Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Scarthew]

BotW should have been a one-off, and TotK should never have been anything more than an expansion to the former; it clearly fails to fix any of the issues BotW had, while somehow also hindering what BotW did well. The open world exploration was admittedly fun for a first playthrough, but the decision to coward out by making the dungeons uniform in complexity and not locking tools behind them really hurt the game's replayability.

Are we talking purely exclusives? Because even then there's more than 7:
Super Mario 64
Zelda (both OoT and MM)
Banjo-Kazooie (Tooie is fine but has aged worse)
Diddy Kong Racing (Mario Kart is good, but DKR fills its niche better)
F-Zero X (I would consider this a different type of game than DKR and MK)
GoldenEye 007 (yes, it's aged like milk but for its time it was great, Perfect Dark may be better)
Kirby 64 (that's seven there)
Pokemon Stadium 2 (Stadium 1 is also pretty good)
Star Fox 64 (I would say Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, but it wouldn't fit in the criteria for this list)

And that's just with the following criteria:

• American releases
• N64 Exclusives at the time
• Only one game from each franchise
• The best version of that game (Rogue Squadron 2 has everything from the first one, but objectively better)

Removing any of those criteria, and the list starts to balloon out to an impressive percentage of the N64's library.

perfect dark
mario party 1-3
yoshi story
dk 64
south park shooter
jet force gemini
battle tanx 1/2
world is not enough
wave race
smash bros
paper mario
doom 64
blast corps
turok rage wars
mario kart
gauntlet legends
pokemon snap
pilot wings

edit: forgot the 2 wrestling games.

And then you had multi-plats
duke nukem 64 and zero hour
hexen
turok 1-3
tony hawk 1-3
spiderman
winback
resident evil 2

honorable mention goemon

There was tons of stuff on the n64

 

[Rololowlo]

I liked Aliens Colonial Marines.

More than ten years later and I still have no clue what happened, the hate it received is such a perfect storm of random, overblown or gratuitious bullshit.

Spoiler

It's not the glitches because I played it torrented at release, largely unpatched. There were some but barely worth more than a few side-comments in a longer review.

Then the game got weirdly singled out for random shit. A software glitch is a typo? Congrats, you just discovered 95% of software glitches. To make matters worse, even without fixing that typo the aliens have no trouble zeroing on you anyway.

The visual downgrades compared to the trailers were a legitimate criticism but they don't really warrant the hysteria, even if they had been left unpatched which they weren't.

It's not even a failure to meet the hype. I vaguely remember the pre-release, sure it was somewhat anticipated but by and large it was going to be another shooter. What could you expect it to be, what could you even hype it as, that a middle-of-the-road shooter gets called the "worst game ever" out of disappointment?

There were legitimate fuckups (such as the trailer downgrade) and while the game is good it still has flaws, so you'll never get a real answer because people will point to these without realizing they are only 10% of the way there. Congrats, you made the case for an underwhelming game. We're not debating "underwelming" though, but how we escalated to "worst game ever".

It's not the only game that everyone somehow ended up piling on, but it's the most egregious example. Playing the game and then reading about its reception feels like entering a room just in time to hear a punchline before everyone bursts into laughter.

 

[MsFrancisFoster]

Neverwinter Nights 1 is superior to Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale in every conceivable way to me. Even if I do like all of them for different reasons, mind. I just think Neverwinter Nights 1 really nailed what made a CRPG good, fun, and memorable without making the game a slog to get through imho. I think Neverwinter Nights 2 is just an okay game. I like it, but a lot of the companions make me want to tear my hair out except for a few and the over arching plot is actually really fun. Though the characters stats are so bad if you just auto-level them. It's like no thought went into their character sheets in any capacity and it drives me up a wall.

Dragon Age: Origins is great and I love the game to pieces, but I also think Dragon Age 2 has it's merits. My biggest gripe is the characterization of Anders, the terrorism acts, the plotline being "it doesn't matter if you're pro-mage or pro-templar." and the fucking shit you get from Carver no matter what you do as a mage. (Bethany is the better sibling, hands down.) Though I will say I do find it fun, and heart breaking, from a role play perspective that you can make yourself the last surviving member of the Hawke name through certain actions/inactions. Not the last of your family, as there is the Origins Amell and Gamlen, but the last of your name. I do think that's neat.

I've never gotten past the Hinterlands in Dragon Age: Inquisition, though, because I get bored really quickly with it. Beautiful to look at, but totally soulless and empty, as well as being slop. Ironically I've been calling them the "Hinderlands" for awhile because they are actually a huge hindrance on getting into the game.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Alien: Isolation is complete ass, mostly owing to it not being scary in the slightest on top of being extremely boring in its buildup.

 

[Calandrino]

I did not like Telltale’s Walking Dead series. I play games because I want to avoid stress. I do not want fictional stress in my games. I want to chill when I game, not get depressed.

Sometimes, after a nice, relaxing day at work, I just want to experience some ball-crushing frustration... is that too much to ask?

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

I'm continuously assured by Internet autists that Unity is a perfectly good game engine and that games that use it only perform terribly because of bad developers, but I've not ONCE seen a Unity game that had even average performance. In every case, it uses a lot more system resources to produce something that both looks and runs substantially worse than any alternative engine.

I find it difficult to believe that Unity isn't the underlying problem and it's all just a coincidence.

Neverwinter Nights 1 is superior to Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale in every conceivable way to me. Even if I do like all of them for different reasons, mind. I just think Neverwinter Nights 1 really nailed what made a CRPG good, fun, and memorable without making the game a slog to get through imho.

That is a truly baffling opinion. I've never encountered anyone who praised Neverwinter Nights without a lot of qualifiers like "well, I mean it was decent if you understand what Bioware was trying to do with it."

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

I've not ONCE seen a Unity game that had even average performance

Hollow Knight
Antichamber
Cuphead
Fall Guys
Untitled Goose Game
just a few titles at the top of my head

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Hollow Knight
Antichamber
Cuphead
Fall Guys
Untitled Goose Game
just a few titles at the top of my head

Does Hollow Knight or Cuphead run as well on meager hardware as similar 2D platformers that use other engines? I'd be willing to bet not.

You can't just look at games that aren't graphically demanding on overkill hardware and conclude that Unity performance is comparable to other engines. I'm sure Unity Pong would run beautifully on a 16-core Ryzen CPU and RTX 4090, but that doesn't say anything about how well optimized it is.

 

[I am Jack's dead arm]

Alien: Isolation is complete ass, mostly owing to it not being scary in the slightest on top of being extremely boring in its buildup.

I wouldn't say it's ass, but it is too long and repetitive. I did really like the Crew Expendable DLC though.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

I think Spore is a nice game.
And i even consider Will Wright's magnus opus.
SimEarth is nice thought.

 

[Catgirl Fornicator]

I liked Aliens Colonial Marines.

More than ten years later and I still have no clue what happened, the hate it received is such a perfect storm of random, overblown or gratuitious bullshit.

It's not the only game that everyone somehow ended up piling on, but it's the most egregious example. Playing the game and then reading about its reception feels like entering a room just in time to hear a punchline before everyone bursts into laughter.

There is a fan patch for it that works out most of the bugs but you can't really patch out terrible game design. Bughunt was an actually fun survival mode but made the autistic mistake of giving exponential health increases to the xenomorphs and Weyland yutani mercs like its contemporary survival mode: Nazi Zombies.

Remember that those completely random retards bitching about this game were also the same ones who can't shut the fuck up about Mass effect 3's ending over a decade later. However they still can't be bothered to actually play the fun co-op survival mode (of which the servers are still up btw) where you can play as every race in that galaxy. Even Collectors. Which is something they still beg bioware to add to the isekai power fantasy that is god emperor commander Gary Stu Shepard's story. Where the reapers don't really fucking matter when the writers are just going to raise him from the dead at the start of every game and the galactic readiness implementation feels a lot more impactful than whatever they tried with the Helldivers series.

 

[MsFrancisFoster]

That is a truly baffling opinion. I've never encountered anyone who praised Neverwinter Nights without a lot of qualifiers like "well, I mean it was decent if you understand what Bioware was trying to do with it."

It was the first CRPG I played through and beat all by myself. But it's also the first one dad introduced me to, to get me into the genre as a whole. So it's a lot of nostalgia, and bonding with dad, factoring in for me. I know it has it's many flaws, but I still deeply adore it despite those flaws.

 

[Scarthew]

Does Hollow Knight or Cuphead run as well on meager hardware as similar 2D platformers that use other engines? I'd be willing to bet not.

You can't just look at games that aren't graphically demanding on overkill hardware and conclude that Unity performance is comparable to other engines. I'm sure Unity Pong would run beautifully on a 16-core Ryzen CPU and RTX 4090, but that doesn't say anything about how well optimized it is.

any pc made after 2005 can run these games. I played antichamber on school pcs that didnt have a graphics card.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

any pc made after 2005 can run these games.

Well, I would sure fucking hope so - they're 2D platformers.

I guess nobody cares about relative performance or optimization anymore as long as "it runs on my machine".

I played antichamber on school pcs that didnt have a graphics card.

Antichamber is an Unreal game.

 

[The Ugly One]

any pc made after 2005 can run these games. I played antichamber on school pcs that didnt have a graphics card.

If Antichamber needs anything more powerful than a GeForce 2 to run, it's badly optimized trash

 

[Scarthew]

Well, I would sure fucking hope so - they're 2D platformers.

I guess nobody cares about relative performance or optimization anymore as long as "it runs on my machine".

It was on the list you quoted. Also I don't know what you're talking about or when I'll have a computer earlier than 2005 with no graphics card. It runs on every machine.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Also I don't know what you're talking about

I don't understand what's so difficult about the concept "Unity games run comparatively poorly and/or use comparatively far more system resources than non-Unity games of similar type and with similar levels of graphical fidelity".

People keep saying "well, I can run X game on my computer just fine" as if that disproves the thesis. Even the shittiest software will run smoothly when you throw an arbitrarily large amount of computing power at it.

 

[Judge Dredd]

We're not debating "underwelming" though, but how we escalated to "worst game ever".

Worst game ever? No. Not by a long shot. Incredibly disappointing and not what was promised? Yes.

There were good moments. I remember a stealth section being kind of tense first time through, and the signature weapons were. But the fact is that an Aliens game has you spend 2 thirds of it fighting humans in a clear attempt to ape Call of Duty, or the canon plot they supposedly care deeply about is complete trash and makes no sense. They had iconic weapons, but to be effective with them you have to make not the iconic weapons. Even basic stuff like the pulse rifle having a 99 round magazine were fucked up and reduced to 40 for balance reasons.

You can't just look at games that aren't graphically demanding on overkill hardware and conclude that Unity performance is comparable to other engines. I'm sure Unity Pong would run beautifully on a 16-core Ryzen CPU and RTX 4090, but that doesn't say anything about how well optimized it is.

I get sick of optimization talk because while criticism can have merit, usually it's utterly baffling what people expect from hardware. "My 10 year old budget laptop can't run Cyberpunk at 4k ultra. Poorly optimized trash! Devs should go back to coding games in assembly!"

 

[Leaded Gasoline]

I've not ONCE seen a Unity game that had even average performance. In every case, it uses a lot more system resources to produce something that both looks and runs substantially worse than any alternative engine.

Genshin Impact runs amazingly well for an open world Unity game, even a 17 year old C2Q with a 2015-2016 mid range GPU can run it at 1080p 60fps as long as the CPU is clocked high enough

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

I get sick of optimization talk because while criticism can have merit, usually it's utterly baffling what people expect from hardware. "My 10 year old budget laptop can't run Cyberpunk at 4k ultra. Poorly optimized trash! Devs should go back to coding games in assembly!"

I'd say the much, much more prevalent attitude - demonstrated by this very thread - is "I don't care how comically badly optimized this retro-inspired indie shooter is because it runs fine on my high-end hardware".