Most overrated "classic" games (anything before the PS2)

[skykiii]

Half Life, Thief the dark project and System Shock. You still get a certain breed of fedora wearers wanking over how no videogame has ever been or ever will be as good at these.


The standard at the time for 3d gameplay was fixed camera and tank controls so it was a really great design feat for the time even when it doesn't hold up as well today. At least Mario 64 is miles better than going back to say, the first Tomb Raider.

One thing I find funny.

Even back in the day, I recall people noticing that Tomb Raider and Zelda Ocarina actually had very similar gameplay. I've even seen TR described as "3D Zelda if it was JUST the dungeons... and you have guns instead of a sword."

And really, yeah... the similarity is very noticable, especially whenever you have to do a running jump or a block-moving puzzle (which is like, all the damn time).

And yet Ocarina is held up as this great masterpiece while Tomb Raider is often called an unplayable dated relic.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

(I'm not accusing you specifically, I'm just making an observation about a trend I've noticed).

 

[skykiii]

My pick would be "basically every 90s PC game" but that would be cheating. So my answer is all the Mechwarrior games.

I heard nothing but hype for these games for years, only to actually play them and find them lacking. The deep lore? Not in the games. It's in several novels that were never released in the UK as far as I can tell. The in depth customization? All the mechs are the same aside from tonnage and hitbox (except in MW4 and MW5 which fans complain about). The tactical simulation gameplay? Biggest mech wins. Get close for short range weapons, or keep your distance and spam long range weapons.

Even the fans don't seem to be fans of the games. They name drop story lines like "the word of Blake", "the merik civil war" and "the dark age", or mention characters like Dominic Payne or organizations like The Kell Hounds, but when I ask for details none are provided.




Sin episode 1 was way better than Half-Life 2 episode 1, but the latter overshadowed the former. I guess Sin was always getting screwed by Half-Life release dates.

Honestly, Mechwarrior/Battletech's lore got retarded after MW2. Basically imagine the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, if it had a crack-baby with Dune, and then was raised by suits that forced it to keep going long past any logical stopping point just like various Marvel and DC properties because it was profitable.

Early on the story was just... there's these five great houses and they're fighting for control of the galaxy (called the Inner Sphere, because anything outside IS is regions of space nobody has explored and come back from). For a long time the novels were basically micro-stories about how some merc team or person played a role in this large-scale conflict. Imagine those parts of Romance of the Three Kingdoms where some one-shot character wins an important battle, if all those parts were turned into full novels.

(And if you've never read romance of the three kingdoms, I recommend this translation. Seriously actual good literature is better for your brain than all this corporate shit... even if corporate shit is fun. EDIT: If you go for a Kindle Edition, make sure it specifically says "translated by Moss Roberts." For awhile Amazon was selling a machine-translated version that was basically unreadable gobbledegook).

Then suddenly they did this storyline called "The Clans."

Backstory: The Inner Sphere used to be united under something called the Star League, but it couldn't keep its shit together and split into the five territories. When this happened, a dude named... Kerevsky or something (too lazy to look it up) basically said he was tired of dealing with Inner Sphere manbabies and took whoever would come with him into the unexplored regions of space. This turned out to be a good call--they set up this radically different sort-of warrior culture caste society where lots of people are cloned from DNA of great leaders and getting highly regarded enough to have your DNA stored (called getting a "bloodname") is highly prized. There's sixteen clans, each named after an animal, and each having different goals and values (though there are some major things ALL the clans agree on).

Then the clans decided to invade the Inner Sphere.

Thing is, IS was fucked--the long never-ending war had actually caused their technology to stagnate and even backslide (in this setting, salvaging undamaged mech parts is highly prioritized because they actually can't manufacture replacements, and a lot of roleplay sessions had battles motivated by "Two opposing armies have found an untapped supply of unused mechs and spare parts" type events). The Clans just had better everything.

Somehow though the five houses managed to pull together and beat the Clans off. How? I dunno--I haven't read those novels yet.

After that though it just keeps going in a circle... for awhile there's a new Star League, but the current leaders are just as much manbabies as last time and it winds up splintering. As for things like Word of Blake, I have no fucking clue--I haven't read those novels yet, and to be honest I might lose interest before I get that far.

Mechwarrior 1's plot is entirely incidental in the grand scheme of things--just some small duchy-boy reclaiming his meaningless slice of pie. Mechwarrior 2 is based off an event called the "War of Refusal" where basically two of the Clans went to war because one accused the other of.... something. Here, this guy probably gives a better sum-up than I could. I have no idea about the later Mechwarrior games.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Tomb Raider and Zelda Ocarina actually had very similar gameplay.

They really didn't

Even back then Tomb Raider played like ass because tank control are terrible for an action platformer.

 

[Lucas Silva #4903141]

How do you manage to get lost in Doom for long?
It has a map, you move so fast that you traverse the whole map in like 5 seconds, and the persistent dead bodies mark where you've already been.

Attention spans have been wrecked by people constantly being on their phones so much. And that's just part of it.

Anyways, for me, the series that fits this thread the most is Mortal Kombat.
First game: It was literally meant to be a quick project. The controversy over the violence in the game made it more attractive to young people at arcades, so they had to keep going with it.
MK2: Cheap ass AI ruined the fun. You can't beat this without knowing the AI's direct reactions to what you do (it constantly tries to get close and throw you or throw jabs, don't get cornered or the AI will hit two perfectly timed throws, your jump kicks are your best weapon, just git gud with Kitana if you want to win, etc.,) - I understand that with arcades, you want to make people keep using coins, but the Genesis and SNES ports also had the same AI.
MK3: Fucking lol. Sub-Zero is the only human ninja, no female ninjas, kombat is less friendly to beginners, AI still directly reacts to what you do, but now there's a twist. The AI will sometimes just stand still. From this point, if you move towards the AI opponent, it will move backwards. If you walk backwards, the AI will walk towards you until you stop, or it decides to run and attempt a combo. Basically, if you damage the AI opponent and know how to fuck with it, you can easily win rounds via time running out. Until Motaro, now you're probably screwed, but there's ways to mess with it.

You still can't beat this game without knowing how to mess with the AI.

UMK3/MK Trilogy: Much better rosters, same core problems tho. N64's version of Trilogy made it harder to mess with the AI. Don't confuse this with the idea of the game becoming more fair, it's just more annoying to beat.

 

[Book Thief]

Really I'm not sure how fighting games still get away with it. Imagine if you had to quarter circle and press the A button everytime you wanted to shoot in an FPS game.

This. The worst part is that if you complain to a hardcore fighting game fan about the obtuseness of these mechanics, they just brush it off and call you an idiot for not being able to magically intuit these mystical button combinations that fighting games to this day insist they use. This shit was outdated the moment Super Smash Bros. hit the scene, with its "Direction + Button" system of inputting commands. No more memorizing retarded button combos that exist solely to sell you a strategy guide on how to perform a basic move. Instead, you know exactly how to perform the moves due to the simplicity of the inputs, so all you need to do is learn how to use your character's moveset.

 

[Caesare]

Doom must be a game where you had to grow up playing it because the enemies feel like cardboard cutouts, and it's easy to get lost in the maze-like levels, which destroys the pacing

From just coming off of playing Wolf3d, Doom, especially Doom 2 was such an improvement at that time. And for a lot of people, it got better and better as time went on, meaning, a lot of kids first played it on computers without a sound card. So all they heard was beeps and bops that didn't fit the action on the screen at all. I remember talking to a friend who also played Doom, telling me about how his dad got a sound card for their home computer, and it was like playing an entirely different game. It was too, you forget how much the sound makes a game. I had the same experience with Wolf3d. Played it originally with poor quality pc sounds, then later with a sound blaster. Finally, the gunshots sounded like gunshots, and the soldiers screamed at you in German when they spotted you and cried out in pain when they died. It was awesome!

That being said, I never play either of the original Doom games now. They was great to me when I was younger, and it will always be a good memory, but I have no reason to go back and play them again. A lot of people seem to really enjoy the originals though, so good for them. Like everyone was saying, it's a good time to be a Doom fan with all the mods they have now, and with more constantly coming out.

MK3: Fucking lol. Sub-Zero is the only human ninja, no female ninjas, kombat is less friendly to beginners, AI still directly reacts to what you do, but now there's a twist. The AI will sometimes just stand still. From this point, if you move towards the AI opponent, it will move backwards. If you walk backwards, the AI will walk towards you until you stop, or it decides to run and attempt a combo. Basically, if you damage the AI opponent and know how to fuck with it, you can easily win rounds via time running out. Until Motaro, now you're probably screwed, but there's ways to mess with it.

I loved MK3, more than UMK for some reason at the time that I can't remember anymore lol. Playing against the AI is bad in all the original games. What made MK2 and especially MK3 and UMK3 fun in the arcades was the versus mode. MK Trilogy did have a great roster, and was a great game to play against friends at home. The N64 version was the first MK game that felt (to me) like you were playing a version just as good as the arcade mortal kombat games but on a home console.

Classics I feel are overrated:

Earthbound
Zelda games on nes
goldeneye (most n64 games really, that was a very mediocre system)
Mario rpg

And probably most controversially, Mario 3. I've always liked Mario 2 better.

 

[skykiii]

Super Mario World on the snes was great. I could play that game right now and enjoy it still.

The guy you were responding to specifically said *3D* platformers.

.........

Re: the Fighting Game Controls Topic ..... honestly, in the original Street Fighter there was a sort of weird sense to them. Like if you think about the fireball move (down, downforward, forward + punch) it sort of represents Ryu/Ken's arm motions when throwing a fireball. Likewise the other moves sorta symbolically represent movements they would make when doing a technique,

I was fine with this even unto Street Fighter II or King of Fighters '94. Sure some moves were hard to input (Zangief's piledriver requiring a full rotation for example) but they made a certain amount of sense.

It's really Mortal Kombat, Primal Rage etc. that fucked it up (oh gawd here comes the "westerners ruin it for everyone" bit!) Their games often had just completely spaztastic move inputs that didn't make any sort of sense, except for the cases where they're blatantly copying Street Fighter, and they also increased the number of moves with difficult-to-do inputs... particularly finishers, which often had absolutely no logic to their inputs beyond "make it something they're not likely to find by accident."

Smash Bros style inputs work, but one problem I sometimes have is they can be too easy to pull off by accident in the heat of the moment. That said I do agree a trend towards simpler inputs is desirable.

RE the Doom topic -- I've honestly never gotten lost in Doom... then again, I've never gotten lost in old dungeon crawl RPGs like Wizardry either. But yeah it can get tedious when you've seemingly killed everything but still not found the exit or the keycard, which ARE very common issues especially in Doom 2, Final Doom, and custom levels. And this is speaking as someone who had these games as a kid.

I think Doom is still fun but yeah its not perfect. In some ways I actually prefer its clone Heretic.

 

[Caesare]

The guy you were responding to specifically said *3D* platformers.

You're absolutely right. I missed it. In that case, I think I agree with him.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

This. The worst part is that if you complain to a hardcore fighting game fan about the obtuseness of these mechanics, they just brush it off and call you an idiot for not being able to magically intuit these mystical button combinations that fighting games to this day insist they use. This shit was outdated the moment Super Smash Bros. hit the scene, with its "Direction + Button" system of inputting commands. No more memorizing retarded button combos that exist solely to sell you a strategy guide on how to perform a basic move. Instead, you know exactly how to perform the moves due to the simplicity of the inputs, so all you need to do is learn how to use your character's moveset.

This is also why melee is the worst smash game, of course, and why all platform fighters trying to be melee 2 will fail. Believe it or not, normal people don't like wavedashing no matter how cool it makes your 2000th fox combo montage looks.

 

[Book Thief]

This is also why melee is the worst smash game, of course, and why all platform fighters trying to be melee 2 will fail. Believe it or not, normal people don't like wavedashing no matter how cool it makes your 2000th fox combo montage looks.

Melee is so fucking broken that literally half the roster doesn't even function correctly. It's the product of a rushed development cycle, and it really shows under a cursory amount of scrutiny. I can't fathom how the Melee community still manages to fellate that game in spite of it being so blatantly and obviously flawed to the point where nobody uses 80% of the cast because they're either bugged to the point of uselessness, or just utter shit in terms of balance.

 

[Lucas Silva #4903141]

Re: the Fighting Game Controls Topic ..... honestly, in the original Street Fighter there was a sort of weird sense to them. Like if you think about the fireball move (down, downforward, forward + punch) it sort of represents Ryu/Ken's arm motions when throwing a fireball. Likewise the other moves sorta symbolically represent movements they would make when doing a technique,

I was fine with this even unto Street Fighter II or King of Fighters '94. Sure some moves were hard to input (Zangief's piledriver requiring a full rotation for example) but they made a certain amount of sense.

My mind was wandering there for sure. If the fireball button combo is "hard" or "mystical" to you, that's a YOU problem. Even as a child, I was able to pull off combos, and that was without a strategy guide - shit, when I started, I thought the motion for the hadouken was a full circle forward, so I was actually making things harder on myself without knowing. Still had a blast with Street Fighter II, funny how that works.

Anyways, I'll add the really low hanging fruit: Pokemon gen 1 games.
We're at the point where dumb fans use the problems with gen 1 to deflect criticism of newer Pokemon games. Fucking consoomers.

Spoiler: For those who don't know

Details:

• The move pools for many Pokemon in the Red/Blue/Yellow era were mostly awful. When you got checked by an opponent's typing, there wasn't much to be done in many cases, other than to switch.
• Pokemon types were unbalanced as fuck! Psychics were practically kings of this era. Dark and steel typing did not exist yet. Bug type attacks were super effective against them, but bug attacks were pathetically weak, and there were only a few of them. Twineedle was the strongest bug attack and Beedrill was the only one who got it, one of the worst fully evolved pokemon. Ghost attacks suffered from the same problem - Night Shade only did a set amount of damage, so there was no super effectiveness there. Lick should be super effective...but it isn't effective at all, due to a programming error. What a great game™.
• The dragon type may as well not exist. There was only one dragon attack, and that was Dragon Rage, which always does 40 HP of damage. Making this a normal move, for example, would not change its damage.
• The odds of an attack getting the Critical Hit bonus were ridiculously in your favor. Without getting into how it's calculated, it's basically tied to your speed. If you have a decently fast Pokemon, attacks like Slash and Razor Leaf will always get the Critical Hit bonus. Always.
• Focus Energy is supposed to increase your odds of doing critical hits, but due to a programming error, your odds will actually decrease. What a great game™.
• Brock is the Rock type gym leader, the first one you face in the game. If you picked Charmander instead of Squirtle or Bulbasaur at the start, you're kinda screwed due to the type disadvantage. How can you beat him? Mankey with Karate Chop? Sorry, that's a normal type move in gen 1. Your best bet is to get a Butterfree, even though its typing (Bug/Flying) means it's 4x weak to Rock attacks. Why? None of Brock's pokemon have Rock type moves. What a great game™. Kids were supposed to figure this out, btw.
• Fire is not resistant to Ice. Charizard does not learn Fly in Red and Blue (TOP KEK), so it would be stuck with Wing Attack as its only ok move with the Same Type Attack Bonus. Fly can get glitched badly if your opponent is paralyzed, same thing with Dig. Those are two-turn moves: in the first turn, you are nearly invincible due to flying into the air or going underground. In the second, you attack the opponent. However, if you're paralyzed or confused, you can get stuck in the nearly invincible state. Great if you're the one getting the advantage - horrible if your opponent gets it, because you can only hit them if you have Swift, or Bide. What a great game™.
• Fighting type Pokemon were fucked. Weaknesses to Psychic and Flying moves, Hitmonchan having completely pitiful stats, no Cross Chop, no Focus Punch, no Dynamic Punch, your best attack is Submission or High Jump Kick...just trust me, the types were not balanced in the slightest.
• Partial trapping moves like Wrap, Fire Spin, etc. were more annoying than ever. Now, you can't switch, but you can fight back while being trapped by those moves. In gen 1, it was totally different: You couldn't attack while trapped in those moves. However, you could switch Pokemon. That said, if your opponent was a fast one, you were praying for them to miss shit like Wrap, otherwise, they could just keep spamming it and prevent you from attacking for many turns.
• The electric gym had a bullshit puzzle where you're supposed to find two switches in trash cans. There's just too much RNG involved.
• Note that most of this isn't talking about glitches like Missingno, btw. You can go through the whole games without experiencing glitches, but that does not mean these were greatly designed games.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

@Lucas Silva #4903141 Reply bug, so pardon me
The issue isn't that a quarter circle is hard, persay. The issue is I have to play Just Dance with a joystick to use special moves and I really just don't fucking want to anymore than I want resident evil to have tank controls.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

I thought Fallout 2 fell off towards the end. There was a great build up to the Enclave, but once you got to interact with the Enclave, the game didn’t know what to do with it.

When you get to the Navarro base, you tell the guard that you would like to join up at he lets you in. I find it hard to believe that the xenophobic Enclave would allow outsiders to be recruited into their military, unless I missed something about Navarro being a bit more lax on that xenophobia.

The other big let down is that you can just convince Enclave scientists to destroy the Oil Rig. You literally tell the scientist that is designing the virus that will wipe out all irradiated humans that the irradiated humans are just another type of human and that convinces him to rework the virus so that it kills the Enclave instead.

Bad storytelling for a game that had a strong beginning.

 

[skykiii]

They really didn't

Even back then Tomb Raider played like ass because tank control are terrible for an action platformer.

They really are though. Seriously any time Link is having to do one of those block-pushing puzzles or one of those bits where he jumps, grabs a slightly higher ledge, and pulls himself up.... its Tomb Raider.

And OoT also basically has tank controls. Really any game where the camera is behind your character's back has tank controls by default. Not saying this is true of you specifically but it always makes it feel weird that people complain about them when they then don't in other games that have a less obvious implementation.

On that subject (just adding a different kind of unpopular opinion here):

I tend to be fine with tank controls personally. One benefit of them is that you always know what direction "walk straight forward" is. Some games like Silent Hill Origins tried to get rid of tank controls and it led to endless moments of "the camera suddenly changed but now you're walking southeast because that's where Down on the analog stick points in this angle."

Funny thing, some games where people like to bitch about tank controls--like Silent Hill 2--actually do have a menu option for not-tank controls, but nobody ever investigates and finds out.

 

[Judge Dredd]

a lot of roleplay sessions had battles motivated by "Two opposing armies have found an untapped supply of unused mechs and spare parts" type events). The Clans just had better everything.

It's funny you say that. I recently finished MW5 and the plot of that game starts with you trying to avenge the death of your father, and ends with you finding some unused Star League tech. The plot of Hairbrained Schemes Battletech is basically the same but with "mentor" instead of "dad". It's an okay plot for a game, but not exactly the epic lore that puts all other games to shame as the fans would lead you to believe.

The issue is I have to play Just Dance with a joystick to use special moves and I really just don't fucking want to anymore than I want resident evil to have tank controls.

At least tank controls serve a purpose. People who demand "3D" controls quickly find themselves bumping into stuff and getting stuck between camera positions.

 

[Coldgrip]

Rygar

Who the fuck makes a game that doesn't allow saves? You have to sit down and play until you win, or start over.

Because putting a battery in for saving costs money and a password feature takes up memory.

 

[Tren Shapiro]

And OoT also basically has tank controls. Really any game where the camera is behind your character's back has tank controls by default. Not saying this is true of you specifically but it always makes it feel weird that people complain about them when they then don't in other games that have a less obvious implementation.

I think you might be confused about what tank controls are. I think you might also be confused about what tanks are.

 

[TheDarknessGrows]

I never really thought Tomb Raider was that good. Same goes for Prince of Persia.

And I always thought the Monkey Island games were really lame.

 

[skykiii]

I think you might be confused about what tank controls are. I think you might also be confused about what tanks are.

Tanks are those things with the fan-like rotors that help them fly, right?

But seriously... you press up to move forward, left and right to turn. That sounds like tank controls to me. (I mean unless you wanna go into the literal definition of tanks where they actually require two joysticks, but I think only Battlezone and Cybersled control like that).

...... Man, how many people even *remember* Cybersled?

 

[ShitLurker]

One thing I find funny.

Even back in the day, I recall people noticing that Tomb Raider and Zelda Ocarina actually had very similar gameplay. I've even seen TR described as "3D Zelda if it was JUST the dungeons... and you have guns instead of a sword."

And really, yeah... the similarity is very noticable, especially whenever you have to do a running jump or a block-moving puzzle (which is like, all the damn time).

And yet Ocarina is held up as this great masterpiece while Tomb Raider is often called an unplayable dated relic.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

(I'm not accusing you specifically, I'm just making an observation about a trend I've noticed).

They really are though. Seriously any time Link is having to do one of those block-pushing puzzles or one of those bits where he jumps, grabs a slightly higher ledge, and pulls himself up.... its Tomb Raider.

And OoT also basically has tank controls. Really any game where the camera is behind your character's back has tank controls by default. Not saying this is true of you specifically but it always makes it feel weird that people complain about them when they then don't in other games that have a less obvious implementation.

On that subject (just adding a different kind of unpopular opinion here):

I tend to be fine with tank controls personally. One benefit of them is that you always know what direction "walk straight forward" is. Some games like Silent Hill Origins tried to get rid of tank controls and it led to endless moments of "the camera suddenly changed but now you're walking southeast because that's where Down on the analog stick points in this angle."

Funny thing, some games where people like to bitch about tank controls--like Silent Hill 2--actually do have a menu option for not-tank controls, but nobody ever investigates and finds out.

As someone who isn't particularly invested on either, I fail to see the similarities outside of lots of squinting.

OOT definitely has no tank controls, y move left Link moves left, I don't rotate in place like Lara. Also, Tomb Raider was also a lot of elaborate jumping puzzles where between rotating and short hops it would take you a while to set up. That jumping was "done for you" reduced the complexity they expected of you.