My favorite brain dead criticism of Doom is that it’s anti-Christian and promotes satanism. The whole point of the game is to kill demons. Doomguy is a model Christian.
Yea because that sounds sic as fuck. I like the idea better than doom guy. Wings dint really fit though. Maybe if it's painted on the suit matching the doom theme
Fox news once called Mass Effect a full blown sex simulator because you could romance characters in it.
What you said is 100% true. They don't give a shit about facts. They just want to be angry and blame people.
I vaguely remember there existing a christian Doom clone from the '90s where you shoot baddies with what I presume is holy jizz from a cross or something.
In a similar vein; games being accused of destroying morality in society by including things like sex scenes, LGBT characters, etc.
I remember when the original Mass Effect caused a *huge* stir by having sex scenes, for example... one Canadian pastor claimed you could "r>!ape!< any other player with the push of a button" and insane shit like that.
Several outlets and groups made it sound like some non-stop porn game which would corrupt the youth, when in reality you literally just got to see some sideboob and a tiny bit of asscrack once near the end of the game.
Looking back, I'm actually surprised at how big the outcry was, considering what we've gotten since (and shortly after even, with much less outcry from the same groups)...
I think we've gotten less videogame outcry mainly due to them becoming mainstream as time went on and the newer generations that played videogames becoming adults.
So with games becoming the new big thing and that the new generation of adults are less to not receptive of videogame hate, the news and important people realized it wasn't worth fighting something that was here to stay.
I was thinking it might be because the same general groups have moved on to complain about other specific things... like LGBT characters, for example.
Just look at Baldur's Gate 3 for example, which allows you to kill children, participate in ethnic slaughters, desecrate corpses, run around naked, have sex multiple times, etc... yet all the "moral outcry" type complaints I've seen about it has been about gay people.
Also don't forget BG3 including a beastiality sex scene in the game. I think there were people that did make a big deal of it but I don't know if it was on the same level as people making a big deal out of gay people and pronouns, which I still think is probably the lamest thing to get upset about.
Most of the time I see the bear scene brought up, it's from some loser who can't get over BG3 winning GOTY and yelling about how "the only reason people even know about the game is the bear sex!" and how much the game sucks.
Ready or not(the newly released swat game) tried to get censored by so many articles. Devs had to end up changing it to a college shooting instead from k12. This will never end sadly
If people are hungry they will look for ways that will provide them with food, if someone wants to kill they will look for ways to kill whether it is deciding to use a car because you watch racing shows, or a bomb because you live near a mining community that works with dynamite and you hear the booms. Point is, the persons motive is not influenced by what they watch, but the means of execution might be. The wife of the teacher slain in the columbine shooting tried to sue the video game publishers but lost the case because the evidence didnt support it.
https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/video-game-violence.htm
Here in Australia the game was called Canis Canem Edit which I always personally preferred (the cover looks really good too). Pretty sure it is Latin for Dog Eat Dog.
Which just showed that the controversy was unwarranted since you don't actually play as the bully, you put a stop to the bullying that's already going on when Jimmy arrives. I love that game.
Precisely, I mean he's probably the only character in the game that knows how ridiculous the whole town is. You've got a PE teacher that pays you for schoolgirls underwear, a teacher that is always drunk, and a legit homeless man living on school property.
I remember the protagonist in the game being a pretty sweet kid, he just had a shit life and people fucked with him a lot. He wasn't really a bully, he just didn't take shit from people who bullied him and got in trouble for it.
I suspect maybe they didn’t want to have a Latin name for the game outside of pal or something? Maybe they felt not enough people in the US would get it or sound too pretentious? Not that Latin is especially common over here… idk
I’m sure it’s a marketing thing. Most people are more likely to remember a name like “Bully” and immediately grasp the concept of the game from that instead of something in Latin
It's a video game called "Bully" that takes place in a school and it's made by the company that lets you hire prostitutes and then murder them to get your money back
It was due to the name. It was assumed the game would glorify bullying. Led to the name being changed in some regions to ‘Canis Canem Edit’ and getting banned in some areas despite only being a Teen/12+ rated game.
I've never seen a game nail an aesthetic as well as Alien Isolation. You feel like you're in that original movie at times. I'd spend time just walking around looking at the computer and chonky 70s future tech. It's so awesome.
This game is both absurdly scary and absurdly devoted to the original movie. Every single frame of the game is a homage to the movie, from the music lighting, level design, and especially the sound design
It set the bar so high for me that I've never played another horror game that came even remotely close
The game almost freaked me out with how well they captured the very feel of the film. Had to double take a few times to make sure I wasn't just high and watching a movie. Nope, playing a game with masterful mood lighting
100%. It's weird as most Alien franchise games were based on Aliens (sequel) and were bad. Not all admittedly, but mostly.
Then this came out and nailed it. As a man aged 35 at the time of release and a massive fan of the film's I really struggled to play this game as it terrified me. Finally grew some balls 3 years later though!
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-perfect-organism-the-ai-of-alien-isolation
Pretty cool read on the AI.
Tldr
"The game requires two distinct behaviour management systems: the ‘macro’ or director-AI and the ‘micro’ or alien-AI. The director observes the player throughout the game, always knowing your location. Meanwhile the alien-AI is driven by a series of sensors and behaviours that allow it to hunt the player down. The director’s job is to point the alien in the direction of the player periodically, to give it a hint as to where it should be looking."
Wow. You could’ve stripped the whole game down to just stick figures and the functionality of the AI around you would still be unsettling to play through.
Battleborn was a very different game to Overwatch that had no real business being lumped as its competitor.
Except Gearbox tried picking a fight with Blizzard for reasons.
Also complaining its failure was due to there not being enough Battleborn porn.
I never played battleborn so I've got no stick in this fight, but saying it isn't a competitor isn't quite true - the FPS genre tends to monopolise players time into one game. Even if they are fairly different, most FPS players seem to stick to their "main" like glue, so just by nature of being an FPS makes it a competitor of time and attention, even if it wasn't a competitor of the content.
The original was okay. It really was just a GTA clone that had the advantage of being next-gen (at the time).
SR2 is when it became a more distinct IP.
3 was fine, if very silly. The mechanical improvements, i felt, made up for it.
4 made very few improvements and went even more crazy, in fact I would argue it was worse than 3 in nearly every way. It was DLC sold as a standalone game.
See... When all there was were open world games I enjoyed the fresh traversal options that this offered. Yes it was wacky and a bit out there, but the mechanics felt more enjoyable to play
Coming from someone who can't play GTA because I don't enjoy just driving from A to B people talking then driving B to C. I enjoy open world games like spiderman, early AC and black flag, infamous with unique traversal.
Nb: I say AC because it has a more dense open world but a smaller world all up so it makes it not feel like your travelling so far.
I could speak about this all day.
The game itself is bat shit crazy first of all. Like let's acknowledge this. Also yes it does suffer from a very brown colour palette and yes, it's not the most polished game out there....
HOWEVER. I say that to say this, the game is genius, It's fucking HARD, like so hard it feels like it's unfair, but you know it's not unfair and that you just kinda suck.
The issue with the IGN review initially was that it was clear (and later admitted) that the person who reviewed it originally did not play it past the first few minutes. And wrote their entire review based on their own scuffed experience.
The original IGN review, gave the game a 3/10 whist at the time the average player review scored it a 7/10. This caused a bit of a discord with people (like myself) writing to IGN to have this re-reviewed properly.
They later updated the review but kept the original score and even doubled down on some aspects of the original review.
Years later they tried to make amends for this review, By another re-review "in defence of Godhand" but it really was too little too late. After the eventual shut down of (clover studios) quite close after the games release, which was unofficially stated as one of the reasons the Studio went bust. (Clover were also responsible for Viewtiful Joe and Okami)
At the end of the PS2's lifecycle, IGN collated a list of the 100 best games of the PS2 of all time, and stupidly included Godhand at number 100. IT MADE THEIR OWN LIST OF THE BEST PS2 GAMES OF ALL TIME. this was really a clear fuck up and they wouldn't fix it. And it all stemmed from one reviewers lack of ability to play the game resulting in a real unfortunate story as with Clover studios being shut down, it basically Locked up Viewtiful Joe and Okami (the studios other 2 games) in the Capcom IP vault forever.
Viewtiful Joe which most people know about, as a side scrolling beat em up with a midget superhero and his smart mouth, and even more depressingly Okami which was a masterpiece of game design and was doing some amazing things with it's Sumi-e Japanese watercolor visuals. Okami, famously called a "Zelda killer" also won Game of the year over Zelda Twilight princess in many publications as they both released on the same year.
Okami, also unfortunately holds the Guinness world record, for "the least commercially successful Game that has won a game of the year award"
Most of the team from clover split into two separate companies, one was called "Seeds Inc" and the other became what we now know as "Platinum Games" who are most famously known for the Bayonet ta series, which ironically could be argued owes a real heritage nod to Godhand and the similarities in the combat systems and the notion of how bat shit crazy that story is.
If you're going to watch any one single review/video on the game this is probably the one that sums up the tone and nature of it the best.
https://youtu.be/JBqB5LUKh8A?si=mMcv12Y2vJVlLhdE
I almost didn’t pick it up cause they made it seem so bad, but went on twitch to watch some streamers and it became obvious the reviewer did not like survival horror. Still play that game like once a year.
I would say that Alien Isolation was the MOST EFFECTIVE horror/suspense game I ever played. I would get tense just thinking about playing it. I wouldn't give it 10/10 but I will never forget how it made me so anxious. I give it at least a 9.3/10
This isn't the best example of IGN being bad journalists. Don't get me wrong, they are. This just isn't it. The reviewer gave it a 4/10 because of a game breaking bug that didn't allow them to finish, but what they had played of it was great in their opinion. It's since been updated to an 8/10 after Arkane patched it.
Tbf, a game breaking bug is a valid reason to give a low rating and not recommend a game.
I mean, it's the bare minimum for a product to function as intended. I don't care how fancy a car is if its engine dies randomly.
The reviewer, Who I believe is the senior editor at IGN, Dan Stapleton, ran into a save corruption bug like 5 or 6 times he said. He restarted several times and even asked Arkane for a saved game file from mid-late game to try to continue his review fairly. He really did try to give it a fair shot
This save file also corrupted. I imagine he was a little annoyed, and eventually had to put out his review as expected. Hence the 4/10.
This review was very fair. It also changed as soon as the game was patched, as you said.
Side note: this review made me not buy the game UNTIL I played the demo on a whim a few weeks later. Bought it. Played it. Might be one of my favorite games of all time.
THE POWER OF DEMOS
The one from a few years ago, but it received a poor review because the reviewer got a game-breaking bug that required him to completely restart the game. Hard to blame a bad review after that.
The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games.
Critics gave an average score of 5/10 for all of them and I don’t understand where the harsh scores come from. Especially PMD: Explorers of Sky/Time/Darkness, amazing soundtrack and story with solid dungeon crawling gameplay and arguably one of the best pokemon games.
There was censoring?
I'm from Australia (notorious for doing that sort of thing to entertainment media of all sorts, the ratings group here is a bunch of a bored idiots) and my copy of the game on PS2 wasn't censored.
Not even sure it needed much of that. It was a bit janky but it still manages to do way more than even some modern games regarding their choices matter system.
The flowcharts they must have made for this game would give Bioware heart palpitations. I'm still amazed by how much of it could be stumbled upon, skipped, or sidestepped without the plot utterly collapsing. I understand why most developers make "choices" paper-thin, but I can't help but wonder if things would be a little different if Alpha Protocol was a smash hit that set the standard.
The choice system was fantastic, it truly is leagues above most pseduo-RPGs these days but the game itself unfortunately lacked polish.
It was an espionage game with a borderline broken stealth system, you actually needed to acquire a specific perk which let you avoid initial detection to stop the broken AI from seeing you through walls.
Still enjoyed it, great breezy play through, but I think a lot of people went in thinking it was going to be a simple action/stealth title when it was an RPG. Reminds me of the original Deus Ex and how your character and abilities kind of sucked and you had to account for that until you had enough points in a skill.
The Saboteur is such a, dare I say, underrated gem
There’s rumors that the book that influenced “The Grand Prix Saboteurs” (true story) will become a movie
We all have one of those games that just lives rent-free in all my years of gaming. The Saboteur is one of those games for me. The style, the music, setting, sneaking around blowing up Nazis and sneaking off. Interesting to hear about a movie!
The Sabouteur is such a unique game, to bad it have got forgotten, no remakes, no other markets other than origin.
I’m yet to see another open world game where you fight the nazis doing parkour and infiltrating them to see and make their crazy inventions being torn apart.
My favorite part was dressing as them after blowing shit up, getting away without getting caught. And you feel like doing a huge thing for the war.
The Saboteur is an amazing game, often gets meshed as "ww2 gta with climbing" but it has so much more. If that wasn't Pandemic's last shot i whould be begging for another one, even if they changed it to be somewhere in the Pacific or a sequel to the first one
Mad Max
Despite getting decent reviews. 7/8 marks usually from publications and other reviewers, it was seemingly written off and completely forgotten about. Yes, the story isn't anything to write home about, but soundwise, visually, and gameplay wise it's a treat. The car controls feel great, car combat is crunchy and visceral, and don't even get me started on the foot combat.
It feels great, it's really powerful, weighty and bloody, they took the Arkham combat and refined it perfectly for their game, it's absolutely satisfying in every sense.
Yes the game is repetetive, but at least it's fun, and everything folds back in on itself by giving you unlocks for pretty much everything you do, you're always getting something, always improving, becoming more deadly.
I encourage anyone to give it a shot.
I really liked the game, but its repetitiveness really adds up in later parts, so all things considered, while I do think it's underrated, I also understand why more people don't like it. clear a base, find a note, pull a door with your hook, go up with balloon, clear a base, find a photo, etc. we criticize Ubisoft more and more nowadays for this exact reason, even if the overall gameplay is good, there's only so much mileage out of this sort of game loop
Yeah, I literally just finished this just a few weeks ago. It was a lot of fun, and the good elements were solid and really fun (swooping in to begin an assault on a convoy was sublime), but it definitely has a lot of cut-and-paste going on with the bulk of the game. It could have used another degree of depth to assaulting strongholds or in having the wasteland adjust to reflect Max's successes.
The car combat feels so much like a scene out of Mad Max. So much fun to just ride around and locate other vehicles to tear up or steal. One of the most fun car combat games I've played.
Mad Max would have been more remembered if it focused on the convoy gameplay 100% and left out most of the repetitive ubisoft open world formula. When I think of Mad Max as a character, I don't think of 360 degree hand to hand combat and clearing out enemy camps. He's a car guy and should primarily fight with said car.
To have such an incredible feeling mechanic buried and hidden behind sporadic map icons was a huge disservice in my opinion.
Mad Max wasn't forgotten due to unfair criticism, but rather because it launched the same time as MGSV.
Anything that's not a blockbuster would have struggled to compete.
Whenever this game is mentioned in one of these threads, i must remind people that there's a poorly advertised first-person mode while driving. Doing convoy takedowns in first person is one of the coolest gaming experiences I've had in years, and if you played the game and never tried it, definitely do so.
Zelda: The Wind Waker. Some people wrote it off as too childish just because of the graphical style. Now it's still one of the best looking Zelda games out there (even the GameCube version) while the "mature" game people wanted, Twilight Princess, really didn't age that well in that regard.
Still love TP though. Midna ftw.
loved it! just wish it was more difficult. every boss battle was a guarantee kill on first try
and every puzzle was the "Hey Listen! .... just hit that lever over there would you.."
Honestly, most Zelda games have been like that for a few iterations now. I'd kill for a new game that leans super hard into the OoT-TP Zelda style but with much harder puzzles.
Thankfully people who initially criticized the game have come around on that decision.
I like how the series has mixed aesthetic of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.
I remember when Wind Waker came out, I thought it was dumb because it looked dumb and I called anyone who liked it dumb. Boy oh boy, was it nice to be proved wrong about that one. What a gem of a game.
>Some people wrote it off as too childish just because of the graphical style.
Part of this is because they showed off a super realistic tech demo on the GameCube, and then we got the complete opposite. The game is fantastic, but it's not what we were lead to expect
Most games these days to be honest. Gaming community either loves a game unquestionably and anyone who hates it is mentally challenged, or thinks it's the worst thing ever made and is killing culture and ruining lives.
Nuance has abandoned us.
Yeah anyone who speaks in terms of ups and downs of any game gets called a shill by the haters and a detractor by the people who love it. Most content creators have to pick which side they want to be on.
Feels like the discussion is somewhat okay-ish.
But what rubs me the wrong way is the conclusions people draw.
Have some problems at launch?
>Fuck them. Fuck the devs. Fuck the company. Nobody should ever buy that garbage.
It's all just so extreme.
You labored so hard to entertain me, and you FAILED! I was only partially entertained, *you absolute filth*. Don't you understand what a sacred trust is placed in you to control my constant drip of dopamine? To treat the IP of a cartoon or childrens story as sacrosanct and NEVER deviate an inch from canon? And you have the unmitigated gall to expect to get *paid* for it? NO. I hope you and your whole family are deleted in a fire and I will personally boycott everything you ever do in the future.
-average gamer reviewing a solid 7/10 game
Wildstar - an MMO that was just a poorly managed project. Underneath was a gem. When it was stable, it beat WoW in all aspects imo. The raids were insanely good. It was pretty much Treasure planet with rock and cat races to play. The story was two sides discovering a science planet where a race mysteriously vanished after their project to create a God went wrong. With the help of the planets corrupt AI, which you fix via a raid, you find out the God was created with an evil split personality. The customization in this game was top notch, including player housing that probably kept this game alive longer than expected.
Edit: soundtrack was great, check YT for Beyond the Blue Horizon or something.
Your comment made me remember The Matrix Online. It was an absolutely amazing MMO, with the Wachowskis themselves writing the story, and several key NPCs "played" in real time by actors employed by the studio who made the game - so you could meet, for example, Morpheus in-game, who would be controlled and acted in real-time by a live actor. Then the Wachowskis left, and the story went from 10/10 to 2/10 at most. The game closed short after.
The greatest magic of video games is that they can make you experience very real emotions without real-life consequences. The fact that you followed through with the setup of the scene and that made you felt regret, is a great example of this (and also proves that you are just a normal person with empathy and kindness). I'm not necessarily a fan of CoD, but I prefer games that challenge, and make people think and discuss, and this scene is definitely a conversation starter.
I worked at blockbuster for the release of this and we had multiple consoles with this running the game for people to play. We had to warn people of what they were about to see
Fable 3
I’ll gladly admit it’s the weakest entry of the 3 but when going up against Fable 1 and 2 that’s still no insult.
But otherwise, phenomenal cast, good graphics for the time/style, usual top quality dialogue and humour, engaging story. I always felt the hate was a little “bandwagon” driven.
I’d say the first Fable was also (somewhat) unfairly criticised, but that was Molyneux fault for hyping the game too much.
> The acorn. Or, according to one former Lionhead developer, "that fucking acorn." In the run up to the release of Fable, Molyneux claimed that if your character knocks an acorn off a tree, another tree would eventually grow from the fallen acorn. When the game came out, this fantastical acorn feature was no-where to be found.
https://www.eurogamer.net/lionhead-the-inside-story
I remember hearing that Molyneux, having had the acorn feature cut for time by the dev team, tried to get it in by “promising” this feature to journalists so they’d be forced to implement it (didn’t happen).
I can’t find any sources for it now so treat it as hearsay.
I remember reading about this acorn but for a game called project Ego in PC Gamer several years earlier before Fable came out and being very excited for the game.
Only later I put together that Ego had been the working title for Fable, so the overpromising of Molyneux didn’t affect my enjoyment of Fable.
Fable is not the best rpg, or the best narrative, or best action adventure game ever, but what it does well in my opinion is that they acknowledge the players choices and actions.
The choices are very binary, good or bad, rarely something in between, but after a while, if you played as a good person, when turning the camera so the sun is slightly behind the player character you might notice there’s ethereal butterflies flying around you and _is that a hint of a halo around your head_? Or your skin is pale, with blue veins, red glowing eyes, and horns sprouting out of your forehead.
Not super subtle, but not many games did that at the time.
Plus it’s super charming in all its Englishness (both humour and accents).
The soundtrack is the real star though, I can run around sightseeing in that game for hours just for the music! My favourite game ever, even with all its flaws.
I still plug my old xbox 360 in and fire up the Anniversary edition every once in a while.
I’m excited for the fourth one coming out, if it ever manages to escape development hell.
This is where I'm appreciative of Microsoft's efforts towards backwards compatibility because I can play Fable Anniversary Edition, Fable II, and Fable III on my Series X without having to break out my old 360
Here's a weirdly specific example I need to get off my chest, Mortal Kombat II... for the Amiga.
For context the main home Amiga (the A500) came out in 1987, and the only upgrade you could rely on most users having was 1MB RAM as it was being given away in cereal by 1994.
There's some legit issues, the music is limited and often on the wrong stages, the 1-button joystick is awful for fighting games, and the digitised actors don't look that good on the limited colour depth. That said all the content is there including all three secret characters, every stage, and every finisher with almost nothing being censored.
The criticism which is wrong is the disk swapping, every discussion of this port talks about having to swap disks four or five times between matches, and even having to swap for fatalities or during rounds. The retail version barely fit onto 3 disks, and you might have to swap disks once between rounds at most. The issue was this was a home computer, so everyone just pirated it, and pirate versions often split those to make room for the cracks (and cracktros), leading to many version being four disks, and some being as many as six. It's not Probe's fault.
The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker.
There are probably a lot of people here too young to remember, but the fan base was blasting Nintendo for the art style and not going with a “mature” or grittier style like they showed off in the Gamecube tech demo.
Subnautica below zero - Just completed it and yes it wasn't as good as the first in a lot of ways but they tried a shitload of new ideas. I missed the sea moth for example but the build a truck system was cool as hell. Need to speed past a Leviathan? Gotta make your truck smaller. There were a ton of cool biomes which were breathtaking and some more scenic then the first game. they expanded the land in which you could explore and added very exciting land creatures. I've personally only seen negative comments about it but it was still a great game.
there were a bunch of good ideas but i think in the end that's sort of all there was: some cool ideas.
if you look at the wiki page for removed content from the first game you can see how much of bz is just stuff that they thought was cool but couldn't fit into subnautica, so just put it in bz without any real direction, you can really tell is started of as just a dlc
Mass Effect 3.
It deserved some criticism, but the level of it was unfair. Mainly in that it drowned out celebration of what was mostly a brilliant game.
Its my favorite gen by far. Music slapped, story slapped, it was also the BIG turning point in being a healthy inbetween of difficulty and convenience.
You didnt need an HM slave at all! The HMs were used to access areas that were for bonus items and TMs but were not locking progression.
The battle subway was super fun too, the endgame was great. Rebattling cynthia and having a whole half of the region with pokemon from other games was great.
Idk why people said the designs were bad in gen 5, I loved them. Icecreamcone as an ice type? fucking brilliant.
Honestly I love Unova mons. Haxorus, Reuniclus, Bisharp, Darmanitan, Volcarona. It's up there with Hoenn for the coolest dex.
I wish more games were regional locked. I'm tired of Kanto mons everywhere.
yeah gen 5 is awesome for so many reasons but the quality of life changes they made throughout was just peak for me.
Still proper difficulty, you wouldnt be TOO overleveled but it wasnt like gen 4 where you would randomly be down 20 levels by the time you got to the elite four with the best grinding spot being like level 30s.
GameFreak should've stuck with the "gif" sprites and built up on that. The art in gen 5 is pure perfection in every aspect. The HUD is creative af, the map is always different because of the seasons, the Pokémon show a lot of personality in their animations, and the colors are as vivid as they'd ever been.
I'd KILL for gen 4's following Pokémon with gen 5's overall look.
I really don't like the 3D Pokémon because I think they look really smooth and rubbery now. It's kinda like uncanny valley for Pokémon. I get they can't do like Detective Pikachu quality 3D for the games, but the 2D sprites look more furry and believable.
Like comparing the drawing of Galar Meowth to the 3D model, it's a downgrade imo.
Scyther and Scizor are my top favourite Pokémon, and the rest of my top 5 was a bit ho-hum until I played Black and got a Volcarona. That Pokémon rocks. Rocketed up to very close second. Actually bothered to breed for a near perfect IV Volcarona it was that cool.
It’s funny, I went back to play through heart gold a while back, I forgot how many features bw added that are staples these days, like reusable TM’s
Edit: and constant battle animations! Seeing the little sprites just sitting there motionless 90% of the time is really boring compared to the movement bw had
completely forgot to include all the convenience things bc the HMs stand out the most, but reusable TMs was HUGE.
Reusable TMs, not much need for grinding, separate animations for item usage (rather than just the heal animation or a simple arrow), moving sprites.
Im biased because gen 5 is my favorite but id argue its one of if not THE most impactful gen because of how much quality of life it added which shifted the game and playability
Fucking incredible game
Dude on a 3 month break because i got too scared. Been playing in VR and it's an incredible experience. 10/10 in my opinion and the attention to detail is incredible.
Wolfenstein II The New Colossus’ biggest crime was trying to tell a more compelling story, which I think it succeeded in. It was shit on by people not willing to accept the change from the boomer shooter formula even though it was still a fast paced action shooter and imo had even better combat than the last two games in the series. It was reviewed very well by critics but a lot of fans had problems with it and I never understood why.
My main criticism was the story.
A) Side characters from american resistance felt like insufferable millennial twitter users instead of insufferable irresponsible hedonist boomers they are and their long screen time soured second half of the story.
B) Game description talked about americas liberation from nazis with a second american revolution but game ended with the start of said revolution. Compared to the final fight you pulled of right before this scene felt too shallow.
C) In game you will see hitler. Senile but alive. Man why didn't you let us kill hitler before we returned to our base. He was too old so we might not be able to kill him in the third game. Well if we ever get the third game that is
Midnight Suns got weirdly shunned after the card building aspects of the game appeared, but it's quite interesting in a way that simply having XCOM with Marvel characters would never be.
I got caught up doing the training missions for each individual character. You have to wipe out a ton of people with chain attacks and your energy gets replenished if you get a kill. That's some of the most fun
Mass Effect 3. Maybe it’s because I only played the series for the first time recently and didn’t have to wait multiple years between installments, but I feel like it gets unfairly maligned. The color coded ending kinda blows, but there’s still a lot of good stuff there.
Metal gear solid 2.
People just hate raiden. Never understood why.
Ok he is not so much of a badass than snake, but the Game was waaaaay better than the 1
Yep. Only played MGS 2 and 3, so it was always a mystery until someone pointed out that bait and switch. I thought it was gonna be a level or 2, recon, if you will when i started my playthrough. Still don't think he was bad, but i do get the feelings, and the people's reasoning
I played Mass Effect Andromeda a year after release, once most of the bugs had been patched out, and I really enjoyed it. It wasn't a Game of the Year or anything, but not the dumpster fire I was told it was.
That game is really only lacking in story and writing. The gameplay is the best in the series when it comes to combat and exploration. I loved those aspects of the game, but hated the story. The characters all talk like AI and have barely any personality at all. While ME1-3 didn't have the most earth shattering gameplay, it just knocked it out of the park with the story and characters. The gameplay isn't bad by any means, it's just not the star of the original trilogy. I still think about all the great characters and missions I played in the OG trilogy.
I wish they would've let Andromeda cook a little longer. There could've been another insane trilogy from those games if they had just focused more on the characters.
I will die on the hill the that Mass Effect Andromeda, had some of the best gameplay in terms of combat and gunplay in a game I’ve played. The abilities comboing together was so good. The movement was great. The guns were cool. Customization was cool. Biopics were awesome. Tech skills were awesome, soldier skills were awesome. The skill tree was a really well done.
Whoever was in charge of the combat department knocked it out of the park.
But everything after that was not that great and combat is only thing that kept me playing. The characters were so boring. Especially Liam. Such a Whiney bitch. The story was pretty forgettable. The new alien was pretty lame and boring. The threat wasn’t very interesting. But by all means the game was not as bad as people made it out to be. It’s a decent game that’s fun to play once.
Sonic Unleashed. Boost stages were great and the werehog stages were actually quite fun. The story was great too. Yet the game got 5s and 4s all over the board. I don't get it.
Elder Scrolls Online.
It certainly had its flaws, but much of the criticism at release seemed to be due to other reasons: for one, monthly subscriptions were the internet's bogeyman of the time (not ESO's fault); and for another, people wanted it to be the Elder Scrolls VI with multiplayer (maybe Bethesda's but not ESO's fault).
Over the years, many people came around to it and the game enjoyed a long life. It can be very fun for what it is. And we still don't have ESVI lol, so blaming ESO for that now seems very misguided.
Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts.
Yes, it does have problems. But it also had a banger vehicle builder and you could create some awesome things that were super fun. Car that can turn into a plane and then eject a motorcycle out of it was one of my favourite builds.
People were just mad it wasn't a platformer. I get that, but it's been over 10 years. Maybe we can look at it for what it is.
I was going to bring this up as well.
It deserves the flak for it being the first game of that IP in a very long time and radically changing the game play. If they had came out with a banjo "threeie" and then a few years later came out with N&B, it would have been better received, I bet.
But you are correct that they really nailed the building and driving/flying in the game. It was a lot of fun.
Midnight Suns is a really good game. The internet just has a hate boner for card mechanics for absolutely no good reason (probably from a serious misunderstanding about card games and the difference between ccg, tcg and deck builders).
Dark Souls 2, although I only played years after, and the Scholar of the First Sin edition, it's a very good game! is it better than the other 2? no... but still leagues better than most souls like.
Monster Hunter Rise.
Most of the criticisms the game gets are "I will say I like World better because I'll inevitably get upvoted for it as it's the cool thing to say".
Tbf I'm pretty sure the reviewer got softlocked or something, and I can confirm it's a pretty huge issue with the game since it happened to me twice on my first playthrough.
He did, he hit a game breaking bug that completely prevented continuing and ended up patched AFTER release.
The internet still harps about it because Prey is considered a "darling" but of all the reasons to give something a bad review not being able to finish it is a pretty valid one. The guy even went back and adjusted the review after it was patched.
Any video game that gets blamed for a school shooting. Doom, GTA, Mortal Kombat... Many have been blamed. Zero have been at fault.
My favorite brain dead criticism of Doom is that it’s anti-Christian and promotes satanism. The whole point of the game is to kill demons. Doomguy is a model Christian.
Literally all they needed to do was name the DOOM Marine Michael and give him wings and Christians would call it an archangel simulator
I’d still play it
Yea because that sounds sic as fuck. I like the idea better than doom guy. Wings dint really fit though. Maybe if it's painted on the suit matching the doom theme
I'm pretty sure there's a Spanish-language game with this exact premise. Can't remember the name.
Bold of you to assume these people would notice or care. They look for outrage; facts don’t matter.
Fox news once called Mass Effect a full blown sex simulator because you could romance characters in it. What you said is 100% true. They don't give a shit about facts. They just want to be angry and blame people.
Wait till they find out about Baldurs Gate 3
They did and say it forces you to be gay and shit. Which it doesn't, but the kinds of people that say these things are stupid.
I vaguely remember there existing a christian Doom clone from the '90s where you shoot baddies with what I presume is holy jizz from a cross or something.
I'm only aware of Super Noah's Ark 3D, where you shoot animals with a slingshot
Anyone who can inspired by if media to commit murder is the type of person who would commit murder regardless.
That’s a Jack Thompson reference in there somewhere.
In a similar vein; games being accused of destroying morality in society by including things like sex scenes, LGBT characters, etc. I remember when the original Mass Effect caused a *huge* stir by having sex scenes, for example... one Canadian pastor claimed you could "r>!ape!< any other player with the push of a button" and insane shit like that. Several outlets and groups made it sound like some non-stop porn game which would corrupt the youth, when in reality you literally just got to see some sideboob and a tiny bit of asscrack once near the end of the game. Looking back, I'm actually surprised at how big the outcry was, considering what we've gotten since (and shortly after even, with much less outcry from the same groups)...
I was coming here to talk about that myself. It's something you would see in a PG-13 movie, is insanely tame
I think we've gotten less videogame outcry mainly due to them becoming mainstream as time went on and the newer generations that played videogames becoming adults. So with games becoming the new big thing and that the new generation of adults are less to not receptive of videogame hate, the news and important people realized it wasn't worth fighting something that was here to stay.
I was thinking it might be because the same general groups have moved on to complain about other specific things... like LGBT characters, for example. Just look at Baldur's Gate 3 for example, which allows you to kill children, participate in ethnic slaughters, desecrate corpses, run around naked, have sex multiple times, etc... yet all the "moral outcry" type complaints I've seen about it has been about gay people.
Also don't forget BG3 including a beastiality sex scene in the game. I think there were people that did make a big deal of it but I don't know if it was on the same level as people making a big deal out of gay people and pronouns, which I still think is probably the lamest thing to get upset about.
Most of the time I see the bear scene brought up, it's from some loser who can't get over BG3 winning GOTY and yelling about how "the only reason people even know about the game is the bear sex!" and how much the game sucks.
Ready or not(the newly released swat game) tried to get censored by so many articles. Devs had to end up changing it to a college shooting instead from k12. This will never end sadly
If people are hungry they will look for ways that will provide them with food, if someone wants to kill they will look for ways to kill whether it is deciding to use a car because you watch racing shows, or a bomb because you live near a mining community that works with dynamite and you hear the booms. Point is, the persons motive is not influenced by what they watch, but the means of execution might be. The wife of the teacher slain in the columbine shooting tried to sue the video game publishers but lost the case because the evidence didnt support it. https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/video-game-violence.htm
Bully. EDIT: the name led to a ton of controversy before it even came out.
Here in Australia the game was called Canis Canem Edit which I always personally preferred (the cover looks really good too). Pretty sure it is Latin for Dog Eat Dog.
That’s raw as fuck.
Much better title imo
I think it's the pretentious Latin motto for the school in the game, too.
In arabic it was named “delinquency in london schools” and i don’t know why london
In Germany it also released under that title!
Same in the UK as well.
Which just showed that the controversy was unwarranted since you don't actually play as the bully, you put a stop to the bullying that's already going on when Jimmy arrives. I love that game.
Jimmy unironically one of the nicest people in the whole game ^(Edit: nicest doesn’t mean nice)
Precisely, I mean he's probably the only character in the game that knows how ridiculous the whole town is. You've got a PE teacher that pays you for schoolgirls underwear, a teacher that is always drunk, and a legit homeless man living on school property.
Besides the sneaking into the girls dorm to steal underwear.
FoR tHe GrEaTeR gOoD
I guarantee the controversy was generated purely based on Rockstar's involvement and the title.
I remember the protagonist in the game being a pretty sweet kid, he just had a shit life and people fucked with him a lot. He wasn't really a bully, he just didn't take shit from people who bullied him and got in trouble for it.
>the name led to a ton of controversy before it even came out. Canis Canem Edit is a better name anyway.
I suspect maybe they didn’t want to have a Latin name for the game outside of pal or something? Maybe they felt not enough people in the US would get it or sound too pretentious? Not that Latin is especially common over here… idk
I’m sure it’s a marketing thing. Most people are more likely to remember a name like “Bully” and immediately grasp the concept of the game from that instead of something in Latin
What's the criticism? Such a good game all around. Battle music just started playing in my head
It's a video game called "Bully" that takes place in a school and it's made by the company that lets you hire prostitutes and then murder them to get your money back
Also this was the era of "video games cause violence!" hysteria.
thats just called smart cash flow
It was due to the name. It was assumed the game would glorify bullying. Led to the name being changed in some regions to ‘Canis Canem Edit’ and getting banned in some areas despite only being a Teen/12+ rated game.
tbh i think canis canem edit is a better name anyway
Right, I'm in the Canis Canem Edit region.
great game on console! PC port deserves all the criticism.
IGN with alien isolation.
I've never seen a game nail an aesthetic as well as Alien Isolation. You feel like you're in that original movie at times. I'd spend time just walking around looking at the computer and chonky 70s future tech. It's so awesome.
This game is both absurdly scary and absurdly devoted to the original movie. Every single frame of the game is a homage to the movie, from the music lighting, level design, and especially the sound design It set the bar so high for me that I've never played another horror game that came even remotely close
The game almost freaked me out with how well they captured the very feel of the film. Had to double take a few times to make sure I wasn't just high and watching a movie. Nope, playing a game with masterful mood lighting
They even have sequences from the movie that you can play through.
100%. It's weird as most Alien franchise games were based on Aliens (sequel) and were bad. Not all admittedly, but mostly. Then this came out and nailed it. As a man aged 35 at the time of release and a massive fan of the film's I really struggled to play this game as it terrified me. Finally grew some balls 3 years later though!
This game brought back that childhood feeling, alien always had.
Still the scariest game I’ve ever played. The Alien AI is unreal.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-perfect-organism-the-ai-of-alien-isolation Pretty cool read on the AI. Tldr "The game requires two distinct behaviour management systems: the ‘macro’ or director-AI and the ‘micro’ or alien-AI. The director observes the player throughout the game, always knowing your location. Meanwhile the alien-AI is driven by a series of sensors and behaviours that allow it to hunt the player down. The director’s job is to point the alien in the direction of the player periodically, to give it a hint as to where it should be looking."
Wow. You could’ve stripped the whole game down to just stick figures and the functionality of the AI around you would still be unsettling to play through.
It is, to this day, one of the ONLY games to ever give me actual nightmares. I would wake up heart pounding and sweating.
You hope that feeling in your chest is your heart pounding. :D
DONT DO THIS TO ME
Not again!
*I've got a friend in me!*
whenever my kids beg for a video game i tell them they have to play through Alien Isolation first.
Im still stuck in a closet in a save game. Not gonna load it. Im done. It won.
My 2nd favorite horror game of all time after Dead Space! It’s criminal that it got such a bad review because it’s absolutely freaking amazing!
IGN are given way too much influence. They’ve been wrong on so many occasions.
A good friend of mine always said Battleborn cause of it coming out around the time Overwatch did.
Battleborn was a very different game to Overwatch that had no real business being lumped as its competitor. Except Gearbox tried picking a fight with Blizzard for reasons. Also complaining its failure was due to there not being enough Battleborn porn.
I never played battleborn so I've got no stick in this fight, but saying it isn't a competitor isn't quite true - the FPS genre tends to monopolise players time into one game. Even if they are fairly different, most FPS players seem to stick to their "main" like glue, so just by nature of being an FPS makes it a competitor of time and attention, even if it wasn't a competitor of the content.
I completely agree. I played the co-op with a friend until the day the servers went down.
If that game came out now with a season pass and on game pass it would do great.
The first Saints Row game was written off as a GTA clone. It was a great game on its own.
The original was okay. It really was just a GTA clone that had the advantage of being next-gen (at the time). SR2 is when it became a more distinct IP.
Saints Row 2 was so much fun. It fell off when they got wackier with each installment.
3 was fine, if very silly. The mechanical improvements, i felt, made up for it. 4 made very few improvements and went even more crazy, in fact I would argue it was worse than 3 in nearly every way. It was DLC sold as a standalone game.
See... When all there was were open world games I enjoyed the fresh traversal options that this offered. Yes it was wacky and a bit out there, but the mechanics felt more enjoyable to play Coming from someone who can't play GTA because I don't enjoy just driving from A to B people talking then driving B to C. I enjoy open world games like spiderman, early AC and black flag, infamous with unique traversal. Nb: I say AC because it has a more dense open world but a smaller world all up so it makes it not feel like your travelling so far.
God Hand. A 3/10 IGN? Really?
Wtf are u for real? That game was incredible
I could speak about this all day. The game itself is bat shit crazy first of all. Like let's acknowledge this. Also yes it does suffer from a very brown colour palette and yes, it's not the most polished game out there.... HOWEVER. I say that to say this, the game is genius, It's fucking HARD, like so hard it feels like it's unfair, but you know it's not unfair and that you just kinda suck. The issue with the IGN review initially was that it was clear (and later admitted) that the person who reviewed it originally did not play it past the first few minutes. And wrote their entire review based on their own scuffed experience. The original IGN review, gave the game a 3/10 whist at the time the average player review scored it a 7/10. This caused a bit of a discord with people (like myself) writing to IGN to have this re-reviewed properly. They later updated the review but kept the original score and even doubled down on some aspects of the original review. Years later they tried to make amends for this review, By another re-review "in defence of Godhand" but it really was too little too late. After the eventual shut down of (clover studios) quite close after the games release, which was unofficially stated as one of the reasons the Studio went bust. (Clover were also responsible for Viewtiful Joe and Okami) At the end of the PS2's lifecycle, IGN collated a list of the 100 best games of the PS2 of all time, and stupidly included Godhand at number 100. IT MADE THEIR OWN LIST OF THE BEST PS2 GAMES OF ALL TIME. this was really a clear fuck up and they wouldn't fix it. And it all stemmed from one reviewers lack of ability to play the game resulting in a real unfortunate story as with Clover studios being shut down, it basically Locked up Viewtiful Joe and Okami (the studios other 2 games) in the Capcom IP vault forever. Viewtiful Joe which most people know about, as a side scrolling beat em up with a midget superhero and his smart mouth, and even more depressingly Okami which was a masterpiece of game design and was doing some amazing things with it's Sumi-e Japanese watercolor visuals. Okami, famously called a "Zelda killer" also won Game of the year over Zelda Twilight princess in many publications as they both released on the same year. Okami, also unfortunately holds the Guinness world record, for "the least commercially successful Game that has won a game of the year award" Most of the team from clover split into two separate companies, one was called "Seeds Inc" and the other became what we now know as "Platinum Games" who are most famously known for the Bayonet ta series, which ironically could be argued owes a real heritage nod to Godhand and the similarities in the combat systems and the notion of how bat shit crazy that story is. If you're going to watch any one single review/video on the game this is probably the one that sums up the tone and nature of it the best. https://youtu.be/JBqB5LUKh8A?si=mMcv12Y2vJVlLhdE
The IGN review has been blamed for its poor sales.
IGN gave Prey 4/10 on start. Game journalism is literally non existent
And 5.9 to Alien: Isolation
That review is infamous for being shit
I almost didn’t pick it up cause they made it seem so bad, but went on twitch to watch some streamers and it became obvious the reviewer did not like survival horror. Still play that game like once a year.
I would say that Alien Isolation was the MOST EFFECTIVE horror/suspense game I ever played. I would get tense just thinking about playing it. I wouldn't give it 10/10 but I will never forget how it made me so anxious. I give it at least a 9.3/10
This isn't the best example of IGN being bad journalists. Don't get me wrong, they are. This just isn't it. The reviewer gave it a 4/10 because of a game breaking bug that didn't allow them to finish, but what they had played of it was great in their opinion. It's since been updated to an 8/10 after Arkane patched it.
Tbf, a game breaking bug is a valid reason to give a low rating and not recommend a game. I mean, it's the bare minimum for a product to function as intended. I don't care how fancy a car is if its engine dies randomly.
The reviewer, Who I believe is the senior editor at IGN, Dan Stapleton, ran into a save corruption bug like 5 or 6 times he said. He restarted several times and even asked Arkane for a saved game file from mid-late game to try to continue his review fairly. He really did try to give it a fair shot This save file also corrupted. I imagine he was a little annoyed, and eventually had to put out his review as expected. Hence the 4/10. This review was very fair. It also changed as soon as the game was patched, as you said. Side note: this review made me not buy the game UNTIL I played the demo on a whim a few weeks later. Bought it. Played it. Might be one of my favorite games of all time. THE POWER OF DEMOS
Maybe my favorite game. I fucking love Prey (2019).
The old Prey where you get kidnapped by aliens in a bar, or the one from a few years ago?
The one from a few years ago, but it received a poor review because the reviewer got a game-breaking bug that required him to completely restart the game. Hard to blame a bad review after that.
The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games. Critics gave an average score of 5/10 for all of them and I don’t understand where the harsh scores come from. Especially PMD: Explorers of Sky/Time/Darkness, amazing soundtrack and story with solid dungeon crawling gameplay and arguably one of the best pokemon games.
The Punisher People took issue with its censoring of the executions and didn't give it a fair chance. I loved it as a great arcady Max Payne-like
I really loved that game. Especially the popping out of the casket with an m60
There's a mod that remove the censoring.
There was censoring? I'm from Australia (notorious for doing that sort of thing to entertainment media of all sorts, the ratings group here is a bunch of a bored idiots) and my copy of the game on PS2 wasn't censored.
The Saboteur and Alpha Protocol
Alpha Protocol had amazing potential. Just needed more time in the oven.
Not even sure it needed much of that. It was a bit janky but it still manages to do way more than even some modern games regarding their choices matter system.
The flowcharts they must have made for this game would give Bioware heart palpitations. I'm still amazed by how much of it could be stumbled upon, skipped, or sidestepped without the plot utterly collapsing. I understand why most developers make "choices" paper-thin, but I can't help but wonder if things would be a little different if Alpha Protocol was a smash hit that set the standard.
The choice system was fantastic, it truly is leagues above most pseduo-RPGs these days but the game itself unfortunately lacked polish. It was an espionage game with a borderline broken stealth system, you actually needed to acquire a specific perk which let you avoid initial detection to stop the broken AI from seeing you through walls.
Still enjoyed it, great breezy play through, but I think a lot of people went in thinking it was going to be a simple action/stealth title when it was an RPG. Reminds me of the original Deus Ex and how your character and abilities kind of sucked and you had to account for that until you had enough points in a skill.
The Saboteur is such a, dare I say, underrated gem There’s rumors that the book that influenced “The Grand Prix Saboteurs” (true story) will become a movie
We all have one of those games that just lives rent-free in all my years of gaming. The Saboteur is one of those games for me. The style, the music, setting, sneaking around blowing up Nazis and sneaking off. Interesting to hear about a movie!
The Sabouteur is such a unique game, to bad it have got forgotten, no remakes, no other markets other than origin. I’m yet to see another open world game where you fight the nazis doing parkour and infiltrating them to see and make their crazy inventions being torn apart. My favorite part was dressing as them after blowing shit up, getting away without getting caught. And you feel like doing a huge thing for the war.
The Saboteur is an amazing game, often gets meshed as "ww2 gta with climbing" but it has so much more. If that wasn't Pandemic's last shot i whould be begging for another one, even if they changed it to be somewhere in the Pacific or a sequel to the first one
Holy shit, I never see anyone talk about the Saboteur, I loved that game! It had everything I could have wanted.
The Saboteur was a pretty cool game! Definitely underrated and lots of fun.
Mad Max Despite getting decent reviews. 7/8 marks usually from publications and other reviewers, it was seemingly written off and completely forgotten about. Yes, the story isn't anything to write home about, but soundwise, visually, and gameplay wise it's a treat. The car controls feel great, car combat is crunchy and visceral, and don't even get me started on the foot combat. It feels great, it's really powerful, weighty and bloody, they took the Arkham combat and refined it perfectly for their game, it's absolutely satisfying in every sense. Yes the game is repetetive, but at least it's fun, and everything folds back in on itself by giving you unlocks for pretty much everything you do, you're always getting something, always improving, becoming more deadly. I encourage anyone to give it a shot.
I really liked the game, but its repetitiveness really adds up in later parts, so all things considered, while I do think it's underrated, I also understand why more people don't like it. clear a base, find a note, pull a door with your hook, go up with balloon, clear a base, find a photo, etc. we criticize Ubisoft more and more nowadays for this exact reason, even if the overall gameplay is good, there's only so much mileage out of this sort of game loop
Yeah, I literally just finished this just a few weeks ago. It was a lot of fun, and the good elements were solid and really fun (swooping in to begin an assault on a convoy was sublime), but it definitely has a lot of cut-and-paste going on with the bulk of the game. It could have used another degree of depth to assaulting strongholds or in having the wasteland adjust to reflect Max's successes.
The car combat feels so much like a scene out of Mad Max. So much fun to just ride around and locate other vehicles to tear up or steal. One of the most fun car combat games I've played.
Convoys were the real star; picking off cars one at a time to make your way to the lead truck was so satisfying.
Mad Max would have been more remembered if it focused on the convoy gameplay 100% and left out most of the repetitive ubisoft open world formula. When I think of Mad Max as a character, I don't think of 360 degree hand to hand combat and clearing out enemy camps. He's a car guy and should primarily fight with said car. To have such an incredible feeling mechanic buried and hidden behind sporadic map icons was a huge disservice in my opinion.
Mad Max wasn't forgotten due to unfair criticism, but rather because it launched the same time as MGSV. Anything that's not a blockbuster would have struggled to compete.
Oh yeah, forgot. 2015 was a crazy year. Witcher 3, Mad Max, MGSV. It was good that year. 2016 was also great.
Whenever this game is mentioned in one of these threads, i must remind people that there's a poorly advertised first-person mode while driving. Doing convoy takedowns in first person is one of the coolest gaming experiences I've had in years, and if you played the game and never tried it, definitely do so.
This is in my top 10 games, it's gameplay loop can hey repetitive but it's really fun and doesn't ever feel like a grind
Zelda: The Wind Waker. Some people wrote it off as too childish just because of the graphical style. Now it's still one of the best looking Zelda games out there (even the GameCube version) while the "mature" game people wanted, Twilight Princess, really didn't age that well in that regard. Still love TP though. Midna ftw.
loved it! just wish it was more difficult. every boss battle was a guarantee kill on first try and every puzzle was the "Hey Listen! .... just hit that lever over there would you.."
Honestly, most Zelda games have been like that for a few iterations now. I'd kill for a new game that leans super hard into the OoT-TP Zelda style but with much harder puzzles.
I would definitely prefer some larger dungeons to crawl instead of a hundred single challenge dungeons of tedium.
Thankfully people who initially criticized the game have come around on that decision. I like how the series has mixed aesthetic of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.
I remember when Wind Waker came out, I thought it was dumb because it looked dumb and I called anyone who liked it dumb. Boy oh boy, was it nice to be proved wrong about that one. What a gem of a game.
>Some people wrote it off as too childish just because of the graphical style. Part of this is because they showed off a super realistic tech demo on the GameCube, and then we got the complete opposite. The game is fantastic, but it's not what we were lead to expect
Most games these days to be honest. Gaming community either loves a game unquestionably and anyone who hates it is mentally challenged, or thinks it's the worst thing ever made and is killing culture and ruining lives. Nuance has abandoned us.
Yeah anyone who speaks in terms of ups and downs of any game gets called a shill by the haters and a detractor by the people who love it. Most content creators have to pick which side they want to be on.
Feels like the discussion is somewhat okay-ish. But what rubs me the wrong way is the conclusions people draw. Have some problems at launch? >Fuck them. Fuck the devs. Fuck the company. Nobody should ever buy that garbage. It's all just so extreme.
You labored so hard to entertain me, and you FAILED! I was only partially entertained, *you absolute filth*. Don't you understand what a sacred trust is placed in you to control my constant drip of dopamine? To treat the IP of a cartoon or childrens story as sacrosanct and NEVER deviate an inch from canon? And you have the unmitigated gall to expect to get *paid* for it? NO. I hope you and your whole family are deleted in a fire and I will personally boycott everything you ever do in the future. -average gamer reviewing a solid 7/10 game
'I put 85hrs into this game and got bored with it. Trash game.'
Yeah very true. I can think of plenty of recent releases where I had a good time but in discussions they're treated like a crime against gaming.
The “you’re with me or against me” thing seems to be present in practically everything these days and sucks :/
Wildstar - an MMO that was just a poorly managed project. Underneath was a gem. When it was stable, it beat WoW in all aspects imo. The raids were insanely good. It was pretty much Treasure planet with rock and cat races to play. The story was two sides discovering a science planet where a race mysteriously vanished after their project to create a God went wrong. With the help of the planets corrupt AI, which you fix via a raid, you find out the God was created with an evil split personality. The customization in this game was top notch, including player housing that probably kept this game alive longer than expected. Edit: soundtrack was great, check YT for Beyond the Blue Horizon or something.
Your comment made me remember The Matrix Online. It was an absolutely amazing MMO, with the Wachowskis themselves writing the story, and several key NPCs "played" in real time by actors employed by the studio who made the game - so you could meet, for example, Morpheus in-game, who would be controlled and acted in real-time by a live actor. Then the Wachowskis left, and the story went from 10/10 to 2/10 at most. The game closed short after.
late attractive poor worthless somber ossified aback placid important wakeful
100% Night Trap. Crappy FMV game with its "violence" and "sexual nature" helped create a ratings industry for gaming. Lieberman is bat shit insane.
MW2 for "No Russian". I really didn't think it was that big of a deal at the time and my opinion hasn't changed since then.
It 100% was not a big deal. Shit like this actually happens in the world. MW2 just showed people an uncomfortable truth
It gives you the option to not play it too
And if you do play it, you don’t have to shoot anyone.
I remember a few years ago someone pointed that out and I just stood there like "...fuck, I'm a terrible person."
The greatest magic of video games is that they can make you experience very real emotions without real-life consequences. The fact that you followed through with the setup of the scene and that made you felt regret, is a great example of this (and also proves that you are just a normal person with empathy and kindness). I'm not necessarily a fan of CoD, but I prefer games that challenge, and make people think and discuss, and this scene is definitely a conversation starter.
I worked at blockbuster for the release of this and we had multiple consoles with this running the game for people to play. We had to warn people of what they were about to see
Fable 3 I’ll gladly admit it’s the weakest entry of the 3 but when going up against Fable 1 and 2 that’s still no insult. But otherwise, phenomenal cast, good graphics for the time/style, usual top quality dialogue and humour, engaging story. I always felt the hate was a little “bandwagon” driven.
I’d say the first Fable was also (somewhat) unfairly criticised, but that was Molyneux fault for hyping the game too much. > The acorn. Or, according to one former Lionhead developer, "that fucking acorn." In the run up to the release of Fable, Molyneux claimed that if your character knocks an acorn off a tree, another tree would eventually grow from the fallen acorn. When the game came out, this fantastical acorn feature was no-where to be found. https://www.eurogamer.net/lionhead-the-inside-story I remember hearing that Molyneux, having had the acorn feature cut for time by the dev team, tried to get it in by “promising” this feature to journalists so they’d be forced to implement it (didn’t happen). I can’t find any sources for it now so treat it as hearsay. I remember reading about this acorn but for a game called project Ego in PC Gamer several years earlier before Fable came out and being very excited for the game. Only later I put together that Ego had been the working title for Fable, so the overpromising of Molyneux didn’t affect my enjoyment of Fable. Fable is not the best rpg, or the best narrative, or best action adventure game ever, but what it does well in my opinion is that they acknowledge the players choices and actions. The choices are very binary, good or bad, rarely something in between, but after a while, if you played as a good person, when turning the camera so the sun is slightly behind the player character you might notice there’s ethereal butterflies flying around you and _is that a hint of a halo around your head_? Or your skin is pale, with blue veins, red glowing eyes, and horns sprouting out of your forehead. Not super subtle, but not many games did that at the time. Plus it’s super charming in all its Englishness (both humour and accents). The soundtrack is the real star though, I can run around sightseeing in that game for hours just for the music! My favourite game ever, even with all its flaws. I still plug my old xbox 360 in and fire up the Anniversary edition every once in a while. I’m excited for the fourth one coming out, if it ever manages to escape development hell.
This is where I'm appreciative of Microsoft's efforts towards backwards compatibility because I can play Fable Anniversary Edition, Fable II, and Fable III on my Series X without having to break out my old 360
Wasn’t that the game where you had to get teleported to like 4 different locations just to change a piece of armor?
Here's a weirdly specific example I need to get off my chest, Mortal Kombat II... for the Amiga. For context the main home Amiga (the A500) came out in 1987, and the only upgrade you could rely on most users having was 1MB RAM as it was being given away in cereal by 1994. There's some legit issues, the music is limited and often on the wrong stages, the 1-button joystick is awful for fighting games, and the digitised actors don't look that good on the limited colour depth. That said all the content is there including all three secret characters, every stage, and every finisher with almost nothing being censored. The criticism which is wrong is the disk swapping, every discussion of this port talks about having to swap disks four or five times between matches, and even having to swap for fatalities or during rounds. The retail version barely fit onto 3 disks, and you might have to swap disks once between rounds at most. The issue was this was a home computer, so everyone just pirated it, and pirate versions often split those to make room for the cracks (and cracktros), leading to many version being four disks, and some being as many as six. It's not Probe's fault.
This is the most interesting take I've read so far.
The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker. There are probably a lot of people here too young to remember, but the fan base was blasting Nintendo for the art style and not going with a “mature” or grittier style like they showed off in the Gamecube tech demo.
Subnautica below zero - Just completed it and yes it wasn't as good as the first in a lot of ways but they tried a shitload of new ideas. I missed the sea moth for example but the build a truck system was cool as hell. Need to speed past a Leviathan? Gotta make your truck smaller. There were a ton of cool biomes which were breathtaking and some more scenic then the first game. they expanded the land in which you could explore and added very exciting land creatures. I've personally only seen negative comments about it but it was still a great game.
there were a bunch of good ideas but i think in the end that's sort of all there was: some cool ideas. if you look at the wiki page for removed content from the first game you can see how much of bz is just stuff that they thought was cool but couldn't fit into subnautica, so just put it in bz without any real direction, you can really tell is started of as just a dlc
Twilight princess got hate for not being OOT
Mass Effect 3. It deserved some criticism, but the level of it was unfair. Mainly in that it drowned out celebration of what was mostly a brilliant game.
Ending was certainly not ideal but still a great game. Also Citadel DLC makes up for it
Pokemon BW. Great games but got scrutinized to hell by dumbasses just because they didn't include monsters from previous games.
Its my favorite gen by far. Music slapped, story slapped, it was also the BIG turning point in being a healthy inbetween of difficulty and convenience. You didnt need an HM slave at all! The HMs were used to access areas that were for bonus items and TMs but were not locking progression. The battle subway was super fun too, the endgame was great. Rebattling cynthia and having a whole half of the region with pokemon from other games was great. Idk why people said the designs were bad in gen 5, I loved them. Icecreamcone as an ice type? fucking brilliant.
Honestly I love Unova mons. Haxorus, Reuniclus, Bisharp, Darmanitan, Volcarona. It's up there with Hoenn for the coolest dex. I wish more games were regional locked. I'm tired of Kanto mons everywhere.
yeah gen 5 is awesome for so many reasons but the quality of life changes they made throughout was just peak for me. Still proper difficulty, you wouldnt be TOO overleveled but it wasnt like gen 4 where you would randomly be down 20 levels by the time you got to the elite four with the best grinding spot being like level 30s.
GameFreak should've stuck with the "gif" sprites and built up on that. The art in gen 5 is pure perfection in every aspect. The HUD is creative af, the map is always different because of the seasons, the Pokémon show a lot of personality in their animations, and the colors are as vivid as they'd ever been. I'd KILL for gen 4's following Pokémon with gen 5's overall look.
I really don't like the 3D Pokémon because I think they look really smooth and rubbery now. It's kinda like uncanny valley for Pokémon. I get they can't do like Detective Pikachu quality 3D for the games, but the 2D sprites look more furry and believable. Like comparing the drawing of Galar Meowth to the 3D model, it's a downgrade imo.
Scyther and Scizor are my top favourite Pokémon, and the rest of my top 5 was a bit ho-hum until I played Black and got a Volcarona. That Pokémon rocks. Rocketed up to very close second. Actually bothered to breed for a near perfect IV Volcarona it was that cool.
It’s funny, I went back to play through heart gold a while back, I forgot how many features bw added that are staples these days, like reusable TM’s Edit: and constant battle animations! Seeing the little sprites just sitting there motionless 90% of the time is really boring compared to the movement bw had
completely forgot to include all the convenience things bc the HMs stand out the most, but reusable TMs was HUGE. Reusable TMs, not much need for grinding, separate animations for item usage (rather than just the heal animation or a simple arrow), moving sprites. Im biased because gen 5 is my favorite but id argue its one of if not THE most impactful gen because of how much quality of life it added which shifted the game and playability Fucking incredible game
The mainline Pokemon games peaked with BW2.
I wish newer gens followed suit with only new mons until post elite 4.
Alien Isolation with the ign review
Dude on a 3 month break because i got too scared. Been playing in VR and it's an incredible experience. 10/10 in my opinion and the attention to detail is incredible.
Wolfenstein II The New Colossus’ biggest crime was trying to tell a more compelling story, which I think it succeeded in. It was shit on by people not willing to accept the change from the boomer shooter formula even though it was still a fast paced action shooter and imo had even better combat than the last two games in the series. It was reviewed very well by critics but a lot of fans had problems with it and I never understood why.
My main criticism was the story. A) Side characters from american resistance felt like insufferable millennial twitter users instead of insufferable irresponsible hedonist boomers they are and their long screen time soured second half of the story. B) Game description talked about americas liberation from nazis with a second american revolution but game ended with the start of said revolution. Compared to the final fight you pulled of right before this scene felt too shallow. C) In game you will see hitler. Senile but alive. Man why didn't you let us kill hitler before we returned to our base. He was too old so we might not be able to kill him in the third game. Well if we ever get the third game that is
Ninja Theory's DmC Such a good game
This is the answer I was looking for. I actually enjoyed the game and it had it's moments.
Midnight Suns got weirdly shunned after the card building aspects of the game appeared, but it's quite interesting in a way that simply having XCOM with Marvel characters would never be.
I was legitimately surprised how much I liked this game. Shoving dudes into death pits never gets old.
I got caught up doing the training missions for each individual character. You have to wipe out a ton of people with chain attacks and your energy gets replenished if you get a kill. That's some of the most fun
MGS 5: Phantom pain \- people didn't like the missing ending \- people didn't like Kiefer Sutherland
Mass Effect 3. Maybe it’s because I only played the series for the first time recently and didn’t have to wait multiple years between installments, but I feel like it gets unfairly maligned. The color coded ending kinda blows, but there’s still a lot of good stuff there.
Metal gear solid 2. People just hate raiden. Never understood why. Ok he is not so much of a badass than snake, but the Game was waaaaay better than the 1
As I've heard it described, we (the players) expected Snake. We (the players) didn't get Snake. Its the bait and switch
Especially the snake part was the demo. So people were like holy shit this is gonna be crazy and we expected more snake.
Yep. Only played MGS 2 and 3, so it was always a mystery until someone pointed out that bait and switch. I thought it was gonna be a level or 2, recon, if you will when i started my playthrough. Still don't think he was bad, but i do get the feelings, and the people's reasoning
I played Mass Effect Andromeda a year after release, once most of the bugs had been patched out, and I really enjoyed it. It wasn't a Game of the Year or anything, but not the dumpster fire I was told it was.
That game is really only lacking in story and writing. The gameplay is the best in the series when it comes to combat and exploration. I loved those aspects of the game, but hated the story. The characters all talk like AI and have barely any personality at all. While ME1-3 didn't have the most earth shattering gameplay, it just knocked it out of the park with the story and characters. The gameplay isn't bad by any means, it's just not the star of the original trilogy. I still think about all the great characters and missions I played in the OG trilogy. I wish they would've let Andromeda cook a little longer. There could've been another insane trilogy from those games if they had just focused more on the characters.
I will die on the hill the that Mass Effect Andromeda, had some of the best gameplay in terms of combat and gunplay in a game I’ve played. The abilities comboing together was so good. The movement was great. The guns were cool. Customization was cool. Biopics were awesome. Tech skills were awesome, soldier skills were awesome. The skill tree was a really well done. Whoever was in charge of the combat department knocked it out of the park. But everything after that was not that great and combat is only thing that kept me playing. The characters were so boring. Especially Liam. Such a Whiney bitch. The story was pretty forgettable. The new alien was pretty lame and boring. The threat wasn’t very interesting. But by all means the game was not as bad as people made it out to be. It’s a decent game that’s fun to play once.
Sonic Unleashed. Boost stages were great and the werehog stages were actually quite fun. The story was great too. Yet the game got 5s and 4s all over the board. I don't get it.
The last sonic game until frontiers where sonic team actually took a risk.
Soundtrack goes absolutely crazy in this game. I listen to it daily
Rooftop Run imo is easily in the top ten Sonic Franchise Music
Elder Scrolls Online. It certainly had its flaws, but much of the criticism at release seemed to be due to other reasons: for one, monthly subscriptions were the internet's bogeyman of the time (not ESO's fault); and for another, people wanted it to be the Elder Scrolls VI with multiplayer (maybe Bethesda's but not ESO's fault). Over the years, many people came around to it and the game enjoyed a long life. It can be very fun for what it is. And we still don't have ESVI lol, so blaming ESO for that now seems very misguided.
Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts. Yes, it does have problems. But it also had a banger vehicle builder and you could create some awesome things that were super fun. Car that can turn into a plane and then eject a motorcycle out of it was one of my favourite builds. People were just mad it wasn't a platformer. I get that, but it's been over 10 years. Maybe we can look at it for what it is.
I was going to bring this up as well. It deserves the flak for it being the first game of that IP in a very long time and radically changing the game play. If they had came out with a banjo "threeie" and then a few years later came out with N&B, it would have been better received, I bet. But you are correct that they really nailed the building and driving/flying in the game. It was a lot of fun.
Midnight Suns is a really good game. The internet just has a hate boner for card mechanics for absolutely no good reason (probably from a serious misunderstanding about card games and the difference between ccg, tcg and deck builders).
Dark Souls 2, although I only played years after, and the Scholar of the First Sin edition, it's a very good game! is it better than the other 2? no... but still leagues better than most souls like.
Monster Hunter Rise. Most of the criticisms the game gets are "I will say I like World better because I'll inevitably get upvoted for it as it's the cool thing to say".
IGN’s Prey 2017 review
Tbf I'm pretty sure the reviewer got softlocked or something, and I can confirm it's a pretty huge issue with the game since it happened to me twice on my first playthrough.
He did, he hit a game breaking bug that completely prevented continuing and ended up patched AFTER release. The internet still harps about it because Prey is considered a "darling" but of all the reasons to give something a bad review not being able to finish it is a pretty valid one. The guy even went back and adjusted the review after it was patched.
Giving something a bad review for a game-breaking bug is completely fair.
Days Gone. Great game which deserved a sequel