I’ve been stuck in Candyland hell the last year or so. I am yearning for the day my kids graduate up to Monopoly and Risk.
Have you tried the Rothfuss variant, where players draw two and choose one?
https://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2014/03/house-rules-and-candy-land/
If you start setting up the board now, you can probably finish a single game of Eclipse by the time the kids move out for college.
I have not myself, but that’s basically the rule my son plays by. “No I don’t like that card daddy, going to try again.”
When my daughter turns 3 I’m taking it straight to Twilight Imperium.
The recommended age on the box is referring the combined age of all participants, right?
–
Edit: wait sorry I was misreading that 12+ Y is for the time-to-play section.
I have so many great games I’m itching to play with my kids when they get a bit older. But we do have a few good kids games too, like Hiss! and a junior version of Apples to Apples. They just gravitate to Candyland. That and the concentration card games, for some reason.
/thread
Seriously. A lot of the talk here hasn’t been about last acts, but last boss battles, which are an entirely different kettle of fish altogether. And there’s been talk about games that have weak/broken end games, like KOTOR2 – but none of those actively made you say “fuck that game”. KOTOR2, for example, is still a great game, end-game warts and all.
But Far Cry, and the introduction of the TriGens… seriously, what the fuck? The gameplay up until that point was superlative and ground-breaking… then the TriGens are introduced and the game goes completely to hell from that point on. Fuck Far Cry.
And fuck Silent Storm 2. You’ve got this smashing WW2 X-Com/Soldiers At War-alike, and then they introduce mechs. Completely ruins the rest of the game
I just realized that while you guys have been talking about Far Cry, my brain has been reading that as Crysis, which may also deserve a spot in this thread. But I don’t think I touched the Far Cry series until the second game, which I didn’t like nearly as much abs lots of others around here did. Did Far Cry have a weird left turn in content and difficulty like Crysis?
Whachu’talkin’bout’Willis.gif
I loved the Crysis ending. It was a refreshing change of pace. I killed Norks the whole game, at the end of Crysis it let me kill some aliens with some laser beams and float around in zero gravity. It kicked ass.
Also I loved that in most games you see a difficulty spike at the end, but Crysis reversed that and except for the final boss, the game actually got easier in the last Act compared to the rest of the game, which again, I thought was refreshing.
All right, so I’m going off ten (or so) year old memories at this point, but there was that spot when you enter this, I don’t know, alien hive or something? And there’s no gravity and you’ve got to float through and find your way and shoot alien squids or something. And I just hated it, because it was so drastically different from what came before, and not in a good way. I can’t remember if I gave up at that point or soldiered on, but I’m pretty sure I never beat the game.
WTF? I love that ending so much. It’s perhaps the best ending of any game I’ve ever played. Given your love of the game, i’m surprised to hear this.
The only game I loved, but then loathed its last act, was Ultima VII-Serpent Isle. A more polished version, almost as large as the Black Gate (one of my favorite games ever), in a new setting which was welcome after we’d had 4 successive games iterating the same continent – everything was great…until it wasn’t. The game completely falls apart at the end, which turned out to be prophetic for the rest of the series.
Nononon, I was replying to this quote here from Nesrie. Sorry!
Me and Brian love that ending too.
Brian was replying to a comment about games that are kept looking fresh by the fans through mod support, and Freespace 2 being the other example he could think of where a game has retained a modern look thanks to mod support.
I hated the FreeSpace 2 ending at the time because I kept thinking that I was failing the mission–given how badly everything goes and your character’s probable death–and that I wasn’t at the end of the game yet. D’oh.
You’re remembering correctly. I didn’t have any trouble with that ending. In fact, I found it much easier than the rest of the game. I’m pretty sure I was playing on a pretty high difficulty level, and the game went from being very difficult to very easy in that alien portion, and I got through to the end very fast thanks to the dip in difficulty.
I haven’t played that, but on a semi-related note, I hate battles which the player is “supposed to” lose so the story can advance.
Jedi Outcast had a battle like that, early one. It drove me crazy trying to win it until I realized the story required me to fail.
(Great game anyway.)
The last mission in Freespace 2 has two outcomes, FYI.
I don’t recall that I found it difficult so much as really annoying and un-fun. I just didn’t like that part, or any of the alien parts. Maybe that’s because it contrasted so strongly against the NK parts, where I could jump around and punch people like the Hulk.