Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Sometimes you get a game. You might play it right away, or you might put it on your shelf for a time. But when you do the latter, do you then start getting "that" feeling after a few days?

I mean the feeling that it's a game you'll really, really love, and as a result you really, really want to play it. Now, if you're like me, you try to complete things before starting something new (or at least give it a fair chance). So when "that feeling" starts churning up, I try to ignore it until I complete something else. That feeling is what got me to put in Red Dead Redemption after it sat on my shelf for a bit, and that game sucked me in to the point I barely played anything else for a month or two, and I loved every minute of it.

I also got that feeling about Bioshock Infinite. I was able to wait until I finished Remember Me before starting it, and my feeling turned out to be very right. I'm loving it far more than Bioshock (which I very much enjoyed).

Now I'm getting that feeling over Far Cry 3, which I got at our game store in town a few weeks ago effectively free thanks to store credit.

I can't think of a time in recent memory where that intuition has been wrong, and I'm glad for that. Since my gaming habits/self-imposed rules for the sake of organization are being upended for my class project-to-be-thesis experiments, I got Far Cry 3 digitally as it was on a PSN sale, so I can pull it right into my experiment if the itch gets too strong to resist.

Anyone have this kind of "that feeling" experience at times?

Oh yeah. That's a great feeling. It hasn't always been borne out for me in every case, but I'd say about 95% of the time I just know when a game is gonna work for me. I wonder if it's a case of confirmation bias; simply believing deeply that a game will be good might color our perceptions of the experience.

Bragatyr wrote:I wonder if it's a case of confirmation bias; simply believing deeply that a game will be good might color our perceptions of the experience.

Oh, I'm sure, at least to some extent. The human brain is good at feedback loops. I think it's been established psychologically that expectations can color actual perception, which reinforce the expectation, and back and forth. That's why "think positive!" is a thing, as if you go in positive, it can help something be...well, positive. Obviously even when your expectations are high you can still be disappointed if something is just bad, but going in with a good feeling helps make the actual thing good.

It does beg the issue, though, of where is the line of actually being good and enjoyable and self-deception. I guess for me, it's not really black and white, it's far more grey. Even in games I love there are things I dislike and think could be improved on or eventually I get bored. Like Borderlands; loved the game, but eventually I had had enough of the grind, the DLC packs weren't interesting enough to override that boredom that crept up. I was trying to like it but eventually, I just stopped trying to trick myself, I was finally bored with it, and moved on.

And of course, for a medium like games, eventually, you have to leave the realm of objectivity and enter subjectivity.

I do think there's that phenomenon of wanting to like a game, as in recognizing certain elements and pushing on past the more tedious or undesirable ones while appreciating the overall effect. I find myself doing that a lot. A lot of times it works out, and I usually find something about the game I like. But I do agree with the original sentiment that some games just sort of reach out and grab the player.

I find that the ones that do that for me are usually nostalgic, either actually from the 64-bit era and before or with a kind of throwback, hearkening to the great gaming days of the past mentality, like Xenoblade. I knew I was going to love that one and from the opening scenes I did. For me a lot of it has to do with music, so if I hear a game has phenomenal music and atmosphere it all just comes together.

Bragatyr wrote:I do think there's that phenomenon of wanting to like a game, as in recognizing certain elements and pushing on past the more tedious or undesirable ones while appreciating the overall effect.

This is where an excellent presentation comes in. A game that is presented well can really make up for a LOT of flaws. I find Skyrim an excellent case of that. It's pretty glitchy (but most open world games are). It's not very well balanced and loading times are awful. Most of the major NPCs are jerks one way or the other (particularly the rebel leader) and the menu interface is a tad on the clunky side. But it's presented so well, so organically, that despite these flaws (and there are others), I can get utterly engrossed in it. However, I do think there's a difference between wanting to like a game despite its flaws, and actually liking a game despite its flaws. Certainly there are games I wanted to like, but the flaws were just too big to ignore (Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly, lookin' at you). And there are games I love despite some massive flaws (Borderlands is incredibly grindy, and while it's fun, sooner or later that grind catches up to it).

Bragatyr wrote:For me a lot of it has to do with music, so if I hear a game has phenomenal music and atmosphere it all just comes together.

Oh man, could not agree more. A game that has (fitting) music that sets the atmosphere perfectly, like a good presentation, can make up for big flaws for me. Red Dead Redemption is probably the best example of that. The music is 100% perfect for the game's atmosphere. The Last of Us also excels here...even the loading screen music sets the mood perfectly.

I think having a sense of what a game's overall atmosphere is like is one thing that contributes to "that feeling", at least for me. I think the big thing that Red Dead gave me "that feeling" over was an open world sandbox NOT set in a big city (digression: big city open worlds often feel smaller to me than not-big city open worlds, because big cities often look too same-y where wilderness expanses often don't. You can have a huge map that feels small because the areas are too similar, but a smaller better-designed map that feels bigger because areas are different). When I started playing Red Dead and found one of the best written games I've ever played along with that vast sprawling wilderness it was like the frosting on the cake. I think Far Cry 3 is appealing to that same "please, come explore my giant, untamed, wild open world..." sense that Red Dead did, and I love big, vast, untamed open worlds to explore. Give me a huge wild world to explore and I will be quite happy to overlook major problems, thank you very much.

I got "that feeling" playing Gone Home because a) It reminded me so much of older point-and-click PC games that I loved playing in the 1990s, and b) It was incredibly suspenseful without being the least bit suspenseful. I was scared something was going to jump out at me for most of the game.

Bastion was a recent-ish game for me that had such great music and narration that I didn't really care that the game mechanics were kind of lacking or that the game itself is super short.

Tanith wrote:Bastion was a recent-ish game for me that had such great music and narration that I didn't really care that the game mechanics were kind of lacking or that the game itself is super short.

I haven't played Bastion but I'm somewhat familiar with what it is. Glad to hear that it sets a great atmosphere and you seemed to like it, but your point on length makes me think. Length is an interesting attribute to a game and its quality. I really don't like it when a game is just simply padded in order to lengthen it, but I also don't care for games that end too quickly and abruptly. There's a sweet spot between the two, which is the spot where a game is only as long as it needs to be.

Exhibit A, Portal, which is probably one of the best games in recent memory. Not very long, but then again, did it really need to be longer? I felt it was exactly as long as it needed to be, and any more would have been unnecessary padding just to draw it out more. Which I think would've been a detriment to it in the end.