The Witness is one for me. I gave it a recommended yes because I was engaged by the puzzles, but I gave up pursuing the story/lore because for me it detracted from the exploration and environment, like I was spending more time trying to piece stuff together and the pieces were not organized like a puzzle themselves, just strewn around. Also it just seemed super pretentious and not in a "this is just the character talking and you'll come to see they are deeply flawed or actually the villain" sort of way.
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I loved witness, but I it's not overpraised in my opinion. I don't think it's pretentious, but it is smart
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I've seen that around and was curious about it because it seemed like there was a bit more of something to drive you forward.
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L.A. Noire is the one right now that i just do not understand the hype. the investigation mechanics and everything is exceptional, the environments are great, etc, but the story and the characters just leave me feeling cold and thus is a struggle to keep playing. it's like the dev has heard about noir films and has a general idea of what they are so they decided to write something in the genre without actually watching any of the movies or reading any of the books to get a better grasp on the genre conventions. noir isn't about glorifying ex-military guys who bully women in every interview and who are praised constantly by their precinct captain, and yet that seems to be all this game is about :/
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Funny, I kinda liked the characters as they pulled the one-dimensional noir stereotypes right.
However, the investigation was atrocious. You leave your fingerprints all over the place yet apparently you never actually use real forensics ever. The initial interrogations are great, but eventually, all of them boil down to sheer guessing as everyone lies and the game gets absolutely illogical on whether some seemingly related clue is good for calling a lie or it wanted you to doubt instead, because reasons.
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everyone lies and the game gets absolutely illogical
I think this was one of the most annoying parts of the game, and the reason it's sitting incomplete in my backlog. The GTA-like experience combined with the right-side-of-the-law made it a grand premise, and the bizarre mo-cap was kinda intriguing at times, but to get punished for having to guess because the game doesn't provide enough solid evidence is just downright plain bs.
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The fact that none of the women portrayed had any agency at all (with the exception of the one femme fatale who was already dead during one of the vice desk investigations) was a baffling and disappointing omission that ran counter to the noir genre. Likewise, as already mentioned, the interrogation mechanics were shallow and frustrating and it got to the point where I used a walk through just to get past them painlessly. But I was fine with the main character as a flawed, misogynistic WW2 vet with PTSD issues and who was more that a little bit of an asshole - that fits the bill, actually. (He just needed that missing femme fatale to tear his world down.) And to give credit where due, the recreation of '40s LA, the landmarks, streets, cars etc. was exceptional - actually the aspect of the game that I enjoyed most.
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YES YES YES. you are articulating the game's issue re: women in noir much better than i could. they're set pieces to abuse for the benefit of the player, not actual characters who mean anything in the long run.
i wouldn't have had much of an issue with the lead's misogyny if he wasn't praised at every turn by everyone. i cannot remember a single film or book in that genre off the top of my head where the establishment treated the lead like he was the second coming here to save the day. generally noir is about the muck, and the precinct captains taking three minutes at the end of every completed mission to tell the lead how wonderful his policing is is not muck. so the guy who is a general shithead was glorified in-game constantly and that didn't just sit well with me.
it might change later? i don't hold out hope, i'm only at case 4 of the first section (Traffic Crimes?) and the last case involved outright screaming in the face of the wife of a suspect, so i haven't picked it back up yet.
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Been a long time since I played it, but I believe you don't open up the free roam aspect until you finish the first desk (traffic). I didn't start enjoying the game until then - maybe you will have a similar experience. I don't want to spoil it for you in case pick up again, but yes, it does change - the plot is pretty much on rails and being a noir, things aren't always how they seem.
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Finished the Maltese Falcon today, one of the world's best noir novels apparently, from 1930. Women are treated literally only as tools to move the plot forward and it's very uncomfortable how the protagonist just randomly keeps touching them - nuzzling, hugging, fixing hair, putting head in lap (even kissing all 3 of the named, more important women). From this aspect it sounds they got the women part right in the game, just not for our time, but for the classic noir times.
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I haven't read the book, but I have to point out that the book is simply detective fiction - noir is more a designation for a style of movie. The Maltese Falcon was made into a movie 4 times, but only Huston's 1941 version is considered noir - the others are detective and/or comedies. If you watch that movie, I think you will find that the women in it do have agency and you won't see any of the random petting that you observed in the book. Still, I can't imagine that even in the book that the Brigid O'Shaughnessy character is just a tool. In the movie she sets everything in motion and manipulates events right up until the end.
There's a lot of debate about what noir really is. One thing for sure, nobody called it noir back then until a French film critic coined the term to describe a certain kind of dark and disturbing movie in 1946 (and even then it wasn't widely recognized until decades later). But although what elements make a movie a noir are still argued endlessly, there's a consensus that the 'femme fatale' character is major one and finds its origin here. In fact, feminists have pointed to this as being the first time that women get real agency and powerful roles in what were considered men's pictures. I really don't believe that a game that purports to evoke the genre got this part right - even though I enjoyed what the game did have to offer.
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Good arguement about O'Shaughnessy, and the tidbit about noir!
I think I should correct myself then - Spade uses women is more accurate way to put it. O'Shaughnessy sure, has her own plans and an important role behind the pretty face (and scenes). It madee quite uncomfortable how Spade's "angry at you, but will still force a kiss on you" scene, or the "undress because you I think you took a bill" scenes play out with her. It feels that no matter what ideas she may has, Spade will force his idea/plans/himself on her, maybe why I did felt her have less agency than she objectively had, and as you pointed it out.
I think at the end it has more with me disliking Spade a lot. ( I'm really, really not a fan of intentional, uncalled physical contact)
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Hmm. Sounds like Spade is more likable in the movie than the book, and possibly O'Shaughnessy considerably more manipulative. The scenes that you describe don't occur though there's no question that Spade operates in a moral grey area, but clearly Huston has a very different vision of him than Hammett did. I recommend it if you like movies - this one is very good. Maybe it's better than the book as sometimes happens.
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Well, Ocarina of Time is timeless for obvious reasons
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GTA5 (many sites rank it as the best GTA game of the series). I just could not get into it. GTA4 was a huge step up over the previous games as far as graphics and depth, and I enjoyed the the story, characters and world in GTA4 but GTA5 just felt like nothing new. Technically the game felt no different than GTA4 and the story and characters just never caught me. I think I only played it a few hours.
San Andreas is the best GTA game, by the way. :P
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San Andreas is the best GTA game, by the way. :P
No way, Vice City is the best one :D
Haven't played GTA 5 myself, but from the screenshots I saw on the activity feed, it doesn't even look like a GTA game anymore. I didn't enjoy GTA IV all that much, if I recall. It felt weird having no secrets to collect besides hunting pigeons and the social activities the game tried to force on you were honestly bloody annoying (Hey, Niko! Let's go bowling!).
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Fortnite and PUBG confuses me on concept as to why so many people play them. I do have a personal dislike for fortnite, but I still don't see the real appeal in either of them
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Lol yes, all Battle Royal games are overrated by default :D Unless it's The Culling 2, which got very much what it deserved from what I heard.
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+1 on Alan Wake, there are much better atmospheric horror games
Year Walk - I found it incredibly dull
Creepy Castle - Tried to give it a decent shot, but the story never caught me and the combat was super simple
Citizens of Earth - I love Earthbound and many similar games, but this one didn't do it for me
Mad Max - Underwhelming, boring and repetitive
CONSORTIUM - I like decision basted story games but this one was a slog with forgettable characters and story
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Alan Wake, there are much better atmospheric horror games
I really liked Alan Wake, even though I dislike horror gams for the most part. I am curious to know what games you'd recommend that are similar to AW, and aren't just a monster fest?
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Well, guess how you define monster fest.
Silent Hill 2 & 3 are my all time favs, creeped the hell out of myself playing these late at night. Definitely lots of monsters though.
Amnesia - The Dark Descent - you lose sanity when you're in the darkness
System Shock 2 - fighting an evil AI on a derelict spaceship. Scifi FPS/RPG
Layers of Fear - Psychological art horror game. Really you're just running through on rails, but it is a creepy experience
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FTL
undertale
dark souls games
sekiro
cuphead
PVP games like call of duty, battlefield, dota, lol, fortnite, overwatch
metal gear cinematic-fest solid
nier automata, dmc, and similar games
sports games like fifa, nba, madden
i'm sure i'm missing at least 500 "great" games here, but i don't want to waste more time. :3
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Lots of things the majority like but I just didn't get/couldn't get into for one reason or another. The Mass Effect series just seemed boring & clunky to me, & I love sci-fi. The Witcher series was also too boring & clunky to me, & I love fantasy. Same with the Final Fantasy series, same with most turn based games, same with any MOBA game.
Don't get me wrong, I see some of the positives these games have or had, I just could not for the life of me find any enjoyment in them. I also seem to like plenty of the games that people hate, especially in this thread lol. A lot of people hated Lost Planet 2 when it came out, but it's one of my favorite games, even today. Opinions are weird aren't they? They should be outlawed or something. :^ P
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You used the word boring & clunky, so I couldn't help but wonder if it's the length of the game that kills the fun for you, or maybe your age has something to do with the sort of games you're interested in at the moment?
I know I used to play lots of FPS games when I was younger, but don't play so many nowadays.
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Well, I usually love longer games. It's gameplay that I find un-intuitive or un-fun that turns me off first. Second would be story that I don't find interesting, usually because it just doesn't 'grab' me early on, or it thrusts you into the middle of a world & it overwhelms you with what it expects you to know/figure out/care about.
The Last of Us is another game I don't care for mainly for the story reason (But also because I found the gameplay to be nothing special). I really did not like the huge leap in time right at the beginning of the game. I know it's pretty much a nitpick complaint at best, but I really would've preferred it starting off with Joel being older & more experienced, or actually somehow showing what happened between the start of the outbreak & where the game actually starts. Expecting me to immerse myself into a characters life, then being like "Ehhh & then 40 or so years went by & now you are here!" just doesn't gel with me.
I definitely can't handle competitive FPS games anymore as I get older. The toxicity & the need to be on your A-game 100% of the time is painful, so I prefer things to be either co-operative or at least a little more casual now.
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This is why people should pay less attention to ratings. Some of my favorite games of all time are rather mediocre in ratings, and plenty of "10/10 GOTY" haven't wowed me.
As to the question, I haven't played the new Super Smash Bros. since the week it came out. It feels bland, impersonal, and empty.
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there are so many games out there, that it really helps to know which games are generally considered worth paying attention to.
I find metacritic a nice shorthand, but I'm aware that certain games tend to score much higher than others, and I take that into account
Unless it's a game I'm specifically interested in, if a AAA game scores less than 80%, it's automatically off my radar, whereas a lot of the indies I'm interested in, probably score in the 70s. On the other hand, if an indie scores 90%+, even if it's not usually my kind of thing, I'm gonna read more.
And as a general rule, I won't spend any money on a game that doesn't get at least 60.
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my view is, there are certain genres I really like, and I'm far more likely to like even the less popular games, so it's weird when I don't like the uber-popular ones. Then there are genres that I don't mind, but I think are so-so, where I'll probably enjoy the best games, even if I'm not a fan of the genre.
And of course there's genres I just don't like, so I'm pleasantly surprised if I do like a game in that style.
Note that I'm using Genre in a broader sense - look & feel can make a huge difference even in what should otherwise be very similar games.
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Why would you remove games from your account? That seems a little extreme
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Most games that get people raving about how great they are, but if I had to pick just one, the very top of my list is Shadow of the Colossus. If there's any music, it's bland and uninteresting, the whole game is in a made-up gibberish language (why hire voice actors, if you're just going to be reading the text, anyway), the game seems to have an absolute vendetta against colors that aren't brown, and the gameplay is so awkward and clunky that it's a miracle that so many people have been able to finish it. I love the premise of seeking out gigantic monsters to climb around on and attack their weak points to bring them down, but the execution is just baffling to me. Like, I get it: this would be that difficult to do in real life, but if you're going for realism in a game about taking down monsters the size of skyscrapers, then you're missing the point of your own game.
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fallout games from 3. didn't even play them but i played the elder scrolls a bit and looked them up. it's basically like the elder scrolls but with bland ugly post-apocalyptic modern age maps and guns instead of bland medieval maps and weapons. and the guns are shit and the "fps" part with the pausing system looks terrible and unfun and dumb to me
borderlands. the shooting is just trash just like all the weapons and there are tons of critical design flaws. the enemies are bullet sponges and the player has a shield bar and a health bar but both drop instantly to 1 and get the player downed in 1 hit by about any mob in the hardest mode. the weapons are just so unprecise and bullets-consumming and deal way too low damages and some mobs are virtually unkillable. solo players are punished a lot with a lack of decent scaling which makes said mobs even more of an issue, downed feature unreliable, and a lot of raid bosses and quests impossible to beat. i feel like this game is a giant bug where the devs basically spammed lots of 0s behind the other different numbers for the mobs stats and let it like that. playing as a solo player feels like having to glitch and exploit the a.i. because there is no way to beat it "normally" by just shooting at the mobs like one would expect. covers and jumps and running being useless as well, they just don't fit with the movements, speed and attacks of the mobs. the builds viability and diversity are also complete shit as well as most weapons which are basically useless. those games are among the worse i played and it's shitty that sometimes i play them telling myself "maybe this time i won't be that bad" but it still is
binding of isaac too. everything was just bad. the art, the humor, the gameplay
half-life 2... played through it and it was meh. it wasn't that bad but it wasn't great either. the story, setting and graphics were shit though. "meh" is what i get from it
morrowind.. nonsense balance and mechanics, takes ages to do anything in the beginning which may very well be dozens of hours. gamebreaking bugs
l4d games. i played them for a bit but don't quite get the appeal. same linear path every time, mobs throwing ccs all the time, overpowered bosses, and the weapons shoot like shit
f.e.a.r.. the shooting and the a.i. are pretty decent, but this game is just boring. it's a linear hall runner and most of the time is actually spent solving puzzles in the form of finding the exit to the next area. there are like 2 types of scenery in the entire game, and some mobs/bosses are ridiculously overtuned and bugged i had to glitch to kill them. like for one of them i thought i wouldn't have enough bullets and simply it wouldn't be possible to beat it cause it was a huge thing throwing missiles and whatnot at me in a narrow area. well it turns out i just had to stand against the wall i was at when it spawned and his missiles weren't doing any damage. idk, looks like the devs went "oops" and decided to allow that more-or-less-obvious glitch for a fix to actually progress in the game
dota 2 underlords.. idk, when i think about that game i wonder "why" on top of "how" cause i barely understand how the game works, or i do understand and just find it being a pointless waste of time
bioshock games. ugly graphics, unfun shooting, shitty puzzles, shitty bosses, i couldn't stand it for more than an hour and didn't even play the 2 even though i've owned it for years
dishonored. just looks boring. thief games aswell, which i had bought once on steam just to refund them after 10 minutes
portal games. they are a bit long and the setting was boring. the puzzles weren't anything special and it was annoying actually spending time to complete them even if we had figured them out. i played and finished 2 and then some time later started 1, played for a few minutes and never launched it again
witcher games. just look ugly with garbage combat and i guess story too
dragon age origins, and all dragon age games by extension. very ugly, very shitty story, and very shitty gameplay. some people praise them a lot and pretend they're among the best games ever and i can only think of either stupid, shill, or having lived in a cave their whole life
mount & blade. among the blandest games i've ever played. "rpg" with towns made of 2-3 static npcs and 2-3 "houses" that are pointlless to navigate and incredibly unpolished. the combats are slow and dumb
chroma squad. shit humor, shit gameplay, yet people praise it like it's jesus
titan quest, linear, bland, boring, and slow progression. had to do things on the side because it was just that boring and it never got better. grim dawn.. slow and unsatisfying, couldn't "play" it for more than 10 minutes.
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sometimes, there is something
something, isn't always a real thing
a real thing can sometimes be something
if that something sometimes become reality
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Personally, I found myself not enjoying Ori and the Blind Forest, for reasons I outlined in my review. Mainly because it had been overhyped as a great story, rather than a great platforner. (Though I bounced off the difficulty of the platforming segments, too.)
I've had the same experience with Cuphead so far—I love looking at it, but actually playing it is painful. Which sucks, because I won it from a generous giveaway on this site. I'd be playing it on easy if I could, but apparently the devs made it so you can't actually beat the game if you do that, which just seems unkind.
It's not that I don't like hard games, either! Crypt of the Necrodancer, Don't Starve, La-Mulana, Jotun, Tumbleseed... Maybe it's the way you have to get past one specific hard task after another, without much room for variety if you get frustrated and want to come back to it later.
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Enter the Gungeon. I decided to buy it on chrono because of the good reviews and I played it a bit, but I don't see myself having fun with it. Maybe it's not my type of game, but I usually enjoy bullet hell games so I don't know. Nonetheless, I agree it's a good game.
And talking about highly rated games, all the games with anime girls have very positive reviews on steam. Really, always, and it makes no sense.
PD: sorry for the necro
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why is that ? my issue with that kind of game is that they sell themselves as being "relaxing" and at the same time imposing very tight timers and schedules on the players. it's the kind of games where i'd just take my time and daze off but a whole day goes by in a matter of minutes (24 usually with a 1m:1h ratio) and the game keeps throwing scheduled quests and events at me and i'm like "noooooooope" and quit
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Try Littlewood. I've only played some, but from what I can tell so far the in-game timer only advances as you do things. It is still early access, however. Graveyard Keeper doesn't have any real hard timers either. Both allow you to move the game at your own pace.
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I bought the game based on the sky-high number of positive reviews. I tried it but couldn't get into it. I like that it was one person that developed the game, but I just didn't find it fun at all really.
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I find the singleplayer to be like that. But my first experience with the game was actually the multiplayer mod (as multiplayer was not in the base game when I purchased it). In fact I purchased the game to play multiplayer.
The singleplayer for me just seems sort of 'boring'. In the multiplayer, tasks were usually split up quite nicely. So everybody did more of what they liked, meaning everyone did less of the stuff they found 'boring'.
For instance, I enjoy the mining aspect of the game more than the farming aspect. And I was playing with someone who was the opposite of that. So I'd usually go mining, whereas my friend would harvest the crops/ plant the crops. I did help water planted crops every day, as the energy use is quite high otherwise, then we would split up, I would go mining, they would go fishing. Sometimes we would go do stuff together too, like fishing, or foraging, etc.
I have started singleplayer games several times, but I never got into it as much as the multiplayer.
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Assassin's Creed. I will never understand the appeal.
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GEARS OF WAR
Glad i was able to try 2 of these for free during my xbox subscription. There are some good dynamic cover shooters out there, these ones were a slog, idk, seems like an excuse for brain dead AI
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So I've been trying to play Into the Breach lately, and I don't get why people think it's a great game. I loved FTL, and I read great things about it, but to me there's nothing special about the game. I don't get the big deal - what makes the game good? I can see it as a nice 5-minute time-waster, but what on earth justified those great reviews? the gameplay felt like it would have been an innovative mac game in 1985, the graphics are nothing special, there's no real storyline.
So it got me thinking, what other 'great' games do you just not understand?
I'm not talking about great games that just aren't your cup of tea - I can acknowledge why, for example, COD was considered groundbreaking, even if I don't much care for the game. I'm talking about truly not being able to understand why a game is considered special.
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