Surprised nobody’s mentioned the post Bungie Halo games, true travesties that I believe were a significant cause of the precipitous decline in the popularity of Xbox.
Also, I suppose I’ll mention the later XCOM games from microprose as a historical example.
I would've probably agreed with you years ago when I first played it but having replayed both recently I was actually surprised how well Black Ops 2 holds up compared to the first one. Part of that is because BO1's PC port is dogshit but even so, there are a lot of missions in Black Ops which feel like filler or tacked on while 2 is all killer. Even the weird pseudo-RTS side missions are pretty fun. Plus the soundtrack is better.
Though I am annoyed that people behind the series seem to have forgotten that Weaver exists.
Now that I think about it I do like the characters of Black Ops 1 better. Who the fuck even remembers Mason's son's best friend?
On that note, COD 4 and MW19 are the only two good games in the Modern Warfare series. Both the original and the reboot Modern Warfare 2 and 3 suck dick for diverse reasons.
Oh yeah I only play campaign unless its with friends. Online multiplayer is for homosexuals.
Couldn’t disagree more, black ops 1 had one of if not the best campaigns in the series both in terms of story and gameplay. BLOPS 2 is mediocre at best with all the new gimmicks not amounting to much. Multiplayer I won’t comment on because I don’t remember one being better one way or the other. Zombies, I much preferred 1 as a continuation of WAW’s zombies. While I know those heavily invested into zombies prefer 2’s, as a casual zombies enjoyer, 1 was the zenith of the series for me.
Let's be honest: the series was dead at that point. Dragon Song was a half-hearted attempt to see if the IP still had any easily harvested juice in it. And, without the magic of the original devs, it did not.
I know. It almost broke my heart looking at the beautiful Toshiyuki Kubooka art on the cover only to find out how bizarrely terrible the actual game design is. Eternal Blue (the Sega CD version) might be my favorite JRPG of all time, so it's especially sad to me.
Lunar basically ended as a series when Takeshi Miyaji died, but they just won't let it go. I just saw they're making ANOTHER remaster of the "Complete" versions of the first two games. It's like they're aware they don't have the necessary talent to make anything else, so they just regurgitate the same stuff over and over for a quick buck. Is someone at Game Arts in severe debt or something?
I believe someone has fan-translated the Saturn version of Lunar: Walking School, but I've never gotten to play it. I guess it will be my last taste of the genuine series when I get around to it.
Perfect Dark Zero
The original Perfect Dark was an all time favourite, but post Nintendo Rare put out a string of turds. Perfect Dark Zero being one of them. The games graphics are weird, but I can forgive it. The story and gameplay are dogshit, and clearly trying to chase trends of the time.
You mentioning Rare's sad downfall after being bought out by Microsoft has reminded me.
It's not really a sequel, it's a remake, but Conker: Live and Reloaded is absolute garbage compared to the original. The graphics, while they might be objectively more technically impressive, have none of the charm of the N64 original (particularly the horrible way they rendered fur) and all the cosmetic changes made to the levels are for the worse (the obvious one for me being turning the water in the Spooky level to blood - so fucking lame).
Also, they took the multiplayer, gutted it completely, taking out all the unique minigames, and just replaced it with a gay, generic, Squirrels vs. Tediz Team Fortress ripoff, again, to chase the trend for online multiplayer at the time.
The N64 version is the best version. Xbox niggers will never know.
Surprised nobody’s mentioned the post Bungie Halo games, true travesties that I believe were a significant cause of the precipitous decline in the popularity of Xbox.
Amen, halo 4's multiplayer was so dogshit it killed competitive scene and got it dropped from MLG. Many of the OG clans died out during that period despite 343 desperately trying to appeal to the competitive game scene. Its forge was also dogshit and dropped the custom game lobbies so casual scene got alienated and dropped off.
The campaign of 4 was also boring and even the people who cope and say halo 4 isn't as bad as people think it is, mostly focus on the story of the game as their main point. Halo 5's story was so bad even 343 fans don't even try to defend it and while its mutliplayer is popular its very different to the other halo games' multiplayer before it.
You mentioning Rare's sad downfall after being bought out by Microsoft has reminded me.
It's not really a sequel, it's a remake, but Conker: Live and Reloaded is absolute garbage compared to the original. The graphics, while they might be objectively more technically impressive, have none of the charm of the N64 original (particularly the horrible way they rendered fur) and all the cosmetic changes made to the levels are for the worse (the obvious one for me being turning the water in the Spooky level to blood - so fucking lame).
Also, they took the multiplayer, gutted it completely, taking out all the unique minigames, and just replaced it with a gay, generic, Squirrels vs. Tediz Team Fortress ripoff, again, to chase the trend for online multiplayer at the time.
The N64 version is the best version. Xbox niggers will never know.
I kinda like the fur but would take a more cartoony version that looks more like the original, besides that I agree entirely and I don't really disagree with that. they also censored the game on the fuckin' adult console of the day. retarded. there is some middle ground where they added their new multiplayer shit, kept the old stuff too and didn't censor it or change too much on the levels itself and it would be by far the best way to play the game if nothing else for the xbox controls. however, in a tale as old as time, the people making remakes then are as retarded as the people making remakes now.
It's not really a sequel, it's a remake, but Conker: Live and Reloaded is absolute garbage compared to the original. The graphics, while they might be objectively more technically impressive, have none of the charm of the N64 original
This reminded me of another N64 title I loved as a kid. Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon Back to Nature.
Back to Nature was basically a reskinned modded version of 64, but 64 was so charming that I think hating that game would be akin to hating kittens.
Not that the later Gamecube/PS2 titles, A Wonderful Life and Save the Homeland were bad, they just lacked the simplistic nature of it, and lacked the nostalgic comfort of 64's soundtrack.
In fact 64's soundtrack was so great I believe it was in A Wonderful Life Special Edition that digging in your field you could come across an album named "Memories of '64" and it was a track from the N64 title you could pop into your record player at the house and listen to it.
I implore anyone to go listen to that soundtrack especially the winter track with this coming season.
But when Natsume released Tree of Tranquility and they introduced having Emus and shit I kinda checked out, or maybe I aged out at that time. I don't mind Light of Hope, it's pretty decent and makes you actually want to save the island you live on, but it seems like a rehash of Save the Homeland which was pretty lackluster in that you don't even get to marry or have kids. Also your dog can die which I didn't fucking know that until a girl from the village came and bitched at me for letting it die. I didn't know, they never could die in any other previous games, not counting the N64 glitch.
Harvest Moon: One World was way too fucking big for it's britches. I don't want 4 different farm steads on 4 different sides of the map. Interesting concept, terrible execution.
Yes, I am autistic about Harvest Moon, and Stardew Valley is a bitch ass tumblr version of it.
I always found it funny that when Rare made the Rare Replay collection, they acted like Live & Reloaded never existed. It’s the only original Xbox title missing from the collection and they just opted to emulate the original N64 version instead.
It's not bad because its hard, it's bad because its inconsistently hard. Having your enjoyment stop dead in its tracks because you have to find some random asshole's hidden hut in a giant swamp or hammer a random square of trees to find a hidden town with no real hint other than, "Its out there somewhere" is just objectively bad design and far worse than anything 1 puts you through. To say nothing of the occasional bottomless pits making your health suddenly not matter anymore in certain rooms.
That's exactly the problem that holds it back. I'd love to see a proper remake that retains the sidescrolling but makes the game much more playable.
One of the worst for me was the hidden Kasuto town. After crossing one of those bridges sane people just fairy over, you finally get to a town only to see it's destroyed and there's enemies everywhere. And you can't get healed there either. If you can survive long enough to find the old man he gives you some vague clue about the forest to the east. Well there's a hell of a lot of forest. There's a cave to the north though and that's where you are supposed to go. As a kid I must have chopped down every tree in that huge forest to the northeast before I realised I should go into the cave instead. I also hated how once you got through the cave and chopped down the right tree tile you have to chop it every single time you wanted to return to town. And the beach is actually a decent grind spot. So you ran the risk of being stuck getting into an unwanted forest battle every time you needed to heal up.
Overall I had a lot of fun with it. But you're right. The design seriously screws you over again and again when it shouldn't have to.
-Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven. Switching from a 2D fighter like ASB and HFTF to a boring ass Power Stone clone was a retarded move. To make matters worse, local multiplayer is not supported in any way and you must play online if you want to play with friends.
-Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Smaller and shittier roster (shittier at least on the Marvel side, the Capcom roster is a little better because it isn't 90% Street Fighter characters this time) compared to MVC2, and while the 3D cel shaded visuals don't look terrible they don't hold a candle to the spritework meshed with 3D environments that MVC2 had. Also the gameplay is boring, it's not as fast paced and chaotic as MVC2
-Far Cry 3. 70% gay little story and 30% repetitive monotonous gameplay. At least Far Cry 2 had cool stuff to do like ignore the shitty story so you can burn down the entire African continent instead and Far Cry 1 was a decent shooter from a time before modern slop trends started forming
-Super Smash Bros. for Wii U/3DS. Slower and extremely casualized gameplay that even a retard could 100% it, newcomers like Mega Man or Pac-Man have their movesets consist almost entirely of retro animations instead of utilizing their abilities from 3D era games, the DLC characters were terrible and weren't worth paying for (3 veterans who should have been in from the start and 4 newcomers one of which is a Fire Emblem faggot, great picks), ugly visuals that are way too bright and oversaturated, and lots of bloat "content" which are just smash matches over and over again
-Pac-Man World 3. Dogshit game developed by a completely different studio than the first two. Lots of stops to fight enemy waves. Lots of running around and backtracking whereas 1 and 2 had linear level designs. The only good addition to the gameplay was being able to punch enemies. Unnecessarily dark story, world, and tone. LOTS of cutscene/dialogue interruptions. Pac-Man fucking talks and drops extremely gay PG one liners. Need I say more?
-Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. Frank shouldn't look, sound, and act like he belongs in a retirement home after only 5 or 6 years. Also, the final boss really jumps the shark and the sandbox mode sealed the franchise's fate as a mindless zombie killer simulator. I don't hate it, but it was the real beginning of the end for this series.
-Max Payne 3. I think this one speaks for itself. Not developed by Remedy, doesn't play like the first two and instead plays like generic third person over the shoulder cover shooter, and only got made as a quick cash grab for Cockstar.
-OG Doom 3 and the BFG Edition. Again, major departure from the gameplay of the first two in favor of muh cinematics, muh amazing scripted events and ripping off Half-Life 1.
-Duke Nukem Forever. Take a boomer shooter and turn it into modern shooter slop that a lobotomy patient could beat and combine it with a weapon limit and retarded, Reddit-level humor instead of overly aggressive and funny one-liners, a shitload of weapons, and fast-paced gameplay.
-Postal 4. As bad as Postal 3 was at least it wasn't pussified and cucked Reddit-level garbage like this one is. UE4 always-in-early-access slop with terrible gameplay. I'm sure the entries that followed are even more "current year friendly"
-GoldenEye Rogue Agent. Storywise, think "Shadow the Hedgehog" if it were a James Bond game. You play as a dark edgelord MI6 agent who murders James Bond and works for the villains. I was waiting for "CAN YOU SEE ALL OF ME" to kick in. Gameplay sucks shit compared to Nightfire and OG GoldenEye. Only bears the GoldenEye name so EA could prey on fans of the old game. Speaking of which...
-GoldenEye 007 Wii/Reloaded. AKA Call of Bond. It's a fucking Call of Duty game starring the worst Bond actor. Everything cool or interesting about the movie or game has been replaced with generic military slop shit. The only saving grace is the multiplayer. A proper GoldenEye remaster for Xbox 360 with online support got cancelled and was lost for several years so this horse shit could get released instead. Think about that.
-Switch Sports. Cucked current-year reimagining of Wii Sports & Resort. All NPCs are bootleg soy nu-Miis instead of real Miis. I would expect this shit from Deca Sports or some other knockoff, not in the real thing. For just the cost of the game itself you can probably find a working Wii and a copy of both Wii Sports games which are infinitely better
-Mario Kart Wii. Snaking removed. R.O.B. removed. Kart/bike selection restricted to character weight class. No custom emblem design. Game sucks dick without mods. End of story.
Also, this isn't necessarily the game's fault but current online play is ruined by tryhard faggots who play one character and one bike only and the pussy furfaggots who run the servers now will ban you if you do not play their way, "repeatedly engage in 'Stop Trolling' against certain players", or using "offensive" names, whereas back in the game's heyday people didn't give a fuck, picked whoever they liked, and you had trolls and hackers but they weren't a constant pervasive issue and it was hilarious watching them fuck with people and AFAIK Nintendo wouldn't ban you if you weren't a hacker. Just look at this rulebook like nigga, it's fucking Mario Kart not the Olympics. It's a game where you drive around as a red plumber and green dinosaurs and throw fucking banana peels at people. If this is how resurrection projects for dead online services is going to be, ran by uptight Discord addicted pedos who are probably doing this just so they can fish for kids to groom, I'd prefer that these cuntbags never bring them back and leave them offline for good.
It also ended on a cliff hanger and introduced a lot of questions that never got answered. Felt like the creators just made it because people were begging for a third game and they wanted to troll the fanbase.
-Max Payne 3. I think this one speaks for itself. Not developed by Remedy, doesn't play like the first two and instead plays like generic third person over the shoulder cover shooter, and only got made as a quick cash grab for Cockstar.
Funny thing about MP3 is that playing it like a generic cover shooter instead of a Max Payne game actually makes the game harder, so the cover system barely even matters.
-GoldenEye Rogue Agent. Storywise, think "Shadow the Hedgehog" if it were a James Bond game. You play as a dark edgelord MI6 agent who murders James Bond and works for the villains. I was waiting for "CAN YOU SEE ALL OF ME" to kick in. Gameplay sucks shit compared to Nightfire and OG GoldenEye. Only bears the GoldenEye name so EA could prey on fans of the old game. Speaking of which...
I had always heard that, but didn't know how they fucked it up. I never finished Torchlight 2. One of the games that's too damn long for it's own good.
Oh, the master emerald broke..... again. But we're nowhere near Angel Island, so why is this even a thing again? Also why is it smaller now? It just comes off like they had no idea what to do with these characters (I know the behind-the-scenes is that some of these characters weren't even supposed to be in this game at all).
All I wanted was for all the characters to control similarly to Sonic in 3D, and all I got was Knuckles/Rouge "digs a hole" and Tails "pew-pew" adventures. At least eggman shooting shit in his machine makes sense.
Knuckles breaking the Master Emerald and being like: "I played Adventure 1, I know I can find all the pieces again!" is the most ham-fisted way to shove a character into a game's plot I've seen.
What really annoys me is that in Adventure 1 Sonic's stages were designed to have multiple characters play through which was necessary for expanding the length of the game without creating more levels. In Adventure 2: Knuckles , Rouge, Eggman and Tails all have unique stages which just makes me think they should have used that development time to create more Sonic and Shadow stages since that was the main draw in the first place; maybe throw Tails and Knuckles in there as optional characters to play adding some re-play value, like 3&Knuckles, controlling mostly like Sonic but with abilities to reach certain secrets that Sonic can't with their abilities to glide, fly and climb etc.
Knuckles breaking the Master Emerald and being like: "I played Adventure 1, I know I can find all the pieces again!" is the most ham-fisted way to shove a character into a game's plot I've seen.
What really annoys me is that in Adventure 1 Sonic's stages were designed to have multiple characters play through which was necessary for expanding the length of the game without creating more levels. In Adventure 2: Knuckles , Rouge, Eggman and Tails all have unique stages which just makes me think they should have used that development time to create more Sonic and Shadow stages since that was the main draw in the first place; maybe throw Tails and Knuckles in there as optional characters to play adding some re-play value, like 3&Knuckles, controlling mostly like Sonic but with abilities to reach certain secrets that Sonic can't with their abilities to glide, fly and climb etc.
I didn't like Adventure 2 in 2001 for the superficial reason of I was mad we had no open hub worlds. I was a little kid and was legitimately really pissed off about it. at that time I was really impressed walking around in sonic adventure. I thought streamlining it to 2 stories and switching characters was better, but the fact you didn't walk around between levels was gay shit. that christmas I got Donkey Kong 64 and I thought it was way better because you had a big ass island to walk around and switched kongs. now, I think DK64 aged way worse than SA2 but I can't help but still think I wish I could walk around in SA2 and change characters from a pause menu or something (not wandering all the way to a character change area like in DK). it's funny to me now how much of a dealbreaker it was because you don't do almost anything in SA1's world you just pick some shit up and drop it in other places lol
Civ 5 > Civ 6
This is a commonly known one. The change to tiles becoming buildings absolutely destroyed the game as it required advance planning meta knowledge like crazy. Also a lot of the strategy got removed from the game as the AI became simplier since it couldn't advance plan, and unit balance was a mess.
Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 > Battle for Neighborville
If you're bored look up videos on this. Garden Warfare is an extremely fun third person class shooter. BfN came out of fucking no where, literally. EA dropped it with 0 announcement one day. If there's ever a steam sale for PVZ, everyone will be gravitating towards GW2 since BfN ended up stripping out a lot of complexity from the game (like the over 100 subclasses) to make things more balanced, but it left everyone playing the original, and because the game flopped, development stopped and a lot of half baked system that were supposed to be expanded upon with LIVE SERVICE were never touched, like equipping different skills.
it's funny to me now how much of a dealbreaker it was because you don't do almost anything in SA1's world you just pick some shit up and drop it in other places lol
yeah I was basically just saying it is humorous to me how much I was mad about something that added nothing to anything but when you're 6 years old or whatever you care about goofy shit. I still think however if they were to make a good adventure remake (which I don't really want) and combined 1/2 it would be cool to have more open world hubs for 2 but also give you shit to do in them. I'm not a huge fan of frontiers and shadow gens open world busy work myself but challenges for something would be better than cutting it in SA1 or not adding it in SA2. at the time I think what was such a big deal to me was that era of real early open worlds and hubs and shit felt groundbreaking to me as a kid because it was this exploratory feeling that I had never really gotten in a game and probably couldn't be recreated now and kids today take it for granted after 20 years of open world design. but there was something so crazy back then about games like sonic adventure, ocarina, dk64, shenmue, whatever and just feeling like for the first time there was a whole fuckin 3d world out there in the game even if it was small and quaint, it seemed like so much more at the time.
Quite obscure but Tank Universal is a personal favorite of mine. I've always loved flat shaded polygons and the Tron inspired aesthetic was gorgeous. It had a tolerably small amount of indie jank to it, especially considering it ran on an engine that seemed to be held together with duct tape and baling wire, but I thought it was overall a great game and a very fun experience. Made by one singular developer who seemed to make it a labor of love for him, and it showed.
Tank Universal 2 is fucking dire beyond belief. The first game was largely a series of arenas with some exploration/setpiece levels mixed in, and all of the aforementioned arenas were individually varied and distinct, visually and in overall design. For whatever reason the designer dropped all exploration/setpiece levels and almost everything is arena fighting, and I can barely remember any levels that stood out, visually or design wise. This sequel still used the same engine, seemingly barely updated and with more bugs introduced, one of which was an area that simply insta-killed the player should they wander into it, located near a mission objective. The story, which was engaging enough in the first, goes completely off the rails in 2, and the dev had to have massive explanation post in the steam forums for the game.
No idea what really happened, though I suspect in part that the developer at some point realized that outside of a relative few (but high in postcount) dedicated people following him on his forum there was apparently very little interest in the sequel after a few years, and basically just half assed it to get it out the door. Just immensely dissapointing all around.
