There are no doubt thousands of landfill-fodder games that mercifully no one has ever heard of, so it's probably best to stick to games that are somewhat mainstream...
RPG
- Final Fantasy X: (and to some extent, all of them) Two words: voice acting. These are jaw-droppingly pretty eye-candy games that often do have fun subgames, but the characters you will, almost without exception, completely despise within minutes for the chintzy awful and above-all whiny voice acting given to them. The writing isn't far above pre-teen level either. Perhaps the Japanese dialog has more depth, but given its overall thinness, this seems doubtful. The turn-based combat genre has become a very threadbare worn-down formula, with FF trailing the pack in terms of doing anything to break out of this stale mold.
If by "any of them", you mean "X and its sequel", then I'd agree. Final Fantasy 1 - 9 (I guess 11 counts too) didn't have any voice acting at all, and were hardly "jaw-droppingly pretty"... I guess your complaint about the writing is still valid for all Final Fantasy games though. Still, I'm not really sure what you expect out of a video game created for kids to people in their early to late teens. The Final Fantasies had, arguably, the best plot & writing during the NES and SNES days (which isn't really saying much) and most of the
PlayStation era as well. Part of the reason they seem so shallow today is that the gaming audience has matured, along with most of the games themselves. //
Thanks, I originally wrote that on the rather disappointing FFX, but feeling curmudgeonly, I expanded it to all of them
- Haven't played any of the recent ones; played the early console versions quite a bit though. The early ones, while nothing spectacular, were amusing -- especially for the AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs-esque dialog that kept popping up. And who could forget the epic battle with the giant wall at the end of one level in FF3 or so. That's right, folks, a turn-based battle between sword-and-magic-wielding characters and the most ridiculous Boss Character ever created -- a giant moving wall, intending to crush the heroes like the trash compactor in StarWars. Each turn, the characters would take a whack at the wall with their swords or whatever weaponry they possessed -- or cast spells on it -- and then the wall would jump on them and inflict hit-point damage. Any character whose HPs reached zero was deemed crushed. It may have been FF4 or FF5 -- it's been so long ago -- but the entire scene was priceless.
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- Boss Character: Computer-game speak for the powerful bad-guy at the end of a level, who must be defeated to advance to the next level. Some of these are unmemorable, some of these are scary, and some are downright laughable.
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- The most riduculous bosses:
- The giant moving wall at the end of one of the FinalFantasy series (AnswerMe: which one?)
- The "great mighty poo" from Conker's Bad Fur Day. Don't ask.
Action
- Doom 3: Apparently there was a directive to make the theme in the game very dark, and apparently they took it quite literally. As one anonymous reviewer sarcastically noted, the game is set in an alternate universe where the laws of physics preclude photons from reflecting off of solid surfaces to produce ambient light. All the effort of creating this game went into visuals so detailed that they simply cannot all render on today's graphical hardware, which could explain why the game is absent of anything else to compel interest or even long attention. Turn around a corner, there's a zombie. Open a door, there's a zombie. No surprises are offered or expected. Typically no more than one or two enemies will appear at a time, given that the engine simply can't handle the massive hordes of the original Doom, making this game more like Quake 4 with a Doom skin. Id makes a fabulously pretty engine, but has demonstrated that it cannot create a story or even design adequately interesting scenes.
- Agree:
- Disagree:
- Doom 3 is worth playing, but don't expect innovation. It has a mood and loose story frameork that works. I enjoyed playing it, up until I ran into a part that was just plain frustrating and out of place (a Nintendo-style boss monster). Its greatest flaw is that it could have used editing. The game as it stands doesn't have enough variety to warrant the number of levels in it.
Real Time Combat/Strategy
- Homeworld Cataclysm: An attempt to create a follow-up to Homeworld, this beater by Barking Dog Studios was so full of bugs that it was practically unplayable. Too bad, because the story was excellent, the character development of the clans was wonderful, the new weapon systems were really nifty, and the graphics were acceptable. I particularly appreciated the idea of the average Joe clan becoming the potent Beast Slayer through hard work and determination. Very nice. How sad that Barking Dogpoop couldn't get the game to perform at all. They only put out one update that didn't address any of the real problems. No expansions at all. Oy.
- Agree: MartySchrader (review author; bugs include: carriers refusing to fire on enemy ships of any type, mothership that tumbles on a random axis, support modules that won't heal, even when assisted by repair ships, mega-cannon that fires in a random direction despite repeated efforts to aim at an enemy battle group. Many more, but it's been 10 years and I forget the minor ones.)
- Disagree: SimonHeath (I've played it several times and never encountered any bugs apart from slightly flaky graphics drivers)
- O.R.B. (Offworld Resource Base): Yick. I simply can't say enough bad things about this game. Strategy First spent a great deal of time, effort, and money developing and promoting this game. Why couldn't they have simply play tested it? Any standard issue 15 year old gamer could have pointed out the lameness of this game and saved the gaming community much headache and fist pounding. The units are not flexible at all. There is a huge disparity of unit capabilities, and little overlap. The armor vs warhead balance is way the heck off. Production times and costs are way out of balance. Then there is the Artificial Stupidity, completely unique to this game. No other game has units that will park in space directly in the path of an orbiting asteroid and wait to be hit and destroyed by said rock. The bugs are incredible, too. No need to go into more detail, you've heard enough.
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Computer Games Not Worth Playing