I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.
The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.
I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time… Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that “Sonic was never good”, “Sonic had a rough transition to 3D” nonsense.
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I enjoyed Outer Worlds. Tons of criticism online, but I liked it.
I had the opposite for this one, heard it was good and really didn’t like it when I gave it a try.
Me too, didn’t even know people thought it was a bad game until recently. Honestly I don’t get why, I wasn’t expecting anything different from what I got, there were definitely some dialogues that made me chuckle, and a lot of storylines were very tongue in cheek, and while gameplay was nothing to write home about neither is fallout and this was sold as “fallout in space”, and definitely delivered on that.
Agreed. I thought it was a competently made game, even if not groundbreaking or best in class for shooting. I think people’s expectations are often their biggest obstacle to enjoyment.
It still has a 9/10 on Steam despite all the flak it took. I think it’s a classic. To me it’s similar to the backlash to Fallout 4 from purists, which I also feel is a classic game
Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Dragon Age 2.
I liked them both. Not as good as Deus Ex 1 or DA:O, but I enjoyed and finished playthroughs of both games.
All 5 of the dues ex games were good. And Ill die on that hill
I enjoyed Dragon Age 2 as well. It’s just that it’s an action movie to Origins’ House of the Dragon. It’s just different genres.
Final Fantasy 8. I loved it but apparently I was in the minority.
I also loved FF8. I’d be more interested in a remake of that one than 7 tbh.
Another FF8 enjoyer here! My husband and I got married on Halloween, so for the reception, I was Rinoa and he was Squall!
10/10 fantastic game!
8 is a very solid game. The issue is that it was always compared to 7 and 9
Which is funny since I’ve played all three of those for the first time recently, and FF7 doesn’t hold up in comparison to 8 and 9. But I can see at the time how 8 could be seen poorly in comparison to 7 and 9.
FF8 has been going through a bit of a resurgence lately where it does seem to be getting a fair amount of praise. It used to get slated though.
I still love it.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey apparently, according to reddit a few years ago, was looked at as being shitty I guess? Not the best one?
It’s the only one I played, and I played it 3 times with ~240 hours. Kassandra is my favorite character ever, in any video game. I loved the world, its beauty, the ships and sea, and shooting arrows through rocks as a demo god.
I’ve still not touched any other assassins game.
Odyssey was really good in a vacuum. Ive heard it described best as that it was a good action RPG set in Greece, but not a good Assassins Creed game. The main issue being that stealth was usually a huge focus in previous titles, but this one seemed to favor general combat and didnt even have the signature wrist blade until the DLC. Also a bunch of the story seemed to return pieces of previous lore, some setup in just the previous game that came out a year prior. Overall though I did enjoy the game!
Yeah I think you’re right with it being good in a vacuum. That makes complete sense because it was different than the other games.
I have panic disorder, so most games with combat overwhelm me as I’m just constantly afraid. I never got that with this game. Just give me a bow so i can stand hella far away and clear the area before entering it. Thats how I did stealth. I’d take an hour slowly picking off everyone from the fort. Plus, it was really beautiful and emersive. Exploring the map was super fun.
I am willing to bet that people who chose the female main character enjoyed this game more.
E.T.
Yes really. I played it all the time as a kid and didn’t think it was any more difficult or abstract than the rest of the 2600’s catalogue. Granted, we kept the manual, which made a huge difference in understanding and enjoying its bizarre logic, but still. I had no idea it was so hated until at least a decade later.
it was actually way ahead of its time, for a game. One small bug (the workaround for which was in the manual) ruined its reputation. But I genuinely think it was a good game.
Also written in 6 weeks by one guy. Freaking impressive
What was the bug and workaround? :)
when climbing out of the pit, it was very easy to immediately fall back down (due to the pixel-perfect collision detection).
And here is an excerpt from the manual: “Even experienced extraterrestrials sometimes have difficulty levitating out of wells. Start to levitate E.T. by first pressing the controller button and then pushing your Joystick forward. E.T.'s neck will stretch as he rises to the top of the well (see E.T. levitating in Figure 1). Just when he reaches the top of the well and the scene changes to the planet surface (see Figure 2), STOP! Do not try to keep moving up. Instead, move your Joystick right, left, or to the bottom. Do not try to move up, or E.T. might fall back into the well.”
Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.
A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.
he was forced to release it quickly to coincide with the film’s release. For comparison, it used to take a team of devs a couple of months to make a game. He had 6 weeks.
Also, if you read the manual, this essentially never happened to you. It was easy to avoid.
You also needed to read the manual. The game did stuff that other games at the time didn’t, for example, a contextual button. You couldn’t know what would happen unless you read the manual to learn what the icons meant. A lot of people never did and so decided that the game was bad.
Yeah, I played it as a teenager on emulation and was pretty mystified at why it was considered so much worse than the other things available on the system. Why would people love Adventure but hate this?
i bought an original cartridge and played it on the vcs i iherited from dad
Super Mario Sunshine. I thought it was just hard as a kid. Come to learn it’s fucking broken.
Personally the movement mechanics and the tropical overworld were amazing in this game.
While the water jetpack may seem like a gimmick, I thought it really changed the platforming in a good way.
Additionally, I’m a sucker for a good overworld and the amount of things you can unlock or discover in delphino plaza turns it into its own sort of level.
There is definitely some jank and padding (blue coins) in the game, but it holds up better than Mario 64 in my opinion (just due to the camera issues IN Mario 64).
Camera issues in Mario 64 are fixed by playing the decomp / homebrew versions that have free camera control. It’s how I first played and 100%d it.
Wait, people hate it? I still do nostalgia playthroughs occasionally, one of my favs for GC.
There were so many issues
- Final boss was lame and level leading to it was slow and tedious completely killing the momentum
- Camera system was wonky
- Rocket nozzle barely got any play
- Jet nozzle was too difficult to control to be useful outside of specific racing segments
- Pachinko machine physics were fucked
- The lily pad level was unfairly difficult
- There was no way to track which blue coins you found. Like even a grey coin marker for already collected coins would have been super helpful.
- The reward for getting blue coins was pathetic
- Yoshi was criminally underutilized. The whole juice mechanic was used like twice.
The whole thing just felt rushed. Like there was another third of the game that they didn’t get to make.
If I remember right, both Legend of Zelda Windwaker and Mario Sunshine were either rushed to an end or released early, leading both to come out unfinished. I the details on why are hazy, but I think they were pushed to try and make up for poor sales of the Gamecube at large or to make up for other gaps in the schedule.
Windwaker had a ton of content cut. The ice island and fire island were both supposed to be full dungeons. Both of those incomplete dungeons later ended up being used in Twilight Princess.
Tap for spoiler
Hyrule Castle was supposed to be a full dungeon.
The tower of the gods was supposed to be longer.
I’ve just learned about it right now. I loved it but I thought that it was a skill issue, I’m not a great player overall.
I rented Superman 64 as a kid, never knowing it was a universally hated game. We had fun with the weird multiplayer mode where you fly around in weird pod things. I remember flying through the rings too. The whole game makes zero sense in hindsight.
Two Worlds 1-2 There are tons of youtubers making joke videos about these games, but against all the jank I alway found them both enjoyable and even I dare say good games. The magic system in particular was amazing.
Finally, someone else who remembers these games! They weren’t as polished or impressive as others, but they were fun and had lots of challenges.
Destiny 2.
Started playing the first game day one but stopped for several years. Picked up 2 when I found out it was ftp right after beyond light came out and bought all the dlcs available until after lightfall. I was at work and a customer asked what games I play. Said D2 and someone else said “why would you do that to yourself?” I thought hard about that for awhile and realized all I do is grind and don’t really have that much fun with it. It was more like a second job. And lightfall was a garbage dlc. That was also a major contributer to me quitting.
My biggest issue with Destiny 2 is that I paid $60 for it and then it soon went free to play and I had absolutely nothing to show for that $60 I paid.
Edit: oh yeah and that original $60 campaign was removed from the game by the time I went back to check out what was new. There was straight up less content available for me after not playing for a year. I felt so ripped off that I wrote the game off.
Even TF2 gave special cosmetics and stuff to existing players when it went F2P ages ago. It’s a standard practice at this point. I sunk 12k hours into D2 until I quit it for good this past fall, and looking back I swear I just notice more and more red flags like this that I hadn’t thought too much about.
I was excited to start again right as beyond light dropped, but it was confusing as hell as a new player because they sunset the starting campaign. Weird to have to research how to play a game.
I started with Shadowkeep and I got sucked in hard for 5 years. The first year or two I heard these sorts of negative comments here and there, mostly from long-term players, but didn’t think much of it.
Fast forward to this past year, and Revenant is what made me say fuck it and drop the game entirely. I was already sick of the state of the game, powercreep to hell and back, pvp in the dumpster, nonexistent loot, etc etc. But jesus that season was eye-opening. I uninstalled a day after Tomb of Elders launched.
I was also a major completionist - near max triumph score, never missed a day 1 raid from DSC onwards til unfortunate scheduling fucked our SE run, every GM soloed to that point, shit like that. Missing that one single season and a couple shitty little time-limited events was enough to feel like I’d fallen behind, and that was it. Booted up the game once since to check out Heresy, activity was the same shit as always, loot was dogshit, so I checked out right away.
And that’s just the gameplay gripes. Bungie as a studio is toxic as fuck in so many ways and I can never in good conscience support them again.
It took a few years but I finally understand what people were telling me way back when I started.
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood and cyberpunk 2077 (PC) not too long after release
Every game that ever gets released when you check gaming forums within the first month of a game’s release lol /s
Im joking. I get the sentiment that a finished product should be fully complete and inspected by a QA team before release. But still, the fuckin extreme hatred ill see for the game and its studio, regardless of the company’s history, is soooooo fuckin wild. And almost everytime when I get to the point of buying the game, ill check the steam reviews and it’ll be mostly positive after like one patch release.
I’ve been curious about this recently after seeing all the reviews for MindsEye. I’d never heard of it until a few days ago, yet all the reviewers I pay attention to are talking about how it’s the worst game ever, while the footage they show makes it look fine. I haven’t played it, so I can’t disagree with them, but the vitriol for something that appears to be completely average is surprising.
A lot of people didn’t like Assassins Creed Odyssey, but I loved it. Only AC I’ve played since 2.
I think that might be part of it. For a lot of people, it was that the formula was old and tired. I know Odyssey did fairly well, but it’s still just an AC game
Odyssey was the second entry in the new batch of games in the series, where they completely reinvented what that series is. There are a lot of us who find it to be a poor substitution for what came before.
Most games that dont scale into 100+ hours. I never reach that point anyway.
Too human. I loved it so much I don’t know why people hate it
Same, as a kid i had no idea if the controversy to and was still waiting on a sequel for some time after. I thought it was a novel idea and it was my first proper foray into Norse mythology.
Kings quest 8. Universally panned as a “bad Kings quest game” and I agree, It’s a terrible entry to the kings quest series. But when you look at this quirky adventure game from a modern perspective you can see it was really ahead of it’s time. It has an unmatched vibe and atmosphere.
