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Universally praised games on GAF you can't get into?
- Thread starter vicissitudes
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RPGCrazied
Member
Any FPS, I just won't play.
NEOPARADIGM
Banned
Clear said:
It's only trial and error if you can't figure out the puzzles.
Someone actually said that to me on here regarding another game.
MrCompletely
Member
Oblivion - Weird, because I love the newer Fallout games and I'm an old school RPG fan, the first RPG I ever played was Ultima 7. Just couldn't get into it, lost interest after completing the first Oblivion gate.
Halo Multiplayer - it just always seemed out of date, antiquated, and floaty to me. It's weird, because I thought Halo 3 and Reach single player were both A+. That engine just doesn't feel right for multiplayer.
Any Final Fantasy (or any JRPG really) - In my mind, these aren't really RPGs. Baldurs Gate is an RPG. They are really just poor tactical strategy games, imo. For good tactical strategy, I'll play Jagged Alliance 2, Frozen Synapse, or Dawn of War 2
Halo Multiplayer - it just always seemed out of date, antiquated, and floaty to me. It's weird, because I thought Halo 3 and Reach single player were both A+. That engine just doesn't feel right for multiplayer.
Any Final Fantasy (or any JRPG really) - In my mind, these aren't really RPGs. Baldurs Gate is an RPG. They are really just poor tactical strategy games, imo. For good tactical strategy, I'll play Jagged Alliance 2, Frozen Synapse, or Dawn of War 2
diffusionx
Gold Member
-NinjaBoiX- said:
Well, most of the games he listed are pretty famous, well known and beloved games. If you haven't heard of them, it's on you. It's entirely possible he made shit up to sound cool, but those are good games listed.
Supervlieg
Member
Random encounters as well yeah. I remember blowing up a reactor. Maybe I was even a bit further in. But I never felt at any point that I 'liked' it or had 'fun'. Hate is a strong word, especially considering its just a leisurely product one can chopse not to play.SneakyStephan said:
I never said I disliked the story (not that I cared for it), but the whole turn based combat thing turns me off. And I've played other turn based rpg's, with the same feeling. I dont think ive ever managed to finish one of those. And I've tried. But at least I know what games to avoid.
SneakyStephan
Banned
The materia system is where the beef of the game's mechanics is at.Supervlieg said:
And about the story: well you quit during the set up to the story before the chars get properly introduced, it's really quite good (exceptional for videogame standards)
Nothing wrong with hating a game, but you have to at least have played it for a bit.
edit: regardless, you can't argue with this (or I will stab you):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzz5cVt70j8
Anyhow, try out a game called 'king's bounty : armored princess'.
If you don't enjoy that, then you indeed will never enjoy turn based combat.
Super Metroid. It's weird because I enjoyed almost every Metroid game that came after it, including the 2D GBA games. I played Super Metroid for a couple of hours but never enjoyed a minute of it. It's one of those things that I just can't explain.
Majora's Mask. It's one of those games that I've tried to enjoy at least five times. It's the only 3D Zelda game I've yet to beat.
Team Fortress 2. I'm sure if I took the time to actually practice I'd enjoy it more, but I get slaughtered whenever I join a match. The game looks fun and the characters are interesting, but when it comes to multiplayer shooters I'm usually no good. I generally stick to the easy setting on FPS single player games.
Majora's Mask. It's one of those games that I've tried to enjoy at least five times. It's the only 3D Zelda game I've yet to beat.
Team Fortress 2. I'm sure if I took the time to actually practice I'd enjoy it more, but I get slaughtered whenever I join a match. The game looks fun and the characters are interesting, but when it comes to multiplayer shooters I'm usually no good. I generally stick to the easy setting on FPS single player games.
ScionOfTheRisingSun
Banned
Joseph Merrick said:
I'll give you the abridged version. In the early 90's, which is a time I consider to be the golden age for western game design, I played a lot of PC games, because they did a lot of interesting things.
The breakout designs of classics such as Another World, Dune 2, Dune, Doom, Lemmings and Civilization where unique and the development mentality favoured experimentation and off the wall concepts over lemming like conformity towards game design trends that have dominated the decades since.
Right around the time where Quake launched the PC development landscape started to shift and the developers began to compete on only the technical merits of their games. The early stuff featured a designed-in-a-vacuum approach and got on by unbridled creativity while being made to run on the modest 640k DOS systems available to everyone.
But the breakneck speed of PC hardware evolution in the mid 90's erased all of that and PC devs were soon driven only by a passion for rapid technological oneupmanship and lemming minded copycatting of popular concepts. Just take a look at the history of Duke Nukem Forver for a glimps into the logic that drove the PC landscape for most of the 90's and early 00's.
As gameplay started to be regarded as secondary to technical improvements PC devs started to rely heavily on a handful of gameplay archetypes borne from their early 90's creativity, such as first person shooting, rather than creating new ones.
Later as the technological oneupemanship started to lose its momentum due to being financially unfeasible the developers in the west started to focus on another favoured aspect over gameplay, which has remained their darling since, that being storytelling.
This is often one of the chief things held up by the sheitgeist as an example of why former PC developers who have gone turncoat and are now working on consoles are the current darling over the Japanese who reigned supreme for decades but have now fallen out of favour in the west.
Increasingly western games focus less on providing a enjoyable gameplay and prefer to have their storytelling take center stage as their main draw for players. This is an approach that certainly resonates with a lot more people as movies have been an ubiquitous part of peoples culture for a long time. Thus the idea of games as interactive movies where you get to play the lead role has a lot more mainstream appeal than the idea of playing a large complicated game with lots of hard to master mechanics and rules because doing so is fun.
I have written a lot about my thoughts on the video game medium and how it is not one fit for storytelling, and even if it could be made to be half decent at it through a herculean effort it still wouldn't matter because that is not the raison d'etre of the medium. I have also argued many times that therefore this constant envy of the cinematic medium is a dead end and a dangerous path, but hey, this is where AAA games are going in the west and there is not a damn thing I can do to stop it.
But let us let all of that be, my ultimate conclusion is I play games for gameplay only and never have and never will care about storytelling, let alone easily digestible storytelling structure yanked right out of Hollywood, for which I do not care the least. So games that try to weigh that above anything else will always fail to capture my interest.
Luckily the Japanese, outside of the often crippled RPG genre, have an unrestrained, only-there-to-serve-the-gameplay approach to storytelling and still focus on refining and improving gameplay so I still enjoy their efforts. Certain eastern European developers like the guys who did S.T.A.L.K.E.R belong more to the western camp but make rebellious attempts at providing new gameplay experiences which I find to be commendable and to my taste.
Anyway, there is more to it, but that is the gist of it.
EricHasNoPull
Banned
The Assassin's Creed Series: Probably the time the first AssCreed came out there was too many other games I was playing and into ( I think I was deep into Fallout 3 at the time, or maybe it was other game(s)) totally a different type of game with pacing and tone. Plus the reviews made it out to be too repetitive and boring. I never had a desire to play any of the AssCreed games since then, I did purchase a copy of AssCreed II the other day, maybe someday I'll give it a try. Also I really enjoyed playing an hour of Ass Creed: Brotherhood on my PSN +. the cannon firing was pretty fun and the story was somewhat memorable.
Red Dead Redemption My life was pretty hectic when this game came out, I was busy at work and had lots of other things to do. It being a huge open world game, and again some people/critics claiming it to be too long and repetitive throughout, I really wasn't in a mood to dwell into a lengthy, time sucking open world game at the time. But considering how much praise the game's gotten post release (way after the dust settling) It seems that it kinda has survived the test of time with its quality. I should give this game a try sometime.
Mass Effect 2 I hope I don't get any slack for this, but I totally couldn't get into this game for the life of me, I tried everything, (please note two things, I'm not a huge fan of deep RPGs, and I never played the first ME game) but this game just felt too tedious and fabricated to me, I played many different demos, I even played about the first three hours of the game, just couldn't be arsed to go on. Maybe it's the crazy lens flares and bland (futurist airport looking) space stations that didn't appeal to me? maybe the dead pan, emotionless close up of faces of the characters? I am not a huge Star Wars fan, I also didn't dig the many colorful alien/people I was meeting to give me missions, that blue alien chick in that cheesy nightclub?!?! the Alien (beastly looking) friend I just met and saved his life?!? I didn't care, although he did look bad ass after his injuries and armor damage. Elusive man was also a little too.. elusive?! all I pictured was Martin Sheen's face after listening to the voice, (which also threw me off) I felt intimidated being thrown right into a captain's position in a big Spaceship full of other staff, trying to navigate the entire frikin galaxy, I guess that's kinda neat, but I just didn't care for the spaceship parts, I wanted to be at the next location etc...Anyway maybe one day "I'll get it" right ow it's just sitting in my PC's HDD collecting dust.
Those are the three for now, I'm sure there's more but not as big and praiseworthy as the ones above.
Red Dead Redemption My life was pretty hectic when this game came out, I was busy at work and had lots of other things to do. It being a huge open world game, and again some people/critics claiming it to be too long and repetitive throughout, I really wasn't in a mood to dwell into a lengthy, time sucking open world game at the time. But considering how much praise the game's gotten post release (way after the dust settling) It seems that it kinda has survived the test of time with its quality. I should give this game a try sometime.
Mass Effect 2 I hope I don't get any slack for this, but I totally couldn't get into this game for the life of me, I tried everything, (please note two things, I'm not a huge fan of deep RPGs, and I never played the first ME game) but this game just felt too tedious and fabricated to me, I played many different demos, I even played about the first three hours of the game, just couldn't be arsed to go on. Maybe it's the crazy lens flares and bland (futurist airport looking) space stations that didn't appeal to me? maybe the dead pan, emotionless close up of faces of the characters? I am not a huge Star Wars fan, I also didn't dig the many colorful alien/people I was meeting to give me missions, that blue alien chick in that cheesy nightclub?!?! the Alien (beastly looking) friend I just met and saved his life?!? I didn't care, although he did look bad ass after his injuries and armor damage. Elusive man was also a little too.. elusive?! all I pictured was Martin Sheen's face after listening to the voice, (which also threw me off) I felt intimidated being thrown right into a captain's position in a big Spaceship full of other staff, trying to navigate the entire frikin galaxy, I guess that's kinda neat, but I just didn't care for the spaceship parts, I wanted to be at the next location etc...Anyway maybe one day "I'll get it" right ow it's just sitting in my PC's HDD collecting dust.
Those are the three for now, I'm sure there's more but not as big and praiseworthy as the ones above.
Pretty much all the games on his favorite list that I've played are legit great games (and many of the ones I haven't played but heard about have their fair share of supporters), and I can see valid reasons for disliking everything on his first list (some of which were even on my own, and others that I don't particularly care for or have no real interest in playing). There's nothing wrong with either one.-NinjaBoiX- said:
Metacritic is a terrible barameter of quality btw.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
NEOPARADIGM said:
The thing about Braid is that its core mechanic of being able to rewind and retry enshrines trial and error as being what the game is all about!
Just because that function allows you to avoid cheap-shot kills when something emerges from the ground in front/too-close to react normally doesn't make it any good. Same deal when pretty much every puzzle is solved by reaching an arbitrary x/y position on-screen through manipulating event sequencing - stuff that isn't really difficult to design when you (as a developer) have the luxury of being able to build them in reverse. i.e. start with your character at the designated end-point in space, and construct the route to it backwards.
Its not big and clever, (ingenious maybe) because when all's said and done there's nothing emergent about the gameplay, its all strictly deterministic and essentially involves the player somehow arriving at the prescribed sequence of events laid out by the designer.
Combichristoffersen
Combovers don't work when there is no hair
Phife Dawg said:
There are projectile weapons, and I'd recommend you to stick to them, as melee combat in V:tM - Bloodlines is terribad, and easily the worst thing about the game.
Half-Life 2
I never played the first one because I didn't have a decent gaming computer until around 2003 so I didn't have any attachment to the story/characters. Played a little bit into it and found myself bored by the slow pace. Set it down and never went back. It didn't help that older FPS games used to give me headaches/motion sickness and this one was right on the border where I could play a little longer than before but I'd start to get those feelings after a bit. I think I've gotten past the motion sickness and whatnot but with no real attachment to the series I haven't gone back and tried it again.
Mass Effect
I love RPGs and I figured I'd like this one as well. Turn out to be a muddled affair where neither the RPG or Shooting aspects really excelled. I would have thought more of the game if the world didn't feel so small in comparison to older RPGs. Either you were in extremely small, poorly designed, cut & paste kill rooms; Barren planets that were a snore to explore; or you were staring at a poor 2D representation of the Galaxy and were "exploring" it by clicking on little icons of planets and such. There were some high points but honestly I enjoyed DA:O far more if mostly because I thought the characters were more realized and that world seemed more organic rather than the obvious constructed feel I got from ME.
I never played the first one because I didn't have a decent gaming computer until around 2003 so I didn't have any attachment to the story/characters. Played a little bit into it and found myself bored by the slow pace. Set it down and never went back. It didn't help that older FPS games used to give me headaches/motion sickness and this one was right on the border where I could play a little longer than before but I'd start to get those feelings after a bit. I think I've gotten past the motion sickness and whatnot but with no real attachment to the series I haven't gone back and tried it again.
Mass Effect
I love RPGs and I figured I'd like this one as well. Turn out to be a muddled affair where neither the RPG or Shooting aspects really excelled. I would have thought more of the game if the world didn't feel so small in comparison to older RPGs. Either you were in extremely small, poorly designed, cut & paste kill rooms; Barren planets that were a snore to explore; or you were staring at a poor 2D representation of the Galaxy and were "exploring" it by clicking on little icons of planets and such. There were some high points but honestly I enjoyed DA:O far more if mostly because I thought the characters were more realized and that world seemed more organic rather than the obvious constructed feel I got from ME.
NinjaBoiX
Member
Oh shit, really? I've been buying games solely on the strength of the metascore, this whole time.tiff said:
/sarcasm
Sorry dude, are you honestly saying that the pooled scores of nearly every published review on the net is utterly useless? I know, moneyhats, blah blah, but most of them are thoroughly legit opinions. You are talking shit.
Haven't been able to get into a bunch of GAF's darling games, and I can enumerate exactly the reasons why they put me off or failed to grab me.
1. Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time - They look and sound like utter mud (both now, and to a lesser degree, at the time of their release), and while they were ground-breaking in numerous ways at the time (enough that I just had to get through Ocarina to see what the fuss was about), they're just plain boring. Empty, relatively lifeless worlds (the Ocarina Hyrule Field is just a disaster), really terrible, clunky-looking art (or it's just realized poorly in the game with disastrously crappy character models). The shitty little moans and sounds NPCs utter in place of dialogue are infinitely more annoying than charming. The music sounds like it's being hammered out of a 4-year old's first toy keyboard. The game 'worlds' are some abhorrent and deformed version of whatever Zelda in 3D looked like in my head before 1998 showed up, and I've never been able to shake it.
I hate everything that Ocarina did to Zelda outside of play control. And yet, they remain on top of everyone's Zelda lists, system lists, replay lists, and best-of-all time lists. A true shame, because on paper, Majora Mask's gameplay system sounds absolutely fascinating to me.
Love the 2D ones to death, and always will. Really hoping Skyward Sword turns shit around for me. Orchestrated music is a major step in the right direction.
2. The World Ends With You - One of GAF's most universally praised original IP RPGs literally starts off its first five minutes with the most visually Nomura-esque character ever created, reciting the most childishly emo soliloquy in all of game history ("I don't get people!"), and being thrust into inexplicable combat against demon frogs, given an artifact that grants you a scanning ability (without being told what you're to scan for) and an ominous world-ending threat from absolutely no one in particular. Extremely unlikeable, right from the get go.
Worst introduction to a game in recent memory. I don't care how stylish and different it is. It's not good just because it's different. I'm sure there's some kind of polished gem of a gameplay system in there, but I, someone who understands the quirks of Japanese dialogue/storytelling in games was put off. Imagine the average gamer, especially someone picking up a game like this for the first time. Terrible. That's not how you get someone into your game.
1. Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time - They look and sound like utter mud (both now, and to a lesser degree, at the time of their release), and while they were ground-breaking in numerous ways at the time (enough that I just had to get through Ocarina to see what the fuss was about), they're just plain boring. Empty, relatively lifeless worlds (the Ocarina Hyrule Field is just a disaster), really terrible, clunky-looking art (or it's just realized poorly in the game with disastrously crappy character models). The shitty little moans and sounds NPCs utter in place of dialogue are infinitely more annoying than charming. The music sounds like it's being hammered out of a 4-year old's first toy keyboard. The game 'worlds' are some abhorrent and deformed version of whatever Zelda in 3D looked like in my head before 1998 showed up, and I've never been able to shake it.
I hate everything that Ocarina did to Zelda outside of play control. And yet, they remain on top of everyone's Zelda lists, system lists, replay lists, and best-of-all time lists. A true shame, because on paper, Majora Mask's gameplay system sounds absolutely fascinating to me.
Love the 2D ones to death, and always will. Really hoping Skyward Sword turns shit around for me. Orchestrated music is a major step in the right direction.
2. The World Ends With You - One of GAF's most universally praised original IP RPGs literally starts off its first five minutes with the most visually Nomura-esque character ever created, reciting the most childishly emo soliloquy in all of game history ("I don't get people!"), and being thrust into inexplicable combat against demon frogs, given an artifact that grants you a scanning ability (without being told what you're to scan for) and an ominous world-ending threat from absolutely no one in particular. Extremely unlikeable, right from the get go.
Worst introduction to a game in recent memory. I don't care how stylish and different it is. It's not good just because it's different. I'm sure there's some kind of polished gem of a gameplay system in there, but I, someone who understands the quirks of Japanese dialogue/storytelling in games was put off. Imagine the average gamer, especially someone picking up a game like this for the first time. Terrible. That's not how you get someone into your game.
This probably isn't the thread to start a real argument on that subject, but yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. They're "legit opinions" in the sense that they are opinions and they are sincere (hopefully, anyway), I suppose, but they are no more insightful or useful than, say, a pooled tally of every NeoGAF user's score for a game, another metric I would put absolutely no stock into when deciding on a game purchase.-NinjaBoiX- said:
-Pyromaniac-
Member
Fallout 3. Though to be fair, it's not like I think GAF is crazy, they usually never steer me wrong. The game just doesn't mesh with me.
Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
Beyonetta so far. I played about an hour and am confused by the story and don't quite have the mechanics down yet. Maybe I need to give it another go though, everyone seems to love it.
-Pyromaniac-
Member
no I haven't, and I did like early Fallout titles (and yes I know who developed NV). Maybe I should give it a try sometime? Is it that much different? I just assumed they carried on what Bethesda did with the series.Billychu said:
-Pyromaniac-
Member
ahh then maybe I will check it out sometime. My biggest gripe with 3 was that it seemed "pointless". Just didn't care about anything happening, not even in the slightest.Billychu said:
I've always had a problem with the 3D Zelda games for some reason. As soon as you are presented with a dungeon I immediately lose interest. It's like everything appealing about the games gets sucked away as soon as you enter them. All the nice atmosphere and music replaced with ambient eerie sounds and to makes matters worse you are forced to remain in this unappealing environment and solve puzzles which makes things frustrating. Had the games at least given you a carrot in the form of a appealing story or something i might have beaten them.
It feels like a very shallow complaint but thats all it is, i love puzzle games and adventure games but i think Zelda implements them really weird.
It feels like a very shallow complaint but thats all it is, i love puzzle games and adventure games but i think Zelda implements them really weird.
-NinjaBoiX- said:
He didn't say that, though, just that an aggregate of the gaming press doesn't mean anything to him.
I'll wait for forum chatter to take off and hope that someone with an opinion I hold highly gives some impressions on a game. If that doesn't happen, I'll usually turn to a demo or youtube videos and make my best judgment from those, with gaming press review scores being the last resort. I don't know the last time I bought a game based on a score aggregated by Metacritic, but it's been a while.
Nizz
Member
I'd go with this as well. I see praise for Elder Scrolls in general and I even had Oblivion at one point but I just couldn't get into it. Seeing all the excitement for Skyrim has me wanting to try Oblivion again. I could have been my state of mind at the time that I couldn't appreciate it, I don't know.Toki767 said:
Bayonetta- I see people praising the game all the time but I played the demo and couldn't get into it. And I enjoy playing games like Devil May Cry and God of War. Maybe it's just the way it runs on PS3. Just doesn't feel as smooth as DMC or GoW.
Grand Theft Auto games- I've always seemed to start these games, get about a quarter of the way through and just seem to run out of gas. I bought GTA3 and Vice City but finished neither. Never got San Andreas or GTA4.
Ratchet & Clank series- They seem like fun games. I played one of the demos for the last Ratchet game (I think it was the Clank demo) and it was fun. Maybe it's just the cartoony style to it. I feel like I'm too old to be playing a game with characters like that. Which I can understand if people call bullshit on it. If a game is fun, it's fun.
Chrono Cross and Dragon Quest VIII. I put a lot of time into both of them, just reminding myself that a payoff was close, and ended up quitting about mid-way through confused and disappointed. They're not good at all.
Half-Life 2 is so fucking boring. I don't understand the praise.
Half-Life 2 is so fucking boring. I don't understand the praise.
bender
What time is it?
There is something about the combat in The Witcher series that just doesn't click with me. Me not liking them is a fault with me over the game though. I guess I just prefer turn-based battle systems or somewhat mindless clickathons. I'd love to see a quality lets play of both games as everything else seems to be right up my alley.
Tactics Ogre (PSP): I've been a fan of the genre since the original Ogre Battle but I'd dropped off in the last few years. I loved FFT, the Front Mission games, TO:KoL for GBA, the Fire Emblem Games, and the original Disgaea. I picked up Disgaea 3 cheap last year and put about two hours of work into it before I gave it to my brother.
I figured I'd pick up TO:LUCT after all the love it was given by tfrog, but man, it just bores me to tears. Part of it is just that my gaming time is shorter now, but it really comes down to not wanting to play for hours with an ineffectual squad, fiddling with skills and equipment to squeak out wins while I unlock the better classes and gear.
I figured I'd pick up TO:LUCT after all the love it was given by tfrog, but man, it just bores me to tears. Part of it is just that my gaming time is shorter now, but it really comes down to not wanting to play for hours with an ineffectual squad, fiddling with skills and equipment to squeak out wins while I unlock the better classes and gear.