Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Xarpho's Return]

/v/ and /vr/ were the places where i heard the Genesis sound chip being praised like it was made by Apollo himself and certainly better than the Super Nintendo sound chip. As someone who owned both a SNES and MD as a kid i always wondered if these motherfuckers actually got ears.

This is from one of those debates years ago (if I saved a screencap, it's long gone, thankfully there's archives).
To this day, I still think this is the greatest description of Sega Genesis music ever.

 

[skykiii]

At that point, it's just an adventure game with a worse interface.

Or a Choose Your Own Adventure book but with sounds and music.

 

[byuu]

Or a Choose Your Own Adventure book but with sounds and music.

To be fair CYOA books don't make you click a button for every single sentence.

 

[Pissmaster]

Goldeneye 007 on 00 Agent, its hardest difficulty, seems to be more about luck than skill, due to the trashy auto-aim that makes your damage output completely unpredictable. On easier difficulties, the messy gunplay is much more forgiving, but 00 Agent doesn't allow much room for error, and the auto-aim constantly works against you with how much it seems to love limb shots. If you're unlucky, you can magdump your PP7 into a single guard, and still not kill him. It's also one of those difficulty levels where they just kinda make everything shitty:

• more enemy health
• more enemy damage
• more enemies overall
• body armor is removed
• miniscule amounts of ammo dropped - 10 per KF7 vs. 30 on Agent (easy)

All of that, on top of more requirements to clear the level. And that's annoying, because easier difficulties don't have as many requirements, so levels often become "go get this one thing and then leave". I'd like to have more to do, but I don't want to play on such a frustrating mode. It's a classic example of bad difficulty.

 

[11 Herbs and Spices]

I will never understand people who say Genesis games sounded better than SNES games.

I'm sure there are some exceptions, but by and large Genesis games always sounded overly loud and super tinny and annoying.

One of the best soundtracks of the era is Sub-Terrania, by Jesper Kyd.

On-topic: Mech games have always sucked because they either too autistic in their controls or just Macross but gayer.

 

[Hatchetman]

Disappointing implies you still found value in them. I've had plenty of disappointments where it undershot what I really wanted, but still was okay. Heck, even some video games that I liked have had disappointing parts or disappointing endings. I like Deus Ex, but find the endings lackluster. I like SimCity 4, but it still falls painfully short in so many areas.

I think it's just part of the bigger problem that every "top x video games" list seems super artificial; it's all the same shit. I'm not complaining about at least one Zelda game making it in the top 10 (if not top 5), it's the total lack of obscure favorites as the list continues.

Pic related is something I got from /v/ a year ago (exactly a year ago, in fact) because not just because
I think some of those choices denote excellent taste, it also is the most "real" list I've ever seen just because of the sheer diversity of it all. Some of these are definitely stuff I've heard of before and even played but NEVER see in "top X" lists.
View attachment 4396848

I would replace Might and Magic 6 with M&M 7, surprised to see Company of Heroes 1 on this list but then remember it gets overshadowed by Starcraft.

 

[Girl Named Sandoz]

View attachment 4403984
This is from one of those debates years ago (if I saved a screencap, it's long gone, thankfully there's archives).
To this day, I still think this is the greatest description of Sega Genesis music ever.

i’m partial to matt from two best friends description of it sounding “like crackling ass”

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Goldeneye 007 on 00 Agent, its hardest difficulty, seems to be more about luck than skill, due to the trashy auto-aim that makes your damage output completely unpredictable. On easier difficulties, the messy gunplay is much more forgiving, but 00 Agent doesn't allow much room for error, and the auto-aim constantly works against you with how much it seems to love limb shots. If you're unlucky, you can magdump your PP7 into a single guard, and still not kill him. It's also one of those difficulty levels where they just kinda make everything shitty:

• more enemy health
• more enemy damage
• more enemies overall
• body armor is removed
• miniscule amounts of ammo dropped - 10 per KF7 vs. 30 on Agent (easy)

All of that, on top of more requirements to clear the level. And that's annoying, because easier difficulties don't have as many requirements, so levels often become "go get this one thing and then leave". I'd like to have more to do, but I don't want to play on such a frustrating mode. It's a classic example of bad difficulty.

Goldeneye really needed a crosshair always onscreen, the same way PD does. If you're lucky enough to have 2 controllers then using one of the 2.x schemes is an option (I always found it easier to shift Bond a little to get an enemy in the crosshairs than rotating the camera). It's bad design, sure, but if you're still relying on auto-aim on 00 Agent you're doing it wrong.

 

[Articles and Nudes]

Kingdom of Amalur owns, and its a crying shame it was such a financial disaster.

 

[Tom Nook's Gloryhole]

Kingdom of Amalur owns, and its a crying shame it was such a financial disaster.

It's a bunch of endless meaningless WoW tier fetch quests that are practically meaningless thanks to it being a repurposed MMORPG. Xenoblade Chronicles did the whole MMORPG as a single player RPG better.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

One of the best soundtracks of the era is Sub-Terrania, by Jesper Kyd.

I prefer Hitman: Contracts *shrug*

As far as Goldeneye/Perfect Dark goes, the day I realized the game was easier with auto aim off was the day I became the best player at Goldeneye in my school.

 

[whogoesthere]

Shouldn't those be the most disappointing games than the worst games of all time? E.T. gets called one of the worst games of all times because it gets blamed for the North American Video Game Crash of 1983. E.T. is most likely not even one of the worst Atari 2600 games let alone one of the worst games of all time. The issue with E.T. is people don't know how to play it thus it's complete shit and it being the scapegoat for the Video Game Crash is just icing on the cake. How many people really play Atari 2600 these days? Most people when they play retro console games start with the N.E.S. not the Atari 2600 or magnavox Odyssey so people don't put into perspective how E.T. stacks up with the rest of the 2600 library.

ET is famous because it has a nice narrative to go along with, plus buried treasure. It's played out like a film, complete with detectives combing the land looking for clues for the fabled dumping site.

Big Rigs is famous because it happened to get mocked by a popular YouTuber, at a time when YouTube had more direct access to the Internet general psyche, if you will. The funny video is what sells it, if you play that game, it's not all that exciting.

I will stop there, because I am going to veer into simulacrum territory and why I think the rise of streaming came about. And how people like me do not understand it, because I am old and shit, thus not able to explore non-real events, driven by hyperreality into some new, replication of an experience.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

I think quick time events are fun.

Only if they're non-vital, like in Yakuza.
You just lost health in a QTE fail, but one time a QTE was delimetral in the final phase, in 5.

 

[Nick Obre]

Here's mine: people need to stop listing "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing" in bad video game lists, because I doubt it's the only broken shovelware CD-ROM that made it to store shelves in the early to mid 2000s and nobody actually played it in 2003.

The idea of bad video games is the expectation vs. reality. It's why ET sucked so hard even though it wasn't especially bad for Atari standards. It's why Daikatana was terrible even though it wasn't the worst game on the market. And it's why you can consider a game an atrocity even if others like it.

If you get oversold on a mediocre game it often turns "bad" just on the disconnect from what you experienced versus what you expected.

Something I've always thought is that lists of "the worst x" are always gonna be wrong, because the real worst things in any category will usually get zero attention, and deserve less. Surely the worst game is some poorly coded, poorly thought out thing made by a small team from some former Soviet Eastern European shithole, programmed entirely through tractor tracks in the mud and fueled by the devs dream of making enough money to maybe one day be able to afford smelling a hamburger.
But something like that doesn't merit mention, no one played it so its horribility left no mark in people's minds.
The devs died of dysentery without ever smelling a hamburger, by the way.

So Big Rigs it is.

But you're right about the ratio of expectation vs reality. Think of DMC2, it has a fame of being a terrible, horrible game that no one should play. But is it?

And here comes my unpopular opinion:

I'll forever defend DMC2...
...IN THE RIGHT CONTEXT!

DMC was a radical discovery. Through its troubled development, it stumbled upon a whole new genre no one had thought of before. It wasn't accidental, the people who made it knew what they were doing.
But the people who made DMC2 weren't that team (the team in question, Little Devils, would eventually become Clover, and then Platinum), instead they were people who had no idea what this new territory they were going into was.
So they made a regular ass 2000's action game. No better or worse than things like fucking Chaos Legion or Nano Breaker. It's boring, sure, but nothing out of the ordinary to the era.
But because it was supposed to follow the DMC act, it gets the worst reputation.

DmC: DmC, though, that one was made when the genre was solved. A bunch of games had come out that took the road that DMC paved and built a shining Character Action city around it. DMC3, DMC4, Viewtiful Joe, Godhand, Bayonetta, some of the Ninja Gaidens. Metal Gear Rising was just about to come out.
But DmC: DmC went and took the genre and did everything in it wrong, on top of shitting on the original and its fans.

There was no reason why anyone would make those mistakes. They had the template, they had the technology, they had everything, but they fumbled it.
The DMC2 team was handed this bottled lightning that no one but Little Devils had any idea of how to achieve, and was told to replicate it and expand it; of course they'd fuck it up. The DmC: DmC team was handed a Lego set with extensive instructions and pictures and videos and everything, simple, streamlined, perfected, foolproof, and they still fucked it up.

And that's why DMC2 is better than DmC: DmC...
...IN THE RIGHT CONTEXT!

 

[Sexyphobe]

I've always felt like people took the few digs it makes at the player way too seriously. The loading screens and some vague dialogue about how much you enjoy killing and pretending you're a hero is metacommentary that has been present in games since fucking Metal Gear. If anything it's a much more biting critique of the genre itself, since COD and Battlefront are basically propaganda for the military industrial complex.

If you get bent out of shape that the game is "MAKING FUN OF ME FOR LE HECCIN WHITE PHOSPHOROUS!" then you're probably just an insecure retard. Especially since, yeah, the game doesn't give you a choice there and you get a chance to prove Conrad (and thus the game) wrong about their presumptions regarding you at the end of the game. Unlike earlier, you CAN decide to not shoot the soldiers that come to pick up Walker at the end of the game.

I think the disconnect comes from what the game itself portrays, and what the writers have said about it. Any digs in the game are against Walker, as there's nothing there that suggests it's about the player. If the intent was to criticize the player, it's lazy and only barely there. If they didn't comment, nobody would have left with that impression, and trying to make the story deeper than it is.

Doesn't help that there's been a whole slew of media since that's basically "We think you're a detestable human, but buy/watch our shit while we insult you, plz".

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Something I've always thought is that lists of "the worst x" are always gonna be wrong, because the real worst things in any category will usually get zero attention, and deserve less. Surely the worst game is some poorly coded, poorly thought out thing made by a small team from some former Soviet Eastern European shithole, programmed entirely through tractor tracks in the mud and fueled by the devs dream of making enough money to maybe one day be able to afford smelling a hamburger.

Slavjank has a certain wholesome charm, though. Weird curios like Warcraft 2000 are actually pretty impressive considering what they manage to achieve on a budget that wouldn't have covered a classic Doctor Who episode. Even at their worst, they have a certain The Room-like charm that makes them more interesting that assembly line AAA slop.

 

[Safir]

Or a Choose Your Own Adventure book but with sounds and music.

I have nothing against visual novels in principle, but there are significant differences and it rustled my jimmies enough that I gotta sperg. (I don't own a single Choose Your Own Adventure book, but I probably have one of the largest Fighting Fantasy collections in the world. Certainly the largest in the non-Anglo parts.)

	Choose Your Own Adventure	Fighting Fantasy	Visual novels	Otome / princess builders
single branch playthrough length	10 minutes	<30 minutes	hours	30 minutes
total length	10k words	50-80k words	50-100 hours	5 hours
branching	roughly equal length, a variety of outcomes, good and bad	short fail branches, one win	varies	gauntlet or a branch per love interest
convergences	very rare	a substantial amount	a lot; expressive/flavor choices	gauntlet, stats-raising choices
states	stateless	visible states (at least one book is evil enough to have hidden states, too)	hidden states	changing STATS! many hidden states, too
choices	frequent (see charts), 0.2-1/para	very frequent (see charts), 0.5/para	ultra sparse to nonexistent, flavor	0.2-0.5/para + possibly training
reader age	7-14, limited vocabulary	children's imprint but adult vocabulary	"YA"	"YA"
text	descriptive prose	descriptive prose	massive amounts of linear dialogue and monologue	descriptive prose + direct speech -> prompt
theme	classic children's adventure	fantasy, sci-fi	animu	bodice ripper + often animu
pc	YOU! (usually a boy)	YOU! (often a man)	some teenage coomer or loli (not you)	self-insert proxy
npcs	rare, often anonymous	rare, usually transient	many, named, persistent	love interests, rivals
randomization	none	lots (FF-inspired books with chargen and no randomization exist)	usually none	usually none

There are some gamebook adaptations (all of them are terrible except Sorcery!) and some original choice games (Disco Elysium as an extreme example, The Walking Dead as the other extreme, plus all the choicescript faggotry), but both "classic" visual novels and otome games are very different from gamebooks.

Supposedly, Miyazaki (of Dark Souls) credited Fighting Fantasy as an inspiration for traps. Souls games and FF books have nothing else in common: Fighting Fantasy books do not allow the player to retreat, plan, rest, amass resources, and pick his battles, failure requires a restart from 1, and true endings are (almost?) always happy.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

To be fair CYOA books don't make you click a button for every single sentence.

Good ones have an auto function, but good ones seem few and far between.

 

[Mega Black]

Voice acting becoming a necessity is one of the worst things to ever happen to gaming as a medium.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Voice acting becoming a necessity is one of the worst things to ever happen to gaming as a medium.

Nitpick: The pervasive idea that voice acting is a necessity is the issue. At least half of the games I've played in the past 5 years don't have voice acting, but studios are just too afraid to make games without it. Yet they are shooting themselves in the foot more often than not, as voice acting adds costs and reduces flexibility for writers and designers