Terrible taste in games? Guilty secrets and you
 

Compared to the game buying public at large, it seems as though I have pretty terrible taste in games. The things I like are often seen as obscure or unpopular and I often don't see what all the fuss is about more popular titles.

For example, I thought Too Human was an awesome game and spent hundreds of hours playing it whereas popular opinion was that it was a bit rubbish. I'm also a big fan of Frontlines, another game that met with less than stellar commercial success. I thought Blazing Angels was a lot of fun and was for a time ranked about 300th on the global leaderboard but that is perhaps due to only about 3,000 people ever playing it online.

On the flip side, I've never liked any of the Mario games, wasn't much of a Sonic fan back in the day and got bored really quickly of Little Big Planet. I thought Final Fantasy X-2 was a much better game than FFX and FFXII is one of my favourites in the whole series. I tried playing FFVI a few times but got really bored really quickly each time.

So what are your guilty secrets in gaming? What games do you really like which the world thinks are shit and what critically acclaimed masterpieces did you think were rubbish?

I thought Uncharted was kind of bleh, and Infamous was just as bad. Trying to think of a 360 or Wii game to balance out the two PS3 choices, but I can't at the moment. I can assure you, they are there and on myriad consoles.

I recently purchased Army of Two and I kind of like it. Also spent a bit of time seeking out and reacquiring Evergrace and Forever Kingdom.

I liked Call of Duty 3. Not only did I like it, but I possibly liked it more than CoD4.

A critically acclaimed game I dislike is Resident Evil 4. It just wasn't enjoyable on so many levels, but I thought RE5 subsequently fixed every single problem I had with it, despite most people saying it wasn't as good.

Along with Krel, I'm probably the only person on the internet who disliked Bioshock. It had a gorgeous environment, but pretty much ruined your enjoyment with annoying fetchquests, ambushes and predictable twists. And by twists I don't mean THAT twist in the story, I meant the parts where you're told to go somewhere, and you already know you won't get there because A) someone is in the way and insists you pick up daisies and elbow grease for them, or B) a new obstacle, be it a collapsing roof, a crumbling walkway or exploding cat prevents you from ever reaching said destination, forcing you to move on to a new area you weren't told about. Or C) both, in that order.

Considering how much shooting there was, it was cumbersome and drab. A shotgun blast or machinegun bullets hardly seemed to slow down the enemies whose AI did nothing but run straight for you, or possibly make a zig-zag pattern for you, which to a 360 pad is obviously murder. Your "massive range of combat options" options usually meant you used up whatever special ammo you had and then had to stick with regular ammo, slowly chipping away health even with headshots. Or using the lighting-wrench combination until you ran out of juice. If you could get close to enemies, which of course wasn't much of an option when they had firearms.

And whose genius idea was it to limit your gravity gun with an ammo count? HL2's gravity gun was so much fun because it encouraged you to use it and experiment because there was so much to experiment on, and because you could do it as much as you wanted.
Being told "ok, you tried lifting that up, but you can't, so now you have 9 uses of that left" will only make a person attempt to conserve, which in the end means not using it at all, sticking with the boxes and boxes of bullets you find in trashbins and skirts of dead bodies.


As for my guilty pleasure, I'm fond of Tenchu Fatal Shadows. The controls are not very good, but they become surprisingly transparent once you learn them (something that didn't happen in Shinobido and it suffered greatly for it), and running around as female ninjas never gets old. The music was great too.

To this day I still don't understand why everyone hates on Valkyrie Profile 2. Maybe it's because I played it before getting beyond chapter 3 in VP1 (though I had a friend who's replayed VP1 a dozen times fill me in as I went along), but I thought it was a fantastic game. The combat was fun, the story was interesting, and the final boss was hilariously insane. What more could I want? Even its low points were amusing, like Hrist's Clark Kent style disguise. "Hey guys, I don't have a helmet. Totally not an evil valkyrie."

I'm also a complete fanboy for the .Hack franchise. I get why those games aren't very popular, though. Both series are flawed in plenty of ways, some fairly serious like the terrible level balance in GU where you slaughter anything 2 levels lower and can barely touch anything a few levels higher. Most people aren't willing to keep buying games in that episodic fashion, and that's reasonable. They're probably my guiltiest pleasure simply because I know most people would probably dislike them, and for good reason, yet I love playing them and have fond memories of drooling over the trailers for each game. I'm hopeful they'll put out another series soon, maybe through something like XBLA where Penny Arcade Adventures has already shown how feasible an episodic RPG can be with digital distribution.

As for games I dislike, the Metal Gear Solid series springs to mind. I played the beginning of the first MGS back when it first came out, and I hated it. Last year I picked up MGS3: Subsistence for $10 to give it another shot, and recognized that it was a good game, but I sucked horribly and still wasn't having any fun playing it.

Also, while I admittedly haven't played very much of it, what I did play of Halo seemed extremely mediocre. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything worth caring about either.


Rockgamer needs to own up and add Super Mario World to his post.

I wasn't trying to hide it, I just didn't think that dead horse needed to be beaten again.

But yeah, I played about the first two worlds or so, and thought the game was garbage. However, since discovering the Koopa Kids are in the game, I'm willing to give it another chance. They can't actually make this game good, but they can at least make wading through this crap somewhat worth it.

I originally played the game via emulator, but for some god forsaken reason I actually own the GBA version, which just doesn't make sense. I wouldn't have played it on an emulator if I already had a physical copy, but I wouldn't have bought a physical copy after knowing how much the game blows after playing it on an emulator. A mystery...

I love JRPGs, especially ones made by Gust. They all look the same, have the same sounding music, and aren't radically different from one another in battle system. They also have mediocre plots at best.

I still buy every single one of them.

As far as acclaimed games go, I do not like the Mother series. I've tried on multiple occasions to get into Earthbound and never made it farther than a few hours. Mother 3 was alright until I got to the Monkey, and then I either missed some obvious trick against the Cactus Wolf or I need to grind a ton and fuck that.

Now where is Skills to proclaim his love of Xenosaga

Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors/Warriors Orochi. Maybe it's jut because with my lack of time I'm getting too lazy to learn how to play new games. But some reason I keep playing these games. Infact a Gamestop employee was baffled when me and a friend were the only people at the store buying something else the day Kingdom Hearts 2 came out. We bought Dynasty Warriors Empires. (Can't remember if it was 4 or 5 now)

Blade Storm. Was kind of a strategy rpg where you did the same things over and over again. A LOT! Many people either never heard of it or couldn't stomach beating the entire game. I did however, I also somehow managed to do it in a little over 50 hours when everyone claimed it takes 80.

Also for some strange reason I don't hate Blue Dragon.

Wait, Blue Dragon is a guilty pleasure game now? Erm, OK, well then put me down for that one as I really liked that game.

Not really sure what other guilty pleasures I have, though I guess you could include the Tomb Raider series, which hasn't been amazing for a while, but since Legend I've picked up each one and rather enjoyed them.

Like Taco, I'm also big into J-RPG's as well since they consist about 80% of my collection of games, but when it comes to my terrible tastes of games there is only one series that really comes to mind that a lot of people can't seem to stand and its actually not a J-RPG, but an anime shoot'em up.

I'm actually a big fan of the Castle of Shikigami series. The thing with this series is despite the not so stellar music, the horrible voice acting, and the insane difficulty there is actually some pretty solid game-play. Even though the games are getting harder to find, and I actually had a hard time getting Castle of Shikigami III for the Wii, in my eyes these games are still worthwhile purchases and I would recommend them especially if you like shoot'em ups. Overall, just ignore everything else about the game and enjoy the solid game-play this game has to offer.

In terms of what critically acclaimed games did I think were not all that great is kind of a tough question for me to answer. There are a lot of critically acclaimed masterpieces that I don't even bother playing, but it isn't fair for me to say that I thought the game was shitty because I never even played it. I usually stick to my favorite genre of games and on the scatter occasion I'll probably buy something outside the norm, but some of masterpieces that I don't even bother playing just simply for the fact that I'm not interested are:

- Halo
- Gears of War
- Bioshock
- Call of Duty
- Grand Theft Auto
- Resident Evil
- Guitar Hero
- Fallout

I'm sure these games are great games, but I have no interest in playing them whatsoever.

Tomb Raider in it's time was as mainstream popular as you could get mate, I'd hardly call that a divergent taste. Deathtrap Dungeon however, that was an obscure and unpopular title I got bang into. Insanely difficult too, like Tomb Raider with worse controls, swords instead of guns, hardly any savepoints and traps that just killed you with no warning. Fucking loved that game...

This.

More than just buy all of them, every time one of them gets announced, I jump on the preorder bandwagon, ever since I regretted not going for the big box bonus for Mana Khemia 1. Being a big fan of these kinds of games, I've only beaten Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. I'm currently playing Ar Tonelico: Melodies of Elemia, but as for all of the others, I haven't even touched them yet. Hell, Mana Khemia 2's already preordered for me and I've already started on waiting for Atelier Rorona on the PS3. People often look at me funny when I mention anything in this camp. Atlus games also fall into this camp, most noteably, the Shin Megami Tensei series.

Another genre that I get weird looks from most people on is the Turn Based Strategy RPG, populated by games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, or any of the NIS entries like Phantom Brave, Makai Kingdom, Disgaea, etc). While this genre's a bit more open than the aforementioned Gust JRPGs, people still look at me funny when I proclaim that Fire Emblem is tons more fun than Fallout 3.

As for the opposite, it seems that the more a game is hyped, the less I end up liking it, partially due to unreasonable hype creating unreasonable expectations. Most popular games, I couldn't care less about. These include noteable mentions of the duo Prototype and Infamous, Bioshock, Far Cry 2 (while we're on it, most other first person shooters), LittleBigPlanet, the entire Grand Theft Auto series and Call of Duty 5, just to name a few. I don't necessarily hate these games, but I just don't see what's so fun about them. I seem to really hate open-world gameplay because most of the reason I'm playing a game is to have an adventure crafted for me, not making me craft my own adventure. I also dislike games that keep trying to be overly realistic (like Skate) because if I'm going to be playing a game, I'm probably trying to get away from reality.

Also:

I'm waiting for this as well.

Yeah, but I'm not talking about Tomb Raider in its time (in fact, beyond Tomb Raider 2 I completely abandoned the series until getting back into it with Legend), I'm talking about the Tomb Raider series now, the last few installments. I'm not saying they're not mainstream, just not really to be considered fantastic games. Was just trying to join in. ;_;

I'd say for every two or three games I can make a really good argument for - theres one or two I cannot even fathom why I played them as much as I did.

Example? Superman Returns. My comic nerd child enjoyed this rather broken game for one very simple reason - flying around was fun as hell. You can do it in a billion other games, but this was Superman, so there was something much more "important" about it. I liked the game - it wasn't a lost work of art nor was it the worst thing for the 360 - but it was an entertaining aside for $15. It is also one of the two games I have a complete 1000/1000 gamer score for (the other being CoD2).

It kind of has to be because that's one of the most boring RPGs in history and it takes a certain sense of masochism to say you enjoyed it.

As for my guilty pleasures, I've always had a thing for cel-shaded games. I don't know what it is about that look but it's like redheads in women for me. I gotta have at least one a week! There's been a handful of games that have pulled off this technology and been genuinely good, but the rest of them are pretty fucking awful and that stylized graphic look has become a gimmick to make anime games look the part. Cel Damage, XIII, Auto Modelista, anything with the words "Bleach" or "Fullmetal Alchemist" in the title are mediocre at best but I have played a ton and actually enjoyed them quite a bit simply because I like the stylized graphics; I even known some of them!

Wow, add me to the list of people with bad taste, Super Mario World is one of my favorite games of all time.

Another one is Breath of Fire V/Dragon Quarter. I guess people were expecting something along the lines of BOF 4 and were hugely disappointing by a super-difficult dungeon crawler. I beat the game multiple times and even got to the bottom of the Kokon Horay, which in the end was much more difficult than the game itself.

I have guilty pleasures I can't really explain all that much. Any sane person would say they're horrible games. But on the other hand, I say games like Grandia are |absolute| garbage, so it works both ways. I'm going to limit this to rpgs, since not much else springs to mind at the moment.

I sort of like Alundra 2, Legend of Legaia and Guardian's Crusade.

They're fun little rpg games, with entertaining, if a bit naive stories. The controls are tolerable, and the fighting systems are rather ingenious and intuitive. Even the hardest bosses are beatable if you just don't suck, even on lower than average levels. Those are things most rpgs generally accepted as good lack to some extent, all of them. The games I mentioned of course have their significant flaws, mostly on the front of impersonal enemies, umbalanced variation of difficulty (suddenly you find youself screwed, if you missed some piece of equipment), but things always worked out, at least for me. Plus the music is actually good, which I can't say for most jrpgs.

For example, the esper system in FFVI is complete garbage, and most of the characters are useless, not to mention story-wise completely uninteresting. The same system was basically in FFVIII, with some cosmetic changes, and it worked a bit better, even though it wasn't perfect there either. It's like a concentrated (or should I say compressed, hur hur) version of VI, actually. I'm not going to rant much, since pretty much all popular games have their small or big flaws, and whether or not they have a significant effect on the enjoyment level of playing the games, they still exist and they are noticeable.

I found Assassin's Creed horrible. Nothing appealing about it, exept perhaps the graphics which were quite nice.

Metroid, Castlevania and similar games? I'm so crap at them and I don't find getting my arse kicked that entertaining.

People say Mega Man 5 is one of the worst in the original series.

I say they should go fuck themselves right off a cliff.

There's nothing wrong with Mega Man 5. Gravity Man: enough said. MM6 is where the series went downhill.

I like Grandia Xtreme. It's pretty much the pinnacle of RPG gaming for me. Very little storyline, no constantly paving boring towns, and tons of rad battles. I just wish they had put in more savepoints so I had been encouraged to try out different character combinations for my party.

I was also very disappointed by Mother 3. It was fun, but the only reason I think I got through it was due to all of the stuff from Earthbound making an appearance.

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This game is shoddy work in every category, but I'll be damned if I haven't played the hell out of it. I had a bunch of fun messing around with all the different weapons and killing 100 identical guys per level. It's fairly challenging, at least--one misstep and you'll die from a mine or sniper, and there are no in-level saves.

Ha ha, I played that for hours and barely ever actually did a race. I just pissed around designing wicked looking cel-shaded cars.

I've never seen the appeal in any of the Mega Man games and Assasin's Creed was one of the most boring games I ever played. Was also pretty unimpressed by Bioshock when I watched a mate play it for an afternoon.

I think I've never liked the old school console games like Mario and Mega Man because at the time they started becoming more popular, I was playing Elite on the BBC and all the silly games on the Spectrum and then later Atari and Amiga. I had a SNES but just for Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct. Platform games on the Amiga were just so much better than console ones, I never saw the appeal.

I guess you could toss me into the jRPG pile because I own all 3 Xenosagas (I don't deny the movie-quality of the first and the shotty battle system of the second though), all four Star Ocean's, Final Fantasy X, X-2 and XII (I had 7 at some point but ive played it more then a couple times so its not a big deal that I can't find it), Blue Dragon, and in a non-rpg example as mentioned above, one of the recent Tomb Raider games (Anniversary).

Having that said, I also have been recently playing a visual novel type game for the DS called "Lux Pain" which apparently has gotten terrible reviews, so I suppose that would count.

Pepsi Man FTW:

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Seriously. I loved that game. Played it for countless hours, even though there were only 5 or so levels. It was extremely addicting at the time. I even left Final Fantasy IX (which I love) asside to play this game for more than a month. First time I played it was hilarious. Rest of the time... well, let's call it a mistery.

MM6 is indeed quite awful. I mean really, the only MM games I despise are MM6 and X7. I really wish they'd done another X game after the excellent X8, since they seemed to be heading in a nice new direction for the series (by which I mean roughly the same direction they were taking up until X7).

I'm pretty sure that FFX was one of the biggest selling games on the PS2. I know it gets pretty short thrift round here but in global terms, it was hugely mainstream popular. Jrpgs in general can be pretty popular games, just look at FFVI, VII and X or those Chrono things. Games like Guardians' Crusade (Good call by the way, I loved that game) or those weird things Elixir used to bang on about on the other hand qualify you as odd taste in games I think.

Wait.

Wait.

X7 I understand, but not 8 or 9? 9 is derivative bullshit, even for a Mega Man game, and 8 features some of the most dull level design in the entire series.

6 had the best new use for Rush since his introduction, some decent tunes, and some good robot masters. Yamato Man may have been pretty shit but Knight Man totally made up for that in pure badassery.

This may be my unfulfilled old school gamer talking, but, I thought 9 was pretty damn great. I'd probably rank them all like this:

2
5
3
4
9
1
7
8
6

I'll agree that Rush had some cool tricks for 6 but it was just an awfully rushed, painfully duil game to play. 7 and 8 were both okay for me. Not very memorable entries, but still good for a go 'round every now and then. The biggest turn-off for me in 8 were the cut scenes. I don't know why they always wanted Mega MAN to sound like such a supple little boy. Eventually they perfected his voice in the X series but I was always cringing at those cutscenes.

Also Knight Man was developed by a Canadian which helps in its badassery. So that's a win-win right there. I actually liked playing Mega Man 8, but its been a long time since I played any mega man games its probably worth while to play them again.

Perhaps, Sprout.

At first, I was thinking the same way. But when I stepped back and looked at it in the context of all the other original series games, it's multitude of design issues and choices became as apparent as day. I don't think I should derail this with some indepth Mega Man shenanigans, but it would suffice to say I would rank it at the very bottom of any numerical lists.

Angel, that is still the best Nintendo Power contest ever. Some of the ideas presented in there were pretty clever. If you have the old issue(s), look back at it and you'll see some stuff that seems a fair bit clever.

My final Mega Man comment: They actually ran the same contest for Mega Man 5, and I submitted a design for Wave Man. When I saw Wave Man actually in the game, I naturally lost my shit. Unfortunately, it was someone else's Wave Man :(


Another game I like that others don't seem to is Super Mario Sunshine. While it wasn't a lasting experience like 64, Galaxy, or many of the others, I still got a lot of enjoyment out of it when playing. Nintendo always has air-tight gameplay, and I really liked the play mechanics with the FLUDD.

I've seen a lot of people apply jRPGs to the kind of thing that you shouldn't be playing more then once which is the main reason I listed them. However, going by your line of thinking, I suppose my ownership of Phantom Dust and Godhand would more readily apply.

As you might have guessed, I've played the shit out of VII. I know its a flawed game, but when it comes down to it, despite the hype-backlash it gets on the internet... I really enjoy the whole setting.

As for Guardian's Crusade, never played it so can't comment.

I enjoyed Sunshine quite a bit. Still a bit of a bitch to complete to 100%, but so much more doable than 64 (which I still can't get past the final Bowser area on, much less some of the more annoying stars).

Oh, and I'm probably about the only person who sees past the flawed camera and slightly rough play control to love the FUCK out of the two Castlevania games on the N64. Some of the best moments in a 3-d castlevania game, EVER. (chased around a hedge maze by a chainsaw wielding maniac, much?)

Does liking DDR give one odd-taste?

Only if it's the home versions.

As for me, I thought Everquest was complete garbage. I guess if I had played it when it came out I would have liked it a little more, but my first MMO was World of Warcraft, so I kept comparing it to that.

Also, Silent Hill: Homecoming seems to be a pretty unpopular game, but I liked it well enough. It's the first game I got every achievement for. And I couldn't get into 3 for some reason, which I think is regarded as the best in the series after 2.

I'll specifically note the US versions for that matter since almost all the Japanese versions are superior to the US ones.

I'm a sucker for the Harvest Moon series. Also, I have a soft spot for the .hack series.

I try to play a lot of genres but for the life of me, I couldn't really sit down and enjoy shooters all that much. I'd enjoy it for the sake of being a "helping" buddy or something, but not if they're obsessed with scores (looking at you SD). I'd take weeks or so in "training" in learning how to control the gameplay in a much sharper focus. IE Tomb Raider II's demo had me trained for days before I finally played the real thing. I shit you not, it took me a couple of weeks before I finally got to the end of that demo. And especially because of that demo, TRII remains to be my favorite adventure/shooter to this day.

An embarrassing game ever would be enjoying Shadowgate 64 and Hexen 64 and majority of N64 games like Gex and seeing my backlog should reveal that I also somehow finished Quest 64 too. (I didn't like it at all, but I finished it just because.) I should get around to playing Doom someday too!

I like Arx Fatalis too for some reason. SailorD would tell me that its a poor man's Oblivion. I'm like oh, well, so what.

Propped for having awesome taste.

Not sure why I didn't think of the Harvest Moon series, as that's one that will get some really odd glares most of the time when I mention liking it. There's really no good way to explain to the typical person why a farming sim with dating elements is so freaking addictive. Rune Factory is easier since there's combat, but if the other person hasn't played an HM game it's impossible to explain the joy of harvesting tomatoes and bringing your sheep out to graze each morning.

Not to derail the thread further, but I wanted to say that I liked both Mega Man 5 and 6. 6 and 8 are undoubtedly the weakest entries in the series, but 8 is the only one that I would call bad. Centaur Man and Blizzard Man were great in 6. I always loved Blizzard Man's ridiculous look.

Okay, I liked Thousand Arms because it was entertaining at best (lolol) as well as Chaos Legion. I minded the drab backgrounds a little, the score was catchy and the Legions fun to use. It just brings a tear to my eye when the Hatred legion just pummels enemies into oblivion or the Blasphemy legion explodes at contact with the enemy after you kick them.

I also liked Spartan: Total Warrior despite several reviews rating it mediocre. Sure, the protect Archimedes quest was annoying as fuck, but everything else just fits in just fine. I still get that rush whenever I use Deathbiter and do a radial special where he slams the ground and enemies just fly.

Infernal.

We love you.

But seriously.

The thread is named guilty SECRETS and you.

I see a majority of people putting down Mega Man 6 and saying 5 was better where as it was the complete opposite for me. Mega Man 5 was probably the worst in the 8-bit series for me. The music isn't by any means bad but it's not that great either...I think Opening, Title, Chargeman, Dr. Wily Stage, and Last Boss were the only appealing tracks in that game for me. Napalmman's wasn't great until they remade it for The Power Fighters. Protoman's Stage? Ear-piercing hell to me in that beginning part and the rest of the song doesn't make up for it. However, I will note that three tracks from this game went on to be used for Megaman Soccer and that ended up being decent.

I think another thing I didn't like about 5 was what they did to Rush. First of all, there was the Rush Coil. In 3 and 4, he just stood there and you were sprung from his back. In 5, he sprung with you from the bottom like he was the friggin Mach 5 from Speed Racer. There was also the Rush Jet, you could only go straight and move up and down where in 3 and 4 you could go anywhere.

One thing that was cool about 5 I will say was the inclusion of Beat. That made the final boss fight a helluva lot easier.

MM6's music was pretty meh too, but the Rush Adapters were pretty sweet. Mr. X's stage had the same ear-piercing beginning that Protoman's Stage in 5 did, but once it got past that part it started rocking and when it looped, the ear-piercing part didn't bother me again. What was really awesome about 6 was the final battle...the music was kickass and so was the setting, and you finally put that damn Dr. Wily in jail for once...only for him to escape in 7.

MM7 was alright, but I probably liked it about as much as 5 (though Shademan's theme is pretty damn sweet). And if you don't know which one I'm talking about, it's this one:

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MM8...the gameplay was decent, but everything else just did not feel right to me. The sounds, the music, the...voice acting. *sigh* Dr. Wowy...

MM9 was friggin hard at first, but once I figured out the weaknesses for each boss it turned out to be the best damn Mega Man I had played since 2, 3, 4, or X5.


While I'm still on Megaman, I have to talk about Megaman Legends. A lot of people did not like it and I know why...it didn't follow the norm for Megaman where you picked a stage and played it, stole the boss' weapon, rinse and repeat until you got to Dr. Wily. Nah, this was something completely different and I was actually pretty happy with it.

Not only did it seem to play fairly well (I had trouble with the lock-ons sometimes), but it was the first game I played where the characters' mouths moved with the voices and it reminded me so much of anime (which I was starting to really get into at the time), however that might have been something else that turned people off from it. Also, Wily in this game is a boat-shop owner. Your recurring enemies in this game are pirates which consist of those little Servbots and the Bonne Family (and Tiesel was probably my favorite, couldn't go through a scene without cracking a smile from his dialogue).

The music wasn't as memorable but there were some pretty good tracks in there, the voice acting was decent, and the story was actually good. At first I was skeptical about MegaMan being a digger and having a last name, but I really got into it and had some fun with the game.

Megaman Legends 2 was more difficult and the story wasn't as good as the first one. There's also the fact about bringing all of the previous VAs back except for Megaman's (which actually sounded like a guy for once in the first game). Instead, Megaman has a familiar voice...where have I heard him bef--oh my God, it's the girl who voiced Sailor Jupiter?! Why?!

There was also a character in the game named Glyde and his little duck subordinates...they annoyed me to no end. If you want to talk about annoying, Nino Ruins falls in that category as well as boring. When you have to flood the place to get around and you're underwater, it just makes me want to sleep.

However, if you stick with the game, you'll end up having some great boss fights (Bola and Tiesel were freaking awesome fights) and watching a somewhat good story unfold.


It's no secret, I freakin love Sonic 2006. Admittedly I have had my problems with it such as in the high speed sections and the one part in Kingdom Valley where I have to light dash a trail of rings but instead I somehow activate the bounce bracelet and bounce to my doom, and then there's the...loading times. Aside from that, the game is actually quite good and some of the music is a complete departure from what I'm used to hearing in Sonic games, but those tracks aren't that bad. The story was good, but like Majora's Mask the ending sucked. They could have done a much better job with that. The levels are well designed, the adventure maps are back (which was lacking since Sonic Adventure), and the stories between the three hedgehogs are pretty good (especially Shadow's, surprisingly).


Another game that wasn't well received was Sonic and the Black Knight. Honestly, this was the most fun Sonic game I've played in a long time. The controls were simple and responsive, the story was really damn good with several plot twists along the way (surprisingly, Eggman is nowhere to be found in this game), and the music is back to being as awesome as ever.

Crush 40 was finally brought back as the main band in this game and out of their 4 songs, 3 of them kick so much ass (the last one was used for the ending of the game and it just seems too slow to be for Crush 40). Once again, they were not used for the final boss battle music but that didn't matter because With Me is the best final boss battle track in a Sonic game since What I'm Made Of from Sonic Heroes.

You have multiple missions in several levels that are well designed and the difficulty is balanced enough to where you'll have a tough time in some areas but not to the point where you'll want to throw your controller or just flat out quit for a week.

Sonic and the Black Knight is everything completely the opposite to that piece of shit Sonic Unleashed I bought for the 360. I had a bad feeling about Black Knight, but for once I'm glad I was wrong.

Diss away, Deni. :P

Here's a secret!

**Hidden Content**

Kingdom Hearts II.

I had a choice of getting LOTR: Twin Tower or KH 1, so I got KH1. One of my favorite PS2 games in my collection. So I suspected KH II would be great... except I couldn't stand it.

Rockband + Guitar Hero: Like what the heck, I love music based games, but hey, maybe drums/guitar/bass/vocal just isn't my thing.

FF7/8/10: Maybe I am just not feeling it. No matter how I try to force myself to play (ex. Dang, a lot of people loves these... perhaps I should give it another try. After couple hours.... I can not play.)

Infamous/Prototype: Not feeling it. Gta VI: I am feeling it!

Halo: ALL. I couldn't get in the game...

WoW: A GAME I CAN NEVER STAND. 15 bucks per month? It actually doesn't sound bad if you like the game xd

Oh, right! In that case;

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ceWiSB9lL.jpg

Kira Kira Wira Wora Bira Bora Pop Princess is one of my favorite games on the DS. The music's rubbish, the actual gameplay barely exists, but it's fantastic. It lets me live my fantasy of having dance offs with people in department stores for a hamburger. And it has a cat that appears from trees upside down.

I've been trying to track down the sequel for months. I think it was only released in Italy. It tears me apart. :argh:

That has 505 Games on the front. I'm not too sure if that counts either. That does sound right up your alley though.

I wish my my guilty secret were as awesome as Hello Kitty Roller Rescue. I got it for my friend's little sister for Christmas a long time ago. I bet she never played it and I long to have my own copy. I should have bought two copies. :(

God's honest truth: the reason Halo is popular isn't because its a good game, but because its a generic shooter. This is the direct reason its fanbase is annoying as it is: because its filled with college meatheads and teenagers who want something for nothing - which is the base building blocks the game sets its self on.

Oh yeah. This counts. Shenmue. I know it's somehow the BEST GAME EVER, which I still have no idea why. I found it terribly boring.

Grandia Xtreme is a brilliant game, not much time is wasted with useless story bits (seriously, the number of games where you spend more time staring at the screen than playing them is way too high these days), and Grandia is just fun, especially with the little tweaks to the battle system that make the game so goddamn addicting.

As for guilty secrets, I kinda dislike SNES RPGs. I only got interested in games later on, near the end of the PS1, and even though I tried to get into some SNES games they just felt awkward to play (I was bored to death with Secret of Mana, and I still can't understand why everyone gets so excited about the SNES FF games, must be some nostalgia thing).

As for guilty pleasures, Suikoden III is pretty high up my list of favourites, although the general consensus is that it is one of the lesser installments. Before V it even was my favourite Suikoden game (maybe because it was the first on I played), and it's one of the few games that I replay every now and then.

My guilty pleasure? I'll have to thank Clover for that, making what I consider to be the greatest PS2 game of all time. No, not Okami. I bought and sold that in the same week 'cause it was pretty boring. I'm talking about Godhand, motherfuckers.

I guess my other guilty pleasure is that I'll always prefer Lagoon to any of the Ys games.

I always said Halo is like the World of Warcraft of FPS. It's pretty mediocre, but it does things in a way that a lot of people can pick it up and learn the game very quickly. At least that's how it feels to me. Having both the Orange Box and Left 4 Dead now I feel next to no desire to play Halo 3 anymore myself.

I think Halo 3 is an excellently-designed game and that the cocksuckers who overcompensate by bitching about the thirteen-year-olds who enjoy it for entirely the wrong reasons are horribly misguided. Referring to it with terms like "mediocre" and "generic" is nebulous as hell, and comparing it to needlessly convoluted PC shooters is a major case of apples-and-oranges.

Also, there is no "World of Warcraft of FPS". That's no fucking comparison at all. They're completely fucking different in terms of target audience and design philosophy. Fuck your genre distinctions.

Yeah um I'm sure there's plenty of people with genuine reasons for disliking the games, but most people ragging on Halo come off sounding like they've never actually played it themselves.

"No, but I heard a friend of mine describe them to me", rite.

I'll put this simply: I think Halo is a game designed to appeal to idiots.

I don't like the setting. It has just enough 'story' to convince stupid people that it's really clever. The entire thing is a pastiche of dumbed-down placeholders from a variety of obvious sources - a space fleet, a ringworld, a holographic assistant, space marines, a masked space hero, etc. etc. I defy any educated science fiction fan previously unfamiliar with the game to play through the first part of the first game and not immediately complain that the guys at Bungie must have really liked Aliens... and Star Wars... and StarShip Troopers... and Larry Niven... and Metroid in very, very unsubtle ways.

This would be fine, in and of itself... after all, my favorite PC game of all time - Wing Commander - does exactly the same thing on exactly the same scale. In Halo, though, it became clear pretty quickly that the developers and the fan were taking it all incredibly seriously and believed it to be high art. Where Wing Commander went off to have some of the most enjoyably pulpy tie-in novels ever written, Halo went on to explain in an intricate fashion just how brilliant it was that the guy who wrote it saw a bunch of movies. I think it completely snapped for me when I saw elaborate official histories about how and why a girl Halo robot appeared in one of those girls-in-bikinis-beat-up-eachother fighting games (see, she's actually TK-422 and she's the friend of Halo Robot Alpha 5 who was mentioned in the pre-release fiction printed on the lanyards they gave out at E3...).

And speaking of terrible stories, remember the lauded 'ilovebees' ad campaign for Halo 2? Ugh, ugh, ugh - it was the most pretentious thing in the universe, with pointless nonsense websites being 'tracked down' to 'prepare' everyone for the epic story behind Halo 2. I wanted to strangle John Halo very, very hard every time I heard someone stupid enough to fall for that crap raging about how wonderful it was. It was a whole campaign designed to make stupid people feel smart about playing an arcade game.

(In that light, let me give a rare kudo to Halo 3 - the advertising was truly magnificent. I'm the kind of guy who loves tie-ins and merchandising, and Halo 3 did that beautifully. Halo 3 Slurpees, Halo 3 action figures, Halo 3 Cars, disgusting Halo 3 flavored Mountain Dew, etc. I know it annoys some folks, but I wish to heck it was a game I didn't grit my teeth thinking about. And an unkudo - that terrible 'museum' advertisement is a brilliant concept that is done so poorly that it makes me angry beyond my ordinary angry-that-Halo-halos anger.)

Now, these pretenses and other nonsense weren't necessarily enough to turn off old LeHah - maybe the game itself was as brilliant as everyone insisted. Maybe it really would change the way we would play first person shooters and the way stories would be told in video games and so forth and so on.

Nope!

Halo is an ordinary game, simplified so that everyone can play. That would actually be an honorable design concept, mind you, if I believed for a minute that they went in thinking 'everyone' would mean mom and dad and little sis and Dusty the cat rather than as many teenage boys looking to scream 'cocksucker' at each other over and over as possible. But... I'm not anti-cynical enough to convince myself of that.

I was never one of those 'FPS games are destroying gaming!' cubes. I think they're fine, they're fun and there's a lot to be built on with them. Some special games, like the first Ghost Recon, take the basic concept in a new direction in exactly the way art builds upon itself. Others, even more rarely (like the original Half Life) are literally earth-shattering - they're games that change how things like narrative itself works. Still others are just DooM with a new hat, and they're usually just as fun as their august predecessor. Halo is that type of game wearing the rotting corpse of the previous two.

The big developments in Halo just aren't. Wow, you hold two guns at once - somebody call Lara Croft! Wow, you can drive a car - somebody call Cybermage! Wow, you can play it in split screen - somebody call every Nintendo 64 game ever made. Halo is a bunch of good ideas that already existed in a pleasant balanced package (literally a pleasant package - the art design works in exactly he same way as the other 'dumbed down' aspects of the game... maps and baddies and characters who are literally as inoffensive and designed not to have a particular style to them as possible.)

It really seems for all the world to me to be a game made to sucker idiots - the story, the gameplay, the art, the ease of the thing... so, I feel bad about it. Several of my friends - people I respect more than anyone on this Earth - love Halo 3. They were playing when I started writing this. I see that and it hits my gut - how do people I really love like something so stupid? Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe I'm unable to have fun for some reason, maybe I want attention... but I just can't feel it. The franchise bothers me on a very personal level that I find myself completely unable to write off. I do feel somewhat bad being an asshole about Halo, in light of people having fun with it and people I believe in loving it, but it is how I feel regardless of anything else.

(Is Halo just plain fun? Maybe - but certainly not for me. I drove three meters in the stupid Halo car and got stuck in a hole... Cybermage's stupid box tank worked better and that game had strippers! I played multiplayer games that were exactly the same as CounterStrike fort-levels with a Star Wars Bounty Hunter skin. It just didn't do anything for me and occasionally veered into incredibly tedious territory.)

So yes - if you like Halo, you are a horrible person.

Halo 3 is a simple video game with minimal cruft, nicely nuanced weapons, well-designed maps (ignore the campaign), a shallow learning curve, bright colours, a distinctive visual aesthetic, and a lack of pointlessly arcane bells and whistles. It's a good fucking example for console FPS games.

(edit: Oh, and as for any criticisms of it being "generic" - what in blue fuck is that supposed to mean? Is the fact that it consists of a solid genre-adherent core devoid of wanky crap like RPG elements or "killstreak rewards" a bad thing? Fuck your feature creep.)

It's the fucking occam's razor of FPS design. Besides, since when do people who criticise a video game for setting and storyline - completely fucking static elements irrelevant to the medium you're trying to criticise - have any credibility at all?

I played Halo 3 to death when it came out. I got all the achievements aside from Metagame and a few of the ranked free for all ones. But I mainly played it because of my friends.

I however regret it far less then I regret all the times I tried to stomach WoW or FFXI but then that might be because Halo isn't a massive time and money sink like those sorry excuse for MMOs were.

Halo did one thing particularly well in my book. They set up match making perfectly. You could easily form a party with your friends and be matched up against random opponents. This is an idea I wish more companies could wrap their head around and is the main reason I never tried to play Lord of the Rings Conquest outside of Campaign mode. Tons of shooters and non shooters have in my mind been better games then Halo, but would have been near perfect if they could have had a similar match making system.

Ever since people took gaming far too seriously.

You're one of those people who say "Why do you have to be so critical about everything?" aren't you? One of those people (emphasis mine, slur insinuated) who takes immediate insult the moment someone bothers using their brain outside of a classroom or their Stephen King Book Club.

Thats fine. Live your life how you see fit, I suppose. But heres the long and short of it: You asked, I answered, you took offense and then couldn't bother to retort, so you replied in generic prosody fashion and emphasized general feeling instead of empirical material I already wrote.

Or since you're of shorter attention span: You just failed at everything.

Hey now. ilovebees is the only part of Halo I gave any shit about, but that's because ARGs are awesome, and have been ever since the flawed inception of the genre that was Majestic. ARGs as advertising are really nice ways of doing things, as I see it.

To reply to this one element would start topic drift. I'm interested to see how someone can... agree... with this idea, so if you wanna start that conversation someone else, I'll gladly follow.

Any game that starts to intrude on real life to the scale that the one I was in the middle of (Dread House or Urban Hunt (they're called both in various places)) gets points with me. While I personally didn't get any calls, when you get phone calls both from characters in the game (sometimes just to CHAT, sometimes to both fuck with you and prod you in the right direction) and calls that are strange recordings that make pictures in spectrum analyzers; emails back and forth with people, websites with hidden messages buried in image files (among other file types) (it's called stegging) oh and fucking creepy shit in password protected zip files?


Fuck yes. Granted, urban hunt wasn't an advertising campaign.

Not in the least. I criticise the fuck out of everything I like, and my criticisms are relevant. I'm one of those people who say "Why do you have to be so critical about shit that doesn't even matter?"

I agree with most of what you said. I do think the Library level bears mentioning, though...

I dislike Sonic: The Hedgehog. I play it and the thought going through my head is "Why can't this be even 1/10th as good as Mario?". Of the many awesome Genesis games out there, Sonic definately is not one of them.

On the opposite end, I like the Atelier Iris and Ar Tonelico series. They're crappy games really, but for whatever reason I like them. There's some more Atelier Iris stuff on the way and I'm fully intending to get it. I do hope that Nippon Ichi doesn't fuck up the translation so it causes a game crash again though. Players of the first Atelier Iris and Ar Tonelico 2 know what I'm talking about.

As for me, I even liked two Wolfgroup games not even mentioned on metacritic, IGN or gamespot - Dark apes: Fate of devolution and Dracula: Days of gore. Maybe it`s a result of my weak playing passion (therefore I don`t play much and many games) but they were completely absorbing and "hardcore" (the second word doesn`t mean that they were hard but no saving except of between levels can be challenging itself). But after all I didn`t want to replay any of them - they`re one time use for me).
Also, Rober Anderson`s Legacy of Cthulhu wasn`t even nearly absorbing or just good for me but playing wasn`t disgusting anyways. Thanks to all-open levels!

Devo hit the nail on the head I think. Halo 1's campaign mode is fucking astoundingly good. I played that through both alone and with a mate so many times I could probably tell you exactly where every tank spawns. With Halo 2, the campaign was pretty much a steamy turd but the multiplayer was awesome. The maps were for the most part really well designed and the weapons were well balanced. Also, there was a preponderance for objective games online which for someone like me who's not that got at straight up killing made it a shit ton more interesting. Some of the various tactics I saw for assault games were almost genius and a well planned attack was worth far more than simple killing ability. Also, there was Midships, the greatest map in the history of Halo maps. I once played a 16 man, King of the Hill match in midships, pistols only, no shields with a three minute win time requirement that I swear lasted over three hours. I think the kill leader had just above 3,000 kills and it was not boring for a single second, especially as I was mates with everyone in the room so we were chatting as much as playing. Good times.

Halo 3 has a pretty solid campaign that suffers from a lack of imagination and gets repetitive. Even though they added the Scarab setpieces, they are a bit slow paced and once you've seen one, pretty dull. The areas are all too open after the base level near the beginning and the whole thing is just too similar to the previous two games without really improving on them. The multiplayer suffers from poor map design. Most are far too big and favour snipers and long range battle rifle battles, plus the weapon balance isn't brilliant. The two latest maps are a welcome addition though as they're both pretty claustrophobic and these days you find more people actually trying to meet the objectives in objective games.

At the end of the day though, despite me basically being shit at the game, I always have a laugh playing Halo online. Mainly because I play with friends and you can never take the game too seriously. It's fast paced and slightly silly and it's accessibility is what makes it fun. I love playing Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon online and whilst those are fun with mates too, there's a lot more lying in a bush with a sniper rifle involved in those and you don't get the face to face immediacy you get with Halo. In fact, you very rarely ever see who's killed you, especially not if they're good at the games.

I think the bottom line is LeHah, you need to lighten up a bit to enjoy Halo. It's flawed and it's silly but it's just fun.

Be happy. It's being remade as "Heretic" and it's in the map pack that'll ship with ODST.

Halo 3 suffers from a lack of polish compared to more recent titles and a fairly dire campaign (issues ODST looks like it'll fix), and the balance is a little off on some of the more exotic weapons, but I'm still resolute that it's good on its own merit. I think most people's issues with it centre around the fact that they don't want to be seen enjoying something whose audience consists mainly of thirteen-year-olds for fears that their masculinity be compromised.

Is it? Wicked, I loved that map and am really enjoying the last couple released as they're much smaller. I like Halo 3 well enough, just not as much as Halo 2. Hopefully ODST will get the series back on track and not just be Halo with no shields.

Yeah, it'll be Metroid Prime with no lock-on. OOOH!

Yup. Halo ODST DS right here folks.

http://gfx.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2004...met_image4.jpg

When they first announced it as Halo Recon, I was quite excited about a Halo/Tom Clancy crossover. I guess Ubisoft weren't up for it or something.

One hopes that since you're now just a normal dude rather than a Spartan, the bad guys won't all be the same old Brutes and Elites. Either that or there'll be a load more sniper ammo lying around.

Has that Franky idiot not been doing a diary about this one or is it just that nobody cares this time out?

I think Mr. Frank O'Connor left Bungie to go work on "other Halo related stuff" (whatever the fuck that means) early in 2008.

Frankie has a hand in that anime thing. I think he's the leader of 343 Industries.

I probably probably deserve a Falcon Punch to the groin for this one, but I can't help it.

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2097/xgra.jpg

It feels like the first two games, which I'm absolutely loving. It lacks depth and the career mode is a bit on the short side, but the gameplay itself is an absolute blast. I've tried, but I just can't hate it.

Not to worry. I loved XGRA too. Damn fun game.

One guilty pleasure would actually be the Unreal Tournament games, for all the over-the-top wanky crap they stuck onto them. Getting big rooms of folks together and having announcers screaming about "Dominating" and "Megakill" was great fun. Used to write mutators and mods for 2004 I liked it so much. The cyclical, John Madden presents the next version of this game, style got a bit old, but I still enjoyed them more than most "serious" FPS games.

On popular titles, I can't stand Ocarina of Time. I disliked the way that 3D controls were implemented as the series shifted, I hated the endless walking through look-alike zone segments, and the visual style did nothing for me compared to the cartoony SNES days. Conversely, I liked Wind Waker, which has all kinds of hypocritical aspects for endless traveling, but was so very pretty.

XGRA really was great. It had some pretty crazy track designs, and the run-down futuristic setting was actually kinda interesting instead of just plain 'ol depressing. It was a ring toss game. His name was Bart. Also the soundtrack was awesome.

Knowing Extreme-G would go down the tubes was the only thing that made me sad about Acclaim's death. :(

The rights for XG was up for grabs when they died, and are now owned by Throwback Entertainment.

I might be a tad silly, also I swallowed a bug yesterday while riding downhill, but I'm still holding my breath.

:giraffesigh:

I must be the only one who thought XGRA was one of the weakest XG games. Maybe I'm just the terrible one. MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE

How's he weird? I played with him once in H3 but he never said a word (one of his buddies mentioned it might be his privacy settings). He's pretty decent as far as players go, but I can say that the man is godlike with sticky grenades. I have never seen someone pull of so much bullshit in one match in my life with those.

SEXIST

For some reason I am a fan of the Monster Rancher series. I find some draw to the randomly created monsters coming from CDs/DVDs you own, and I always hoped that they would add more depth to the game's battle engine, and to make the monsters less "cute". It sucks though, I wanted to try the second one, but have never found a copy, and apparently it was the best of the bunch. Sigh.

Wow...I can't believe I got through that novel on the Halo series. There isn't even more for me to add on that discussion <_<

I saw two of my games mentioned that I like and a lot of people seem to hate. The Harvest Moon Series and Thousand Arms. The amount of laughs I got from Thousand Arms alone was worth my game times. Just talking about it makes me want to play it right now and brings bake my memories of dating random girls to make my sword stronger...the sexual innuendo. And any game where you take a girl into a hotel room and it tells you "this game is not rated for that" gets my win any day.

I also loved Final Fantasy VIII. I hold to this day it is the most underrated Final Fantasy.

I've haven't played anything after X however, so I have yet to judge.

Games others seemed to like that I can't get into? Tetris and Dr. Mario, or any puzzle game rip-offs of the sort. Mostly because I'm terrible....