Five Games I Loathe That You Love

Welcome back to the second part of my little love/hate-fest.  I assume that I already managed to tread on a few toes in the first part of my article, even though most of the games weren’t so much universally hated as universally ignored by everybody.  In fact, looking back, the first article was positively tame.

Not so this one; I may not like a whole bunch of things that you hate, but I sure as hell hate a lot of the games you like.  In fact I’m not sure if I can even fit this into five games, but let’s give it a go.  In the interest of not antagonising everyone, I’ll try to give reasons for why I dislike these games, rather than simply stating their level of suckitude.  Now without further ado, the list:

•1.      World of Warcraft

Let’s get this one out of the way straight off; I cannot stand World of Warcraft.

For the two people that didn’t close this page in disgust, let me tell you why.  I have never been a big fan of the Warcraft universe; mainly due to the fact that it’s just the Warhammer universe, but with smart Orcs.  Despite all this, the combination of a huge MMORPG with a not-as-generic-as-some fantasy world had a lot of potential.

So with this in mind I stopped playing City of Villains (the best MMORPG I’ve played, with EVE Online a strong second) and eagerly picked up a copy of WoW…and just as eagerly uninstalled it soon after.  What everyone praises as fun and user friendly struck me as nothing more than an overly simplified version of every other MMORPG out there combined with the mindless level grinding and loot-whoring of Diablo.  Oh and don’t listen to people talking about it having stylised graphics; it’s just ugly.

The game doesn’t suck, but it’s no more deserving of its huge status than any other MMORPG, and less than some.

Why I loathe it: Been there, played that; derivative world; glorified Ebay simulator with it’s “kill; loot; kill; loot; sell old loot; kill; etc” gameplay. 

Why you love it: It’s made by Blizzard, for whom the gaming public and media have a massive crush; it doesn’t do anything new, but what it does do it does well; addiction to getting the latest, greatest equipment and mounts.

•2.      Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Goodbye to my remaining two readers.  I just want to get one thing straight; I’m not trying to court controversy here. I just legitimately dislike San Andreas.

I’m not a GTA hater either; I loved the old top down games, and GTA III and Vice City were both terrific (especially Vice City).  San Andreas, however, just tries to do too much in one go, and in doing so manages to dilute the experience to the point that almost every single task feels generic and boring.

When combined with the fact that the shooting and fighting kept the series’ typical clunky controls, the “gangsta from the hood” setting didn’t have a lot of the charm of the previous games, and all the pointless mini-games just being aggravating; well, lets just say that it didn’t take long for SA to outlive it’s welcome.

Why I loathe it: Stupid storyline; a deluge of content diluting the whole experience; ridiculously difficult in parts due more to poor controls and mission layout than actual difficulty level; couldn’t decide whether it was being a serious action game, or a humorous parody.

Why you love it: Large, expansive world; lots of new content; bmx riding down a mountain; fun in parts; Hot Coffee…you know who you are.

•3.      Every Final Fantasy after VII

The Final Fantasy games are classics of the Japanese Role Playing Games genre, and rightfully so; they are at the very top in terms of quality.  It’s just a shame that JRPGs are, on the whole, monotonous, random battle filled tripe with gameplay systems designed to be as obtuse and frustrating as possible, but disguised as “deep” and “strategic.”

Despite all this, the old SNES FF games were pretty great, (cheesy Star Wars reference names aside).  And Final Fantasy VII had a plot, characterisation, and a relative lack of mincing nancy-boys masquerading as heroes, which made up for the fact that playing it felt like battling in Pokemon Yellow, but not as fun. 

Every game in the series from this point on has just gotten progressively more irritating, until the delicate balance of horrible JRPG-ness versus semi-decent plot and character development was completely undone by a cut-off vest wearing pansy and his adventures into suppressed-homoerotic-feelings land.

Why I loathe it: The lamest D&D rip-off Western RPG plays better than any Final Fantasy; character development does not have to mean constant monologues, ridiculously over the top prose, and gradually stupider hair; Random battles are a plague on mankind.

Why you love it: They’re huge; they are so damn pretty it can make your eyes bleed; some of the characters are mildly awesome (Sephiroth); fighting system can be fairly deep once you get past the banality of it.

•4.      Quake III: Arena

The arrogance of id software never ceases to amaze me (although they were far worse when thrice-damned Romero worked there).  Quake III released into an era of FPS where the online revolution was well and truly in full swing.  The mod scene had led to some awesome creations and full-blown games (such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike), and id had started it all by making the previous two games so user friendly to modders; they wanted to see the future of the single and multiplayer FPS made into reality by the gaming public.

So why then, in this giant mutual love-in where new game modes were being created all the time, did Q3:A release without any of the by-then basics of a first person shooter? For what amounted to an online-only game (unlike direct competitor Epic’s feature-rich Unreal Tournament, which even had an attempt at decent single player with smart bot AI), Quake III came with little more than a few maps and some deathmatch.

Critics and fans alike can say what they will about “ultra polished” gameplay; I say it’s a one-trick pony whose only saving grace was a loyal Quake community.  If Q3:A hadn’t had such a strong modding presence from the get go, it would have just been an amusing diversion before going back to playing something else.

Why I loathe it: So simplified it quickly became boring; a commercial product shouldn’t sell based solely on its freeware mods; took some of the spotlight off UT, a far superior game and franchise.

Why you love it: Quick and deadly; Rocket Arena is great for a laugh; rewards skill more than some other FPS games.

•5.      Total Annihilation

If this game hadn’t been one of the first semi-3d RTS games, would it have been as popular?  I ask this mainly because I’ve never been able to find another remotely redeeming feature about Total Annihilation.

I mean, sure, it has a billion units.  Unfortunately, those billion units are almost identical to each other with only minor cosmetic differences; but it won’t matter anyway since they just form an amorphous blob on your screen as you wait for them to die so you can churn out slightly more powerful versions of said blob.

Apparently there is a great depth of strategy to the game, with epic wars waiting to be fought online that can go for hours; in my experience playing online, all I saw was players making a horde of units and sending them in a flood at their enemy’s own flood of units, and so on.

At least Age of Empires or Dark Reign had some real strategic potential in them; this was just a simple case of quantity over quality, which was damn shame an a terrible waste of potential.

Why I loathe it: Quite possibly the most generic setting ever devised for a game, with generic robots using generic weapons generically killing other generic robots on generic battlefields generically; resource collection was so incredibly fiddly and time consuming that micromanagement distracted massively from the actual fighting.

Why you love it: Huge in scale and pretty to look at, especially at the time of its release; highly modifiable, and with plenty of bonus units available to download; did the land/sea/air thing when most games only dabbled.

Dishonourable Mentions:

• Counter-Strike 1.6 - Was great 5 years ago; get over it already
• TimeShift - I actually only know one person who loves this, but that’s one too many.
• Diablo - My World of Warcraft write-up probably explains what I dislike about the Diablo franchise.
• Resident Evil - Looks good, pretty cool setting, shame about the gameplay.
• Tomb Raider - The original game was a terrible mess, and it only went downhill from there. Fairly sad when the highlight of your gaming franchise is the fact that Angelina Jolie played your star character in a shonky movie.

Part of me is glad right now that not many people are commenting on my site yet; probably means that I’ll avoid too many hateful comments about some of the stuff I said above (especially about World of Warcraft, those people are rabid I tells ya!).

Still, I encourage anyone to give me their opinion on this and its sister piece; did you love it or did you loathe it?  Regardless, I’ll keep typing away, looking for more articles to write and more ways to alienate my potential viewership.

-Tim Sweeney

(By the way, I would hope that people would realise that I was purposely being a bit of a bastard in how I talked about all of these games; fact is I’ve owned them all and played them to one degree or another, otherwise I couldn’t have written this piece.  Let’s just say I reached down somewhere dark and slightly scary in my journalistic heart-of-hearts to say all the nasty stuff that I think when I’m really pissed off, but otherwise wouldn’t have put down into words.

In actual fact I’ve had some fun with all of the games I’ve mentioned here; well except for Total Annihilation, I really do hate it with the passion of a thousand Dark Reign fans.)