Poll: Do "good" games or "unique" get remembered and loved more than the other?

[Someone Depressing]

So, I'm a fan of tongue-in-cheek stuff. A very worthwhile tongue-in-cheek thing is Illbleed, a game in which you get the true ending by getting your clothing torn up by letting your friends die in an actually-dangerous horror park and then showing some skin to get your dad who is a smurf to come out of his hiding place so he can explode and turn into a brain and then you beat him up and get one hundred million dollars yay for everyone.

Now, I just realised something: I can remember so much from Illbleed. Traps, (the game's main obstacle) enemies, the horrible B-movie inspired voice acting, the above-mentioned true ending, and the whole surreal Japanese-ness of the whole thing. The game is just something that you can't forget. It's weird, idiotic, and far too fun for its own good.

It's also horrible. Really really horrible. Like, you should play, but only for an hours long murder mystery level to end with the murderer being the identity the murderer took on in the first place, and a Toy Story parody in which you kill a child to go to hell to save your girlfriend with camel toe from Sonic the Hedgehog...

Then I started thinking about one of my favourite games ever: Earthbound on the SNES. It's a game I remember vividly; it's magical, odd, charming, and it had such great moments as...

a kraken?

It happened to be one of the greatest games ever, and the most I remembered about it was an annoying boss fight against a kraken and that you were fighting against a cosmic horror that came to be from hatred and neglect from its human parents.

Now, this could just be because I have a horrible memory, and Illbleed is fresh on my mind, but I'd like to ask you, the people of the Escapist...

Do "good games" or "bad games that were unique", like Earthbound and Illbleed respectively, get more fondly remembered?

 

[StriderShinryu]

Reading the question and not the OP, the first game I actually thought of was Earthbound.. except I was thinking of it in the opposite way the OP did. I consider Earthbound to be little more than a passable RPG that gets remembered and praised so highly simply because of the few things it did differently rather than because it was actually notably good compared to it's contemporaries.

Anyway, to the question at hand, I think unique games are often the ones more remembered at least on a larger scale. Good games are recognized in the moment but unless they're truly exceptional they tend to be quickly forgotten. In fact, I'd actually say that really bad games that aren't unique (outside of their badness) actually get remembered more than really good ones that aren't unique. Classic games that get referenced years and even decades later are generally the games that do both, evolve their genre or even gaming as a whole while actually being really good.

On a personal scale, there's a lot more going on that makes a game be memorable or not and it may have nothing at all to do with the game. I find myself sometimes remembering games simply because of what else was going on in my life at the time that I was playing the game. It may be a fairly poor game that also wasn't unique or interesting and yet I'll remember a lot about it anyway.

 

[Netrigan]

I think well-remembered games are the ones which are a) good at what they do and b) occupy some reasonably unique niche.

It's why it's so depressing to watch all the "Me Too" mentality as everyone was jumping on the modern warfare MP FPS bandwagon. The only franchise which has managed to get any sort of toe-hold into it was Battlefield which put a lot of focus on vehicles, something CoD didn't do.

Or the endless stream of meh sandbox games. The Sabateur isn't a bad game and it's worth the bargain bin purchase, but there's no game mechanic it can call its own as it doesn't bring a single thing to the table which we haven't seen a dozen times before.

On the flip side of that is a game like Wanted, which brings the novelty of bullet-curving to a shooter and... it's pretty fun, but fails to do anything particularly interesting with it and the game becomes a repetitive slog long before you'll finish its five hour campaign.

 

[Rose and Thorn]

I am not sure I know the difference, probably because I am a little slow or something.

I like what I consider unique games, but of course I also think they are "good". right? I know a lot of people called me a wad when I said I liked Dear Esther. I even bought the soundtrack. I simply stated that I didn't think it was for everyone, but I liked it. A lot of people don't even call it a game, but I still enjoyed it, right?

Most of the games I like tend to have that unique feel I guess, whether is is how the game plays or how the story is told. Things like Portal, Shadow of the Colossus, The Walking Dead, Stanley Parable, Heavy Rain and Metal Gear Solid 2. My favourite game is Bioshock and I have heard many times people say the gameplay is lousy, that is isn't a very good shooter. I really enjoyed it though, gameplay doesn't have to be super complex for me to have fun.

So I guess a good game is what the general opinion is, but I happen to think all the games I like are good. So I guess I don't understand the question, or maybe I don't play enough of them to know what is considered a unique game.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I think it depends a bit on the time. There's that "Cultural lens" effect where the further back you go, the fewer games there were and so the more good games stood out because relatively speaking, they were more unique innately (or sometimes, the really awful games too, like the infamous E.T.).

Today, we're constantly bombarded with games. Very few push through to the surface.
In this, something like FTL: Faster Than Light sticks out way more than say, CoD: Ghosts. Not because CoD Ghosts is unpopular or "bad"* but because we've seen it all a dozen times before, while FTL is the first of its kind.

*[sub](some allege it is, I don't care enough to debate it because it just looks like the same CoD I've seen for half a decade now)[/sub]

 

[BrotherRool]

The thing that's making this hard to judge is that all the good-but-not-really-unique-games spawn franchises that continue to sell millions. Assassins Creed 2 is a good example of a fun game that didn't really do much new. If it were by itself would anyone remember it? But because it's part of an established franchise, of course people remember it exists. It's impossible to forget AC2 when everyone is playing AC4.


For the rare examples of games that don't get made part of franchises but are worthwhile in some way, I'd say unique is much more important than good. Alpha Protocol has a really large cult following because of the things that made it special, despite it's huge flaws.

Whereas games that score 70-80 on metacritic and don't do anything great, but also don't screw up, I don't think people ever really remember those games. Stuff like 'Spartan: Total Warrior' doesn't stick around in the same way that Indigo Prophecy does.