The latter is, of course, the important part. The people that rave about Goldeneye do so because it was their introduction to the FPS genre. It’s just like the reception Halo got later, even though both were mediocre by the standards of the time. You don’t have to be amazing when you’re breaking ground in new markets.
LOVED all the Lego games. And I enjoyed most of the LOTR games that I played… (though that might be because I played them with my brother when he still lived near me, and we had such an awesome time together). Arkham Asylum was pretty good.
So why were both games applauded by video game magazines / websites, including multi-platform outfits like Edge and Gamespot?
Probably because they were some of the best games on their platform and game journalism is pap, I’d imagine.
I never actually played *GoldenEye *myself. I wasn’t into consoles when *GoldenEye *came out, being a big PC gamer snob at the time. I did, however, play the hell out of Halo, which I found to be an excellent FPS. And I’d been playing shooters since the days of Castle Wolfenstein 3D. So I don’t agree that the appeal of Halo was due entirely to people never having played the genre of game before. I suspect the same applies to your theory about the popularity of GoldenEye.
The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers for Gamecube was pretty good, except for some infuriating sections (mostly involving Hobbits). But it was a decent game at least.
Spider-Man 2 was a pretty good “sandbox” type game. Think GTA with webswinging instead of cars, and crime to fight instead of hookers to beat to death. And Bruce Campbell providing the voice of the tutorial. This is the console version, btw, the PC version was a dumbed down POS.
Fun to swing around, but I really did not like any of the missions. Still, neat to swing around NY.
Oddly enough, they say that the game X-Men Origins: Wolverine is actually pretty good. I remember hearing that it wasn’t even originally planned as a movie tie-in game, but rather some independent game; when the movie came out, they slapped some new graphics in there and called it a tie-in. That means that the mechanics and story didn’t suffer from the usual “rush job” that plagues other movie tie-in games.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was awesome (except for that mandatory stage in all superhero games where you lose your powers). It totally nailed the feeling of being Wolverine.
Even for the PS2?
There were three versions of Wolverine. There was the PC/PS3/Xbox 360 “Uncaged Edition” (considered the real version of the game by Raven Software). the DS/PSP version (outsourced to Griptonite) and the PS2/Wii version (outsourced to Amaze Entertainment).
But the Uncaged Edition was much, much better.
Yeah, but that last thing you said is by far the most important part. A sandbox game like SP2 succeeds or fails, to a huge degree, just on whether or not it’s fun to get around town. Take the GTA games, for instance: the writing is good, but aside from that there isn’t much about them that’s notable in a good way, and there are some things (e.g. combat mechanics) that would just be unacceptably bad in most games … except, of course, that it can be such a blast just getting from Point A to Point B, so it’s hard not to have a great time playing it. Ditto SP2.
That’s what I came in to say. Spidey 2 was quite a decent game on its own merits. Not spectacular perhaps (where superheroes are concerned, *Freedom Force *held my attention for much longer), but it’s a’ight by movie tie-in standards.
ETA: for that matter, the Wolverine game was also a’ight as a God of War substitute.
ETA2: OK, so I was beaten to the punch thrice or more. I’m feeling like Ant Man over here.
That wasn’t a movie tie-in, though (thank god).
I never get around to playing missions in that type of game anyway.