consider this a counterpart to the post made by @GuyWTriangle
i have a few but this is my best example:
driv3r. i played the absolute hell out of it back in the day. the first two driver games are ps1 classics but the third game nearly killed the series entirely. atari forced the devs to release it several months before it was finished in order for it to compete with gta san andreas, but the game was very glitchy and a tacked on third person combat system was no match for what gta had to offer. there was also a scandal called driv3rgate (very original) related to atari giving early access to a couple of gaming magazines in exchange for positive reviews, which ended up being the final nail in the coffin for the game.
i still like it a lot. the driving in it feels really good, and i honestly prefer it to san andreas in that respect. the car destruction in the game is also really impressive for ps2, even though car explosions could bring the game down to like 5fps due to the amount of physics objects flying around. also, the three cities in the game (miami, nice and istanbul) have their own distinct atmospheres, cars, and soundtracks. speaking of soundtracks, there were some really good songs on it, my favorite being this. the story mode had some fun missions, but also some really brutal ones. i feel it relied way too much on the third person shooter combat that just wasn't very good. however, the driving missions were mostly fantastic in my experience. it's kinda what the series was known for.
it'd be nice to hear about any negatively received games that are near and dear to you. i love to hear people being passionate about the things they love
Slightly cheating, because nobody really claims this anymore, but I remember back in the 2000s people were shitting on Zelda: Wind Waker because of all the sailing being "time consuming"
It was one of my favorite parts of the game.
honestly having frequent periods of downtime where you're not doing anything besides traveling from one destination to another is a really bold decision and i wish more games would try it.
Sid Meier's Beyond Earth
I wouldn't say I LOVE the game, but I have immense respect for any game that tries to do something interesting and fails. SMBE is full of potentially really interesting mechanics that on their own I think are really good but ultimately don't really fit the game that the fans thought it would be
I would also add Civ:Rev as a console prole, myself. Yeah, it's not real Civ and a lot of people shit on it for that, but it was the closest we got on console until the latest game. Viewed on it's own it's a fun little strategy game with one benefit over real Civ: fast games!
Also i could fucken destroy the ai on the hardest difficulty once i figured out how op Leonardo's Workshop was, along with the one Wonder that built free cathedrals in all of your cities if you built a temple before you discovered it
I would start every game once i got sailing tech just searching like mad for that thing, and if i found it my new priority was settling EVERYWHERE and building a temple before i would let my unit "discover" it, culture flips for days lmao
My favourite game of the Assassin's Creed series is Liberation, which many others think is the worst in the series. But the story, the dress mechanics and the main character I think hit the Assassin vibes the best of any game. Just walking up to a target, poking them with an unbrella and walking away unseen.
My favorite is AC1. I felt like most of the games in the series don't fully embrace their setting (2, Unity, Syndicate) and the ones that do are kinda boring (3). But AC1 setting is fresh and historical while fitting the assassin character perfectly.
i'll have to check that out, i haven't played that yet. it seems way more interesting to me than ac3! plus having a female protagonist is a massively welcome change of pace
I really enjoyed Liberation too! Mechanics were great and really interesting change, that also worked really well with the main character and her story. Plus you get to kill slavers and free slaves, automatically making it great
i feel this if only it didnt suck such eggs on modern systems :angery:
I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was super engaging and thrilling. I definitely don't want to downplay the bad experience people had with last gen consoles, but if you can run it well on a PC it can be great.
The thing with Cyberpunk is not that the released game is bad, it's alright if you want a linear game in a beautifully made setting.
The problem is that they marketed a game that was going to rival what Rockstar make and yet Cyberpunk doesn't even contain basic features that have existed in GTA since GTA3 let alone things that would make it rival the likes of RDR2 etc. The world isn't really a sandbox it's more like a diorama unfortunately.
And unlike No Man's Sky which actually HAS gone on to deliver what they promised in all the marketing, Cyberpunk probably won't deliver anything they promised. It's pretty clear that there's like 3 people working on it now.
I got it second hand for $20 on ps4 and didn't keep up with hype, played it a year after launch. I thought the story was only okay, the shooting was fun, the city was pretty gorgeous, it was still pretty buggy Id crash every hour or two, the city was pretty sparsely populated and the racing gigs with trans icon Claire was bad because you can outdrive the AI and loading on last gen pretty easily. It would have sucked to have payed full price for it at launch, but I liked it overall for $20 I guess.
Good post, on the one hand I hate theme park MMOs as a concept but on the other hand seeing the whole world of Elder Scrolls makes this the one theme park MMO I want to go back to
Also the PVP is pretty fun when the servers don't fuck everything up but I haven't played in a few years
Yeah I liked how some of the quests would just have a gay couple as part of the story and it wasn't treated as a big deal and also that quest in the Black Marsh DLC where we help an argonian transition
I remember finding a quest I missed in my starting area right before I quit when I thought I had completed the base game so I can see how guides could help
I heard they changed something about champion points in the last year
For all it's genuine issues and legit bugs, if you can get beyond them Alpha protocol is the most underrated game of it's generation.
oh man, i did a melee only run in plain clothes to keep my stealth high and orphan counter at zero :meow-fiesta:
the game needed like a year more in the oven, but damn if it wasnt great
Right? I swear you can see the seeds of greatness in it if you look really close. Another year of QC And polish and revamping a few systems here or there and my god it could have been the start of something huge.
https://youtu.be/8dyPBkJuFdU
:yea: there were so many cool things that the game basically pioneered. Like the whole, this person fucking hates you and that means you have an entire dialogue tree where you just insult each other all day long AND you still get gameplay bonuses for it. Also the amount of choices that actually change things, trying to get Marburg to stand and die is like a goddamn puzzle by itself.
Also you bug a CIA listening post in Rome and you can murder everyone there :meow-bounce:
Oh I played the shit out of Aliens vs Predator 2. It was a wacky wonky mess but it was fun as hell.
They had this great game mode in multi where everyone was a marine except 1 alien. Every subsequent marine that died respawned as an alien. What started as a bug hunt spirals out of control while 2 or 3 panicked marines are fighting off an endless tide of alien drones.
I know exactly which one you're talking about.
Used to play that shit with a friend of mine via direct IP connection on my 28k dialup.
Yep. That game had great ai. The alien ai would spawn off the regular map and track you down both on the accessible map and their own hidden routes. "They're in the vent ducts!"
imagining someone shitting on a game i enjoyed
Empire Total War is decent, actually. a bit of a mess but i actually disagree with the refrain 'Napoleon Better, More Refined'. actually fighting across 1/3 of the planet is pretty cool and extremely important to the whole premise of an 18th century wargame. like why y'all think Napoleon went to Egypt in the Critically Acclaimed campaign in the sequel? it wasn't a fucking sightseeing tour it was designed to undermine British Empire providing it revenues to keep up the fight in Europe. the game that lets you capture/blockade british india to win against them in Europe is a better game than one that pretends europe is some kinda vacuum
My biggest one is Star Fox Zero. I fucking loved that game, it captured exactly the energy of the N64 game while adding a bunch of new stuff like the chicken mode and the buggy. The only level that kinda sucked was the one where you explore around the base in the quadcopter - everything else is high speed arcade shooty action, fuck yeah that game rules. Gamers hated it because it used motion controls in a really interesting and innovative way.
Watch Dogs 1 has fun gameplay and an amazing atmosphere. The color grading or whatever you call it is amazingly realistic. People went in probably expecting like Elder Scrolls or something because of the fake gameplay footage but it still delivered on a lot. The seamless player invasions are mind blowing. Much cozier vibe than GTAV but a smaller game obviously.
I really liked Clara, but all the shooting in that game is really incongruent with the premise and story.
2 games on ps2 i fucking loved were the bionicle game (very negatively received) and predator concrete jungle.
bionicle owned honestly. like its a p typical collect-a-thon game like banjo kazooie or w/e but you got to play ALL of the OG bionicles, and each area + character had a unique mechanic. i vividly remember going underwater with the water bionicle or FLYING/gliding with the jungle one. it was so cool.
predator concret jungle was just being a predator and it also owned and still owns, last time i played it (like 2017?). controls are super clunky but once they click, it has such a fun movement system, like how assassins creed platforming felt but long before AC. if it wasnt for the controls being kinda shit i think it wouldve been received a LOT better
The new Assassin's Creed games, they're the exact kind of open world schlock that I love (and they still have cool historical stuff)
Origins >> Valhalla > Odyssey btw
