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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.'"
You SAY they are bad games, but what are their start to crate scores?
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.
your = it belongs to you. you're = a contraction of you and are. Got it now?
Is it April Fools Day or something? /. is sending us to MSNBC??!! The horror!! ;^)
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
who knows what kind of disease your children might get from overexposure to these games
You're not kidding, I'm still in therapy over Daikatana.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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!
What were the skies like when you were young?
We just had a HUGE year
We've got 3 systems out right now
No really good games....
Smells like 1983-1984
Do you remember the NES game Cowboy Neal and the search for the Missing Karma? I got to level 45 before I realized I wasn't affecting the game through the controller.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I've played one or two of those games, and I can attest to their awfulness. Still, nothing holds a candle to Skydive! for the PC. I (Capital I)couldn't make a game worse than Skydive! if I tried! Some games are just born to be bad.
...(rejected by CmdrTaco) ...(accepted by timothy) or whatever it looks like because I haven't had a submission accepted yet. Oh well, I'll keep trying!
P.S. This is the second time that this has happened, but I submitted this too! This gives me an idea for Slashdot. When our submissions are accepted or rejected, we don't know which editor accepted or rejected them. Maybe we could be told that on our homepages (or somewhere else). It would be like this:
And now, for a sig that's a complete copout.
And a couple of gems that have literally stolen months of my life...
S.t.e.v.e.
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.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I like how, near the end of the bit on the X-BOX game, it throws in [in it's own paragraph!]
:o
(MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)
for no apparent reason.
[And for you guys who, I suppose, didn't bother to read the entire article, the guy rips on the X-Box games just as bad as the rest of them.]
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 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.
Ethnic Cleansing, made by Resistance Records (owned by the National Alliance neo-nazi group) using the Genesis3D open-source rendering software. In the game, you control a white KKK member who runs around beating up on other races. And you thought people were upset about violence in video games after Columbine...
On the other hand, on this topic someone asked "why is beating up on other races bad, but beating up cops and prostitutes (in Grand Theft Auto 3) OK?"
Uhhh...you seriously believe listing Xbox games on a list of "GAMES YOU SHOULDN'T PLAY" is an ADVERTISEMENT? I mean, geeze, I like MS-bashing as much as the next guy, but that makes very little sense.
It's a damn fun game. The key, as in real life, IS NOT TO DRIVE YOUR BOAT UP ONTO THE ISLANDS! I mean, c'mon...
Seriously, one of the most fun moments I've had with that game is trying to outrun torpedoes and turbo-boosting over a reef, sending my boat into the air while the torps hit the reef and blew up behind me. Smooth sailing from there. It may be Microsoft, but MS's games department tends to hit fairly often...
Wow. Picking up garbage. That is lame. Next let's make a game called "Day at the Beach" where in the time between flashing people and selling crack to preschoolers you pick up hypodermic needles and dead fish.
What would have been better is to make a game where you find say a gun and just start capping everyone in line in front of you. Call it 'Universal Studios Rampage.' As a person who used to wait in lines, it would be quite therapeutic. Such missions could include going 'Back to the Future' to destroy Kevin Costner before he makes Waterworld. (Or the Postman, or that crappy movie about Bottles, or pretty much anything after Field of Dreams.)
The MSNBC article is about crappy games, and how they exist. There are crappy games. There have always been, and there will always be crappy games. Now that you can't develop them without a significant investment and a large team, there are fewer 'Bible Adventures' and 'Wally Bear and the No! Gang's, and no 'Tooth Protectors' at all, but there are crappy games of an entirely different sort.
Anyone who feels that games have gotten 'worse', without qualifying that statement in some way, is full of it, or is simply blocking out the part of their brain which held (or maybe has never heard of) the Wall Street Kid, Amagon, King of Kings, M*A*S*H, Vigiliante 8 parts 2 and 3, Mega Man 4, 5, and 6, Pac Man on the Atari -- the list goes on and on.
No one's saying that Monster Party and Burgertime and Utopia shouldn't get props. But there were over 600 carts released for the NES -- how many of them are you really pining after here?
I'm so sick of this discussion. Have you played Super Mario Brothers lately? It's one of the best platformers ever, no doubt, but it's over in 30 minutes. Games are different now than they were ten or fifteen years ago, and you can dislike what has changed about them, but 'better' or 'worse'? Those are awfully broad brushes. For every Blood Wake, there's a Halo, for every Mortal Kombat Advance, there's an Advance Wars, and for every Mall Tycoon, there's an Unreal Tournament. It's the way of the world. Some things are crap. And this is not a new condition, even in the gaming industry.
Now quit your whining and let me get back to my Sim Golf.
god is just pretend.
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.
Although nothing probably beats Custer's Revenge, there's a list of best/worst awards sites here. (don't mind the MSN stuff, the ODP is pulling a 4/1 joke).
and ...er...
Grant Turismo 3?
OK. You got me. I've been waiting for an original game for A LONG DAMN TIME. What have we got?
Rez.
Ico.
Both new and interesting games in their own rights, but not the bold sweeping inovation that has been missing from video games in recent years. Games to day are either A) Shooters, B) RTS varients, C) Sims varients, or D) combination of the above.
Yawn.
...It's just like Old Man Murry but without the gratiuitous overuse of the word "fuck". Man, I miss OMM - and before you say it's still there, they've done, what, about 3 updates since September? Might as well take down the site with that sort of update rate.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Well they tell the truth. Those games had amazing graphics, especially Blood Wake but the gameplay sucked bad.
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)
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.
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.
Maybe it was Skydiver. That was easily one of the best games for the 2600. You push the button to jump, you push down to pop your parachute, then you steer hoping that the wind isn't too bad. Then you had the damn moving landing pads.
Anyone who played it can't tell me they didn't have hours of fun just pounding their jumper into the ground time after time after time. Take away my points - see if I care!
This reads exactly as an ad. You just have to read into the implications. First off, just compare how the reviewer examines X-box titles in comparasin to Playstation titles. In x-box titles, he lists poor game design choices such as the game being simply a button masher, or the game having too real of physics. Now look at the Playstion games - horrible graphics - horrible frame rate - etc. This author is implicity stating - wow - these are horrible x box titles even though they having amazing graphics, incredible real time physics, and so on. Of course, if these titles are horrible with their amazing graphics, imagine what the good titles are like. That's the implicit statment. The playstation reviews attack the platform as being inferior. Frame rate problems, poor graphics - damn, can't get much better. Of course, they drop in the MSNBC is owned by Microsoft to make you think, "Oh, these guys are owned by Microsoft so they will make sure to make a biased article" when in fact they do exactly opposite. This is an adverstisement. Trust me. And this practice doesn't simply occur in game reviews, check CNN or especially Fox news to see this overtly in action. Unbiased news is a myth.
This is moronic. It falls apart as soon as we recognize that 'enjoyment' is not a binary state, on or off, but rather occuring in degrees. The total enjoyment = enjoyment level * duration, and your point only makes sense if the only possible values for 'enjoyment' are 1 and 0, or some constant k and 0 where k is the same for all games. Is a 5000-hour game that you barely enjoy at all honestly better than a 20-hour game that is completely engrossing all the way through?
Hopefully, this was a troll. If not, I presume you believe that the latest harry potter should be judged better than, say, hamlet, for its superior duration?
god is just pretend.
I often thought they should have combined Knight Rider, Airwolf, and Street Hawk into one big show where everybody drove around black, high-tech vehicles.
All they were missing was a boat. If it had been ten years later, maybe they could have used Knight Boat!
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
Difficult is the flying noses in Kid Icarus.
Difficult is being naked in Ghosts and Fucking Goblins.
Difficult is DODGING THREE MISSLES FROM A SUBMARINE IN "TOP GUN" LEVEL 4 THEN HAVING TO REFUEL *AND THEN LAND*
Difficult is the flying noses in Kid Icarus.
Difficult is being naked in Ghosts and Fucking Goblins.
Difficult is DODGING THREE MISSLES FROM A SUBMARINE IN "TOP GUN" LEVEL 4 THEN HAVING TO REFUEL *AND THEN LAND*
Ugh. They were fun for about 1 afternoon before you got so frustrated that you burned them in effigy and went back to playing Kung Fu.
Everyone is talking about how great these systems are, but let's be honest...
I just don't have $300 and then get Halo..
(And then another $300 when your Xbox breaks in 91 days... LOL)
Another $300 and then get GTA3...
And then for over another $200 for a Gamecube to let it sit warmed up and plugged in fot the next Zelda and Mario game.
Everyone is screaming about the one great game, and not screaming about the price to buy the dang systems.
by hard experience, Games Not to Play.
Any school child has been thoroughly indoctrinated about these.
For instance, any one with a deck of cards asking if you'd like to play "52 Card Pickup". I only had to play that game once, at age 6.
Another great card game that any 8 year old can teach to a 5 year old is "Janitor".
The worse part of the whole thing is that, despite growing much older and more knowledgable and ostensibly working at a professional job, the workplace is still full of such games and people with mentalities to propagate them.
I especially like equivalents to "Bring Me a Rock".
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Perfect Dark on the N64.
:) You just have to adapt to the loss of resolution...
(and Goldeneye's not bad either)
I originally felt like you did, but PD is just so well balanced
deus does not exist but if he does
They made a whole bunch of kick-ass board games, to wit: Advanced Civilization, Titan, Diplomacy, Cosmic Encounter, Acquire, and more. Recently-ish they got bought by Hasbro and are reprinting select games in fancy boxes with flashy boards and pieces.
share and enjoy
C'mon, this game was the best garbage collector sim I've ever played. There are tons games where you play as a secret agent or a soldier, but this is one of the few truly ground-breaking games that lets you pick up virtual garbage.
It would have been even better if you could have played as a park employee. Think of the action: people who are sick of waiting in line yelling at you, passing out from heat exhaustion in your costume, having small children puke on you... Now that would've been a game.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.