Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Pissmaster]

There's also Paralives, but it's not out yet. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1118520/Paralives/

Come to think of it, there haven't historically been very many knockoffs of Sim games. There were a bout of cheap "Tycoon" games in the 2000s, but, like, SimCity even went unchallenged until Cities Skylines came along. Maybe they have strong enough patents to prevent competition.

Funny you should mention Cities Skylines, because Paradox announced their own Sims knockoff (Life By You) earlier this year and then canceled it almost immediately. They spent 90% of their projected yearly earnings on it

What the hell went wrong with it?

 

[The Ugly One]

If a game has ludicrous requirements for unlockables then it's perfectly justified to use hacks or cheats to unlock them. Specifically, any game that requires me to spend excruciating amounts of time grinding to unlock shit, I would just use cheats and call it a day. Same for any game that requires you to play at god/TAS level to unlock stuff.

I never unlocked Site in Timesplitters 2 because of how balls-out hard it was to beat the cathedral level on Hard difficulty.

 

[Thé au lait]

What the hell went wrong with it?

The entire announcement is bullshit cope, and came down to "we didn't think we'd ever be satisfied that it was good enough to release, so we scrapped it after two delays and getting close to an open beta/'early access'"
I suspect the dev team was having troubles, because what publisher would cancel a game they've fully funded once it's in beta and they've just announced it?

 

[Franz Joseph]

Though you are right they should have stopped catering to the twitter troons forcing the femshep meme

Speaking of femshep, I find Jennifer Hale's performance as femshep to be extremely overrated. I never got the praise she got for it, you basically get a choice of, girl boss shep and slightly more pissed off girl boss shep.

 

[Shao Khan]

Since it's that time of the year: Steam Flash Sales were fucking awful and I'm glad they're gone. No, I did not enjoy calling my bank several times a day for several days because my card was locked down after multiple "suspicious purchases" and missing out on a good deal. I didn't enjoy feeling tethered to my monitor to make sure I didn't miss that one game I really wanted going on sale.

im sorry but it seems you are retarded bro

 

[Brain Power]

Nobody likes Sims 2 and Sims 4's non-existent cars

Sims 2 has ownable cars, or are you talking about base game content only?

 

[Terra Pax]

I don't know whether this is still an unpopular opinion but BioShock Infinite sucked, though I admitedly went into it pretty closed minded. It just felt so forced. "Oh what if the sequel is a city in the sky" was a reddit take even before Bioshock 2 came out and I remember thinking it was dumb then. I've never liked multiverses, but especially when there's infinite of them and they are physical places where you can travel to - so nothing has any stakes at all then.

But it's mostly the worldbuilding. Rapture, despite being impossible, was at least a grounded place. It needed maintenance all the time to keep the leaks out. The people in it were normal, they needed a place to generate the oxygen and places to make the food. The entire place has a great atmosphere of sadness and faded glory (helped by the amazing soundtrack of sombre violins). in even if It was inherently secret by being 2 km at the bottom of the ocean, and the need for secrecy obviously led to smuggling, discontent, effectively brought the whole place down.

Columbia is feels like a parody. I don't recall it being very high in the sky and all the buildings constantly bobbing around ever being referenced or having an effect on the city's design. All of Rapture's advances are secret. Columbia was built in the 1920's by the government, so all the magic-tech that went into it available. The fact that I'm supposed to be in anyway bothered by the "bad future" where the balloon city attacks the US eastern seaboard in the 1980s is laughable - 1980s New York looks exactly the same and so do the bits of Columbia we see despite it being far into both thier respective futures. The inhabitants feel like unreal charactures and it's jarring when the game tries to make me take things seriously.

Bioshock and Rapture felt like a lightning in a bottle moment of a cool idea, a cool aesthetic, and a creator who had a sincere interest in making a game about a ludicrous ideology. Infinite felt like just trying to do all that again. "There needs to be a magic-city, and of-course you have to get there by a lighthouse for theme points (the lighthouse made sense for Rapture, why is it a multiversal constant?). And Plasmids are an established game-play mechanic so I'll just come up with some equivelant. Sure they were intrinsic to the story of the first game but whatever. I suppose I'll need a through-line via some ideology I want to lampshade. How about Racism? I'm sure that'll be very impactful whilst you're flaying people's faces open." The entire game felt very pretentious, especially the two twins that speak exclusively in cryptic nonsense.

Ken Levine being a salty little bitch about Bioshock 2 and retroactively ruining Bioshock 1 via the DLC didn't help my opinions on it either.

 

[The Ugly One]

The difference between 1 & Infinite is the difference between political themes and current politics. Infinite comes right around the Woke revolution, when all the libtards in America decided at once that they desperately needed to cure America of its racism, sexism, and problematic infatuation with its own racist, sexist past. Bioshock 1 is a story; Bioshock Infinite is a parable.

 

[ChucklesTheJester]

The difference between 1 & Infinite is the difference between political themes and current politics.

Bit more then just that of difference between the two outside of just the themes. Infinite saw how fun having more then 2 weapons in 1 and 2 was and decided to go for the even annoying at the time trend of limiting you to 2 weapons. Infinite is what happens when you jump on a trends while having no idea what made those trends good. While also having no idea how to write a coherent story with in a already set universe(s now lol). Which then shits all over the first two games stories with the DLCs. Don't get me started on the fucking regenerating health(shield). I hate that shit in games.

It feels like they saw most of the stuff people liked in 1 and 2 and threw it out because fuck you fans.

Don't forget the RNG equipment nonsense that was added to replace the Gene Tonics.

There are still a few good elements to the game, but man are there so much more bad shit in the game that brings it down. Elizabeth looks nice outside of the DLCs. And her gimmick with ripping tears in time and space is cool, but then is ruined by the whole muti universe nonsense. I think the HP/Vigor/Shield enhancing drink you find is a good way to pace your HP/Vigor upgrades(fuck regening shield) And makes for a nice reward to find some in the more out of the way hidden places.

I really like the designs of the non standard human enemies. The handyman qoutes real gives you the mental image of how awful and fucked up existence is for them.

"I miss my old body. It was so… so warm!"

"Every step is like coals!"

Thinking back on infinite and it did feel like it had real potential when all we knew of it was the very early stuff.

I don't like the early hair design for Elizabeth but when all we knew was this.


Also

Has to be my favorite very game prompt of all time.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

I don't know whether this is still an unpopular opinion but BioShock Infinite sucked

I will say an unpopular Opinion.

The worst part of Infinite wasn't the writing
or the stupid Proto Woke Pandering

The gameplay was fucking ass and is worse than Bioshock 1. Bioshock infinite is one of the few games that was so terrible gameplay wise that I said fuck it and turned on Journalist Mode (set the difficulty to easy) just to get the game over with because bosses(and their adds) are such fat sacks of HP that they took too long to kill.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

The reason Bionic Commando and DmC got made the way they did was because, at the time, the head of Capcom's R&D division was one Keiji Inafune. He was infamous in the 2000s for talking incredible amounts of bullshit about how Japanese games were falling behind. So what he did was contract out various Capcom IPs to Westerners at exorbitant cost.

Bionic Commando for example was produced by Inafune's friend and English translator Ben Judd using Grin.

There's a reason why Bionic Commando: ReArmed was good and Bionic Commando was...

 

[Point Man]

I fucking hate modern lighting with a burning passion.

Bloom, godrays, glare, and especially that eye adjustment shit where you're in a building and it looks like a constant flashbang outside and the opposite of it being darker than hell inside when you're outside, all of that shit should not be in a videogame. I swear to God that there is some kind of specific word or phrase for that phenomenon, but I completely forgot what it was.
I've been revisiting Battlefield 1 since all of the games are on sale and holy shit, BF1 has some of the most obnoxious lighting I've had the misfortune of experiencing in a combined arms FPS.

It also doesn't help that it feels like that enemies are nearly impossible to see with them blending in with the brown colors of the game... Or maybe I'm just blind, who knows.

 

[Thé au lait]

He is now known as Con Man because of how badly that Kickstarter went, as a Mega Man reference.

GET EQUIPPED
WITH
BACK
-LASH

 

[Terra Pax]

Bioshock 1 is a story; Bioshock Infinite is a parable.

Can it ever be better said than this? One feels sincere and the other feels so forced by a wannabe auteur (them both being the same person). Followed up by DLC that has half fanservice and have apologia to hamfist their own latter nonsense into their original creation.

Honestly. Few moments from games have ever stuck in my mind - the ending of Far Cry 2 being one. But in Bioshock 1 there's a scene when you go to Tenebaum's appartment and it plays a section from Dancers on String that perfectly times with her saying "You will not believe me. But there was a time when this place was all so beautiful." And I remember doing a sweep of the room the first time I played it and being at a window over looking the city when that line played. And here I am over ten years later recounting it, if that's any measure of how well that moment was delivered for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zNY18R54iU&t=780s

 

[Eagle Bro]

There's plenty of talent out there. There's just too many retards trying to be the next big youtube sensation and stabbing each other in the back because they want to grift patreon paypigs forever instead of collaborating to make anything worth buying or caring about. So you end up with the last decade and a half of piles of awesome meaningless concept art that they end up spinning their wheels in.

I get taking a vacation or break once in a while after you've released a game or two and created a legitimate following for yourself. No one will give you shit about that as long as you are transparent, but none of these faggots want to actually complete a game at all in the first place and rightly get banned off platforms like patreon because the grifters want to run a discord-based scam operation more than anything. Crowd funding platforms such as Kickstarter are also notorious for these kinds of grifters.

Its always funny when they complain about "losing their livelihood" when you take a look further and see its just some shitty half assed asset flip YEARS into development that was likely a front for a money laundering operation.

 

[Pissmaster]

Same with complaining about AAA slop being full of wokeshit, then paying $160 for the deluxe collectors edition.

I think there's a significant number of people who do that thanks to parasocial communities online, where you're judged as a person by how much of a fan you are. The game may be woke garbage, but that doesn't matter, because the guys on the subreddit upvoted the hell out of a picture of someone's Deluxe Collector's Edition in their car seat strapped in with a seatbelt, and you don't want to be left out and forgotten, do you?

 

[Metallic Blood]

We lost something in the transition to CD quality audio. There's been great music since then obviously, but rarely is it ever as catchy or memorable as something from NES, SNES, or N64.

Excuse my 1 month-late reply.

This has more of the fact that gaming musicians forget the rule of KISS and instead think that "more instruments = better music", kinda how devs focus on making bigger sandboxes and more realistic graphics and forget if the game is fun or not.

Look at Super Mario Galaxy, it has one of the best soundtracks ever produced in gaming history, it's so magical and whimsical that I don't think a N64 cartridge could ever replicate the same feeling.

And now look at something like Undertale, while I think the soundtrack it's overrated, I can't deny that the music is good. And it's so simple that the entire soundtrack is probably really made of 8-9 melodies with everything else being a remix. (take a shot everytime you hear the leitmotif of "Once Upon A Time for example")

TL;DR: Good music is good, bad music is bad, and it's shame that things like the bottom music is a rare sight... or hearing to behold.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Bioshock and Rapture felt like a lightning in a bottle moment of a cool idea, a cool aesthetic, and a creator who had a sincere interest in making a game about a ludicrous ideology. Infinite felt like just trying to do all that again. "There needs to be a magic-city, and of-course you have to get there by a lighthouse for theme points (the lighthouse made sense for Rapture, why is it a multiversal constant?). And Plasmids are an established game-play mechanic so I'll just come up with some equivelant. Sure they were intrinsic to the story of the first game but whatever. I suppose I'll need a through-line via some ideology I want to lampshade. How about Racism? I'm sure that'll be very impactful whilst you're flaying people's faces open." The entire game felt very pretentious, especially the two twins that speak exclusively in cryptic nonsense.

Ken Levine being a salty little bitch about Bioshock 2 and retroactively ruining Bioshock 1 via the DLC didn't help my opinions on it either.

The original Bioshock was interesting because the idea of Rapture came later than you might expect. It sounds like the founding idea, but originally the game was going to be set on an island.

But one of the elements of Infinite was that it was, in part, made to troll fans of the original. Columbia is set up to a "more of the same" situation, but then it switches to make the story about a deadbeat dad and his daughter. The problem is it doesn't really work. The Vox being bad guys could have worked as a twist if it wasn't so heavy handed, and as others already said they ruined it by retconning it to appease Tumblr and Reddit.

There's plenty of talent out there. There's just too many retards trying to be the next big youtube sensation and stabbing each other in the back because they want to grift patreon paypigs forever instead of collaborating to make anything worth buying or caring about. So you end up with the last decade and a half of piles of awesome meaningless concept art that they end up spinning their wheels in.

One of the big problems with being an indie dev, or just a dev generally, is the split between ideas and execution. Having a big idea is easy, delivering on it is hard. As such collaborating or even hiring people is difficult because they quit after a week, often without saying anything, when they realise the scale of the task. Being on the other side of the collab is difficult as well, since there's a lot of "idea guys" who think their role is to come up with the ideas and the other person to do all the work fulfilling it.

Even when you can get people on the same page, then you have squabbling over stupid shit that doesn't matter until the entire thing is derailed. A great example can be seen in the KF Doom project.

 

[Thé au lait]

Excuse my 1 month-late reply.

This has more of the fact that gaming musicians forget the rule of KISS and instead think that "more instruments = better music", kinda how devs focus on making bigger sandboxes and more realistic graphics and forget if the game is fun or not.

Look at Super Mario Galaxy, it has one of the best soundtracks ever produced in gaming history, it's so magical and whimsical that I don't think a N64 cartridge could ever replicate the same feeling.

And now look at something like Undertale, while I think the soundtrack it's overrated, I can't deny that the music is good. And it's so simple that the entire soundtrack is probably really made of 8-9 melodies with everything else being a remix. (take a shot everytime you hear the leitmotif of "Once Upon A Time for example")

TL;DR: Good music is good, bad music is bad, and it's shame that things like the bottom music is a rare sight... or hearing to behold.

You've made me realize that I honestly remember games for their soundtracks more than I ever thought. Undertale and Nier are two of the most memorable games I ever played, and in both cases it's largely because of the music. Even if it is given a bit too much attention, Undertale's soundtrack was legitimately well-made to connect certain moments and give a new tone to them. Sometimes it's to things outside of the game, like the tutorial having music that drew from SpongeBob of all places.

Spoiler: for those unfamiliar

Now compare:

SpongeBob was probably a good choice just because of popularity, so most people of the target age group will recognize the song well enough to remind them of the episode, even if they don't realize it at the moment.

I refuse to spoil Nier in case anyone hasn't played it yet. Go get the remake if you don't have a PS3, just play the game.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Having a big idea is easy, delivering on it is hard.

People are too laser-focused on having a "big idea" in the first place
Big ideas lead to big disasters and big failures
Focus on having good ideas instead, regardless of how big or small they are