What are some of your controversial gaming opinions

[brunocar]

• Duke Nukem Forever isn't bad. The storyline is "meh" at best, but the gunplay is manages to be quite decent at times.
  
• We need more games with a linear storyline, devs nowadays make their games non-linear just to hide the fact that their storyline is mediocre.
• The whole open world trend needs to stop, too many games have been ruined by giving them an open world full of nothing when it wasn't really needed.
• Making games purposely "competitive" and "hardcore" just because e-sports are now huge also needs to stop. I enjoy a good challenge but I don't want to play e-chess all the time in every game ever. Sometimes I just want to sit back, relax and play a calm and comfy game - or maybe a party or RNG based game with friends, you know?
  
• The 4th gen Pokémon games might have improved a lot the battle mechanics but the main storyline is dull, boring and also advances at a snail's pace.
  
• Kingdom Hearts is pure garbage.
• Borderlands is overrated.

Spoiler

I'm pretty sure there will be at least one person reading this post that will get mad for one of the last three points I made. But hey, it's an controversial opinion thread so I don't care

pokemon: YES, thank you, its bordering on captain planet levels of stupid message.
regarding KH: i can agree with the story, but the gameplay, specially after the first one, is really good, what is it in particular that you dislike?
regarding borderlands: how so? did you only play the second one? because if thats the case then i can certainly agree that BL2 is overrated, but BL1 is a much better overall package

 

[FAST6191]

I Think Visual novels are boring. Ya i know i'm the farthest thing from a weeb but they still seem so.... bland
If someone would like to tell me why they enjoy them, i'd love to know. sincerely

the reason why you dont get it can be summed up in 2 words "wrong board" visual novels are basically interactive books, not actual videogames, if you take that at face value then you have books with nice artwork, music and some choices to make

I suppose the question then becomes
Phoenix Wright?
Ever tried "walking simulators"/"not a game"s?
What about the likes of the Sherlock Holmes games?

"I can hear them now"
Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U

So there are 10 of them out in the wild, all a hideous merging of lesser beings to create something less than the sum of its parts, and without good communications infrastructure?

I would fire up a bit of Dead Kennedys - I Fought the Law but I am pretty sure it would be one of those things one "wins" by accident/in ignorance that you were even in a battle.

• Making games purposely "competitive" and "hardcore" just because e-sports are now huge also needs to stop. I enjoy a good challenge but I don't want to play e-chess all the time in every game ever. Sometimes I just want to sit back, relax and play a calm and comfy game - or maybe a party or RNG based game with friends, you know?

I would like them to lean more into it if they are going to (good intentions, incredibly poor knowledge base and execution is mostly how I would sum that world up). However it does not seem like it is happening to all games like we sometimes get for other fads and plenty of people. Equally game design does recognise the need, or at least it being highly desirable, for competitive games to be engaging at all points during the game for all players, no matter their chances of winning.

 

[RattletraPM]

pokemon: YES, thank you, its bordering on captain planet levels of stupid message.
regarding KH: i can agree with the story, but the gameplay, specially after the first one, is really good, what is it in particular that you dislike?
regarding borderlands: how so? did you only play the second one? because if thats the case then i can certainly agree that BL2 is overrated, but BL1 is a much better overall package

1. Saying that a story driven game like KH has a crappy storyline should already be a big deal on its own (and it really is, considering it's just a forcibly glued up, fanfiction-level mess of a crossover) but putting that aside for now - the combat is way too button mashy, the bosses are repetitive and frustrating at times and regarding the second game, the gummiship sections were awful, gimmicky and completely uncalled for. Character design was also surprisingly bad for a crossover game, considering that you can sum up 90% of the bad guys as "edgy for edginess' sake".
2. I've played the first Borderlands, I've never even touched the other ones. The art style is great, I'll give it that, but I think there are many better FPS/RPGs out there (notice how I didn't say it's bad, it's just overrated imho). Still, I've played it quite a long time ago and my tastes changed a bit since then so who knows, I might give it another shot one of these days.

 

[slaphappygamer]

Pokémon is not fun at all. I understand it, but it’s all a waste of time. I mean, one can say “all video games are a waste of time.”. These types of games do nothing for me. No reward, not entertaining or stimulating. I gain nothing by moving along through this formulaic pathway. Collect, upgrade, fight, over and over.

 

[brunocar]

I suppose the question then becomes
Phoenix Wright?
Ever tried "walking simulators"/"not a game"s?
What about the likes of the Sherlock Holmes games?

in walking simulators you press WASD and some button to interact and the mouse to move the camera, thats more than the the average VN.

phoenix wright is called a VN by people that havent played it or see the similar interface an format and think its the same, by that messure portal and doom are the same because the have similar controls and camera style. phoenix wright has a shit ton of gameplay

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

3D Zelda games are all inferior to top down Zelda.

HG/SS were the last good Pokemon games, everything after is trash.

In addition, competitive Pokemon is stupid.

In addition to my addition, competitive Smash Bros is stupid. People took a party game with little to no competitive nature and tried to make it competitive, and that's dumb.

No Man's Sky was not a bad game per se, simply an extremely overhyped one. While this mostly happened because of false advertising by the devs, when you look at the game at face value, taking absolutely none of the hype or previous false advertising into account, the initial release of the game turned out pretty decent for a small dev team and what they tried to accomplish. This is especially true after all the updates its received since release, which refined a lot of aspects and added new content which made it a generally fun game to play.

 

[brunocar]

1. Saying that a story driven game like KH has a crappy storyline should already be a big deal on its own (and it really is, considering it's just a forcibly glued up, fanfiction-level mess of a crossover) but putting that aside for now - the combat is way too button mashy, the bosses are repetitive and frustrating at times and regarding the second game, the gummiship sections were awful, gimmicky and completely uncalled for. Character design was also surprisingly bad for a crossover game, considering that you can sum up 90% of the bad guys as "edgy for edginess' sake".
2. I've played the first Borderlands, I've never even touched the other ones. The art style is great, I'll give it that, but I think there are many better FPS/RPGs out there (notice how I didn't say it's bad, it's just overrated imho). Still, I've played it quite a long time ago and my tastes changed a bit since then so who knows, I might give it another shot one of these days.

1. most of that is personal prefererence so ok
2. the first one seems bland at first, thats an issue it does indeed have, but as soon as you get into the first town you start getting really interesting side quests, some funny and some with a bleak tone, i think its fantastic, the second one onwards is a mush of memes and edgy jokes made into a generic story about a corporate bad guy that is also kinda like the joker

 

[FAST6191]

in walking simulators you press WASD and some button to interact and the mouse to move the camera, thats more than the the average VN.

phoenix wright is called a VN by people that havent played it or see the similar interface an format and think its the same, by that messure portal and doom are the same because the have similar controls and camera style. phoenix wright has a shit ton of gameplay

I am not up to date on modern visual novels, though the ones I did play back when played similar enough to point and click adventures and thus Phoenix Wright (as well as the others listed) that it scratched the same itch -- role playing, conversational investigation and 3d world investigation. That said looking at some of the "porting" efforts I can see them being slideshows nowadays and that would be a step too far.

To chuck in another few games. Hotel Dusk, Secret Files: Tunguska and maybe Runaway.

Similarly despite portal being a fantastic example in the "genres, what a useless term" discussion thinking about it I play battlefield much like I play portal, which is to say sight lines and 3d movement puzzles.

No Man's Sky was not a bad game per se, simply an extremely overhyped one. While this mostly happened because of false advertising by the devs, when you look at the game at face value, taking absolutely none of the hype or previous false advertising into account, the initial release of the game turned out pretty decent for a small dev team and what they tried to accomplish. This is especially true after all the updates its received since release, which refined a lot of aspects and added new content which made it a generally fun game to play.

Given the general state of space sims at the time* I can take some kind of relative to the state of the scene type argument, however from a general gameplay design perspective then not really.
However I still sit here smug as I was among the ones to not be on the hype train after it was in a runaway situation.

*FreeSpace 2 is to space sims what Mario Kart is to such racing games, which is to say a very flawed game that is so very popular that people copy it and make an ever weaker game as a result. However where Elite came back as something of an answer to it I am still waiting for the thing to do it to Mario Kart. There were some very nice efforts on the PS1 and N64 (barring the awful track selection/open world selection thing Diddy Kong beats MK64 all day long for me, Lego Racers and Crash Team Racing also having many things to teach) but it seems to have fizzled since.

 

[brunocar]

I am not up to date on modern visual novels, though the ones I did play back when played similar enough to point and click adventures and thus Phoenix Wright (as well as the others listed) that it scratched the same itch -- role playing, conversational investigation and 3d world investigation. That said looking at some of the "porting" efforts I can see them being slideshows nowadays and that would be a step too far.

To chuck in another few games. Hotel Dusk, Secret Files: Tunguska and maybe Runaway.

Similarly despite portal being a fantastic example in the "genres, what a useless term" discussion thinking about it I play battlefield much like I play portal, which is to say sight lines and 3d movement puzzles.

all the games you mention i consider adventure games, not VN, so maybe thats a diference of definition between us both.

as for portal, the share the 3D FPS movement, but nothing beyond that, thats why portal started a genre of its own, first person puzzlers

 

[FAST6191]

Looking into it it seems visual novels departed from being essentially text adventures with pictures to disappearing up their own arse into a sea of self referential memes and fan service. Pity really.

Portal started first person puzzles? Didn't half life have multiple game essential sections that were that? The concept goes back about as far as point and click/dungeon crawlers as well. If we are going to be a bit less vague then what was Myst?

 

[brunocar]

Looking into it it seems visual novels departed from being essentially text adventures with pictures to disappearing up their own arse into a sea of self referential memes and fan service. Pity really.

Portal started first person puzzles? Didn't half life have multiple game essential sections that were that? The concept goes back about as far as point and click/dungeon crawlers as well. If we are going to be a bit less vague then what was Myst?

first person puzzle games, half life was still a shooter and myst was it own beast, due to mechanics not being tied to predictable rules like in games like tetris or portal, rather depending on more detective skills than actual puzzling, making it more of an adventure game

 

[FAST6191]

This seems like it is getting overly specific/constraining and more reasons why the term genre as it applies to games pretty weak.

Also Half Life was like space invaders?

 

[Billy Acuña]

- Playstation has the worst d-pad while the Sega Genesis is the best one (specially for fighting games).
- Smash64 > every other smash > melee.
- PlayStation 4 is the worst Sony's console ever made, they made much better pieces of hardware in the past (even the Vita is a better idea/hardware), that thing pretending to be a console does not deserve all its sales.
- The "PC Master Race" meme is just stupid, I always prefer dedicated platforms for gaming.

 

[brunocar]

This seems like it is getting overly specific/constraining and more reasons why the term genre as it applies to games pretty weak.

Also Half Life was like space invaders?

no, but both share the fact that they are games where you are shooting things, but if you really wanna get specific, space invaders is a sidescrolling shoot em up while half life is a story focused linear first person shooter.

im not trying to put them in the same bag, but on different ones that are on the same shelf.

portal and tetris both work very similarly if you look at the actual process of solving puzzles, same with stuff like mr driller, but then you have games like myst or monkey island where you gotta use real life logic to advance through the story.

 

[FAST6191]

It was a joke on the name being used for two rather different styles of game.

Still not convinced this genre lark as you are defining it will get me many places. There is talk out there of the internal genre classification system that netflix uses, supposedly numbering in the hundreds and being very very specific (think IMDB key words). That I could see being sort of useful -- the phrase earlier of scratch that itch speaking to something there.
At the same time I do find some of the game theory terms quite useful, though more in a real time vs not and multiplayer analysis than the sorts of things covered here.

 

[Pakhitew-Island]

In my opinion 2+2=5. You can't tell me i'm wrong for saying that because thats my opinion.
If you tell me i'm wrong, and try to get me to say 2+2=4, then you are forcing your opinion on to me.
You are oppressing me and not allowing me the freedom to think.

is this a parody post

 

[Taleweaver]

do you have any proof that actually affected sales?

Yes. You must have read over it:

I once considered buying a game, but wanted to try it out for myself first. So i pirated it. I ended up playing it so much that i held off buying it until it had a couple price cuts and a 75 percent discount.
In other words: had i bought the game rather than pirated it, the company would've gotten about 40 bucks extra in sales. Hence... Piracy influences sales.
(And that's an example where the company was able to sell me their game for one tenth of the price... i can give more than a few examples of companies i pirated that went bankrupt instead).

Your turn (in pb if you don't want to further detail this thread): prove to me that piracy not only doesn't affect sales, but in a way that doesn't involve a leap of faith (which is required if you really think you can "factually" prove it).

 

[cracker]

The 3do had some pretty good games. The N64 controller was a piece of crap. 2D/2.5D Zeldas are better than the 3D games. The Vita is a great handheld. Tekken > Street Fighter. KI > KI2.

 

[RattletraPM]

1. most of that is personal prefererence so ok

(Keep in mind I'm not trying to start a flame war here, I just want to explain my point of view a bit more clearly)

When it comes to what I said about character design then sure, you could say that's personal preference, but I think we can all agree that - again - if a story driven game doesn't have a good story then it cannot really be considered all that good. Sure, there can be a good game without a good (or no) story but not only KH is an RPG (and I think it's pretty safe to say that the story matters a lot in an RPG) but it's also pretty obvious that the devs gave a lot of space to it in these specific games. In fact, if I really have to be completely objective and unbiased about it, the gameplay might not be completely bad but it's also not really all that special - there are arguably many better hack and slash games out there, even on the good ol' PS2 itself. So I really feel that in order to like KH as a game you must like the story to at least some extent and I don't know about you, but most people I've met that like or dislike it pretty much confirm what I've said so far.

I would like them to lean more into it if they are going to (good intentions, incredibly poor knowledge base and execution is mostly how I would sum that world up). However it does not seem like it is happening to all games like we sometimes get for other fads and plenty of people. Equally game design does recognise the need, or at least it being highly desirable, for competitive games to be engaging at all points during the game for all players, no matter their chances of winning.

It's not something that happens as much as other fads, true, but it's something that I've seen happening more and more as time goes on. Sure, nobody's going to like an unfair game so there must be at least a little bit of balance in every situation but sometimes making a game too balanced might actually be worse. Think about this: would you like Mario Kart as much if everyone could only get the same weapon everytime? And in order to make a real life example of this, while it might not be a popular game by any means, that's exactly what happened to Formula Fusion: it was meant to be a spiritual successor to WipEout (aka Mario Kart with spaceships if you've never played it) and while it's not bad in itself - I personally had some fun playing it - they definitely focused too much on making every weapon and pickup balanced because they wanted to make the game, quote, "e-sport ready" so you really start to wish they'd kept some of the old overpowered but really fun to use ones such as Plasma (slow, single shot, OHKO) or Quake (as the name implies, creates a giant wave that hits everything in its path). Another infamous example is Battlefront II which, sure, that game has so many other worse problems but again, EA and Dice said it was going to be competitive while, well, let's just say that competitiveness and loot that gives real gameplay advantages don't really mix togheter (and hey - I'm not saying that making this specific game non-competitive would do it any justice, I've brought BFII up simply because it tried to mix two ongoing trends in the gaming industry).

In the end, this might not be as bad or frequent as other bad trends out there (forcing games to be open world when it isn't really needed, loot boxes/mtx, season passes, day one DLC and abusing the early access tag to sell unpolished/unfinished games just to name a few) but it's something I feel could get ugly pretty quickly if this keeps up.

 

[FAST6191]

That sounds like it would fall under the bracketed section, save for Battlefront 2 which I can't believe had good intentions anywhere in that.

Mario Kart with same pickups would be poor, however mechanically speaking you don't need it to be. Save blue shells for 7th/8th (maybe also factor distance a bit) rather than second works just fine. You can even keep some theoretically overpowered ones for said lower places; while being theoretically able to win at any point is nice there is an alternative in what is called "kingmaking" (if last place has a chance to effect a different outcome people still seem to enjoy that, or to take it back to mario kart how many times have you been hanging back for whatever reason and launch a blue shell/lightning which changes the dynamics of the race).

Equally I don't necessarily have a problem with microtransactions and some of the other things mentioned. You are not going to catch me opening my wallet any time soon for them but I could see them being positively executed within a game. Day one DLC I can take if it is the difference between a game going gold and the devs then having a few weeks to do something fun (see something like Skyrim game jam). Which I suppose handily brings us back to the thread -- pay to win is nonsense but microtransactions can be done within games. They are not an immediately cancerous concept like some seem to find them.