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The Games We Hate

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Merkava:
Xenosaga.

Xenogears is one of my favorite games, so you can imagine my disappointment upon playing Xenosaga. Obviously, it wasn't meant to be a true sequel/prequel, and I wasn't expecting such. I was expecting a playable game with interesting characters and an enjoyable plot. Unfortunately, I got this slow, extremely cheap battle system that, when in motion, is the equivalent of swimming through molasses. If I'm not having fun, I'm not going to stick around for the story. Of course, the story didn't strike me as that great, either. Nothing that occurred made inching through the drudgery of the battle system worth it.

Johnny C:

--- Quote from: Storm Rider on 12 Jun 2007, 14:15 ---If I remember correctly, Yukon Trail actually was a fun game.

--- End quote ---
It was, actually. There was river rafting and my favourite part was when you picked your site. If it was lucrative, like a dozen people would show up and pan straight gold from the river.

Maya Trail, now that was a shitty game. The plot was that an asteroid was going to hit Earth (!) unless you deciphered a bunch of clues in Mayan temples. You biked to each temple. And the temples were kind of like exploring in Myst, i.e. utterly dead. Then you could go in the temple and into a little D&D-style maze except there were no enemies ever. It was boring as shit and I couldn't figure out what to do so the world kept exploding.

öde:

--- Quote from: Switchblade on 27 Apr 2007, 12:32 ---fething
--- End quote ---

Nerd.

I hate Wurm Online simply because it is almost perfectly what I want from the genre (reality sim) yet it fails on crucial points. Bascially, Wurm Online is a big world, populated by players that have gone out and made their own settlements, organisations, etc. There are no NPCs in the game except for merchants and monsters, everything in the game is player created and player run. This is awesome.

Unfortunately for me, it is extremely tedious. You have to dedicate a lot of time and effort to menial tasks to keep up what you've created, and somehow earn money to buy a deed and hire guards, etc. While this isn't too bad in a community, the tedium does get to you. The massive effort to do anything in the game is a huge put-off. On the other hand I suppose this is what makes the game realistic, slows down the development of the landscape to a manageable pace, and provides a bigger sense of accomplishment when you finally get something done.

What really screws up the game is the distinction between free players and people that pay to play. While a lot of the differences are fair, you can buy in game money cheaply, meaning free players have no chance unless they spend most of their time on the game.

Cenyu:
A game which I did not hate but was rather immensely disappointed in: Black and White.

It had been pretty hyped before its release and I immediately bought it. The thing is I can't even remember why I did not even finish the third island. I just was not motivated to spend more than a few hours with the game. Six to seven years later it is kinda puzzling now that I think about it. I bought it, installed it, played it two or three days, ejected the CD and forgot about the game. And I can't even remember what exactly bothered me about B&W.


On the ongoing Halflife 2 discussion:
I did not like HL2 terribly much mainly for its lack of a proper story (in my eyes). I have witnessed year-long debates about the implications and nature of the story in gamers' forums and yeah, I find myself asking: What did I actually accomplish, who did I fight against actually...? The whole game is experienced from Gordon Freeman's perspective with no cutscenes transcending his personal viewpoint and giving away information to the player. Some might like this feature, I did not. I didn't know what was going on and GF's unnatural silence throughout the game was unnecessary and didn't help me to enjoy the game. For me HL2 was not very exciting and to be honest the gameplay was not that smooth, too.

xero:

--- Quote from: Spike on 20 Jun 2007, 01:24 ---I'm tired of multi-platform releases.  It works between consoles, but it doesn't work so well with console and pc releases.  It just seems to me that games are simplified to cater to the console, and that gimps the pc release.

--- End quote ---
Seconded. Unfortunately I think it's pretty safe to say that barring some unforeseen turn of events, the PC gaming market is slowly dying, being replaced by the console market. Don't believe me? Check out the PC games section of your nearest Best Buy. Four years ago, the PC games section took up a quarter of the whole store. Two years ago, it took up two racks (front and back) in the middle of the Home Computing section (but I'm not counting the budget/youth/educational titles that no self-respecting gamer would purchase, like "ABC Turtle Teaches Spelling" and your "Bratz: Do-It-Yourself Brazilian Waxing for Young Girls" games). A year ago, the gaming section took up one rack (front and back). Last time I went in there, about a month ago, I was looking at half of one side of one rack. The console games section has had the inverse development.


--- Quote from: Spike on 20 Jun 2007, 01:24 ---I only had one gripe with Morrowind, and that was the combat system.  I could see the guys pores, and yet, I'm to not be able to hit the guy on three out of five attacks.

--- End quote ---

Try 49 times out of 50. The numbers-based combat and magic in Morrowind originally put me off of the game entirely, but luckily a friend of mine convinced me to give it a second shot. Once you get past the first few levels of your weapon of choice (and for this, the mudcrabs and rats are perfect), combat becomes much easier and less frustrating. I never did get the hang of the magic system though, aside from enchanting weapons. Still, Morrowind (and its expansions) was, for three years, my favorite video game ever, until Oblivion came out.

Now I can't honestly say that Oblivion replaced Morrowind for the #1 spot... It's not a horrible game (once you mod it up to fix the broken leveling system, the bad LOD, and some of the "well duh" glitches and missing features) but I still wouldn't call it my favorite game, by any sense of the word.

The reason Morrowind stopped being my favorite game after Oblivion is because after Oblivion, Morrowind felt downright unplayable. The problem with playing a next-generation sequel to a great game is that all the limitations and flaws that were barely noticeable before suddenly stop being so easy to miss. The characters in Morrowind ceased to be slightly-pixelated, poorly-proportioned, oddly-behaving people in my eyes, and instead became poorly-rendered, poorly-designed, poorly-scripted cardboard cutouts. The game-stopping glitches and crashes to desktop became downright unacceptable. AI scripting and bot-pathing became glaringly clunky. The interface, which I still think was far better implemented than the Oblivion one, suddenly started screaming "OBSOLETE!" at me every time I tried to use it. The enchantment system stopped being so familiar. And so many other things. Oblivion took away my ability to enjoy Morrowind.

Thankfully, Oblivion is not entirely a lost cause. There's a lot you can do to improve things with mods. With the right ones installed, you can pretty much turn the game into a true successor to Morrowind. But you can't fix the goofy AI. You can't fix the boring, generic-fantasy scenery. You can't fix the voice-acting problems. And you can't bring back the giant mushroom trees looming overhead, the "tap-a-tap-a-tap-a" of a nearby squib, the mating calls of the netch off in the distance, or the raspy Ashlanders urging you to "make it quick, n'wah!" It's just never going to be the same.

I loved Shivering Isles, by the way. Even if the rest of it was horrible (and it wasn't), the return of the giant mushroom trees made it worth the $30.


Oh, yeah, games I hate:

Lionheart promised to be an intelligent, deep RPG with one foot firmly rooted in medieval history, and the other in classic fantasy. Instead it was... half of a just-barely-decent game. Where was the other half? I don't know. I bought it on release day for the full $50, and a month later it was in the bargain bin for $9.99.

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