As somebody who likes Tetris but essentially had no idea about PuyoPuyo until I came across that comment, that was a brilliant yet depressing read. I’m currently busy with life but wishlisted some PuyoPuyo games for this winter, just because that article outlined such an interesting game. It’s kind of hard to find something for current platforms in Europe though…
If you want functional online, the Switch version of Puyo Puyo Champions is the only title worth bothering with. Specifically Switch, other platforms are ghost towns.
If you want singleplayer content, 15th Anniversary, 20th Anniversary, and Chronicle are all peak. None of these games were released outside of Japan and they're older titles you'll have to emulate, hence all my salt about the state of things today, but at least they do have fantranslation patches.
Flatout 3. I just checked on steam, and it’s tagged as “psychological horror”. Being a fan of the first one, and still having spent lots of hours playing the second one, I was totally not prepared for the utter monstrosity of the third one
I think Valve has the capacity to make some truly excellent stuff, but they only seem to care if it increases their wallets in a significant way.
After Architect, I'm very cautious about any Valve multiplayer game as it is bound to become infected with ways to extract money (or "value", as Gabe Newell puts it) from the customer.
I mean by all accounts Artifact was actually a great game if you wanted a digital CCG. Deadlock is going the Dota route of making all gameplay content free, I’m sure there will be a skin market but that’s irrelevant to me, and the game is already very fun. I trust the Valve/Dota balance team far more than any other similar game’s, so I really don’t see what could derail it from at least moderate success at this point.
It’s still fairly rough around the edges, but at this point I prefer Predecessor. Mostly because even at lowest settings, Deadlock feels unresponsive. But some heroes just have very unfun mechanics, like the lightning storm that covers a quarter of the map and lasts 20 seconds, or the ultimate that swaps your HP.
A bunch of early access survival crafting games on steam in the early days of early access. One was trying to be like starship troopers and it got like one update
Oh god, survival crafting games were a dime a dozen back then. Though I am eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release of Satisfactory next month so clearly I never got my fill :p
Looking through the lens of relativity, I’d have to say Witcher I. The fact that the fucking masterpiece that is Witcher III and not-amazing-but-definitely-worth-a-playthrough that is Witcher II both stemmed from the comically bad dumpster fire that was #1 is nothing short of a miracle.
The franchise should have died at #1, but I’m sure glad it didn’t.
I think that’s maybe a bit harsh compared to a lot of the games mentioned here. Witcher 1 definitely has a lot of problems compared to 2 and 3 but it had a lot going for it as well. Sure the combat was broken as hell once you got all the spinning moves and it was super sexist with the women as trading cards thing. But the story and world building were still fun and Geralt was well characterised. It’s not a great game but it did well enough to get them the sequels. Definitely nowhere near the worst game I’ve played.
I remember playing Witcher 1 and being thoroughly underwhelmed by it, so I’m glad to feel validated here instead of just having to label myself as a game troglodyte
W1 still has probably the best writing and script of any of the three games. I definitely prefer the third for gameplay but W1 is just an artifact of the awkward time it came out, when there was a lot less consensus on how 3rd person action games controlled.
I don’t even remember all the trash games i tried to played just to delete them after few minutes.
But the ones being remembered are instead the biggest disappointments, games which were supposed to be great or were supposed to be improved sequels of great games.
In this cathegory trashcan lid medal goes definitely to REBEL GALAXY 2. I played first part like 10 times and only ever wanted more of it, but 2nd problem was not that it was bad or not (it was though), but that it was entirely different game.
Dishonorable mentions for few more:
Dragon Age Inquisition for being a solo player simulator of a boring MMO instead of a awaited resurrection of series and even sub-genre
Marvel Midnight Suns, again for being supposed to be next X-Com but in reality being poorly optimised card game
Pandora: First Contact, supposed spiritual successor to Sid Meier Alpha Centuari. Well it was spiritual in sense i wanted to get drunk on spirits because no chance to play this turd while sober.
Starfield, i don’t think i have to comment on this
Less specific but every Dune game since Emperor: Battle for Dune and probably every Dune game in the future as long as the unFuncom have the licence
Gladius: Relics of War: for a game that had so much development and DLC’s it’s still shallow as puddle. Which, along with Pandora above leds me to:
Everything published by Sltherine i played maybe except Armageddon in good way and Pandora in bad way. Somehow nearly every good idea for a game that this company make into reality turns out to be the mediocriest of mediocrest game ever.
EDIT: oh and the one i tried to forget so hard but other poster made me remember it: “X-Com” Chimera Squad. No, just fucking no, the pathetic death of series after glorious predecessor is just too much.
I got to play video games with spider man and be in a book club with Captain marvel.
The deck building was pretty good. I wanted more cards and more excuses to use more heroes.
The fact that there’s no miss chance on attacks is subtle but a real improvement over the genre standard. And using the environment was a lot of fun, and very genre appropriate.
I tried to play is earnestly after Epic gave it out for free, but while gameplay indeed is actually quite good, three factors are still bad:
Disappointment, this is the game from X-Com developers, while there is no next X-com game for years after the last one was not only a commercial hit but genuinly best game in genre, the only thing they did is the Chimera Squad which was extreme disappointment. It’s really no way around that.
Optimisation really sucks, comparable games are working smooth for me and this crap does not and never was no matter what i tried
Marvel banter, i HATE it, capital letters. I don’t hate Marvel universe but holy shit they should shut the fuck up sometimes. Even the pompous style of original comics was better because at least it was unintentionally funny unlike this pathetic crap served nowadays.
This reminds me of a method of trying to evaluate art in an objective way. Basically you ask yourself 3 questions:
What is this trying to do?
Does it succeed in what it’s trying to do?
Is what it’s trying to do worth doing?
If the answers to 2 and 3 are “yes”, then it’s probably a good work of art. This helps remove the subjectivity of “do I enjoy it?” when evaluating a work.
I would say the answers for Desert Bus indicate that it is indeed a good work of art. It succeeds in being a monotonous parody of a video game which makes a political statement about what games would be if they lacked any fictional elements or conflict. And I think the statement P&T were trying to make with this game was definitely worth making. Plus, we know from the amount of people who play it as a streamed challenge game that there is some desire for a game like that to exist.
Myst is certainly a bit of an odd one. There are more modern versions with full 3d graphics, and some of the puzzles are all time classics, but Riven was always the better game. There’s a remake of that one which just came out, though it also doesn’t hold your hand as far as figuring out what to do.
The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.
It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.
Hard as hell, and unfair. Plenty of jumps powered by seemingly inconsistent mechanics that need to be done perfectly, otherwise instant death.
Played it recently as an adult after beating some other retro games from my childhood for the first time. In Lion King, I made it one level further and put the game down again…to level 3.
Well, I had gotten to Level 3 as a kid, but I was able to clear the Ostrich Run in Level 2 much more consistently after some practice. It was a fluke as a kid.
I must’ve played a ton of trash games that I purged from my memory, but one notable one that comes to mind is Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. The game was super highly anticipated and hyped and I was a massive C&C fan before, only to be completely disappointed by this massive turd that they shat on this genre defining franchise. The revolutionary “physics” did nothing to the game play, the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours and it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors or the main other RTSs of the time.
You must have been amazing at it, because it was certainly more like 20 for me, not counting branching missions. (The internet says it’s around 25ish)
it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors
I think you’re wearing some rose tinted goggles about Red Alert (and some solid black ones for the first game). Pathfinding in Tiberium Dawn was so terrible that it was part of the balance of the game: when they tried to fix it for the remaster, they found it horribly unbalanced the game in favor of GDI, so they decided not to fix it. Pathfinding was pretty shit in Tiberian Sun, but it was much worse before.
or the main other RTSs of the time.
Yeah, StarCraft was better but Total annihilation was much worse than Tiberian Sun in places where there was any terrain.
TA is much better now, but it has 25 years of mods going for it.
Im sure there are games that wouldnt even work so i technically didnt even play them but ill list a couple of games that i tried playing, hated, and uninstalled almost immediately
They both had the same problem.
Days gone and Red Dead Redemption 2.
I tried to force myself into enjoying rdr2 because it was supposedly that good. For the first few hours i kept asking myself when does the game start? When do i actually get to play?
Days gone i only made it maybe an hour before i quit and uninstalled.
I want to play a game not watch an interactive movie
RDR2 is very much not for everybody. It is intentionally tedious. It’s the kind of game you sit down and play for at least 2-3 hours every time you play it because that’s just how long it takes to get anything done. You aren’t fast traveling. You aren’t doing things instantaneously in a menu. Your time as a human being is an in-game resource. If you’re in the middle of nowhere and your horse dies, a ton of your shit was being carried in the saddle; you need to walk your ass to the nearest town lugging that saddle, vulnerable to wild animals and robbers. It’s a game about getting things done with your own two hands at the turn of the century when that was becoming much less valued. It’s a game about subsistence. You could have an easier, more prosperous life, but at what cost? At whose cost? It’s a game about nature and living in a natural world as a natural being, criticizing the transition into industrial exploitation of our fellow natural world and natural animals, including natural humans. It’s not a rootin’ tootin’ spaghetti western adventure; it’s an interactive classic American novel that can occasionally have funny or fun moments depending on your tastes. I fully understand that it’s wasn’t a game that you or millions of other people enjoyed, but I think it’s wholly unjust to label it a “bad” game for that. It did exactly what it set out to do, and evoked impactful emotion in sharing its message as intended for the people who wanted to be open to it. It’s successful art, but not all art is for you and not all art is for me. You may have gone in with the wrong expectations for it. I think it really sucks that every rockstar game since the early 2000s seems to be marketed as “GTA but ___” because the Red Dead games and LA Noire are very much not GTA. They’re 3rd person open worlds with similar engines, but that’s where the similarities end.
If you ever try it again, come in with a similar mindset to wanting to sit down and watch The Godfather, not The Avengers. There’s a lot to get out of it if you just focus on the story and the characters and the beautiful setting. Enjoy the honest work, and lament the shootouts and heists.
I’d recommend trying RDR1 before RDR2, but then again that might make you hate the tutorial section RDR2 had even more lol
RDR2 is excellent, but it almost feels like it’s trying too hard. RDR1 was just a classic IMO, literally revolutionary for its time. I thought it would be just GTA with horses but honestly it felt so much more than that, they completely nailed the atmosphere and everything else about it. I still play RDR1 sometimes these days.
I remember buying Duke Nukem Forever in a Humble Bundle, a bundle that I had virtually every other game for the price. I remember only paying $1 and I gave all that money to charity.
I played DNF. I still felt robbed. To this day I haven't completed it due to how terrible it is (if my memory serves me, I've been minaturised and I'm driving around in a tiny car? But the controls are awful and Duke now seems like a Trump like character whose charm is entirely devoid in modern times. It was already wearing thin back when it was released, too).