Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[LORD IMPERATOR]

"This popular thing isn't actually good" is the eternal cope of fans of the unpopular thing that sold poorly.

I've seen this way too many times to count. From RPGs, to stealth games, to FPS games, there's always the fans of more obscure games calling the popular game shit because their game only cracked a couple hundred thousand sales while the other game sold millions of copies.

This is the problem. The type of game you love is a miserable experience for anyone who's not in the top 5% of players. You can insist all you want that people should feel a moral obligation to practice, practice, and practice some more until they get into that 5%...but only 5% of players ever will. Most just won't. You can't be upset that they don't, and that their lack of interest in being cannon fodder in Quake or a juggle dummy in a fighting game is a personal failing on their part...but this is just how consumer markets work. Most people don't buy things that they don't enjoy. Products that provide terrible experiences to all but the most committed users just plain do not sell in large numbers, and never will.

Moral obligation? In video games? The only "moral obligation" for video games is preservation of games so that future generations can enjoy them. Otherwise, they're digital toys; you can peruse, enjoy, or dismiss them as you see fit.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I've seen this way too many times to count. From RPGs, to stealth games, to FPS games, there's always the fans of more obscure games calling the popular game shit because their game only cracked a couple hundred thousand sales while the other game sold millions of copies.

The Old Man Murrey article about point-and-click games is eturnal.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

The Old Man Murrey article about point-and-click games is eturnal.

Same thing with later games.

People who were fans of more obscure stealth games hated Metal Gear Solid's dominance.

People who were fans of CRPGs lamented the rise of JRPGs on the SNES, PS1, and PS2, and people who were fans of older RPGs hated the rise of casual Action RPGs like Skyrim and Mass Effect 2.

Fans of many different fighting games hated how Smash Bros dominated the Esports world.

Fans of more obscure shooters tend to dump their hate at Halo and CoD for dominating the market for so long, back in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Backwards compatibility is one of the most advantageous features for a system to have. A system is defined by its library, and backwards compatibility (properly implemented, of course) makes it more than what it is. Think of the Game Boy Advance, one of the reason it's such a great system is that it plays some 2,600 unique titles. As a kid I always wondered why the Game Boy Advance kept its backwards compatibility but then none of the consoles did (yeah, different architecture, but tell me that it wouldn't be cool to stick a cartridge in an N64 and then stick a SNES cartridge into it).

 

[Rick The Stick]

Backwards compatibility is one of the most advantageous features for a system to have. A system is defined by its library, and backwards compatibility (properly implemented, of course) makes it more than what it is. Think of the Game Boy Advance, one of the reason it's such a great system is that it plays some 2,600 unique titles. As a kid I always wondered why the Game Boy Advance kept its backwards compatibility but then none of the consoles did (yeah, different architecture, but tell me that it wouldn't be cool to stick a cartridge in an N64 and then stick a SNES cartridge into it).

Didn't they(Nintendo) do that sorta? I swear there actually was some sort of attachment that let you play SNES/NES games in your N64, and I know they did the GameBoy adapter thing for GameCube too.

 

[Super Hans v2]

Didn't they(Nintendo) do that sorta? I swear there actually was some sort of attachment that let you play SNES/NES games in your N64, and I know they did the GameBoy adapter thing for GameCube too.

There were unlicensed adapters for the N64, but nothing official. There was the GBA adapter for the GameCube, but in typical, faggoty Nintendo fashion games had to be whitelisted to work. Why? Fuck you.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

think CS was astroturfed. I can't definitely prove it, but I feel this way

I dunno man. The first time I played CS was at a LAN party in 2003. They were stuck on 1.5 at the time. But it was the most played game at our LAN. The popularity at LAN parties is what made CS a household name in PC Gaming IMO

 

[Scarthew]

Fans of more obscure shooters tend to dump their hate at Halo and CoD for dominating the market for so long, back in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

Sorry but these don't match the trend. People hate cod for introducing regenerating health, spliting movement into 3 seperate states of walk, sprint, ads so that all of your actions are mutually exclusive dumbing down everything into who hits autoaim(ads) first. While also popularizing hit markers, !!+200!! dopamine signs for every basic action. Or the senseless grinds where you're expected to achieve mundane tasks 100-2000 times to get skins. And if you say "just ignore it" im not the problem, my teammate throwing because hes running around farming knife kills is.

The only good or interesting thing cod did was its point-buy loadout system where you had to make tradeoffs to make a custom "class" that specialized at something and yet nobody copied that aspect of the game. They copied all the worst trends/aspects and still do this day. Gaming as a whole is worse because of CoD.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Didn't they(Nintendo) do that sorta? I swear there actually was some sort of attachment that let you play SNES/NES games in your N64, and I know they did the GameBoy adapter thing for GameCube too.

There was never an official adapter for any system to play previous generations. The Game Boy Player, while functional, didn't have a lot of options (the Super Game Boy had options and interesting features) and the GameCube controller didn't lend itself as a Game Boy style controller, partially due to its lack of a decent D-pad. That's why said "properly implemented".

 

[big pauper]

Sorry but these don't match the trend. People hate cod for introducing regenerating health, spliting movement into 3 seperate states of walk, sprint, ads so that all of your actions are mutually exclusive dumbing down everything into who hits autoaim(ads) first. While also popularizing hit markers, !!+200!! dopamine signs for every basic action. Or the senseless grinds where you're expected to achieve mundane tasks 100-2000 times to get skins. And if you say "just ignore it" im not the problem, my teammate throwing because hes running around farming knife kills is.

The only good or interesting thing cod did was its point-buy loadout system where you had to make tradeoffs to make a custom "class" that specialized at something and yet nobody copied that aspect of the game. They copied all the worst trends/aspects and still do this day. Gaming as a whole is worse because of CoD.

call of duty 2, 4, and world at war were fantastic cinematic single player shooters. it takes after the set piece school of level design where you're constantly railroaded through finely crafted experiences - that king kong game comes to mind too. I think just about the only real bad thing the games introduced was the screen jelly and regenerating health but that exists so the game is faster paced and so the player takes more risks, and its not really worth bitching about

 

[WULULULULU]

I dunno man. The first time I played CS was at a LAN party in 2003. They were stuck on 1.5 at the time. But it was the most played game at our LAN. The popularity at LAN parties is what made CS a household name in PC Gaming IMO

If your internet cafe doesn't have CS, you should just shut down.

call of duty 2, 4, and world at war were fantastic cinematic single player shooters. it takes after the set piece school of level design where you're constantly railroaded through finely crafted experiences - that king kong game comes to mind too. I think just about the only real bad thing the games introduced was the screen jelly and regenerating health but that exists so the game is faster paced and so the player takes more risks, and its not really worth bitching about

Hey man, whats with the hate for 3 all of a sudden?

 

[The Last Stand]

Hey man, whats with the hate for 3 all of a sudden?

I assume Call of Duty 3 you’re talking about. CoD3 does have unskippable cutscenes in place for intermission breaks, quick time events, awkward controls and no sprint. I can see why it’s the black sheep in the CoD franchise.

 

[trent]

I assume Call of Duty 3 you’re talking about. CoD3 does have unskippable cutscenes in place for intermission breaks, quick time events, awkward controls and no sprint. I can see why it’s the black sheep in the CoD franchise.

I might be misremembering but didn't it also have a bunch of random difficulty spikes and sections that were basically instadeath if you didn't play them exactly how the dev wanted?

 

[big pauper]

Hey man, whats with the hate for 3 all of a sudden?

i just never played it. or the first one. i just don't have an opinion on them. black ops was kind of shit but the cold war setting was enough for people to give it a pass - the poo brain design had started to set in

 

[Nick Gars]

"This popular thing isn't actually good" is the eternal cope of fans of the unpopular thing that sold poorly.

While this is true in some cases, I often find the popular thing is blown wildly out of proportion and is nowhere near the quality I was "sold on" by word of mouth. It's why I fucking despise the Legend of Zelda series. They're good games, sure, but they're nowhere near the "second coming of Christ" levels of wank they get.

Then you got shit like Earthbound, where the fans treat it like Jesus himself jizzed on a cartridge, when its a mediocre as fuck RPG only special for its setting in a time of solely fantasy RPGs.

 

[Calandrino]

've seen this way too many times to count. From RPGs, to stealth games, to FPS games, there's always the fans of more obscure games calling the popular game shit because their game only cracked a couple hundred thousand sales while the other game sold millions of copies.

Statistically, 90% of people have below average intelligence, and they make their purchases accordingly

 

[Green Kitbash]

Call of Duty's fall off is easy to pinpoint, and it happened wirh possibly the best game in the series wirh Black Ops 2. Before that they were basically a Tom Clancy movie but presented in the same way Half Life did. And once it started having pre rendered cutscenes and shit happen outside of player POV it lost a lot of what made it engaging. COD got a lot of hate but it was basically Half Life without the fluff and more action, which I dunno when playing a video game Im gonna go for more action and less fluff all the time. COD4 might be 4 hours long but you were getting way more bang for your buck than other games around then time. Keep in mind this was the start of the storytelling wank era that happened every couple of years so it was back to being fresh as Half Life clones were dying off in favor of Halo clones

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Statistically, 90% of people have below average intelligence, and they make their purchases accordingly

People say that all the time, but when you look at these more "obscure" genre games, you find that they have very little to offer which the main breadwinner titles do not have.

 

[Scarthew]

Call of Duty's fall off is easy to pinpoint, and it happened wirh possibly the best game in the series wirh Black Ops 2. Before that they were basically a Tom Clancy movie but presented in the same way Half Life did. And once it started having pre rendered cutscenes and shit happen outside of player POV it lost a lot of what made it engaging. COD got a lot of hate but it was basically Half Life without the fluff and more action, which I dunno when playing a video game Im gonna go for more action and less fluff all the time. COD4 might be 4 hours long but you were getting way more bang for your buck than other games around then time. Keep in mind this was the start of the storytelling wank era that happened every couple of years so it was back to being fresh as Half Life clones were dying off in favor of Halo clones

Actually CoD lost popularity as it experimented with cool mechanics. Things like wall runs and air dashes which alienated common players either because it added some level of skill expression or because it wasn't realistic and mid-wits are attracted to superficial things.

See, to me something like ADS is bad because its an unnecessary state change muddying actions. To the average casual player ads is immersive and makes it feel like you're handling a real gun. Most players ONLY care about the superficial.

 

[The Last Stand]

Backwards compatibility is one of the most advantageous features for a system to have. A system is defined by its library, and backwards compatibility (properly implemented, of course) makes it more than what it is. Think of the Game Boy Advance, one of the reason it's such a great system is that it plays some 2,600 unique titles. As a kid I always wondered why the Game Boy Advance kept its backwards compatibility but then none of the consoles did (yeah, different architecture, but tell me that it wouldn't be cool to stick a cartridge in an N64 and then stick a SNES cartridge into it).

I think of the PS2, DS Lite, and first generation Wii for why backwards compatibility is an underrated feature. Their massive libraries are expanded through backwards compatibility of their preceding consoles. Controllers and memory cards notwithstanding, there's no special whitelist, no dongles to buy, no configuration to set up. Just insert the disc or cartridge, press a button, boom, the system recognizes it out the box. I miss that.