Awful Crimes of Beloved Games

[Ingmar]

See my grief title.

[Job601]

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.

[Trippy]

See my grief title.

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

[Velorath]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[Tannhauser]

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.

[Sjofn]

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

[K9]

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.

[Xilren's Twin]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Ingmar]

Er, what's wrong with the UI?

[Margalis]

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:

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.  

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.

[Lakov_Sanite]

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

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.

[rk47]

Katawa Shojo is shit.

[Sjofn]

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

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.

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[Rasix]

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

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.  

[Ingmar]

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

[Velorath]

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.

[Rendakor]

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.

[Selby]

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...

[schild]

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.

[Sjofn]

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.

[Sir T]

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.

[Ginaz]

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.

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

[Velorath]

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.

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").

[Rasix]

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.

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.

[Maledict]

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.

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!

[Cyrrex]

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.

[DraconianOne]

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.

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)

[Velorath]

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.

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.

[Mosesandstick]

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.

[Sjofn]

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.

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 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.

[Fabricated]

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.

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.

[Yegolev]

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"

OK, I laughed at that one.