i love starfield, despite its flaws. the public opinion was very… 😬
I have been meaning to go back and give it another chance. I played it on launch and got to some place like 30 minutes in that they clearly wanted to be some big “ooo, ahh” moment but I just felt bored. I shut it off and never played again. I do enjoy Bethesda games though so it’s possible I would like it if I pushed through.
if you treat more of a meditative exploration rather than dungeon crawler (like skyrim or fallout excelled at) you may like it
I really enjoyed my first playthrough. Never felt the need to play again, but I got a solid 65 ish hours in and enjoyed it the whole time. I haven’t played it for a while now, maybe I should do another playthrough.
I like Starfield, but the game sure tries to make me hate it with the amount of annoyances packed into it.
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Dialogue, almost exclusively meant a railroad of one singular outcome not matter what you picked, or consisted of dialogue options that didnt correctly communicate the degree of emotion that would be applied to it. So often I would either say “I dont want to pick any of these options,” but I was forced to stay in the conversation, or “the character didnt say that how I expected them to and now I want to say something else,” but that usually looped back to the first complaint.
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Ship customization is awesome. Not enough parts or tweakability.
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So many ugly characters and armor suit designs. Ugly characters comes down probably to rendering, maybe its lighting or something but man so many characters in the game are just ugly looking. And the armor designs are worse, because the lighting on them is actually fine but the designs are just atrocious. When I first heard “NASA-punk” as an aesthetic, I expected designs based on NASAesque objects. You know, whites, gold foil, utilitarian. Not whatever ended up in the game.
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Ship flight. I love Elite Dangerous, and even Star Citizen. Too games with space flight models that already exist and allow the player to seamlessly fly between planetary atmosphere and space. There is no reason the Creation engine couldnt have this functionality added. Even if its a cloud covered load screen like No Mans Sky had.
I think a big problem with the game is the NASA-Punk aesthetic, honestly. If they had just gone through with their likely original plans of a Star Wars or Alien esque design board, most people probably wouldnt hate it as much. Most people coming into the game expect Star Wars Skyrim, Bethesda probably should have just made that. Heck, I would have even liked if it was closer to Star Trek, too. But its simultaneously both and neither at the same time.
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I like it as well… The mix between all these different game genres is very interesting. Idea is great, execution is lacking a bit, but it is good that they tried… Just sad that it didn’t work out so well… Hope they try again and improve on the concept.
I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but Prototype (and its sequel) comes to my mind. It wasn’t that badly received, but most people liked Infamous more, in the same generation.
And a game that I really love, my personal best SNES game ever (yes, even beyond Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia, my numbers 2 and 3), is Terranigma, which is a game that many people who’ve played it don’t like (because they get stuck at the beginning in the Underworld or at the fight with Bloody Mary).
How is Terranigma mentioned here? It’s one of the most beloved Action Adventure RPGs on the system and to my knowledge, most people who have played it liked it. I also had the game back then, purchased it randomly because Lufia 2 wasn’t released yet (in Germany). Honestly, I think Terranigma is one of those universally loved games, never heard anyone disliking it.
I personally know two JRPG gamers that played it (recommended by me) and didn’t like it, because they never advanced beyond the underworld. And some other people online with a similar experience. Of course, that was in the '90s, when I played it for the first time.
In the 30 years since, the game has become a lot more popular and gained a cult following, but at release time it wasn’t like that (not helped by the fact that the 2 previous games in the trilogy were kind of obscure too).
It’s always fascinating to read other experiences and cultures. In my experience, from what I read back then and from personal experience with friends opinion, plus all the aftermath of internet culture I never had the impression that this game is not liked by “most”. So seeing the game here was surprising to me. I am in Germany, just for reference.
Terranigma’s not disliked, it just never got a North American release so it’s more obscure than it should have been.
I love the movement etc. in Prototype 2! 100%ed it more than once, it’s just too fun. Surely we’ll get the sequel any day now 🥲
Resident evil 5, probably mostly because of coop.
5 and 6 are top notch couch co-op games. I think the only people that hate them are ones that tried to play them solo
5 was the only one i ever tried, and the camera angle was too much. couldn’t see shit. very narrow fov and can’t see past the character…
I liked Watch Dogs 1 mainly because I didn’t consume any pre-release media about it. Whatever downgrade there may have been, I was unaffected. The game and its story are about as Ubisoft as they come (and I don’t mean that in a particularly positive way), but it was great for fucking around.
I also liked Cyberpunk 2077’s launch version, but at the same time, I think the people who are trying to memory hole the objectively dogshit launch state of both 2077 and The Witcher 3 are perpetuating the problem.
I also liked Watch Dogs, I enjoyed the darker tone and it’s more serious setting. Good game play, story was good enough, a bit janky with some optimization issues. But overall it was good.
I don’t think I really cared about the downgrade either. But it really was around when my trust in what Devs and publishers were saying about their games was the lowest. So many games were bullshots and rendered trailers so you took the idea and if it was interesting you just waited to see the actual product.
Cyberpunk was also my game of the year, I had immense fun with the launch version and I was lucky enough to have minimal bugs and most were dumb shit. I think I had 2 which were gameplay and caused issues. It launched in a terrible state and I expect it as well, CDPR don’t have a great history of releasing bug free games. But, they do have a history of patching and fixing the broken bits. It also should not have been anywhere near the old gen consoles, that was stupid.
I adored Watch Dogs 2 because, in an era discovering “partial multiplayer”, in the case of Dark Souls, WD2 really refined that formula, even if it didn’t quite nail the rest the way people wanted. You would be randomly driving around and get an option to disrupt or assist someone else’s singleplayer game, without any loading screens.
I also admit I enjoy the way they promote stealth by making it the main way to keep things nonlethal, and stop bullets from flying. The series has an interesting bit of guidance against violent escalation; don’t escalate to guns against bad guys, and they likely won’t do the same to you. And thanks to all the hacker tools, an enemy that brings heavy artillery and turrets to a fist fight may find themselves facing their own weapons.
I had a blast with WD2. It was just fun. Unlike the first game, if wasn’t taking itself too seriously and it came out at a time where Ubi was still sorta developing what would become their open world formula, so it still felt fresher than similar titles do now.
still sorta developing what would become their open world formula
The formula was already fully developed when AC2 was released in 2009. You didn’t have to literally climb radio towers, but WD2 was still the same map marker collect-a-thon with a slightly different, slightly gay coat of paint.
I loved WD2, and I purposefully never bought/got the lethal weapons if I could help it. You probably get a couple as a matter of course in the game (I don’t remember), but I always just used the stun gun or melee - though hitting someone with an 8-ball on a rope is probably going to do some damage.
I don’t think any game since has made it as fun to pilot a little drones like this game. I loved being able to casually sit outside and sneak into places with the drones.
Oni.
In my most unpopular opinion, the only good thing Bungie ever made. Way more satisfying than console-friendly auto-aim shooting aliens without gore.
Oni has some great sci-fi details, even when missing a deep overarching story. And breaking people’s necks with a cool 360 swing with proper sound effects of the neck bones being chipped is sooo satisfying. And that was an unfinished project by the way: you can notice there was no environment work done.
I enjoyed Zelda Skyward Sword upon release, despite having to get the new controller that supporter more motion on the Wii for it. The dungeon on the ship in the desert that involved time travel was a standout level and i really enjoyed it at the time. Granted I haven’t played it in 10 years, it’s a good game. I am glad though that the backlash resulted in Breath of the Wild, and without Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild would have never happened.
Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!
And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.
If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.
The Link-Zelda ship problem is that all Zeldas are each other’s blood daughters, and all Links are the same “soul of the hero” despite being different people. So they don’t want to have any incest story baked in this reincarnation stuff, and it stays platonic most of the time. This was a retcon (kinda) introduced Skyward Sword, probably to justify why they’d been avoiding it the whole time, previous games like LttP and OoT would only say that the various Links were just from some royal knight families or “the last of the families of knights”.
Skyward Sword is the very first incarnation of both of these characters (Zelda being the first human incarnation of Hylia, and we don’t know about Link), so they can be in love - it goes out of focus, but it’s assumed to still be there at the end. And then BotW is the very end of the timeline, tens of thousands of years later, so that’s fine, they’re very clearly in love there by the end, and live together in TotK.
There’s also some hints in the Wind Water timeline (I think in Spirit Tracks but I never played it), because that timeline insists that this is a new hero unrelated to the previous soul of the hero.
Riding in that boat in the desert and being in that “time bubble” where there was only water around you is still one of the coolest things Zelda has done, I think. And the music in that spot was very good.
Of all the things in that game, I remember that area the most.
Yes exactly the same feeling for me. That was so cool and unique, there were also amazing puzzles with that mechanic.
I didn’t play Skyward Sword on release, but I did play the Switch remake a few years ago and had a blast. With full motion controls
Watch Dogs, the first one specifically. I know Ubisoft has had a pretty bad track record, especially in recent years, but I’ve played through that game a bunch of times and always had a good time with it. Even in its worse parts its still dumb fun.
The story honestly aged really well too for better or worse with how tech companies and governments are mingling now.
I didn’t like that game for the most part, but for reasons I find difficult to explain, I really enjoyed that minigame with the robot spider.
that’s from WD2, the first game was way more grounded.
It was definitely the first. I don’t own and have never played the sequel. They called them “digital trips” or something like that. It was supposed to be like an in-universe computer game, I think? There wasn’t a lot to it–you piloted this tank thing and had to clear a level, by jumping around and sometimes killing some enemies until you reached a checkpoint, in a certain brief time limit. But I found it kinda weirdly compelling.
Right, I remember now
I would have like Watch Dogs more if there was some sort of magical element to the story. Because what that character could do was basically magic.
Can it be played on Steam Deck without much tinkering? I’ve always wanted to give it a try.
Dont forget you can check ProtonDB and see how users have found it on the Steam Deck! The site is a great resource for checking in advance:
https://www.protondb.com/app/243470
There’s 30 separate reports there for you to check over!
It says it’s playable with it on the Steam page so probably. I’m not sure if Ubisoft made it extra janky with something like Ubisoft Connect though.
I played the first one for a while and enjoyed it, don’t really remember if there was a specific reason I put it down. I didn’t realize a lot of people had beef with it. I remember that the driving mechanics were clunky as hell after playing things like GTA or Mafia, but other than that it seemed like a pretty cool game.
Whether deserved or not Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy is always forgotten compared to its predecessor. But I don’t care, it’s the best one for me.
In the same vein The Force Unleashed II is the one I remember more fondly. It’s worse than the previous one certainly, but the story does have some nice moments and playing it on the hardest difficulty makes you actually have to block correctly and plan your movement right to survive the onslaught of fire by the stormtroopers.
That first time you land on a rainy biome and the rain drops sizzle on your saber…
Ohhh my god I played so much jka in 2005-6. It is the best sword fighting mechanics ever imo
The Mount and Blade games feel like such a janky mess, and I don’t know anyone else that likes or plays them. But I absolutely adore the combat gameplay, nowhere else do I feel that merge between tactical medieval warfare and intense personal combat.
All the strategy/diplomacy/trading/RPG stuff on top is fine, but only as a context for the combat gameplay.
Unreal
The original one. Not tournament.
I have a fear of sentient silver metallic blobs because of that game. Lol
What? Who didn’t like Unreal? It was groundbreaking, a milestone of its time. In my area and peergroup, everybody loved it.
I thought it was awful. The graphics and the 2d textures looked weird and the movement was absurd. It was unplayable. UT, on the other hand, was fantastic.
Interesting, how different people can look at things. But, calling it unplayable is really odd.
Unirally in PAL / Uniracers in USA, 1994 on Super Nintendo
It’s a side scrolling racing game, up to two players. There are regular races and stunt points races. Unfortunately no interaction with the other player, its only about time. So its one of those two player modes that wasn’t super fun for us, but we loved playing fore highscores. Game is super fast, imagine Sonic as a racing game. What most people get it wrong is, they think they have to react to the changing course parts instantly. But in reality the course parts are color coded and you know in advance what is coming.
The game is from DMA Design, who also made Lemmings and later GTA; the company you know as Rockstar today. Also they got sued by Pixar. Yes that Pixar, making films. Because the pre-rendered unicycles were looking similar to the Pixar film. What an incredible dumb lawsuit, as this is how unicycles look like in general. But Pixar won and the game had to be taken from shelf quickly before it could sell much. Game didn’t even make it to Japan. It’s a rare game most people didn’t play on original hardware!
I can only assume anyone who doesn’t like it hasn’t played it. It’s a platformer racing game, which is rare, but excellent.
I remember playing it. Was fun. Didn’t know all the story behind it though. Thanks for sharing
Uniracers is awesome! Truly a unique game for how it plays. The track color code system is very well implemented, and once you get good at the game you feel like Cypher reading the Matrix code directly. Great music that still pops in my head. I think it fits this category because the design is kind of bizarre and I’m sure it didn’t click with everyone.
The lawsuit is just tragic because it’ll never be rereleased/remastered, and would be awesome on NSO.
Bubsy
I loved Bubsy.
The new Bubsy game is actually decent, albeit short
Anthem is a goddamn masterpiece, and I will die on this hill. The graphics, the combat, and the traversal were all AAA quality. There just wasn’t enough fodder for the internet hate machine that month, so Anthem got tossed into it for some reason.
Have my upvote good sir/ma’am
Coming in at a 45 rating on Metacritic: Hyperdimension Neptunia.
Is it a bad game? Yes. It’s really bad. It’s an ugly game for PS3 standards, and the battle mechanics are borderline insane. It’s a JRPG where you can’t manually heal, but instead set a % chance to heal automatically in battles… which means sometimes you game over because RNG wasn’t going to let you heal. But regardless it’s one of my favorites. I’m a sucker for the core concept of the schoolyard console wars, with little gaming references everywhere and silly humor. I also love the theme songs for each console nation. It really drives home how different the console cultures are supposed to be as you are traveling around solving their problems.
And I mean, come on… When you first start the game and you are in the tutorial dungeon it plays this song during exploration and this song during battles. Games today would never do something that silly.
The later games polished the gameplay, expanded the character rosters, gave more depth to the story, and dealt with some very dark topics (Gehaburn trauma)… but to me none of them captured the lightning that the first one had.
I’ve tried to play these games, but I think I got caught up in:
- The upgrade systems requiring materials located god knows where
- The combat involving no interesting decisions, just a spam of the strongest attacks
- Low drop chances resulting in a lot of grinding
I can even be okay with an RPG if the combat is a curb stomp and you play for the story; but in Neptunia’s case it actually got in the way.
I looked at the trailer on Metacritic, and jesus those costumes and poses of the underage-looking girls are really uncomfortable to watch
It sounds terrible. I’m glad you liked it
I liked Duke Nukem Forever, I kept waiting for it to get awful and it never did! Surprisingly fun game.
Depends on how long you waited for it and what expectations you had. “They demonstrated the first Duke Nukem Forever trailer at the E3 convention in May 1998”… and reading in Wikipedia to look this up, I just by accident saw there was/is a Doctor Who themed DLC! Wow I think I need to get into it again (never finished it however).
For fellow whovians, not Doctor Who, rather Doctor Proton, aka the Doctor Who Cloned Me.
I got excited and thought that’s a weird crossover. Turns out, I’m just simple.
I followed it’s development a tiny bit, I knew it was in development hell, that things kept getting redone, and then some other company stepped in and actually finished and shipped it. I was expecting it to be bad. The worst thing I have to say for it is it’s a console port. It was fun, it was whacky, it had decent combat although I’m not a fan of the halo style hide to recharge your health.
soulmate. I liked it as well. Of course it wasn’t groundbreaking, like Duke3D was, but it was fun. And it made fun of itself - I like that trait.
