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Black & White - Most Overrated Game Ever?
Following on from our earlier story about GameSpy's 25 Most Overrated Games countdown, the Top 5 have been announced, and Lionhead's PC-based 'god game', Black & White, made it to the top spot, with GameSpy suggesting: "Sometimes... people want to love a game so badly that its reputation runs away with itself." Congratulations to an an anonymous reader for guessing right, before another commenter noticed screenshots for the Top 5 had already been uploaded, doh. Meanwhile, Penny Arcade chime in on the chart, commenting: "When you deny the profound effect of Donkey Kong Country's fully rendered sprites in 1994, making the system a bulwark against the 32-bit revolution, there is no educating you", and illustrating: "If a company that overhypes games does a feature on overhyped games, are they overhyping the game?"
I'm not sure I would call it the most overrated game ever, over dogged on game ever perhaps. I mean yeah it was a mess, and yeah it didn't even come close to what it was supposed to do as described by its creator, the missions were lame yada yada yada.
But despite all that, I did at least have fun with it. Teaching my giant cow to eat children and crap all over my worshipers homes was great fun. Rolling flaming boulders into my own villages entertained me for far longer than it should have I suppose.
Broken, definately, but at least it was fun.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Black & White may have had some issues, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The only flaw I saw with it was that it should have come with 20+ levels instead of only (was it?) 5 levels.
The User Interface for the game had the best "feel" I've ever experienced in a 3D game. It was very easy to get around the world and manipulate the objects within it. It was also amazing how you could seamlessly scroll all the way out.
The "gestures" concept was also quite novel at the time.
It's a shame it did so poorly. I would have loved to see what they could have done with some further refinement to the GUI/3D Engine.
All they would have needed to do was design a few dozen levels and the game would have done so much better...
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There whole deal the FF7 was over rated because FFT, and FFX were better is just bizarre. I think they've forgotten to consider the time at which it was released.
It's easy to look back 5 years or whatever and say that FF7's graphics are mediocre, etc. But at the time it was released it broke new ground all over the place.
The argument that FF6 had a better story is valid, that's fine, but damn if you can't just rip on it for not comparing up to FFT, or FFX.
Also one of the contributer comments remarked that the story just wasn't as epic. How the hell wasn't it? A genetically engineered super-villain hell bent on destroying the world, and damn near succeeding isn't epic anymore? Ok, ok, sure in FF6 the world was actually nearly destroyed, but as for the other games, the epic level wasn't quite the same.
Was FF7 overrated when it released? Hell no. Is it overrated now? In my opinion no. Is it one of the most overrated games of all time? Not even close.
I loved Syndicate and Populous. I thought I was going to get something fantastic. I did. It was a fantastic piece of shit.
I found showstopping bug after showstopping bug. Complaints in the official forum were being deleted rather than addressed. I literally spent 24 hours trying to get the game to run for more than five minutes at a time, and once it finally did, I found a different bug that prevented me from completing the first scenario.
Add to that the sheer amount of repetitive handholding involved in play (feeding your people, training your beastie), and the obnoxious gesture system, and you have something I wouldn't play even if I was given a salary to do it.
I ultimately wrote to EA and asked for my money back. Wanna know the good part? They gave it to me.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
All the reviews I read were identicle to mine: Daikatana is complete crap..
Maybe they were trying to say that there was not a rating low enough to express the complete crappiness level of Daikatana, so therefore any rating given to it would have been way higher than it deserved.
I fear nothing but my government. Vote Libertarian.
There are so many quotes in that piece that make me upset.
Lets start with Halo.
"Look, I'm glad so many people loved Halo. My beef's not with you."
So you are well aware of the overwhelming popularity of the game, yet you think it is "over rated." Apparently you and I differ greatly on our definition of overrated, as well as your role as a game reviewer. I don't give a crap what your personal opinion is of the game. Your job, as a "professional" reviewer, is to evaluate the game and make a judgment about what most gamers will think about the game. They go on to attach the other reviewers for giving Halo high marks. Well guess what, its STILL fucking popular! If its so overrated, then why can used game stores still charge 50 bucks for it? With the numbers it sold in, the used shelves should be filled with the worthless things if the game was so overrated. Get off your high horse and re-read your job description. Its a good game, its extremely popular, and so within the realm of game reviews, is by definition, deserving of high ratings, and certainly not overrated.
Mortal Kombat:
"The game was an instant hit... Fans persevered, but its popularity was driven more by infamy than quality. "
WTF are you talking about!? Now you are saying it was popular, but for the wrong reasons? People liked it, people played it, people continued to like and play it; where is the problem? Who frickin cares why it was popular... are you honestly going to sit there and type that people dropped countless quarters into Mortal Kombat machines because of "infamy"? Get a clue.
Again, dismount and join society.
Scott
Example the first: Donkey Kong Country. I'm not going to say it was a stronger game than, say, Yoshi's Island (which they mention in that profile), but it wasn't worthless. It helped to popularize the use of "bonus areas" in every level, and because of that it gained instant replay value. It had two different characters with different abilities that (unlike, say, SMB2) you could swap between. The graphics were godlike for the time. And it came out 11 months before Yoshi's Island, by the way. It was, for its time, an outstanding platformer. The next two, however, were just ripoffs of DKC's formula. THERE'S your hype.
Example the second: FF7. I don't think it wasn't overhyped, but I don't think it was top 10 on this list. It had a huge hype machine backing it up, and after all it was a very good game, so to call it severely overhyped is a bit unfair.
And I wanted to add one game. Banjo-Kazooie... the whole game was like fetch quest city, and it only got worse in the sequel and in DK64.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
Overhyped? Yes.
Overrated, no. It got horrible reviews. How could it possibly be overrated?
I thought this whole countdown was pretty funny. Who better to complain about how games are overhyped than... those who do the hyping!
Let's think about this. GameSpy makes their money from advertising (among other things). Who advertises on their site? The game publishers! So is GameSpy going to publish that a brand new, multi-million dollar games sucks big ones? Nope! The advertisers would leave immediately.
GameSpy, including all the game magazines, can't be relied upon to deliver impartial news and reviews. It just can't happen. All those games are hyped for a reason. The trade press gets their money for doing the hyping.
Never ever trust one of those sites or magazines for impartial initial reviews. I have seen, however, after the game has been out for a while, some impartial reviews. This only happens after the wave of hype has passed. Then, and only then, will you see a game magazine or site say truthful things.
So, to GameSpy and other game press: Stop complaining about the hype, and stop being part of the problem!
Here.
Score: 91
"The final word: Black and White is one of the most unique -- and enjoyable -- strategy games we've seen this year."
Yeah, ok schmeg.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
They're looking back (with the benefit of some hindsight) and saying: "wait, some of those games didn't change the gaming world as much as we thought at the time." Games like DK Country were fun, but it was pretty much a standard platformer, not the "Second Coming of 16-bit" Nintendo wanted us to believe.
When you come down to it, it's all relative anyway. If you liked the game, what do you care? Stop reading articles about games, and go play the damn things!
... but rather overHYPED. Everybody who suffered the misfortune of actually playing that rancid shitstain of a game would RATE the following activities higher:
1. licking clean the toilets at Grand Central Station
2. brushing one's teeth with a random-orbit sander
3. playing Oni
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
1. They consistently go back to their original reviews and say how bad they are. What kind of integrity in reviewing do they expect to drum up if they keep saying that their own reviewing is crap?
2. The get really picky. In the Halo overrate, they talk about how it did all these things right, and then decide to pick on how is just sucks they couldn't use a mouse. I'm sorry, but I believe this is a REVIEW, not a statement that the game is overrated. I'll also go on record as saying that while 90% of the world may believe that a mouse with it's pinpoint accuracy ability is peachy keen in die hard competition FPS's, the rest of the single player gaming world does not agree. For Halo, the controls were configured almost perfectly to put everything I'd want at my fingertips in a highly intuitive manner. The reason I like and have played Halo through numerous times (6 now I think) is the ballet like manuevering and tactics that the game has become for me, it's like an art, one that I have yet to replicate. Now move to Unreal Championship, I'll agree, it's painful to not have a mouse, but the game moves so freaking fast you need the speed and accuracy of the mouse.
3. They also seem to really just have picked that "The New Game God's" issue of PC Mag (which someone mentions in the GS article) and taken everyone in there and basically determined all the work that was judged awesome back then was crap.
4. The major problem is that a lot of company's OVERHYPE (which is what the article should have been dealt with) games.
I'm rambling and incoherent. I just hate to see that Gamespy is turning out crud. Especially since they want everyone to pay them for subscription services.
I don't like FF7 much myself (I prefer 6, 8, and 10), but that doesn't mean it deserved every drop of hype it received. Yes, it lacked a certain amount of polish; but that was largely because at the time it was probably the most ambitious game ever made. In fact, I would go so far as to say that later FF games were slightly less ambitious, if perhaps more polished.
Rough edges aside, though, it certainly wasn't overrated.
I played through Black and White once and loved it, I never played a game so smart but...
It wasn't fun, it seemed like a chore after a few days of playing (teach the monkey, pet the monkey, spank the monkey... hehehehe).
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
Robinsons Requiem and Everquest... the pre-hype on RR was insane, and the game just sucked when it came out... EQ was so hyped up after it came out and it sucked even more.
Penny Arcade's reaction is almost as dumb as the actual list. Final Fantasy VII "deposited the notion of gaming into a new generation"? Use hyperbole much? The ironic thing is this sort of hysterical bullshit alone justifies the inclusion of FF7 on the list. In fact anything that pisses off Penny Arcade is automatically beyond reproach in the greater scheme of things. So congratulations Gamespy.
"I don't know about this game, but that Black and White episode of "Star Trek" sure is overrated! "
Jokes about the topic aren't off-topic. The joke wasn't very funny, but it wasn't off-topic.
"Derp de derp."
Grand Theft Auto and Vice City. Both are virtual sandboxes with dull missions tacked on to torture those massochistic enough to not use codes. Rockstar's pop music soundtracks, celebrity voice-overs and smart advertising conviced people that by playing GTA they were part of something special. The ensuing controversy drove the message home. EGM responded by giving the game three perfect 10s. Sure, these games paved a lot of ground and presented some of the most wide-open levels in history. But when it comes to quality, it's not the thought that counts. GTA is buggy and controls poorly. They hype machine that made both games best sellers makes both the definition of "overrated."
Swearing and pop culture references, impresses the kiddies every time :-)
It was tremendous. I loved the gestures and such. It was a great program.
What? It was supposed to be a game?
Never mind.
BRING BACK DAILYRADAR!
The rest of the games I either basically agree with them, or never heard of. (And I'm ignoring their confusion between overhyped and overrated.)
DOA3, however... had *excellent* gameplay. They accuse it of rewarding button mashing. My roomie's girlfriend played it a bunch, and pretty consistently beat the hell out of button mashers. I knew more of the combos and special moves, and I pretty consistently beat the hell out of her. My roomie had a better feel for the timing and range and pretty consistently beat the hell out of me. (And anyone else that ever played the game.)
They bitch about the counter system... what? What is the complaint? Is it too weak? Too powerful? Frustrating? What's frustrating about it? They say it's "flawed" but wasn't really improved in 3. Ok. I still don't know what that means.
The main reason I ask isn't because I'm positive that it's the best fighter ever. I ask because I'm so fucking baffled why more fighter game fans don't play it. Is there some flaw I'm missing? What's so much better in other games? Please, fill me in.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
b&w was ok... i got it, played it a bit and then after torturing and killing all the island tribesmen a few times got bored.
Shenmue was hyped to an amazing extent, both to players and to developers. Shenmue was going to revitalize the adventure game category, and show developers how games would be made from then on. If you go to Gamasutra, you can actually watch Yu Suzuki's original presentation of the game at the 2000 Game Developer Conference. It's a love-in of epic proportions.
Then the game was actually released. While it excelled in many areas - it had good characters, large environments, lots of interaction, etc, it also suffered from some severe gameplay problems that made it frustrating to play. Couple this with the fact that developers began to realize the resources the game required - five years of work by a one-hundred-person team! - and the development hype wore off as well. Eventually the shine wore off and reviewers began rating the game (or revising their ratings) based on how it actually played.
Disclaimer: I personally love Shenmue, and love its sequel, Shenmue II, even more. But I can recognize overhype when I see it.
So, folks, what are your favorite game review sites?
They complain that there is no multiplayer in the original product and that it was added later. They also sight it was just Quake with better graphics. For the multiplayer section, I think that's a bit unfair, what did most people have then 28.8k so even if multiplayer did ship it would have been quite laggy. Doom III isn't going to have much in terms of multiplayer either is that going to make it over-hyped? I doubt it. Sure multiplayer offers replay value and you can see in games like STEF2 that the screwed up multiplayer aspect with lack of dev support(took too long to get radiant out and it didn't offer much) ruined the games mod potential. However I always like to think of Id games as a demonstration of graphical talent. Its like a vanilla kernel, and games that use it are like patch sets, still using the underlying tech, with changes to it and additions.
I think the whole idea of "top 25 overrated games" was a dumb idea for a list. As Tycho pointed out their criteria for "overrated" varied between:
:
1) over hyped by the publisher
2) over rated by the critics
3) under developed and being rushed to the shelves
4) being a sequel that didn't live up to it's predecessor
With such a wide array of criteria you are sure to piss off most gamers because every gamer has a sacred cow. Maybe that's what they were trying to do to make it a "conversational piece" but I think it alienates their main target audience more.
I've thought of a couple Lists that I think would be much more interesting
1) Best games to be rushed to market (#1 Tribes 2)
2) Most poorly implemented good ideas (#1 Battlefield 1942)
Who can argue that Tribes 2 wasn't rushed to market 6 months to early *cough* UE *cough* . Or that the interface to BF1942 isn't HORRIBLE (ever tried to kick someone? forget it). I mean i loved t2 and played quite a bit of BF, but that doesn't mean they don't have their faults. Instead of saying a game is "overrated" and thereby invalidating everything about it why not point out its flaws in a way that you can't argue with.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
That list is largely useless. Whoever wrote it should take the definition from page one and write it a hundred times.
Daikatana overrated? Puhh-lease, it got slammed in the reviews, and is synonymous with ridicule among gamers.
Explain this, please. SMB2 had 4 characters with different abilities and using certain ones on certain levels made a world of difference. There were definitely areas where the princess was the better choice than toad or vice versa. The only one I rarely used was mario because once of the characters could always do something better than him. I'm not flaming, I just never played DKC so I don't understand the comparison.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
There's only one place on the web where you could say that and not get mentally raped by every single poster in the forum...
Maybe it's just me, but Diablo 2 is the most overhyped game ever made. Game mechanics? Hack'n'slash. Simply hold the mouse over enemies and watch them die. Pick up a cool weapon or two. Rinse lather repeat. The graphics weren't even good. It was kinda like black and white: fun for about a day and then tedium sets in. Black and White at least tried and succeeding in being unique, especially with interface. If anyone can mention one original thing about Diablo 2, I'm all ears.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Well I remember when it came out, and I remember playing it for the first time with friends and roomates that had sega cds, and I remember that there was not a soul that didn't think it was one of the slickest looking games of all time. It had a great soundtrack (one of the best cartridge based anyway) and solid gameplay, even if it was nothing new it was well refined and most of all, fun. The super FX was a major boon to the SNES, but it was already 2 years old when DKC hit the shelves. I would say it was more of a midpoint extender. DKC showed that the SNES could still out perform the psuedo-next generation systems that were being thrown against it.
I think that the thing that most extended the life of the SNES was the fact that the segacd and 32x were such utter crap, the 3D0 was a still born, and PC gaming was for the most part a joke at the time. But hey your entitled to say that a game considered great by many is crap just as i could say that the "Godfather" is a dull cliche movie.
Want some McGridles with that?
the whole "sell out" thing rarely bothers me if the person or thing selling out can still deliver the goods, but IGN went down the road of suck years ago. This latest debacle with the McAdverts is just a nail in the coffin.
Defination of overrated copied and pasted from www.dictionary.com :
overrate ( P ) Pronunciation Key (vr-rt) tr.v. overrated, overrating, overrates To overestimate the merits of; rate too highly.
That said, Gamespy is speaking contradictory to itself based on their previous reviews. There are two reasons for this :
1. The person fails to look at the game in -retrospect- . When Halo came out, everyone was (and some still do) nicknaming the XBox, "The Halo Machine." I have yet to find or hear someone refer to the PS2 as "The System with FFX"
2. A person tends to correct himself when given the opportunity. If given the opportunity, how many of us would take the opportunity to change anything that occured within, say, the last 3 weeks?
I agree. Especially for the first game. For all of the huge amount of development time and money, not much actually happens in the game. Couple that with the fact that the game itself was very slow-paced, you fall far short from the hype.
I agree the second game was significantly better. I didn't even finish the first one, but Shenmue II kept me enthralled nearly nonstop until I finished it. Can't wait for Shenmue III.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
I'm almost positive its the most popular Xbox game STILL.
The gamespy list is most retarded piece of journalism I have ever seen.
I have yet to find or hear someone refer to the PS2 as "The System with FFX"
:) (Well, okay, the Xbox is getting it soon. But the new games in the series are still temporarily exclusive.)
Right, because it's "The System with GTA3".
The article is funny. "Though we were one of the ones to give this game such critical acclaim when it was released, we realize now that we were just riding the bandwagon for fear of having a different opinion" A site like this just shouldn't do an article about overhyped games, cause they are the main ones doing the hyping to start with. What's the point?
These guys are mixing the two up I think.
Games such as Daikantant and Enter The Matrix are in no way overrated. That's impossible:) (Daikatana deserves it, Enter The Matrix does not IMO).
Black and White was overrated, however from what I remember.
But Final Fantasy VII overrated? Hardly. If they wanted to put a FF game in there, they could have put FF VI in there, that was amazing until the end of the Forgotten Island, then pretty much sucked after that. All the character development just kinda stopped. It became like Dragon Warrior, (and not one of the good ones either)
About every review out there rated Soul Calibur (Namco, Dreamcast) as one of the greatest fighting games ever. Truth is, other than the awesome looks, it is quite dull, shallow and uninteresting. The Dreamcast has far superior fighting games, like Project Justice (Capcom), Guilty Gear X (Arc), and The King of Fighters 99 Evolution (SNK).
Circumcision is child abuse.
The criticism of Halo was in quite a few places ridiculous. They bashed it for using a controller to aim, rather than mouse and keyboard. Surely if you're reviewing a console game, you review it in the context of consoles, rather than PCs? The controller aiming is fairly decent in Halo and I don't seem GoldenEye being lambasted in the list for being a console FPS.
It was criticised quite a few times for forcing people to play multi-player on split screen, complaining that 4 people on screen makes for a poor gaming experience. Given that a single console can only be hooked up to one TV, how else do they suggest multiplayer be implemented? To use more than one TV, you'll need more than one console; on the PC, if you want to play multiplayer, you can't unless you have multiple computers, so how is Halo at a disadvantage here? It allows you to play on a LAN, contrary to what one reviewer suggested and gives you the option of playing on a single console. What's the problem here?
Criticism of some of the level design is fair enough, particularly where Library is concerned, but to say 'Worst of all were the levels, which offered fleeting glimpses of brilliance, but all too often degenerated into recycling the same areas over and over until you were bored to tears.' is over-exaggeration. The first 6 levels are all offer very different environments which look amazing and play brilliantly. Level 7 is repetitive. Level 8 is basically 5 backwards, but plays a bit differently, you face different foes and you go to a couple of new places, so it's not boring. Level 9 is superficially similar to 3 but has quite a few different sections and much harder opposition. Level 10 retreads a lot of level 1, but adds a few new sections and lets you drive a warthog about the place. The external environments are all stunning, quite a bit of the indoor stuff looks quite groovy and it's only really the Library that is a let down.
The last guy calls the multiplayer levels unbalanced, messy and boring, but doesn't say which ones or why. The most popular ones are probably Hang em High, Prisoner and Blood Gulch and I fail to see what is boring or messy about any of them. I fail to see what is unbalanced about any of them, especially given that a good chunk of the levels are 90% symmetrical. In fact, he says he doesn't like PC FPSes or 4 player split-screen on a console. I'm not aware of any shooters prior to Halo that could work over a console LAN, so basically his problem is... he doesn't like FPSes, especially multiplayer. That's hardly reason to call a game over-rated.
My final qualm is with their 'been done better before' award. Which console FPS done what Halo does better? They acknowledge lovely graphics. They say the AI is the best they've seen. The 2 weapons thing is innovative. So who did these better?
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Bittorrent file for an amazing video of Super Mario Bros 3. It's pretty sweet, I'm spreading the .torrent link everywhere that I can.