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Author Topic: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?  (Read 7796 times)

Frumple

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #45 on: July 18, 2014, 11:07:07 am »

But... but I liked dungeon siege 2... it was refreshing to see that amount of corn and cheese after the hours-long marches through Ominous Gray Woods #5 from the first game.
Echo this.

Also, I have to say, even though I had no idea what they were saying (I mean, there was text, but whether they translation matched or not, zog if I know), the german (or maybe russian? I think it was german.) voice actors for DS2 were kinda' amazing. Head and shoulders above the english ones. I actually left sound on for that game.
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Sinistar

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #46 on: July 18, 2014, 12:29:28 pm »

I really enjoyed the universally panned Orion:Dino Horde with a few friends. Sure it's kinda a case of being 'so bad it's good' but on higher difficulties it's actually a pretty fun co-op shooter with some nice character upgrading and vehicle/weapon buying. Big environments to play in, and the AI isn't too awfully terrible.

I also have to say that being caught in the middle of a field, in the dark and the rain (with only the headlights of our buggy as light) whilst getting attacked by dinosaurs on all sides was one of the best co-op experiences I've had. If they could have worked towards that instead of it going a bit silly-crazy-rocket-shooting then it'd have been a really, really good game.

Also, the waves do eventually just repeat, so as soon as you get to wave 20(?) on the hardest difficulty it just wraps around to wave 1 and starts over.   

Unfortunately I heard some really bad things about the company itself, so that's kinda off putting.
I still have it in my Steam library uninstalled, about time I get around and do something about this.
Some time ago, there was an interesting post on official site about the drama that happened concerning this game. Reading it, I kinda got the feeling those guys did admit their mistakes and were sorry for them and were actively trying to fix the mess... Sounded like cool guys to me. But I wasn't around when the shit actually went down so all that might be just empty words. I can search it for you if you are interested.

As for my panned-but-enjoyable-games experience:
Well, E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy had a pretty rough start. Apparently it was very buggy at release and coupled with the general weirdness of it, initial reviews weren't really positive. Still, I absolutely adore it. True, I started playing it way later when it was decently patched and it is a pretty stable game this days so maybe it doesn't fit in this topic.

Another, maybe more on-topic example: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace the video game, any one?
Well, wikipedia tells me it got mixed to positive reviews. I remember one of my local magazines giving it around 7/10 or something while some other gave it IIRC around 5/10?
But any ways, if you are searching for things to hate, this game has it all: lore butchery, incredibly imbalanced boss fights, ridiculously difficult jump sections the more the ending draws, occasional weird dialog/useless items and a weird camera angle.

Still, I had absolute blast playing it. Nothing like playing ping-pong with your laser saber and droid laser fire. Or happily wielding a rocket launcher as a jedi. Or the very special Gungan city section.

Dunno, I keep thinking there was some game that got REALLY negative reviews but I enjoyed playing it, but I just can't remember which game was that.
« Last Edit: July 18, 2014, 12:31:13 pm by Sinistar »
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Cthulhu

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #47 on: July 18, 2014, 12:52:40 pm »

I hated the fucking gungans god damn.

My favorite part of the game was falling into the giant fan at the trade federation ship and dying.
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MonkeyHead

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #48 on: July 18, 2014, 12:53:52 pm »

Gonna have to go with Master of Orion 3 as well. It was clearly released unfinished, and a buggy mess. I resented this, and found a dedicated community on-line that attempted to do what we could to finish it and deal with the biggest bugs and glitches. Oh, and boy, were there bugs and glitches and unimplemented features galore. Some more notable ones were:

How the AI instantly disbanded fleets with troop transports in so it never invaded planets.
How ground combat options made no difference to the battle outcome.
How fleet combat did not take any kind of targeting modifiers into account, or how your ships weapons would ignore certain types of target.
How diplomacy between races made no sense due to badly handled racial characteristics.
How it took a whole turn for assembled fleets to appear on the map after you assembled them.
How ship building routines would make ships for the AI that were literally unarmed cannon fodder.
How planetary governors had no idea how to run a planet.

... and at least 350 or so more. The thing is, when fixed, the game is glorious.

Damiac

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #49 on: July 18, 2014, 01:12:58 pm »

The mario brothers movie was great, I watched that movie so many times as a kid.  It bothered me a little that the lore had nothing to do with the games, but whatever, it was a fun movie.

I found dungeon siege to be so boring... they really seemed to stick with the formula on that game, and it just seemed so repetitive.  I never paid much attention to the scenery and music and what not, so maybe I just didn't appreciate what was good about the game.

Battletoads was awesome, I can't believe it was disliked.  Then again, it was brutally difficult, and required a lot of memorization...
The best part was playing with 2 people and just beating the crap out of each other.  Because there was a bug where you couldn't actually beat the game with 2 players...
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gigaraptor487

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #50 on: July 18, 2014, 01:24:54 pm »

Ride to hell retribution. So bad I had fun laughing and how buggy and utterly stupid and shameless it was.
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Retropunch

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #51 on: July 18, 2014, 01:35:26 pm »

I still have it in my Steam library uninstalled, about time I get around and do something about this.
Some time ago, there was an interesting post on official site about the drama that happened concerning this game. Reading it, I kinda got the feeling those guys did admit their mistakes and were sorry for them and were actively trying to fix the mess... Sounded like cool guys to me. But I wasn't around when the shit actually went down so all that might be just empty words. I can search it for you if you are interested.
Yeah I remember reading that, if I remember the people involved really didn't think they went far enough with their apologies and there was lots of accusations of theft and stuff still after the apologies. I can't really remember everything, so it seems kinda harsh to lambaste them when I can't remember all the facts, but I do remember that the entire thing left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Quote
As for my panned-but-enjoyable-games experience:
Well, E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy had a pretty rough start. Apparently it was very buggy at release and coupled with the general weirdness of it, initial reviews weren't really positive. Still, I absolutely adore it. True, I started playing it way later when it was decently patched and it is a pretty stable game this days so maybe it doesn't fit in this topic.

Yes, yes a thousand times yes! I love it, probably the most original FPS since Deus Ex. I did have the misfortune to play it on release and it was pretty awful - they hadn't got half the stuff labelled, a lot of stuff said it was one thing and did another and it was incredibly glitchy. Impressive work they did on it afterwards though, and I'd love them to do a sequel with better tech (although they're working on a W40K IP now). Definitely worth a purchase now for anyone considering it.
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nenjin

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #52 on: July 18, 2014, 05:58:37 pm »

I think Battletoads got panned because of its style. It was unapologetically DUDEBRO. And the art style, with the big cartoony flourishes, I think kinda threw a lot of people off because compared to other side scrolling fighting games, Battletoads was a little harder to know where the actual points of contact were.

I loved it, though. I loved the diversity of attacks. Where every other game doing the same thing kept it very minimal, Battletoads went big and bold and for their day it looked lavish.
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Graknorke

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #53 on: July 18, 2014, 06:28:41 pm »

Spore.

Despite me bashing it, it was a fun game. The problem is it was touted as the game it wasn't.
Cell stage was good. Creature stage was acceptable. Everything after was the awkward combination of simplicity that gets bogged down.
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Gunner-Chan

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #54 on: July 18, 2014, 06:33:22 pm »

I've mentoned it in other topics before, but I absolutely loved Corridor 7: Alien invasion, even if back in the day it got slammed for being a wolf3d based FPS in an era of doom. I just find it really, honestly well put together and fun if a bit amateurish.

I also really, really quite liked Clash at demonshead on the NES. Even if it was pretty strange and bad in some ways. Hell the very end of the game had a luck based puzzle.
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flame99

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #55 on: July 18, 2014, 06:43:32 pm »

Spore.

Despite me bashing it, it was a fun game. The problem is it was touted as the game it wasn't.
Cell stage was good. Creature stage was acceptable. Everything after was the awkward combination of simplicity that gets bogged down.
I never really cared for Creature stage, but I actually liked the Civilization stage.
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Darkmere

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #56 on: July 18, 2014, 06:46:34 pm »

One of my very first inherited consoles was an Atari 2600. I did, in fact, have the E.T. game for it. When I was a kid I used to play it a lot. Oh man, I fell down those wells so many times. And the FBI guy or something. and the forest. I'd just run to the right of the screen over and over to hear the buddle-dup buddle-dup walking noise.

Looking back, I was a kid with little taste or intelligence.
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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #57 on: July 18, 2014, 07:27:09 pm »

Corridor 7 is decent.  There are far worse Wolfenstein 3D clones.

Operation: Body Count was a Wolf3D clone, released by the same company that made Corridor 7, at about the same time.  It was much, much worse.
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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #58 on: July 18, 2014, 10:25:02 pm »

People didn't like EYE?  Wait, people didn't like Battletoads?  EYE is a good time, and Battletoads is a classic.

Hmmm... apparently Metacritic gives the 360 remake for Project Sylpheed a 64, which is probably totally maybe low enough I guess to be considered 'panned', so I'll put that up.

Flying around spess, arcadey controls, awesome lightshow lockon lasers, shitloads of lockon beeps and little reticules everywhere... that shit was a good time, even if it was a little hurrrranime.


Way of the Samurai 2 only got a 59, too.  Maybe it's because I played that before 1, but I liked it more - partially because both the day AND the story would pass along over time, as opposed to 1, where time and the story didn't progress until you participated in an event, and opposed to 3, where time would pass, but the story wouldn't unless you hit a storyline event (which were clearly marked on the map, unlike 2, IIRC), and partially because it was easier than WotS 1 and 3, where the mechanic was different (and one of the things that most people hated about 2) and seemed to be primarily a memorization thing.

(There's a 4, too, but I didn't play long enough to figure out how it handles time/progression, though the tone is kinda like Saint's Row 3 compared to WotS' SR2, so there's that.  Digression!)


I've also heard that people didn't dig UFO: Extraterrestrial.  I played the Steam version, which came preinstalled with a good mod, and I dug it.

Sinistar

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Re: Games That Were Panned But You Enjoyed?
« Reply #59 on: July 19, 2014, 02:11:11 am »

There was WotS 4?? I have a hazy memory of hearing about 3rd one, (though I might have mistaken that for Yakuza 3), but damn, I need to crawl out of under my rock.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon has 68% on Metacritic and apparently it was decently received. I'm still mentioning it because while I think it's immensely fun to play, some old EDF fans are quite opposed to it.
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