Jaded Gamers Thread - "ya im mad"

[Taylor]

the last of us looks like another generic naughty dog/zombie game and i have never been impressed by it.


in retrospect, bioshock infinite was not as fantastic as it was hyped up to be. much like the original bioshock, it does a lot for the genre and the industry in general, but it's far from perfect

 

[Reagan Rayden]

I never used any other Vigor besides Bucking Bronco because it's the only one that's actually good.

101/10 game design

 

[Wehrmacht]

god of war is actually a really really bland action franchise which catapulted a brand of western action games that are all mostly unremarkable, and kratos is a really terrible main character. the only reason he has any popularity is because of how "badass" he is, which doesn't really make up for how he is uninteresting, not fun to watch or play as, and generally a good example of how to not make your audience empathize with your main character in any way.

 

[Taylor]

ocarina of time is probably not even in the top 3 zelda games of all time and is only overrated because it was memorable for being the very first 3d zelda, similar to the treatment given to games like ffvii and sm64.

 

[Reagan Rayden]

I played ff7 a while back, got to the chocobo farm, died to the worm boss while riding a chocobo, forgot to save beforehand and lost a good few hours of game time.

I never had the desire to ever go back.


I honestly think Golden Sun is a better turn based game than ff7. hell even paper mario

 

[Taylor]

I honestly think Golden Sun is a better turn based game than ff7. hell even paper mario

idk about paper mario because that game is probably almost too simple, but i'd totally agree with golden sun. i think it has way more depth and better presentation than any final fantasy game i've played (save for maybe VI)

 

[Piercing Light]

the gameplay in DMC was actually kinda fun. The plot was pretty bleh, but there's a certain something that video games can get away with that other mediums can't, and that's having a crappy plot. Granted there are exceptions. It can be a deal breaker if the plot is meant to carry the experience in some way, and you don't enjoy it. (L.A Noire, Mass Effect [just examples, I enjoyed those games for the most part])

But for an action game like DMC, you come for the gameplay, you stay for the gameplay. So, it should be judged accordingly. The bad plot should have an effect on the score, but not nearly as much as the gameplay would, since that is the backbone of the experience.

On the flip side, what if people judged something like Silent Hill 2 for it's gameplay? It would be critically panned. But the gameplay isn't pivotal to the experience, the atmosphere and plot are.

so, I think the critical lens on games is highly subjective depending upon what you're meant to take from it.

 

[Orion]

Also, to address a more contemporary issue: why does xbox one NEED to lock me out of games if i don't have an internet connection for more than 24 hours? that alone is enough to not make me want to buy the console, especially if i need to pay an xbox live subscription to get me an online connection to begin with.

Because it's what publishers want - cementing greater profit-per-experience while being seen to 'take action' against the newest industry boogieman they created. First it was rented games, then pirated games, and now it's used games. When you have always online, you can be always sure that every single experience of a game has been monitised to your benefit, be it a new, used, borrowed or whatever game.

Think about this: the Xbox One development and retail side of Microsoft have virtually no need for something like always-online DRM measures. App stores, digital music stores (iTunes) and online video services (Hulu, NetFlix, HBO Go) are all set at such prices and offer such convenience that it's basically not worth pirating. This is something that's also been seen with Steam and why it does so well - they provide a paid product to consumers in the right way, and the would-be-lost consumer no longer cares to pirate it.

By 'fighting' used games, the big-publishing arm of the industry gets to hold onto it's current position of power. They get to determine what games get made, how they get made, how they deal with IPs, what developers - the real creative heart of the industry - do, and so on.
Publishers would rather fight a false enemy than actually engage with the other branches of the industry because it would mean losing those perks they've held onto for so long. Used games aren't the problem, they're just a manifestation of the inadequacies of the publisher-retailer relationship, and it also has to do why we see so much day-one DLC for games.

In new sales, publishers take the majority of the profit, while retailers get very little. With used games, retailers get all of the resell value, while publishers get none. To remedy this, they set up DLC and online passes and such so that even if they didn't make money off of the in-store sale of a used game, they could still benefit down the line from a used-game user buying online content, but unfortunately the current system incentivises retailers to keep selling used games.
If two things would change, I can promise you the industry outlook on used games would be very different: If retailers got a larger cut of new games, and if publishers actually got a cut of used games. It would also solve the aforementioned DLC problem, since now publishers could be sure they'd profit off of every single retail sale, though personal trading and independent selling is another story.

tl;dr orion saves vidya gamming

But for an action game like DMC, you come for the gameplay, you stay for the gameplay. So, it should be judged accordingly. The bad plot should have an effect on the score, but not nearly as much as the gameplay would, since that is the backbone of the experience.

Except in marketing and in the game itself, the plot was treated like it should be taken seriously. The one-liners and over-the-top action that featured in the old DMC games became contrasting to the mood of the plot in DmC instead of complementing it.

 

[Nyangoro]

I played To the Moon and that was the first "modern" game that made me cry in who knows how long.

Most all AAA games don't do it for me unless that have a really good explanation/world-building element.

 

[Piercing Light]

There's almost always a dissonance between marketing and the actual game. Does anyone remember the commercials for the gears games? Namely the third entry. They seemed to imply there was an overall tone of melancholy and hopelessness in the game. Yet the game has so much dude bro testosterone injected into it.

 

[Orion]

It's not really surprising. AAA games cost a lot to make, so publishers push for the game to sell to a wide-as-reasonably-possible demographic. Attracting such a demographic usually involves all sorts of claims about revolutionary gameplay, graphics and/or online, none of which have any strict bearing on the emotional content or impact of a game. That, and most gamers probably don't care to go out and deliberately find a game that'll make them cry, maybe one's that'll incidentally do that at best.

 

[Piercing Light]

Ha... I still recall activison bragging about the fact that fish swim away from you when you get close to them in ghosts... There certainly may be a horrid misunderstanding of what is 'innovation' these days...

 

[Orion]

Super Mario 64 had fish that swam away from you when you got near them. Maybe they didn't make the movements as part of some individual-in-a-school algorithm, but it was enough. That Activision is doing that for Ghosts shows exactly what's wrong with a big part of the industry.

Call of Duty has so much money behind it that they can afford to make meaningless additions to the game that will only feature for a single level, likely only a single section of it. They're doing it with fish in Ghosts and they had it with the wingsuit section in MW3 or Blops 2. The game is so stagnated but well-funded that the developers can and do create entire sets of AI, game assets and mechanics that will only see use for five minutes at most. The fish don't add anything to the game, and the wingsuit section was just a glorified, on-rails method of getting from one place to another - goes to show Call of Duty is almost all about style, with virtually no substance these days.

Features that could have entire games built on them if applied well are throwaway items for big, yearly-release titles like CoD; meanwhile Battlefield, Assassin's Creed and Halo are following close behind.

 

[quiteMAD]

I didn't notice this thread, so this is going to be a long post SORRY GUYS.

Devil's advocate mode: activate.

no?

it's a AAA title from a company who already has overrated games (see: uncharted), of course it was going to get really great scores. a lot of games get really good scores and then don't actually live up to the praise. it happens all the time. bioshock infinite, as orion mentioned. DmC as well. the rating system has a lot of problems, and one of the largest can be seen right here, right now: the bandwagon effect: everyone gets really hyped up for the game and suddenly everyone is manic about it; mania dies down later and reality kicks in and it's just an average game, maybe an above average experience.

do i think the last of us is an average game? yeah, on paper, definitely.

>zombies
>guns
>lots of cgi action
>deep, gritty story with heart between two main characters
>MY WAIFU THO

am i saying it's a bad game? i wouldn't know. it's probably a good game and a great experience, but i'm not going to blindly be like "wow look at all the 100s must be goty all years" before waiting a few weeks/months/even years and seeing what happens when everything dies down. it's okay to be excited for a game, but let's not keep jizzing ourselves just because we see scores from game journalists who are probably just overhyping the game to hell and back.

i mean seriously, the Citizen Kane of gaming? lol ok.

First I'd like to mention how tired I am of the phrase "AAA", because it's just a buzzword replacement for "game made by a popular or well known company". It doesn't really mean anything, and you shouldn't expect more from a game just because of it.
Now I will say the Citizen Kane statement is probably a bit of an exaggeration on Adam Sessler's, especially since that movie doesn't nearly live up to the hype as much as something like Casa Blanca or Psycho does, though I don't know what Last of Us' story is so I can't say if it's justified or not. The trailers don't tell us anything other than "these people are going somewhere", and you know there's obviously more to the plot than that. But from what I've seen, Last of Us has highly unique gameplay, and it seems like you're completely ignoring that in lieu of trivializing the fact that it has zombies in it. It's not just the story that people are praising for that game, after all. It's a survival horror game at heart (and dude you can't list guns as a negative, what do you expect man kind to do, just stop relying on our most efficient means for survival??), and the first I've ever seen where the menu screen is used in real time and can potentially get you killed for using it. It's also the first survival horror game I've seen where combat seems actually visceral and heart pounding because you're dealing with either monsters that can kill you in one hit or humans who want to kill you just for the shit you have in your backpack. You're not dealing with the brainwashed idiots from Bioshock Infinite, and you're not facing an undead horde with a fully loaded machine gun. This is an actually realistic take on what it would be like once civilization has ended, not a generic zombie game.

Granted, this is coming from someone who hates anything with zombies (save for L4D and Tell Tale's Walking Dead) and LOATHES "my dead wife" plots, so....I might end up hating this game anyway. Still, the gameplay looks unique as diddly, and I don't think you can ignore that.

god of war is actually a really really bland action franchise which catapulted a brand of western action games that are all mostly unremarkable, and kratos is a really terrible main character. the only reason he has any popularity is because of how "badass" he is, which doesn't really make up for how he is uninteresting, not fun to watch or play as, and generally a good example of how to not make your audience empathize with your main character in any way.

God of War 2 and on, eeeeeeh sure whatever. But the first God of War became a hit because there was nothing like it when it came out. It was like Zelda (action game with heavy emphasis on puzzles) meets Mortal Kombat, but with bosses the scale of Shadows of the Collosus, and HOLY SHIT NUDITY.

I honestly think Golden Sun is a better turn based game than ff7. hell even paper mario

Hell yes. Though I always found the story for Golden Sun to be missing a certain something (I don't know what, it just feels incomplete to me), that's still one of my all time favorite turn based rpgs. FF6 is still the highest watermark for me, though.


And back to the subject of "overrated", I'm curious where you guys think the threshold for that concept is. For example: I felt Call of Duty 4 was awesome and arguably underrated when it came out, and now I question if any CoD game coming out even deserves to exist. Another example is the previously mentioned Uncharted series. When 1 came out, it was critically panned, and alot of people just skipped over it. However, Uncharted 2 was SO much better than 1 that it absolutely blew people away, and even made 1 look better as a result and lead to 3 becoming an unstoppable hype machine. But since 3 didn't live up to that hype (which I didn't follow, and walked in with lower expectations, and actually like it better than 2 as a result), now the whole franchise is considered "overrated" by Trayroar and many many others. So....where's the line? At what point does a game stop being worthy of the amount of praise it gets, and start being a piece of shit that's not worthy of even pissing on? Is it a mistake for a company to build on its own success? Should they start ending franchises the second they reach their height of popularity? If they did, they could certainly bank on nostalgia for their games later in life, but they'd be out a lot of potential money.

 

[Deleted member 36435]

bioshock infinite was a 7 at best

u r a fkn i diot

 

[Ehres]

Sales =/= good quality.

'Poor commercial performance' is a fact, yes, but by no means is it an accurate dictor of the quality of a game. Sales are based purely on how effectively a game was marketed. Great marketing doesn't make a game good, nor does a good game make for great marketing. While it's difficult to stay unbiased since nothing is really 'good' or 'bad' (opinions are subjective and subject to flux, whatever, what's not the point), take examples such as Call of Duty and Shadows of the Damned.

I think most of us can agree that CoD is subpar, but what do you know, Modern Warfare 3 shifted 6.5 million copies on release day in 2011. Also in 2011 was SotD, which was apparently a great game, and to this day has sold only 200,000 copies.

So, yeah. Great sales =/= great game. Just saying.

 

[Reagan Rayden]

back to the subject of "overrated", I'm curious where you guys think the threshold for that concept is.

I think there's a fine line between how you perceive a game when you first complete it and how you perceive the game in the face of its entirety after a rough amount of time has passed (i.e. after the "wow" factor is gone). That is usually when most people can determine the game's true value.

I mean, haven't you ever played a game that you thought was SPECTACULAR and then 3 months after beating it you look back and go, "Eh it was ok I guess.", the same thing happens with movies. That's what is happening right now in this entire thread.

Just to add one more snippet to be relevant, I played Uncharted 2 and thought it was pretty decent, I still remember certain parts of the game, so there's that.

Also I think with the way game scores are nowadays, anyone would think a 7/10 or 6/10 means it's bad when it's not. So I'm not going to be throwing out any scores.

 

[Taylor]

First I'd like to mention how tired I am of the phrase "AAA", because it's just a buzzword replacement for "game made by a popular or well known company". It doesn't really mean anything, and you shouldn't expect more from a game just because of it.

i usually associate something like AAA to mean the amount of money put in to a game. big budget games only really come out of popular companies because they have the money to produce those sorts of games. i don't think i'd say it's only a buzzword.

But from what I've seen, Last of Us has highly unique gameplay, and it seems like you're completely ignoring that in lieu of trivializing the fact that it has zombies in it.

I just don't think the gameplay is that revolutionary; it doesn't help the fact that it features something as overused as zombies.

It's a survival horror game at heart

A survival horror game that comes off more as an action-adventure game, and maybe that's a part of the problem.

and the first I've ever seen where the menu screen is used in real time and can potentially get you killed for using it.

Other games have done this before: look at Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. I know you're just referring to the survival horror genre, but one genre borrowing innovation from another genre doesn't exactly make you unique.

It's also the first survival horror game I've seen where combat seems actually visceral and heart pounding because you're dealing with either monsters that can kill you in one hit or humans who want to kill you just for the shit you have in your backpack.

I think that mostly comes down to opinion, honestly. You also mentioned Infinite's AI, which is definitely really bad, but the point is that you're referencing AI from other genres, and I don't think it's out of the question to assume that another game along the line has had AI that makes you feel as threatened as The Last of Us. I've also heard that the AI is actually not that great, and that it almost takes you out of the atmosphere of the rest of the cinematic experience.

Still, the gameplay looks unique as diddly, and I don't think you can ignore that.

So to clarify, I'm not ignoring it, I just don't think it's quite as unique as you think it is.

 

[quiteMAD]

I mean, haven't you ever played a game that you thought was SPECTACULAR and then 3 months after beating it you look back and go, "Eh it was ok I guess.", the same thing happens with movies. That's what is happening right now in this entire thread.

I honestly can't think of a case where I have. It might just be that I have specific interests in regards to games, but I go through the "eh it was ok I guess" while still playing it. I never beat any of the Borderlands or Bioshocks because I'd get about half way through and go "nah I know where this is going, and I'm not going to enjoy it, I'll just watch a walkthrough or something" lol. The games I have finished I still love and adore. Though I could count those games on one hand.

I just don't think the gameplay is that revolutionary; it doesn't help the fact that it features something as overused as zombies.

If I think of a survival horror game that doesn't have zombies or zombie-esque enemies, I'd concede to your point. It's just a staple of the genre.

And I wouldn't call any game's gameplay any amount of "revolutionary", that's a kind of ridiculous notion.

A survival horror game that comes off more as an action-adventure game, and maybe that's a part of the problem.

I don't think we're watching the same gameplay...Yeah the E3 reveal trailer was pretty action-y, but that was just for the sake of getting the audience's attention, and most of the game will actually be like this, but with some action sprinkled in for the sake of pacing.
[video=youtube;5lNfeOJ6f1s]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lNfeOJ6f1s[/video]
1)Try to ignore the tool on commentary.
2)Clickers scare the shit out of me. I don't know why.

Other games have done this before: look at Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. I know you're just referring to the survival horror genre, but one genre borrowing innovation from another genre doesn't exactly make you unique.

I never played any of the Souls games haha. Still, it's different from how they do it too.

 

[Orion]

Seeing the Xbox One shat on by the PlayStation 4 was great to watch, I was smiling the whole damned time, especially when they delivered the news about no ridiculous used game, DRM and connection measures. That said, the PS4 as a console on its own and taking into account its exclusive titles, has done little to really impress me outside of the expected - not implementing draconian measures was just a continuation of what Sony already had going, for instance, and that PS+ is now required for multiplayer is irritating, so hopefully it might see a price drop by the time of release. KH3 and FFXV were sort of expected surprises, but what we've seen of gameplay hasn't got me convinced yet.

And Microsoft throwing games at everything in the hopes to distract people from its shitty policies was funny as hell considering it was Sony who showed how people still feel about that stuff.