You know, over time, when you get older you start to realize that most games you enjoyed in your youth aren’t all they’re really cracked up to be. Infact, you’d think you were brain dead retarded when you first loved them. I know the feeling from countless N64 games (Don’t know what I saw in Space Station Silicon Valley).
Often times, for the sake of being “brutally honest” (a euphemism for “controversy baiting”), several reviewers, bloggers, and even journalists will outright attack what is deemed a “sacred cow” in the hardcore world. Xplay went out on a limb and said FF7 sucked just to generate hate mail. Square tards used to be that easy to rile up back then. Unfortunately, you never see anyone rip any of these games to shreds. These are games that are damn near immune to criticism but could be some of the biggest pieces of shit to grace a gaming device.
Lets be frank here, I love Treasure Inc. They’ve made some of the best action games in the history of action gamedom, from Alien Soldier to Mischief Makers and even Sin and Punishment 2 on the Wii. Hell, even Bangai-O has it’s moments. But when it came to the GBA, their output equated to an inert brick. If you’re not a fan of slowdown, the GBA was not the portable to own, but those problems seemed quadrupled when Treasure is around. Or more specifically when they’re being jerked around by the assholes at SegaSammy. Here’s an idea folks, how about not making a game that looks too damn blurry to see!
I’ve hated games that scrolled the screen too fast for you to notice any nearby enemies and while GSH isn’t that bad about it, combined with muddy ass sprites and enemies that blend a little too well with the scenery (even without matching colors!) becomes a piece of fecal matter and a peanut. A pain in my ass. But lets not forget about the combat, the one element that was supposedly improved in this sequel where your character is given melee attacks that feel more tacked on than they feel practical. While you’re flying around the room showing off your wire fu, enemies are free to fire away with their guns and turrets knocking you on your chaps, crying for relief along the way.
But don’t worry. Combat is still relatively fun… when you’re actually in combat. The jackoffs at SegaSammy had a sip of Nintendo’s vanity juice and decided to cram in several of their unmemorable arcade games. After Burner only works when you’re able to move your game character, Sega! Not just rotating the screen to avoid 2-dimensional missiles that make depth perception impossible to discern. When you’re not doing that, you have little chickens to find in a disorientating forest that for some goddamn reason ROTATES when you move! Not only is this a fetch quest, it’s a spinning labyrinth that you get lost in even though it’s tiny! And how many people actually enjoyed Flicky!? It was a crappy arcade game that Sega seems to adore, they shoved it into so many unnecessary games like Sonic 3D Blast and Mega Collection. Here’s, it’s a much greater pain in the ass when you’ve got enemies who can knock your collection of future KFC prey back onto the map and then you’re back to finding them all over again. FUN RIGHT!? Ah, but then there’s a top down version of Sega’s “Thunder…. name I can’t remember”. Here, you’re in a chopper dealing with walls and tiny ass enemies and bullets you have no real means of avoiding. This segment is a glorified endurance test. It’s slow, it’s very tedious, and takes up more time than the whole level itself.
For a game that’s listed as a “run and gun” game, you spend more time NOT running and is instead chained to some arbitrary minigame shitfest like the board game that should never have returned from the original game! Here’s a nice concept, if you’re at the finish line and you roll a number bigger than the amount of spaces you need, you go to a garbage dump! What do you here? You play Mr. Driller with a Desert Eagle. You fail, you die and start over. You succeed? You… start the fuck over anyway. What a genius idea! Create a minigame based around CHANCE… and create a reward and punishment based on events that are completely out of control! Hey Capcom, tired of leaps forward in fun factor for Devil May Cry 4!? Well get ready to take a step back to the world of Gunstar for ideas in how to piss off your fans!
That’s all this game is. 30% run and gun, 70% w/e bullshit these bastards have in store for you! Good thing it’s short! Right? RIGHT!?
What a fucking pile! I’ve been a staunch detractor of the “puzzle platformer fetch quest” fad that successfully died around 2003, but for good reason, Banjo Kazooie sticks out like a sore thumb. Mainly because I got a video copy of this game’s trailer in the mail that spelled out all the nuances of this nonsense. Most shit stain platformers at least came with decent attacks that didn’t feel awkward in 3D. Even Mario Sunshine has better combat! You know how we evolve Mario 64’s combat system? How about we give these characters a shit load of moves that eat away at their supplies!? A platforming game with the micromanagement BS we’ve dealt with from games like Resident Evil and every RPG in existence! You need red feathers just to fly and do crazy shit, gold feathers to make you invincible, eggs just to use your one and only useful attack in the game, shooting and shitting at enemies!
9 of the most uninspired worlds in the history of gaming. You get some random mountainside, a beach, a sewer, a swamp, a snow place, a desert, a haunted house, a ship harbor, and a forest that became the inspiration for Zelda Oracle of Seasons. At the same time, at least most other platformers had sensible explanations for how characters could travel to different worlds. Mario 64 had magical paintings, Vexx had portals, Jak and Daxter is really just one big open world island. Gruntilda’s mountain just has… caves and pipes. All of which you had to piece together several puzzle pieces just to fucking access! Great, so when I get said number of puzzle pieces, I now have access to the next world… no I don’t! Unfortunately, there’s this arbitrary door in my way that says I need a large ass number of music notes just to progress! Holy shit, 2 SEPARATE MACGUFFINS TO LOOK FOR! Double the fetch quest obviously means double the fun! What a bunch of dicks, you require 2 separate sets of items to progress through the game. Collecting puzzle pieces just wasn’t enough for these sadistic bastards, now I have another relic bundle to keep track of while I revisit the same locations over and over just to find shit.
And what is all of this for!? To save Banjo’s little sister? Why was she captured!? Because this wicked witch needs tootie’s beauty to not look ugly as hell. I’m sorry, this girl is like… 7 years old at best, w/e beauty she has, it hasn’t bloomed an inch. At least Crash Bandicoot’s sister had jail bait status. And even after you save the tramp after a torture test of a board game, the game still isn’t over. No! You have to find even more puzzle pieces just to fight the final boss herself in what can be explained as my entire reasoning behind why multi-part boss fights suck ass these days. There’s like 5 friggin parts to this whole fight!
Banjo Kazooie has always been undeserving of it’s praise and only seemed to gain it because western 3D platformers were immensely popular for simply being in 3 fucking D! The late 90s was the industry glorifying western platformers as if to claim some sort of triumph in carving a niche of fans that stuck around in a much shorter time than Mega Man’s relevancy. There’s a reason why barely anyone recalls the late 90s 3D platformer saturation, and Banjo’s utter stupidity is proof fucking positive.
3D Platformers are nothing more than glorified Adventure games with an emphasis on exploration to find crap rather than actual challenge. Unfortunately, the western industry is so in love with the adventure genre, they renamed it “Triple A” just to hype that piece of shit genre up.
Of all the rage I spent pissing away on “Into the Nexus”, I’m actually quite glad that my first entries were a bad spinoff and Tools of Destruction. If I had played the first game… first, then I’d never come back to the series. If I played 2 afterward, I would treat Ratchet and Clank the same way I treat Jak and Daxter. Going Commando couldn’t possibly get away with “most tedious Ratchet game in existence” as All 4 One still exists, but going so far as to consider how massively underpowered you will feel through out the course of the game is a start. Damage scaling and ammo starvation create a sense of non-badassery as you find yourself NOT engaging against enemy hostiles and spending more time scavenging for supplies. No matter how many times I upgrade my weapons, they are still no match for the thugs4less enemies that seem more overpowered than the spiders in Devil May Cry.
Why did the first 2 Ratchet games make you afraid of engaging enemies? Especially since the sequel boasted about it’s improved combat system, we didn’t see any actual improvements until the best game in the series, Up Your Arsenal. What you get are weapons that feel like they can do something which seems to only piss off your enemies, and improved controls which is most appreciated (oy, did I just use the “A” word!?). When the game isn’t busy not being shit, it gives you enemies that will completely decimate you with reckless abandon. How fucked is your life when you’re staring down a bridge filled with nigh-impervious tanks? You have lots of ammo deposits emptied where by you have to buy more ammo later on because good luck finding that shit in the wild. Insomniac couldn’t seem to remove the bullet sponge effect as damage scaling in this game was unbalanced. When you have only 2 weapons that are truly useful for anything in the later half the game, you know it’s fucked. At least when the game allows you to use your weapons. There’s one boss fight in the city in which you have to run around and find turrets just to kill a giant robot boss whom you can only seem to tickle. This fight literally took me 20 minutes because I CAN’T UPGRADE RANDOM FUCKING TURRETS!
Ah, but there’s the plot. The first game was compelling enough to see Ratchet and Clank work out their differences to stop a corporate wanker who schemed to destroy the planets of POOR people in order to funnel more money into his bank account. How do you beat that? Why… by making smirf looking Venonats as the game’s new bunches of enemies! I’m wrapping my head around who in the green fuck thought this was a good plot! The only significant aspect of the game was Qwark’s asshattery, but beyond that, this was one game that everyone could skip. Play Up Your Arsenal after the first game, you would barely notice the details.
Say kids, you like execution complexity? Well get ready for a time when fighting game developers knew jack shit about accessibility like oh Idk CAPCOM, the same company that thought using 6 button inputs was a good idea. Of course, everyone would be able to get a handle on the control layout, but slap that shit into CPS2 and prepare for pain. Virtua Fighter players would blush at SFA3’s execution.
Why is it that more than half the roster of characters are practically unplayable? Could be because some of their worst moves are configured to 3 different button inputs? Shit like Guile’s somersault strike super is enough to make any grown man cry at his bleeding palms. What psychopath figured it was a good idea to configure a super motion to a charge DownBack motion, and then rapidly fire DownForward, DownBack, UpForward, Kick just to pull off a most unimpressive super attack that could’ve just been easily configured as a DownForward 2x motion? Apparently the crazy fucks at Capcom! These bastids have move executions that really aren’t befitting of the end result, and the charge times on some of these moves are often too long to be useful.
But that’s got nothing on the gutted Alpha Counter system which is so utterly worthless, it’s not even considered a viable strategy. Along with SC5’s Gutted Impact system, Alpha Counters were unintuitive little shits and giggles where you use up meter just to counter what is essentially a move that would probably not be too dangerous. Reason it’s not recommened is because you fucking need your meter. Street Fighter turned into micromanagement fighter where keeping a watchful eye on your meter became more important than the actual fight, where players would fly around the room whiffing their attacks just to build up enough meter to use their AWESOME SUPER POWERS! That said, why waste Alpha Counters on moves when chip damage doesn’t have that much risk when meter building is just too important!? Not to mention the damage dealt is completely ass in comparison to Alpha 2. Or how about the beginning of the end for rewarding play with the introduction of guard crushes!? You know when fighting games actually required a little defensive tactics every now and then to ensure that you don’t die? Yeah, for some reason developers thought this was problematic and decided “lets change that shit up so there will be more offensive play in mind” which means jack shit for characters with charge motions
I have no clue why Capcom made so many alterations to Alpha 3, maybe they were trying to pound the idea into your head that this is a new game, and to get their point across, they’ve thrown out what works and made illogical changes out of spite. 2 buttons throws are ass, Guard Meter punishes defensive play
Even if you manage to learn any of the overtly inaccessible characters, all of your efforts will be meaningless in the face of Akuma, or more specifically V-ism Akuma. When he’s not busy being the wetdream of every loud mouth kid online in SF4. Akuma is such a one-dimensional character that I’m really not that shocked and angered by his repeat usage anymore, but back then, this bitch was merciless. For those that live in a cave, V-ism gives you custom combos or “gay ass after-images that hurt people”. Activating it means you will dominate almost 100% of the time. Why? Could be thanks to the immense juggling properties the Vism possesses, the Tekken retards would be calling for help. But in the hands of Akuma, you might as well forget the concept of winning. Akuma has always been an overpowered shit stain, but Vism takes his already high-damage and priority moves and amps them up to disproportionate levels. If it’s not VAkuma, it’s the retard FGC that would be in a hurry to find a youtube video of Vakuma losing to a low tier character just to show that Vakuma is somehow not overpowered.
And why wouldn’t you use Vakuma? The roster of characters (being nigh inaccessible) are just boring characters in general. You have characters from an old relic called Final Fight whom’s ass was thoroughly kicked by the supremacy of Streets of Rage. You get Guy and Cody, but then you get 2 total nobodies from the Mad Gear gang. Joy! The highlight of the Alpha series was drawing connections to an old beat em up for no reason other than to have them in the series. Then you get Rainbow Mika who was possibly only added to have a Zangeif with boobs and a stink face move. Other retarded character choices are Karin who is a rich girl and rival to Sakura. WOW! Foreshadowing the irrelevancy of Asuka and Lily in Tekken! Alpha 3 has the most boring and uninteresting roster of characters ever to grace any fighting game second only to Virtua Fighter. Not to mention it’s some prequel so obviously characters look younger in order to appease Japan’s obsession with youth.
Capcom has a nasty habit of creating fighting games with uninteresting characters with the exception of the Marvel vs Series where they practically had no choice but to use all the cool bits for the game. But SFA3 is crammed with no one you want to use. Unfortunately, this trend continued with SF3 and 4.
Speaking of that obsession with youth, here’s another damn prequel starring a high school student named Dante! At least… he looks like one.
Along with Capcom’s obsession with origin stories, this one covers the tale of how Vergil became a boss encounter in the first game, something we can’t help to give no fucks about. Which is ironic given that the only game in the series that has the best narrative unfortunately becomes the least enjoyable entry in the entire series.
Lets take a simplified control scheme from DMC2, a game that is a guilty pleasure of mine, and screw that up with some awkward “style” system which nerfs the dodge function by adding delay and long recovery times while limiting it to a style that gets no other perks like the other 3 styles, one built for sword combos, one built for special gun attacks I think, and another for counter attacks. You know what would be better? Having the ability to switch between all different functions on the fly! I can’t stand games where you’re limited to using certain functions until you’ve completed a level where the option to switch becomes available, or find little nodes in between levels to do so from there.
I haven’t seen where people were so fed up with the difficult aside from 2 boss battles. Agni & Rudra, and motherfucking Vergil. Ok Fine, Vergil’s the main antagonist. He’s supposed to do all the asskicking, but if you needed proof that 3D and action games don’t mix, then look no further than DMC3’s camera and the need to fight 2 bosses at once! And not just any pair of bosses, you’re fighting kung fu legends. 2 big ass statues that took some classes from Hwang from Soul Calibur who decided to use DMC3’s shit camera to their advantage all the while having superior blocking, dodging, and counter attack measures all the while sporting super moves like fiery tornadoes. Wish I could do all that at once, but I don’t have a node on hand, and because you assholes are so cheap, I couldn’t bare facing you 2 without my nerfed evasive maneuver from a previous title! Who the hell thought this was a great idea? DMC is already a difficult enough series, but putting in 2 bosses in a microscopic room with enough clutter to throw you off isn’t my idea of fun.
Infact, the whole game isn’t even fun. Combat becomes a boring chore by the time all the enthusiasm you had for making “sweet looking combos” goes the way of vapor, and the game goes into that “Adventure” bullshit in which you have so much backtracking on hand. You could easily get lost in this game thanks to every area being copy/pasted horse piss as well as having the most unintuitive map and saving system ever. A game where you can easily get lost and not have a viable save function is a double negative, having boss battles that take longer than 10 minutes is a triple negative. The fact that this tween Dante appears in MVC3 over the superior DMC2 awesomeness Dante is a quadruple negative! It’s not compelling, it cannot engage you, it’s combat is even more dull than DMC2’s spammy pistol-whippin fest, it has no convenient game flow, and is a much worse DMC4 gameplay wise.
Trying to go back to playing Metroid 3 is an exercise in boredom. The only thing this game has is atmosphere, although with the existence of REmake on the gamecube, Revelations on 3DS and HD, and even Metroid Prime 1 & 2, Metroid 3 has aged about as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gut.
The first 2 games in the series promoted exploration through choice rather than requirement in which the games possessed items that weren’t mandatory to your progress through the game. Imagine not needing to have the long beam or the screw attack in order to progress, you didn’t have a bazillion fucking obstacles in your way basically shoving into your face that you need X item to progress beyond this point! People have suggested that Aonuma Zelda was guilty of having mechanical overworlds that advertised mandatory items to progress, but all that bullshit started with this game. How many green and yellow doors do I have to pass up before I can find the only blue/red door in the whole corridor? Oh, you wanna bomb this wall to discover a secret passage? Well fuck you loser, you need FLASH boots for this bitch!
You weren’t arbitrarily locked out of an area until you found the appropriate item in the original Metroid (all you needed were missiles for red doors), but for some reason Nintendo seems to think spinning your wheels is an acceptable form of entertainment, which would explain how enabled Aonuma seems to be with all the shitty elements contained in recent Zelda games. How lazy is the “item renting” feature in that shit?
How incredibly obnoxious of the Space Pirates to point out their own little security flaws in order to delay their inevitable destruction? And I mean that literally, this game is piss easy. If not for having stiffer controls than a Classicvania game, you would be able to nuke the entire cartridge in less than an hour. Then again, there’s Phantoon. Fuck Phantoon. That is all.
And for a game that could’ve been described as Survival Horror, it’s not at all scary! It’s got the eerie music and dangerous caverns, but for what it’s worth, it could’ve been a simple remake of the original. Monsters aren’t at all terrifying beyond how tedious they are to deal with. As long as you have enough missiles and super missiles on hand, there is nothing that can stand in your way. There is very little challenge in this game beyond getting lost and a couple handful of boss battles that a lot of times you won’t expect.
If I had to describe my experience with Xenoblade chronicles, I would say I was deluded in a vain attempt to wash out the bad taste Skyward Sword left in my mouth. This game might as well cost 20 bucks.
As a game where you walk around big ass worlds, it rocks as people love to travel. As a game for fun, though, it has virtually no lasting appeal. All of this due to the game’s combat system which is virtually on autopilot for the entirety of the game. If you loved FF7’s RTB system for w/e pantshitting reason, you will fall in love with this game. Don’t expect combat to feel like anything more than a chore as you could pretty WATCH how the game plays out as the characters can fight for themselves. Oh you can use certain skills to increase your chances of winning, but does that really help? Of course not. The most you can do to not die is position yourself where the enemies can’t hurt you, and this is difficult to figure out as specific enemies might have certain effects that you’ll never really know until it’s too late and your teammates start falling one by one.
This would prompt you to use strategy. What kind? Why you keep the fuck away from enemies and do a plethora of shopping lists for lazy NPC’s. And believe me, this is what the majority of your time will be spent doing in Xenoblade Chronicles. Completing the game’s wretched amount of quests simply to gain money and experience points, essentially being a power-leveling fest where you don’t even have to worry about a little thing called “strategy”. But that’s cool, I guess. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to grind by playing these boring ass battle sequences over and over again simply by walking up to enemies and watching my characters hit them.
The story, which lets be real is the only reason people bother playing RPGs in the first place, is actually quite a thrilling revenge story where the main character’s assbitch gets murdered by giant robots… only to come back as a robot herself. Then the story starts going into random mythology nonsense about “Telethia” and some shit called “Zanza”, it gets to the point that the game starts focusing on psychic pokemon that wishes to eat the human race. The story plunges head long into animuville and becomes far too unrealistic for anyone’s taste. It’s got this huge prologue about 2 giant statues fighting each other, then dying where their bodies start sprouting life where 2 different races exist, then it dumps that shit for a race of people with wings on their heads who completely take over the story! I don’t care about these wing cap mother fuckers turning into Green Dialga’s!
Out of all the Rainfall games, Xenoblade is considered a must have, but honestly speaking, The Last Story deserves more attention than it got. It has a REAL combat system, FAR more interesting characters and content, and a much cooler villain who isn’t some nerdy scientist that inexplicably became god for no reason.
Dishonorable mentions go to:
Super Paper Mario
Injustice
Metroid Prime 3
The Medal of Honor series
The Sims
Dig Dug
NBA Hangtime
Gex: Enter the Gecko
GoldenEye 64
Castlevania Symphony of the Night
Conflicting Views 