So, have you ever been in love with a game that were hated by reviewers or gaming community? Or just neglected?
I remember that in the last years of Amiga, the game called Basejumpers were published. I only had demo version that came with a magazine but boy did we play it with my buddies. It had ingeniously simple and fast paced three player multiplayer. You tried to sabotage the basejump of your buddies and push them to hit an obstacle, which created satisfying cloud of gore. But for some reason the game got atrocious reviews from the press and it is largely forgotten.
Paladin’s Quest (AKA Lennus). A SNES RPG that lacked a lot of polish, and made a whole lot of bizarre choices (why is the town music borderline terrifying? Why is a weapon more powerful than Sword of Plot Advancement available in a store halfway through the game? And why is it less expensive than a weapon that’s perfectly in line with what you should be getting?)
But, for all its flaws, it was fun. Battles were amusing, a lot of minor characters had personality (AND fun, unique powers), the twists were unexpected because they were so silly there was no sense in trying to predict them, and the short excursion 1000 years in the past was phenomenal.
Oh, and I love “fantasy hodge-podge” settings where they just throw a million random ideas together side by side, and everyone acts like it’s perfectly normal to have a bomb throwing anthropomorphic hedgehog going to school with a Tengu.
Interplay’s Lord of The Rings, played it a few days after or at the same time that I read the books (cant remember) LOVED it, most people’s reaction go from MEH to hate.
I enjoyed Far Cry 2 a bunch before I found out that I was supposed to hate it. I’ll admit to all its flaws (stupid malaria, insta-respawn checkpoints) but I still had a good bit of fun with it.
Mafia II was another game that I enjoyed a lot and then found out that a lot of people had negative impressions, I think mainly because they were expecting GTA: 1950 and not a fairly linear plot driven game with a few open world elements.
Alpha Protocol is basically the only game ever I’ve finished twice in a row. Loved the branching plotlines and even the combat was good enough, but there’s a lot of haters out there.
ETA: I played Mass Effect 3 long after the furor over the ending had died down, and when I played it expecting a shitty ending I had great time with it. Even the ending didn’t make me hate it.
You know, recently I decided to disregard the bad press and play it in preparation for Dragon Age 3. Yes, yes you’re the only one. Holy crap, that game is downright *insulting *on so many levels.
And I say this as a guy who thought Mass Effect 3 was pretty damn a’ight and didn’t quite grok the issues people were having with it, including its ending (though I only played the “reworked” edition). Yes, “choices” ultimately funnel you down a narrow handful of specific railroad-y paths, but what the fuck did you expect and what game is there where that’s no the case ?
Shit, the new Deus Ex was (rightly) praised to the Heavens, and that game featured a “press button to choose ending, irrespective of whatever might have brought you to this point” machine as its final state. Now *that *was bullshit.
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Alpha Protocol is basically the only game ever I’ve finished twice in a row. Loved the branching plotlines and even the combat was good enough, but there’s a lot of haters out there.
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Are there ? That one’s on my personal “best games you’ve never played” list. The combat can be a bit clunky and the various skills are super unbalanced (e.g. the pistol is a better sniper rifle than the sniper rifle :p) but the plot & feel are awesome.
Anyway, my contribution : Spec Ops:The Line. It caught a lot of flack for being “pretentious”, “unfair”, “pseudo-intellectual”, “heavy handed”, for revelling in exactly the thing it purportedly condemns, for antagonizing the player… the smug declarations of the lead designers didn’t help it any. And on some level, I agree with part of the criticisms. Once you sit back to analyse the game and deconstruct it and whatnot, there’s plenty fault to find in it. BUT.
But when you’re playing it all in one sitting, and you’re in a state of mind where half of you is emotionally invested in the story and immersed in the plot while the other half is challenged by the themes and mind-fucks ; it really *does *something. Something unique. I’unno, it worked for me something fierce.
Yeah, there are. I was lurking in a thread on another forum where it was brought up and there were a lot of people saying how bad it is - they had clearly played it but just didn’t like it for some reason. Maybe it was too RPGish for the FPS players, or too FPSish for the RPG players or maybe they played an early version that had tons of bugs, I dunno. I loved it but I did buy it several years (and presumably a number of patches) after the launch and only paid pennies for it which might have helped.
I loved Thief 4 to bits. It’s definitely not a perfect game, but after 10 years I chose not to be too picky and it didn’t disappoint. I’m also one of the few who really like DA2.
On the other end of the spectrum, I hated DA3, although that is widely regarded as a perfect game. I spent 200+ hours into it, and in the end nothing of what I did mattered in the end. I still beat the end boss with three button presses. It disappointed me more than ME3, which in fact I loved.
Hey if it is still possible to change rules, please tell also about games other praised but you hated. Like Aghris just did.
I absolutely despised Fallout New Vegas. You can’t even talk about awesome Fallout 3 and that thing same day. Still it got perfect reviews and my friends loved it. So far I have met only one person who thinks like I about this.
I really liked Sonic: Lost World. It had some problems. Even if you liked it being a cheesy cartoon story, the boss wasn’t exactly interesting, and there was no secret ending for having all the emeralds. However, the movement and level design felt really good to me, except for wall run sections which felt poorly explained, at the very least.
Everyone hated it though, because it seems to be A Thing™ to hate Sonic games now, while maybe making begrudging concessions about Generations, Colors, or maybe maybe the day levels of Unleashed.
(Sonic Boom was still trash, though. Glad I never bought it)
E: By contrast, I don’t like Skyrim. I just don’t. I tried, but the game is just… bad to me. There’s this really odd mix of ISO Standard Design and baffling errors. Like the entire game came out of a factory that was calibrated slightly off. Not to mention pretty much all of the quests and stories were dreadful. Notoriously, the thieves guild quest might as well have not even been about thieves and was otherwise subject to an array of headdesking nonsense. I can’t really forgive any of this based on either it being a “smaller” studio nor it being open world, because The Witcher 3, while it has its own problems, solved pretty much all of my issues with Skyrim.
I liked Skyrim okay but didn’t see the love for it that leads others to sink 1,000+ hours into it (I suppose major mods help; I mainly use use minor QoL style mods). My biggest complaint was that nothing I did felt like it mattered. I remember making a pure mage style character, doing the wizard college quest line and becoming the Archmage. At which point everyone in the college I supposedly was head of still treated me like I just fell out of a turnip truck and the court wizard in Whiterun greeted me with a “Hey, if you’re interested in magic, you should go see the wizard’s college!” My other complaint was that it felt like a big world with lots of places to go but not much to see. Wander, find an ancient barrow, kill a half dozen Viking zombies and loot a barrel of potatoes at the end. Find a new barrow and do it again. I guess that, for the world size, it didn’t have many “Wow, this is really cool” moments for me.
I thought New Vegas was better than FO3 because of a stronger story and faction choices. Plus I just liked the setting better: it bothered me that Bethesda did nothing new with the Potomac Basin setting than making it essentially “Fallout desert with the Capitol building”. The Mojave desert in NV has more plants and interesting terrain. But I’d really say you need the mod to remove invisible walls from NV for it to shine – those were a terrible design choice.
Another “love it or hate it” game was Remember Me. I hated it. Thought it was insultingly linear and hand-holding and the combat was terrible; the boss fights even worse. I even lowered the difficulty to Easy to try to blow through the game and just learn the story but still lost interest. The most entertainment I got was setting the language to French and the subtitles to English and treating it as some post-modern French art film. But others loved the game and it seems like a 60/40 split in favor but very little middle ground.
Hitman: Absolution was an example of a game I liked before learning I was supposed to hate it. I never played the previous Hitman games so I didn’t have the whole “This isn’t a real Hitman game, Agent 47 would never do that!” angst going on. I thought it was an enjoyable stealth-lite game with a cheesy B-movie style plot but others were really upset that they didn’t spend more time dressed as a hotdog salesman.
I adored FO3, bought all the DLC and put about 120 hours into it.
New Vegas? Bugged to shit. I used to have to restart my 360 every 30 mins or so as the load times increased with every time it had to load anything. I gave up when I made a choice to kill a certain person, thus meaning I was aligned with another group, but the next objective in the chain refused to activate. I tried several times to no avail. It is (was?) a known bug.
I got bored with the obsession with what I found to be unimportant and uninteresting things. The myriad of different types of ammo, for example. It seemed like complexity for the sake of complexity. It just sucked the fun out of it all. Even the soundtrack was shit in comparison. There was not a single bit that improved on FO3.
Due to the bugs though it is what finally turned me back into a PC gamer instead of consoles, where patches are more frequent and there’s a community that can do unofficial patches. The only console I have from this generation is a WiiU for the exclusives.
I didn’t like paying full retail price for what seemed like a much smaller game. I didn’t like the constrained ending that flew in the face of everything they seemed to suggest you were building. But replaying it before Inquisition came out, I was reminded how much I loved the characters.
I remember loving Sparkster and Terranigma on the SNES, and Low G Man on the NES, but these seem to have received a great big ‘meh’ from the rest of the country.
I wish I’d held onto my copy of Terranigma. It’s bloody pricey now!
Way of the Samurai - somewhat obscure “Yojimbo”-like samurai game. I don’t remember this game doing very well in sales in the US, but I thought it was brilliant. I suspect it did well in Japan, and apparently had several sequels, but I only ever played the first.
It was not great in the way of graphics, or gameplay, but the branching storyline, the ability to drastically affect the outcome of the game, and the almost brutal level of reality was completely mind-blowing at the time. You could be as involved or uninvolved in the main storyline as you wanted. Important events occurred whether you were present or not. Your actions had real consequences. People you killed stayed dead; you could get some work done by the blacksmith, and after he was finished, you could choose not to pay him. Of course he would attack you, and you could kill him and not have to pay, but then you couldn’t get any blacksmithing done (d’oh!).
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Emphasis added. There’s your problem. The Bethesda properties on consoles are just horrible for reliability, and judging the title by the console version is gimping the product in the extreme. FONV shines on a decent PC. FONV plus good mods is absolutely brilliant on a decent PC.
You’ve never obliterated a whole Legion assassination squad with one sneak shot from a .50 cal sniper rifle firing explosive ammo? You have no idea of the fun you’ve missed.
Demonstrably false, except in the sense that everything they improved you didn’t like. C’est la vie. FONV squashes FO3 like a bug. If nothing else, Radio New Vegas with it’s swingin’ Rat Pack sound track wins hands down.
So, you did eventually see the light about console gaming. Too bad your bad console experience probably poisoned your opinion of a great game too much for you to give it a fair shake any more.
As someone who loved all of the previous games, I felt like Absolution was an appropriate evolution for the series. Blood Money was the perfection of the particular gameplay style of those first 4 games, and there was really no where else to take it after that. Anything else in that style would just start to become Blood Money add-ons. The series needed to go in a different direction and I, for one, enjoyed what they did with it. Sure, it was a lot more pewpew action-oriented, they added in a “win” button, and it was much, much more linear, but there was still a lot of stealth and I was happy with it.
I know I can’t steer this conversation back to the direction of the original OP, but I just want to say that hating praised media (be it games or movies or books or whatever) is incredibly overdone. There’s always a lot of people ready to tell you how bad something commonly liked thing is, it isn’t very interesting at all IMO. Oh well.