SalaciousCrumb on 25/8/2008 at 13:14

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You're right, that mission was nearly impossible. I beat it by connecting a joystick to my pc. Then I made it in about 30 tries. Still damn annoying.

Ajare on 26/8/2008 at 01:19

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I'm going to nominate (http://www.byond.com/games/hub/Exadv1/SpaceStation13) Space Station 13. SS13 is, incidentally an incredibly interesting game for many reasons and could easily have its own thread, but if people haven't heard of it, it's probably because of the learning curve.

SS13 is an online roleplaying game: that is, roleplaying in the truest sense of the word. It has a horrible interface (thanks to the software it runs on) which lags, requires multiple clicks on unintuitive icons to achieve even simple tasks, and has no consistent scheme.

Once you've mastered the interface (took me a week or so of playing), you still don't necessarily know how to do anything. There's no manual, and limited help online, so your options are either experiment or ask other people. The SS13 community is full of dicks and consider a lot of the things you can do to be "classified", so experiment it is!

Of course, you can only really experiment properly when in a game. But because the roleplaying is cooperative, do something wrong and you're likely to seriously annoy someone. Or kill yourself, which is even worse because death is permanent, and you'll have to wait until the end of the current game before you can try again, which could easily be 20 minutes plus.

And when you've found out how to do something, good luck remembering how to do it! For reference, here's how you remove a reinforced wall:
1) put wirecutters in left hand
2) put screwdriver in right hand
3) select left hand
4) use wirecutters
5) select right hand
6) use screwdriver
7) wait 5 seconds
9) remove wirecutters from left hand
10) put welder in left hand
11) select left hand
12) use welder
13) wait 5 seconds
14) remove screwdriver from right hand
15) put crowbar in right hand
16) select right hand
17) use crowbar
18) wait 8 seconds
19) remove welder from left hand
20) put wrench in left hand
21) select left hand
22) use wrench
23) wait 8 seconds
24) remove crowbar from right hand
25) put welder in right hand
26) select right hand
27) use welder
28) wait 5 seconds
29) remove wrench from left hand
30) put crowbar in left hand
31) select left hand
32) use crowbar
33) wait 8 seconds
34) remove welder from right hand
35) put wrench in right hand
36) select right hand
37) use wrench
38) wait 8 seconds

And you're done! Want to know how to use the cryo machine? Thought not...

To make matters worse, only certain people can use certain things. So you may play for a month, and never be assigned engineer. Then one day you're an engineer and despite havine played for a long time, you'll have no idea how to operate the engine. There are a lot of different jobs, each with their own complex routines to master. There can only be one captain, and unsurprisingly it's a popular job, so you're going to be flailing the rare times you actually get assigned to it.

That said, when things go well, there is literally no game that comes close to how amazing SS13 can be. On the other hand, when things go badly (ie people grief) it's one of the most frustrating, stupefying experiences known to man.

ZymeAddict on 26/8/2008 at 01:57

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Too bad, the rest of the game afterward is just as good as the rest. It's just that stupid aircraft training bullshit which cocks up the experience and turns what would have been a nearly perfect game into just a very good one.

Heck, once you get past the training mission the flying can actually be pretty fun, especially once you get the Harrier Jump Jet and can go do strafing runs against the other gangs in Los Santos. :ebil:



It might be possible, but I just remember the key controls being very clumsy and unintuitive, and I don't really think changing to first person view would really have made much of a difference in that regard. I guess I could have rebound the keys, but I think that likely would have screwed up the controls for everything else, and I don't think there was any other settings which would have helped much anyway.

ercles on 26/8/2008 at 03:04

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For the missions that didn't require you to shoot anything in a plane in san andreas (i.e. the majority of the training missions), I didn't actually find it that hard once I figured out that using the arrow keys and WSAD at the same time was the best scheme. Even then helicopters were just retarded. At least with the jumpjet you could just lock onto shit and bomb it.

Thirith on 26/8/2008 at 10:18

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I don't know what it was, but I always found flying school in San Andreas much, much easier than driving school. Some of that may be down to me using the keyboard rather than a gamepad with analog inputs; some of it might be down to video card timing problems which meant that rolling the car didn't work as well if I didn't activate vsync for some weird reason. By comparison, flying through the hoops took me 2-3 times.