Awful Crimes of Beloved Games

[Yegolev]

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[HaemishM]

Don't you mean Homeworld?

[01101010]

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.

[luckton]

Final Fantasy 6.

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

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 

[Fabricated]

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.

[Shannow]

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.

 

[Mrbloodworth]

Homeland 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.

I Disagree.

[Engels]

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

[HaemishM]

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. 

[taleril]

That cannot be.

[Lantyssa]

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

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

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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"

[Rendakor]

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.

[bhodi]

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!

[Fabricated]

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.

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.

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

Also Metal Gear Solid. It holds up really poorly.

[Merusk]

Don't you mean Homeworld?

oooof course I do. That's why I said it. 

[trias_e]

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).

[Miasma]

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.

[jakonovski]

All of the MMOs.

[trias_e]

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.

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.

[Quinton]

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.

[trias_e]

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.

[Hawkbit]

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.  

[Lucas]

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  ), 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

[Strazos]

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.

[Shannow]

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!

[schild]

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.

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.

[Teleku]

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  ).  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.

[Maledict]

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.

[Kail]

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  ).  I think some people miss the purpose of the thread, though its really vague and asking for exploitation to begin with.

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.

[Zetor]

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.

 

[Trippy]

Nuclear missiles.

Also, Wing Commander had horrible horrible space combat.