Ah, stackamynutz, welcome to the fold with a most excellent name. I'd have to agree with the Gran Turismo games. The only one out of that series that actually felt fun to me was number 2... 3 and 4 seemed to get bogged down in their HYPER SIMULATION!!!!

Also, I think they took Tony Hawk from a fun series to a completely crap WTF series within the span of 4-5 years. The first 3-4 were good and fun games to play, but once Underground hit, they started becoming teh ultimate suck. Yet... they still got good reviews, and people still bought them.

Why thanks for teh name props Prof. I will double your thoughts on those THPS games - my opinion exactly.

I've been thinking about this thread a little more since I posted and there are a couple of other games that have come to mind as well:

Kingdom Hearts - this game was very highly praised and I heard a lot of people talking good about it, so I decided to check it out. I will admit that the action in it was fun, but the finding out where you have to go and what you have to do with absolutely no clues and having to fly that stupid "let's dumb the graphics down to N64 level for this" spaceship to get from one world to the other for 5 minutes only to find out I needed to be on the world I originally left got old really quick and eventually caused me to put down the game for good and never return to it. The moral of this story: If I spend more time in a gaming session trying to figure out what I am supposed to be doing than actually doing something, it's not fun anymore - it's just annoying.

And the last one I'll post (at least for a while) is Rock Band. Now I ain't hatin' on it because of the whole music game thing - I love guitar hero and I've played it tons since I discovered the first one. But for as much praise as Rock Band got, it didn't play nearly as smoothly and wasn't nearly as accurate/real on the guitar and bass side as I would expect from a company who has already had experience making music games of this format (at least 4 of them to my knowledge). I had fun with it at first and when I was playing with a couple of friends, but when it got left at my house and I played the guitar campaign on my own, I was bored out of my mind. Now I won't say the same for the drums or vocals - I never got to do much of those (and I won't ever do much of the vocals on any game unless it's "Super See How Bad You Can Sing In Your Car On The Way To Work 2: Turbo Edition"), but the guitar part was like a step back in the music game genre. Another aspect about the game that makes me put it up on here that will apply to all the instruments is how repetitive the set lists get towards the end of the game - they all have the same 5 songs in them (and they're all hard as balls). I mean, they may have remedied this with the mass amounts of downloadable content, but you have to pay for all that. I wouldn't wanna pay mass amounts of money on top of the $160 or whatever I already paid for the game just to make it enjoyable after the first 5 hours of gameplay. It's like someone buying a steak and then having to pay to send it back to the chef to have it cooked to the originally ordered doneness. I'm not havin' it Rock Band, I'm just not havin it.

I'm quite good friends with the boss of Rockstar, but he knows that I'll never play any version of GTA.

I also agree with MGS2 and GTA 3 (the other games in the series were great though). Wind Waker I also think got more credit than deserved.. it was the weakest 3D Zelda.

I definitely agree with GTA. I totally get why it is so highly rated, but I just do not enjoy it. I think it's awesome how they have TV with channels and commercials. I love their cynical sense of humor. I enjoy going car "shopping" and I appreciate the no-hold-barred violence. Maybe my problem is it's too realistic, too life-like? I just feel bored. I actually feel like I'm walking down the street. I actually feel like I just walked into a strip club... etc. I can go outside and do that right now.

I know, there's also the shooting people and drug dealing and car jacking that I can't do (or can I... muahahahaaa!) but that's just not enough. I make serious attempts to get through the GTA games and just fall asleep.


To the Halo guys... OMG!! lol I respect your opinion and I guess there really isn't all that much to seperate it from all the other FPS games but man... I LOVE those games. The music is fantastic and it give me goose bumps sometimes when the music swells just as I get into a tense battle.

I love the difficult situations where I have to play through a level like 10-30 times until I just happen to get unconcious on fire and pwn it, wishing someone had been there to see how awesome I was lol. (This is also something I appreciate about Gears)

I also think the story is very good and the voice acting supurb. It has always kept me interested. Even when it's totally predictable I really want to play it out...

I have actually never read a Halo review. Of course I was going to play the first one because it was the only game I had (not to insult anyones gamer cred but to those that don't know it was bundled with the first XBox when it came out ) and after that first part where the ship got boarded by the bad guys and I had to escape (yes, just like Star Wars Episode IV) I was hooked. The next two were a given because I had to see where the story went, if nothing else.

The multiplayer was good, not great. What made it the most enjoyable FPS multiplayer for me was the fact that there were a LOT of people playing it. I never had a hard time finding games. To be honest I was pretty dissapointed that some of the game types and maps were sorely under-utilized. You can't make people play them, of course, but the way multi-player was set up didn't help at all. I can't remember what it was but it actually made it difficult to put together a specific type of multi-player game. There was something about the way they set things up that made it difficult to find those player-made games, if you will.

Umm.. so anyway.. I guess I kinda liked Halo

Burnout Paradise!
I can't help feeling disappointed about this game! I love Burnout Revenge - which is the top arcade racer on the Xbox360 - and I just can't believe how Criterion messed up the latest game.

I've tried to give the game another chance several times... no way, I don't like it!

cons:
* the "open-world" gameplay doesn't fit the burnout game-style! We need gold-silver and bronce medal limits!
* you can't quit a race
* you can't restart a race (without driving around for some minutes)
* I don't want to read a map when driving a burnout race (so I lose the event because I miss an intersection)
* crash-mode is gone in single player
* gameplay is slower than in previous Burnouts
* you can't bump into cars driving the same way anymore => more realistic, much less fun.
* you need to change cars to match the type of an event ( => driving around for minutes to start an event).
* the Guns n Roses "Paradise City"-title-tune is soooo annoying - I miss the indie-rock tunes (to be fair: apart from that the soundtrack is nice).


Probably the multiplayer mode is nice, but I don't care if I can't get good on single player.
Technically the game is great, but I don't bother...

All in all this is rather a "Midnight Club" meets "Need for Speed" game that lost the "Burnout"-soul. Maybe it should be titled differently.

Sad but true...

OK Mine is GTA IV .

I am a big fan of the series but in IV I find several things really dissapionting and annoying.

1. The mini games are crap IMO, I'm talking specifically about pool and bowling.

2. Taking freinds out to keep them happy is repetative annoying and boring, I would have prefered if it was just optional girlfreind missions. The fact they keep calling you on the mobile is stressful not fun.

3. Too much emphasis on online play. personally i would have prefered more effort put into the single player game.

4. No ambulance side missions for health

The graphics and game engine amazed me and i loved things like the addition of the internet and the level of detail but there just seems less to actually do that i enjoy and is fun. I got bored after the second island became available and stopped playing it. maybe i should give it another go.

Oh and I hate rap and r+b music.

Halo was hype and little else from the get go.

A couple of the beginning missions were good, but then it all petered out to a very average FPS which somehow got hosannas from otherwise sensible critics as if the damn game was soo original!!

Never forget history! Goldeneye, PD and Timesplitters had all got there before Halo...to rave as if Halo was a new thing...mmmm as Marge Simpson would say.

Halo never was and never will be about the single player campaign and if you attempt to judge it's worth based on the single player campaign you clearly don't understand what kind of a game it is. Which halo is first and foremost a multiplayer game and it's clear if you play it that's pretty much where the developers put all of their effort into (hence the 8-hour campaign, or 5-hour in the case of Halo 3). I would never call Halo original, but as far being a very well balanced and designed shooter, it is.

Wellllllll, I would dispute that Halo was so little about the single player campaign; but I have played multiplayer on it plenty of times and it's merely ok, y'know?

It just never sent a shiver up my spine. Oh well.

I really don't get this huge praising of Bioshock and GTA IV. They're both damn good games but aren't as good as the metascore lets you comprehend.

bioshock weak guns, linear, repetative, irritating.

GTAiv, stupid irritating friend missions and the awful minigames like pool darts and bowling, lack of side missions like ambulance.

BioShock. It has nothing original in my book. It just wasn't enjoyable, and I'm very much glad that I rented it instead of buying it (OMG, I was about to buy it but decided to rent and I hated it! Thank God I didn't decide to buy!). Also, Halo3. It was a bore fest!

quote:

Originally posted by red-white mayweather:
......
I think Guitar Hero 3 is also overrated. The graphics are awful......

No it's not.... the graphics need to make a great harmony to the game. If not, then what do you want? Mario GRAPHICS?!