Ace of Sevens (4479) on 8/4/2007 6:58 PM · Permalink · Report

Now that this is out on XBLA (someone approve, please), lots of reactions are popping up around the web. Many of them seem to amount to complaints the game is too hard or too confusing. I realize people are not used to reading to find out what they are supposed to do these days and some of the later levels with multiple stories do get a bit confusing on the automap, but lots of players can't even get through the first level, where all you have to do is insert two chips into sockets, grab a gun and leave. The chips are not hidden. They are right in front of the sockets. It's hardly using a cat and duct tape to make a fake mustache in order to disguise yourself as a man who does not have a mustache.

The difficulty complaints aren't just limited to puzzles though. The game itself is thought difficult, even at normal difficulty. I've heard plenty of complaints about What About Bob?, for instance. I missed the recharger in the previous level and came in with under 1/4 health and still cleared the basement using mostly fists. My main reaction was how simple it is compared to modern shooters.

Lest I be mistaken for some sort of gaming god, this is from the guy who couldn't beat the first batch of levels in X-Men Mutant Apocalypse, has never gotten beyond the third tier in any well-regarded 2D fighting game and has generally given up in frustration on any game made before about 1994. I'm hardly an FPS savant, either as I can't get past Cairo Station on Legendary in Halo 2 and have won 4 out of 126 games in Halo 2 and two of those I was dragged along by my team.

I think a lot of the issue was that back 11 years ago, monsters had more firepower, but were relatively dumb, so the strategy is different than what required in a modern game.

I do have a couple minor annoyances with the port, though. The first is they didn't fix the long-standing problem that there was a maximum number of monsters active in a level to keep memory requirements down. This led to situations where monsters could activate and you could punch them to death at leisure. This is still the case, especially is big coop games at high difficulty as they have more monsters.

Also, Every Man for Himself was renamed to Deathmatch, which is a more standard term, even though the rules are different than what's typically considered deathmatch. Namely, your score is kills minus deaths instead of kills minus suicides and environmental deaths.

Also, quick match doesn't seem to work. I have yet to find a game with it.