Like video games? Like lists? Here's five of Tom's most overrated video games....
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| "This IS SPARTA!!!" |
Let's preface this list by saying that no one is saying these are the worst games out there. Tom is saying that they're simply over rated. Let's not get our panties all knotted up, boys and girls.
5. God of War - This game and series suffers from many of the same problems as Uncharted, found later in this list. The best parts are dumbed-down to QTEs, where you watch the action and wait for a prompt telling you what button to press. Whee. The combat was impressive at the time, if only because they fit so many enemies on the screen at once. The problem with this, of course, is that you can't tell what the hell is going on most of the time. Button mash, button mash, button mash some more until only the big bad dudes are left, then have a decent fight. The environmental "puzzles" are laughably easy and add nothing to the gameplay.
5. God of War - This game and series suffers from many of the same problems as Uncharted, found later in this list. The best parts are dumbed-down to QTEs, where you watch the action and wait for a prompt telling you what button to press. Whee. The combat was impressive at the time, if only because they fit so many enemies on the screen at once. The problem with this, of course, is that you can't tell what the hell is going on most of the time. Button mash, button mash, button mash some more until only the big bad dudes are left, then have a decent fight. The environmental "puzzles" are laughably easy and add nothing to the gameplay.
4. Braid - I have a special hatred for Braid, and
it's the only game on this list that is actually bad. This boring puzzle game
masquerading as a deep, philosophical satire of the gaming industry has fooled
so many people. "What does the ending mean? Nobody knows! That's the
beauty of it!" Bollocks!!! Yeah, I know...... if you don't like it,
you just don't get it. Well, according to the creator of Braid, Jon Blow,
there is no definitive ending. "I could write a novel about all the
aspects of Braid, and still not scratch the surface of what it's really
about."
Hey, I love ambiguous endings as much as anyone.
The Sopranos, No Country for Old Men, and Dark Souls did them brilliantly. I
had to endure hours of tortuously tedious physics puzzles, just to
get to a quote from the creator of the nuclear bomb. Ooh, what does it mean?
The hero of the game is really the villain? I couldn't care less. Critics were
so afraid of looking stupid, they refused to give Braid the crappy score it
deserved.
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| "Duke Nuke Em kicked my ass!" |
3. Halo - I'm probably going to catch a lot of
flak for this one, but that's okay. First off, I'm not a "hater." I
gave the first three games full play throughs before reaching the conclusion
that this series is extremely overrated. If it had been released on the PS2 or
Gamecube, it wouldn't have gotten nearly as much fanfare. But since it kept the original Xbox afloat
for its first three years, people treat it like a masterpiece.
The story, characters, and gunplay are all
competent, but nothing about them stands out to make it a true gem. And all the
people who claim that this game brought the FPS from PCs to
consoles should do a google search for Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64. It
came out years before Halo.
2. Uncharted 2 - Oh, the love for Uncharted 2. It
swept nearly all of the Game of the Year awards when it was released in 2009.
It wasn't in my top five. First things first, everyone talks about the
"epic" train scene at the beginning, where our hero Nathan Drake,
hobbled from a gunshot to the gut, is barely hanging on to a train that's
teetering dangerously over the edge of a cliff. To be fair, the scene is
graphically beautiful. The problem? You barely interact with the damn
game during the whole scene!
Many people referred to this game as the one that
blurred the lines between movies and video games. In reality, it accentuated
the disconnect between the two mediums. Having this character in such a
perilous, hopeless situation, with only a press of the "x" button
needed to get him out of it, ruined the experience for me.
The rest of the game features many scenes like
this that are barely interactive, interrupted by mediocre gunplay and simple
environmental puzzles. Real gamers know that Naughty Dog used the Uncharted series to perfect the Playstation 3 technology so that they could make their
real masterpiece, The Last of Us.
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| "I'm so cool...and deep that I don't even have to talk." |
1. Half-Life 2 - Many respected publications,
websites, and industry insiders list this as their number one game of all time or at least in the top five. They give baffling reasons for having placed it so
highly.
"It set a new standard for pacing". What!? It's a FPS where you move from scene to scene, shooting things in the
head. Brilliant. "It establishes emotional connections never before seen
in the genre, particularly the bond between Alyx and Gordan Freeman". There's a scene where you play catch with Alyx's robot dog, and... not much
else. "The set pieces were mind blowing, considering it was 2004". Okay, I remember the big chimney falling down when I was jet skiing around and
it was cool. Cheers for that!!!
Again, I'm not saying it's a BAD game; far from
it. But the ridiculous amount of fanboy love that has risen over the past
decade, largely in part due to Valve's refusal to release a sequel, is annoying
beyond belief. It's an above average FPS; nothing more.
So there you have it, five of the most overrated video games. Agree? Disagree? Have a list of your own? Comment below!
-Tom McDaniel