30 Days of Gaming

[patiirc]

I don't know where you are getting these ideas from at all. The problems in Mario 64 are widely acknowledged, and were at the time. They weren't ignored because of some massive pro-Miyamoto/Nintendo conspiracy that you seem to believe existed. For the vast majority of people who have played and reviewed it they simply felt, like I did, that the occasional camera and control problems were not insurmountable and that its plus points vastly outweighed them.

 

It's not a conspiracy of silence, pat, and it's absurd that you should suggest that it is. What it actually happens to be is that you don't like the game and don't feel that you can play it because of the faults we have both talked about (which I'm perfectly fine with), but you are in a very small minority and actually cannot seem to understand nor accept the fact that people could actually love the game despite its flaws. Therefore it has to be something dodgy? Nonsense.

 

 

I don't think it is a conspiracy of silence, I think wires have been crossed somewhere. I cant for the life of me see why, in many peoples eyes it is beyond criticism. This stretches across many swathes of the internet and when discussing its pros and cons in person. To me, it is one of those games that is seemingly beyond reproach, by many people ( and in gaming lore whether percieved or actual), purely of who it is by and what system it is for. There is a lot of bandwagon jumping for it, and Ive seen people who hate it and I mean really fucking think its the drizzling shits play though to be a part of the magic, or at least be able to be a part of the 'revolution' and then lie about loving it to not be sneered at by peers or wider social circles (and no it wasnt me) and because of that and because its so well loved and liked it makes having to defend not liking it a right royal pain in the arse,

 

That is not to deny that others think it is excellent and amongst the best games of all times and I've stated as much in my posts above. As with Goldeneye critiques, the view he'd is so against the grain that there has to be some sort of defence mode, and in many cases, see I dunno, Retro Gamer, because SM64 is so well loved that its a case of going on the defensive, because every single time people will 'look at you funny' because you dont like, or agree with the assessment that it is the greatest or whatever.

 

It may come across as some kind of crack pot theory, its not meant to be, it's just that I'm sick of having to justify it every time that it comes up, because opinion is so largely polarised about it. 'How can you think that is overrated?' 'How can you like a game, with so many obvious flaws?' and so on.

 

Just saying like

[Burchill's Buddy]

Most Overrated game

 

Has to be Halo for me, I know there are a lot of people on here who love it, but I just didn't get it. Fans always talk about how pure or perfect it is, but for me it just seems painfully generic. I can't remember which FPS I was playing at the time, possibly Battlefield 2 on the PC, but whichever it was I remember playing Halo with some real hardcore fans and just not understanding what the fuss was about in comparison to it.

[Loki]

Halo WAS revolutionary though. Let's look at what they brought in

 

Twin weapon slots, and the idea of weapon balancing.

Recharging health

Vehicles (including flying ones!)

Proper enemy squad AI

The now ubiquitous Halo control pad configuration

 

The reason you might have thought it generic, up against Battlefield 2, is that Battlefield 2 stole all those ideas from Halo (it came out 4 years later!) The day after Halo was released, every FPS design team in the business went back to the drawing board and started to deconstruct Halo, trust me.

[Chest Rockwell]

Until Halo I never thought I'd be able to play an FPS on console; the controls were so shitty compared to playing them on PC.

[BigJag]

Most Overrated Game

 

StreetFighter 2 or what bloody ever.

 

Never understood why people liked this game. I am rubbish at it. One of the most incredulous things for me about it was Akuma's super special move. Which was a load of Chinese/Japanese text flying out of the screen. This was apparently amazing because it did loads of damage! Except you can't see anything.

Much preferred the Tekken series. Even though I was quite rubbish at that too.

 

Have never understood the attraction of games such as GTA or COD either.

[thejeffjarrettone]

Overrated? Call Of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2. Absolute crap. The plot is paper-thin, the dialogue is straight from a crappy 80s action film, the action highspots are stymied and convoluted, and don't worry about using any actual skill, because you can just turn on auto-lock on and just keep on pulling Left Trigger to find those minimally-intelligent AI bad-guys. -5 *s

[Lawz]

I have to say that the Modern Warfare series/Call of Duty's are the most overated garbage I've ever seen. I've never enjoyed the gameplay and it just seems like the only reason it sells so much is because of the media and marketing campaigns they put together brilliantly rather then the actual game.

[Bus Surfer]

Well I wouldn't of thunk there were other COD haters here.

 

 

Absolute tosh.

[darepool]

I would go with COD : Black Ops. Fastest selling game ever which does absolutely nothing new and nothing incredibly well. Same old formula with a poor single player. It also gets my heat for releasing map packs that you have to pay for despite the game being so bloody expensive to begin with.

[The Gaffer]

 

This game makes me so angry, though I suspect it's repressed rage about the whole series. People often talk about the first MGS being a game changer, and at the time it looked like it would be. But what pissed me off was that, having created so much innovative gameplay in that first game, the team then preceded to go off on their own entirely separate little road of game design whilst the rest of the world took what they had come up with, and ran with it to create amazing new games.

 

The games got progressively weirder, more awkward and repetitive and less playable, culminating with MGS4 which was an utter abomination of a videogame, the apex of self-indulgent artistic expression with absolutely no compromise on playability or appealing to the wider public. Of course, the fanboys liked it, but fanboys like everything without critical consideration. For me, it just seemed like the dead end of a long, dark road through the woods. Videogames should be expansive, not on rails. They should be interactive, not sitting there watching huge cutscenes. We've now had 26 releases of the Metal Gear franchise since the original MGS. Please, no more.

I'll have to contest that. Personal opinions aside there is nothing abominable about appealing to your massive, multi million strong niche audience by continuing to make the type of games you want to make, telling the type of story you want to tell. It also annoys me that this myth now prevails that MGS has little or no gameplay worth talking about. That's bollocks. There is plenty of highly entertaining, quirky gameplay intersped throughout hours and hours and hours of cutscenes. That's not to most peoples tastes and that's fine but Kojima knows his audience. An abomination would be making MGS does Splinter Cell and pissing off five million or so people to appeal to what could well turn out to be an even smaller audience. MGS is a different animal.

 

It's pretentious as fuck - without a doubt - but most of anything that claims to be in any way 'deep', thematic or reflective on philosophical themes these days get's lambasted for being pretentious. If it had a more straightfoward story I would be dissapointed. So would most other people. And it's really not that hard to understand at all provided you have played the past games in the series.

 

And no, that's not a dark mark against it either. Plenty of films and books work that way. I'm betting Snake Eater - the lowest selling game of the main series at about 4m copies - has still sold more than these wonderful titles that took the original games ball and ran with it. It's a formula that works and each successive title has added more than enough worthwhile tweaks to the series to make it worthwhile.

[Chest Rockwell]

Overrated? Call Of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2. Absolute crap. The plot is paper-thin, the dialogue is straight from a crappy 80s action film, the action highspots are stymied and convoluted, and don't worry about using any actual skill, because you can just turn on auto-lock on and just keep on pulling Left Trigger to find those minimally-intelligent AI bad-guys. -5 *s

 

You can't really group the two. COD4 had a great story, paced really well. MW2 was just a series of absurd action sequences, with no reason to care about the characters.

 

Also, your complaint about auto-lock is just dumb. You can't put a game on beginner retard trial mode and then complain it's too easy.

 

COD4 had a good story and a superior online experience to anything else around. It was fantastic.

 

I could get down with the argument that the next two COD games are over-rated - I don't think they would have done half as well if Modern Warfare hadn't made the franchise so popular by being brilliant (although Nazi Zombies was a lot of fun).

[thejeffjarrettone]

"Rockwell In Disagreeing With TJJO Shocker. Now, Sports."

[Loki]

 

This game makes me so angry, though I suspect it's repressed rage about the whole series. People often talk about the first MGS being a game changer, and at the time it looked like it would be. But what pissed me off was that, having created so much innovative gameplay in that first game, the team then preceded to go off on their own entirely separate little road of game design whilst the rest of the world took what they had come up with, and ran with it to create amazing new games.

 

The games got progressively weirder, more awkward and repetitive and less playable, culminating with MGS4 which was an utter abomination of a videogame, the apex of self-indulgent artistic expression with absolutely no compromise on playability or appealing to the wider public. Of course, the fanboys liked it, but fanboys like everything without critical consideration. For me, it just seemed like the dead end of a long, dark road through the woods. Videogames should be expansive, not on rails. They should be interactive, not sitting there watching huge cutscenes. We've now had 26 releases of the Metal Gear franchise since the original MGS. Please, no more.

I'll have to contest that. Personal opinions aside there is nothing abominable about appealing to your massive, multi million strong niche audience by continuing to make the type of games you want to make, telling the type of story you want to tell. It also annoys me that this myth now prevails that MGS has little or no gameplay worth talking about. That's bollocks. There is plenty of highly entertaining, quirky gameplay intersped throughout hours and hours and hours of cutscenes. That's not to most peoples tastes and that's fine but Kojima knows his audience. An abomination would be making MGS does Splinter Cell and pissing off five million or so people to appeal to what could well turn out to be an even smaller audience. MGS is a different animal.

 

It's pretentious as fuck - without a doubt - but most of anything that claims to be in any way 'deep', thematic or reflective on philosophical themes these days get's lambasted for being pretentious. If it had a more straightfoward story I would be dissapointed. So would most other people. And it's really not that hard to understand at all provided you have played the past games in the series.

 

And no, that's not a dark mark against it either. Plenty of films and books work that way. I'm betting Snake Eater - the lowest selling game of the main series at about 4m copies - has still sold more than these wonderful titles that took the original games ball and ran with it. It's a formula that works and each successive title has added more than enough worthwhile tweaks to the series to make it worthwhile.

 

We're talking overrated here. The gulf between what its fans perceive it to be, and what it is in reality, makes it one of the most overrated games ever. I think, as I said, I just found the whole series from MGS1 on an escalating disappointment. Personal opinion, of course. I think it's mystique was fed by the massive hype for the PS3, which itself was something of a disappointment.

[Burchill's Buddy]

Halo WAS revolutionary though. Let's look at what they brought in

 

Twin weapon slots, and the idea of weapon balancing.

Recharging health

Vehicles (including flying ones!)

Proper enemy squad AI

The now ubiquitous Halo control pad configuration

 

Halo brought in vehicles? are you just talking in terms of console based multiplayer first person shooters? Because I'm fairly certain Tribes had vehicles and that was out about 3 years before Halo. Possibly Operation Flashpoint too although I think that was around the same time as Halo, going back further there was a Terminator FPS game on DOS that had a tank you could use, that must have been about 1990 / 1991.

[Loki]

You may be right on that one, I do remember Tribes being fricking awesome. Was that part of a single-player campaign though, and did all your AI buddies jump in? I certainly don't remember it being as integral to a game as it was in Halo.

 

Obviously vehicles have been around a while, I seem to remember 3-D Tank has a tank in back in the 80s