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25 Most Overrated Games of All Time?
AriesGeek writes "GameSpy is running the 1st of a 6-part special on the 25 most overrated games of all time. From the article: 'Over the next several days GameSpy is taking a tour through the 25 most overrated games of all time. It's not a pretty list. It's a tale of tragedy where hype gets out of hand, or good licenses and great ideas fail to live up to expectations.' You think Zero Wing will be on there?" As with previous charts, predictions for the Top 5 are welcome, we'll run another story at the end of the week to see how people did.
Specifically Dragon Quest VI. I kept hearing all this hype about the Dragon Quest series from Japan, how it was suppossed to be even better than the Final Fantasy series, how there's some law against a game in the series being released on a school day.
Got a rom of DQ VI (it was never officially translated into Englsih so you have to use a fan translated version) and boy was it boring, I put about 35 hours into, got to the job system and played around to that, then gave up. The combat system was simplistic, the characters uninteresting. Not as good as FF VI or Chrono Trigger, the other big 16-bit rpgs.
Maybe I'll give it another go someday, but it just didn't live up to the hype for me.
Gamespy has a really crappy way of protecting stuff for the future articles.
Screenshot for game #1
Just change the last number in the URL for the other 2-20 games.
I didn't expect to see The Sims mentioned at all in a discussion of overrated games. Of course, I'm going to (safely?) assume that you're a male, and that you usually play games.
That said, The Sims influence on games simply cannot be overstated. Why? Because for the majority of females that play it, it is quite possibly the first and only game they've *ever* played. I worked full time for EB for three years, and the Sims brought in more non-gamer females than any other game in the history of the store. Someone's buying all those $20-$30 add ons because each one rules the sales charts every month, even if that someone isn't you.
So, on a personal level, I think one could say they didn't like the Sims. I'm one of them. But I think there's a huge amount of people, mostly females and mostly non-gamers, who would argue many of the points in your post.
I don't think they caught on, but I couldn't get that URL to work either. Try this:
v er rated/images/25_graphics_#.jpg
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/september03/25o
replace # with the position
Good points, and fairly good research. I did some minor research of my own though and found completely different results from several different pages. Most were from NPD Intellect, which tracks game sales, and others (like the Ownt.com link) either referenced some other site or magazine or didn't bother to cite at all.
;)
I think it's mostly because NPD Intellect is in the business of selling this kind of data, so it's not as easy to come by as we would like (similarly, try to find the best selling albums of all time, or other similar bits of information, sometimes pieces of it are available, but the whole picture is often hard to come by). I also found NPD numbers putting Myst significantly lower only 2 years ago (ie 5.5 million), which seems amazing to me, unless sales are counted in such a way that retailers might not report sales until certain numbers are reached, or other circumstances put some lag time into the process (ie retailer doesn't report sales until they run out and have to re-order). Similarly, OEM deals may effect the sales numbers. I have a copy of Riven (the first sequel to Myst), because it came with one of my DVD drives (one of the first DVD-based games I ever owned, unfortunately DVD games haven't caught on for the PC yet).
There are also two things to consider, one for each "side," when considering Doom and The Sims. First of all, Doom was highly pirated. I knew dozens of people who played it but very few who actually owned it. Moreover, it was distributed through shareware and that probably tends to deflate sales figures.
I definitely agree here. I only know a handful of people that ever owned a legal copy of Doom, but everyone I know that played PC games back then or got into PC games around that time has played Doom, as well as quite a few people that didn't touch PC games until a few years later.
On the other hand, The Sims numbers probably don't include the seven or eight add-ons which have consistently dominated recent sales charts.
Again, this is true, but then expansion sales should not be added to the original game's sales. That being said, the Sims expansions did quite well during their time periods as well. One quarter saw the Sims and 3 of it's expansions in the top 10, and Diablo 2 and it's expansion took up 2 more spots. Expansion packs, though, are easy sales if the original game sold well, especially since most of the Sims expansions hit the $20 price point either on release or fairly quickly (whereas the deluxe edition of the game is still $50 in some places today). The $20 price point being important because it's usually considered an impulse-buy point (and is why some people cried foul when Deer Hunter started topping charts, but frankly whatever sells, sells). Obviously if an expansion outsells the original, you've got a piracy problem
So, yeah, we can debate semantics and stats - but all the lists include The Sims and Myst on the chart, so I don't think we can readily excuse it as overrated. Sure, we can discuss whether it was good, or bad, or whether people had CD-ROMs or not, or what have you. But to suggest that they are overrated is a gross application of our FPS "worldview" to the general market. Moreover, it's very much excluding a huge market that does not fit the traditional gamer stereotype. That cannot be denied.
I'm not really sure about that. I think it depends heavily on how people view the term overrated, and personal viewpoints. In general, it's hard to overrate the need for mass-appeal, at least in some games (I would never say that all games should have mass-appeal, I don't like mass-appeal in my music, either, unless it's strictly because the masses happened upon something good, rather than someone tailoring their music to the masses). At the same time, some horrible games (Deer Hunter) have mass appeal at some level, and the games can be overrated (as in 'best selling game of XX month', yeah, because it's $10-20). I don't know if the Sims is overrat
-PainKilleR-[CE]