veloper said:
Congrats to the TS
ME: nice story with mediocre gameplay
FO3: fair game, weak story
GTA: average game
COD4: decent
Oblivion: fundamentally broken game, unless you DL mods for it on the PC.
Yahtzee likes Gears2 though.
I don't know if I can agree with any of these points in their entirety. ME's gameplay was shallow for an RPG, but it was well suited to the environment. I'm not prepared to call it "mediocre", but I'd certainly opt for "weak".
Fallout's core story is as well told as most any story in any game I've ever had the pleasure of playing. Sure it's the standard "save the world" affair but you can hardly dock points for that given that 90% of games around at any given moment revolve around the idea of "save the world" or at least "save the area".
GTA 4 is an excellent game by all accounts with a flaw so gigantic that it sapped my will to play entirely. I won't go into too much detail but I have to say the entire friend mechanic can absolutely go to hell. The story is well told, the city seems truly alive and it's the best gameplay GTA has ever delivered as far as I'm concerned. That said, I prefer the saints row approach in general.
CoD4 is easily the strongest entry in the call of duty franchise. The single player game is fantastically compelling and action packed and it delivers some of the finest multi-layer shooter action ever found on a console.
To call oblivion broken is more than a bit disingenuous as the game is fully functional. The story again is the "save the world" sort of thing and it's not told in a terribly compelling way. It does have that "elder scrolls" game feel to it, which goes a long way to endear itself to fans of previous games, but it does feature some improvements that I personally appreciated. The inclusion of mini-games for mundane tasks like lockpicking and speechcraft actually added a bit of joy for those activities, and combat itself took a few stumbling baby-steps forward, but inevitably degenerates into a very standard block/attack sort of combination. That is unquestionably better than what existed in previous games where the player's part in combat was simply "push a button" and the computer took care of the dice rolls behind the scenes to determine what happened. That said, the PC version is almost certainly better simply because of the sheer number of mods that are avaialable. As one of the most mod friendly games ever produced, you can find a mod for just about everything. There's one that gives you the tools from the thief series (like vine and water arrows, and a blackjack that provides an instant knockout if applied to the back of the head), a handful of mods that add a great deal of depth to the combat (they work well but I'm not convinced any of them work for the game in the long run), mods that add new weapons, armor and quests, mods that turn the game into a porn game (which may have been what sparked the rating increase post launch, and by porn I don't mean the nudity mods that exist for most any game that can be modded), mods that make the environment just a little bit better (flora/fauna/weather improvements). I played the game extensively on 360, getting the PC version breathed a great deal of new life into the game thanks primarily to user generated content.