pubs
There’s this mission in Fable, where I’m supposed to rescue a kid from a cave filled with monsters. I tried twice to beat it. It wasn’t any fun at all. I mean, I really did not enjoy it. The second time I nearly did finish, but I died again. The third time, which I attempted just today, I succeeded — but then I failed anyway because the kid I was supposed to protect got killed somehow. When I failed, I figured, ah, well. So I failed it. At least I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.
BUT THEN THE GAME LOADED THE LAST AUTOSAVE.
So. I was forced to start again.
Finally I completed the quest effectively. I went back to the guild and leveled-up. I went back to town. I bought a few items. I checked on my wife.
AND THE GAME LOCKED UP.
I… I tried loading the last autosave. It was was just before that quest, again.
I’m… about to kill something.
I certainly don’t feel compelled to continue playing.
The crux of this problem is that there’s no way to ‘get rid’ of a quest. I can see why this would have been a real bear to implement (allowing the player to duplicate quest items, kill ‘bosses’ twice for the XP, etc.) but I think that even a crippled functionality (you can only quit before you’ve entered the main quest area, for instance) would be far preferable to the system they wound up using.
Haven’t seen a lock-up yet myself, although there’s been a lot of slow-down, weird texture issues and at least one point that looked like a crash (game jumped back and forth between loading screens whilst the Xbox made horrific noises) but it corrected itself before I could get up and power-down the system.
Maybe it’s karma. I mean, you get a Gradius game, and it’s all awesome and doesn’t make you want to kill anyone at all, so… I guess Fable‘s just picking up the slack — you know, making things right with the universe once again.
Look on the bright side: at least Xboxes are apparently bulletproof. So that’s something.
You double posted.
Your message double posted, with a two hour time difference even. Don’t you just love LiveJournal?
And that sucks about Fable. Why is there always that one game killing moment where the designer felt the need to punish and abuse the player? It’s like almost every game has one. Also, does the game lock up often, or have any other serious glitches?
Re: You double posted.
Yeah, someone alerted me to this only moments later. When I tried to delete the last post, though… my computer locked up.
…
I’ll probably get over my SUPREME ANGER tomorrow. It’s just. Oy.
This is, I think, my first lockup. I might have had one more; I might just be thinking of Morrowind, for some reason. The way it happened is that, as soon as I got back to town, I went home and had sex with my wife, twice. Then, out of curiosity, I asked her to follow me while I went to talk to this guy who kept demanding that I get weirder and weirder hair augmentations, such that I might speak to his daughter.
Thing is, THE ABSOLUTE MOMENT that the game began to switch areas, my wife spontaneously decided to give me a gift: a really, really expensive axe.
And. That confused the game, I guess. It was trying to get rid of one area, when something new popped up that it couldn’t account for.
ASIDE FROM THESE LITTLE PROBLEMS, I like the game lots for what it is. I just had to share my frustration.
Level six in Gradius V is when things start to get stupid. I mean. I. I just…
I need a ripple laser.
Oops. See below comment, in response to Gradius.
I think this is the best PS2 game I own. It gets me using the system for something other than DVDs!
Yeah. The queer thing: early on, before I understood how the save system worked, I decided to save and leave the game just before I was set to graduate from the Guild. Of course, we now know that the game doesn’t save quest progress. So I had to start all over again.
But. I still had everything I had collected at the point I saved. All of the money and items. It was… strange. I haven’t played around with this element enough to see how much it can be exploited. Maybe that was just a fluke.
You should be playing Katamari Damashi instead anyway.
Nope, not a fluke, definitely an exploit. I was going to mention that in my comment originally, but it got cut out during the editing process – the fact that you can fail a quest, or use the ‘Hero Save’ to save your items, and still retain the items that you did pick up makes the inability to back out of a quest even worse.
I’m tempted now to start another character and use the Hero Save after getting certain items/XP rewards and then see if I can get them again. (There’s a certain item near the end of the game where if you can do this, it would be…really interesting. Especially considering that the more I think about this, it seems that the designers intended for the game to work this way rather than it being an exploit.)
I sympathize with your killing rage
I actually killed the kid myself at one point, just because he, well, deserved it.
I finally figured out that you can leave him in a an empty room and then go back for him when you’ve cleared the next one.
With so much emphasis on “play how you want!” I had kind of assumed that if I failed a mission, well, that mission would be failed. I’d lose fame, not get paid and then pick up the pieces from there.
NOT SO!
So far, at least. I’m having trouble killing more piglet-creatures than Whisper – she seems to be a cheating beast.
This is all bizarre.
I guess it’s something worth exploring more, though.
Re: I sympathize with your killing rage
His AI was kind of strange. Instead of following me, like as not he’d just run away. On the other hand, you don’t need him to keep up. You can leave him as far behind as you like; as long as he’s still in “follow” mode when you change rooms, he’ll warp and wind up standing right next to you. So, really, once you’ve dealt with the sprite one way or the other, you can just dash for the exit.
This is much more troublesome than the QTE-repeating in Shenmue. I mean. I can understand how difficult those branching paths could be to implement. In a game like this, though — what if I want to be perceived as a doofus?
I’d rather that than have to go through the stupid escort mission again.
sheesh.
And I thought console systems were supposed to be easier to do QA on :)
I quit playing Shenmue for a similar reason. You know how, occasionally in that game, you have “big days”, where just a lot things seem to happen, and there is a lot drama, and whatnot? I just reached one of those (it was also the first time I placed first in the forklift race), I think it was the day that Nozomi was leaving and we took a picture together. Anyway, like, right before I got home to save, the game disk just sort of stopped spinning, and the Dreamcast returned to its boot screen.
I wasn’t pissed, exactly. I think heartbroken is a better word. I didn’t want to have to go through some of those scenes again. And, I stopped playing.
I’ll finish later, I guess.
The worst is when you fail something big like a battle arena and instead of losing your reputation the game loads the autosave and your forced to start again. Still no problems with locking up yet. Is your Xbox an older model, that could be the problem?
For an explanation about the lockup, see one of the other comments. The game confused itself, essentially.
Yeah. I don’t see why the game doesn’t let the player lose. That seeems counter to the whole concept.
Did you give Nozomi the picture where the two of you are together?
I failed to, even though I wanted to, thanks to how unclear the menus can be in that game.
Yeah. I’ll try it again today. And. I’ll save every five minutes. (Although I had only been playing for about ten minutes after I finished that quest…)
LOL XBOX IS A COMPUTR D00D
As a matter of fact, the exact same thing happened to me, and I felt so horrible afterwards, cause she seemed so disappointed.
In a way it works though, or, at least it reminded me of when I know what I want to say and accidentally say something else in tense social situations in real life.