Good games that are actually rubbish.

[TylerAW]

New Super Mario Bros


And the Wii version


Both were crap the DS version was far too easy and too short which lacked all the special extra levels and secrets that make Mario games so great.


The Wii version all though long still has a physics system which does not belong in 2D mario games.

 

[Exophase]

Ironsword II: Wizards & Warriors for NES has a very good reputation and is generally considered an excellent game and quite personally I find it to be utterly terrible. It theoretically has a lot of things going for it, but it's ruined by the world's most ridiculous manner of controlling a sword. The second level, which has you haphazardly bouncing on clouds while crap randomly falls on you, was my breaking point.

 

[TornadoCreator]

Aaaah... Good games that are actually crap. How this list is large. Honestly I think it's more prevelant with current generation games, and the generation just gone. Every website on the face of the planet rates video games on an out of 10 basis (occationally it's out of 5 or a percentage, but it seems to be very rare). The average game will get an 8 out of 10... rating mean nothing now. I've seen people give things like Sonic Unleashed 8.5 out of 10 when they didn't even fucking like it.


The most irritating good game that was actually rubbish though... HALO!


Halo for the original Xbox was a mediocre and irritating shooter with no atmosphere, no storyline, no character, buggy controls and a difficulty curve that was like a SINx graph. It was a crap game, easily overshadowed by Call Of Duty, Half-Life 2 and even Doom 3. The game sucked yet got amost perfect scores across the board. I hate Halo.

 

[ndbsolar]

I thought Left4Dead 2 was horrible, no atmosphere, seemed more like a cartoon.


First one is still awesome.

Left4Dead 2 is the ONLY game I am playing at the moment!! Yes it has more laughs than the first (Ellis is a funny c**t), but the extra weapons (the samurai sword rocks ), special infected (the splitter and charger really are bastards that can stop everyone just hiding in a corner with their backs to the wall) make a game with so much more variety than the first. I love it.


Also, Halo 2 was a huge step down from the first

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

Red steel was a game in this department. Everyone was following it because of the swordplay and the shooting mechanics, and it turned out to be god awful.


left4dead in general is just not a very good game to me.

 

[lulzfish]

Red steel was a game in this department. Everyone was following it because of the swordplay and the shooting mechanics, and it turned out to be god awful.


left4dead in general is just not a very good game to me.

I played it at my friend's house.


It turns out pointing a Wii gun at the derivative of where you need your in-game gun to be is a pain in the ass, just like joystick aiming. The Wii couldn't fix calculus.


I haven't tried the Left 4 Dead games, but I like Team Fortress 2 when the teams are balanced.

 

[Wintersdark]

I strongly disliked the left4dead games. Too pointless, really. I need a good plot in a game, even if it is a zombie game. Just killing millions of zombies? Meh.

 

[ndbsolar]

I strongly disliked the left4dead games. Too pointless, really. I need a good plot in a game, even if it is a zombie game. Just killing millions of zombies? Meh.

Wow, I'm guessing that you don't like 99% of games


99% of games do not have a good story, and 99% of great games do not need one.


The Left4Dead games are very similar to the Phantasy Star Online games. It's all about teamwork, and how fast you can rescue each other when you get pounced on by a special infected, and ofcourse just having a fun with your friends.

 

[Sugar_Kane]

I second L4D2. I loved the first one and I couldn't wait to play the second, but oh how horribly wrong they got it. It's just too busy. I can see that a lot of people might have been crying for more weapons because they like games like halo (+1 to that franchise being terrible, between that and gears of war they have the most juvenile series' ever created), but that was part of the atmosphere of the first game, minimal equipment implying how desperate your situation was. Sure, add different weapons, and maybe one extra, but not a bewildering array of extremely similar guns and slapstick melee weapons.

 

[craigix]

I second L4D2. I loved the first one and I couldn't wait to play the second, but oh how horribly wrong they got it. It's just too busy. I can see that a lot of people might have been crying for more weapons because they like games like halo (+1 to that franchise being terrible, between that and gears of war they have the most juvenile series' ever created), but that was part of the atmosphere of the first game, minimal equipment implying how desperate your situation was. Sure, add different weapons, and maybe one extra, but not a bewildering array of extremely similar guns and slapstick melee weapons.

I agree, the first one just had some serious atmosphere going on. Less is more with these sorts of games.


The second one also had some very sloppy level design, areas where you can just walk up to the edge of the level and see nothing - the first one was very inventive with the 'edges' hiding them really well and keeping you in the game.

 

[Klaue]

Let's see..


Centipede - I always found that one boring


Halo - was kinda good until after about the first half of the game, maybe a bit sooner. Then it turned to poop. The story gets lame, the same rooms/levels get copypasted several times, the devs got lazy and let you run through the same corridors multiple times, the new enemy (the flood) was annoying and so on. Also the weird difficulty curve, there are about 2-3 points where the game gets unbearably hard and you have to play it 30 times, then on the other hand most of the time the game is piss-easy


GTA 4 - worse than GTA San Andreas in about every single aspect save for the graphics. The missions are lame, you only have a city without any surroundings again, the drive physics were crap, the characters bland and.. remember the stupid girlfriend side missions of GTA SA? Yep, they're back, 10 times worse and this time mandatory (at least once).


S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - If you enjoy long boring walks, if you love realism (esp. in all the places where it helps the enemies but not the player) but hate fun, if you like brown, if you enjoy a pretty stupid storyline, if you're having fun walking back to the shop all the times because you can carry no weight, if you want to be killed while having your inventory or map open because the game doesn't pause, if you think lerning curves should look like an U, then, congratulations, this game is for you.

The average game will get an 8 out of 10... rating mean nothing now. I've seen people give things like Sonic Unleashed 8.5 out of 10 when they didn't even fucking like it.

That's exactly the reason I started to write my own reviews. I hate that "the more advertising they pay us for, the better we rate their games" attitude that seems to be omnipresent nowadays.


By the way, I gave Halo a 4/10 and Doom3 a 7/10 (D3 was better than I thought it would be when I played it again for the review - all you remember from it if you haven't played it for some time are the cheap shock effects)

 

[Wintersdark]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - If you enjoy long boring walks, if you love realism (esp. in all the places where it helps the enemies but not the player) but hate fun, if you like brown, if you enjoy a pretty stupid storyline, if you're having fun walking back to the shop all the times because you can carry no weight, if you want to be killed while having your inventory or map open because the game doesn't pause, if you think lerning curves should look like an U, then, congratulations, this game is for you.

Hah! I'm playing Call of Pripyat right now, and while I do enjoy it you're absolutely right. I replaced the existing graphics with less boring brown ones, but the game does slide a little more on the realism scale than is absolutely necessary.

The map thing, for example. One can argue that life doesn't pause when you look at a map, but if you're in a hostile area looking at a map, you don't completely block your vision with it either. It's much, much easier to look at a map IRL while maintaining at least solid peripheral vision for your surroundings, something you can't really replicate with the limitations of a monitor/viewport. So, pausing is a good tradeoff.

That's exactly the reason I started to write my own reviews. I hate that "the more advertising they pay us for, the better we rate their games" attitude that seems to be omnipresent nowadays.
By the way, I gave Halo a 4/10 and Doom3 a 7/10 (D3 was better than I thought it would be when I played it again for the review - all you remember from it if you haven't played it for some time are the cheap shock effects)

Yeah, it's a huge problem in gaming reviews these days. I find independent bloggers give better, more reliable reviews. You've got to read a few to find out if they're actually intelligent reviews, but at least you can avoid the whole paid fawning issue.

I can't think of a single large game review site that doesn't just spew crap

 

[craigix]

I agree on GTA4, wow what a massive disappointment that was after the awesome San Andreas.


Sonic2 was another one I thought was shit.

 

[quartercast]

I nominate Rock'n'roll Racing 2, for being such a poor sequel to the great SNES original.

 

[Klaue]

Yeah, it's a huge problem in gaming reviews these days. I find independent bloggers give better, more reliable reviews. You've got to read a few to find out if they're actually intelligent reviews, but at least you can avoid the whole paid fawning issue.


I can't think of a single large game review site that doesn't just spew crap

The problem is just that giving good, detailed reviews is a massive time sink, more than you would expect. I usually have about 6 hours on one (including editing of screenshots and some research on the nets), not counting the time spent for shooting usable screenshots, making notes while playing and so on, and I'm not even sure if anyone but myself would think of them as "good".


So, my guess is that many bloggers will just not waste that amount of time and the ones that did will maybe just stop it.


(I mainly stopped writing them as well because nobody reads them anyway maybe I should make english ones instead of german ones, but that just means even more work. And no one cares about reviews for old games like "Albion" or unknown ones like "Der fünfte Raum" (a textadventure) )

Sonic2 was another one I thought was shit.

Oh, I liked that one. Not quite as good as sonic3&knuckles, but I loved the hill top zone and the oil ocean one

 

[CoMiKe]

Sonic2 was another one I thought was shit.

I can't agree, I believe is master piece (they added a few things the original Sonic was missing, mantained the original spirit and improved the music to be fantastic) and it's my preferred Sonic by far (if you haven't already realized).

 

[Cloudef]

Regarding to Final Fantasy VIII


Anyways, I love almost all JRPG's and don't really play anything else. (I do play Danmaku's, Visual Novels, and some random games)


Regarding to game that I dislike, there really isn't any. If I don't get any enjoyment from game, I just stop playing it. I've never got feeling that I dislike something tho.

 

[Exophase]

Willow on NES. I pretty recently beat this game.


It's not really bad, it just seems terribly overrated.


Pretty much everywhere I've looked has praised this game top and bottom as being flat out excellent, some going so far as to call it one of the best action RPGs on the platform. With all of the flowing recommendations I had to finally play more than the first couple minutes of it.


Strangely, all of the reviews seem to omit how utterly awful the area design is, which to me flattens the effect of the good features (competent sword fighting, a few useful spells, experience points, snippets of story although it gets pretty inane at the end, music that's only sort of annoying after a while). The whole game is just a big fat boring maze, consisting of palette swaps of the same connecting rooms over and over and lots and lots of meaningless dead ends. Even the towns are far larger and contain far more dead weight than makes sense (I want to know whose idea it was to put in a bunch of empty houses, especially considering you have to see a little cutscene to get through them)


The game had other problems too. A lot of the enemies were designed to make you run away from them, which got old and occasionally was pretty cheap. Leveling up was a tease because it only increased your strength and defense stats by 1 point. The ghost enemies were just horrible - if you were unlucky enough to get caught in them casting a spell while you were in the room you'd get turned into a pig and had to spend forever dodging their blasts. Sometimes it'd get you again before you could even exit. And then there are all those enemies you can't kill except with the sword that likewise doesn't hurt anything else, making you switch gear or just avoid them. A lot of the spells were pretty much useless, and some (like the wand) were useless AND used way too much MP. Except against the final boss, where you'd better not miss more than once or twice or you're screwed.


I think back then people must have had a much greater tolerance for games that were designed to waste their time. Willow is praised as being "long" but the real meat of the game is lacking - only three towns and you see the first two immediately, and the areas can be summed up as caves, forests, mountains, and towards the end a couple castles, each exceptionally bland in appearance. The music is similarly about as unvaried, and while technically impressive at times it can also be pretty high pitched and grating.

 

[Aurekana]

It may be the nostalgia goggles, but any game on the NES, except for Paperboy. Though I guess it might be my ADD kicking in. :lol:


I played Halo on the PC, and actually enjoyed it, except for the fact that the second half of the game is the same as the first half, only in reverse.


Never got L4D, but saw friends playing it, and they seemed to get bored of it quickly after the 40th or 41st playthrough, as there really aren't that many levels or combinations of play.


Most recent one is Alien Breed; looks outwardly similar to Alien Swarm, which is a rocking awesome game, but the actual play is really long and drawn out and repetitive. I think it was the first mission that has you search for a keycard to activate a part of the reactor, and then a search for a keycard to activate another part of the reactor, and so on.


Edit: A little off topic, but something that has bothered me for so long is: why is the game called FINAL Fantasy, yet they keep making more of them? They should call it Penultimate Fantasy (for anyone who has played a decent amount of KoL).


Edit2: I just realized that I accidentally gravedug. Sorry about that :unsure:

 

[DavidBowman]

Edit2: I just realized that I accidentally gravedug. Sorry about that :unsure:

That happened to me the other day, but then there was renewed interest in the thread, so nobody cared. I will now prove that point by adding my opinions on FF8:


Crap. A huge waste of time. I'm fairly certain that I finished the game, but it had so little of an impression on me that I don't remember anything about it.


I remember coming off the high that was FFVII and Xenogears and thinking that FFVIII would be killer. I know a lot of people think FFVII was overrated, but the majority do not (there are so many ongoing projects related to VII, it's crazy - including an attempt to create a new 3D engine for the PC version as a replacement to the original). Square obviously recognizes the love for 7 as they keep making more games (and a movie) based on it (which, of course, I haven't been able to get myself to play). The music was something that really provoked my love for the game, and though many would disagree with me, I think that Sephiroth was the ultimate villain.


I will have to play FFIII (VI) now to see if it really holds up to everyone saying that it was better than VII.


As for other games that everyone seems to think were great, but were really crap I would have to say that I never liked the Resident Evil series either. Wonky controls and slow, unimaginative game play do not a good zombie game make.


As much as I loved the original, I think Metal Gear Solid 2 was really weak. I bought an xbox so that I could play MGS2, and I only ever played it through once. In the end *SPOILER* it's revealed that Jack was part of an experiment to see if it was possible to produce another beats-all-odds Solid Snake. Sooo... basically Kojima handed us MGS 1 with worse characters and terrible acting (HATED the unending dialogues with Rose). I did play MGS3 Snake Eater and I thought that was a solid effort, but because MGS4 came so long after I'd played the original and picked up on MGS2's story, I never did play it (despite purchasing a PS3 for it...). I had to watch the ending on YouTube finally because I knew I'd never get myself to invest the time it was going to take to beat it. Which, ultimately, says a lot about the series after the first MGS: that is, it became less about great game play and too much about the messages Kojima was trying to send. Seriously man, go direct movies instead. HALF of your games are cutscenes? I suppose that I might be a bit too hard on him, but I never loved any of the other games the way I loved the original.


I'm sure I could think of a lot of other games to add to this list, but in the end it really comes down to personal preference.