I was kiiiinda sorta maybe with them up until this point, then I just flipped a desk and set an old copy of PC Gamer on fire.
I got an alert about this post via @wumpus, what happened?
What’s the difference between “I like it” and “it is good”? “Other people like it as well” I guess?
Doom 2 is THE best game you can play today!
Even that is not necessarily true. If we applied that principle on other media, Jurassic World would be one of the best movies ever; Dan Brown would be an exceptional writer, and I am afraid to even mention a musical equivalent.
You don’t have to like something to appreciate it. Furthermore, many people wrongly believe that if they’ve been playing something for 5472 hours, it HAS to be good. But that just may be justification of their own actions, and is a problem of another kind in the game criticism.
I don’t know if I’d go as far as that, but there really are not many PC games from that era that stand the test of time like Doom. I try to play it every year, and a friend of mine played it for the first time on Xbox Live last year and had nothing but good things to say about it.
The source ports definitely help, though.
The source ports do help. But even when I played them on Xbox, they hold up way better than other games. Like they ported Duke Nukem 3D to XBLA as well, for example, and even put in the ability to reverse time. But the game is still ridiculously hard. Doom 2, on the other hand, is just so well paced and well designed even today, I was surprised that I could get back into it even on the 360. And then again recently when it showed up on Xbox One as a backward compatible title.
I think it’s to do with the medium itself. It’s possible to like a game as a guilty pleasure if it’s gameplay is excellent but the story is a guilty pleasure. But if the gameplay is the part that invokes the guilt, then it’s a lot harder to swallow.
For example, one that might be considered a guilty pleasure in terms of gameplay is Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. Unlike most shooters, you are constantly being ambushed by Japanese that come out of nowhere trying to stab you. Now, if you can get past that, and actually make progress in the game, then yeah, you could consider that a guilty pleasure.
Also, putting that aside for a second, I’m still a bit confused about guilty pleasures though. Are there a lot of film or book critics that put their guilty pleasures on their greatest lists?
Still, going back to the first category: games with rock solid gameplay that can be guilty pleasures are nearly all games done by Monolith. I just love their games. Shogo (their take on Anime), No One Lives Forever (Their James Bond spoof), NOLF 2 (their brilliant sequel), Condemned: Criminal Origins (their detective/hobo beating game), F.E.A.R.(their slow motion gun porn game), and I’m sure when I eventually try Shadows of Mordor, I’ll probably find something to enjoy there as well. All have really good gameplay though, and that’s how they’re able to get away with having excellent guilty pleasures as part of their other elements.
Not a lot of serious ones do so, though, for instance, Pitchfork’s infamous for tossing a couple of “So bad it’s good!” pop albums onto their yearly chart every year (in fairness, there’s usually a few dedicated pop-heads on-staff, but still). I suspect it’s being brought up in this case because [allegedly] game writers/list-makers are unusually predisposed toward doing so, or something?
I was just thinking that distinction appeared far less frequently in game media than in other places, and when it does appear, it is usually used in a wrong way. There are exceptions to this among the reviewers, of course (Chick and Richard Cobbett are the first that come to my mind), but, the more mainstream the media is, the more obvious it is.
For example, even on the list we are talking about, there is an entry for Morrowind, where one of the journalists says that the game has not aged well! WTF? But it is so obvious that the game is mentioned because he loves it, and that’s it. That’s the whole reason for being included. Another said about StarCraft II: LotV that he was not interested in multiplayer, but in the story, although the multiplayer is “arguable the biggest draw”! But that’s not why it is on the list of the best games of all time. No, it’s there because HE liked the story! Etc, etc. It should be the other way round: this game is here although I don’t like it very much.
Ah… I suppose it’s not that interesting to talk about. Besides, many people define games by their fun factor, and it’s very difficult to separate fun from some theoretical ‘quality’.
Why is everyone so bias (sic) anyway?
Bias is a necessity, but superficiality is not.
Ironic, since that review was so terrible I actually felt the need to respond to it in my PC Gamer editorial:
There are certainly reasons to like DA2, and they’re described quite well in the top 100 paragraphs devoted to it (story and focus/characters/dialogue), but I don’t think the actual review was competent or evidenced a meaningful consideration of the game or was indicative that sufficient time was spent playing it and similar games to evaluate it in an appropriately thoughtful and considered way.
As for the top 100 list in general, I thought it was a pretty quirky list with some choices that are difficult to rationalize in a persuasive way, at least until the top 20 or so (which seemed to make more sense).
Agree.
I really liked DA2 (more than Origins, although they are so different it’s hard to compare them) but the combat was plain horrible (not that Origins combat was good either, but it was much more solid) and I wish I could have skipped most of it and focus on the stories intstead.
That review is crazy.
Ok, I will play ball.
Company of Heroes too low.
Doom 2 too low.
No Stalker SoC.
No Thief 1/2.
No Master of Magic. No Age of Wonders.
No Jagged Alliance. No Xcom Ufo Defense.
F:NV too low, F4 too high.
Drop Rising Storm.
Drop Castle Wolfenstein.
Drop Far Cry 2.
Broken Sword and The Curse of Monkey Island, but not MI2, or S&M, or DoT, or TLJ or GK3.
Swap HL1 and HL2.
Drop PoE, put Fallout 2.
Drop Bioshock Infinite, put System Shock 2. Bioshock 1 a bit too high, but whatever.
Drop Alien Isolation, put Amnesia.
Drop Spelunky.
Put Operation Flashpoint in there.
Put C&C1 in there.
Drop Oblivion, Skyrim a bit too high.
Drop Rainbow six Siege.
Overwatch too high.
Deus Ex HR too high.
Drop Mass Effect 1, ME2 too high.
Drop Dota 2, put Smite. :P
Drop Gta5, put GTA:SA around pos. 70-60. WHY PEOPLE LIKE THIS GAME.
MGS5 too high.
Maybe put Splinter Cell Blacklist in there.
Dishonored too high. It was good, but not top 10 material.
Man, I just ignore these kind of clickbait listicles these days.
Yes, pure clickbait. Someone somewhere will be livid that X, Y, Z weren’t included on that list.
And biased towards recent releases as well.
No, you shouldn’t play DA2. Maybe on Easy to just see the story, which is… nothing special really. The story would possibly be solid if it wasn’t so hamfisted in it’s railroading near the end. The only good thing in the game as I remember it was the Companions. Everything else about it was bad if not outright terrible.
This, a million times. Heck, just youtube the story events. I love DA: Origins and really had a lot of fun with DA: Inquisition, but there is no good reason to play DA2.
DA2 is worth playing for the characters, which were way better than the ones in the first game.
Eh, they some of the most Bioware of all Bioware characters so YMMV on whether it’s worth it for that. They’re not even as good as the Mass Effect cast.
Wouldn’t begin to dispute that. But I think Varric is one of the best characters I’ve played in a Bioware game, nearly enough to get me to pick up Inquisition to hang out with him some more.