I'm surprised Mass Effect is as popular as it is. It's my second favorite game series after Zelda, but I'm surprised that so many people love a game with that much dialogue. It's a comforting thought and proof that our medium is maturing.
All Valve games, seriously I just don't see what's so great about them and why I seem to be the only one who doesn't like them. Although, Steam is extremely useful.
3. There are a lot of games that I don't think deserve their popularity, but I am not actually surprised they are popular. I guess I'm surprised that TF2 is such a golden child among PC gamers. A game that is only good in private servers with regimented teams really isn't very good. With all the ridiculous item farming and crap added to it lately, I can't even take it seriously anymore.
Yes, I'm surprised at how popular they are to warrant 13 sequels and 2 mmo's, I thought 13 was tripe yet there are so many people in love with the damn thing.
You'd be surprised what people will pay for. Remember when that rumour that CoD was going Pay to play was going around? you could imagine how many people would be paying for that.
Also 15 dollars for Wow seems reasonable when you take into account the bandwidth, man power and creative work it takes to keep the game running and constantly add new content.
Red Dead Redemption. I figured that gamers would not want a wild-western game. I personally hated it for having so many glitches it was borderline unplayable with my play-style. I'm shocked so many people loved it despite it's bugs.
im surprised people were able to tolerate MGS4's ridiculous number of cutscenes, most of which twisted my brain right around, enough to give it its high success.
mgs1 was probably the most accessible, so im not surprised.
mgs2 rode on 1's success, so im not surprised
mgs3 was just, utterly utterly, amazing, so im not surprised.
i guess mgs4 does well because of its the conclusion piece, and those always do well. but still.
im surprised people were able to tolerate MGS4's ridiculous number of cutscenes, most of which twisted my brain right around, enough to give it its high success.
mgs1 was probably the most accessible, so im not surprised.
mgs2 rode on 1's success, so im not surprised
mgs3 was just, utterly utterly, amazing, so im not surprised.
i guess mgs4 does well because of its the conclusion piece, and those always do well. but still.
Out of all the MGS games, 4 I thought was the worst for that very reason. The popularity of it isn't surprising. What is surprising is how few people I expected to complain about it, although that could be due to the fact that I know very few, if anyone, who doesn't like the MGS series.
I have a litany of games that I am puzzled that are so popular.
1) Yearly sports games: I understand the popularity of sports games: they let you be a sports star when you don't have the athletic talent to be one in real life. But why buy them every year? At most you're getting a roster update and usually the changes developers make are small and don't alter the game that much. I would like to see a sports franchise release a game every 2 years but make the roster update DLC. And what's with the game's developers not even updating the rosters for games like Madden once the season starts? They have players on teams that were released or traded weeks before the season started.
2) World of WarCraft: I have friends who play it and they like it... a lot. But when I played it the game felt like a second job. You quest, you grind, you quest some more, you grind some more, you get better gear so you can do more quests and grinds in higher-level areas... And if you want to do PvP you have to do more grinding to get your PvP gear. But the "endgame" is apparently where it's at but I don't see how people are willing to wade through all of that repetition (much less pay $15 a month for the "privilege") just to get there. But then again, I'm just not much of a fan of MMOs to begin with.
3) Halo add-ons beyond Halo 3: I can understand the popularity of Halo 3, since people wanted to see how the story ended. But Halo: ODST, Halo: Reach, Halo Wars? Come on... you have to know Bungie and Microsoft are just mining money from you to make their next Halo game...
As for the off-topic suggestion from Payne121 about a game that's under-appreciated: Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick(sp) Obscura. Made by the same developers as the original Fallout games, this game combined that open-ended, decision-making world that you enjoyed with Fallout but put it in a fantasy world that was unique. You get to view a world where the forces of technology and magic are at odds and a struggle for influence is gripping the world. You see the traditional fantasy races in different capacities (dwarves and elves living in cities, mixed races [e.g. half-ogre, half-orc, half-elf], and the like). Although it's highly dated now with the 2D graphics, a camera that doesn't scroll (you have to manually move it with the arrow keys...) and the turn-based combat (although you can make it real-time, which can be easier or harder depending on the situation...), it's still worth at least one playthrough.
CoD and Halo are my main two. The Black Ops campaign is very fast paced but it gets dull fairly quickly. It has a lot of vehicle sections, which all feel quite the same (the boat level was pretty good, but the helictoper one sucked since you can't control your altitude (best Heli controls in gaming goes to GTA Vice City/San Andreas for PS2)).
Halo is the same thing, same day almost. Only thing that really changes is the levels and a few guns.
Honestly I don't get it at all. The story is about as deep as a rain puddle and what is there is terrible. Especially the very end after you beat the big bad and he tells you his life story, that part was the cherry on the ice cream sundae of the plot, except the ice cream is expired and will give you the runs and the cherry is 5 years old and very very rotten. The characters are all completely unlikable which is part of what hurts the story so much (why am I supposed to be upset that Cole's girlfriend is mad at him? she's a total *****). The karma path thing was a joke as well, especially the choices you make. They might as well have not bothered because both choices for a situation give you the same effect on the plot anyway. Examples:
The big bad has stolen your girlfriend that you don't care about because she's a total ***** and has her dangling off the roof of a very tall building. He also tells you that there are 6 doctors dangling off the roof of a different tall building, and you can only go to one of them and save whoever is there before bombs go off that drop whoever is still dangling.
> If you go to the doctors and save them, your girlfriend falls and dies.
> If you go to your girlfriend and save her... It turns out the big bad lied to you as it's one of the doctors up there. Your girlfriend was in with the group he said was all doctors, and so she falls and dies along with the rest of them.
Same result on the story either way, only difference is if you get good or bad karma points.
Later on, you find the magical macguffin that gave you your powers in the first place. It's sitting on some pedestal, maybe it was powering a machine or something, I can't remember. With you is some guy, he's a tosser like all the other characters in the game and I can't be assed to remember more about him (again, the story isn't deep or really memorable). Anyway you have the choice to let the guy with you remove it from the pedestal, or take it yourself and use it to try and increase your powers.
> If you let him pick it up, it kills him when he touches it. The guy with you dies and you retrieve the macguffin.
> If you take it and use it, it kills the guy with you. He is dead and you have the macguffin.
Once again, same result on the story. This time it does also max out your evil karma and your ammo capacity power meter (more on that later), but again it's just a gameplay choice. It has no actual effect on the plot except for one or two lines of dialog the big bad says to you over the radio right after you finish that mission.
Honestly for a feature that was so heavy touted on the back of the box it's pretty terrible. This is not a big story driven game where your choices matter like the game wants you to think, being good and being a dick both result in the exact same things happening.
But really it's the gameplay being so horrible on top of everything else that makes me not understand this. People like to talk about how many first person shooters there are out there these days, but there are also a lot of third person shooters too. Great games too, like Uncharted and Gears of War. So why is it that a completely bland third person shooter like inFamous can get love too? This should be down there in the pile of bad third person games that get the same kind of scorn that games like Haze do from first person shooter fans.
But yeah, inFamous. You just hide behind something and shoot at it with your infinite lightning powers. No need to look for ammo which ruins some of the challenge, why aim properly when you can just spam the fire button? And even if you do use one of the other guns powers and run out of ammo lightning, there are shitloads of ammo pickups things you can get more lightning from all over the place, so you might as well have infinite ammo power for everything. And they are also health refills at the same time so even on hard mode, they might as well have not even implemented health and had the game be one of those games like Wario Land 2 or Kirby's Epic Yarn where the main character can't die.
And then the city. Oh yes we should be so impressed because of the big open world. Yeah okay but there is nothing to do. One set of side missions and then nothing. The side missions have you doing the same things as the regular story missions anyway, kill more bad guys. Only a few are unique and sadly you can't replay those, but you'll get plenty more baddies to kill in the story just in case you weren't sick of that yet (you were but the game doesn't care). And sure there is collecting shit but really that's not a feature you need to talk about in games anymore. Side elements involving collecting shit aren't really worth mentioning, it's like saving. These days, does a game save your progress? Yep. And it has you collect some shit on the side too. It's really only a discussion piece when it doesn't do that. Also a big open world like this means you are going to climb some shit right? Well the climbing sucks too. Constantly pressing X to get him to hump the wall a little more to get high enough to reach the next grabbable (I made that word up I think, oh well) object on it isn't fun.
Overall I found every single thing about the game to be awful, and I honestly cannot see how, in this generation of gaming where we have so many series of great third person shooters, anyone can like this game. Let alone beg for a sequel. And get one.
Nieroshai said:
Cronq said:
I was just fine with only having 4 Call of Duties and 7 Final Fantasies. These developers need to develop some imagination and creativity and stop making the same damn games year after year after year.
Ever play a Final Fantasy, or are you just making this up as you go? All Final Fantasies are different. All of them. I've never played an identical one. Unique doesn't always mean good, but they're by no means carbon copies. As for Call of Duty, it's ALWAYS been a cover-based shooter set in a realistic war setting. Since the first one. The biggest innovation was when in the second one they let you use a trigger for grenades instead of having to select them out of your inventory first. After that, there's been little new aside from weapons and setting, but you may argue level design gets monotonous. Bash a game by all means, but do it in a way that anyone who HAS played the games can see where you're coming from. Like if you were to argue that FF's storyline is very drawn-out, or that you hate grinding and gatherer quests and androgynous heroes with unrealistic weapons, or you hate how in COD the Nazis ALWAYS know where you are even if you hid and snuck around a building behind them. I can tear a game apart, or make it sound like the best thing ever, because I use actual experience from the game when I played it.
I would argue that ALL FF's storylines are drawn out, involve too much grinding, and have androgynous heroes with unrealistic weapons. So they have their similarities and while that may be greatly oversimplying each of the games, it does stand to reason that someone who isn't a fan can look at them all and think that they are all the same: More characters with swords bigger than they are in some grindy game with a story so fat that when it sits around the house it sits around the house. And while that maybe isn't fair to each game on its own, it sure is enough to keep people who aren't interested from taking a closer look, and the developers do need some creativity and imagination to try something else for a change.
This game isn't crap, but when I was in high school I sure as hell thought I was the only one on Earth who wanted to play it. That game is Kingdom Hearts. Who knew that Square + Disney = lot's of $'s.
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.