Thursday, July 26, 2012

4 Absurdly Overrated Videogames

Often we confuse something being critically acclaimed as actually being good. Just because something gets decent reviews doesn't mean it's actually good, especially with videogames. Most of the time these reviews are based on only playing the game for a select amount of hours. Here are some of the most overrated videogames.

Grand Theft Auto 4 GTA 4 is the highest rated game on metacritic (a site that compiles reviews from all over) and is one of the best-received games of all time. I remember going down to Gamestop with my college friends at midnight and purchasing it when it came out only for us to be like, “ehh…this is okay.” I’ve been absolutely puzzled by this games critical acclaim ever sense.

The main “beef” I have with GTA 4 is that it added “realism” to the franchise. Apparently realism means cars handling like big roller skates, being pulled over for driving drunk, and having to hang out with your virtual friends in the game. For a game that many critics called “perfect” I found myself annoyed at these things and I also found the story to be pretty mediocre.

I think in a game about being a maniac Russian immigrant set lose on a fictional New York City the last thing I’d want to happen is to be pulled over for drunk driving. Especially since the mechanic is the minute you drink and get even near a police car they immediately know you’re driving drunk and chase after you like you just beat an innocent bystander with a baseball bat. Did the New York County Sheriffs Sponsor this game or something? Drive drunk and they will know!

Even worse is when you progress through the game you start to make friends and those friends want you to pick them up and take them to do stupid things in the game. Seriously, the amount of time I wasted picking someone up, taking them to play pool, darts, get drinks, and then dropping them off is absurdly stupid. I’m playing a videogame if I wanted to be hanging out with my friends, I’d go hang out with my friends. It’d be one thing if this social mechanic isn’t an absolute bore to deal with but it’s just a total waste of time.

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"You want to hang out, again? We just played darts yesterday, asshole"

Also, the graphics were made out to be some of the most amazing graphics you’ll ever see. However, everything just kind of had a bland look to it with grey and brown overtones. If that’s what realistic graphics mean then I will take anything else. There were also tons of graphical glitches and people popping in and out of building and cars.

It’s not that GTA 4 is not a very good game, because it is. It’s just certainly not a masterpiece. It is very derivative of the previous GTA’s and really not much in the game made ever me think, “Wow, I’m playing the best game ever made.” It’s not the best game ever made and you’re a fool if you think that.

Diablo III – This is one of the most controversial videogames ever released and let me save you some time, it sucked. If Diablo III was not a Blizzard game, and was not called Diablo, it would’ve received atrocious reviews. It’s just a crappy game anyway you cut it.

The game is comprised of 4 Acts and only the 1st of these Acts isn’t a completely rushed disaster. The story of the game not only ruins pretty much every character they established in the 1st and 2nd Diablo, but is painfully stupid and short. If you are someone who plays through games quickly you’ll beat Diablo in about 12 hours. This is a game that’s been talked about for over 10 years and you just beat it in 12 hours, way to go Blizzard.

“That’s how the game’s designed though, you’re supposed to play through it on all the difficultly levels to get better loot,” cry all the blind Blizzard supporters. That’s just painfully stupid and there is simply no excuse whatsoever for a game to have a really crappy story. If they wanted the player to play through the game a bunch of times they should’ve made the story tolerable or at least made the player be able to automatically skip the cut scenes.

I managed to play through three of the four difficulty levels in the game with my Barbarian named Dolph Lundgren. At the end of the “Hell” difficulty Dolph was level 60 and ready to face the toughest difficulty level, Inferno. Only Blizzard designed the game so that right around this time good loot just stops dropping. I couldn’t even get half way through Act I on the toughest difficulty because I didn’t have good enough gear to do so.

They did this in order to make more money off a rushed completely crappy game to begin with. They wanted me to grind gold for hours off monsters in order to buy good gear at the Auction House. Who the hell finds that fun? What a freaking waste of time. I could opt to use my real money to buy items at the Auction House as well, but that’s just disgusting.

This is not to mention that the Diablo III servers are pieces of freaking crap. The game seemed to never work when I wanted it to work and I felt like I was back on my Packard Bell in the 90’s when it was a serious challenge to get games to work. They knew how many people were going to try to play this game and completely failed to provide enough server space for people to play it. Again, they were thinking about profits and not actually providing a great game for people to play.

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Sorry, you cant play because we didn't spend enough money for servers

A cash grab is the only way to describe Diablo III. It’s a stripped down and rushed version of the previous game that Blizzard wants you to pump more money into than you’ve already paid. Diablo III not only doesn’t deserve the praise it’s received, it deserves to have some sort of lawsuit pressed against the company who created it.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Calling this game overrated will probably cause some Nintendo fan to sneak into my apartment and attempt to murder me. Unfortunately, despite getting fantastic reviews across the board, Skyward Sword is just kind of a crappy game. It’s the same Zelda formula you’ve played for 10 years; meaning the story is painfully stupid, the characters are painfully annoying, and it doesn’t have voice acting. Oh, and motion controls are still a really bad idea.

Seriously, someone has to explain how anyone could call this game a “masterpiece.” Even when it’s evaluated in some sort of Zelda only vacuum it’s easily the worst one. I happened to play this game a few weeks before it came out because of a magic power I possess called the Internet, and when the perfect score reviews started rolling out my jaw dropped. Really, what game were they playing?

The motion controls are certainly the best in any Wii game I’ve played but that doesn’t mean they don’t completely suck and add nothing to the game at all. Pretty much every single thing you fight in the game requires you to swing the Wii-Mote in a certain direction and that almost never seems to work correctly. You travel to each of the three worlds (only three, I know right?) by flying on this big stupid bird thing that requires you to flap the Wii-Mote like an idiot. It not only is completely unnecessary but it also hurts your arm to do.

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Seriously, what the fuck is that thing?

I don’t think I really need to describe much of this game to you because you’ve probably played it before if you’ve played any Zelda ever. There’s still no voice acting for no apparent reason and the story basically consists of Link following Zelda around and proving he can fight this stupid guy that’s kidnapped her. At least this one set up some kind of relationship between Link and Zelda and didn’t just make you assume you have to save her because that’s just what you do in these games.

Like I said, even for a Zelda game this is a pretty crappy game. If you are absolutely in love with Zelda games you will probably love this game to. It doesn’t take away from the fact that by all the standards that we should be using to judge videogames at this point in time, it sucks.

Gears of War – One of my good friends convinced me to buy this along with my Xbox 360 after my freshman year of college. When I turned it on I didn’t understand the appeal of it and I still don’t understand the appeal of it. I have to talk about this one because after being so appalled by it I didn’t bother to buy the sequels assuming they’re more of the same. (I’d be totally shocked if they weren’t)

The best way to describe this critically acclaimed game is “grey.” Everything in this game is grey with brown smeared in it. Somehow these are perceived as some of the best graphics ever known to man but to me, they were dreadfully depressing. Who wants to run around in this grey world? I’m from upstate New York, most of my existence has been living in a grey world.

IGN
Is there anything in this picture that's not a combination of grey and brown?

This is another game with super “realistic” graphics that didn’t impress me at all. I get that it’s post apocalyptic game but really this style of graphics just caused everything to look the same. I didn’t even know whom I was supposed to be shooting at half the time, unless I was playing it online.

Gears of War also has to be blamed for every single game becoming a cover shooter. Hell, even Mass Effect became a cover shooter instead of an RPG. At least Mass Effect did it well as opposed to Gears of War where your back is like magnet just seeking out the next half sized wall. Seriously, in what world are there just perfect cover sized walls just sitting everywhere? If the zombie apocalypse occurs does that also mean that all our walls are going to suddenly crumble in half so we can take appropriate cover?

My friends insisted that the multiplayer is the reason to buy Gears of War though. It had to be because it couldn’t be the testosterone infused story that I played for about 3 hours before I realized I needed to slam down 8 Bud Lights to get in the right mental state to play it. I’m typically pretty good at games like this but not only was I terrible at Gears of War there was this stupid mechanic that made everyone who wasn’t the host of the game lag. This caused 1 person on the 4v4 matches to basically just have super powers because of his greater Internet connection. This was not my idea of fun and while I don’t really love shooter games, Halo and Call of Duty blow this out of the water.

This is one of the games people buy Xbox 360’s for and I can’t imagine them not being disappointed. Gears of War and both its sequels received great reviews and if they all sucked as bad as the first one, this is completely unwarranted. I haven’t heard very good things and that’s from people who really enjoy the series.

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