits. Additio5nally, it seems the game was designed around one-on-one combat, but then throws several enemies at you at once which are impossible to fight in any enjoyable manner thanks to aforementioned clunkiness. I had many of the same frustrations with DS, but it seems most of the budget for this game went into making it look "good" as opposed to a crisp, responsive gameplay experience, whereas I at least had fun with the Dark Souls games.

i am 99% sure this is copypasta cause i've seen this posted on another surge thread a while back. this game is god awful

I don't know the exact quote but it was something like this

All modern games are shit. Some less than others but the industry as a whole is a cancerous pile of garbage that deserve to crash before they go full hollywood kikes (coke parties and underage prostitutes included).

This thread is not about The Surge.

It's about Shammy.

I'm not shilling, I just don't know how to compress a goddamn 39 minute video into a Holla Forums postable webm

I just saw some owl motherfucker recommended to me over and over and after finally watching it I'm gonna save you the time based on my own experience playing Surge as well as other bad games to summarize. The Surge as this reviewer defines it is a clunky piece of shit with some factors that should but don't really redeem it. The Surge as I played it was a knockoff minimalistic Souls clone that had a bunch of neat ideas like combining inventory and upgrades into its own system, letting you skip upgrade tiers, and making stamina management more complex by timing your attacks to use less of it, among other things. While Owlman does make solid points about boss variety and such every minute or so he'll say something like
and all his gameplay shows him using the staff with lower proficiency than you should have at that point rushing and and tanking hits to win. He even says in a comment below the video he doesn't know if this is really a good review or not, and I'd say at least he's not Dean Takahashi, but he was definitely approaching DSP levels of retardation and anti learning while playing this game. Since there's no summon signs and damage is gated more by where you are in the game and your skill rather than, say, going out of your way to cut off the dragon tail to have 200 damage so you can breeze your way until the next cheap weapon, players are required to either be extremely lucky or, as the saying goes, acquire proficient talent.

In short, a braindead retard played an average video game and blamed it for his own shortcomings on the internet, so now we have more retards parroting his thoughts all around the world wide web.

it's kind of like life in comparison to religious afterlife.

true

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Every point raised in favor of this game is peripheral shit that doesn't make up for the deficiencies in the actual gameplay. Sure, you can argue all you want about the minor quality of life improvements, but at the end of the day, playing the game is a fucking chore.

Also, I'd like to hear the rationale behind security bots and the grenadiers in restricted projects having attacks that either have no startup and do half your health, or perfectly tracking charges that do 90% of it in the second-heaviest armor you can get at that point.

From a game design point of view, there's interesting things in any game. Be it good and well executed ideas, interesting ideas that lack polish or bad ideas, any game can have value if you approach it right. As an example, I've been playing Rise of Nations lately. It's not a bad game by any means - it's pretty good and has some great gamemode variations - but it's made me appreciate AoE2 so much more by showing me a lot of small, good design decisions in AoE2 that I've only noticed because RoN lacks them. And in contrast I rather like ideas like the territory and attrition system of the game.

You don't know genuinely bad games.

Those are the bottom feeders that you would find in a thrift shop, from some unknown developers in Middle Europe or China. Things that simply are 20 years behind the times, because they were made with actual outdated tools and skills.

The "bad" kind of games you learn of from Holla Forums, are the low performers in the mainstream: communities pick their favorite, but the difference is in the details while the core game is mostly the same. Essentially a first world problem, for faggots to whine about non existent woes. Let me tell you about hastily put together floppy games sold with early vidya magazines in the early 90s, developed over a week.

it is

also, the game is a turd

I really enjoyed The Surge.

It was in the vein of Bloodborne where the world is really interconnected with shortcuts and shit, with one level that acts as a sort of hub level that changes as you progress. Enemy types get switched up every level too which was nice. Lore was fine, gave you tidbits at the start that build towards the final third. It felt like Bloodborne where most of it is on a plate for you and is straightforward rather than obscure shit tucked away. For a game on a budget, they really really tried. In my opinion it is superior to Dark Souls 3 due to offering some new things to the table (multi-limb targeting on everything, single upgrade stat, implants, armour vs flesh, factory setting etc.) rather than incestuously referencing better games.

Most of the complaints seem to be that it was too hard or that it was 'clunky'. The clunkiness is the same shit DKS1 was lauded for (slow weapon swings and whiffs if you missed) but here it is unwelcome. Why? The difficulty complaint also seems bullshit. The problem is that people want to dodge every attack, even the quick ones but The Surge wants you to play a tank build every time. That's why you get health implants and armour upgrade mats periodically, you are meant to stack them on or of course you are gonna get fucked up.

Weapons weigh nothing, you can have a hammer with light armour and claws with heavy armour. Staffs are shit unless you use them properly but you can easily beat the game with twin rigged and the highest DPS weapon in the game is a twin rigged / one handed hybrid. And the hazard operatives in Restricted Projects are bullshit but you are encouraged to use the utopia gas to your advantage.

I would've been interested in The Surge if you could choose your own character instead of playing Blank Slate the Empathetic Relate-able Silent Man.

If you're going to make the main character uninteresting, boring, and not expand upon him in any way whatsoever outside of the opening cutscene why not allow the player to customize their character?

I'm glad you asked, I would make the character a lass with perky but small breasts

I think it is you who should go back user

I used to still crosspost on 4chan when bloodborne came out as well

It's worth a play regardless but character customization would've been nice considering it is an ARPG. The MC is forgettable and literally has zero stake in the story - he is a nobody engineer. My thinking is they didn't want to scrap or retool the throwaway cutscenes at the start with the MC in them, even though they could've pulled a DKS2 and had the character's face and body fully covered up initially.

w e w

Definitely not worth the price and against my expectations not that great. It has amazing shortcut porn though. I would have liked the heavy frames to be much more tanky, so that I could have a big stompy suit. Going heavy suits you sacrifice your speed but don't gain much. Stop overselling the game, they would have done much better focusing less on graphics and more on making a better game. Pic related.

That made me legitimately gag, whoever drew it needs to switch hobbies.

If only defense values actually meant a shit, so there was some reason to use weapons that force you to trade blows with opponents. Instead, switching from light hazard to gorgon means that hits only do 80% of your health, not 90. You can't say you want Dark Souls I defensive play and then make armor nearly irrelevant like the rest of the series. Also, don't forget that you can't trade blows and tank later in the game, because those protective drones will sometimes fly entirely out of reach and you, player, can get fucked because you don't deserve a ranged game.

I also would have liked a lot more armor variety, and not having had to grind for each piece. Add a skill slider or something so that if I get a perfect cut, I can pick the armor right off the limb and use it. That, or reward me for weaking the enemy without targetting the part I want, so that I finish by cutting off an undamaged limb and instantly get the armor. This would be mostly for fashion, but it also doesn't matter progression wise if you're supposed to dodge anyway.
Multiple throwable javelins would have also been a fantastic weapon, for some reason no game ever has this, not even monster hunter.

I have to agree with this guy. We really don't need people to keep excusing bad games as not as bad. Right now, it feels like mediocre means shit but popular. However, that doesn't mean that everything is equally shit.

While Bioshock 1 isn't the worst game that I played, it is just shit. I'm not going to compromise on that.

That's like saying you need to eat shit to appreciate cooking.

Well if you were forced to eat shit, you would appreciate good cooking that much more.

Yeah, but you don't need to eat shit to appreciate cooking.

OK lets not use shit for this.

A better idea here is comparing the same food but prepared differently.
Many people only ever eat processed Bread, so when they eat real oven fresh bread it's amazing. Me, I grew up eating only Fresh Bread since my father is a baker. I never appreciated the Fresh Bread I had every day until I had Processed Bread and other poor attempts at bread later in life.
If I never had those other styles of bread, yes I still would like my Dad's bread, but I wouldn't have perspective on just how good it is comparatively if I never had mediocre bread.
This same idea is true for Video games and every other art form. You can stick with only great works of art, but you may never truly appreciate them if that high quality is the only thing your ever exposed to.

Precisely, yes. Souls is just trash and doesn't even have likeable things or things it does particularly better than other games. The opposite.

Yeah, about no other RPG does this. Have fun finding and clicking all the armor parts in Xenoblade or Fallout 4 when you want to wear a certain full set.

It's the second time I posted it. And no, it's actually good. Not very good but definitely good.

You could try to make an argument, though.

I wouldn't click all the armor parts in Xenoblade because it's not controlled with a mouse, and I wouldn't click all the armor parts in Fallout 4 because I haven't played it.

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You're a funny guy.

It absolutely helps, and gives some insight to people who want to gamedev.

what kind of jackass logic is this? its the most childish and autistic thing ive read on here in weeks

It's not meant to be like DkS 1, it's meant to be like Bloodborne, first strikes and quick dodging is rewarded. Trading hits is still viable in late game you just have to not rely on armour. Health implants are a better bet, you get tons of them and you are meant to stack those fuckers on. Complaining that everything does too much damage without health implants is like underleveling Vitality and complaining that everything stomps you. The only truly unfair parts I can remember is the two elite hazard ops with drones in R&D and the cerberus heavy and dog guarding the core.

The grinding is pretty obnoxious. Maybe they should've had some weaker gear lying around so you can luck out and find some without cleaving. Then have the miniboss enemies like the black cerberus and the bloodied proteus drop their special gear especially from them.

And I don't know if the javelin would work but a rivet gun type weapon would fit the factory theme and give ranged alternatives. That or buff the drones that are useless for anything but pulling groups of enemies.

The only weapons that really penalise you for missing are the halberds, with longer whiffs than usual.
DS1 wasn't clunky at all, it was just restrictive and each move mattered.

I wasn't complaining. It's a good from a gameplay perspective to add some punishment to the heavy weapons if you miss. I think it is good in The Surge too.

Well the idea behind javelins is you can carry like 2,3, or even 5 of them, and be able to stab, space, but also throw them, and then retrieve them. They have straight up bo staves in the surge so I have no idea why javelins wouldn't. Make em be out of sharpened pipe.

This post is amazing. Worth a read.

That's a name I haven't heard in a very very long time.

uuhh

It's called having standards.

What did he mean by this?

Always false.
If it's the first game you've ever played, your opinion has the same weight as someone whose played every single vidya in existence before it.
In fact, you don't even have to play a game to know if it's objectively garbage or not.

Nice job there """""user"""""

iirc, the latest patch makes it so you can interrupt your attack animations to dodge, though I haven't tried it since then.

Bet he won't make that mistake again.

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(apologies in advance for the autistic wall of text)
I really liked the core gameplay in spite of its flaws. I used the staff and twin-rigged weapons for much of the game, which meant I was faster than most enemies, so that helped. I can't imagine anyone playing through The Surge with single-rigged and heavy-duty weapons as the default.

Maybe I should be more accurate in that I appreciated the design of the core combat, because it was trying to include a lot of mechanical depth to, let's face it, separate itself from Dark Souls.

I don't think the system is too complex, necessarily, but I think it suffers from the same problem that low TTK MMSs had last gen: when you have all your gameplay decisions needing to be made in under a second, players either ignore many of them or cook their brains computing them all. Resolve Biolabs and The Nexus were awful for this because they threw so many fucking enemies at you, and The Nexus had so many maintenance tunnels it was impossible to track your position in 3D space.

The game had real heart (Maddy's story was adorable and funny, vid related), but there were so many ideas they crowded each other and made the core combat feel muddy.

While your other criticisms have some merit, your conclusion from this one is untrue and a sign you need to git gud/you don't understand the game. The execution moves do require you to push the button, as every other interaction does, but it also appears in the middle of your other attack animations, which allows you to buffer into it if you hold the button as soon as the prompt appears - in fact, the timing of the button press will actually change based on how long the animation is, and the execution animation will interrupt any enemy attack. It's not exactly hard, either, unless you hamstrung yourself by removing the implant that displays enemy health.

Well, you still need upgrade parts after you get the blueprint, so there's that. You build energy by hitting enemies, too, so depending on your armour/drone configuration you can build energy to store drone attacks by prolonging fights. There's also the implant which restores health upon executions, so if you're like me and compulsively min-max stuff, then taking 1 hit per enemy and healing 1 hit per execution is therapeutic.

On a related note, I never found a reason to use the implants that increase your maximum energy, but I'm sure some people did. With games as open-ended as this in terms of character building, developers often err on the side of too many options rather than too few.

Agreed, I thought all the NPC storylines were souls tier story wise and all of them gave worthwhile rewards (good weapons and high-tier implants). I liked the one with the flirtatious russian engineer who slowly loses her sense of self due to rogue process fucking up the electronics and you have to mercy kill her to finish the questline.

The level design was shockingly good. I was amazed when not only did each level have multiple routes, shortcuts and secrets, all of the levels fold back into Central Production B unlocking new areas and enemies there as you fuck shit up in CREO.

Energy was another thing that distinguished the game from souls, instead of being a 1 to 1 magic counterpart it functions completely differently which I liked. Personally I couldn't find any way to make the max energy implants worth it, since energy is always draining away you are encouraged to use it as and when you get it otherwise you won't be able to use the drone ability or heal as much (with the energy to health implant)

You could probably make it work with sustaining arrays (slower draining) voltaic dynamos (more energy per hit) a rig capacitor XL (20% energy buffer) and implanted electrodes (energy injectables) as a full on energy build. You only get the first decent offensive drone at the chemical refinery but it doesn't matter at all because builds can be swapped out on the fly so you can just switch at whatever point you feel geared for it.