[General Discussion] Games that are supposed to be really good but you hate

I still don't understand what people see in MGS3. I still love MGS1, but 2 was a huge disappointment for me, and 3 didn't help at all. MGS is played for the plot and awesome atmosphere, both of which were missing from 3. Where MGS1 at least worked as a (somewhat silly) action thriller, MGS3 was merely a parody of James Bond and other agent films, being neither gripping nor thrilling. The environment was supposed to feel atmospheric, yet I felt nothing. All I saw were trenches which was supposed to look like a jungle, with bits of grass where you could hide. If you tried to hide anywhere else but grass (or a tree trunk), you'd get spotted the moment guards got close enough, no matter what camouflage you used (because outside grass you'd never get the % high enough since, well, you're not in grass).

The mediocre voice acting (decent choice of voices, bad actors) made sure none of the drama engaged any way, and pretty much all of the characters were left very uninteresting and you felt no empathy for them at all. The only characters who I actually liked were Major Zero (who actually had a good actor adding a lot to the character) and to a smaller extent Para-medic. All the other characters seemed either poorly written or poorly acted. Boss was naturally supposed to be the tragic character of the story, but because her voice actress delivered her lines with such lack of any kind of skill, you couldn't feel anything for her.

That's pretty much what bothered me through the whole game. While I disliked MGS2 mostly, it could still thrill and move me in many parts, even if the game let the player down completely towards the end. MGS3 on the other hand only thrilled me once. Everything else was just indifference. I didn't feel any kind of atmosphere in the "jungle", pretty much none of the character were empathic, I felt completely indifferent about every single plot twist that came along, bosses appeared out of nowhere and then blew up without any kind of relevance to the plot, hours of dialogue would pass by without me feeling anything but total indifference. I played through the game, but it was on complete autopilot, something that only happens to me at the very dullest moments in RPGs.

The one time MGS3 thrilled me, was the escape from base in the motorcycle. The music was finally excellent, the setpiece and execution phenomenal. None of the action scenes till then had had that kind of energy and grip, that scene alone managed to bring the same kind of rush as you got from the best moments in MGS1 and 2.

Ok, so the story and characters didn't engage me, there was no music to speak of because the jungle noises were supposed to be atmospheric, whenever there was music in boss battles or such, most of it was as poorly chosen as in Twin Snakes and worst of MGS2. What else people raved about was the gameplay. MGS3 was supposed to be just so amazingly fun to play 24/7 that no one cared how stupid the story was or how bad the voices were. You had so much fun doing this and that and replaying the game 60 times and this earned it all those 9.8 scores and game of the year awards.

But if you look at the gameplay, it's just awful =/ If Splinter Cell had been done with these kind of controls, publishers would have laughed it out of the conference room before the demo ended. There is a wide variety of gameplay choices to tackle levels, but only one or two of them were ever really useful and everything else was just too much work and effort for it to be worth it. You could spend two hours slowly sneaking through an area with three enemies patrolling, remaining unspotted, till at the very last moment, you got spotted because the shitty camera wouldn't let you look around well enough (and neither of the two radars proved useful at all). An alarm sounds, you hide in a tree trunk, or if it's an enclosed building, kill everyone. It was simply easier and less effort to simply shoot or put everyone to sleep than try any proper stealth because being aware of your surroundings was a chore at best and the controls were clumsy as hell at worst.
Subsistence tried to fix this with the rotatable camera, but in the end didn't really improve that much when hiding in grass or trying to sneak up to a guard (good luck with that).

The fact remains, with any lesser name game, the controls would have been deemed broken. Anyone will tell me I was simply crap at the game, and this could be true. I wasn't however crap at MGS1 or even 2, yet they had issues with control too. I can "learn" to play Tenchu: Fatal Shadows (which I enjoyad a lot) or Shinobido, but that doesn't make their controls any less broken. This is the same thing with MGS3. All it did was cause even the gameplay between the cutscenes to stop being any fun and staying an utter chore, outside that brilliant, brilliant motorcycle chase.

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I think the problem is still how (not necessarily in Skexis' case, but in general anyway) people treat Metroid Prime as an FPS because of the viewpoint, even though the controls are built for exploration. For me they work perfectly. Sometimes the auto-aim isn't the smartest around in a tight spot with multiple fast moving enemies, but you learn to adjust and the combat is far more satisfying than 90% of console shooters.

As for story, I'm not exactly sure how much you bothered to scan, but there was an amazing amount of backstory and depth to the events that occurred on Tallon IV, and I think the scan system revealed these events to you very subtly, allowing impatient players to skip them entirely.


I can't for the life of me get into GTA San Andreas. It's not even the gangsta environment that bothers me because Rockstar presents it all with wit and skill, the dialogue being most entertaining. It's really the muddle of controls and gameplay that drives me off. Everything feels so halfassed. You can finally climb fences and ledges, which is a welcome change, but the system is so inconsistent, you can't even climb a small shed near your house and there is nothing to indicate why. You apparently have a huge amount of wardobe and hairstyles to use, but only like two of them don't look completely awful.

The driving mechanics were fun in GTA3, but here the driving skills stats make sure you won't get any enjoyment from driving for the first twenty hours it takes to raise up the meter because when doing a 90 degree turn the camera refuses to follow and you're stuck driving blindly for a good 5 seconds which in a tight spot is pretty fatal.

The new targeting system seemed good originally, because I liked it in Manhunt, but in practise it's just as awful as before. You stop at a bridge and there's suddenly a gang member shooting at you outta nowhere. You try to lock on to him, but the targeting system picks up every single civilian around him instead and then you're already dead.
Drive by shootings are still as useless as they were in GTA3, since you can still only shoot directly to the side, leading to embarrassing passing bys where you slowly backup shooting till you finally hit your target.

I guess the game really picks up past the 25 hours mark or so when so much new stuff opens up to you, you no longer mind the broken controls, but if the 25 hours before that aren't enjoyable, I don't really want to play at all and would rather play a "short" 20 hour game that's enjoyable from the start.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

This is actually far more amusing than dimkya's attempt at biting-humor-angry-review. I'll allow it, but don't continue this, ok?

That means stop.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by vemp

There's something about the "Grandia" and "Tales" series that I don't get. Might be the battle systems, but I'm not sure.

Are you talking about 2 and 3 or the whole series?

Cause I can't imagine why someone wouldn't like Grandia 1 ;____;

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