I haven't played any of these games on the list so I'll offer an alternate game for the most overrated of 2012: Far Cry 3. What looked so promising from gameplay trailers has become one of the most disappointing gaming experiences. I think the problem with Far Cry 3 is that it is two different games in one. It excels in the open world aspect, but the overdone, trite story sucks all fun out of the open world. I think I my not even finish the game.
Definitely! But I don't think their ignorance is Chick's responsibility.
Everything on this list is rote garbage.
The only people that enjoy these games are intellectual babies.
I would've included XCOM instead of Crusader Kings, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who was disappointed with Dishonored.
i disagree with 3 of them. Does that mean it's still link-bait?
"And what does that chaos level actually do, anyway?" -- This makes it seem like you didn't even play Dishonored.
Completely and totally full of it on Crusader Kings.
Yeah, for the most part I think it's just a list of the games that were hyped the most through the year, with some smaller ones like crusader kings and Journey to avoid criticism. Shock journalism and I fell for it.
It's a shame about Endless Space, that game has some excellent concepts behind it.
Ah, again the short sighted bullshit. It's not about problems you may or may not experience during this first year of launch (though those happened, and they didn't need to). It's not even really about people who don't have reliable broadband internet connections (though they exist and should be able to play any game that could possibly work offline, like Diablo III). It's about the servers inevitably being shut off, thus denying the game to posterity. Even if Blizzard in this specific instance keeps things running for decades to come (which, admittedly would be in keeping with their current character as a company and they certainly have the money), it's going to happen sooner or later. And it sets a terrible precedent that's likely to come home to roost much sooner with games from other companies like Ubisoft and EA.
EA's well known for shutting off servers for their multiplayer games just a couple of years after release. Would you trust them to not do that with servers that run the whole game? Gamespy got bought by another company and they just shut down most (all?) of those servers without notice. That could happen at any moment to practically any company in the industry, no matter how well behaved and well meaning they may currently be. And you're okay with that shackle being placed on games that have no valid reason to require a server to operate? Really?
I know I'm sure not.
What didn't you like about XCOM??
Well, you win this round, but only because I know I won't be playing D3 in a decade to have it actually affect *me* as an end-user. But as it goes, D2 servers are still humming along nicely and likely will for God knows how long and that's a fairly good indication of their intentions. The game is fun and I played a lot of D2, but I have from it and will for D3 move on to games with newer content. Do I think this DRM is crap? Yes. Does it bother me? No. Do I think this is the end of video game freedom and shackles for the consumer? Only if you like Ubisoft games. On your final note, I think what EA is doing is absolutely terrible and companies like that corporate black hole are really screwing their player base. '2-year old game? Axe those servers. It's like saving a dime a month for us!'
And what does that chaos level really do, anyway?
Kind of makes me wonder if you were really paying attention when you played the game. I did two playthroughs, a low-chaos stealth playthrough and a high-chaos kill-kill-kill playthrough, and I was surprised at the differences. A lot of the "flavor" conversations that you overhear are different in a high-chaos playthrough. It gave a really different feel to the world. For example, in mission 2, in the Back Yard, you come across a guard barracks where a guard has become infected. In the low-chaos playthrough, his buddies were saying that he wasn't really sick and should take some elixir and he was saying that they knew what wasn't true, and eventually, he convinces them to kill him before he becomes a weeper even though they don't want to do it. It was really poignant. In the high-chaos playthrough, they have discovered that he has been hiding his illness, and they are raging at him for putting them all at risk, and eventually murder him.
And like I say, it's entirely possible that Blizzard will keep those servers humming indefinitely. But they don't have to. There's no particular incentive for them to do so from a business perspective, no particular guarantee that they will, and certainly no guarantee that the people making those decisions will remain the same. And the likelihood just keeps going down over time. There's absolutely no reason to accept that in a product ostensibly being sold to you. And absent arbitrary restrictions of the form found in Diablo III, there is absolutely no reason games should not continue to be available as a historical and artistic legacy for generations to come. Might take some work to make them function on modern technology even without those restrictions, of course, but there's no reason to build in easily foreseeable points of failure.
SSX. Too many reviewers looked over that awful campaign, which had some some punishing AI and course design. Too many races were restarted because trying to turn led to boarders being stuck in on a part of the mountain, leading you to somewhere you didn't wanna go in the first places. That rewind feature was put in to cover up some bad playtesting that should've caught those f-bombs to physics.
Look at me look at me I'm failed actor turned video game shock "journalist" Tom Chick. I get attention by low-balling beloved games so that people come to my shitty little site. Maybe if I get enough hits it will keep my self esteem up high enough that I don't eat a gun reflecting on my pitiful life. Too bad so many are rooting for me to get cancer and die. Hopefully I do.
Diablo 3's online DRM and RMAH meant I wouldn't reward them by buying the game. The difficulty locking means I wouldn't play it even if it was free.
The response to Journey is baffling. It makes it hard to put any trust whatsoever in the widespread opinon on indie-ish games, as there's clearly no standards for criticism.
Your comment is utterly pointless without an example of a game that you believe is NOT "rote garbage" for "intellectual babies."
It's easy to shit on someone's opinion without having to expose your own to scrutiny (as Tom Chick does in almost every one of these, by providing examples of games he thinks succeed where these fail.)
In short, sack up and put your money where your mouth is.
I think you should have put Journey at #1 on this list and replaced Dishonored with the Walking Dead.
I'd argue that a choose-your-own-adventure based on a generic zombie show in a world that has been crushed under a mount everest size pile of generic zombie media is more worthy of being put on a "most overrated" list than an incredibly rare modern attempt at making an action game with non-linear level design and cool abilities that are fun to use.
Dishonored has flatline character performances and I can't help but but think how bad it is in terms of presentation compared to Thief. However, it is so amazingly rare to have an FPS that relies on designed, multiroute levels rather than taking place in a series of tubes or having a giant tedious open world where you have to spend 20 minutes walking across a vast expanse of empty copy/paste terrain to get to a glitchy mission. It is so so rare to have a game that focuses on giving you fun abilities that you get to use in the moment to moment general gameplay rather than sequestering them off into special situations or limiting their usage or effectiveness so much that you never get to use them.
Journey doesn't do anything different though; It just provides the absolute barebones, bare minimum core mechanics from older games (in this case 3d platformers and action adventure games) and takes out everything else. Flower basically did the same thing with flying games.
Why is subtracting gameplay meat from a traditional genera and leaving the bare bones considered "doing something different and non traditional." What do you mean "at the cost of traditional game elements?" All Journey is is the basic core traditional gameplay mechanics of an action adventure game or a 3d platformer. I don't understand why a game that consists of absolutely nothing other than core fundamentals that have been around since the 80s is considered a transgressive experience.
And what do you mean "art games?" People have to write dialogue for games, design characters, animate performances, and so on; these are all artistic disciplines that require creativity and process to execute. Why is there this separate "art games" thing when video games are fundamentally an art medium? I don't understand.