henke on 2/12/2015 at 06:58
Alright kids, amateur hour is OVER. TIME TO TALK ABOUT SOME SHITTY GAMES!
Quote Posted by Muzman
Mirror's Edge is arguably one of these.
Mirror's Edge which has a metacritic score of 81, sold well enough to warrant a sequel, and which everyone loves? Get out of here Muz.
Quote Posted by faetal
are we really letting it slide that Henke really liked AC3?
Pffft, too easy. For series like AC and COD, if you only listened to what people on the internet have to say about them, you'd think they were terrible games that everyone hated and noone bought, rather than the blockbuster sequel-a-year franchises that they are. They are clearly very well crafted games, so it's no BIG WHOOP to say you like them.
Ok, here are some properly maligned games I like(nothing with a metascore over 65, and no cult classics either, so no Deadly Premonition)
Betrayer - actually this one might have achieved some amount of cult following by now, dunno, haven't checked. The artstyle and ambiance is unique and great enough that I wouldn't be surprised if it has. Anyway, played through this last summer and greatly enjoyed it, even though I'll agree that the combat is simplistic and it's quite repetetive.
Crash Time 2&3 - rightly derided for it's terrrrrible writing and terrrrrible mission design(in CT3 roughly a third of the missions is racing the same track over and over), BUT the driving model is fun, and the open world is great. Very fun to see an open world driving game set in Europe for once as well.
The Getaway: Black Monday - Speaking of driving around European cities, I had so much fun just cruising the streets of London in this much-maligned PS2 game. The story and on-foot gameplay was fun too!
Driv3r - The story and on-foot gameplay was crap. As was the performance. BUT the slidey driving model was as much fun as in Driver 1, and the soundtrack was BANGIN! Coming out in 2004/2005, it couldn't help but compare unfavourably to GTA:SA (which was much better, no argument), but Driv3r
did have better vehicle physics. That's a fact. Don't argue with me on this because I'm right.
Hydophobia: Prophecy - This one maybe didn't have much more than the fluid physics going for it. The shooting and the story are fairly middle of the road. I enjoyed it enough to finish it anyway.
Kung Fu Strike - I don't know how this only has 63 on metacritic. Really solid, challenging and fun beat em up.
Lost Planet 3 - I've banged on about this one enough, but I guess I'll bang on about it some more! Yes, the combat is weak, and the checkpointing is dreadful. But I love the characters, and I love the
working man ambiance I guess you might call it? The opening sections of the game is basically Ice Road Truckers on a hostile alien planet.
Stolen - yeah this was pretty awful, but I'm a sucker for stealth games. The laser-grid sections and some of the hacking bits were good tho.
Velvet Assassin - what I said about Stolen, and what Judith said.
Zombie Driver - just like Kung Fu Strike, I can't believe this one had such a low metascore(60!) Just like KFS it's a small game that only does one thing, but does it really well.
demagogue on 2/12/2015 at 09:07
When I was a kid I thought E.T. on the Atari was a fun enough game, and it wasn't until I got older I heard it was apparently universally hated, which always struck me as odd because ... I mean, we're talking about games that are smaller than 4kb. How can somebody seriously get worked up about a game under 4kb being "bad" with a straight face? Some Facebook posts are longer than that.
From the C64 era, I loved all sorts of obscure games, too many to remember just now. Shogun is the one that comes to mind that regularly gets called out for awful and incomprehensible gameplay, but I really like it... Maybe because I had the patience to really understand what it was doing. (The gameplay is about gaining followers among AI, so it's "social" gameplay, way before The Sims made that a thing, and even the Sims didn't gamify it like Shogun did. So IMO it's still ahead of the curve.)
But more recently, if the Stalker games and Mirror's Edge are seriously maligned, then they'd be at the top of my list since they're some of my favorite games. I've heard people rail against Hardwar and it's another of my favorites. And I like games that are technically good, but a lot of people toss out for being really complex, like Dwarf Fortress, X3, and Victoria 2.
But speaking of indisputably maligned games, I like my share of charming lemons too like Farm Sim and Big Rigs.
Malf on 2/12/2015 at 09:09
You know what?
Trespasser.
Yes, the engine really doesn't scale well and is almost impossible to get looking remotely not like hammered shit.
Yes, the controls are some sort of nightmare contortionist vision of hell.
But there's something in there so brave, so forward-thinking, and the technologies it tried to use were insanely ahead of their time.
Everyone goes on about the physics, the hand and the boob-health-meter, but whenever I remember Trespasser, I always remember that procedural animation system. Yes, it often resulted in the dinosaurs moving in a bizzare floaty jig, but just seeing the system work and adjust to the terrain was incredible.
Malf on 2/12/2015 at 09:14
Quote Posted by henke
Kung Fu Strike - I don't know how this only has 63 on metacritic. Really solid, challenging and fun beat em up.
Wait, King Fu Strike only has a 63?
WTF?
That game's INSANELY good. Granted, it also gets so ridiculously hard I have to put it down to stop from giving myself an aneurysm, but the way it promotes repeating earlier levels by constantly teaching you new techniques is fantastic. I think I bought it after TB gave it a surprisingly glowing review, and I definitely wasn't disappointed. Even though I've never completed it, I got more than my money's worth from it.
twisty on 2/12/2015 at 10:00
Thief 4 definitely. While it had some issues, mostly as a result of straying completely off canon, it was superior in gameplay to TDS and one of the best sneakers over the past 5 or so years.
The Temple of Elemental Evil was also pretty awesome in its own way, although the criticisms leveled against it are fully justified. I replayed this for a number of years though with the various c08 patches on the merits of its detailed and reactive combat system.
Ultima 8 and 9 were also pretty good in their own way despite their respective significant shortcomings.
And I'm not sure if Fallout 3 is maligned ( it seems to be from what I've read of many other people here) but I got over 100 hours of gaming out of it so I can't complain. Loved it actually.
WingedKagouti on 2/12/2015 at 10:13
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
And Colonial Marines. The game that gave exactly what it's title said. I think everybody bitched about it because it wasn't Alien. It wasn't supposed to be Alien, it was supposed to be Aliens. Aliens... the antithesis to Scotts original that for some dumb reason everybody acclaims while they shit on Alien 3. Well it delivered. ... and it sucked.. but I liked it.
As I understand it people were shitting on A:CM for a few reasons, none of which were due to it being closer to Aliens than Alien.
1: It was buggy as shit on launch. Buggy enough that people frequently ran into situations where they simply could not progress and had to restart from a checkpoint.
2: The limited gameplay demos they presented at expos were not representative of the final product.
3: Half the time was spent fighting humans instead of aliens.
Quote Posted by Malf
Wait, King Fu Strike only has a 63?
WTF?
That game's INSANELY good.
My reaction as well.
icemann on 2/12/2015 at 13:52
Quote Posted by twisty
Ultima 8 and 9 were also pretty good in their own way despite their respective significant shortcomings.
Count me in for Ultima 8. I can still recite the intro to that, to this day :). A game MUCH improved with patching.
Ultima 9 I HATED. It just seemed like such a drop in quality from Ultima 8. And yes I know people think the same of U8 when compared to 7.
Since when was the Stalker games disliked universally? I've heard nothing but love for them (much more for the first game) internet wide. Next to Far Cry 2, it had some of the best weather effects I've seen in a FPS game. Need to beat that game (Stalker 1) at some point.
Thirith on 2/12/2015 at 13:58
For me, Ultima 8 (after patching) holds up as a spin-off; as a main series Ultima I still find it disappointing, because it kept few if any of what I consider the core Ultima strengths.
Stalker, as well as Far Cry 2 and Mirror's Edge, I'd call a "Marmite game". You love it or you hate it. I can't fault people who dislike the Stalker games, but for me it's one of the medium's true diamonds in the rough, lacking polish but doing something unique (well, doing that unique thing three times over). I'd absolutely love a current-gen Stalker game that does the same things in terms of design but updates the engine to allow for more details, better lighting etc.
faetal on 2/12/2015 at 19:27
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Gunman Chronicles, a game that started out as a fan-made total conversion of
Half-Life. It's cheesy as hell, but it's
intentionally cheesy as hell, and the variety of weapons, enemies, and levels is pretty amazing. Great sound design and in-engine cinematics too.
I loved that game. Was it really maligned?
Jason Moyer on 3/12/2015 at 00:06
It's kind of ridiculous that Gunman Chronicles has never turned up on Steam.
