Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

What qualifies as "actual merits"?

Not being Nintendo.

 

[Matt Damon]

Baldur's Gate 2 is poorly written railroady trash where you're forced to play second fiddle to the main writer's OC donutsteel who is 15k steps ahead of you.
1 is unironically the better game on all accounts

If you think BG2 is bad, you should try the retroactive BG1 expansion that the faggots at Beamdog made. The villain of the whole thing is the writer's self-insert who's SO good and SO powerful and SO morally righteous and your characters are just too lame to understand how great she is until the very end.

It's like an episode of fucking Frasier where the entire plot could've been avoided by a single conversation, except it's not played for laughs.

 

[God of Nothing]

If you think BG2 is bad, you should try the retroactive BG1 expansion that the faggots at Beamdog made. The villain of the whole thing is the writer's self-insert who's SO good and SO powerful and SO morally righteous and your characters are just too lame to understand how great she is until the very end.

It's like an episode of fucking Frasier where the entire plot could've been avoided by a single conversation, except it's not played for laughs.

I'm never going to play that. Its existence is completely unnecessary. At the very least, 2 gave us Throne of Bhaal and an actual resolution to that whole son of Murder God thing.

 

[fartsnstuf]

Rock Band's fanboys were simp tier for how they'd make excuses for Rock Band's abysmal instrument quality. The guitars were terrible, they had no tactile feedback in the strum bar, and big flat mushy frets that just weren't pleasant to use at all. Each and every Guitar Hero guitar was better. And then you had the drums, which would drop inputs all the time. I never got to try Guitar Hero's drums, but I didn't understand how anyone actually got gud at drums without modding them to boost their sensitivity.

The keyboard was great, though. It also lasted exactly one game, only to get dropped in RB4, which vacuumed every last bit of enthusiasm I had for that series.

I prefered RB 1-3 over Neversoft's GH at the time, but honestly, Neversoft's GH was fine. Both had on-disc soundtracks of roughly equal quality, though Rock Band was a lot more user-friendly with its disc exports that only dropped a smattering of songs, and fully cross-compatible DLC, none of which was guaranteed in Guitar Hero.

the only good thing that came out of Rock Band was that microphone, especially if you can find it at a sale, works natively on a computer and is decent for what it is

 

[Articles and Nudes]

64 is the best DOOM.

 

[Pissmaster]

Speaking of The Witcher 3, in the brief time I tried it, I couldn't believe Geralt isn't memed to high heaven for how he's like a middle-ages version of J.C. Denton in terms of sheer autism. At least J.C. has some charm, but Geralt in a nutshell is basically like:


except he's played totally straight, and somehow people online don't riff on him endlessly for that

 

[God of Nothing]

Speaking of The Witcher 3, in the brief time I tried it, I couldn't believe Geralt isn't memed to high heaven for how he's like a middle-ages version of J.C. Denton in terms of sheer autism. At least J.C. has some charm, but Geralt in a nutshell is basically like:
View attachment 3740689

except he's played totally straight, and somehow people online don't riff on him endlessly for that

when you're a kid, autistic deadpan is hilarious
when you're an adult, autistic deadpan is admirable

 

[Local Degenerate]

Speaking of The Witcher 3, in the brief time I tried it, I couldn't believe Geralt isn't memed to high heaven for how he's like a middle-ages version of J.C. Denton in terms of sheer autism. At least J.C. has some charm, but Geralt in a nutshell is basically like:
View attachment 3740689

except he's played totally straight, and somehow people online don't riff on him endlessly for that

I've always figured it has something to do with the fact that Geralt is literally just every high-schoolers first fan-fic OC mary sue rolled into one, and the fact the Witcher games have titties in them.

I mean, tell me this doesn't sound like some middle schooler you want to slap the shit out of: 'My character is so cool, he's got a scar, and yellow cat eyes, and white hair, and everyone hates him because he's so much better than them (even though what makes Geralt 'cool' literally comes out of a bottle, so anyone could be a Witcher), so he beats them all up, but all the girls still want to fuck him, and he gets all the girls he wants, but is married to the coolest, hottest mage ever. Oh, and he uses two swords, but not at the same time, because I don't want it to be too obvious I'm ripping off Drizz't.'

I'm aware a ton of Geralds flaws come from Sappo himself, but damn if the games don't make them worse, especially with that garbage tier voice work.

His droning 'nooooo' at the beginning of W3 is still fucking hilarious to me.

 

[DavidS877]

I've always figured it has something to do with the fact that Geralt is literally just every high-schoolers first fan-fic OC mary sue rolled into one, and the fact the Witcher games have titties in them.

I just play it for the whores, and Shani, and Triss, and Yennifer. Just the whores, Shani, Triss and Yennifer, that's why I play the Witcher 3.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem should have been given another sequel. It’s a game that I’ve never played, but I still believe it would have been better competition for Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Spoiler

I was legit looking at long playthrough videos of the game, and visually speaking, it looks amazing. Plus, the altered freeze sequences make the haunting effects really well-done for its time.

 

[Yamamura]

I feel like GTA San Andreas was a "you had to be there" sort of game in order to be fully appreciated. For me the issue is that by the time I played my first GTA game the series was already into the HD era, so I don't have the same nostalgic appreciation/reverence for it as other people do who played it when it first came out.

I don't doubt it's a good game, however since I've already played tons of newer games that have borrowed a lot of features that San Andreas pioneered. I can't help but be reminded how I've already seen everything implemented better somewhere else. It's sort of like how the Blair Witch Project was a pretty cool idea for its time. But now since found footage type horror movies have become dime a dozen, it doesn't really have the same impression on people who have already watched dozens of found footage movies that came out after it.

 

[Matt Damon]

Unpopular opinion: I've been told for years that the Chronicles of Riddick: Butcher Bay was a great game, sleeper hit, some called it the best movie-license game ever made.

It's uh... it's really not. The story is incoherent, the voice acting vacillates between okay and terrible (Vin Diesel completely phoned it in), NPC behavior is a bizarre mess that I still can't understand, movement is even more floaty and vague than most first-person games, melee combat is awful, gun combat is uninspired, and it's generally just an unremarkable 4 or 5/10 movie tie-in.

I guess it's a pretty good-looking game for the time, but that's about it.

everyone hates him because he's so much better than the

And it's the kind of not-real-hatred where people are MAYBE slightly wary of him at first, but are instantly won over by his charm, good-looks, heroism, and conspicuously modern views on social issues.

I feel like GTA San Andreas was a "you had to be there" sort of game in order to be fully appreciated.

I disagree completely. I played through San Andreas again this summer and I was struck by just how much fun it still is and how shockingly well it holds up.

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem should have been given another sequel. It’s a game that I’ve never played, but I still believe it would have been better competition for Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Spoiler

I was legit looking at long playthrough videos of the game, and visually speaking, it looks amazing. Plus, the altered freeze sequences make the haunting effects really well-done for its time.

This is the unpopular opinion thread, and i doubt anyone here would dislike another Eternal Darkness. It is kinda sad you know, what made ED especial back in the day was the sanity mechanic and how the game used to mess with the player, something that could work a lot better today on newer platforms.

Just think about it, your'e just playing like normal and then the games "crashes" and an error message appears saying "your user data is corrupted" or "your account is suspended" , or the game closes randomly only to show your game library... and it's fucking empty, stuff like that would scare the hell out a lot of people the first time. Not to mention that a mainstream horror game inspired on Lovecraftian horror would feel like a breath of fresh air, especially compared to what the horror genre has become in the past few years.

I feel so old some times.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

I feel like GTA San Andreas was a "you had to be there" sort of game in order to be fully appreciated. For me the issue is that by the time I played my first GTA game the series was already into the HD era, so I don't have the same nostalgic appreciation/reverence for it as other people do who played it when it first came out.

I don't doubt it's a good game, however since I've already played tons of newer games that have borrowed a lot of features that San Andreas pioneered. I can't help but be reminded how I've already seen everything implemented better somewhere else. It's sort of like how the Blair Witch Project was a pretty cool idea for its time. But now since found footage type horror movies have become dime a dozen, it doesn't really have the same impression on people who have already watched dozens of found footage movies that came out after it.

I can totally see that, the game has some bullshit in it. It improved on many things from the previous games but these improvements might feel archaic now, same with the new additions that were really cool back then. Plus, the 3D GTA's lock-on shooting wasn't fun even then.

 

[Pissmaster]

I feel like GTA San Andreas was a "you had to be there" sort of game in order to be fully appreciated. For me the issue is that by the time I played my first GTA game the series was already into the HD era, so I don't have the same nostalgic appreciation/reverence for it as other people do who played it when it first came out.

I don't doubt it's a good game, however since I've already played tons of newer games that have borrowed a lot of features that San Andreas pioneered. I can't help but be reminded how I've already seen everything implemented better somewhere else. It's sort of like how the Blair Witch Project was a pretty cool idea for its time. But now since found footage type horror movies have become dime a dozen, it doesn't really have the same impression on people who have already watched dozens of found footage movies that came out after it.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I played GTA:SA when it was new, so the immense size of the game world was staggering, but that just reminds me of this image I saw a long time ago, comparing the sizes of game worlds:


So it was small even by 2010, but, the liveliness of the world and the density of content still rivals sandbox games today. Still though, the graphics were middling even back in '04, and there wasn't really random weird stuff that you could just stumble across. It's a fun game, but I can understand why it'd come off dated to you. It's pretty fuckin' old now, but that's what you get when you ask for the most amazing game of nearly 20 years ago. Time travel 30 years into the past, and you'll hear people discussing how incredible Wolfenstein 3D looks, and how it's surely a timeless masterpiece.

Time travel 10 years into the past, and you'll get.... well, Grand Theft Auto 5. Video game improvements have really trickled to a crawl over the past decade.

 

[Becky McDonald]

What qualifies as "actual merits"? The idea that intentionally pursuing novel product strategies that your market competitors won't is somehow invalid is utterly absurd.

I guess the alternative is packaging the same AMD SoC in two different plastic boxes and pretending that's "true gaming".

This is the Unpopular Opinion thread, you do realise?

The N64 stuck with cartridges and meant anyone designing software for it had to essentially either focus exclusively on it, or designate a separate team for it since the hardware was so different between it and games designed for the PS1, Saturn/DC and PC, along with their own arcade machines, which were more or less cohesive with each other; the N64 was the odd one out. And without the strength of its IPs, it would have died long before 2001. There was no logical sense in developing a title that was 1/10th the size of one on any other console, unless you could afford to do so or you were a smaller studio. They insisted on sticking with cartridges even though everyone could see the writing was on the wall for them and they were colossal retards not to have followed through on any of their CD plans. As a result you got super low poly models, low-res textures, midi sound effects, non-existent draw distances, and any game worth its salt needed extra processing power the original console didn't have which was dressed up as an "Expansion Pak".

The GameCube was Nintendo's "FINE I GUESS OPTICAL MEDIA IS THE FUTURE" moment and they engineered a pissy little disc that could store more and loaded quicker than the established DVD format pound-for-pound, but they didn't want to go all the way with it since once again, they cared more about their self-image than potential profit. They didn't want to engineer for the future, designed an unwieldy, cumbersome exterior that belonged in the early '90s, and above all else were late to the party. It still somehow sold less than the equally-late, inexperienced Xbox which didn't have the benefit of the xenophobic nip market the other two did.

So after Nintendo got buttfucked for two generations in a row, they shit out the Wii, and manage to wow the goyslop caste with motion controls for half a decade. Thanks to a little-understood Roman concept called Janissarius Faciam Gratis, it was impossible to discuss video games on the internet for about 18 months without the infinite horror stories of RRODs, YLODs, FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE US DOLLARS/NO GAEMZ and the like helping to run an unpaid guerrilla marketing campaign barely a decade removed from Nintendo's sabotage of the Saturn launch and attempted sabotage of the PS1 launch. The most blatant was probably that one video of a dad and his baby playing GTA and then playing Wii Golf or something, with the infant crying over the former.

It hardly matters that motion controls ended up becoming a gimmicky footnote in the greater history of video games in favour of VR, because the Wii did its job. It matters less that the Wii U was a colossal flop, and that Nintendo's only earnest shot at VR post-Virtual Boy was a bunch of cardboard shit that became the laughingstock of both 4chan and 8chan's video game boards for the year it came out. By the end of the seventh gen, both the PS3 and X360 were only within 15 million units less, with the X360 again without the advantage of the JP market after two subversive campaigns waged by the console's own fanbase that would have wrecked any lesser competition. Success, I guess?

It took 3 years, a pandemic, and the abandonment of eighth-gen hardware for the Switch to see any serious sales after trailing behind the XB1 for a fairly long period of time, and now in the ninth gen, the PS5 and XS are already nearly up to its comparative sales figures for the same period of time in spite of hardware shortages, little in the way of exclusive software, and the worst economic recession since 2008. Yes, technically the Switch has sold over 100 million units in total, but that's split over two gens. And when the generation has finished, you get zero credit for anything that happens afterwards. It's like Dreamcast fanboys who say the console "outlived" the PS2 and Xbox. Shovelware made 10 - 15 years after official production concluded does not constitute "outliving" anything. And unless the Switch adopts the model the Game Boy and DS did, it'll need to reinvent itself again soon. And no doubt it will.

Oh, and then we have portable consoles. Nintendo figured out that its DS could basically become the video game equivalent of Nike and release a thousand limited editions in all sorts of colours and specifications without actually doing anything. Even in the era of the Steam Deck, most gaming enthusiasts acknowledge the PS Vita was probably the best handheld of them all, shunned by its own company and doomed to failure because of the mobage market. Its possibilities are endless, but because Sony didn't make a thousand different editions and released a line of "Air Vitas" with black stripes on the back case and a picture of Kaz Hirai doing a slam dunk, it never saw the sales figures it aimed for.

Nintendo are basically the Jews or the Irish of the video games industry. They reel you in with all these sad tales and sob stories, and then you decide to actually look into their history and realise most of the bad stuff that happened to them was a result of their own greed and hubris.

 

[Matt Damon]

This is the Unpopular Opinion thread, you do realise?

Yes, it's the Unpopular Opinion thread, not the Unsubstantiated Opinion thread.

You can have whatever opinion you like, but expect pushback if your rationale is crappy.

 

[The Ugly One]

The N64 stuck with cartridges and meant anyone designing software for it had to essentially either focus exclusively on it, or designate a separate team for it since the hardware was so different between it and games designed for the PS1, Saturn/DC and PC, along with their own arcade machines, which were more or less cohesive with each other; the N64 was the odd one out.

The biggest difference between the N64 and the Playstation was media sizes. The Playstation, of course, had CDs, and what most people don't know is it could handle larger textures as well. However, if you cut the FMV and downsampled your textures, it wasn't too hard to port your game between the N64 and PS1. Where you really ran into trouble is if your game used too many models and textures to fit onto an N64 cartridge. Architecturally, the programming model is pretty similar between the PS1 and the N64. You've got a main CPU and a GPU, although the programming model of the N64 is a little different than the PS1s.

The Saturn, by contrast, used quads instead of triangles, meaning porting from PS1 to Saturn meant reworking 100% of the geometry. The SGL graphics library didn't abstract as much away from the programmer as the PS1's and N64's libraries, and of course, the hardware architecture was radically different, featuring two identical processors running in parallel rather than the CPU/GPU model.

Nintendo's sabotage of the Saturn launch

Sony got on stage after Sega's announcement at (I think) E3 and announced a price $100 below Sega's. Sega has nobody to blame but Sega for Sega's failure.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem should have been given another sequel. It’s a game that I’ve never played, but I still believe it would have been better competition for Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Spoiler

I was legit looking at long playthrough videos of the game, and visually speaking, it looks amazing. Plus, the altered freeze sequences make the haunting effects really well-done for its time.

So few exclusives came out for the Gamecube that weren't Mario-themed that it really got short shrift on graphics. Any time a developer whole-assed a game, it looked stunning. Eternal Darkness came out in 2002, so that was when a lot of people's main way of encountering a game for the first time was seeing it on a store shelf, not Twitch or YouTube. The game has terrible packaging. The front of the box gives you no idea what the game even is, and the screenshots they chose for the back make the game look garishly colorful and kind of lame. It looks like it might be some sort of boring point-and-click adventure.

The PSP's whole raison d'etre was to build a portable console that would destroy, from every conceivable factor, the Game Boy Advance.
To its credit (once the bigger batteries came out), it did. The only problem was they couldn't foresee Nintendo launching the DS and making bank on yet another gimmick.

The Game Boy kept destroying challengers (remember Game Gear and Lynx) because Nintendo understood that in the handheld portable space, battery life and durability trump graphics every time, and winning on price just adds a killing blow. Sony didn't understand this and assumed that if your graphics were good enough, a fragile, expensive handheld with poor battery life could sell.

 

[Becky McDonald]

Yes, it's the Unpopular Opinion thread, not the Unsubstantiated Opinion thread.

You can have whatever opinion you like, but expect pushback if your rationale is crappy.

Unsubstantiated? How exactly? You mean like how the N64 and Gamecube sold a fraction that its gen-leading rivals did, the latter somehow underselling the Xbox despite having a far longer R&D period, significant IP advantage, and home advantage over the American upstart? The GC should have sold at least 50 - 60 million units bare minimum, but didn't because it didn't support DVDs (mainly because its rival held a monopoly and it didn't want to go to Philips due to pre-existing bad blood over the CDi, a similar slapfight that caused it to engineer its own soundchip for the GBA rather than licence some 15 year old Sony unit), its own proprietary format was underdeveloped necessitating 2 discs for a lot of more intensive titles, its exterior design was antiquated and unwieldy and SMS tried to be quirky and different instead of a direct sequel to SM64.

There is no argument other than agreeing that Nintendo, at the very least, blew what could have been a very comfortable lead (or at least competition) during the sixth gen away because of the company's own flaws and unwillingness to adapt to the times.

Like how there's been no mainstream hit video game titles released since Just Dance 4 that used motion control in any significant capacity? Literally, that entire genre vanished from the face of the Earth once the Wii ended its lifespan and the Wii U failed to make so much as a dent. You don't go from pioneering one gen to irrelevant the next unless you were just a flash in the pan, like Sega's Genesis kind of was. Wii Sports Club sold so little its sales figures aren't even reported anywhere, and the new one for Switch has only sold 5 million which is still a fraction that the second game sold during the final 3 years of its life on a console which peaked in sales 2 years ago.

Nintendo has made much of its money post-1995 investing into gimmicks of which the only remotely successful ones were motion controls on the Wii, a portable console with a touchscreen, and the concept of a hybrid system with the Switch. Other than that, they have haemmorhaged (and continue to haemmorhage) vast swathes of the wealth it built up in the '70s, '80s and '90s simply because it has "beyond fuck you money" and can afford to do that, without any real desire to innovate and keep up. Its games aren't the best they can be, and over-rely on what are now approaching 40 year old franchises outside of maybe Splatoon. We are already seeing the effects of this in their decision to use Chris Pratt instead of Charles Martinet in the Illumination movie, simply because they're fucked if he pegs it on their watch. Even Sega, without a console, managed to come up with Yakuza (fuck whatever retarded name they changed it to) and look how much of a success that's been.

People tend to forget, based on what its rivals (including Sega in regards to the Shining Force debacle) have done in recent years that Nintendo are and firmly remain some of the dirtiest heads in the game. If they could find a way to profit on every Italian newborn named "Mario", they would. But if you dare to critique the sacred cow in circles such as these you're labelled a "neofag soynygger".

 

[Raging Capybara]

Dude wrote a wall of console wars text in goddamn 2022. And he even simped for Sega holy shit.