Another update, that I’m writing more out of frustration than anything else.
This month’s theme includes playing games that have been sitting unplayed in your library for ages. This is how my luck has panned out thus far:
I’ve tried 20 games
9 of them I could play through without any major issues (although that’s not to say I did not discover bugs in them…).
1 of them was broken due to servers being down (in a puzzle game…)
2 of them had had patches released that broke the games (and which never received any patch to fix the mess they caused)
1 of them had a serious bug in it from day one that was never fixed (corrupts your save data, and it seems to be a very common one, if you go by what people say on the forum for it)
3 of them did not play nice with my modern OS/hardware
1 of them worked, but was based on a comic book series I’m unfamiliar with, and it was clearly not made for people unfamiliar with it
1 of them worked, but there was no way to rebind the controls and the controls it defaulted to on my gamepad were completely bonkers (and it’s the kind of game I’m not playing with a keyboard & mouse)
2 of them were just really bad, or annoying. Considering I played through Air Conflicts: Secret Wars and Kane & Lynch 2, that should give you an idea of how bad these were.
It’s funny how those are a lot of the same reasons I generally stay away from multiplayer games these days. Also, with emulation, I guess these sorts of issues are a rare point in favor of the oldschool consoles vs PCs.
1 of them worked, but there was no way to rebind the controls and the controls it defaulted to on my gamepad were completely bonkers
How bonkers…? I’m curious if maybe it was an older DirectX input game instead of Xinput? That’s one thing I’m very grateful for about the Logitech gamepads with their X/D input switch.
None of these games were MP games though :( I do have a few dead MP games that I activated early on, and that I skipped.
The game was Midnight Club II, which is a racing game, and it tied functions to pressing down one of the sticks. Brakes & gas were not close to each other either, they were X & B on an Xbox controller, with Nitro being where it would have been logical to put the brakes. I do actually have a Logitech controller, and both settings resulted in the same bad controls. I guess I could some some external program to re-bind the keys, but honestly, the game did not seem good enough to be worth the effort.
Broken games are so frustrating. I have a few cluttering up my account in the hope that some day I’ll get them working :/
With games broken by the devs themselves, I don’t think there’s much hope. Although today I did managed to fix an old SG win that I thought I would never be able to play. Akaneiro: Demon Hunters. The game was utter pants, and not worth fixing, but at least it no longer needs to sit there and make my stats look worse :P
Yikes. On the bright side all this Spring cleaning is clearing out your backlog, even if in a disappointing way. Hope you discover some hidden gems (or at least not totally broken, buggy messes) soon.
What was the comic book game?
I am glad I played through Kane & Lynch 2. Even though that was a pretty awful game, it was interesting (and it was quite short). Other than that, NightSky ended up being very nice. It looked like a kind of generic early “indie boom” game, and well, I guess on some levels it was, but it was well made, with controls that felt good to use.
The comic book game was Nikopol: Secret of the Immortals. It did make the comic book look potentially interesting, even for someone who does not read comics normally though (just one of those things I never got into).
Haha one of the reviews for K&L2 says “so bad that its good”, from the looks of things it summarises it perfectly. :P Often those kinda games lend itself well to not overstaying its welcome, just pure unadulterated action/fun.
Oh nice, I hadn’t heard of the trilogy before! Just requested it from my library. :)