Oh, people do go on about their favorite games, but how many talk about their least favorite? How many talk about the games that they couldn't stand, but for some reason kept playing anyhow? That's what we're going to talk about this week.
It's not enough just to give a list of your least favorite games, though. A reason would be nice. What made the experience so revolting? Did the games pixels stab you in the eye? Did you finally reach the end boss, only to have him be completely unkillable? Did you spend $40 dollars in one sitting at the arcade only to discover that at the end, the game started out? Remember, the list isn't worth much unless there's a story to go along with it.
Don't feel contained to five, though. If you only can think of three, hit us with what you've got. Do you hat twelve games? We want to hear about them. Probably twelve is too many and we'll ignore your post on the air due to a lack of energy to thumb through your novel-length complain-a-thon, but go ahead and write it up anyhow!
And yes, that's a picture of Link on top a post called "Bottom 5." I leave deciding why it's there to you.
Spencer Williams
i don't really have a list but my least favourite game that i've ever played is Command and Conquer 4. I played the beta of this game and it was revolting. EA abandoned the concept that made CNC such a famous franchise for the ending of the saga. it seemed that what EA should have done was try this "crawler" mechanic in a new series of unrelated game and stuck with base building for the last chapter of a legendary series.
ReplyDeleteLeast favorite games? Holy hell that's a hard one. Usually if I don't like a game I'll stop playing it immediately and forget about it. These are the ones that come to mind first, so it's probably somewhat accurate.
ReplyDelete5. Fire Emblem -- The game that finally showed me in a concrete manner that I suck at strategy. About halfway through the game I found myself having to restart a level ten, twenty, thirty times before I could clear it without losing a character. Meanwhile my friends kept wanting to show off their maxed out characters by forcing me to play arena with them over and over.
4. EVE Online -- Sorry Spencer. I played the trial for a good five or six hours. At the end of this time I realized that not only had I spent most of that time watching my ship fly somewhere, but I was actually playing another game while that happened. I didn't want to pay monthly for that (lack of) experience, so... I didn't.
3. Sonic (the entire bloody series) -- Maybe it's just because my reflexes are too slow. All I know is that whenever I try to play this game all I see is a blur of colors. Somewhere in there is a blue guy hitting every spike in the level. I only play games where I can actually see what the hell is happening, thanks.
2. Super Smash Bros Melee -- "It's so simple, just press this one button to attack, see? And then to smash you just hold it and a direction." So said my friend right before he proceeded to beat me to a pulp for an hour straight. Every time I'd ask how he did something he'd just say "it's so easy!" Then I got up and walked home. Apart from the jerk friend I played it with, I found the action in SSBM almost as hard to follow as in Sonic.
1. Megaman Zero -- Before I start on this one, let me say that this is also one of my favorite games. That said, when I borrowed MMZ from a friend in high school I was perpetually pissed off for an entire month, not exaggerating. I couldn't stop playing until I had beaten it, but every time I switched the game on I was gambling that I wouldn't enter into a blind frenzy. While playing MMZ I swore in the presence of family, which is pretty huge. I've disrupted class and had my GBA confiscated a couple times. When I finally got to the final boss, I spent a good day or two in a state where practically the only thing I would say was "must... kill... X..."
I'm not quite certain what game it was that caused the bite mark on my GBA, but if I had to attribute it to some game, this is the one I would place my money on. It was just that kind of game for me.
My bottom 5 games, 5 being least hated and 1 being most hated
ReplyDelete#5: Zelda: The Wind Waker - I normally love the Zelda series, but that sudden change in the graphics and art style was a little jarring to me. I also didn't like how a good portion of the game was very silly and cartoon like, when other Zelda games, while having humor, still have a more serious story telling experience.
#4: Super Smash Bros. Brawl - Honestly I was disappointed by this game. All the characters I liked to play as were nerfed, and the Wii remote controls were crazy to learn (and Im very glad the gamecube controller can be used). I also just dont like the maps and some of the new characters.
#3: Zelda: Majora's Mask - This one just frustrates me to no end. The three day time limit always freaks me out, and when you need to save, you need to go back to day 1...and do all the shit you just did over again! The masks are obnoxious and tedious. Also, the moon just creeps me out.
#2: Halo (1-3) - The reason this game is on this list is because I suck at fps games. I always hated, and still hate, how my friends could kick my ass at Halo. Ive also never been enticed in the story line and cant get excited about it.
#1: Any Sports game - the concepts of these games just leave me speechless, play...a...sport...No way, I think thats why we have things called sports! I'm no sports fan, but I'd rather play football or baseball or basketball, than pretend I'm playing those, because I can at least feel a little healthier as my legs snap in half from being tackled to the ground by 7 other men. I dont like playing these games, I dont like watching people play these games, and I dont even like talking about these games so thats the end of my list.
I'm a gamer who tends to only play games I would seemingly enjoy playing, and as result tend to have a deficit of hated/disliked games I have played. Please note the following list will be in no particular order of my hate/dislike.
ReplyDelete#1 Prototype - A game that when I started played truly felt 'awesome' and gave me 'oh snap' moments but eventually turned into this 'meh' gameplay. I grew tired of the repetitive gameplay, such as go kill x, destroy this, fight boss, collect orb for points. The lackluster plot was the only thing that had kept me going, but I eventually gave up, and just Googled the plot(Which still sucked).
#2 Flatout 2 - Back before I realized I despised racing games and still loved destruction, I naively thought it would be a fun game and maybe something like Burnout. Well the linear race structures, limited ways of having fun destruction and my growing dislike of racing games, made me put this game aside. (Side note on why I hate racing games: 1. I have trouble acknowledging the existence of brakes, 2. I hate playing through several races to proceed onwards in the game 3. I hate losing races and having to replay them)
#3 Red Faction: Guerrilla - I got this game because I wanted to destroy stuff and a sandbox game seemed perfect. So the tutorial level was great, allowing me the freedom to blow and smash stuff up as I pleased. However once I got into the real game, the lack of music in cars(Damn you GTA and your variety of radio choices), wonky physics (How in the world one sheet of metal support an entire building?), wonky gunplay (cool guns but difficult to aim) wore me down. However what I truly hated were the enemies. When I wanted to go on my destruction spree I would often encounter enemies who kept on spawning, hampering the time I spent destroying stuff. Plot did not hook me either.
#4 Poke'Mon Games - My gripe is it takes a lot of time to play these games. My poor strategic skills prevent me from playing smartly (I go pure offense, which apparently is bad). My dislike of the grinding and training (probably related to my poor strategy) have prevented me from every reaching the Elite Four or beating a Poke'mon game.
#5 Silkroad Online - A free MMOrpg I played in my past, this is in a way how I came to dislike playing MMOrpgs. 1)Grinding - Oh the grinding, I can not believe how many quests required me to kill X bandits or X tigers. 2) Time Required - It takes a lot of time to get to level up or reach a 'endgame' 3)Builds - Why must my build always be wrong?
The thing is I don't hate MMOrpgs, I just hate the grinding involved and having to waste X amount of time before I can truly be on par with people who have invested more time into the game. In the end I'm just not having fun.
One of my least favourite games would be S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky. I loved Shadow of Chernobyl and welcomed this sequel with open arms only to be greeted by confusing messy game mechanics, and just an overall unfulfilling experience. I just couldn't get into it to the point I uninstalled it and it's sitting on my bookcase gathering dust now.
ReplyDeleteI just can't.
I think this is a really easy one for me. Catwoman for the Gameboy Color. The controls were unwieldily, the game was ugly and very, very bad. I till have nightmares about it.
ReplyDeleteI tend to stay away from bad games, but I have played a few.
ReplyDelete5. Resident Evil 5 - I had high hopes for this game, because Resident Evil 4 was so great, but the terrible AI kills the experience. I would be playing the game, there would be hordes of zombie dudes all over me, and sheva would be looking at me and not doing anything. As well as doing nothing when there were enemies, she wasted ammo when there was no threat in 40 miles. Sheva is just full of fail.
4. Army of Two - I played through this with my brother, and it was kind of fun, but after beating the game once there really is no point to keep playing it. It was repetitive, and boring. The multiplayer was also not too good.
3. Any 3-D Sonic game - sonic is meant for the 2D high speed gameplay back on the sega, when you throw him into a 3D world he gets scared and starts seizing all over the place, thus ruining the game. The more recent sonic games aren't even focused on speed, sonic is supposed to fast, HE DOESNT NEED A FREAKING CAR!
2. Universal Theme Parks Adventure - this game is just aweful, you play as a kid running around a theme park, where there are two goals: 1) pick up trash 2) play really terrible movie based mini games. You pick up trash in this game! That makes the game bad by default, and what's worse is when your running around the park the camera is fixed, like in Resident Evil 1 but over 9000 times worse. The mini games are really bad too, there's one game where you have to answer movie trivia, and the questions are so unbelievably hard, you never answer them right, and you are made fun of because you "don't know your movies"
1. Too Human - this game was so anticipated, it was in development for such a long time, and it just sucked. Its a third person action rpg hack n slash with bad controls. You do combat with the thumb stick, you point in a direction and your dude attacks in that direction. Just like sonic in 3D games, the thumb stick gets scared when you make him do combat, he's supposed to control camera angle. Speaking of which the camera was really bad, just imagine having a moveable camera, but not being able to move it with the right thumb stick. That's not even the worst part, in this game you die a lot, and when you do it takes forever to respawn. When you die a Valkyrie spawns from high above, and floats down really slowly, lands and looks at you for a good 4 minutes, decides to finally pick you up, and ascends into the sky even slower than when she came down. This respawn sequence literally takes about 2 minutes, and YOU CANT SKIP IT!!! if you play this game for 20 hours, a good 10 of those hours will be spent RESPAWNING.
There's my bottom 5
5. Too Human- I was just majorly disappointed in this game and I really wanted to like it. It wasn't the controls that ruined it or even how easy it was to beat the game It was two factors. The first being that ANNOYING ANGEL SEQUENCE that happened every time you died. The second is the Ice forest level (second level int he game) it took maybe 3 hours to beat that level alone, they could have split it into two levels but OH WELL.
ReplyDelete4. Halo series- Everyone said that it was "so amazing" and "very fun" but after I played it for a couple hours I found nothing to distinguish it from any of the other shooters I have played
3. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2- Honestly I just hate it took so long to get your Force powers and that the final stage of the game was just "force lightning.. Win"
2. Fable2 2- I liked the dog but the story mechanics and the lack of any good end game content really brought it down. I hated this game cause I felt cheated after everyone said how great it was. I liked the first and I think maybe it was just over hyped to me by A LOT.
NUMBER 1. Bioshock 2- I loved the first game so much. The story telling, presentation, gameplay, plazmids. The second one came out and it just didn't deliver. I remember reading in an article that playing a big daddy was suppose to make you feel strong and extremely powerful. Not that the game wouldn't have Challenging. Then it came out and despite everything it felt and played just like the first one. Is that bad no cause the story was still pretty good but... it didn't deliver on its promise. I never felt stronger than the Splicers around me and, while the plazmids were cool, i never really needed anything more than two of them, fire and electricity. It was just a disappointment... Still looking forward to the third one though.
Well I realized that I don't really have a bottom 5 just because I've never bought any really terrible games. But if I had to list some disappointments:
ReplyDeleteViewtiful Joe 2: After the awesomely fun Viewtiful Joe that came before it, it was a letdown. They carefully removed all of the first game's unlockable easter eggs that added to its replay value, leaving the player with no incentive to play the hardest difficulties or try for a perfect runthrough (other than "for the heck of it"). They also somehow managed to make the game experience awful slowdown during action sequences, without even improving the graphics to balance it out.
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: This is my least favorite Zelda game for a few reasons. In my opinion, Nintendo botched their venerable "light world/dark world" formula, which worked so well in the past. Instead of having both worlds exist simultaneously and letting the player travel between them, the game turns the darkworld into discrete "chunks" that are conquered and subsequenly discarded, never to be seen again. The "darkworld" gameplay isn't even that interesting; you just hunt for 15 bugs (seriously?) and you're back to the light world. Furthermore, Nintendo and Zelda fans made a big deal about TP being "dark" and "edgy" and "blahblahblah" (seemily forgetting that at heart, it's a cartoon game about a 15-year-old fighting rock-shooting squids and soldiers hiding in bushes) and then the game totally ignores the only "dark and edgy" theme it has: the corruption that comes with wielding the ancient magic that you've spent the game collecting. Oh well.
Dynasty Warriors 6: I should say that the Dynasty Warriors franchise is very much a guilty pleasure of mine. It is a shameless third person hack and slash with no strategy or redeeming qualities of any sort, yet still this iteration was especially bad. First, the entire color scheme is bathed in a boring "Call of Duty 6" sepia brown. The frustrating "pop in" glitch (a relic of Dynasty Warriors on the PS2 and XBox, in which enemies pop in and out of existance when too much is going on onscreen) remained, despite the fact that the PS3 it was running on could easily handle the graphics. DW6 failed in every way to satisfy the most basic function of videogames: "brain off, push butan."
Call of duty 4 isn't the worst game I've ever played, but it's way overrated IMO. I couldn't get a feel for the poorly made story with the unknown country and the Russian Communists. Respawning enemies, unforgiving checkpoints, and the god awful A.I. also has to do with it.
ReplyDeleteAs for Multiplayer, I have the same grudge. M16s and MP5s feel completely dominant in that game. Perks are alright, but it gets annoying that nearly 95% of all the community uses the God-forsaken Martyrdom (lets you drop a grenade when you die). Not to mention the bland map choice (Crash and Crossfire are very enjoyable though.)
Overall, I felt like I could have better fun with the first 3 Call of Duties and their WWII setting (I prefer WWII to Modern Day conflict in gaming). I'm not trying to get you to not like the game. This is just my personal rant.
I don't really have a bottom 5. only a bottom 2.
ReplyDelete2. Fable. This game was a major letdown. I started playing it about 3 years after it came out, and I had a blast. I played through the whole game and the expansion, getting every single upgrade, treasure, etc. After beating Jack of Blades a second time, it hit me like a ton of trains made of bricks. Every single flaw about the game jumped out at me at once, and I nearly gagged after realizing I spent 2 weeks of my life on a game that isn't worth crap. I mean really? Jack of Blades combat strategy: Dodge attack. Dodge slightly different attack. Wail on him with your massively compensating sword. Repeat.
1. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. I mean come on. This game is so bad it's good. In fact, it shouldn't be on this list, because it totally lived up to the hype. Trees and bridges have no collision models, you can drive up vertical surfaces, gravity doesn't affect acceleration, and you can go faster than the speed of light, but only if you're in reverse gear. You need to try this game
I am generally very good at beating every single game I own, however a certain few have managed to otherwise get under my skin to the point where I don't even beat them.
ReplyDelete5. AI Wars - Not a bad game in itself, it is just that the game ate so much of my time that it really ticked me off. Not to mentioned that I would constantly reload saved games so to get that assault or defense just right... I was going through my final playthrough, trying to milk the game as much as possible and finding myself continuing to be foiled by the AI that I just ragequit and uninstalled the game. I knew perfectly well that I could have finished the game, I just did not want to invest the time necessary to do it.
4. Evil Genius - Got it 2.50 from a steam sale and for what its worth it was still a bargain. However the game kept eating up so much of my time. I ended up restarting the game a few times and even had to do the final missile launch twice because of a bug. (I had my evil genius sitting evilly on his chair at the end with John Steele captured) My issue isn't so much with the game itself, but rather how I sank FAR more hours into it than I really wanted to.
3. Thief 3: Deadly Shadows - I knew that this was less well received than the other thief games, but I felt that out of the awesomeness of Thief 2 that I owed it to the series to finish it off. And with a steam sale in hand, I snagged it. I never liked the city sequence and the enemies just came off as being annoying. I tried to like it, but I couldn't. I even tried to just blast through the missions on easy, but even then I couldn't do it. In the end I just youtubed the cutscenes.
2. Eragon (DS version) - I was given this game. Meh... I don't even want to go here. Needless to say my ire for it was satisfied by seeing it go on ebay.
1. Phantasy Star 1-3 - I'm a bit of a retro gamer but these games were stupidly hard. I got about 1/3 to 1/2 through the first game before putting it down for a few months and then realizing that I had absolutely no idea what to do next. Even with a print out from gameFAQs... I was baffled and never got much further. Phantasy star 2 was little better as the dungeons were labyrinthine and the combat was common and fought a war of attrition against you. Numerous printed maps out later I finally managed to beat the boss (which interestingly enough, the game only had 3 or 4 actual bosses) I was then greeted with an extremely lame ending. The combination of the journey, the outside resources I needed to get there, and the ending made me just ragequit the whole series, including 3 which I only played maybe an hour or so of and was not liking it very much of at all. I can not imagine how on earth anyone could beat these games without outside help.
Interestingly, one of my biggest criteria was how much time the game demanded from me. If a game demands more time from me than I wish to invest then my opinion of it sinks like a rock. This isn't so much of me wanting short games, but rather if I expect a game to last me only 20 to 40 hours and I instead sink +80 into and could easily sink more... I get annoyed. This is more of a problem for Single Player games because these games are stand directly in the way of games I know I will enjoy far more because I proceed through my list of Single Player games in a Linear fashion.
And a comment to TalkAcanthi - Wind Waker wasn't -that- bad of a game, its just that in The Legend of Zelda: Sailing Simulator, sailing around was time consuming... that boat really needed a speed upgrade.
I have 2 too!
ReplyDelete3)Farmvile
For god sake! That game will just suck time out of you. I cannot believe I wasted 1 hour on Framvile, I could be playing AAA game.
2)Half-life/ Half-life2
I dunno maybe it is just me, I can never stand playing HL 1 or 2 for more than 30minutes. Do not misunderstand I think it is a good game but my get a major headache. I played a lot of FPS(TF2,COD) but only the HL series gave me a headache and vomiting afterward.. I will never play HL again!
In April of 2008, I encountered what was, irrefutably, the most disappointing game I have ever played. Worse than Sonic 06. More disconnecting than Enter the Matrix. More agonizingly, pointlessly BORING than World of Warcraft. It made me doubt the future of gaming, as if all games would one day be more reminiscent of Excel spreadsheets than of anything requiring skill, challenge, or, y'know, FUN.
ReplyDeleteI speak of course of THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION. This is the epitome of everything I do NOT want in a video game.
oh wow i saw eve on this list so i wanted to link this first
ReplyDeletehttp://rattlab.net/wp-content/uploads/eve-online-learning-curve.jpg
not trying to stir the pot D:, but after playing for awhile this graph gets more and more true XD
I saw Half Life series by NoUse4AName, and i have to agree. I never saw what all the hype was about. I have played the game alone, and i have played the games with friends through synergy a fair few times but i never could really understand what was so amazing about it.
Anyway a list with 1 line explanations =D
1) Twilight Princess - didn't feel like an epic zelda adventure
2) Modern Warefare 2 - got angry with no dedicated server support, played the single player for about 1 hour and it felt so repetative
3) Pokemon series after Red and Blue - can't be bothered remembering the 7 different incarnations of rattata equivalents, also the number of legendary pokemon is WAY too many now
4) Apollo Justice:Ace Attory - not a bad game, just not exciting, in the same way Zelda:TP wasn't exciting
5) FFXIII - we all saw this coming
Meh, theres alot more, and things like replaying games such as Kingdom Hearts series, which i loved at the time seem to not hold my interest anymore.
But its funny how all (except pokemon) the games on the list are drawn from expectations. Alot of games that i loved make me expect amazing experiences when i go back to play them, but i get let down because i over hyped it for myself XD...except chrono trigger I love that game 8 times so far ;) [yes i mean i loved it 8 times]
1)Legend of Zelda II: It was an attempt to make something different compared to the first one. IMHO, it failed epically.
ReplyDelete2)Any original Mega Man Game: Not because I hated them (I loved them to death) but because they were SO DAMN HARD.
3)Virtua Cop 3: While the first two felt like they required skill to win, this one relied on cheap tricks to take you out. The Bullet Time gimmick didn't help any.
4)Kingdom Hearts: Probably wouldn't be here if my friends didn't talk about it so damn much.
5)FFXII: I think the control scheme was intentionally designed to include everything I hate about video games in it.
Bonus Points to any video game movie. They all suck.
my worst games are darkerness/ lord of the rings conquest/two worlds/too human and my worst game is mw2 because of the dang multplayer of of noobs and campers and double shotguns
ReplyDelete[...] NoG Blog: Bottom 5 [...]
ReplyDeleteHmm, this is a rough one. I've played a lot of games I haven't liked, and although I already know my bottom pick, a lot of people will probably be upset by it. I'll try not to use too many modern games, as well.
ReplyDeleteSuper Mario 64 - Bad camera angles, crappy controls, crudloads of glitches, and weird varying levels of difficulty put this one on my stinker list. Mario should've stayed in two dimensions, instead of launching out into one poor iteration that everyone loved due to omg grafix and then not making a good 3d game since. (No, I did not like Galaxy either.)
Lineage 2 - An MMORPG that I lost 6 months to, this game represents everything wrong with MMORPG design. Massive grind, overly homogenized characters, and lame content made it all pretty horrific. The best part of the game? It was pretty. Also, open-world PvP with real consequences was -awesome-, but it wasn't enough. When pretty is your primary benefit you're in trouble. The "success" of this model can be seen in its spiritual successor, Aion.
Starcraft - Blarg, I hate Blizzard RTSes as it is, but Starcraft annoys me the most. Balance is really weird in SC, and the resource system makes me want to stab myself. I get tired of it being held on a pedestal, because there are MUCH more interesting offerings out there that aren't as mindbendingly annoying. Two that come to mind right now are Rise of Nations (lots of races yes, not totally balanced yes, but way more fun yes.) and Total Annihilation. TA is just the best, the end. =(
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 - If this is what modern FPSes are going to be like, I want out. This game is best played with a flagon of mead and a haunch of meat at your side, screaming BLOOD FOR ODIN as you rain down death from above instead of using your puny mortal form. That said, it's just -way- too arcadey for an FPS and everyone dies in like two shots. It's not hard to be good at it, since all you need to do is sit in a corner and shoot through a wall when your heartbeat sensor sees something, repeat until you win. Too campy, too arcadey, too lame.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Wait, what? Isn't OoT the GIFT OF THE GODS? No. OoT is where the LoZ started its downward spiral. Going from interesting level design (for the most part) and usage of items to where every puzzle is just a hookshot puzzle is really depressing. Anybody who thinks the water temple is hard needs a lesson in actual hard dungeons. This game suffers from the same fate that Mario 64 does: It was 3d and pretty so it did well, and we all suffer from it because now they focus on pretty instead of good content. OoT did give us the engine for Majora's Mask at least, which was -excellent-.