Much like every other entertainment medium in the planet, every video game save for a few exceptions I could probably count with my two hands, has a consensus attached to it - everyone either loves it, hates it, or something in between. That's because gamers usually expect something specific out of video games, and products either deliver or they don't. However, at the end of the day, we're all different, and sooner or later we're all bound to not follow the general consensus at some point, and video games are no exception.

I made this a roundtable so we can hopefully get some good discussions going, and be baffled at some of our fellow board members' choices. I'm sure some of you will be dumbfounded even at this OP.

So, post games everyone loves and you hate. Of course you can do any amount of games you want, and include descriptions only if you see fit. You can also add games you acknowledge to be well made games, but just aren't for you. Also, feel free to include games everyone hates and you love, I just didn't make that part of the main topic because it's not that common for that to happen. When games are generally considered horrible, it's usually because they're just not well made from a technical standpoint - no one can stand horrible cameras, textures, frame-rates or glitches abound. But if you can find an example of this, go ahead.

This should be good. Also, sorry if it's been done before. I don't remember if it has. Anyway, I'll start.

I Hate:

Kid Icarus

I hate this game. Granted I didn't play it in its entirety, I was fed up with it far before the final stretch of the game, but I completely disliked what I played of it. It stole the Metroid engine and made me go around in very generic looking stages attacking enemies with lame attacks. And constantly scrolling upwards (I know not the entire game is like this, but still) is so annoying in 2D a platforming game like this.

Animal Crossing

I had never played Animal Crossing until a few months ago. It didn't look like my type of game at all, so I steered clear. In what seemed like a call from destiny, a friend of mine recently let me borrow City Folk and said - here, you have to play it. You can't go on with your life until you play Animal Crossing. So I did. And, wow. What the hell do you do in this game? Seriously, though, I can see how people could get into this game. It's a good simulation game, and I can definitely see the Nintendo touch. I can feel it, almost. But the game bored me to no end. I put a couple hours into it and I never wanna see it again. Everyone says all Animal Crossing games are the same, so I feel I am entitled to say I hate the entire series.

Zelda II

I'm not completely alone on this one, I know, but it's still generally regarded as a good game. It's not a fun game at all. It's comprised of all these different "pieces" that ultimately don't add up at all. Towns, overworld with RPG-esque battles, experience points, AND side-scrolling gameplay? It never comes together, it's terrible. It doesn't help that it's extremely hard. But you know what's even harder? Finding a reason that justifies actually beating this game. Fuck it.

I hate the following more than the rest...

Gears of War

I should clarify before I begin, I haven't played the second one. And I don't want to. As for the first one, I played a substantial amount of the campaign and a bit of multiplayer, too. The multiplayer's alright, it's well designed, the problem is it has to work within the confines of the design of the game (of course), so... it sucks. First of all, the game is gray. I don't care what you have to say - it's gray. Yeah, it has some beautiful textures, but it's so unappealing to look at. I know people often complain about this in realistic HD games, but Gears is easily the worst offender in this aspect. So you already have a raised eyebrow from the minute you fire up the game, and then you start to play it. Your character moves like a tank (the "worse than Leon S. Kennedy" variety of tanks), the environments all look the same (of course) and are like 2x2. You have to take cover constantly and fire generic weapons at generic aliens. Yeah, it's a third person shooter which is kind of original, but it might as well have been an FPS, it's hard to tell the difference honestly. "Stop 'n' pop" doesn't make a shooting game more strategic - it makes it more boring.

And there's soon to be THREE of these games! Damn! Gears represents everything that's wrong with this generation of gaming (it only needs a 99 cent iOS game and we're golden), and people love it.

I'll post more games if they come to mind. Looking forward to your responses!

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Come on guys, let's not turn this into an argument thread. We're open to discussion here on NW, but when a thread is titled "Beloved Games you Hate" if everyone starts defending the beloved games they love and throwing insults (direct or passive) back and forth it'll just be one huge ass messy thread. I mean, I theoretically have a lot of things to say about people who hate on Metroid Prime series, but... I feel like this thread isn't really the place. Like it was created so people could just say what they want to say and not have to defend it or whatever.

Maybe the OP would say otherwise. What say you, GE?

Whatever the case, let's not compare people to the Amish and such. That's never productive.

I wouldn't say I hate this game by any means, but I couldn't get into Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The music is incredible as is the pixel art, but exploring that gargantuan castle wears me down, and there first couple hours aren't that exciting.

By extension I'd say that the first two DS Castlevania games weren't to my liking either, but I still want to give Order of Ecclesia a chance. I'm stubborn like that.

Jargon said:

@PogueSquadron

You're right, you have to do the level over. It definitely makes it harder to beat than the original, but it is doable.

@Dapper Dick

That's quite a crusade you've embarked on, defending Halo in every recess of the internet. Good luck on your mission, holy soldier.

Thank you, my crusade against ignorance isn't exclusive to Halo or even video games, though.

Zero said:

Come on guys, let's not turn this into an argument thread. We're open to discussion here on NW, but when a thread is titled "Beloved Games you Hate" if everyone starts defending the beloved games they love and throwing insults (direct or passive) back and forth it'll just be one huge ass messy thread. I mean, I theoretically Zero said:[quote]Come on guys, let's not turn this into an argument thread. We're open to discussion here on NW, but when a thread is titled "Beloved Games you Hate" if everyone starts defending the beloved games they love and throwing insults (direct or passive) back and forth it'll just be one huge ass messy thread. I mean, I theoretically have a lot of things to say about people who hate on Metroid Prime series, but... I feel like this thread isn't really the place. Like it was created so people could just say what they want to say and not have to defend it or whatever.

Maybe the OP would say otherwise. What say you, GE?

Whatever the case, let's not compare people to the Amish and such. That's never productive.

Almost as unproductive as slandering good games. It's one thing to say "I hate game X", and it's quite another to say "Game X is poorly made." Here I'll give an example: Super Mario 64 was poorly made. They took the tight, responsive controls set in the 2-d perspective of previous titles and plopped them into a 3-d world where they aren't as tight anymore. They replaced excellent level design catered for running an jumping with precision toward an end goal and replaced it with a giant sandbox with sparse enemies and recycled objectives. Mario 64 ruined the platform genre for years to come. This post is okay because I am bpumkin!

@WrathOfSamus777

Like I said I was talking about PD, not Halo. You brought up Halo in the post before that and keep bringing it up for some reason. Some people don't like it. Whatever, not a big deal.

You would be right about the accuracy argument for M+KB vs. controller and I already said that it is indeed more accurate. That however does not make it better. That's a pretty crucial point to grasp.

What you said was that HL1 and 2 absolutely destroy their competition. That's just untrue. They are very much in competition with other games.

What's ironic about you disliking that developers are abandoning split-screen is that the Halo series has kept split-screen throughout each iteration despite moving on to new engines. I think it is one of the only (if not the only?) franchises in the genre that does this. Whether PD was meant to be played online is kind of irrelevant considering that this happened with bots. We had another game where we ratcheted up the bots to be harder and they just massacred us over and over again in Felicity. Playing split-screen would not have helped matters at all.

@Jargon

Nope, I did not get him to sign up. He actually disagrees with me regarding PD being a relic.

@Zero

I mean, I would have refuted any counter-points he would have made regarding PD but since he didn't and just went with the indisputable "I disagree with everything you said" route I decided it wasn't worth any kind of actual reply.

@Zero My original intention for this thread's existence was seeing the interesting choices people made. We got some good results - Wind Waker, Metroid, Halo, Castlevania. I never intended for this to turn into a flame thread, I mean of course you're gonna have some disagreements, but I thought NW could handle it. I was going for the friendly "Whaa?? You hate that game?", like it happened with me and Kid Icarus in the first few replies.

It was going fine for the first few pages.

Dapper Dick said:

File Halo under well-made games that just aren't your thing if you must, but much of the "criticism" on it in this thread is from people who know almost nothing about it.

I agree with that, sometimes when Nintendo fans start ranting against popular games on other platforms it sounds like sour grapes.

WrathOfSamus777 said:

You are way, way oversensitive about Halo and it's blatantly obvious in your typical passive-aggressive fashion writing an essay on everything you think is wrong with PD after a bunch of people crapped on Halo. As soon as Shadowlink posted what he did about Halo, I was 99.9% positive you'd make an appearance in this thread. And sure enough.

You're right; how dare he voice a dissenting opinion! What buffoonery!


I really don't get all of the flak that Stephen gets about Halo. He has never come across to me as being annoying or whiny about it; it's just a game series that he defends when the topic comes up. Is it really that bad that his opinion doesn't match up with other people here about it? He's not saying "Halo is the best, Goldeneye/Perfect Dark are horrible and everyone who likes them is stupid"; all he's doing is providing a counter argument. I often see people talk about how worked up he gets about it, but he's always come across as pretty level-headed to me.

stephen08 said:

If you honestly think PD holds up then you are either delusional, have some very strange standards, or have not played PD for many years.

Though it probably would have been better if he didn't write stuff like this, but in general I don't see much wrong with his behavior in this thread.

PogueSquadron said:

(For instance, after you beat the second dungeon, you go to Greatfish Isle...nothing there...so they play some cool music and make it rain for you, then I think they make you go to Windfall to get the bombs, and go through a really tedious rope swinging minigame...then they require you to go all the way back to Outset, which was kind of near Greatfish in the first place...then they have you go place the three pearls...and this is all not including any exploration that you might even think about doing, and the fact that you haven't gotten the bow yet...it's like a half hour of nothing. The game definitely felt rushed more than any other Zelda game).

That part is actually one of my favorite parts of Wind Waker. I think the game has a lot of issues, but I prefer the stuff they added in place of dungeons. I wish more Zelda games would award you with progress for doing something other than trudging through dungeon after dungeon.

@stephen08

If you're calling it slow and unresponsive I can only assume you haven't played with it properly calibrated. I put huge amounts of time into GoldenEye Wii multiplayer and I can't come close to reproducing the results I get on Wiimote to what I get on CC. I'm not sure what you mean by "aiming channels though (what are those?). And I'm not sure what you mean by lack of inputs either, I can do everything on the Wiimote that I can on CC. There are no missing actions.

And the only reason they added DA in was so they didn't alienate people who are put off by new things.

@X-pert74

Yeah I might have been overstated there but I stand by it. We are actually playing PD right now because of this thread and it's chaotic fun but it is tough to go back to. Some of these challenges are insane.

Shadowlink said:

@stephen08
And the only reason they added DA in was so they didn't alienate people who are put off by new things.

Not true, they added it because a lot of people don't like the Wiimote controls and simply prefer DA.

To me, RE4 answered the question about Dual Analog vs. Wiimote. I'm not a DA pro, but I'm not horrible, either. I had about 8 years of experience with DA when I played the original GC game, and I did a serviceable job. A headshot every now and then. Bing. Bang. Boom. No problem.

But the Wii edition came out and it was almost comical how much better I was with it right out of the gate. Every other shot I was blowing off some Ganado's head. And the Wiimote has the added bonus of feeling more like shooting a gun, rather than controlling the gun like you'd control a damn Mars Rover. Even if it was merely comparable to DA, that would be a huge selling point for me.

@Dapper DickYeah but this is a thread about hating games. It's not going to be very objective.

@kriswright
The camera in RE4 was controlled with the analog stick, and aiming with the Wiimote, because you don't move and shoot at the same time. For that reason alone it worked about a million times better than games like Red Steel or The Conduit. It's the dragging the cursor at the edge of the screen to turn that really makes FPS games janky with the Wiimote. This is why a lot times you see light-gun games getting made on Wii instead of full-fledged shooters, and I agree that IR aiming works really well for games like Link's Crossbow Training and Dead Space Extraction.

I still prefer the GCN version of RE4 though, it looked better and I liked the analog aiming, it technically wasn't as fast or accurate as IR but the game was designed around it so it worked well. In general I'm not a huge fan of going back to classic games that were near perfect and slapping shit on to them that was never meant to be there.

Yeah I think the 'dragging the screen' works fine in something like Metroid Prime, when you basically just lock on to enemies (and not use the IR to actually shoot at them), and I think the problem comes in where devs try to recreate other console/PC FPS', rather than build it around the Wiimote like Metroid Prime.

Also, I wanted to throw out some Red Steel 2 hate, but I guess that's not really a game that would be considered "beloved."

@stephen08 Yeah but overstating it is often what leads to confrontation. I mean, do you honestly not expect confrontation when saying something like this?

stephen08 said:

That's cool. I don't begrudge anyone their opinion. You are entitled to your opinion about PD just like the Amish are entitled to their opinion about electricity.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, it's going to be taken as insulting.

@PogueSquadron
I hate the controls in MP3, they were so cumbersome, bloated, and inelegant. The lock-on mechanic is what made it playable, but it also defeated the purpose of forcing players to struggle with IR. Also the waggle, oh god all the needless shaking and waggling and janky rotating to open doors and whatnot... it's like they went out of their to add layer upon layer of needless bullshit to that game.

Oddly enough I didn't really mind playing Red Steel or Medal of Honor or whatever with somewhat bad controls because those were mediocre games to begin with. But to mar an incredible franchise like Metroid Prime with awkward IR and waggle... is truly unforgivable.

But for many of us it wasn't awkward at all. I'm not going to say your experience is invalid, but I will say that mine was completely the opposite. Prime 3 controls felt like 100 times smoother than Prime 1 and 2 for me. In fact, in my mind when I'm rating the games, I can think of a lot of things that the other two did better, but Prime 3 always wins out in combat/controls.

@Zero
You're not alone, tons of people think MP3 is the best game in the series, that's why I chose it as the beloved game I hate!

stephen08 said:

@WrathOfSamus777

Like I said I was talking about PD, not Halo. You brought up Halo in the post before that and keep bringing it up for some reason. Some people don't like it. Whatever, not a big deal.

Sorry, no I didn't bring Halo up before you did. I think you you need to re-read the thread and what you posted.

stephen08 said:

@WrathOfSamus777You would be right about the accuracy argument for M+KB vs. controller and I already said that it is indeed more accurate. That however does not make it better. That's a pretty crucial point to grasp.

Not just accuracy. When it comes to FPS games everything is better control-wise with KB/M. So yeah, it pretty much does make it better. Just cuz you don't prefer or want to to take the time to learn KB/M controls is irrelevant.

stephen08 said:

@WrathOfSamus777What you said was that HL1 and 2 absolutely destroy their competition. That's just untrue. They are very much in competition with other games.

Again, that's not what I said. I never said the Half-Life series is not in competition with other games on the market. Go back and re-read what I said.

stephen08 said:

@WrathOfSamus777What's ironic about you disliking that developers are abandoning split-screen is that the Halo series has kept split-screen throughout each iteration despite moving on to new engines. I think it is one of the only (if not the only?) franchises in the genre that does this. Whether PD was meant to be played online is kind of irrelevant considering that this happened with bots. We had another game where we ratcheted up the bots to be harder and they just massacred us over and over again in Felicity. Playing split-screen would not have helped matters at all.

Again you mis-characterize what I said. I never said I disliked developers that have abandoned local multi in their FPS games. I just said that PD was not designed to be played online originally. It was designed for local split-screen multi. Read what I wrote. And just cuz you're not good playing against bots or don't like playing against bots is irrelevant. Maybe you're just not very good at FPS games, I don't know.