It's review time!

[zuhane]

Here's how the game works:

Basically start by criticizing a game which everyone knows and loves and say why it's not as good as
people say it is, then follow up by praising an overlooked game. Hopefully, this should kick up a good
discussion!

Fallout 3- I think it's overrated. Not much to do, aiming's off, everything depends on how many stimpaks
you have and not on how skilled you are. You can't actually get away from enemies, because they all tend
to run faster than you. Blocking is fairly useless and melee fights don't work properly. After 10 hours of
collecting tin cans and talking to prostitutes, this game goes on my "dusty things" shelf.

Killing Floor- Why-oh-why did it get a Metacritic score of 71%? Sure, it glitches here and there, but it's
MUCH more fun than Left 4 Dead and a hell of a lot cheaper. The aiming is spot on. If you land a headshot, you
get a satisfying splat and the specimen goes flying. On L4D, it just feels like they've been programmed to
collapse on the floor after X amount of bullets touch them. Killing Floor gives out free updates and offers
levellable perks which add hours of fun.

[HobomasterXXX]

Fallout 3, as with any Bethesda game, is 1000x better with mods. And Killing Floor is nothing like L4D, why do people compare them?

[fruckert]

Bioshock: Fairly overrated in my opinion. While, I admit, the story is quite nice, and the world does suck you in fairly well, the gameplay was rather overrated. "Hey look, first person shooter with magic and some customizable elements!" Yeah, I didn't buy it.
After I beat it the second time...I just couldn't really enjoy it any more.
It might just be because I'm a prick and criticize ****ing everything, but whatever.
I am terrific at explaining myself.

I'm having a very hard time thinking of a game that you guys would know of that isn't very universally liked.
Probably because I own very few games.
Only one that I can really think of (which really isn't great) is called Scurge: Hive, which is basically an isometric Metroid clone with rock-paper-scissors enemy weaknesses.
I did have a blast for the month that I was playing it (my DS is neglected, I need to get games for it), but there's a bunch of things that make me want to sodomize my wall:

The enemy balance thing broke up the combat. Badly.
In order to switch weapons, you had to pause the game, and you had to switch weapons CONSTANTLY.
So most of my 10 hours of playtime (I'm not even done with the game) were spent paused.
Or dying.
The game is quite hard.

The isometric perspective is godawful for jumping.

I'm nitpicking, but whatever.
The girls hair makes me want to kill kittens.
It's ****ing 8 feet long for christs sake.

[HobomasterXXX]

I'll do two of the first one because I'm a hateful bastard.

Osmos
This obscure looking indie game was very cheap (2 dollars or so) on steam a few days ago. It had good reviews, so I figured it might be worth a try. Bought it. The basic concept is this- You are a small orb type thing. If you bump into other, smaller orb type things, you absorb them and gain size, allowing you to absorb bigger things. But to move, you have to expell small amounts of your mass in the opposite direction you want to travel, propelling yourself. Your goal is either to consume a certain type of orb thing, or just to be the biggest orb thing in the world. There is nothing more to it. It is the most bland game I've ever played.
Halo
I tried playing it the other day. Played the first 2 hours or so of the singleplayer. It was bland as hell, and bored me to tears. It failed to pull me in and make me want to play more at all. I promplty went back to other, more enjoyable games.

Now, for a positive review-

Penumbra: Black Plague
This game is very overlooked. It's a first-person survival-horror type game, with a heavy emphasis on puzzles. It is probably the first game in years to legitimately scare me.The plotline is very well written, and the scares are legitimately scarey, not like modern games where most of it is "OOH LOOK, A ZOMBIE JUMPED OUT OF THAT AIRVENT" or shock moments like that. One of the best parts of the game is this (spoiler tagged for people who plan to play the game and don't want spoilers):
[spoiler]Your friend, Red, who you only contact through radio, and has been living in the mine long before you came here, tasks you with fetching something from his old hideout. When you go there, it's somewhat tame, a few upturned desks, some dead rats and such. You could easily fetch the item and leave without a second thought. But if you flick on the light switch, UV lighting floods the room, and you can see the manic scawlings of Red all across the walls, written in some UV marker type thing. This also plays into a puzzle, as you have a seemingly blank piece of paper from earlier, but if you examine it under this light it reveals a crucial code to open a door (if I remember right). I probably made that sound really lame, but whatever.[/spoiler]
My only complaint is that the game loses a bit of scare when you realise you can take out all of the enemies with your pickaxe with relative ease. I'm told they removed combat in the sequel.

[zuhane]

Mass Effect- I don't get it. It's like watching the news, but the news is being told to you by
a dying horse in slow motion, so that it takes longer and is less enjoyable than something that
already takes ages and isn't enjoyable. Fights are so incredibly rare, objectives are hazy and
navigation is a pain.

FEAR 2- The reviews are a bit stingy. The game is incredibly polished. Whilst it's just a standard FPS,
it's a very polished and well-made one done to a high standard which can be genuinely frightening at times.

[Valiere]

Old school 2002 Gamecube game review!


Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem...Awesome game, in spite of some oft-reused areas (It's plot-based, if that helps) and a bit of repetitiveness. The magic system, where you mix and match runes to create new spells, is rather cool. Most importantly, the plot is dark and often extremely disturbing (and this is a Nintendo game?), and I have all the respect in the world for a game that utilizes psychological horror instead of jump-out scares. I know everyone raves about the fourth-wall breaking insanity effects, but I find the audio when your sanity bar is super low much more disturbing. There's something about that woman sobbing that gets to me.

[Archem]

Fallout 3, as with any Bethesda game, is 1000x better with mods. And Killing Floor is nothing like L4D, why do people compare them?

In other words, his argument is invalid.

[zuhane]

What are these mods you speak of?

[Archem]

Just check this place out.

[fruckert]

Don't go crazy now.

[HobomasterXXX]

Really, if I played FO3, or Morrowind (to a lesser extent) without mods, I'd have enjoyed it a lot less.

Also, to summarize the bad parts of Mass Effect, in my opinion-

[Archem]

I still don't understand all the bitching. Hell, if it hadn't become an internet whine sensation, I might have never even noticed that the elevator rides were that long.

[HobomasterXXX]

I still don't understand all the bitching. Hell, if it hadn't become an internet whine sensation, I might have never even noticed that the elevator rides were that long.

Maybe it's my PC, but they were pretty damned long for me. Sometimes they'd be around 100 seconds.

[fruckert]

Probably your PC, because they weren't nearly that long on the Xbox.
Although the damn popup does make me want to punch something.

[Archem]

Yeah, I played on Xbox, too. And the popup was obnoxious. I mean, there are worse games out there when it comes to popup, but still.

Yeah, back to my point: The elevator rides were no longer than an elevator ride in real life. Except for the one on the Normandy. I'm serious, you descend at a rate of about six inches per second. As often as I used it and as slowly as it worked, I had the time to do some calculations based on the wall tiles slowly scrolling by.