5 GAMES THAT SUCKED (that you enjoyed)

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I actually liked that too.

I recently enjoyed Shank, even though it's controls responded like a heroin-addict. In other words, it was wonky at best, and there's some parts where you're just going to die unless you know the game by heart.

I think all the Assassin's Creed games past the first are horrible as they just milk the franchise while adding a bit and tweaking the problems a BIT. I still love playing every single one, though. Wish they would make the multi-player more team-oriented, though, as right now most people just go off and do their own thing, not like a team at all.

Gears of War. That new Prince of Persia everyone hated. Heck, sometimes I think the 'Splosion Man games are pretty bad, with their trial and error gameplay. Co-op is a ton better, though.
I enjoyed all, though some people would fight me on that they don't suck. Meh.

Telltale's CSI games. They are lame in terms of gameplay, but the stories are so over-the-top that I could not stop laughing while I played through them. I have never seen the TV series, so I can't compare.

LLAMATRON!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwg8-7kZHSY[/youtube]

E.T., for the Atari 2600. Most people said it sucked, but when you think about it, the programming team was rushed to get it out for Christmas of 1982, I think it turned out to be fairly good. I call it a good game, not a great game, those wells E.T. keeps falling down were a pain in the butt, but it did not deserve the bad rap that it got.

That game was awesome.

Played it on PC while I was watching a movie at the same time. Happened like 10 years ago but I can remember exactly what movie it was too :'

I'll have to revisit it some time. I really enjoyed the allies you picked up throughout the game. Was an interesting way to do it imo.

Me too. It wasn't a sucky game at all, just very non-linear and different. It had an amazing soundtrack too.


I feel like its unfair to include Adventure games like Monkey Island but I LOVED Snatcher and at the same time hated the shooting gallery sections. The last one was way too frustrating and they all felt really tacked on. I don't feel right calling Snatcher a bad game at all though. Silent Hill 2 gets called a sh***y game a lot despite its brilliant story and atmosphere yet I feel like its gameplay added to the atmosphere and future SH game, mainly the newest ones, have really lost something despite the improved combat.

The only objective "bad" game I like is Alien Trilogy. Its not bad, its just a very mediocre, derivative Doom clone shooter where you play through 3 different arcs, all corresponding to the first 3 Alien movies, albeit out of order (you do Aliens, Alien 3, then return to the ship from Alien). The game has various graphical glitches and you can easily defeat every boss in the game (3 identical Queen Aliens) by getting her stuck in the same hallway and firing away.

Odell Lake on the Apple IIe.

Super Mario World 2

I'm going to try to play fair and include 5 games that are generally hated by reviewers -OR- the gaming populace in general. I'll try to explain why they suck and why I loved them.

1. SaGa Frontier
Critically panned and one of the first Squaresoft games to earn universal bad reviews. The game is the definition of non-linear and not in a good way, let's just say if you don't have the guide book (I did long before I owned the game) you really are screwed in some instances. I still found the game very enjoyable and loved the beautiful pre-rendered graphics and score by Kenji Ito. This has some of the best boss themes ever to grace a Square game (or an rpg in general). Fun to use for encounters in a D&D game if you are a HUGE f*****g nerd that uses video game music to supplement pen and paper roleplaying.

You have quests for each of the main characters that involve their own little story (or lack thereof in some cases) with a unique last boss. Some of them are really fun, like Emelia's where you get framed for the murder of your fiancee and join a special organization dedicated to fighting crime or something after they break you out of jail but not before you fight a giant undead centipede with a skeleton head. Yup, that's SaGa Frontier. Lots of boss battles just for the heck of it. The combat system was very unique because you didn't gain levels in a traditional sense but you gained random stats upon vanquishing your foes and there were different races who progressed in different ways:

Humans - These are your standard guys. The bulk of the recruitable cast in each story arc. They gain stats from battle and what you'd expect them to be. They are the most versatile when it comes to learning different types of magic and other battle techniques.

Mystics - I don't remember a whole lot about these guys but in the story they are VERY badass. They're like vampires..sorta and I THINK the way they work is that they absorb moves from other mystic type enemies. I know they can use some magic but I can't remember if they have the potential to use every possible type, I haven't played this game in years. My favorite characters were mostly mystics, you had this one fellow that joins you and he's basically a mad doctor with a clinic in the backstreet slums full of ghouls and monsters. Too bad you learn next to nothing about him, as is the case with 95% of all the characters who join you. Oh and before I forget: all mystics hail from this super cool place called Facinataru, its this HUGE castle-looking thing composed of giant roots and beautiful flowers. Its ruled by the mystic lord, Orlouge. He's a bad guy..for some reason, in one of your character quests. You see the REALLY powerful mystics are lords, like Orlouge is the charm lord, there's the Time Lord as well (who can join your party and is TOTALLY awesome!) and the ring lord, Virgil, who serves no purpose other than living in a spooky looking castle in front of a giant volcano and warping you to various locations depending on if you piss him off or need to go find Time Lord. He's actually a pseudo-boss in one of the character quests, which I'll go into later.

Mechs - I can't remember how mechs worked, I believe they got upgrades and their performance was linked directly to what you equiped them with. One of your main characters is a mech. I liked these characters a lot and one of the mechs that joins you is, get this, A CAR. I s**t you not. A car joins your party. The biggest strength of mechs is that they have a lot of "life points". In Saga Frontier all your characters have HP, JP, and LP. Once your hp is depleted you're unconscious but attacks STILL hit you but instead of doing hp damage you merely lose LP. Once your LP goes to 0 you are officially dead and can't be revived (at least not until you go to an INN or something). If the main character loses all of his or her LP its game over. Mechs have LOTS of lp, which is kind of cool but really only terribly useful for one battle and quest.

Mechs are pretty underrated and people prefer parties with humans or mystics.

Now to my favorite..

Monsters- Have you ever played a roleplaying game and wished you could have the giant black dragon or triceratops you're fighting in your party? Or have you ever wanted an entire party of the same undead fish skeletons you've been fighting forever instead of the various human losers? Well, I've got good news for you, in SaGa Frontier you can have all that in spades! Monsters work like this:

One joins you and after each battle you have the option to "absorb" a skill from one you've defeated. Sometimes after you absorb a monster's skill your character will then transform into a seemingly random monster and its stats will change to reflect this. The thing is that the transformation is not random and you can manipulate what monster form you get by having the proper "skillset", which requires a bit of work and luck, since I believe skills absorbed can be random. Lots of people hate monsters because A: they don't gain stats in a conventional way and B: I don't believe they can equip weapons. But who cares about that when you can transform into a giant black dragon with awesome stats?! Most of the time you'll get a crappy low level monster bu with some research and preparation you can get some really powerful monsters early on, giving you access to moves and stats you normally wouldn't have so early.


Now, on to why people hate this game and why it technically sucks. It is VERY non-linear and unlike an early dos roleplaying game, like say Ultima, you NEED the strategy guide or a walkthrough. Many psx rpgs suffer from this syndrome but its usually just for the extra stuff, like beating Omega weapon or finding out how to get the super secret sword. Not the case for SaGa Frontier, in fact one could make the argument that the entire game plays like a series of sidequests, a dungeon, a boss, then the final dungeon and last boss. Some of the quests have actual padding out and story to get you prepared but there are several, one in particular, where you can immediately go to the final dungeon within an hour and promptly get your ass kicked and boy I hope you didn't save! Oh and if you want to be strong enough to defeat the last boss go do all these sidequests for gifts of magic and stuff. Also..there is a certain quest in this game that has the single most agonizing fetch quest ever this side of a Gabriel Knight game. Seriously:
http://lparchive.org/SaGa-Frontier/Update%2021/

SaGa Frontier is a game trifled with objectively bad design decisions but I had a lot of fun with it in the day and the game has a bit of a following. Also the game was a bit more well received in Japan, since its part of the Romancing Saga series of video games that started out on the gameboy then were released on the snes. You can play the translated roms, I think they are all pretty well received.


2. Legend of Mana
Another psx era game by Squaresoft. Yes, I played Secret of Mana and the Japanese sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3. Yes I loved both those games dearly. I probably love Legend of Mana even more and even I can acknowledge this game's numerous faults that make it "suck". Thankfully its not quite as bad as SaGa Frontier and it received a warmer reception that was mostly hated for not being a direct sequel to Secret of Mana. Before I gush on about why I like this game I'll list its faults, which again, are terrible design decisions for the most part.

1. There is no central plot. Seriously, like SaGa Frontier you do lots of little quests but UNLIKE SG these have some story in them. There is no one main story but tons of little story arcs and several bigger, more epic scale stories. Some of them are REALLY cool, like in one you basically descend into hell by examining a tombstone in a "macabre graveyard" and an axe wielding anthromorphic wolf calling himself a dragoon strikes you down and "kills" you I think. Apparently theology in the LOM world is a lot like the bible pre-new testament in that everyone goes to Hades/Hell/Sheol. You can even visit rooms and in some cases find npcs who have died in the story.

Anyway, you descend down into Sheol/Hell/Hades (its called the Underworld in game but I like to be dramatic and call it other stuff) and fight a giant demonic face for no reason then meet the frickin DRAGON EMPEROR, in human form. He basically offers you the choice to become his servant and go about the process of killing other, -good- dragons who possess this giant mana stones that are instrumental in bringing the Dragon Emperor back to his former glory. Your only other choice is to eventually fade into nothingness since you're technically a ghost now, even though everyone on the upper world treats you the same and nothing bad happens if you decide to focus on other story arcs. In fact I recommend doing this because you get to keep your badass wolfman dragoon as a teammate for the other quests and its fitting to do his story arc as one of the last ones simply because of how epic the scope is, in terms of the game itself.

All this stuff I described above sounds like a good final dungeon complete with an epic final boss to end the game with, right? Well no, there IS a final boss..

2. The final boss and dungeon is completely disconnected from all of the story. Defeating the last boss serves no purpose other than unlocking the additional difficulty modes. No questions are answered upon completion of the game and how much story you get is completely up to you. The -trigger- for the final dungeon is determined in a seemingly random way I can't remember too well. Basically in Legend of Mana you re-create the world by placing artifacts on this map grid and the quest that unlocks the artifact for the final dungeon is unlocked..at some point, but its pretty random.

With that said its very possible for you to be in the middle of one of the games' more epic story lines and you get the quest that unlocks the final dungeon. You go explore, fight your way up and then fight the a final boss that's nowhere near as awesome as some of the stuff you fight in the story. After that you get to carry over your level and items but you also start over completely with a blank map!

3. A high point of Secret of Mana and its brilliant sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, was the combat. 90% of people who had a super nintendo and secret of mana have fond memories of hooking up multiple controlers (if you had friends) and beating the various bosses and dungeons. Less people played SD3 because A: It was never officially released in the US and B: Most of us played it on our computers with zsnes and if you DID have a copy I really doubt your friends would want to play a game in Japanese. I LOVE Seiken Densetsu 3, its a game I never got to experience until the advent of emulators but it is a very dear, sacred game to me. Many people regard it as one of the best snes games ever, up there with FF3/6 and Chrono Trigger.

Well, Legend of Mana's gameplay is a step back in many ways. You only get control of your main character, who is really a blank slate, and then you have space for a story related AI partner and either a monster or golem (more on that later). Its really pointless to try leveling up your AI partners, even if some of them are REALLY cool, like Larc (the dragon I mentioned earlier) and Elazul. You get to carry over your own levels and your monster/golems do as well but I believe AI partners reset each time you kill the last boss.

Also, in Secret of Mana you had various spells, both offensive and defensive and various weapons you could upgrade with orbs. Seiken Densetsu 3 expanded upon them with tiered character classes that possessed different spells and abilities, it was VERY fun replaying the latter and trying some of the game's classes and seeing how well they synergized. Legend of Mana has none of this. There is a very indepth but VERY unintuitive weapon crafting system and you can also craft instruments which allow you to use magic spells. The best part is that you really customize your weapons a lot but to make a truly badass sword or axe you're going to need to play the harder difficulties because enemies drop rarer, high quality crafting mats. You never really need to craft for the regular game mode, its just something you can do to make yourself even more powerful. Disappointingly, magic is kind of useless. Again, you can craft better instruments but its so situational, you have cast times and its easier just to walk up to an enemy and whack it a bunch of times with your elemental sword. With that said, I STILL used magic because you can name your spells and its not like you'll make the game a lot harder by using magic. Maybe magic is better on higher difficulties with a rare quality instrument.

4. This may be a plus or minus for some people but I'll list it as a negative: all battles are scripted and unavoidable. You remember how in Secret of Mana and its sequel you could just run through screens of enemies if you didn't feel like fighting or you out leveled everything? Not the case here. Every time you visit a dungeon to do anything (you'll be re-visiting them multiple times for certain quests) you will have to fight through the exact same screen of enemies again.

5. Virtually no difficulty. I think one boss in the game actually killed me and if you lose you're given a choice to get back up and start over or not (and get a game over). This obviously changes on higher difficulties but its more artificial than anything else, bosses just take longer to kill ,that's all. Every boss in the game telegraphs its special attack in the most obvious ways possible so its not like you're going to have any trouble. A big letdown from the awesome battle systems in the previous games.


Now, with all that said..I love this game. I think its the most beautiful 32 bit rpg Squaresoft has ever made and the soundtrack really stands out, it was composed by Yoko Shinomura of Kingdom Hearts and Street Fighter fame. Seriously, this and Xenogears have the best soundtracks ever. Also, despite the non-linearity of the story, many of the plotlines are really touching, like one where you help this minstral centaur who is head over heels in love with a siren/harpy. She wants to make beautiful lamps in a city that's perpetually nightime but he wants to elope with her and leave the city she loves. Alright..maybe I'm taking some liberties with how well it was written..but I thought it was really good back when I first played it.

One of the more epic story-arcs involves you tracking down this demon who robbed this young girl of her powers so he could become more powerful. The girl, who I imagine is a teenager, is aging rapidly and is actually a "wisdom" in the Legend of Mana universe, think of them as all knowing sages who specialize in different things. Like one is a poet, the other is a multi-armed swordsman who trains in the Underworld. The catch is that the demon is actually in love with the girl and there's all sorts of mortal ambiguity running rampant as one of the guys trying to help the girl, is a COLOSSAL douchebag and the whole thing is just very fascinating and tragic too. I don't want to spoil too much, but the end of the demon's story arc is really good.

So Legend of Mana is what I would call a unique game. Sword of Mana, a gameboy advance remake of Final Fantasy Adventure, was uterrly mediocre and every subsequent mana game has been objectively terrible or mediocre. Some people will call Legend of Mana a bad game, others will say its decent but an incredible disappointment compared to its classic predecessors. I've been an apologist for this game since it first came out but nowadays I kinda lean toward the latter camp. I think there's a lot of good in this title and A LOT of aesthetic beauty that's really unrivaled. Its disjointed, unintuitive and the definition of hack and slash gameplay wise..but I still love it.

3. Final Fantasy 12
This is very controversial because critically this game received very favorable reviews yet among Final Fantasy fans it is very hated or at best people go "Ugh". Let me be the first to say that I ABSOLUTELY love Yasumi Matsuno, he along with the deceased Gunpei Yokoi is one of my favorite video game developers overseas. I LOVE Tactics Ogre, I LOVE Final Fantasy Tactics, and I LOVE Vagrant Story.

I'm not an egomaniac but I feel like its very weird to say this is one of my favorite Final Fantasy games when you see me talk about how much I like old retro games that are actually really good. It sort of betrays my good taste, oh god that sounded egocentric didn't it? I'm sorry. I agree with this game's flaws and think Van and Penelo are stupid, I mean..what's wrong with having Ashe and Balthier as the main characters? We have a strong female lead with good motivation and Balthier is awesome. Did ANYONE like Vann? Every single critic of this game that says those two are the most unnecessary additions to this game are 100% correct.

All that aside, I like this game. I love the soundtrack, I love the character and art design (outside of Van..he looks ret*d) and I -like- the combat. Oh and you know what else I love? The fact that you can summon the friggin LUCAVI FROM FINAL FANTASY TACTICS . Eat it Ramuh, I'm going to summon Zalhera the death seraph who has a naked girl grafted to one of his wings. I love the eidolins in this game. I really liked this game a lot actually and FF13 was a huge letdown for me even though people who (rightfully) harp on Final Fantasy will list 12 as one of the worst games. I admit, I've gotten weird looks from people in real life when I've confessed to this and 3/6 being my favorite Final Fantasy games (if we don't count tactics).

Unlike SaGa Frontier and Legend of Mana, I don't think this game is -too- objectively bad. I really don't want to turn this list into "Neuziel's most underrated games", which I fear its becoming already.

And yes, I like the Final Fantasy Tactics sequels everyone hates.

4. Alien Trilogy
Here we go. A game that defines mediocrity, a Doom Clone based on the Alien license in a day when Doom clones were -almost- as much a dime a dozen as super realistic military shooters are now. Nothing about Alien Trilogy is remarkable. The enemy sprites are poorly animated and every level consists of typical Doom era "find the key card, go here, do this". There is about as much plot as Doom, you get occasionally get really primitive looking 3d cutscenes when you complete a section of the story but I'll cut some slack because Tekken 2 looked just as goofy, if not more. Its nice to see I'm not the only person that owned this game though!

Belial pretty much covered it. Level wise you progress through the colony from Aliens, then after a bunch of levels you fight a Queen Alien, then you go to the penal colony from Alien 3 despite being the fact that in the movies the Colony was on LV426 and the prison was on totally different planet. Oh dear. Alright, you go through the penal colony, fight several new enemies (runners ala dog aliens), go through more levels and fight ANOTHER Queen who is identical to the one you fought before except the arena looks a bit different. Oh and for some reason various synthetics (androids) and members of the Weyland Yutani security forces want to kill you. There's never much reason to this except for in the manual, I think they want to recover alien specimens and don't appreciate you killing them? Who knows.

Anyways, after you kill the second Queen you go to where things started: the derelict ship from Alien. Oh except there's tons of aliens here now instead of dormant eggs and there's a queen you've gotta kill too. The ending of the game is a nod to the extended one from Aliens where Bishop puts you in cryostasis and you see a facehugger egg nearby. Opps, sorry for spoiling a game without much plot!

This game is very mediocre, it blew no one away when it came out. The original System Shock had more story and this was no AVP. Of course I never owned a jaguar and wouldn't play an AVP game until years later when AVP2 came out. As far as Alien games go this one is toward the bottom, both AVP games are superior shooters and the various Alien beat em up games are far more enjoyable in general.

What's to like? Well..more accurately, what did -I- like? A lot actually. This game got A LOT of playtime from me as a kid, which says a lot when I had better stuff. The soundtrack is a high point for me, its very atmospheric, chilling and a tad depressing. Its techno-ish, which I liked a lot and the game has some really neat touches, such as:

1. When you kill any alien you take damage by stepping on their corpse since xenomorphs have acid for blood.
2. Everytime you die to a different enemy there's a unique "death" cut scene. As a kid I thought this was really cool.
3. I enjoyed the soundtrack a lot and this was back in the days of redbook audio so you could play the cd in a cd player..neat!
4. The weapons all felt pretty satisfying to me, at the time at least. I loved the pulse rifle just because it made that cool "KHHKK-KHHHHK" sound from Aliens.

I still -like- this game ,even after playing much better stuff. Hell, I had played the Alien vs Predator beatem ups, which I ENJOYED and still liked this game.

5. Silent Hill: The Room
Yes, I'm one of those wacky people who LIKES this game. In fact I think it beats the socks off of all the new Silent Hill games even with its myriad of flaws. Before Silent Hill 3 you could argue that the first two games were kinda bad but I'd disagree with you and then beat you upside the head with a steel pipe like those nurses from SH2. This game DOES have some very apparent flaws, most notably being the forced escort quest for a big duration of the game and forcing you to revisit the same locations during the second half of the game. The unkillable ghosts are NOT a flaw and make the game more awesome. As expected the soundtrack is awesome, composed by awesome dude all around Akira Yaomka.

Its not as good as the first 3 Silent Hill games and mores than being an objectively bad game its an objectively weird game. I think this game gets too much flak, especially when you consider how awful and derivative the newer games were.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed a video game very much that didn't get good reviews overall.

My opinion on games is actually pretty close to mainstream opinion. An exception could be "love it or hate it" type games, in which actually...I think they're usually "okay" or "fun" or if I'm in a good mood and really into them, "pretty good".

Like for example, "Endless Ocean"--most people really like this game, or don't like it at all. And for me, I...I like it. I don't adore it, though. It's alright.

Some games that were considered "mediocre" or worse, which I enjoyed greatly:

- "Bloodrayne" series. Not really a terrible platformer but still a guilty pleasure; I don't remember it reviewing very well.
- "Get Medieval" It was designed to be so bad it was good, and Monolith delivered
- (speaking of Monolith...) "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division" I think the critics didn't think too highly of it, but dammit, giant freakin' robots!@!
- "Star Trek: Klingon Academy" It wasn't designed to be so bad it was good, but for me it was. Zoinks...

Castlevania 2 for the NES. I've seen a lot of people that didn't like it but I did and it was the only Castlevania game that I ever finished.

I liked the Hyperdimension Neptunia series (and I plan to pre-order HNV when it gets localized). I also liked the Nintendo 64 game Hybrid Heaven. Many people thought it was a really weird Fighting JRPG, I thought it was awesome. I also liked Final Fight: Streetwise. Fun beat 'em up. And last but not least, Mischief Makers. Never had more fun shaking the s**t out of stuff!

I liked Wall Street Kid for the NES. Considering that it was a game where you mostly just bought and sold stocks it probably didn't have too many fans.

I also liked Taboo. It wasn't even really a game. It did tarot card readings.

http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/basedoncrap.htm

Courier Crisis (PS1, 1997)

Excellent soundtrack and regardless of what critics said, riding the bike in a free roaming city while running people down, doing tricks, watching out for cars and kicking and punching people was a helluva lot of fun.

I don't think I can name five games, but I certainly can name one: Crazy Castle 2 for GameBoy. I was shocked when AVGN made a video about the Crazy Castle franchise. I absolutely adore Crazy Castle 2! It was one of the first GameBoy games I bought, and it took me a long time to beat it. I loved having to find all eight keys while avoiding enemies and strategically planning out which enemies to use bombs/arrows on to pass and which you could just avoid by stealth. The main point in the AVGN video was that the game is too "repetitive." I disagree, but as an Aspie who loves repetition, maybe it IS. Who knows?