I'm fairly critical, so there's not too many on my list, but the biggest one is that I liked Quest 64 (somehow) when I was younger.
I also love La Mulana 1&2, along with Deadly Premonition, though those are more "cult hits" aka critical failures that 'widely disliked'. But, I'd definitely hesitate to recommend any of them to someone unless I thought they'd be into it.
Yeah critics were quite positive but it's the black sheep of the franchise in the souls community. I swear to god if I have to read "Dark Souls II is good game, it's just not a good Souls game" one more time I'm gonna become the pain train
Lots of reviewers will give high scores to bad games that are highly anticipated to pander to Gamers. Dunno if DS2 fits that but it does happen
Dark Souls II is a really good game. I don't even remember who didn't like it when it came out. I think it's generally regarded as the best soulsborne PvP.
I really like how beautiful ds2 was. dark souls 3 had a lot of browns and felt washed out. I liked how 2 managed to add a lot of color and still keep it grim. Too many games think that just becuse its grim it need to have a bland color palleted
Still my favorite Souls game. I took the entire thing to be a circular metaphor of being trapped in a loop of depression. Majula is my favorite area from any game, ever, and I will defend it until I die. Those waves rolling in, the sun on the horizon unsure if it's setting or rising, the town slowly filling back up with new friends. You can see distant landmarks of where you're going or where you've been, but here you are once more in Majula. It's perfect. I love how still it is even as life returns, how it's always in an eternal state of either dying or coming back to life, yet never reaching either. Everyone seems so distant and spaced out. Most of all? I love how no matter where you go, Majula is your home. You can travel far and wide, you can defeat dragons in sky castles and big scorpion monsters. You'll always find your way back either deliberately or through whimsy. It's always waiting for you and it's begging you to simply sit down and watch the waves, forever. Also you get a talking cat friend who makes fun of you.
I'm gonna cry just thinking about it. No other area in any game gives me the same feeling of Majula. It's both my home and yet it's threatening. It's a trap and yet it's welcoming. It's a physical representation of how depression can feel peaceful when you become accustomed to it, and change can either seem frightening or pointless. It's the welcome embrace of the stillness of the present, telling you to simply sit down and accept how things are, rather than leave and regret your every decision. I want a real Majula please.
I really likes the Pursuer. First time you fought him? I got my ass absolutely kicked. But as you progress through the game and fight him against and again it gives you kind of a way to gauge how you're doing, how you're getting more powerful, how your build is coming together. I really liked that.
And Majula's theme is fantastic as well, perfectly matches the feel for it as this hopeless dumping grounds for lost hollows.
The online forums are wrong. After years of avoiding it due to bad public opinion I finally got into it last month and it wasn't perfect... not at all. But it was still great, and I thought the gameplay was really strong. I really like parts of it more than DS1
Edit: To clarify why I think the game's not perfect:
- I played Scholar of the First Sin, but IMO the original should've and could've also been 60fps.
- I felt that the difficulty curve was off, and that the first intended area was a bit overwhelming.
- Attribute descriptions are very poor. ESPECIALLY "Adaptability" which is a very, very useful skill because it gives you dodge roll i-frames and the game doesn't explain this at all. So I consider it a failing of the game that that info has to be found online instead of in-game.
- The controller, at least on PC, has a square deadzone instead of a round one. You get used to it but it's still dumb.
These two pix explain point 4 http://imgur.com/1js9v6S vs http://imgur.com/uO3l10d. Blue regions don't register diagonal movement.
Same here tbh. Darksouls 1's strongest point is the first couple of areas as you search for the bells but drops in quality sharply post Sens, meanwhile Darksouls 2 has rough maps but nothing on the sheer unfinished scale of Lost Izalith.
The Guild. It's peak Eurowonky. An incredibly buggy and poorly designed game that lets you do The Sims as a medieval dynastic economic simulator. I've yet to come across a game that has the same sense of political economy to it short of like the Victoria series.
Patrician series comes close and is marginally less eurojank, marginally
same. after countless hours in morrorwind it felt like a genuine upgrade of everything that made morrowind awesome, possibly excluding the alien atmosphere (until the mad god expansion) and of course magic flight.
Yeah I've been really amazed at the level of detail that game has in it, and I also played it Day 1. I must have spent the first several hours simply walking around looking around at the scenery. It's amazingly detailed, the environment is huge, every car, gun, and building has a level of care put into it that drew me in. I seriously love that game simply from the map itself. All the different areas of the city feel distinct, it's easy to visually navigate based on landmarks.
Also? The traffic lights work and there's even pedestrian crossing signals. It's a good people watching simulator
One of these days I'm going to play Cyberpunk 2077 solely so I can watch the Action Button review of it
IIRC you could watch the AB review without being very spoiled; during the choose-your-own-adventure segments, you just have to choose the ones that don't focus on the game.
It's always held a place in my heart because it's kinda like Oblivion: Janky as fuck, poorly designed, and just not at all what was promised, but still possessed of an ineffable charm that kept me playing it
Also the flying cars mod really gives it some staying power now
I'm going to take the laxest possible meaning of "widely disliked", but Cultist Simulator is probably in my top 10 games ever, and it has 71 on Metacritic (6.9 user score). It is probably the smartest application of anti-design in gaming.
Most I've heard about press is that the creator is, unfortunately, a sex pest. Dunno if that affected reviews, but I did like the game as well, before that news came out.
That one kinda bums me out because Ross is describing an incredible game there and I want someone to make it
Cultist Simulator is so fucking cool, I love it. It's very buggy though. Kind of hurts the enjoyment when you've got a table literally covered in cards and it feels like every third time you pick one up the UI bugs out and cards become untouchable or unaligned with the grid or disappear or something.
What's your favorite aspect? I like knock and the moth one, but the heart one is also cool because Percussigants.
this is maybe a stretch but considering the way people talked about MGS4, I actually think it was an amazing game. People write it off for much the same reason that people write off Death Stranding (which is also one of my favorite games ever): because it's Kojima at his most bombastic and self-indulgent, and true as that may be, I think it also means it's the most personal game in the franchise. In making a serious attempt at writing a story about world peace, about the end of the series (which it should have been), and about his own career, he creates moments that are simultaneously absurd and heart-wrenching.
I actually quite like Metroid: Other M and that's almost heresy among people who like Metroid. I like all the other Metroid games too though, favorite is Zero Mission.
One I doubt any of y'all have heard of is Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon on the SNES. I know it sounds like I made that up, but I really liked it as a kid. It's a basic platformer with some spaceship parts where you're a tiny shrunken doctor shooting viruses and stuff with your medicine gun. The ending of the game you're in a person's brain shooting nicotine particles to cure a cigarette addiction.
I also like a lot of the 3D castlevania games, like the N64 ones and Lords of Shadow.
I think I'm alone with thinking that Bubsy 3D isn't all that bad.
it's interesting and ambitious for its time, but it aged poorly right from the start. It came out about 2 months after both Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot, both games that nailed the formula a lot more smoothly. Although Bubsy 3D definitely laid the foundations for later 3D platformers. The art direction is kinda cute too, like a Chuck Jones era cartoon.
the game is a massive grindfest, lost a year of my life to it and i was stuck in the cold war tanks
Dark Souls 2 🤝 Bioshock 2 🤝 Dragon Age 2
Oft beloathed middle children with a lot to love about them
Even I don't call it "good," but I have fun with Lichdom Battlemage
Shadow the Hedgehog isn't a masterpiece by any means, but aside from a couple of obnoxious missions, I found it blandly enjoyable at worst. The story is actually kind of adorable in its tryhard edginess, and the soundtrack has some legitimate bangers.
I like how you can shoot NATO Troops (or their Sanicverse equivilent at least) and Sonic gets mad at you
I have a fondness for tryhard edginess. Idk I grew up on Jak 2 and 3. I can never explain why I find it charming.
I liked it as a kid, then I didn't like it for a while, but in recent years I've come back around to liking it again. I guess it reminds me of being a teenager so it's a bit nostalgic - but also I think part of why I've come to appreciate it is because modern pop culture is annoyingly self aware ("well that just happened" laugh track) so I appreciate media that takes itself seriously even if it's going over the top.
I absolutely loved Shadow the Hedgehog. For a while it was probably the most replayable game I had, I probably played it 100 times +
I really liked Star Fox Zero and think it's one of the best games on the Wii U (which is basically an entire console of underrated games). Fly and drive fast, blow up cool robots piloted by wacky furries, find secret exits that form multiple game paths, do fucking BARREL ROLLs - aside from one level which is really slow and sucks, Zero should have been everything people wanted
Oh but apparently it's "too hard" to fly with a joystick and aim with the gyro, and instead of getting good the game community completely rejected Zero based on its controls. I'm reminded of how the first games that used twin stick controls got bad reviews for them despite it becoming the gold standard once people got used to it.
It just sucks. We had to wait like eleven years between Assault and Zero, and it'll be at least eleven more before Nintendo takes another risk with the franchise, which along with F Zero (last game released almost 20 years ago RIP) is one of the best IPs Nintendo owns.
This is from my childhood, but Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for the SNES. Very simplistic compared to other titles in the series, in plot and characters and gameplay, and apparently considered to be Not Very Good. It was designed as a dumbed down game for Americans.
But the music is incredible and I have played through the game several times over the years.
Looks interesting, may need to give these a try. I have never heard of the series before, but I do like HoMM, and don't mind some old-game jank
