Alarien said:
*Halo: Ultimate generic FPS shooter with bland, derivative story and characters (but at least it had Cortana).
It wasn't particularly generic when it came out well over a decade ago. A combination of features not seen in a single game at that point, a unique aestetic across the board, and a reasonably strong focus on story are all things that were fairly unique at the time. The overwhelming success of the game lead to it's features being copied and iterated upon by those that came after and, in
retrospect it may seem derivative but that's a fallacy. At
worst it is
iterative and even that argument is tenuous.
Alarien said:
*Half-Life: Very competent. Good polish and FPS mechanics. Boring as hell. I just can't be bothered to care about anyone. I am still baffled by the amount of love for Alyx out there.
Half-Life is a series where the story is implied more than anything. If you aren't the sort to project ideas into a framework constructed for that purpose, I can see the problem. You might not, for example, like The Elder Scrolls either as a result.
Alarien said:
*Uncharted 1: I once wrote a rant about this game that ended up being about 10 pages in Word. That said, I kinda am ok with Nathan Drake, himself, but the baffling blonde, Sully and pretty much every other character drove me nuts. The game has comparably poor shooter mechanics to other cover-based shooters, but insists on being far more "shitty Gears of War" than "competent Tomb Raider Knockoff." The first game also has some fairly blatant racist overtones and finally ends up with zombie nazi/conquistadors. Sorry, terrible game, and that's before you get to the jet ski sequences, which are some of the worst, most random things I have ever played. (Uncharted 2 was a pretty decent improvement in many respects).
I don't really buy this in the slightest. The only way you really find racist overtones in that game is by projecting them on the fact that you're killing people of non-Caucasian descent. Given that you're in a local that will predominately feature such people
naturally it's simply a matter of setting. Hell, there isn't even any of the classic white man's burden to fall on here since the motivation of both protagonist and antagonist is simply self-serving greed. The brown people are simply pawns or obstacles to that end.
I would fully accept an argument that the dissonance was overwhelming enough to ruin the game but not the racist angle.
Alarien said:
*GTA IV: Wow, I cannot think of a worst cast of characters in a game. GTA has never had "good guys" but, just wow. From a just plain scumbag main character to his downright hate-worthy irritating "friends," and the whole "hey, wanna take me bowling aspect?" Wow. It's a shame. The world-design and driving mechanics were solid, but the weapon/melee combat was awful, but the game also insisted on forcing the weapons through overly scripted events. I will never get over shooting out a guy's tires before engaging the chase portion of his mission and his tires automatically re-inflate. Baloney.
This one I'll agree with in principle. The game was simply broken in a great many ways. I wouldn't call the main character a scumbag so much as I would point to him as being wildly inconsistent. The level of inconsistency will vary depending on how you play the game of course .
