Hmm, dvd stule menu with chapters, I like it! I would love for games to come like that, sometimes I wanna replay an RPG for instance but don't wanna start from the begining, same with fps games etc and sometimes I don't have saves for each "level" or "chapter".

This is at the same time bizzare, intruiging and possibly game crippling. I don't know what to think... it's like having cheats, you intend to use it just once, then you end up relying on it.

I'm assuming that you either can't skip through story, or that this game has little to no in-game story exposition.

I'd read 'teh linkz' but I am at 'teh werkz'

I actually like this idea, it makes it easier to replay areas you liked too.

While I don't think this is the best way to do this, I think it's about time games allow this. Personally I think the AI should just reduce its difficulty every time the player gets killed in one place thereby keeping the structure of the game intact. But sometimes you do just get completely stuck at a point in the game and bashing your head against the wall trying to do it over and over just isn't fun.

You've got to be kidding me.

I wish some of the FF series had achievement points. Lost Odyssey might be the first time I tried to get all skills and magic just to fill up the GS since trying for all Materias and Knights Of The Round. I didn't realize the addiction until Pacman CE.

I will most likely try to get every single achievement, let alone pass any content in any game.

We need harder games, not easier! I want Nethack(or most Rougelike)/Steel Battalion-style death, no "extra lives" or "save points" :P

Why not charge $60 for a 8.5 hour movie?

@Fyren: If you havent already seen the Blue Dragon Achievements I think you might retract that statement of yours. ;D

the amount of times i've got stuck on a game and tried it in,
its really quite a lot -_-.
so this is awesome,
^_^
i just hope theres a cap or something on it, so impaitent people just dont skip right to the end.
its a twin headed gift horse this one.

@Morberis: Yeah, I like replying certain levels. I think it should be mandatory that unless a game isn;t structured in levels and chaters (e.g Okami) that you should be able to replay any Level/Chapter (e.g CoD4) this is something Gears of War severly lacked in my mind, but also made Insane more rewarding in a way than CoD4 because you couldn't just skip stupidly difficult levels.

WTF this is the reason people think the industry is in trouble and miss "the good ol days".

@Witzbold: yeah, ive yet to see anyone max 1,000 on that. or rock band, or even orange box, come to think of it.

@Morberis: its got that going for it, but i think its a fine idea for another genre. isnt this the chapter of the game dealing with phobias? i thought that idea was really interesting, but it'd sure take a bit've the edge of knowing you can skip the parts that really fuck with you, and that's kinda a shame for a horror game.

does this mean the game isn't balanced properly?

@VanFinale: People bitched back then too. Besides, you don't have to take the "easy route" and not so long ago there use to be a thing called cheat codes for every game made and gamefaqs is still getting hits everyday.

I think these days are most of the time better then the past, nostalgia just makes it seem bad now.

Didn't HL2 (originally - PC version) "monitor" your progress and would "ramp down" difficulty if the player continually had trouble completing a stage? IIRC, that data was sent back to Valve and eventually resulted in a patch that affected certain levels. WC3 also offered to decrease the difficulty on repeated tries on the same levels if failed repeatedly. Again - IIRC. I'm all for it, as long as it only pertains to a particular scene/area/level - whatever, and as long as I have the option to not tone it down on that particular part. I don't like to miss content due to difficulty. Fast Forwarding/skipping is just that - skipping content.

@Witzbold:
I was thinking of mentioning that.
----------------------------------
Seriously though, I don't think all games lend themselves to being hard.
Shooters aren't so bad, but at the same time, dying in one spot in COD4 on veteran about 80 times is annoying as hell.
An old platformer won't make you worry too much - restarting a level in SMB3 doesn't hurt. Restarting a purple coin challenge in SMG does.

RTS' should be balanced with occassional defeats from the computer.

Ultimately, I feel modern games don't lend themselves to being hard (as in losing often) as much as old games - odd, since we seem to want more hardcore games these days. I feel a game should instead provide a heart-pumping challenge which you'll eventually overcome, possibly without dying - intense action on a game like Call of Duty is better served when the flow of the game is not interrupted by death. Similarly, an intense boss fight in a turn-based RPG is all the more memorable when you're on the edge of death but end up winning by an extremely small margin.

There's a fine balance to be achieved.

It is nice for those who would like to enjoy the story though I think.

Kinda makes me wonder just how hard do they plan to make their game though? Since one would assume it would have an "easy" mode alone.

@Aimless: aw, hell yeah. it took me hours to be Borgan in Lunar 2 (Sega CD version) and literally, it was one of those "him or me" moments where i pulled off a critical attack as about the last man standing, and i felt like a million bucks, as opposed to all the times before that night. shit was epic, man.

i figured that's why we've got hard/crazy mode on most action titles these days, for those of us with something to prove, or just loving the pain. you know, like maldron.

I really wonder how much people will use that function to skip content on the first go through, and I wonder how far ahead it skips you.

My bet is that the people that use it are the people that would have given up or quite anyway with a few people that would normally have toughed it out but hated it mixed in.

This also makes replaying the game easier, once you play through it once you have these areas that you just hate that sometimes go on just long enough to stop that replay.

As has been mentioned, this'll be great for replaying the game. Though the completist in me can't comprehend someone skipping a hard level.

If anyone remembers the last boss in Xenogears, if only that friggin fight could have been skipped. D:

@Witzbold: wait, the naked fight with deus?

Genius! So many games I haven't bothered to finish just because one damn boss was insanely hard and I couldn't be fucked to frustrate myself any longer. I just want to see the next damn part. Fuck making games harder.

ok people needa stop their bitching about it, personally i think this is a great idea. a lot of people play video games these days as entertainment, not to be challenged to the point of insanity. could you imagine if you were watching a movie like memento, and it would only let you watch the next scene if you FULLY UNDERSTOOD the scene you just watched? no... and making it so you miss achievments also makes sure the "hardcore" gamers dont get jibbed because they still have to play through the old fashion way if they want the achievements to show they actually did.

to me this just shows how flexible and varied the video game industry can be in entertainment and story telling compared to other industries.

It's an interesting mechanic, for sure. I don't know how tempting it will be to use it. I'm one of those obsessive compulsive types that flat out REFUSE to play a game on any less than the hardest difficulty setting, even if it has me screaming at my PC and breaking shit. So given a one-click option to skip a tough part? Urgh, it's going to be TWICE as frustrating, knowing I can do it and refusing to.

Still, it's good for people who prefer a more casual experience.

I'd much rather this than have the game adjust to your playing ability, personally. It'd annoy the hell out of me to be stuck at a tough part and only getting past it because the game went soft on me. Where's the challenge in that?

@TheIrishNinja: The one with the single form with the 2 smaller enemies that circle around him or something. I think that was the last boss in Xenogears.

@Yin: Damn straight! Back in my day, if you wanted to get psat the hard parts, you'd better have a roll of quarters in your pocket. Mwa ha ha!

Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was a step in the right direction for difficulty. While I won't complain that this feature of AotD is bad or anything (since I won't be using it, it doesn't affect me), I hope they ramp up the difficulty because of it. I don't want a game with watered-down difficulty AND a way to skip past the hard parts. That would suck.

@Witzbold: wait, im recalling a few forms but only one was a bitch and i think its the one you're on about; mech battle, yeah? didnt you have to fight it in teams or something? i hate it when RPGs remind me why i shouldve bothered leveling/armoring the less interesting characters.

@Witzbold: If I remember right, the last boss in Xenogears had about 4 guys orbiting around him, and defeating each one weakened the core boss. You could skip the four around him but it made the end fight really tough. And some of the orbiting mini-bosses were a pain, too.

I don't remember a naked with with Deus, though...
(scratches head)

@TheIrishNinja: Yeah, you nailed that...you had to divide up your group, which means I had to balance my teams with a mix of my godlike characters and my really under-leveled ones. Like that damned stuffed animal. Grr.

@Captain Impulse: coulda sworn the last, last fight with deus before kreilan leaves was with deus, and after awkward voice-synching (actually, during, though this was years ago) there was definitely nakedness on fei's part, as well as elly's.

@TheIrishNinja: That does sound sorta familiar...man, it's been a long time since I've beaten that game. I think the ending also plays second fiddle to some of the other awesome memories I have of that game, though.

@Captain Impulse: yeah that was it and goddamn it was stressful and LONG. D:

Almost as bad as boss fights in romancing saga.

@Irenicus-the one and only: Game Genie + NES= Big-eyed with astonishment.

@Witzbold: I passed on Mistwalkers first production but took a quick breeze xbox360achivements.org to see what you were talking about. Although I don't know much about BD, it seems like "Max **** class" and get "perfect **** stages" seem alot of fun :/

I think thats too heavy for me, its like GOW leet achievement.

Work is not proportionate to achievement=does not compute.

Althogh, the 10,000 kills for undertow was begging to get done due to "Get new Gamerpicture" reward.

@Fyren: Yeah, my friend was actually insane enough to go through and do those achievements in BD. He said it involved a lot of just leaving the 360 on with checking it every now and then.

@TheIrishNinja: Yeah it was the form you had to fight with the mechs, and the boss had the most cheat attacks ever. D:

@Fyren: lol all those gamesharks and stuff rules :P

I remember Ghost recon on old xbox, to get the best guns for online play you had to complete the single player, something I refused because I hated it and played the game before on PC, that game made me get an action replay, I'm ashamed. I also have to admit using xploder for GBA to get the 251 or 252 pokemon that you could not get unless visiting a toy store sharing a line with 8 year olds :D Don't tell anyone :(

@sirpilf: no, what you seem to want is for games--inherently active experiences--to mimic movies and television--inherently passive experiences. Plenty enough of people have expounded on this point but suffice to say to twist games in such a way is inherently wrong. There's a good reason that after more than 30 years of game development this feature is still considered cheating.

@Witzbold: I remember that one mini-boss whose attacks drained your Gear's fuel. Yeah, that was fun. I liked having inoperable Gears. ;/

This ain't a bad idea, why not skip to your favourite parts? This works for this kind of game.

This is what I like about this gen of gaming. New, unconventional thinking. Sometimes it doesn't work out, sometimes it does.

@Witzbold: That's odd, I don't recall there being any problems with that fight. As long as you have Xenogears itself tripped out with the best mods (ie to do stupid amounts of damage) and you've also got Citan you can walk that fight.
I seem to remember that the section towards the end including a fight with Ramsus being somewhat harder (I think you have to fight 2-3 bosses without refuelling?).
Anyway, surely one of the best games ever made :)

No achievement points? All my moron buddies will loose their respect for me and I'll have no one to invite on Xbox Live, if I ever felt the need to host a mulptiplayer session.

No but seriously, this is fucking grand. There are a ton of games (read: two) sitting in my library which I've yet to finish because of either (a) rubbish game design (yes, Dead Rising) or (b) the game having scary bits which startle and frighten me (RE4). Now I'll be able to just skip on right ahead.

@Geckosan: That game's combat is pretty easy to break, if I remember right. Do you remember the fight on the sky bridge in Shevat (I think?) where you face off against Grahf and Miang (again, I think?). On my second time through the game, I had Citan with his sword, the Speed Boots, some other Speed-increasing item, and the Power Belt that made it so the lower your HP is, the more damage you do. I started the fight with Citan having 1 HP, cast Haste, and he took 8 turns before any other character (enemy or ally) even got a chance. I actually killed both bosses before any other character had a chance to act.

Citan = God.

@Captain Impulse: holy shit, you're a tactical genius for that. i get around to replaying it one day, i gotta do that.
seconded on cican, too.

@Captain Impulse: Yer, Citan certainly ruled once he got that sword. A pity that it's mostly the second disc that you can actually use it :(

You know, I'm somewhat getting the urge to dig out that game and play through it again :D

@Geckosan: I know we're completely off-topic here (still), but Xenogears combat system was pretty damn sweet. Sure, it was turn-based, but there were so many nifty combinations of attacks, plus the death-blows, spells, and the ability to fight in AND out of your Gear (yes, you could go hand-to-hand against a Gear, and win - Fei was that friggin' awesome)...someone needs to bring that system back, in THIS gaming generation.

And no, not like Xenosaga's failed attempt at imitating it.

This is a very good idea!

One of Eurogamer's new year's gaming resolutions was to "just walk away" when a game is driving you nuts. This would male a fine companion to that.

@cheeses: