What things to you love that are infamously bad, and everyone else mentions as the best and most obvious example of a bad thing?
I’ll start of with a big one, to make everyone else less shy. Trust me, you won’t look bad following me - here it is:
I think Jar-Jar Binks is hilarious and he made the The Phantom Menace for me - easily the best single thing from that movie. Then again, I was a kid, and I hadn’t seen the old ones, so I wasn’t comparing the movie to anything else. I still don’t get what the problem is.
Another example? Okay, here it is:
I love Gabriel Knight 3. I played that game for hours and days and years. I wore out a copy and had to buy a new one. It was the last game I was able to play that obsessively - the last game of my childhood, if you will. And my favorite part, the bit I described starry-eyed when describing the game to other people, is a problem fairly early on: persuading Gabriel Knight to leave town by figuring out how to rent the Harley.
I though the puzzle was hilariously brilliant, completely off the wall quirky, and it really made the game for me. It is fairly involved but it goes like this:
The main character refuses to advance the plot unless you rent a particular motorcycle for him.
The motorcycle is reserved for someone else.
You “borrow” this someone elses ID. However, Gabriel Knight looks nothing like the picture in this ID.
Solution? You give both Gabriel Knight, and the picture in the ID a fake mustache. Since a fake mustache is the perfect disguise, this fools the rental place.
I fell off my chair laughing when I solved this puzzle.
Later, I find out that this single puzzle is what everyone points to when saying how much Gabriel Knight 3 obviously sucks, and it’s even been blamed for killing the adventure game genre as a whole.
So, anyone else? What do you love that everyone else points to as an obvious example of suckitude?
Yes, it’s one of the worst video games ever released - a complete disappointment as a movie tie-in, boring, bizarre graphics (“if I fall in the goddamn wells ONE MORE TIME…!!”), aggravating gameplay (“if those FBI agents catch me ONE MORE TIME…!!”) and almost entirely to blame for the Great Video Game Crash of 1983.
But I loved it. I was only 8 years old at the time of its release and as such, I loved video games too much to realize I should have hated it. The day I beat the game is one of my fondest childhood memories.
To this day, I think “Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom” was the most enjoyable movie of the series; I had no idea how badly it was thought of until I discovered the SDMB…
(The original Raiders Of The Lost Ark was indeed excellent, and in my TOD “defense” I haven’t seen any of the Indiana Jones movies again in over 15 or 20 years, so maybe if I was to watch Temple Of Doom again I would feel differently today)
I also think that Burger King’s french fries are excellent, the best large chain fries around—I don’t eat meat, so I can’t say anything about any of the other Burger King offerings, but I take my parents to BK every couple of weeks, where they split a Whopper Combo and I will often get an order of fries and a Coke. The fries are always perfect, and my parents really like the burger.
Like Temple Of Doom, I didn’t realize that Burger King was supposedly awful, at least according to most Dopers…
The ending of A.I.
Eveybody thinks it should have ended with him at the bottom of the ocean. I think that’s the point where it starts to get interesting.
It is, without question, the best Bond film that was ever made, and the only one worth watching more than once.
*Where “notoriously bad” is defined as “actually, really and truly bad, and notorious for being so.” If it’s simply defined as “notorious for being thought of as bad by a large number of people,” I’m okay with that. The people who think it is bad are simply wrong about it.