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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 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
Want to know which game site you can trust?
The one that doesn't presume it knows so much that they can spew out a Top X Games of all time in Category Y.
I seriously hate this make a list journalism. To top it off, Gamespy's retarded.
Look at some of the games that made it. Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. This is highly overrated...by WHO?! I don't know anyone who likes this game...or Daikatana for that matter. I think they started making an Overhyped list and then realized, "Oh wait a second, they advertise WITH US...we can't make fun of them!"
Then Starfleet Command...who here has played this besides me? And I liked the game. If you don't, it's probably because you didn't like Star Fleet Battles, the game it was based off of.
I figured games.slashdot.org was for game news, not the latest crap article someone was spitting out. Hey, when's the next new insertcredit incisive something or other coming out? I need see if there's really something worse than Gamespy out there now.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
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."
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
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.
At the time, some did complain about the "Popeye" look to the character models. That's not something new that Gamespy writers just thought of while looking back at the game.
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?
Gotta agree on this one. Anything involving a globe-spanning quest and someone bringing a meteor down right on a huge city seems epic to me too.
Ok, ok, sure in FF6 the world was actually nearly destroyed
Destroyed once, damaged by a huge beam from a towering fortress later. Gotta love Kefka.
Was FF7 overrated when it released? Hell no.
Hell yes. People heaped praise on it and it received nearly perfect review scores. I'd call that overrated, though not necessarily the seventh most overrated game ever. Overhyped, definitely.