Good games that you hate.

[Flying Arrow]

The companion thread to Merry's. List some solid, well-made games that you just can't get into or that put you off in some way despite their general higher quality. I have several:

-Xenogears: Picked this up on PSN this week. It's the third time in my life that I've started it, but I have never actually managed to get even halfway through Disc 1. Not only that, but I hit a wall and had to restart this time (this is partially my fault and partially the fault of a badly-designed scenario). God knows when I'll finally see the end credits. I've also never been into mechs of any kind, so I've always kept a healthy distance from this title. I also generally dislike the game's look and mechanics (ugly rotatable environments and terrible platforming sections). It generally doesn't really have that special something that I love in other Square games, although maybe I haven't given it a fair shake.

-Okami: A solid, beautiful game that I just find monotonous and kind of boring. There's a lot to do and it's absolutely gorgeous to look it, but I feel like there is way too much busywork going on. It also lasts forever and the companion character never shuts the smurf up and kills any possible mental challenge the game throws at the player. Probably another one I'll never see the credits for, but wish I could.

-Psychonauts: I'll admit it. I hate this game. It's creative and adorable and all that, but it plays like absolute trash. I have the PS2 version but I'm willing to bet that the others are just as obnoxious. This probably shouldn't be on this list, but since a lot of people like it I figured I'd include it.

-BioShock: Honestly? I find it boring. I love almost everything about it except for the actual level-design, which I found to be tortuously monotonous. Every time I get the urge to give it a spin again, the thought of slogging through level after level chills me. I may give this one another try; I still want to see that 'good' ending.

-Dragon Age Origins: I'm primarily a console gamer, so I realize this isn't the ideal way to play this game. Truthfully, I think the console version is a butchered PC port, and I only had about an hour or two's worth of time with the PC version at a friend's. I completely see myself enjoying this a great deal more with the proper set-up and inputs (on PC with a keyboard and mouse). On the other hand, I'm just not a fan of Bioware's games. Jade Empire and Mass Effect 2 are others that I've sadly given up on.

-Deus Ex: Yeah, yeah. But there's just something about it that gets me. The AI, mostly. Every encounter is awful for me simply because I dislike killing people (funny thing is that stunning and killing have no functional difference; enemies will never wake up once down and nor will they be woken up by comrades). I bet if I had more bloodlust I'd have a better time. I've always wanted to love this game and popped it in recently again, but just nothing. Still looking forward to Human Revolution, though. And Alpha Protocol was a great variation on the DX theme, too.

[Jessweeee♪]

FYI I made that thread because every gaming thread turns into this thread and it's just so negative! But I'll participate anyway because I love complaining.




I'm not too fond of anything Mario.

[NorthernChaosGod]

If I don't like it, it sucks.

[Laddy]

I hate shooters.

[Wolf Kanno]

You should know, you're officially dead to me now Flying Arrow for hating on Xenogears and not liking giant robots.

This is kind of tough for me actually, cause despite disliking several popular games, I don't necessarily feel I hate them. I would still play them (many I still do) but I still feel the games are flawed, and often don't deserve the praise they receive. Other popular games I don't like has more to do with not liking the genre itself, these I'm omitting.

So I start with this frame of mind, often times the game simply doesn't live up to my expectations and nothing more, some are awful though...

Let's start off with the two big ones for this forum.

FFVII. I've grown to like VII from a mechanical point of view and I do like the world design and mythos, but I feel the game failed to live up to it's grander background and VII still has my least favorite cast in the series ignoring crap like X-2 that is. I still feel the game has many redeeming values, and I do get around to playing it more than I care to admit but I don't really take any pleasure in the narrative or characters.

FFX is mostly a sub-par game. Its not necessarily a terrible game but I feel it backtracks so much from previous installments of the series and does so little to advance the series and genre, either as a game or as a story. It's just disappointing cause it's overwhelmingly mediocre and even good ideas like the combat system are poorly implemented by making the game dirt easy and creating a battle system that requires you to be more repetitive than usual for RPG.

Crisis Core: Solid proof that nostalgia and fandom can make even the most awful of games sells millions of copies and excel it into greatness. CC has a watered down version of KH1's combat system, with a terrible interface for using materia, a useless skill (block) and a broken skill (dodge roll) that either hinder you, is useless to you, or is so overpowered that it sucks away challenge from the game. Missions are incredibly repetitive, usually involving traversing the same five maps for 90% of the missions and only add a few extra for the other 10%. The story mode is criminally easy, requiring little in levels, strategy, planning, or pacing. If you had a hard time with the final boss in CC and you are not playing on Hard mode, you fail at gaming. It is that ridiculously easy. Speaking of hard mode, it goes in the opposite direction and is incredibly difficult unless you spend countless hours in normal mode leveling materia and working on fusions to get max stats.

The story is awful, Genesis is not only annoying but his whole story is a slightly alternate version of Sephiroth's and while the game tries to make him sympathetic, his obnoxious bouts of gnarm inducing poetry and his snarky jack-assery pretty much wants you to smash his goddamn pretty face in every time he is mentioned.

Most of the cast of new characters feel like knockoffs from other characters in VII. This is the games biggest flaw as a narrative, often times the best moments are simply the times the game emulates the original game, from the alternate train opening, to Zack falling through the abandoned church, to randomly running into Yuffie, to the fact the games plot is basically the same themes of VII, from Zack trying to stop a Super SOLDIER elite who was created in an experiment involving gene splicing alien DNA with human DNA. He learns he's a monster, goes crazy, and tries to destroy the world. CC really doesn't try to be original, its just a cheap knockoff of the original with a different cast and lacking all the elements that made the first game great.

Overall the new elements don't add anything new to the VII mythos, Shin-Ra made a few Sephy knockoffs who just cheapen the blow to Sephiroth's fall into insanity. Considering he learns that both his best friends are Shin-Ra experiments, what's the big deal then Sephy? Why would you think you were different. I would have been questioning my origins after you learned the first one was not completely human.

The storyline undermines the original game and tries desperately to force itself into the canon so fans can't just ignore it anymore. The Nibelheim incident is completely ruined thanks to the alterations to the story. Even returning characters feel like shadows of their former selves. Happy an calming Aerith has to be cheered up quite a bit by Zack and her interactions with Zack are so few that it doesn't do much to establish much connection with each other, Cloud is continuing his whiny self-pity rewrite from AC, Sephiroth is keeping up his calm and quiet badass reslove despite being one of the more chatty villains in the series. Hell, the majority of Sephy's dialogue in CC is during the Nibelheim incident.

Even some of the better elements like the last stretch of the game feels like the staff is trying so hard to compensate for some kind of inefficiency in the original. As far as fans knew, Zack was taken out by a small platoon of soldiers that got the jump on him For BoB cause I think he's still playing this In CC, he fights most of the Shin-Ra army and almost wins, literally being killed by the last two survivors of the battle. He get's a gnarm induced final speech to Cloud and then the game breaks out into one of the worst ending themes to grace the FF titles. It's bad enough that Sephy got transformed into a city destroying badass of unstoppability in CC, to have Zack get an equally absurd power boost was ridiculous. This coming from a guy who actually loves Zack.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Good god has this game not aged well, it was acceptable back in the day and even then I still felt that the move to 3D didn't really work out so well for Link. I hate Z targeting cause it seemed like it got in the way more often than not, but the game constantly brings up new scenarios that force you to use it. The best elements of the game are taken straight out of it's predecessor (which never seems to get any kind of credit) and the Time Travel gimmick is barely used in the game, beyond grabbing a few extra hearts and one silly dungeon, hell, it's practically the same thing as the Dark World gimmick in LttP except you get a different character model and it's in 3-D.


Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - As a cinematic experience, this game is great, as an MGS fan whose eaten up the mythos, the game does a decent job tying up most of the loose ends even if some things felt kind of pointless. As a game, I felt MGS4 dropped the ball, it incorporated a third person shooter set-up which destroys the games balance and makes it one of the easier entries imho. There is no point in using stealth, Snake can murder anything but Gekkos (until you get to Shadow Moses that is) that the game throws at him. The boss fights themselves, while still fun and crazy, felt much easier since you can actually just blow them away with ease and access a gun store for any ammo or weapons you need. The 3rd Person Shooting is not even that good cause the game can't put up enough of a good fight to offer a challenge. What's the point in using stealth if its really difficult to be killed? The entire principle of stealth is to avoid conflict cause you can't win. When you're main character has the power of an 80's action movie star, why the hell should you hide? Some would argue the game is great cause it allows you to play it differently but now you're just in the GTA mindset, except everyone seems to fail to forget that GTA is actually pretty awful in all of its gameplay modes, it's an awful shooter, an awful driving game, it's only strength is that it allows you to do multiple things, not any of it very well. No one is waiting for the GTA racing spin-off, nor the action/shooter spin-off either. The same applies here, neither mode is really satisfactory.

GTA series - Just read the part I referenced in MGS4 rant. Except add the fact the game is more engaging as a silly middle school gore fest where you're laughing to yourself everytime you score with a hooker and then beat her to death. The plots are (like everything else in the games) simply just poor knockoffs of actually good crime films. If you really want to watch the story of a crime lord in Miami set in the 80s, just watch Scarface.

Mario Galaxy - I don't know what it is about this game that makes it so unengaged for me. Maybe it's because the levels feel like nothing more than a series of micro puzzles rather than a silly romp through a level where I can shut-off my head. Maybe it's because other plat-formers have come and destroyed my ability to accept the Mario formula of platform gaming. I'm halfway through the game and I am utterly bored, maybe it's just too easy.

Fallout 3 - I love the world and setting, but it's bogged down with too many silly quests that bog down the pacing, it has a rather boring main story with awful pacing, and the game gets pretty easy rather quickly. Basically what most of you people say about FFXII.

Resident Evil series - Its not scary and until RE4, it had awful controls.

[Flying Arrow]

FYI I made that thread because every gaming thread turns into this thread and it's just so negative! But I'll participate anyway because I love complaining.




I'm not too fond of anything Mario.

If it makes you feel better, I love your thread. Forgive me for being hate-filled.

In my defense, I wanted to use the word "dislike" in the title rather than "hate" - but then it wouldn't have mirrored your thread and I would have lost my beloved symmetry.

[Slothy]

Mario Galaxy - I don't know what it is about this game that makes it so unengaged for me. Maybe it's because the levels feel like nothing more than a series of micro puzzles rather than a silly romp through a level where I can shut-off my head. Maybe it's because other plat-formers have come and destroyed my ability to accept the Mario formula of platform gaming. I'm halfway through the game and I am utterly bored, maybe it's just too easy.

What bored me more than anything was the complete lack of exploration and how linear ever single world was. Not to mention everytime they (poorly) implemented motion control into the game. It felt like a big step backward from games like Mario World and Mario 64 where the player could explore for secrets and dictate how they completed the game. Hell, I didn't even get most of the stars in Mario 64 in order. Nothing beat stumbling across a star you weren't looking for, or finding a new secret in a level. Much of that was absent in Mario Galaxy and instead we got extremely linear miniature worlds and the lackluster return of suits and the fire flower.

Resident Evil series - Its not scary and until RE4, it had awful controls.

RE4 still had awful controls. Not being able to move while aiming, strafe, or even see the laser if it didn't hit something you could shoot (which makes no sense to me since it should be easy to render the dot on walls, floors, etc. when everything is rendered in real time). It's also about twice as long as it should be and falls into a repeating pattern of shoot some enemies, run away when they get too close, turn around and shoot some more (once you can figure out where you're aiming anyway), die in some unexpected QTE that expects me to have the reaction time of the flash, restart, die at the same QTE because they changed the button they want me to press, etc. I could keep going on, but suffice it to say I despise every aspect of the game and from what I played of RE5 they didn't fix anything. Dead Space was the game RE4 should have been if they wanted to go the action route.

Mass Effect: Like pretty much every Bioware game I've played (and Bethesda for that matter) I love the world, the setting and the history, but they decided to populate that world with boring characters, a predictable and very cliched sci-fi story, terrible gameplay (and I do mean terrible, the combat is a bad TPS with a piss poor cover system and half assed RPG element), and to top things off, what western RPG these days is complete without your genre standard binary morality system, complete with telling the player exactly how good or evil they are. Seriously, I despise any game giving moral choices and then completely undermining any meaning they have by applying some sliding scale of moral judgement to it. The morality systems need to become seamless and subtle if developers ever want me to take them seriously. You can apply every criticism I just had about Mass Effect to KOTOR as well. The only thing I can give them credit for is at least carrying the impacts of your choices in Mass Effect over into ME2, but since I haven't played Mass Effect 2 yet (and getting the full effect would require replaying ME since my save file is long since gone in a PC reformat) I can't really judge how well it works, though it wouldn't surprise me if they found a way to undermine the impact of it like I felt they did every other time I made a choice.

Every (console) Mario Kart since Mario Kart 64: Rubber band AI is a lazy solution to not being able to program competent AI, and the rubber banding became a massive problem after MK64. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that beating DD or MK Wii on anything over 50cc is as much about luck as skill. Add to that the fact that the newer courses have boring layouts with no real shortcuts, and there's little appreciable difference in the characters and you have games that make me want to put my controller through the TV. In fact, I hate these games so much that I refuse to even acknowledge them as being good, but some people seem to disagree, hence the make the list.

[LunarWeaver]

Halo D=

[Loony BoB]

I would say hate is too strong a word, but I dislike FFX despite knowing that the game itself is probably good. Why? Because I can't stand Tidus and I can't stand Yuna. Seymour is nothing but annoying as well. I just... urgh. I hated those three characters. Wakka was annoying on occasion as well. The rest were tolerable, but still, urgh. Couldn't have made the three focus characters any more annoying for my end of things.

[kotora]

It can't be a good game if I don't like it.

[Dreddz]

It can't be a good game if I don't like it.

I was about to say the same thing. My word means more than anybody elses I say. The only exceptions might have to be the Metroid and Castlevania games. In particular Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. Both well made games which I feel I should like but just can't get into.

[Madame Adequate]

This thread is breaking my heart

All Zelda games

[Jessweeee♪]

GTA series - Just read the part I referenced in MGS4 rant. Except add the fact the game is more engaging as a silly middle school gore fest where you're laughing to yourself everytime you score with a hooker and then beat her to death. The plots are (like everything else in the games) simply just poor knockoffs of actually good crime films. If you really want to watch the story of a crime lord in Miami set in the 80s, just watch Scarface.

Ahahaha I remember when a Scarface game was made and it looked EXACTLY like Vice City because really how was that not going to happen? The only GTA title where I enjoyed doing the missions was GTA IV. I was actually interested in the plot, and most of the missions weren't aggravating (but oh god every time I see "Get on the motorcycle." I want to punch things). The REAL fun in GTA is cheating to get weapons and tanks and then blowing things up!

[Psychotic]

Ōkami. Look at the reviews it got.

The game is completely atrocious. Nice artistic style, the rest was just smurfing dull and not fun to play in the slightest. And get rid of the line above the O you pretentious jerks.

[sharkythesharkdogg]

-Xenogears: Picked this up on PSN this week. It's the third time in my life that I've started it, but I have never actually managed to get even halfway through Disc 1. Not only that, but I hit a wall and had to restart this time (this is partially my fault and partially the fault of a badly-designed scenario). God knows when I'll finally see the end credits. I've also never been into mechs of any kind, so I've always kept a healthy distance from this title. I also generally dislike the game's look and mechanics (ugly rotatable environments and terrible platforming sections). It generally doesn't really have that special something that I love in other Square games, although maybe I haven't given it a fair shake.

WHAT?!?!?!?!?

You should know, you're officially dead to me now Flying Arrow for hating on Xenogears and not liking giant robots.

That is all.