f13.net

I've been thinking of a variant of this thread for a while.  The core concept is one that is also core to the F13 Experience: that game you love is actually a piece of shit.  This thread is a place for us to enlighten each other on how wrong we were or are about The Universe.

I'll start.

Ultima.  Holy fuck this series.  They use the same goddamned map every time.  Same characters.  Each one is like Dragonball with a new antagonist.  Always with the shit that you have to have played previous games to get.  That fucking mouse in the castle?  Sorry Garriott, I didn't play your earlier turd and I don't have any idea what sort of self-referential "thing" you are trying to pull.  Also: that's not really you in the game, Richard.

If you like Ultima then you're wrong.

I love Red Steel and I KNOW it's a piece of shit. But then everyone would agree with me, I'm sure. That's probably not the intention of this thread.

Baldur's Gate? I do love it, but holy shit is it a cockpunch for the first 20 hours or so. Death, reload. Death, ressurect. Archers ungodly. Story kind of sits there waiting for me to trip over it without really pushing me towards it. All the quality of life things I'm used to in modern RPG's just isn't there for me which I can kind of forgive based on the time it came out. But then, it uses AD&D which really is a shitty shit system despite my fondness for it because it was my first.

Final Fantasy 6.

Best story/graphic style/music/etc of the 8-16 bit eras.

Buggy as shit and literally the easiest FF title in the entire series. You can't lose at this game unless you try. Simply bothering to pick up 3 groups worth of people for Kefka's tower in the world of ruin nets you enough gear to pretty much autoattack everything to death.

Homeworld was a stinking pile of crap that's lved because you had far more time than sense and it was innovative by adding a 3rd dimension to stale RTS mechanics.   Too bad it was hampered by a terrible 3-d interface & poor unit controls.

"Carry Forward your fleet" means "You're fucked if you barely survived the last level! Go back and replay it again! But since there were no resources to build you have to go back 3-4 levels and play from there, enjoy!"

Fuck that game.

Don't you mean Homeworld?

Final Fantasy XI. It was my first MMORPG that I loved before I knew what the hell I was doing. It had story, graphics, epic questlines, bad ass epic armors+quests for it, and a punch in the balls grind that looking back on it now... just no. Couple that with the absolute shit UI controls and no jumping?

But it still resides on my "love this game" shelf.

Or you super cheat with an auto-attack controller and do the river loop farm near the start of the game.  Let it run over night, and play the entire game at lvl 99  :awesome_for_real:

Again, it's the easiest game in the series so you don't even really need to do that. The Lete river is the only spot in the game I think where you can honestly get stuck, because if you're underleveled from running from nearly every battle Banon can get one-shotted which is a game over.

Also technically that'll gimp you endgame, because you won't be able to get level up stat increases from your espers.

edit: to give you an idea of how much I loved this game- I forget what the birthdays of my parents and brother are. I will NEVER forget the time you put into the clock in Zozo to get the chainsaw however.

6:10:50 if you're curious.

Dune 2. The greatest RTS of all time? I loved playing this game. Then I played the web version of it and realised how much it FUCKING SUCKS to have to select every. single. unit. individually. to move it.

 

I Disagree.

The mother of all cockpunches that gave birth to entire communities that last in their diasporas to this day: Everquest

My wife is still playing that. She's leading a guild.  :ye_gods:

That cannot be. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY-03vYYAjA&noredirect=1)

Star Wars Galaxies.  My first real MMO.  So much right.  So much potential.  So much so very wrong.

No wonder she never posts.  She needs to move to a somewhat modern game so she has an ounce of free time. :-P

Just last night I was playing skyrim and using some wall walking techniques to get up a mountain without going around and thought to myself "huh, I guess everquest did teach me something"

Final Fantasy X.

Everyone says it was the last good FF game and bemoans how XIII is shit; if you liked fucking FFX you are why XIII is bad. FFX introduced fully voiced cutscenes, pretty graphics, and linear as fuck gameplay; the very definition of the "style over substence" that FF has become. Instead of actually being able to fly around exploring in your airship, it's a glorified fast travel menu. The actual in-game areas are tiny narrow hallways with only a few branches, and again there's no overworld map with cool shit to find. The final boss is a MUCH EASIER recycle of a side-boss from 6, except you don't even need to figure the reflect trick out if you've got someone's ultimate weapon because that just one-shots him. And while FFVI was easy if you used the Vanish/Doom trick, in X with Hastega/Quick Hit you could attack ~5 times in between every enemy attack. The story was fucking silly, and the costume design was terrible. And the icing on the cake is that this awful game was so "well loved" that they further ruined the series with a shitty sequel, opening the door for future shitty sequels. Fuck this game.

Deus-ex.

Boring levels, ugly texture. Oh boy, you can either walk in the front door of the square-shaped empty room with 2 people standing in the middle of it, or crawl in the super obvious vent on the side. That's branching gameplay!

Hacking into people's computers and reading files was neat, but modern games do it with an in-game encylopedia. It was just another thinly-veiled way of giving you exposition. Plus, everyone is standing right next to you while you do it. Oookay!

Deus Ex only holds up for me since I just try to do increasingly weird things with it every time I reinstall it. Messing with the AI, glitching the game out, getting to places I shouldn't by using LAMs as platforms, etc.

I don't think I could play it seriously anymore.

This is about games you LIKE which are honestly bad games.

Also Metal Gear Solid. It holds up really poorly.

oooof course I do. That's why I said it.  :why_so_serious: :grin:

So, my favorite three games ever are/were Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, and Grim Fandango.  I've played them all in the last six months, after not playing them for 5+ years, and I would say that Deus Ex holds up great.  PS:T holds up better than great.  And Grim Fandango...

Fuck.

The controls are so fucking bad that the game is almost goddamn unplayable.  If it had released on console everyone would have been screaming consolitis for the cause of it's problems, but it has no good excuse.  The puzzles are more on the ridiculous side than I remembered, and to be perfectly honest even the characters and plot aren't that great (where I remember them being amazing).  It does still have an incredible soundtrack and exudes atmosphere and charm like no other game (well, like no other games except for Tim Schafer games).

I really liked the first Everquest all those years ago.  It took other, better MMOs for me to see how terrible it really was.  I can not believe I ever put up with idiocy like xp loss, corpse runs, needing a group to go anywhere, fizzles, bosses and raids shared with everyone on the server, hour plus travel times, quests so badly done it was just assumed you would look up where to go, no auction house and so on.

I just can not understand how I liked it at the time and didn't quit right away.  So many hours grinding at camps.

All of the MMOs.

I can't believe I still love EQ, but I do.  There's nothing like spending a lazy sunday chilling out in unrest.  It's just so...less busy than modern MMO's.  I love it.  Project 99 makes me so happy.  I think the reason I enjoy it is because I turn my achiever mode totally off when I play, and really don't give a flying fuck about leveling up.  Otherwise, of course, it would be crazy frustrating.

PS:T is pretty fantastic (love the writing and the setting especially), but it is still a product of its times.  It does a lot better quest logging / journaling than many earlier games, but I still run into the occasional "wait I just went and talked to every goddamn NPC again and I'm still stuck, oh I missed this one in this one building over here" situation.  Also the party AI isn't, and fighting groups of medium-high power critters requires some pretty cheesy techniques.  Still loving the experience, but there's plenty that could be improved.

I highly recommend putting the combat difficulty on one of the two lower settings.  It makes combat go from tedious and frustrating, to interludes of fairly fun and easy blowing things up that chop up the story.  As far as I'm concerned, the game wasn't meant to be played on normal difficulty.

Nier.  It's one of my favorite games ever made, but it really isn't a good game.  The lack of direction is almost what makes the game so likable to me.  The world though, the world of Nier is utter awesome.  It's not even post-apoc; it's post-apoc of a place we've never seen.  

MMOs: UO and SWG. Still the two most immersive MMOs ever released, with the greatest amount of people who were willing to "live another life" and forget about any game mechanics...With all the hellish consequences it brought :D

Single player games: ugh, tough call. I would say:

Ultima 8: I loved the story and the world; after UW2 (which, on the other hand, is faultless, and that's not IMO  :why_so_serious:), it's the Ultima game which immersed me the most. But you know the rest of the story: tragic jump puzzles before the patch, abysmal claustrophobic environments, disgraceful combat etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. ;

Gabriel Knight 3 - my favourite adventure game ever...With the worst UI ever conceived by a human mind for an adventure game ;

Captain Blood (Atari ST, 1988): because I  wasted spent hours as a child having incredible fun destroying worlds, landing on them, and clicking randomly on those still incomprehensible speech icons without never advancing a inch with the story :P

Is it really fair to be criticizing games that look like shit NOW, in retrospect, due to evolution of the genre, etc?

I thought the point was to point out games that you loved...even though they were actually shit at the time they were released.


If I had to pick a game off the top of my head, I'd pick EA's Earth & Beyond. It was a pretty bad MMO, and only lasted for two years...but for whatever reason, I liked it for at least a few months.

World War 2 Online.

Horrendous in beta, horrendous on release, still alive today with extremely mediocre graphics and a very unfriendly skill level for noobies.

Still love it, even though I haven't played it full time in 3 years  I will defend to the death (TO THE DEATH!) its place as one of the most unique games ever to be released. A game that has not been replicated and while other games may be prettier and easier to play (looking at you Planetside 2) they still don't reach the truely epic feel and downright hardness that ww2ol presented us with.


Also various Star Trek MUSH/Mux. Literally 99% of the time was sitting around Out of Character chatting, simming, or idling but when shit went down there was nothing as immersive and tense. And fuck it was text!

Your concept of "buggy" is flawed. As far as game balance goes, it's kind of a train wreck. But bugwise, it's a pretty clean game given the scope.

I'm going to be the first person to come in here and flat out say: This thread is weird.

I don't love shitty games. Deus Ex is not a shitty game. It's old and from an era where QA was questionable, but if you just play through the game and don't fuck with things, the chance of a bug appearing is super low. Same with System Shock. I am not willing to fault a game for the era its from and when I think of shitty games on a design or tech level, I can't actually think of a game I love that is shitty in either one of those respects.

Edit: That out of the way, this thread is full of shitty games people should NOT love. Nostalgia is not a reason to love a thing. I don't sit around and say "Man, I fucking love Klax or Final Fantasy 1." No, I was a child that had bad taste in games and they are both wretched pieces of shit. Influence on other games does not raise the quality of a game for me. I do not love A Link to the Past more because Demon's Souls was such a massive success. I love Demon's Souls because it's fucking perfect and better than any game of its type before it. No one today should be saying "Yea! I love Ultima!" Saying that makes me think you missed puberty or something.

Edit 2: The obvious comeback for anything I say is SW:G. I'd like to go on the record and say that I never loved SW:G itself. It was a fucking train wreck and I played it in spite of itself because of the people I was playing with. Game is an awful hog and would not even fit in the top 1,000 games I've played. I certainly am willing to struggle in something to play with a good group of people though. It's why I've played Arkham Horror multiple times. What a terrible game.

Man, lots of heresy in this thread.  Some valid points on things, but overall I'm going to have to agree with Schild.  Oddly misplaced hate here in an out of context way (especially for Homeworld.  I'm just going to have to assume your a blind deranged idiot pedophile for not liking that  :why_so_serious:).  I think some people miss the purpose of the thread, though its really vague and asking for exploitation to begin with.

Having said that, fuck Schild for dissing Final Fantasy 1.  I can STILL play that and enjoy it.  I god damned love that game and all its cock punching.  One of my favorite NES games ever, and still holds up!  YEARGGGHH!!!!

Edit:  I was soooo tempted to troll this thread with a Demon Souls post.

Ff13.

It is objectively a bad game. I know its a bad game. I have completed it twice.

I honestly don't get why I find the battle system so compelling, but on some odd level it clearly satisfies some unholy desires I have because it is not a good game.

I think it's more the realization that a lot of the love for games is despite their failings, not that they're perfect.  And the people who play the games are generally the ones most acquainted with their flaws, but they don't want to talk about them because it's "heresy" to point out bad things for a game you're supposed to like.  So conversations about them tend to devolve into either "this game is great and flawless" or "this game is shit" positions.

For me, the most obvious recent example is probably Brink... I dunno, I just love that game.  But it's not exactly hard to see why it tanked.  "We're going to be merging single player storylines seamlessly with multiplayer gameplay" said the developer, meaning of course there's a ten second cutscene before each map with characters randomly chosen from either team's players in place of any actual characterization or plot.  "The big innovation will be our SMART system, which allows for intense acrobatic aerial maneuvers" said the developer, neglecting to mention that 2/3 of the characters can't actually use most of it, or that none of the maps are really designed to take advantage of it much aside from occasionally sliding over or under obstacles.  And there were other weird problems with class balance and weapon balance but probably the biggest issue was that the game launched with a grand total of eight maps each of which was maybe a half hour long, and their idea of a "single player campaign" was a bot match.

Why is the earthling ship such a complete shitshow in Star Control 2? Also, you're supposed to kill every enemy by running away and pooping death at them through back-mounted heat-seeking cannons. wut.

 :awesome_for_real:

Nuclear missiles.

Also, Wing Commander had horrible horrible space combat.

See my grief title.

Skyward Sword is a recent game I'm ambivalent about.  I've heard mixed reports, but on my system the sword-fighting really worked, and I felt like a little kid waving the remote around (in a good way.)  It was gorgeous for a wii game and had a lot of fun fights and good puzzles.  But the difficulty is pitched too low for my tastes, the people complaining about the hand-holding and constant reminders have a point, and not all of the items are interesting.  A lot of games are broken at their core but have great trappings; bad Nintendo games tend to have really fun core gameplay but let you down everywhere else.

Yeah but that was never a beloved game by the masses.

I loved the first Dead Rising despite clunky controls, questionable design decisions, and technical issues that caused my 360 to freeze up on more than one occasion. The zombies in a mall setting and the ability to use just about anything as a weapon were enough for me to overlook all the other issues.

I really and truly loved SWG pre-NGE.  But then I also knew all its terrible flaws, and I recognize that the things which did work about it were exactly what I needed in a game.

I won't be ashamed of that. :-P

Temple of Elemental Evil

Buggy as fuck, sluggish and I couldn't stop playing it.  As an old school DND'er, I cherish this only AAA Greyhawk title.  I even have the strategy guide.

Does CoX count? I loved that game, but holy fuck grindfest.

I REALLY tried to like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, but frankly both were over-worked and self-absorbed pieces of shit.

Guilty pleasures though? Aside from the MMOs (AO and WoW), I'd say FFX was a game I loved despite having possibly one of the dumbest plots of any game ever, even by the standards of JRPGs.

Steve Jackson's Autoduel for the Apple IIe.  I love eveything about that rpg/action car combat game.... except trying to play it using a crappy apple joystick.

for me it's fallout 3.

I have probably spent >350 hours with both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, have bought and played every add-on and I'm currently considering yet another playthrough to get the last achivements. God I love both games.

Still they are a clunky mess of bad UI and even worse QA that compared to the polish of Mass Effect or Red Dead Redemption feels like it's from the stone age of gaming and not from 2009/2011. They perfectly capture the gloom and dread of a postapocalyptic earth and playing them actually feels like I'm roaming the wasteland but compared to contemporary titles it looks and plays like shit.

It came out at around the same time as Mass Effect 2 but you would never guess it if you played them side by side.

Er, what's wrong with the UI?

Wait...is this thread about telling other people that the games they like are actually shit, or is it about admitting that the games you like are actually shit?

Anyway, I'm not really down with the sort of thinking that you can like a game that is genuinely enjoyable because of conscious design decisions but that it can still somehow be bad. It seems to me that this is making the mistake of evaluating a game solely based on readily apparent craft - like evaluating a movie as "good" because every dollar is on screen - even if the script is terrible.

For example:


See, I would just say that Nier is a good game.

I love Earth Defense Force. It would be easy to say that EDF is a bad game that is enjoyable, but I don't think that's right. It's a good game by virtue of the fact that it is enjoyable. There are a lot of specific design choices that make it what it is. (Contrast it to the US-made Insect Armageddon)

Making a well-crafted game with high production values that checks every box is mostly a matter of money. IMO it's a lot harder to make a fun game than a game that appears well-made. So I would argue that a lot of "good" games that aren't that fun actually are just plain bad games, and that a lot of fun bad games are in fact good games. It's just that it's a lot easier to call out things like bad production values, bugs, UI quirks, etc, than sometimes subtle design issues.

No other game has yet to replicate the awesomeness of making "The Robo Hedgehog" a huge body type set to tiny height with spikes and darkness aoe. The little brown spandex'd hero would just run in and shake around like a seizuring rodent on meth, it was glorious.

Still, fucking horrible grind, never made it past 20.

(http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/smiles/codex_troll.png) Katawa Shojo is shit.

I made it further than that (I think my highest was 38 or so) but yes exactly. Exactly.

Wing Commander.
Temple of Elemental Evil.
Star Wars Galaxies.
Trust and Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot.
The Sims.
The Witcher
Black & White
Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
Scribblenauts

would all be examples of games that fascinated me and kept me engaged even when I could see their horrible, horrible flaws or even when they weren't really my cup of tea at all (say, The Sims). For various reasons. I'm not sure that this is what this thread is about though, but this seems a more interesting thing to talk about: the games you shouldn't have been interested in but that kept you interested because they were extreme design paradigms, spectacular failures, brilliant near-misses or simply because other people liked them a lot.

There are great games for which I will make no apologies today despite them seeming old or worn-out or flawed in some way. That is not what this is about.

Yah, I'm not sure I get it.  Are we supposed to knock down some sort of game held up by everyone as great? Or are we admitting that certain games we like are shit, but with the prerequisite that it has to be some sort of popular game?

The truly awful games that I've liked are mostly disliked here.  Star Wars: Rebellion and Alpha Protocol. I like some games with iffy mechanics (Deus Ex, Witcher 1, VTM: Bloodlines), but the combination of systems working together overshadow the obvious flaws.

I think the crappy game a lot of people love is Final Fantasy 7.  It's probably the least mechanically interesting Final Fantasy since 1 and more grindy than any other entry in the series.  The plot is mostly nonsense. It has not aged well.  Go ahead, try and play it now.

Most of the MMOs people pine for are garbage, but they had their moments.  Everything's better with friends, including mind numbing, tedious gaming.  

I thought it seemed pretty clear we're supposed to talk about the games we personally like (but are bad, whatever that means.)

I think admitting to your guilty pleasures is more fun and easier than trying to come up with a game that a lot of people praise and then explaining why it sucks (I mean really, when was the last time you saw someone here try to hold up FFVII as a good game). Plus any game that came out in the last decade that received any sort of praise here like already had a number of people jump in to explain why it sucked.

Personally, the Metal Gear Solid games I think are utter shit but somehow get praised by a lot of people, but around here not so much.

I didn't understand the intention of the thread either; I'm with Margalis that if a game is fun, then it's a good game because they're supposed to entertain us. The closest thing I can think of is something like Fallout: New Vegas at launch. Whenever it crashed on me, instead of going to the forums to whine that it was a buggy piece of shit, I just relaunched it because I wanted to keep playing.

The MGS games are console only, while f13 is largely PC-centric so they don't get a lot of discussion.

Might and Magic VI.  I love the game to death.  Castle Darkmoor was a horrible design mistake and one of the first times I considered hacking the game to get past it without having to suffer it.  I hated it then, I hated it now, I still love the game.  I still periodically play the game, but loath having to deal with that horrible dungeon again...

The only Metal Gear Solid I've enjoyed was MGS4. I'm looking forward to the next one. All the ones prior to 4 struck me as basically unplayable.

Eternal Sonata! I don't even know why I finished it BUT BY GOD I DID. The combat was fun, and the plot was insane, so I guess that carried me through to the shittastic ending.

Escape from Monkey Island. Terrible game with some really cheesy homour. But I sank hours into it.

Soul Reaver 2 was really cool but had lots of awful flaws in the actual gameplay, to the extent that I wound up jumping over a lot of the offered combat and running away from the tedium. Still loved it.

I'm going back a bit to the 90's and the SNES.  Pacific Theater of Operations 2 and Operation Europe are the two games I played constantly yet everyone else I knew that tried them, hated them.  They were both turn based strategy games that took forever to play with a clunky as hell interface.  Loved them both. :heart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T.O._II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Europe:_Path_to_Victory

Movies are supposed to entertain us also, but I'm sure you can acknowledge that there are movies you've seen that are bad on any number of levels but that you somehow manage to enjoy. Hell, Michael Bay has built his career off people's willingness to enjoy shit movies provided there are enough explosions or they play off nostalgia from a line of toys from the 80's. That doesn't elevate them to the status of good movies.

Don't really see games as any different. There are games that are huge messes with just enough of a hook to keep people playing (the obvious joke here as others have pointed out is "we call them MMOs").

I really, really hated that game at the point I put it down.  I think I had gotten to the point where the completely obvious betrayer spends 5 minutes telling you what you already had figured out before dying pointlessly.  Then I was wandering around on a ship or something without Chopin, and I just had enough.

The combat wasn't terrible and it was a very beautiful game, but I felt like it was insulting my intelligence to a degree I wasn't comfortable with.

Eternal Sonata broke my heart. The team that made it previously made Baiten Kaitos, which is simply the best JRPG I have ever played. To then go to this awful, grindy, game with a terrible combat system just depressed me.

JRPGs should never have real time combat unless its done like Xenoblade or FF13. Most of the time the systems are complete junk - Tales of Vesperia I'm looking at you!

I can understand looking back at some of the MGS games and saying they don't hold up (the control schemes in particular were very wonky), but man, that was some amazing shit back in the day as far as I am concerned.

I guess SWG belongs on my own list.  I am aware of all the reasons that made it objectively shite...but damn I loved that game anyway.  This thread made me go look up status of the EMU project, which despite all the back slapping, seems to not be moving ahead all that much. :crying_panda:

Obvious one for me is Bioshock because it keeps coming up in every damn thread with Ironwood everyone ranting about how bad it is - but gods help me, I loved it despite it's flaws. Mostly because of the setting, the world and the atmosphere.

I'm also another on the SWG freight-train. I sunk hours into it even though I knew at the time it was a terrible game.

Also, Star Wars games - Force Commander, Supremacy (Rebellion) in particular.

Mortal Kombat on the PS2 (Deception, Deadly Alliance, Shaolin Monks and Armageddon)

I can barely even manage to slog through the 20 minutes of cutscenes and bad monologue about the nature of war it takes to get to the actual gameplay in MGS4.

The game universally reviled that I loved: Star Wars Jedi Power Battles. Only ever played it co-op and it was a (very buggy) arcade-y beat em up with jedis doing their jedi thing.

I disagree with you on the combat, it was the one thing I enjoyed completely. I liked the balance it struck with it being kinda turn-based and kinda-not and I liked the light/dark positioning stuff. I thought it was interesting and never felt that "oh god I have another blob, bat, blob fight again" feeling I have gotten with more strictly turn-based shit.

And Rasix, the point where I almost stopped was the same spot, where the betrayer spends roughly a half hour dying and talking about I don't even fucking know what. I probably should've, because in truth it was a warning. It was a warning about the ending. The ending was even stupider. But I didn't stop, I'm not sure why. I think because I had played it that far, goddammit, I could keep going!

Also, I admit it. The stupid music names for everything never failed to make me laugh. My favorite character was Jazz, because why the fuck would Chopin hallucinate someone named that.

Entire stats didn't work in FF6; namely evade. Regular evasion as a stat did nothing because of a programming error attributing both physical dodge and magic dodge to the magic evasion stat. So if you aimed to max out magic evade (easy to do really) you can make a character that literally cannot be hit.

Relm's sketch bug can literally destroy all the savegames on your cartridge. Or give you 99 Illuminas and debug items. It is not hard at all to have the Relm sketch bug occur completely by accident since all you need to do generally is try to sketch an invisible enemy.

There's a whole LP someone did on Something Awful where they completely sequence break the game and gets to the point where he's directly editing the game's active memory via menu tricks:
http://lparchive.org/Breaking-Final-Fantasy-VI/

It's a fucking buggy ass game. I love it, it's still the best Final Fantasy game as far as I'm concerned, but it is a mess as far as bugs go.
(http://lparchive.org/Breaking-Final-Fantasy-VI/Update%2009/36-Untitled2.gif)(http://lparchive.org/Breaking-Final-Fantasy-VI/Update%2008/5-3.png)

OK, I laughed at that one.

You are the worst fit for this thread of all the people here.  You actually do realize the flaws in the sacred cows of gaming and mostly don't play shitty games.  Or if you do, you know what you are playing and are aware of it.

You can think of this as a place to contain all the "hey they are remaking ______!" "Oh, that pile of shit?", if that helps.  Been seeing a lot of that and I want to encourage people to speak out against games that the majority love.  Like Final Fantasy VII.

Also, I happen to dislike several popular titles and I wanted to have a place to dump those ideas when they came to me.  Never could get into some of them.  Metal Gear Solid?  I don't see the appeal.  I mean that from when it was new.  Walk around and avoid the eye-cones?  It's barely above the arcade classic Berserk, mechanically.  Don't even get me started on the "plot".

The first one, but I always underestimate how self-absorbed this community is.

Total.  Complete.  Shit.

I also bought this abortion on an optical disc.  Did not finish.  Characters were insipid, the starting premise of the story was BLAH WHAT, combat was shitshitshitty.  Why would anyone like this game?

Can't say anything about Star Wars: Rebellion, but Alpha Protocol is fucking great.  Is it really disliked that much around here?  If so, you're all wrong.

I like Demon's/Dark Souls, but you pretty much have to have some low grade of autism to love it to the point you put hundreds of hours in.

There's a difference between glitching the game and being a buggy ass game. Every game has bugs when provoked. Also, who the fuck actually looked at stats in that game? You didn't need too. It wasn't exactly, you know, difficult.

Again, played through it about 10 times, never once ran into a bug. I'd imagine that is most people's experience.

I actually agree with this. I beat Demon's Souls I think, 3 times, just to try different builds. But it's not a game I would ever try to 100% in any capacity. Dark Souls I couldn't even bother with. It didn't have the cleanness of Demon's Souls.


So, I can't actually tell you the story of MGS4 for the most part as it's an incomprehensible train wreck. I skipped the vast majority of the cut scenes in the game both times I played through it. But the game portion of that title is absolutely worth experiencing. As far as I'm concerned, all of the other Metal Gears are completely unplayable, so it's not like I don't understand your sentiment. MGS4, however, is the only game I ever considered doing a no kill / no alert run through because it's just that good.

I've played through FF6 four times from beginning to end, and I can't recall ever encountering a bug.  I don't doubt that they exist, but they certainly never affected my gameplay in any noticeable way.

So I wasn't doing it wrong. Good to know my reading comprehension still works.

I can name two recent games that hit that button for me. Limbo and Bastion. Limbo because it's just so gorgeous but GODDAMN do I hate platformers with the white-hot passion of the sun. Bastion because I really shouldn't like such a goofy looking game that is all about clicking monsters to death but somehow is just so atmospheric and plain weird that I can't help but enjoy it little bits at a time.

Don't we do that on the rest of the site?  Then in that case, WoW, any recent Bioware release, .... pretty much everything you guys play. ;D

Well, while I had a ton of fun playing Alpha Protocol, it did have a lot wrong with it.  First of all, the game has some really poor stealth and combat mechanics. The weapon balance is fucking terrible.  The game is unplayable on PC without a heavy amount of tweaks. Even then, some of the mini-games are god awful with a keyboard and mouse.  The AI is just plain wretched in parts.  Basically: it was made by Obsidian.  

BUT, it's a lot of fun to play.  It's cool to see the choices you make have an actual affect on the plot, and you have to make some difficult ones.  Sure, there's a lot of binary choices like "save the girl" or "save 1000 random civilians" (which are dumb when they're in there), but occasionally there's the "Jack Bauer this motherfucker", "introduce yourself", *head slam*    I think this game could have been something very special if they were able to smooth out the gameplay experience and didn't suffer from some of the publisher interference that was reported.  

Experiencing the game is a lot better than actually playing it, if that makes any sense.


I was right too.  Neener neener something.   :oh_i_see:

Still, weird, semi non-interesting thread with the original intent.  Reminds me of Sam's grammar gulag.

edit: <nah, I better not>

Ya Cryptic should have stuck to making character creators, cause their game design skills were pathetic.

Ditto.

By the by: Homeworld still sucks ass.

I did a terrible job of specifying that.  I re-read the OP and it could have gone either way.

:why_so_serious:

Hey, I didn't have much to throw except "I think this game blows, but I can't give specifics.  WHY DO YOU MORONS LIKE IT?"

As for Homeworld and CoH; didn't like either game.  I didn't get past level 11 in CoH, which I think is my worst effort for any MMO I actually played at release and paid money for.   I don't include Auto Assault, because schild got me a press copy.  Go go wizard car!

Or, and I'm just guessing here, it feels way less douchey to have a thread that goes "haha, this game I love, I know it is shitty and yet I loved it anyway" than to throw poop at someone because they have the gall to like games you don't, and so people were erring on the side of self-depreciating.

But ... it's not like people are shy about telling other people their taste in games is shit in every other thread here. Which makes this thread even weirder than I originally thought.

I would like to go on record saying that whoever invented that White Tower level in Lands of Lore with all the spirits and crap that kill you and you can't hurt them except for a random item you probably discarded several dungeons ago is a bad person and fuck that place with a spoon dgfiofdsjgadfijgo

Most of my friends encountered the Relm sketch bug; namely when they'd try to sketch stuff like Wrexsoul or Intangir.

Buggiest 16-bit RPG however is Lufia 2. There's an area that's literally a completely glitched out mess, and graphic/text glitches just happen on their own with no provocation.

Sketch wasn't something I used much.  Was it #6 where your team could all be kappas with genji gloves and imp halberds?

Yep.

I do remember now that there was a item duplication exploit in FF4.  I used that one a lot.

Ooo, thought of another terrible game I shouldn't like but do -

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

The only redeeming trait I can think of off-hand is that I could beat it in a single weekend rental.  :why_so_serious:

I sometimes still pick up Mystic Quest for a quick play. I still find it fun, though I acknowledge it's not that good of a game.

But it has another redeeming trait though! Its soundtrack is fucking ace.

Anyone mention ToA yet?   :grin:

Who would admit to loving that?

ToA was a crime to my beloved game!  DAMMIT

Donny, you're out of your element.

I now realize that.  Fortunately, most people ignore me unless I'm talking about medicine.

I'm at least halfway through Bioshock Infinite, and I'm not seeing how it's special.  Shoot, cutscene, shoot, cutscene.

All of the great "adventure games", from Infocom to Lucasarts to Myst and its clones: The daffy shoe-horned world design. The pixel-hunting. Now guess the verb and guess what the designer is thinking, and then try every single object in your inventory on every single other object in your inventory and then every single object out in the world. As a reward, you get to watch precious minutes of terribly acted, terribly voice-acted, terribly directed, terribly produced "full motion video".

I still have a lot of nostalgia for the time I spent playing these games as a kid and the satisfaction I found in completing them, but as Old Man Murray (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) put it: the genre committed suicide. People are still making these things, and they're still terrible. The medium has moved on.

For that matter, the entire concept of a "puzzle" is basically dead. Cognitive leaps just aren't predictable enough in the age of walkthroughs on the internet. If it can't be solved by flailing with the controls, it's not going to survive testing.

That's pretty much a tl:dr of the entire thread concerning said game, minus the beret squad picking the corpse bare.

I have to say, I still remain a bit surprised that aside from WoW, the only two games I can think of that have had a long term, somewhat active f13 presence are Eve and Blood Bowl, neither of which I think are particularly good games. I guess there's LoL also, but I've never tried it so I can't really say shit about it.

I don't find Bay movies entertaining. They aren't good, and they aren't so bad you laugh at them. On the other hand I do like some schlocky movies, but I would argue that the schlocky movies I like are good in the ways that matter.


Yeah, adventure games as a whole are pretty terrible and they actually got worse over time. Once they became more graphical with a cursor and such they turned even more into "try every verb on every object." From what I understand modern adventure games are still pretty much the same.

Edit: It seems to me that after 20+ years nobody has figured out an actual gameplay mechanic for adventure games. The more successful games sidestep this - Walking Dead has almost no systemic gameplay at all, neither do many Visual Novel / Choose Your Own Adventure style games. Games like 999 have choice-based sections and then puzzle/minigames that are again not really systemically related.

Blood Bowl is actually a decent game - unless you mean the video game interpretation which is a massive crime against fucking humanity in how BADLY it shits all over the concept of user-friendly UI design. The underlying game is decent.

LoL's crimes are almost solely focused on the unwashed masses of cuntweasels that play infest it.

Adventure games mostly blow. Even the current ones. Anyone saying otherwise is just being a nostalgic gasbag.

Indigo Prophecy is one of the few "Adventure" games I would define as "better than good."

I was really in love with Dreamfall for a while, but I couldn't finish it. Turned into an incomprehensible pile of trash. We need a thread for games that start off so strong you want to throw GotY awards at them and make you hate them by the end.

Edit: LoL is a fine game and doesn't belong in this thread. I'm surprised DOTA2 hasn't popped up yet since it keeps all of the horrific design mistakes of DOTA but does so willingly.

Sadly, some people out there do.

Binary Domain - the gunplay starts ok and gets bland by mid way, but it was saved by the unlikeliest of source - it's localization.
Probably the best localization work I've ever seen in my life.

League of Legends is retarded trash for retarded trash gamers. Same goes for all MOBAs.

And LA Noire is about the only real attempt at modernizing adventure games and it shits the bed about halfway in.

Also the amount of patience granted to D3 here infuriates me when it's a bad game and will likely stay bad forever. PoE isn't very good but at least had the excuse of having no budget and being designed by people who flat out admit they had never ever made a videogame before. Detritus from Blizzard shit out a better game on a comparatively shoestring budget provided by a third-rate Asian grindfest/cashshop MMO developer.

LoL is not all mobas.  I wouldn't even call Dota 2 bad, really, it's just Dota.  I do think leaving the stuff in that was present due to limitations of the War 3 engine was a semi bad idea if you want a broader audience.  They had an opportunity to improve upon Dota and bring it to the masses.. and instead just made Dota.  Which is fine, if you like Dota.

D3 was fine.  You guys are so sensitive about that game.

Never played LA Noire though.  Seems like I might like it, but the feedback has scared me off so far.

LoL is a bad game.

For me that would be Heavy Rain.

Hate is probably too strong a word, but this is how I felt about FF14.  I just got tired of it before the end, and never actually finished it.  Being on rails is one thing, lots of games do that.  FF14 was in a long, never-ending hallway.  And no towns?  I mean, let's at least pretend this is an RPG.  Ironically, I gave up at exactly the point where it "opens up" towards the end.  I felt like a prisoner being released after 40 years in the hole and not knowing what to do with myself.

You mean FF XIII (XIV is the MMO).

That's what I was saying earlier about ff13. I know that it objectively is a bad game - there can't ally be any argument over that. No amount of flashy production values can make up for the gibbering ly insane storyline, terrible characters, endless hallways and completely dead world. Yet for some reason I've completed it twice - it's the only JRPG I've ever done that with. He'll, the number of JRPGs I've completed once is tiny...

Given we seem to have a lot of game taste overlap: LA Noire was ... meh-to-OK. It wasn't anywhere near what the hype indicated it would be, and the open world aspects are pretty bad. You'll end up fast-forwarding through the driving parts because there's just not really anything to do once you get past the novelty of 'omg 40s LA'. The story kind of goes off the rails in the last third, too, but it does have some good moments and it does a pretty good job with the 'feel'. I played it on Xbox, right after Red Dead Redemption and it really, really suffers in comparison to RDR.

L.A. Noire does some great, and honestly pretty modern and unique things for gaming.  But it fails the holistic gaming test pretty horribly, even worse than say how PS:T's combat infringes on it's raison d'etre.  L.A. Noire is a mediocre game, but I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad I played it.  It's important that it exists.  It's certainly worth a rental (or super cheap steam sale).  It's just not very good.

As far as modernizing adventure games goes...isn't Walking Dead worth a mention?

I thought LA noire was sub $2 steam price at some point?
I was too shocked to click on it - it seems like a better game watched than played.

Speaking of awful crimes, Activision's UK head of PR got busted for stealing 20K GBP from Activision.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312997/PR-boss-siphoned-19-000-makers-Call-Duty-pay-engagement-party-designer-shopping.html

mods feel free to move this somewhere more appropriate :)

Hah, I wrote 14 and I totally meant 13.

At this point people should just start posting games they feel are great, so everybody can then attempt to tear it down and tell them how bad of a game it really is.

I still dont get this thread.

Sure it's "fine". Doesn't change the fact that I'd rather play its now 13 year old predecessor.  Or even Titan Quest, Borderlands, Dead Island, Path of Exile, probably that Marvel game when it comes out, maybe PSO2 when that comes to the US, and possibly a number of other multiplayer loot based RPG's (never really got into the Torchlight games). But hey, it sounds like the PS3 version of Diablo 3 might actually be a vast improvement so it's got that going for it.

Edit: I feel the need to point out, especially since I'm typically one of the people here that hates excessive negativity, that I don't actually hate Diablo 3 and it entertained me enough for multiple playthroughs. It was somewhat disappointing though, I hated the AH, and I would still be more likely to go play any one of those other ARPG's I named even though they all have their own faults.

Love ya.

Heavy Rain would have been a great step forward for adventure games. If it weren't for the big story twist half way through that breaks the fourth wall, destroys any semblence of suspension of disbelief and actually tells the player outright that he was betrayed, lied to and bullshitted until now.

There were also lots and lots of infuriating QTEs that you probably have to be ten years old to react to in time but this is the only game that I really had a deep emotional connection to due to the for me great story telling and atmosphere, well until the game tells you that what you were playing wasn't what actually happened.

LA Noire has that in common with Heavy Rain, it was a decent game that captured the atmosphere and flair of fifties LA  until you realized that what you had seen with your own eyes wasn't what really happened. Oh and also that they had kept pretty big parts of your character's life from you just so that they could surprise you with their plot twists. Never once got told I had wife and kid until I got busted for adultery with the cabaret singer. After that the game quickly became crap as the story got even less cohesive or comprehensible.

Then they all do? ('cause students...)

I almost suggested this already, since I'm personally having trouble thinking up the laundry-list of "awesome" or "popular" games that are, in reality, bags of hobo shit.


Feel your hate flow while your friends die.

I forget LA Noire. It would definitely fall into that category of noble effort that just completely shits the bed. It really is an adventure game that tried to hide its "find the pixel" origins by bolting on 3rd person action trappings but it might honestly have been better as an adventure game. At least then, they could be forgiven for really only allowing 1 path through investigations despite all the talk that it would require real thought and feel more organic. It didn't. The investigations were terribly one-track, with answers to questions coming out of fucking nowhere that somehow got you to solve the case even though the solution MADE NO SENSE. And I stopped playing it about halfway through but I really think the bed-shitting started soon after your first promotion. It just got really fucking obvious the farther you went along.

Star Wars :  Supremacy was shit but I loved it.

Homeworld was great ; I'm not getting the hate...

Regarding LA Noire, just watch LA Confidential again.

The Skittles game.  I'm not joking.  For a throwaway, no-budget game based on collecting fucking SKITTLES, it was actually great.

On a similar note, the 7-up Spot game was one of the best 16 bit platformers ever. But nobody will ever believe you when you tell them this, because the game is about the 7-up Spot.

Ditto Zool [1992?] and Chupa Chups.

Cool Spot was pretty good. But it didn't hold a candle to Yo Noid!

of course, it was made by Capcom and was a reskin. But Whatever!

(http://i.imgur.com/N8YPNAr.jpg)

The Burger King Creeper game was better than Vanguard.

Oh yeah, fucking Sneak King.  Inexplicably awesome.  I bought a burger to get it.

I spelled it out as clearly as I could from 13-year-old memories.  I only got about 8-10 missions in before giving up.

It also doesn't help that I despise RTS games because of the extremely limited rules of engagement and non-existent AI within the individual troops.  I've always been a Turn-based guy.

What was that Bug Domino game that was based off some shit marketing ?

It was a fucking awesome game.

EDIT :  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushover_%28video_game%29 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushover_%28video_game%29)

I drove through the burger king drive through twice. The first time ordering fries, the second time ordering a drink - so I could buy 2 copies of each of the 4 or 5 games or whatever they made.

Point is, I still have a set of that weird crap sealed in my storage unit.

That probably would top my list, but I didn't get there until Velious, and by then enough of it was workable that all my personal angst is from the game rules, not the unplayable broken mess I hear it was at launch.

If I had to pick, I'd probably go DAoC. It only became retroactively beloved for what the players fondly remember bringing to it themselves, years after it had any real market relevance. It's like the ST:DS9 of MMOs  :awesome_for_real: I can't see why any remake of that would have any appeal.

Ah, Everquest. You missed most of the "fun" then.

My personal favourites is the "if you try to loot a second lore item when you already in possession of one it gets destroyed and nobody can take it ever again" feature. People online lives were destroyed by that one and they had to wander around lonely and hated after destroying a rare and important item.

No wonder people have Stockholm syndrome about that one.

Talking about going back to any of these MMOs is just a very sad, sad thing to expose about yourself.

Honestly it is more a statement of how much of a failure modern MMOs are.  Most people would happily forget those games if they had something more appealing to play.  But nothing new has really captured imaginations the same way, even if they were dreadful mechanically.  Something with modern mechanics, but the old games worlds/player interactions would be fantastic. But nothing has emerged.

There are no modern MMO's. They've all become Massive Lobby Wait In The Queue Until Your Group Of Half A Dozen People Go Do Your Instanced Mission Multiplayer Games.

Except the half a dozen might be 50 like in WoT or WoWP or there's no lobby like in GW2 or Secret World you might be right.

Na, your entire statement is wrong.

I don't really buy into the idea that you need to play old MMOs because new ones suck.  The old ones sucked, too.  Also, there are other game types to play.  Some of these games are outside.  So, two things:
1) Modern MMOs suck because MMOs suck.  People are allowed to like things that suck, by the by.
2) Lack of a good modern MMO doesn't mean you have to pine away for a shitty non-modern MMO.

Its less about how "good" the games are and more about how they make you feel when it comes to MMOs.  The moment to moment playing of Counter Strike or Team Fortress or Starcraft is engaging and fun to me.  The moment to moment playing of EVE is not particularly engaging and fun, but as an experience  it captures what I am looking for.  It is that overall experience that modern MMOs have generally lacked, whether they hit or missed on the good moment to moment gameplay.  Older MMOs seemed to get that overall experience right, even though their mechanics were clunky and I actually generally wouldn't want to put up with them today (which is why I'm not playing any of them right now).  A good modern MMO would be able to get both of these things right.  Incidentally, I think this is one of the reasons that WoW continues to hold strong.  It still has just enough of those older influences to give a bit of that experience, while giving some of most responsive combat, engaging combat out of the tab-targetting combat style games.

As far as I recall, MMOs have been tied to online forums more intrinsically than any other genre, talking like BBS/MUD days if you trace it back. That being the case (or, because I'm old: if that's the case) then I'd say that's the reason MMOs are more a special place in a lot of people's hearts than whatever crap ass FPS or RTS game launched that whenever year.

Because unlike that crappy game we bitched about to a few people around school or the office, that MMO was right on the cusp of being awesome if they only did [a few thousand armchair design ideas] since the days the MUD operators could find their top 100 players in a lineup.

Beyond MMOs though, I'd go with Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Screw you super sekret moves fighting game that only the cool kids knew all the right moves for because they ripped them from the BBSes.

To be fair, shitting yourself in public is better than Vanguard.

Oh, I mostly figured these out for myself, but yes.

World of Warcraft (Vanilla). Levelling Horde side when you run out of fucking quests and don't even get to kill 10 rats, just grind mobs until you could hit the next swt of quests. Horde Onyxia chain. Fucking barrens runs with no mount. All of that was bullshit but it didn't stop me grinding my fingers down to hit 60. Hunter and warlock classes on release were screwed up messes... but I played both and had fun doing so.

Black and White - fun for a bit especially learning the pets but fuck that game was a shitty sandbox and flawed in really giving you open reign on what you could do. I still played it.

I'm not getting the Homeworld hate - the UI was it's biggest flaw but I got through the campaign fine and still play it today for a bit of nostalgic fun. Homeworld Cataclysm is still enjoyable too.

Then again, I don't get the LoL hate (but can't stand HoN and that has prejudiced my view of DOTA2).

Ok, here's where I show my age:

You're complaining about WoW! Shit man, that was easy mode on rails dinggratz compared to DAoC  :geezer:


I never had nearly enough quarters to pay2learn all those moves.

And by the time they came to consoles, I was burned out on the very idea :-)

Each SF and MK character has like 3 special moves, many of which use the same inputs. It's not exactly rocket science.

Physically manipulating your controller just to get your character to do their built-in moves shouldn't be rocket science. Fighting games reify some pretty stupid and arbitrary design.

Yeah 360 circles makes me mad. Wish i can just bind a button to each move

I've never been able to pull of a 360 circle move.  I just avoid those characters.  My dragon punches were always shit too.

You guys are old.  :why_so_serious:

I can go back to early 80s and complain about Rescue at Rigel on a tape driven Apple ][ if you like :D

Not to mention Rocketeer on my Amiga 1000 and that stupid decoder wheel!!!!!!

It is if the only way to learn is through one round every 30 minutes in the arcade at the beach because of the row of quarters left by the other 20 kids waiting to take their turn at the local pro. Maybe if I lived near one of those fancy arcades with 20 MK2s in a row and fewer kids...

They are technically straightforward, as I learned in whatever turbo/reboot/sequel/version/bullshit SF one that launched on X360. But that was decades after I burned out.

heh, if we're talking about "awful crimes" related to copy protection, I think almost nothing beats this:

http://xboxmeagain.blogspot.it/2006/08/chrono-quest-retro-review.html


Nonetheless, Psygnosis: I miss you  :heart: :heartbreak: : your fabulous game covers, your weird and difficult games and cockpunching UI (Obliterator, Barbarian...ugh)

I sort of miss the physical puzzle DRM.  It wasn't very effective, but at least it didn't shit up my computer.  Also I got a neat toy.

I don't miss it, it was clunky as fuck keeping track of that stuff.  Even when I had like, six games total, I lived in mortal terror of my decoder wheel getting thrown in the garbage by my parents or something.  And nowadays it just causes headaches.

For example, I think I've mentioned this before, but the Space Quest Collection is an anthology of the six space quest games, and the documentation is a mashup of the documentation for the old Space Quest Anthology (which itself was a frankenstein of the documentation for the first five games) plus the basic control manual for SQ6.  Unfortunately, the docs excluded one of the fluff lore pamphlets, which had an article towards the end titled "how to convert your datacorder in to a homing beacon".  This is unfortunately required to solve a puzzle in the game.

To top it off, it's not one of those "Hey, kids, go enter the solution found on page 197 of your manual!" type setups, either, the puzzle was originally supposed to be solvable in game, and there's references to it lying around the place you need it, so if you don't have the book and don't know the puzzle is missing, you're probably not going to know that it's even supposed to be copy protection.