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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.
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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.
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.
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."
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.
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
Let me rephrase that. In DKC and its ilk, you have, at certain points of the game (most of the time, actually) two characters, a la Sonic 2/3. Usually one just follows behind the other, but you can at any point swap between them mid-level... Diddy jumped higher, while DK had the ground pounding ability and a better jump attack. In SMB2 you could change between the characters, but only when you died or reached a new level.
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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.
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First up, replace "fully" with "pre" and you'll get a head start on where I'm going. DKC is of no technical merit, nor does it contain any original gameplay. It's a platformer notable only for the fact that rather than being hand-drawn, the sprites, background and sprite animations were rendered on a Silicon Graphics machine. The fact that anyone credits it with extending the lifespan of the SNES is beyond me, especially when some seriously innovative development in the form of the SuperFX in-cart chip actually allowed the SNES to render workable 3D.
Donkey Kong Country introduced pre-rendered 3D graphics to the Super Nintendo and thus shortened the gap between the SNES and the PlayStation. Instead of the difference between the two being "2D versus 3D", it became "beautiful 2D versus ugly, clunky 3D". The PlayStation was all set to be regarded as a huge leap in graphical power until Donkey Kong Country came along and ushered in an brief era of games with beautiful 2D graphics and the sort of refined 2D gameplay that people had come to respect from the SNES, essentially making the two systems six of one and a half dozen of another. Different, but equal.
Without Donkey Kong Country, I really don't think that the Super Nintendo would've lasted until the release of Final Fantasy VII. Games like Donkey Kong Country, its sequels, and Super Mario RPG were what held the PlayStation at bay for all that time, and DKC was obviously their forebear. Also, its sales simply couldn't be denied. The difference in graphical power and variety of gameplay should've kept the SNES from ever having another hit after the PlayStation was released, but instead it released the blockbuster DKC, the nearly-as-successful DKC2, Super Mario RPG, and a few others that I'm sure I'm forgetting about.
I don't think the SuperFX chip was quite as revolutionary simply because the way to preserve the SNES wasn't to do a 3D vs. 3D battle with the 32-bit consoles, but rather to refine and beautify what they already had. I think the games' sales also reflected this, because StarFox was the only truly successful SFX game, but DKC, DKC2, and SMRPG were quite popular.
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?
The fact that anyone credits it with extending the lifespan of the SNES is beyond me...
Then maybe you should look at sales numbers sometime. It sold like gangbusters, and single-handedly brought the SNES decisively ahead of the Genesis in sales. It also ensured that the SNES would continue to sell tons of games even with the competition of newer consoles.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
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?