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MeetyourUnmaker

unpopular retro opinions

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6 minutes ago, Patch93 said:

On the subject of SMB2J, sixfortyfive wrote an excellent post on neogaf defending the game:

 

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/super-mario-bros-2-needs-to-serve-as-the-inspiration-for-the-next-mario-platformer.499596/post-44286986

 

Frankly, I'm inclined to agree with him. NoA definitely made the right choice in localizing Doki Doki Panic instead back then, but that doesn't make The Lost Levels a bad game either.

Great article. SMB Lost Levels is good because SMB is good. It's just Lost Levels is far tougher. I've been pondering with digital only releases of Nintendo would be willing to make an official SMB1 part 2. New tiles, colors, new themes, but still holding that SMB1 look and NES restricted feel. Then release it. They made a Super Luigi Bros where the original SMB1 game goes backward with Luigi being able to high jump. NES Remix has a lot of fresh things to the SMB1 formula, but well it's lost in NES Remix and relegated to a micro scale with its challenges.

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- Quake 1's atmosphere and soundtrack are great... but the game play is BORING AS ALL HELL. It also clashes hard with the tone of the visuals/ audio. I have a hard time playing it for more than fifteen seconds. 
- Quake 2 was the best Quake. 

- Doom unmodded is ... not very playable ( DON'T KILL ME PLEASE)

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Here's a few;

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was really cool. Mirrors of Fate and the 2nd game were pretty good as well.

Shadow Warrior is the most frustrating out of the Build trinity, while Blood is the best, though the latter likely isn't an unpopular opinion.

Serious Sam 2 is tied for first place in the series alongside the obvious Second Encounter.

Marathon's gameplay is worse than Doom's, even with the advanced engine features. Great storyline, though, I liked M2 the most.

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Zelda 1 hasn't aged very well. Zelda 2, on the other hand, holds up very well and is a fantastic NES title.

 

Bubsy on the SNES is highly underrated. Good level design, lots of funny things to discover, great explorative elements, good enemy design, and a phenomenal soundtrack. 

 

Having finished the game recently, I can proclaim Tyrian 2000 to be very mediocre.

 

Serious Sam is crap, even though I love the character. Unbalanced level design, boring weapons, and bullshit enemies make for an unfun experience.

 

Battletoads isn't terribly difficult.

 

Wolfenstein 3D has only gotten better with time and holds up extremely well.

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6 hours ago, geo said:

 - Old school RPGs are more of a relaxing time sink than a game.

 

 

a)

what's this

giggle

is this one of those "people who play peggle aren't real gamerz" kinda things?

i can't find many definitions of "game" that demand the form involve reflexes and competition at all

 

yr comment looks a little like snobbery to be honest

 

and

 

b)

a lot of old-school RPGs are fairly involved

you gotta do a lot of mapping and paying attention to the composition of yr party in some of these esp. wizardry and shin megami tensei

most of these games have REALLY hairy systems too, ie:

Wizardry being full of instant death attacks; wizardry's character classes being wildly variable in power and forcing you to roll dice for hours

SMT being full of instant death attacks; SMT's challenge bosses being ludicrously difficult and specific as well as being unavoidable now and then

might and magic basically having that Hell Revealed progression where if you wander into the wrong place you get liquefied really easily

SMT and might and magic both having mazes in areas where you can't see the walls

things like EOTB and Dungeon Master are in design super-unfriendly, in particular being incredibly discouraging to players who forget a SINGLE fact about them during the whole playthrough

etc etc etc

of course that doesn't make them bad games, it just makes 'em variable and scary

but you can only relax in these games once you've seriously done yr homework on 'em

 

if you're saying final fantasy isn't hard enough, or that dragon quest is repetitive, or that Ultima games involve nothing but a grand tour of the universe where you interrogate every responsive person, followed by a brief grind-segue into immortalhood where combat slides off you, or that baldur's gate-style games lack gameplay beyond chatting to NPCs then i agree :P but there's no crime in a game being casual and you can always choose to avoid their particular upgrade systems and tackle their various scenarios underlevelled and create fun for yrself! plus ultima is one of the most interesting and touching series of games there has ever been

 

 

here are some more unpopular opinions or whatever:

 

- most FPSes have stupid music

- most sword & sorcery RPGs and action RPGs have overblown, derivative music

- no game ever made looks more striking than SMT 2 on the SNES

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I dunno, arguing with 'unpopular opinions' doesn't seem in the spirit. Like, anyone sharing an opinion here is acknowledging that their view isn't held by many. I'd wager as a result they've already heard each and every objection you could come up with because the inverse opinion is, well, the popular one.

 

Just for thread-relevance;

  • Half-Life is almost wholly-overrated in terms of level design, combat, scripted sequences, and environmental storytelling. Everything it did back in the day had been seen somewhere else, done more competently already. Also Xen isn't as terrible as people argue it is.
  • Ocarina of Time was overblown, poorly-paced and boring back in the '90s. Ergo, has not held up at all.
  • Sonic The Hedgehog was great, and people only dislike it because it was historically the closest any non-Nintendo company came to challenging their videogame mascot dominance.

In before people disagree with any of these. Yeah, I know you disagree. This is the unpopular retro opinion thread. :P

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34 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

 

  • Also Xen isn't as terrible as people argue it is.

 

I also like Xen. But a lot of content was cut from it apparently.

 

A few years ago one of the developers behind Black Mesa said that after Valve granted them access the original game they discovered that a lot of content was cut from it. How was Xen originally meant to look and play like will probably always remain unknown.

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1 hour ago, Jayextee said:

 

  • Sonic The Hedgehog was great, and people only dislike it because it was historically the closest any non-Nintendo company came to challenging their videogame mascot dominance.

That opinion is not unpopular though.

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Oh? Must be my filter, I mean I do overlap with the Sonic fandom; but elsewhere I see a lot of "DURR SONIC WAS NEVER GOOD" takes. Enough to make that look like the popular view. I stand corrected.

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Majora's Mask is the worst Zelda game ever made.

 

The Guardian Legend is the best NES game.

 

Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 is not hard.

 

Battletoads is a fun game.

 

 

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Another few unpopular opinons I have...

 

I actually happen to REALLY like Gradius IV, sure it can be seen as a rehash of II, but my god, are some of the levels actually pretty good. And that soundtrack, THAT soundtrack.

 

I find Thunder Force II's top scrolling levels somewhat enjoyable. Especially in the first 2 levels.

 

Oh boy, this one is seriously gonna make people go crazy. I surprisngly quite liked the PS1 Contra games. Yeah sure, they do deviate a bit from the standards set, and the lack of auto aiming on Legacy Of War is a bit dumb, but I still enjoyed it.

 

In my opinion, I happen to like Urban Strike's on foot missions, it's a nice addition on top of Jungle Strike adding multiple vehicles. And on the subject of the Strike series, I prefer the original trilogy over the 32 bit games.

 

Surprisingly enough, I really like After Burner III on the Sega CD, I can see why people lament the game for not putting the extra hardware to use, but it still delivers on speed and thrills.

 

I really liked Xen from HL. I can see why A LOT of people didn't enjoy it however.

Quote

The Guardian Legend is the best NES game.

I strongly agree, Compile went all out with that game

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I miss shovel ware games. I miss my dad coming home with some “1000 Games!” bargain bin CD Rom from circuit city as an impulse buy while picking up more important stuff and earnestly attempting to play every single game on it as a kid taking into stride the crashes and overall garbageness the experience probably would seem to be now.

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12 hours ago, insertwackynamehere said:

I miss shovel ware games. I miss my dad coming home with some “1000 Games!” bargain bin CD Rom from circuit city as an impulse buy while picking up more important stuff and earnestly attempting to play every single game on it as a kid taking into stride the crashes and overall garbageness the experience probably would seem to be now.

I'm at an age where I'd rather play shovelware for 5 - 10 minutes and get on with life. Some shovelware and someone's first game can be hilariously terrible rather than a well made mediocre game someone poured their heart and soul into.

 

16 hours ago, yakfak said:

 

a)

what's this

giggle

is this one of those "people who play peggle aren't real gamerz" kinda things?

i can't find many definitions of "game" that demand the form involve reflexes and competition at all

 

yr comment looks a little like snobbery to be honest

 

Your comment looks like utter silliness. I can't take anything you say serious when you have such poor punctuation, start with a giggle and cannot manage to hobble together a complete sentence. Perhaps I should tipe wit ow u ken undastand it gigglez Peggle is a game, so are match 3s. Old school RPGs combat is the most basic form of chess that rarely have any difficulty beyond sinking more time into them. Many battles can be overcome by just button mashing, but it's about endurance. How long can you get pecked to death before you die or heal. I say this as someone who has gone through Final Fantasys and Dragon Warriors multiple times. Even in the past two months.

 

UNPOPULAR RETRO OPINION:
 - Sims series is one of the hardest of hardcore games, because you can never beat them.

 - Candy Crush is a hardcore game. You just try getting somewhere without paying money! It's possible, but an uphill, random struggle.

 - Rogue likes aren't fun, the only fun you have is the hope of having better luck with whatever run you're having.

 - F-Zero is better than Super Mario Kart SNES. Fight me over it!

 - Males didn't want to play Shantae because of the female protagonist.

 - Link is Zelda and Zelda is Link it's a translation issue

 - Samus is a corpse inside suit of armor, not a woman, which explains her ability to liquefy and when turning into a ball.

Edited by geo

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6 hours ago, Ajora said:

Serious Sam is crap, even though I love the character. Unbalanced level design, boring weapons, and bullshit enemies make for an unfun experience.


I never liked the first three games. (First and Second Encounter and Serious Sam 2) the very first thing that turned me off was the conflicting art styles: it can't decide if it wants to be cartoony or realistic. BFE, on the other hand, settles this question once and for all, hence it's the only game in the series i actually like.

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PS1 Doom is also overrated. It may have some cool unique features but the bad framerate ruins everything. I've even read some people say PS1 Doom is better than Vanilla Doom (aka Doom for DOS). Yeah right.

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Starcraft 1 is overrated. The story and unit balance is great but the gameplay mechanics are obnoxious. The pathfinding is horrible. The 12 unit selection limit is annoying as hell (even the original C&C had 50+ units selection capability). The workers don't start collecting minerals when they are given waypoint to the mineral from the command centre. The workers don't start collecting a new mineral patch when existing ones run out. The campaign missions are extremely long and tedious. There is no difficulty settings for the campaign. I can go on.

 

Starcraft 2 is thankfully much much better and has none of the issue I mentioned above.

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@ReaperAA I was just about to add my issues with Starcraft...  I agree 100%. I would in fact extend that sentiment to all Blizzard games; really neat in concept, amazing cinematic, but boring game play that focuses way too much on being a sport, not enough of following up with their cool premise. 

 

Warcraft 3 is actually the biggest culprit. So here's an unpopular opinion: Warcraft 3 is overrated and dreadfully boring. There are other, far better RPG/ RTS hybrids out there, and they existed even at the time of its release. 

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Warcraft 3 has disgusting kiddy graphics. WoW looks like crap, too. Only the Starcraft series has escaped the signature Blizzard artstyle for children.

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13 hours ago, UNERXAi said:

PS1 Doom is also overrated. It may have some cool unique features but the bad framerate ruins everything. I've even read some people say PS1 Doom is better than Vanilla Doom (aka Doom for DOS). Yeah right.

It kills the original levels with texture replacements and cut out sections.

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On 5/30/2019 at 6:19 PM, Salahmander2 said:

I actually really like Castlevania Harmony of Disonnance's soundtrack. It might not have the greatest sound choices. But damn the soundtrack is still awesome. Awesome enough for a few tunes to be on my phone.

 

Agreed. The instruments used are far inferior compared to Circle of the Moon and even Aria of Sorrow, but most songs have a good melody and are catchy. Marble Corridor comes to mind, or the first hallway.

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All of you guys crapping on Fallout 1 are crazy.  Fallout 2, sure, that game missed the point entirely, but Fallout 1 is a masterpiece.

 

Doom E2 and E3 are better than E1.  E1 sux.

 

Every Super Mario Bros. game is bad.  All of them.  Without exception.

 

Lives and limited continues were the best things about old games.  Consistency is the true beacon of mastery, not being able to fluke your way past a difficult section once.

 

Resident Evil 2 was the worst of the Playstation trilogy by miles.

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Symphony of the Night is overrated.

 

Now that my head's been bitten off, let me back up my claim:

  • Graphics and music are still absolutely beautiful to this day. Peak pixel art, and a rare instance of 3-D and 2-D graphics intermingling well (on a PS1 no less!)
  • But...
  • Why does it have three distinct categories of extra weapon (subweapons, magic spells, consumable) each with their own resource system?
  • Why does it have so many inventory items and equipment when the vast majority of them are useless?
  • Why are familiars nigh useless unless you grind the hell out of them, at which point you don't need them?
  • Difficulty of bosses is all over the place. Most of them can be rolled right over, then you stumble onto Galamoth.
  • The second castle is an absolutely un-fun mess, with no consideration given to how clunky it is to move through. SotN has some of the most enjoyable player movement in a 2D platformer yet you spend an inordinate amount of time in the back half of the game super-jumping or floating as mist to get through rooms.

I still love the game, and recognize its importance in the Metroidvania lineage. I just don't think it's held up well from a gameplay perspective.

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22 hours ago, yakfak said:

)

a lot of old-school RPGs are fairly involved

you gotta do a lot of mapping and paying attention to the composition of yr party in some of these esp. wizardry and shin megami tensei

most of these games have REALLY hairy systems too, ie:

 Wizardry being full of instant death attacks; wizardry's character classes being wildly variable in power and forcing you to roll dice for hours

 

The stat-rolling in Wizardry was stupid, but I find the lethality and randomness actually become a positive if you treat characters themselves as a resource. I always start with 12 characters, cycle them in and out of the party to gain levels and have backups for when Ninjas decapitate and I can't rez.

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- Warcraft series > WoW.

- Contra Force is at least decent.

- Build engine automap > Doom engine automap.

 

I can put that one to good use in general, Doom's not so much, especially when playing big, complex levels...

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9 hours ago, seed said:

- Build engine automap > Doom engine automap.

 

Is it because of the textured automap. GlBoom+ and GZdoom are both capable of showing textured automap too.

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Some of these are a bit of a re-iteration/me too of ones that have been mentioned before, and I guess might not be as unpopular as it seems, but here goes.

 

Half-Life is overrated, and its influence had a negative effect on the FPS genre in general (and Doom 3 in particular).

 

Blood is overrated, but it's an ok game.  Is Shadow Warrior better like someone said earlier in the thread?  Maybe, it certainly grabbed my interest more back in the day.

 

Myst sucked, but I'm not sure if this is even an uncommon opinion any more.

 

Hexen II had more interesting combat than the first Hexen, at least once you progress past the initial "melee only and no artifacts" phase.  Puzzles/levels are a tossup though, the Egypt nine-square "puzzle" (you know the one) is probably the worst thing in the entire damn series.

 

Quake 2 was good.  Quake 4 was at least decent and better than Doom 3.  It's Quake 3 that was the crappy one of the series; multiplayer only? Screw that.

 

On the topic of Quake, Trent Reznor or no, Quake's soundtrack was a bit meh.  I like some of the mission pack tracks better.

 

But, music in video games isn't actually that important.  A game can be fine without music.  Some of the early DOS games in the days before sound cards were a standard feature come to mind.

 

Corridor 7 was good.  Wolfenstein 3-D and Wolf-alikes in general are way better than they're given credit for nowadays.  The Spear of Destiny Lost Missions are not as bad as people say either (though I can understand them being considered worse than the original SoD levels).

 

Zelda 2 was good.  Zelda 1 is still decent too but be honest, anyone who goes on about "rules of good game design" should probably hate it if they're not a hypocrite.

 

Speaking of which, fuck "rules of good game design".  This sort of mentality has to be a big contributor to games being dull, compared to ones that feel free to be a bit outrageous at times.

 

Sandy Petersen's levels are more enjoyable than most of the WADs that get released nowadays.  So are a lot of '90s WADs.

 

"Nintendo hard" wasn't nearly as much of a thing as people claim it was.  Most of those games just need some patience and pattern recognition to figure out and are remembered as harder than they were because people last played them as impatient and tantrum-prone children.  Cargo-cult "retro" indies that use difficulty as a selling point tend to overdo it beyond what actual old games were like.

 

Relatedly, most old game characters did not look like Lemmings and people who make indie games with tiny barely-detailed pixel stick figures for characters generally either have no idea what the games they're supposedly inspired by actually looked like, or are just using "retro" as an excuse for low-effort graphics.  And Lemmings probably only looked that way for the sake of fitting lots of characters on the screen at once rather than that they wanted it to look low-detail.

 

Shareware was primarily trash and the concept is only remembered fondly because of the likes of Apogee and Epic Megagames who took it a notch above the rest.  Dig underneath the popular stuff and you'll find truckloads of dreck that was either someone trying to get a buck off of a shoddily slapped together hobby project (often without even offering any tangible registration benefit, or "make the program stop doing something purposely obnoxious" as the only registration benefit), or designed with a very similar mentality to the "pay to win" games people love to complain about today.

 

Most Amiga games that were ported to the Sega Genesis were better on the Genesis.  Taking advantage of a controller with multiple buttons is a welcome tradeoff for any minor degradation of graphics/sound involved.

 

CGA's white-cyan-magenta palette can be made to look cool, in a surreal sort of way.

 

An accurate emulator is (usually) preferable to an inaccurate source port.

 

Most of the games AVGN slags on aren't as bad as he makes them out to be.  Some of them are indeed genuinely awful but a lot of the time he's just over-exaggerating the faults of middling or even fairly decent games for comedic effect.

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I guess I may as well add up the piles of opinions.

 

Quake 3 is a game that gets worse with age, whereas Quake 2 gets better. Quake 3 is dull to play and the base maps are crap, and being a multiplayer only game it doesn't do it any favors. Quake 2's single-player is something I appreciate more the more I play it, at least whenever I do play it.

 

Serious Sam 2 is the best game in the series, I find its gameplay to be more entertaining than the first two encounters, even with its cheap enemy placement. To the First Encounter's defense, it is short so repetition doesn't hit hard, something I can't say for the second personally.

 

Sonic CD is a bad game with too many questionable design choices that makes each playthrough unfulfilling in certain ways. If playing like your typical Sonic game, you have very bland levels with nothing really stopping you from reaching the exit (aside of the last zone). If trying to explore, then you have troll springs setting you 10 meters back. Did I mention that one generator is found if you stand on some piston that will send you to it, even though it looks like it should have crushed you?

 

Sandy Petersen made some of the best levels of both Doom 1 and 2, and I argue they have far more influence with creative custom maps than the rest of the id team.

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- Hexen > Hexen 2 > Heretic. I think Hexen 2 was overall worse than the original, still a good game, but not as enjoyable and the puzzles were occasionally frustrating (seriously, the first hub can just go fuck itself). I only ever had to consult 42's videos on Hexen during my playthrough once to find a solution to a particular piece of a puzzle, as opposed to almost constantly checking his vids on Hexen 2. The combat was also much worse, and I think that the moment you have to rely on your starting weapon the whole game because nothing else seems to be an improvement over it is definitely a bad sign, power ups or no power ups. How would have it been if you had to rely on the pitchfork in Blood 98% of the time because the other weapons basically sucked? Emphasis on "had to", because you can pretty much do that, if you really want to. As about Heretic, I think it is a boring game. Interesting levels and plenty of passion put into the game, but I occasionally had to force myself to finish it. I almost felt asleep on my chair a few times back when I streamed the game on my channel, and I am not kidding, that's how engaging it was for me... City of the Damned was the worst offender here. It was extremely tempting to can the whole thing a second time...

 

- The original Quake is better than the games that followed. Quake 2 is more or less an entirely different beast that just looks dull and is boring to play. I tried to finish it once and couldn't, and I don't plan on trying that again (unlikely to be a Heretic scenario). I can't even watch a full playthrough, it bores me terribly in 5 minutes. Quake 3 and 4 are much more interesting and fun.

 

- The soundtrack of the 2 Quake expansions is overall better than that of the original game. More or less an extension of my previous point.

 

- Linear level design can be great if done right, and preferable to bizarre or frustrating puzzles or "imaginary exploration", as I call it (exploration put into the game for the sole reason of making the player think there's more to the world or the game than there actually is, which adds nothing to the overall experience whatsoever).

 

- Sandy's maps are much more fun to play than anything from UD's, regardless of their less eye-pleasing texturing. UD is still tons of fun and great, but gameplay wise D2 eclipses it. Sandy gets an awful lot of shit that I think is simply unwarranted, especially when he seems to have had a bigger influence on the community. Ironic, isn't it?

 

- Inaccuracy of modern remasters vs the original games tends to be blown out of proportion.

 

- Original MK trilogy > First Street Fighter games.

 

- Guilty Gear is an underrated franchise.

 

16 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Is it because of the textured automap. GlBoom+ and GZdoom are both capable of showing textured automap too.

 

I have no idea tbh, I tried that a few times and it changed nothing for me. Usually, the moment I open the automap on a complex/big map I go "Yeah, screw this, I'm better off spending this century wandering around the map than trying to use this disaster".

Edited by seed

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