If you do care about what I've been playing today and yesterdays its just making the usual rounds with SMT V mainly; grinding, recruiting, dying, you know, all the good stuff. I also streamed a whole bunch of Yakuza where the combat in that games just swings wildly between insultingly easy and actually impossible. There's one guy in particular in the collesium who is just consistantly clapping my cheeks and I just cannot seem to get the better of him. He's not THAT hard but getting hit like, once, means that a quarter of my health vanishes and unlike fights in the story, I can't spam convini energy drinks.
But what I want to go off about today is a game called Ghostrunner. I bought Ghostrunner after seeing the trailer because it looked like someone took Mirrors Edge and Hotline Miami and then smashed them together. The atmosphere of the game and the soundtrack are right up my alley so I snapped it up right away. At first I was having a good time with it but the more I play it the more janky and buggy it seems to get and it all came to a head yesterday with a certain platforming challenge.
In one level of the game you have to run through these giant spinning discs that have breaks in them. At first they are spinning too fast so as you approach them you have to right click them to slow down time on them which allows you to either pass through them or run along them. Now one thing you have to understand about Ghostrunner is that it's not an easy game. It presents you with pretty rough challenges that you will probably die on a few times but will also give you pretty frequent checkpoints so you can try over and over nice and quickly until you get it.
I came to one spinning disc section about half way through the stage where the disc was horizontal and was positioned near a wall. The idea is that you time slow the disc and run along top of it, jump off and wall run along the wall to the next platform. I will attempt to crudely draw a diagram of the scene in MSPaint
The black thing is the disc and the red thing is the wall, looking at the part of the level sideways on. So I slow the disc, jump on the wall and screw up my jump to the ledge and die, no problem I'll just start again. Only problem, when I hit the restart button the scene had changed.
The disc had like, pivoted and was now clipping through the wall as it spun around. I tried to press on anyway only to find that the angle of the disc and the spinning meant that it would make the wall run impossible or, if I could get on the wall, I'd get clipped by the edge of the disc and knocked off to my death. Completion of the room was impossible and my only solution was to quit the game.
Now while each level has a great number of checkpoints that make dying not a problem, the game DOES NOT save progress at those checkpoints. So I had to do the entire fucking level over and then hope to God that it doesn't happen again. Well it DID actually happen again, 2 more times on 2 different discs in the stage only I got lucky the other 2 times and the disc pivot was either not a problem or a minor annoyance at best.
This has really soured my view of the game now. When I fire up Ghostrunner now I'm constantly worried about what game-breaking bullshit is going to pop up out of nowhere and force me to restart enitre stages thus wasting god knows how much of my life with this crap. I went onto the Steam discussion page to see if anyone else had experienced it and while I couldn't find anything about it, I was greeted to thread upon thread of people complaining about other, way more serious bugs and glitches.
I know game-dev is no easy task and obviously its not really realistic to expect a developer or studio to find and fix every bug before release but this is game breaking shit. Ghostrunner is 25 pounds and apparently developed in part by 3D fucking Realms of all people so having level geometry just randomly break or game crashes or major performance hiccups just is not acceptable.
How about finish your fucking game and make sure it works before you charge me money for it, eh? Is that really so much to ask?
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