#PRESENTABLE LIBERTY TVTROPES TV#

All of them are annoying on purpose, mostly for the sake of a punchline. By every metric it's an annoying, 'badly designed' level, but once you figure out the gimmick it's actually pretty easy and fun to get through, and ends up being one of the most memorable levels in the game.Īnd at a glance there's not really anything different between Super Paper Mario and those examples that I liked. The very first ladder drops you into a pit of spikes if you jump on it, there are enemies disguised as energy tanks, and there are extra lives that are impossible to get without dying. There's a boss who's a shut-in gamer type, so her level is deliberately set up to subvert Mega Man level design in trollish ways. Another game where it worked for me (and this is a real obscure pull that just popped into my head for some reason) is an extremely weeb Mega Man clone called Rozenkreuzstilette. The game can be genuinely creative and funny in places, but some of its jokes involve forcing the player to do something absurdly tedious for an extended period of time (like grinding for money for about 15 minutes, running to the right in an empty void for several minutes, entering an incredibly long password, talking to a character a hundred times, etc), and they're such a goddamn slog that I basically never want to replay the game.īut on the other hand I don't mind the Portal 2 example at all. As a fairly gameplay-oriented person my gut answer is 'if it sucks to play then it sucks to play, and being intentional doesn't help.' But as soon as you start looking at specific examples it's easy to find exceptions.įor example one game where 'intentionally bad' sections really got on my nerves was Super Paper Mario.

This one's actually kinda complicated if I think about it.

Now I'm curious about the experiences others have about stylistic suck, so hit me with your favorite poor-on-purpose moments from gaming! These test chambers are an entertaining way to sell what's going on at that point in the story and feel all the more effective coming hot off the heels of some of the best puzzles in the game.įrom these and other games, I think I know where I stand on intentionally bad game design show me that you can do something well before you do it poorly. At this stage, the story requires the player to play through some utterly crappy puzzles, which are piss-easy at best and non-functional at worst. That is until you hit the test chambers that were designed by Wheatley. This is an utterly sublime puzzle game, with great pacing, multiple new mechanics introduced throughout, and enough ingenuity to keep me invested through both the single player and co-op campaigns. I much prefer how Portal 2 handles bad game design. I do like No More Heroes, but I doubt that I'll ever accept the open world segment as a good addition, even in the 'intentionally' not good sense. If the open world sucks by design, then what about other aspects of the game that I didn't enjoy? Was there some artistic intent behind the parts that I would otherwise criticize? That's a rabbit hole that I generally choose to not go down I like how it does emphasize how unglamorous Travis Touchdown's life really is, but I can't believe that there wasn't a more efficient way of doing this.įurthermore, it feels like the game is trying to induce some unearned benefit of the doubt by doing this. A prank that lasts for roughly half the game and feels completely detached from the far more biting satire found in NMH's action segments. A lot has been written about how much of a wasteland Santa Destroy is, and I've heard (without finding confirmation) that this was done intentionally, possibly as a criticism to open worlds.Īll I can think to say to that is.maybe? It feels more like a prank on the player than any meaningful attempt at critique or criticism. No More Heroes is a game that I like despite its dreadful, barren open world. I've come up with two examples of purposely bad (or at least boring) sections of games that really stood out to me, one negatively and the other positively.

#PRESENTABLE LIBERTY TVTROPES TV#

I've been thinking about games that utilize intentionally poor design choices, or in TV Tropes parlance, Stylistic Suck. Sometimes a game will feature poor gameplay elements as a conscious decision, usually in order to criticize or breakdown game design or as part of the story.

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