Over rated / Under rated Games

Balladeer wrote:

Dark Souls.  I've never played it

I thought you were better than that, man, I really did.

Dark Souls is a brutal, difficult game but it keeps pulling you back. And the difficult, vague nature of the game makes it fun and necessary to talk about it.

Call me crazy but I've no real desire to play ds myself, it just kinda creeps my skin a little too much.

Its a game that deserves its plaudits, while I respect that the article writer had a hard time because he didn't know what certain items did, I would argue that he is just lacking basic gamer intuition. I didn't know what titanite did when I first got it, so I read its description because I have played other RPG's in which this happens. I found the gold pine resin because after playing Zelda I know to check every corner for items.

Yes it took me a while to find each items uses but the lack of hand holding just made me feel more immersed in the world. If you take the time to read each items description you can learn a lot about the game. Dark Souls is hardly contemporary.

I would argue that all truly successful RPG games have a smug fanbase. Go take a look at Smogon. (competitive pokemon battling) Or look at some final fantasy fans reaction to ff13. Any of us have the tendency to join in with the clamouring of a favoured game or stand against a game series because 'we don't like it being popular' this includes the article writer. To say Dark souls is unique to this is entirely hyperbole.

To put it simply, if you don't like it then don't listen and don't play. I mean, what is writing an article going to solve, really .

Smogon are awful, but they are at least confined to one website. Also, I feel that the article in general is quite harsh: the DS fanbase as I've experienced them isn't as bad as he makes it out to be. They're not smug or self-satisfied, just... overenthusiastic. Or maybe that's just because this is the nicest place on the Internet?  That said, I completely agree with that one paragraph I quoted.

The_Jaster wrote:

It does bring up a good point but I'd rather have folk raving about something than staying quiet & effectively being selfish by keeping it to themselves but then again I've never been put off by something that is widely popular, if anything it makes me more interested to try it out & make up my own mind about it.

I think there are big gaps between staying selfishly quiet, praising a game, and the level DS praise has reached.  I don't know of a single gamer (on the Internet anyway) who stays selfishly quiet about a game they like - whether it's DS, you lot about Steamworld Dig, Mas about anything on the Dreamcast ever, or me about DKCTF.  And that's fine!

I just feel like DS praise and discussion leaks out everywhere, including places where it isn't really relevant, more often than any other game/franchise at the moment.  Hence the MLP comparison: the reason so many people are so anti-MLP is because of its fans that will come into discussions to which MLP is irrelevant and say, "Ooh, a Pony version of this would be really good!"  Save it for the MLP discussion boards.

Drunkalilly wrote:

Dark Souls is a brutal, difficult game but it keeps pulling you back. And the difficult, vague nature of the game makes it fun and necessary to talk about it.

See my answer to Jas: I've got no problems with talking about any game, vague or not, where it's relevant.

Athrun888 wrote:

Call me crazy but I've no real desire to play ds myself, it just kinda creeps my skin a little too much.  

I dunno if I'd play it if I owned the right console.  I don't like the sound of the gloomy aesthetic or the story being hidden away in item descriptions, but that sounds a lot like Metroid Prime, which is one of my favourite games ever.  But it wasn't unrelentingly brutal, bar the odd boss (Flaahgra  ).

Ah, I think I see what you mean now. However I find MLP easy to avoid, I don't try to understand it, I don't want to understand it and whenever it comes up I just glaze over and move on to the next comment. Yes this may be ignorance but it serves me fine.

Although, I don't really browse the internet that much apart from this forum and youtube. So I can't really comment on how widespread DS chatter is, I see now how it can be off-putting because it doesn't give a fair representation of the game of which the difficulty is entirely subjective according to the player. Really, its probably on terms with Prime in difficulty, just slightly harder combat but easier exploration.

I can see your point but I just think
A) it's very unlike you to use that as a springboard to slag off the game itself
B) I don't think we've been too bad on here in terms of bringing up DS chat where it's unwelcome, have we?

(a) I'm not really slagging the game off.  See my last post for my honest opinion on it.  It's just that from all the praise it seems to get, it'd be overrated unless it was actually the Second Coming in game form, and Jesus was riding a flaming tyrannosaur down from the heavens.

(b) This place hasn't really.  There was the off-topic one and a vote for Oracle of Ages that seemed like "Can I get a DS mention in here?" (since it came first, shouldn't DS be being compared to it?), and those were the trigger events; but it's more the Internet at large.

Balladeer wrote:

Dark Souls.  I've never played it

Come on Balla.

I read your other posts, and I don't see how the reaction to DS is any different than any other game that picks up a bit of traction. Can you imagine how much Ocarina of Time would have leaked into discussions if the Internet was as big as it is now in 1998/9? With Dark Souls 2 being fresh, it's unsurprising that there's a fair bit of chatter about it in the Web at large, and a fair few regulars here, myself included, have been playing either Dark Souls or its sequel. Give it a couple of months, and chatter will die down.

I think the reason the praise is so high is that it's a very niche, but very loud audience who are enjoying the game. The MLP comparison is unfair because ponies have fuck all to do with games, but Dark Souls is a game which shares or builds upon the mechanics of lots of other titles, hence it invites comparisons with other titles. For example, if a Castlevania discussion started on this forum, I'd jump in with a comment that DS is a good representation of what I think a 3D Castlevania should be.

I'm not talking about MLP filtering into games chat.  It's more like if this was a TV forum, primarily for discussing a different genre (anime say), with an MLP discussion thread; and then you got the pony talk leaking out.  And to come back to the games example, I'd probably have got bored with OoT talk filtering into an FF thread in '98 too (if I had been old enough to engage in any sort of intelligent discussion then, and if FF had remained on the right consoles).

I'm not saying that people bringing the DS-talk to Nintendo or other unrelated threads are wrong, just that it annoys me. It's my problem, not other people's, and I'm half-expecting y'all to ramp up the DS talk in response.  But this thread is for airing our problems with games that everyone else seems to love, is it not?

I cant believe I haven't said this on this thread yet but...

Overrated

The Last Story.

This game is horrible and an affront to all JRPG's.

Balladeer wrote:

I'm not saying that people bringing the DS-talk to Nintendo or other unrelated threads are wrong, just that it annoys me.  It's my problem, not other people's, and I'm half-expecting y'all to ramp up the DS talk in response.  But this thread is for airing our problems with games that everyone else seems to love, is it not?

Nah, only where it's relevant! And yeah, it is - but I just feel there's something inherently wrong with lambasting a game you've not played purely based on the fact that people like it enough to talk about it.

JayMoyles wrote:

I think the reason the praise is so high is that it's a very niche, but very loud audience who are enjoying the game.

It's also worth pointing out what that audience is. The media narrative on games after 2006 was ultimately dominated, or at least heavily influenced, by Wii Sports and Dr Kawashima- mainstream media was finally paying attention to the form, but only to those two games- meanwhile the specialist press was all how the entire future was exclusively the mass market, progressively simplifying games in the name of "accessibility", Women And Old People™, sterile, inoffensive presentation, lifestyle photography and nothing else, all of it completely exempted from criticism and everything else a catastrophic mistake which should never have happened.

People got beaten around the head with that- which didn't reflect the reality of gaming at the time- for five years until Demon's Souls came out in 2010, brazenly being a sleeper hit pretty much on the back of being the opposite of all of that above.

While the press has settled itself since, there are still major aspects of it in play- the way that things like David Cage's output and Walking Simulators like Gone Home are mired more in justification of their lack of gameplay than critique, how terms like "dudebro" and "shootybang" are used to reductively invalidate large amounts of titles, and that consoles/handhelds/full-price games/Japanese studios are all but dead and free-to-play/indie/mobile is The Only Way. With that in mind, it's hardly surprising that the DS market are so vocal and really why the series is so notable.

Great post beemoh. I never really thought about DS being as popular as it was because of its utter devotion to the "retro hardcore" gamer, as much as I hate labelling like that.

Dark souls is the second coming in game form, but Jesus didn't ride down from heaven on a flaming tyrannosaur it was Seath the scaleless.

Praise the sun!

In that case its praise is fully justified!  

JayMoyles wrote:

Nah, only where it's relevant! And yeah, it is - but I just feel there's something inherently wrong with lambasting a game you've not played purely based on the fact that people like it enough to talk about it.

While I think most people have their unfairnesses regarding games, I'll concede your point.  I retract my previous defamation of the game, and replace it by saying that based on the hype it's got, it's overrated...

Balladeer wrote:

...unless it was actually the Second Coming in game form, and Jesus was riding a flaming tyrannosaur down from the heavens.

...(SM64 being the First Coming, natch) without saying that it isn't.  'Cause, as you say, I don't know that it isn't.  I'll direct my ire instead to DS discussion outside relevant threads/topics/boards/articles.  And also in the interest of fairness, I think that the bolded part is a bit unfair: I've said several times that I have no problem with people talking about it where appropriate.

beemoh wrote:

It's also worth pointing out what that audience is.

Don't agree with you there.  Annoying vocal discussion is annoying and vocal, regardless of the discussers' backgrounds.

Balladeer wrote:

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(b) This place hasn't really.

Well there you go then! It's your own fault for continuing to go on the rest of the Internet even though we established a long time ago that the rest of the Internet is full of arseholes.

This reminds me of how I felt about Breaking Bad. For the final season (oddly, nobody seemed to mention it before then), everyone everywhere seemed to rave about it yet I had no interest in it.

Drunkalilly wrote:

Balladeer wrote:

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(b) This place hasn't really.

Well there you go then! It's your own fault for continuing to go on the rest of the Internet even though we established a long time ago that the rest of the Internet is full of arseholes.

GNamer - the happiest place on earth (Disneyland can go fuck itself).

The Second Coming. Heavily overrated because it didn't feature dinosaurs.

Not sure if I've said before but The Last of Us for over-rated, it's not the second coming of Christ as some seem to make out it is.

NONONONONO The Last of Us is the most overrated game for people saying it's over rated. Game is bang on.

So it's kinda like Pablo Zabaleta everyone used to say that he was such a under-rated RB but everyone & his dog said it.

The game is great and easily a 9/10 but not as some make out it is, would maybe make my Top 40 games.

I think the reason so much noise was made about The Last of Us was because it told a story better than 95% of other videogames, and it did so to a mainstream market. My dad, whose experience of games prior to picking up The Last of Us was a few levels of Call of Duty, blasted through The Last of Us in a week with the fervor of the most rabid of hardcore gamers. He said to me that "This is better than TV." If a game can engage with the casual and hardcore masses alike, then I think it fully deserves the praise it receives.

Yeah the story is excellent hence why I think it will be the first really good video game movie but the actual GAME isn't all that.

I watched the live script reading thing and that was great, I didn't even need to play the game.