Games People Shouldn't Play

MBCook writes: "I've been a video game player for years, and I must say that the average game seems to be getting worse. Exihbit 1: Games People Shouldn't Play, an article on MSNBC. This article shows what the author thinks are the worst games on the current crop of systems. You've got to agree with calling a game bad if "...the only way to get in [the minigames] is by buying hats... How do you buy the hats? Why, by picking up garbage." If that doesn't make you want to play a game, what would? I agree with the author when he says: '... who knows what kind of disease your children might get from overexposure to these games.'"

Comments

Doling out masses of crap

[goneaway]

has been standard on the console for way too many years even as far back as the Atari 2600. Games were rushed out to take advantage of movie tie-ins on a pretty regular basis. Think of the E.T cartridge for 2600. I've heard about a small landfill being created with the leftover copies of this game. That's why we read game reviews.

Re:Doling out masses of crap

[hrieke]

Execpt that 90% of the reviews are bought and paid for by the game companies, the other 10% are just raving fan muttering about how great this version is.
Objectivity is not something that I have ever seen in the game press.

Pretty Skies!

[little_fluffy_clouds]

From the article: Blood Wake, Microsoft's attempt to spread the popular car kombat genre to boats, has some of the best-looking skies ever to appear in a game.

Just like the pretty sky background in XP was the best reason to upgrade from 2K, we all need an Xbox now... actually physically going outside is so 90's!

Looks like an ad

[rednaxel]

Its plain Xbox advertising disguised as article. Xbox is too new and hav too few titles to even be cited in an article like this, but it manages to get not only cited, but shown as good! "The best sky/water/island ever...".

It's about love, damn it

[Dark Paladin]

You can tell when a game is good or bad, and 95% of the time, it's about how much the developers love what they do.

Take a look at Morrowind, the upcoming game from Bethseda. I've spent a week with it, and while it's still beta and crashes, you can see that they give a damn if people like what they're doing. It's not about how much money you spend - the game Starships Unlimited and Serious Sam were made on a low budget - but they were both fun, entertaining games that succeeding in spite of their backgrounds. (Let's face it - who would have thought a no-name Crotian programming house would have made one of the best games of 2001, and 2002 with Serious Sam 2?)

Then look at Final Fantasy X. Basically, it's a movie that sometimes you walk from point A to point B to watch the next movie. And it tells - the designers just didn't have that same love, that same pride in what they did (except in making great movie scenes and giving a reason to make sure Lulu won so you could check her out when she bent over.)

It's true with fucking everything. If somebody doesn't care about what they make and what they do, then neither will anybody else. It doesn't always work (Battlecruiser 3000 - lots of love there, but not universally loved), but it's true with your work, your spouse, your children - and the games you play.

Of course, that's my opinion. I could be wrong.

Playability is why we own consoles

[DohDamit]

If we wanted awesome graphics, we would use a computer.

If we wanted complex story development or AI, we would use a computer.

If we wanted real tactical or strategic challenges, we would use a computer.

But we don't. We own consoles because:

• We don't want to have to read a fucking manual to start playing the game
• We want it to work in our living room
• We want to be able to enjoy ourselves immediately
• We want to have easy fun

We own consoles because the games are easy and fun to play. Any development shop that misses these points is bound for the garbage heap of business history. The article hits this right on the head. Anyone who claims this is about any one console missed the point.

Re:Playability is why we own consoles

[larien]

Ok, my view on it. I used to avoid consoles, because the games were generally more expensive than PC games and there weren't as many options with a console (I like a lot of strategy games where the lack of a keyboard would cripple me).

However, the reason I got a PS/2 was mainly down to the social aspects. I had a few mates round on Saturday night for a PS/2 session; any multiplayer session before was something like HOM&M3, in which you spend at best half your time playing, the rest is waiting for the other player(s) to finish their turns. The PS/2 on a widescreen TV was much more fun with a group of people, even when we were doing 2 player SSX tricky. Two people played, the other 2 laughed their asses off as people crashed and burned, often painfully...

Of course, your points about "easy fun" and easy accessability are good too. On the PS/2, time between switch on and playing is around 30secs-1 minute. On a PC, you need about that to load the OS, let alone get a game started. That and the fact that shutdown is so much easier; you can pull the plug on the PS/2 without a problem (unless you're saving to the memory card at the time!) but a PC has to be shut down properly, taking 30 seconds or more (OK, you can switch off if you have a journaled filesystems, but I still use FAT32 for sharing between linux and XP).

I miss the good old days

[Orangedog_on_crack]

I have many fond memories of the golden age of video games from the late 70's into the early 80's. The graphics were lacking, the sound was no where near what it is now, and the premiss of most games was simple. For all that those old games lacked, they had one thing that almost all of the games today don't have....a soul. Back then gameplay was the main focus for game developers. Too many of the new games go all out for the "eye-candy" factor and gameplay seems to be a distant concern. This goes for the arcade coin-op games as well as the home games. That's not to say that there weren't some serious turds floating in the video game swimming pool back then. Anything with a movie tie-in was almost certainly a waste of time, and I'm sure that some of us old-timers, now in our 30's, remember how much of a big dissapointment the 2600 version of Pac-Man was.

And your point is?

[silvaran]

I anticipated an overly unbalanced article, being that
(MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)
and held my breath while I read the article. Fortunately, it does do a good job of picking on all the top players in the industry, though the article truly has no point.

I found myself hunting around for a "Next>" link at the bottom of the article, confused at the abrupt end. None. Then I re-read the "conclusion":

Playing a fighting game without good controls is like going to a Milli Vanilli concert in which the dubbed music does not work. I mean, what's the point?

That doesn't explain this article at all. It explains partially what to look for in a fighting game.

What is the point of this article? It's clearly not an extensive review of the worst games. I consider myself an adequate judge of a good game, after purchasing (interpret how you may) over 100 games for the original Playstation, and another 20 for the PS2. I've seen far worse games than what they have here, many not worth the price of rental. Granted, there's nothing worse than a fractional frame-rate or the controller-breaking frustration of a ridiculously difficult game, but why warn consumers about the pothole in front of them, only to have them fall into the next?

I counted about 8 games to avoid. I'd be willing to bet there are more than just a few games that serve no other purpose on the shelves than to be load-bearing devices. Few are even worth the price of a blank CD (but you didn't hear that from me).

IMHO, if you want to write an article like this, give the do's and don'ts to selecting a game. Give suggestions on how to weed out the worst from the best. Don't just list a bunch of bad games, say why they're bad, plug a few consoles (any publicity is good publicity) and leave it at that.

(conclusion reduced to prevent conflict of interest)

I think Arctic Thunder should be the worst ever!

[Nelson]

My sister works at a radio station. They did some promotion giving away PS2 games. When the people don't come in 30 days she can keep stuff if she wants. So one afternoon she strolls over to my place and gives me this game. Up to that point I had been completely high on PS2. I had Ico, GT3, NBA Street and I didn't think they could make a bad game for such a fine machine. Then I slipped Artic Thunder in.. I don't remember that crappy a title on any platform. They wouldn't let me trade it in at the store!

Ignoring the slow downs, I haven't really even played it enough to see them, there is just this amazingly cheap quality about it all. I mean the premise is insultingly stupid. I'm reminded of the mid 1990's when there was this glut of first person shooters release, I mean just dozens of them on the PC and they were largely Doom with different levels and graphics, or about that sophisticated and a lot of them you could tell were just rush jobs, someone somewhere hired a few artists and an engineer and tried to crank out a game in a week and make some bucks off the trend. they had this feeling like there was no soul put in to it, the authors didn't even care if they were good or not, that's how Arctic Thunder feels. Honestly, I doubt the authors really cared if it was any good, if not, then they have to be slave programmers in some radically different culture where they've never seen snow or something. There is just something amazingly shallow about it and I've only put about 10 minutes on it.

All shooter games on consoles shouldn't be played

[WildBeast]

I have a hard time using shooter games on a console. It's so much harder to control. Nothing beats PC's for shooters.

Consoles however are great for racing, party and fighting games.

Re:Airworlf for 2600

[dswensen]

I've seen reruns of Airwolf, A-Team and Knight Rider. Believe me, you're better off sticking with your childhood memories, because seeing them again will rob you of them.

Re:All shooter games on consoles shouldn't be play

[djbentle]

As a die-hard pc fps player I thought the same thing until I played halo. Are the controls as accurate as they would be on a PC? No. But they are completely transparent after 10 minutes to get used to them and don't detract from the game at all.

If you had to play against someone using a keyboard and mouse you would get slaughtered, but you don't so why miss out on one of the best fps's of all time because of imagined problems with the control scheme. It is incredibly fun and, after all, that's what is important.

Now the lack of an online mod community for multiplayer, that is another problem entirely.

David

Re:Heh..

[NanoGator]

The whole point he was making was "wow, they sure spent a lot of time making this game pretty, too bad the play stinks." That is a rather common problem in the game industry.

The only way this could be considered marketing vs. an honest review is if you think graphics are far more important than game play. In that case, it sounds, from what this guy said, that this game'd be for you.