"Classics" that you were underwhelmed by.

[Hemlet]

The most underwhelming gaming classic I've played to date is Zelda: A Link To The Past. Of the ones I've played (1, 2, LttP, OoT, MM, WW, OoS) it is my least favourite. I just can't get into it.

As for movies, I'm inclined to agree with the earlier posters' opinions about Blade Runner. I don't see why it is so highly regarded.

Totally with you on LttP. I can't even really explain why, but that game just annoys the hell out of me.

The one classic that really "underwhelmed" me though was Pride and Prejudice. For some reason or another I've had to read the book multiple times and bear witness to the movies, and my opinion on the book has not wavered. Indeed my opinion has only been driven deeper and deeper into my heart: I hate this goddamn story. It's the characters really. The unlikable, pompous, self-righteous, preachy, useless gits who are supposed to be the characters the reader or audience can relate to.

It's not like I don't get why the story is considered great either, I've had to read the damn thing several times after all. I'm pretty sure I get it: it's a story of manners, clever word play, and it introduced the tropes of the romantic comedy that we get to "enjoy" every summer. All of these reasons are exactly why Pride and Prejudice pisses me right the fuck off. The clever word play and manners amount to page after page of backhanded compliments, pointless polite small talk, and characters pretending to be aloof and uncaring while showing little emotion anyway when they do decide that it's appropriate to show that they give a damn. Plus, thanks to being the progenitor to now well known tropes, we can all tell from the get-go exactly what's going to happen anyway!

TLDR: The women in Pride and Prejudice are a bunch of shrews and harpies sniping at each others reputations, and the men are a bunch of posturing dick heads. It doesn't help that the story is predictable as the sun coming up now, even if it was new and fresh back when it was first released.

 

[xFullmetalx]

Street Fighter 2. I love fighting games but I don't like Street Fighter.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Subject is in the title but I got to say I watched blade runner and........
It was either really boring or I'm really stupid. And I don't think I'm particularly stupid because I have read the entire wheel of time series thus far and you need allot of patience to keep reading book 10.
that aside I don't understand the whole stigma around the movie. I walked in expecting a slow burn but talk about no burn. Instead of you know investigating and stuff he just roams around getting in arguments about philosophy with the replicant girl before very suddenly everyone starts very suddenly getting in gun fights. and then at the end it just ends. I mean the bad guy dies suddenly no kind of personal goal is achieved and the movies over. I walked in with the highest expectations yeah but I still never once enjoyed, was intrigued, liked the characters or anything that would typically constitutes a good movie.
I'm not saying it's a bad movie so don't get angry but I seriously didn't get it.
anyway what classics were you less then fond of.

yeah I also didnt "get" bladerunner I dont think its bad but...wheres the brilliance? instead its more just an hour or so of weirdness in fact I can bearley remember remembering what the hell was going on

but that said after a bit of thinking I guess perhaps the "themes" and/or Ideas of Philip K. Dick (and I guess you could say its an early example of cyberpunk in film) were more groundbreaking back then (the visual style certainly is/was theres no denying that)

so mabye it was so underwhelming because to us its really nothing all that new (except you know...weirdness)

eather way its not hard to see why it didnt do so well at the time

I guess for me S.T.A.L.K.E.R. there are actually alot of good things aboutt he game but really its just not very engaging

Yeah I guess what you say makes sense but still I wish i liked blade runner more than I did. And I like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and for that matter a lot of other Russian games. But hey it's all just opinion right?

dont get me wrong I dont dislike S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (its not like..in my oh so smug and supiror opnion which goes against popular veiw which makes it better..I mean some people act like their opnion is fact because they dare insult somthing popular)

I can see why its considered good and even ground breaking, I just couldnt get into it mainly because of the way the story was presented and the gameplay, I have alot of trouble reading big chunks of text in video games (not in real life however) it was the same with the witcher (not so much text as....wait...what am I doing here again?)

similar thing with AVATAR I dont think its a bad movie...by all logic I should really really like it but I dont because both sides are dicks and I dont like being told how much I suck compared to blue cat people

I didn't like AVATAR because I'd seen it before and it was better the first time. You know when it was still called Dances with wolves.
All right an exaggeration yeah and a far from an original argument but the reasoning still stands. Also I found it way easier to support the humans. Dicks they were but at least I enjoyed them being dicks as opposed to the "I think you should hug more trees" thinly disguised environmental message.

Avatar isn't really a classic it is what like a year or two old. It is no where near old enough to be considered a classic.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

Book: The Da Vinci Code. I have nothing against the controversy, far from it. But Jesus, who knew a story about global conspiracy and murder could be so FUCKING BORING!

Film: Alien didn't scare me at all, and couldn't even manage to be a good movie to make up for it.

Music: Elvis. Why? Just Why? People say he's the king of rock n' roll, but The Beatles have been about 10 million times more influential. Overall he's just underwhelming.

Game: (heavy duty flame shield at the ready) The Elder Scrolls games. I just don't like melee based combat from a first person viewpoint, it just looks and plays so much better from the third. Also the story to me seems like pretty much formula fantasy RPG, not bad in the slightest but nothing I haven't seen before.

Actor: (I hope my flame shield still works) John Wayne. Even if he was the dog's bollocks at the time in retrospect he's just not a very good actor, and pretty much everything he did Clint Eastwood did better.

Captcha: anatiti discussed... They're just f*cking with us now aren't they.

 

[harrflawless]

I feel like I should defend Lord of the Rings, particularly on the style. (over-descriptive/involved in the made up world)
Obviously it is a matter of taste but for me the beauty of all epic fantasy is the sense of really being part of another world. I mean, isn't that why we play videogames? The escapist, anyone? I've personally read the books dozens of times and love that each time I do, I generally learn something new (maybe I'm just not a very good reader lol). It's impossible not to get caught up in his passion for the world that he created. And no plot? It's like, incredibly intricate...Personally I think Tolkein would have thrived in our milieu, imagine if he could use that imagination and level on designing a computer game?

To the question.

2001 A Space Odyssey. Give me my three hours back. Key redeeming feature has to be the 'grip-shoes' the airline hostesses wear. (hey wow, in the future we can label things).

 

[Norris IV]

Game: FF7, I hated cloud and Vincent
Film: LOTR, Just too long, yeah i know it's petty but I dislike watching extremely long films and each one of the LOTR trilogy takes this biscuit

 

[Mr Somewhere]

I wish people would stop feeling the need to justify their hatred of beloved works...
On topic, I've never had a hatred for any "classic" work. I've never had a problem appreciating something, regardless as to whether the work has dated, I can still see why it was (usually still is) so influential.

 

[elvor0]

The thing is, if you play some of those Classics now of course they're going to seem boring or "done this before" because you didn't play them at the time, and instead you've played all the games/movies/books they've inspired and are now coming back to the original, of course the original is going to seem old hat in comparison to all the spick and span new stuff, but the classics are classics for a reason.

 

[Weofparadigm]

Link to the past. It didn't do anything especially daring except for the Dual-World idea. Plus the fight against Gannon was kind of underwhelming

 

[Woodsey]

Game: Bioshock. More personal biases than the game itself.

In what sense?

OT: BioShock for me too. The gameplay loop is rather archaic (its a slightly more complex version of the blue key for the blue door), which also destroys the pacing. The game's momentum rests too much on backstory and themes too, and the actual story really does only show up for 5 minutes to tell you the twist. And the twist doesn't work that well because its attributed to a non-character.

 

[y1fella]

Subject is in the title but I got to say I watched blade runner and........
It was either really boring or I'm really stupid. And I don't think I'm particularly stupid because I have read the entire wheel of time series thus far and you need allot of patience to keep reading book 10.
that aside I don't understand the whole stigma around the movie. I walked in expecting a slow burn but talk about no burn. Instead of you know investigating and stuff he just roams around getting in arguments about philosophy with the replicant girl before very suddenly everyone starts very suddenly getting in gun fights. and then at the end it just ends. I mean the bad guy dies suddenly no kind of personal goal is achieved and the movies over. I walked in with the highest expectations yeah but I still never once enjoyed, was intrigued, liked the characters or anything that would typically constitutes a good movie.
I'm not saying it's a bad movie so don't get angry but I seriously didn't get it.
anyway what classics were you less then fond of.

yeah I also didnt "get" bladerunner I dont think its bad but...wheres the brilliance? instead its more just an hour or so of weirdness in fact I can bearley remember remembering what the hell was going on

but that said after a bit of thinking I guess perhaps the "themes" and/or Ideas of Philip K. Dick (and I guess you could say its an early example of cyberpunk in film) were more groundbreaking back then (the visual style certainly is/was theres no denying that)

so mabye it was so underwhelming because to us its really nothing all that new (except you know...weirdness)

eather way its not hard to see why it didnt do so well at the time

I guess for me S.T.A.L.K.E.R. there are actually alot of good things aboutt he game but really its just not very engaging

Yeah I guess what you say makes sense but still I wish i liked blade runner more than I did. And I like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and for that matter a lot of other Russian games. But hey it's all just opinion right?

dont get me wrong I dont dislike S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (its not like..in my oh so smug and supiror opnion which goes against popular veiw which makes it better..I mean some people act like their opnion is fact because they dare insult somthing popular)

I can see why its considered good and even ground breaking, I just couldnt get into it mainly because of the way the story was presented and the gameplay, I have alot of trouble reading big chunks of text in video games (not in real life however) it was the same with the witcher (not so much text as....wait...what am I doing here again?)

similar thing with AVATAR I dont think its a bad movie...by all logic I should really really like it but I dont because both sides are dicks and I dont like being told how much I suck compared to blue cat people

I didn't like AVATAR because I'd seen it before and it was better the first time. You know when it was still called Dances with wolves.
All right an exaggeration yeah and a far from an original argument but the reasoning still stands. Also I found it way easier to support the humans. Dicks they were but at least I enjoyed them being dicks as opposed to the "I think you should hug more trees" thinly disguised environmental message.

Avatar isn't really a classic it is what like a year or two old. It is no where near old enough to be considered a classic.

No I'm definitely not saying it's a classic it's just we were half way through a conversation you apparently missed.

 

[Anti Nudist Cupcake]

2001: a space odyssey.

Nice music, I get the messages in the film but I was very very very BORED, even by the "Special effects" which aren't great in today's world at all.

ALIEN

I liked it a bit but it wasn't scary and felt a little...thin, if that's the right word.

AVATAR

Is this a classic? No matter, it just didn't have anything good about it, it was mediocre.

These are all just my OPINIONS of course so it differs from person to person.

 

[plugav]

The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot. It only gave me the impression that he was a pretentious prick.

Ann Rice's vampire books after Interview with the Vampire. The more perfect and godlike and indestructible the vampires become, the more nauseating it is to read about them.

Also Dracula. I get why it's a classic but, my God, is it boring! And that comes from a person who enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray and À rebours.

Movie: Citizen Kane. Again, my fault. I was expecting something really clever but it felt like something average done to perfection... if that makes sense?

It does. It's because the stuff that made it revolutionary back in the forties is commonplace now.

 

[ItsAChiaotzu]

Led Zeppelin. They're just not that good.

Oh, and Gladiator, that was a dull film.

 

[Blue Musician]

Also: Mozart

LOL. I don't know if you are referring him as he was a composer from the Classical period, his work is Classical music or that many people consider him a great composer.
Well to be honest he's not that great composer (I must agree that his Requiem was bloody-fucking great, one of my favorites) and that I don't really like his music (except his Requiem of course) except there now and again. He reached popularity because his age. He was already a virtuoso by the age of four and composed with great ease and his work was great (for that time), that's why people remember him. When he died people forgot him (I like to guess there was already starting something similar to pop music in that point) for at least 60 years until someone started classifying his work, offering great sums of money for his works. Unfortunately people started composing and even changing the compositions signature and selling to this person, and since this person did not study music and didn't play an instrument he didn't really saw the difference between pieces. Up until this day there still are pieces that are discarded as Mozart's.
People suddenly remembered Mozart not because his music, but because someone offered money for his pieces which were scattered all over Europe. After that, he got remembered as a virtuoso and someone who managed something that takes years and years of study to even try to be at the level that Mozart was at that point. He rightfully deserves this title, but for me he might have been exposed a little too much to everyone...

OT: Music: Ac/Dc for some reason.
Movies: Still have to decide to be honest.
Games: A lot. Oblivion, Morrowind, KotOR, GTA: SA, BioShock, Fallout 3, every Resident Evil, Deus Ex, Call of Duty 4, American McGee's Alice, Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, and many, many more.

 

[ZombieGenesis]

As for games, easily Half Life 2. I understood that the gameplay and graphics were going to be very retro, and that didn't actually bother me at all, it was the characters and the setting that did it in for me. I've heard so often about how amazingly characterised and immersive it all is... bollocks, I say. At no point did I feel anything was fleshed out, and though this is my opinion granted, I didn't like any of the supporting cast. Got most of the way to the end before just giving up... I honestly didn't care enough about anyone to work for their survival.

For movies, Bladerunner was dissapointing. I have to admit I adored the setting and the music above all else, but the actual story and script? Lackluster, didn't care for it. The main villain though is still one of my favourites, but that's mostly because of the actor's amazing job.

Catcher in the Rye, from the perspective of someone who is a writer, was a waste of paper.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Game: Bioshock. More personal biases than the game itself.

In what sense?

FPS's are my least favorite genre, but Bioshock is one of those games you feel obligated to play for yourself. I loved the Randian themes and art style, but the gameplay was lacking for me.

 

[Shiftygiant]

Lord of the flies, by William Golding. It's good and all, but unlike 1984, it didn't really hook me in, or shock me.

 

[Verlander]

The following films feature on the IMDB Top 250 list (http://www.imdb.com/chart/top), yet I would rate them average to poor. I have seen 212 out of 250, so some (like the Social Network) I haven't seen. I wouldn't recommend people to not watch these, but bare in mind that they are nowhere near as good as people say they are. The following are average to poor:


8. 8.8 Inception (2010) 342,187

10. 8.8 The Dark Knight (2008) 525,091

12. 8.8 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 407,740

33. 8.6 Toy Story 3 (2010) 126,265

49. 8.5 WALL·E (2008) 213,964

56. 8.5 A Clockwork Orange (1971) 215,277

61. 8.4 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) 247,575

67. 8.4 L.A. Confidential (1997) 179,862

75. 8.4 Black Swan (2010) 120,964

91. 8.3 Inglourious Basterds (2009) 221,218

120. 8.2 Heat (1995) 161,461

136. 8.2 Annie Hall (1977) 72,572

139. 8.2 Donnie Darko (2001) 235,535

170. 8.1 Avatar (2009) 313,953

192. 8.0 Star Trek (2009) 156,602

218. 8.0 Children of Men (2006) 177,283

 

[TSED]

I wonder how many of these opinions come from academically minded individuals. There is a huge difference in how, say, a Bachelor of English will dissect a narrative and how a layman will.

"Blade Runner," I must confess, is a movie I have never seen. "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?", the novel by Dick on which it is based, I have read and quite enjoyed. The point of the novel is how it's a postcolonial piece. It's a critique on specific paradigms found at the time it was written. Many of the points it makes - particularly the anti-war sentiments coupled with a frustration and acknowledgement of the necessity of the police - ARE still culturally relevant. Once again, I know the movie has been altered substantially from the novel but I have not seen it.

Anyway, education is important to appreciate things. Some people complain that this exposure "ruins" literature for them; others find the exact opposite. The latter finds a way to vocalize their dislike of a work, and can now not only explain why they liked something, but they can find new interpretations to further their enjoyment.

This is not to dismiss pacing (I can't stand anything written between Pope and the Modernists, for example), but there's no nice way to say this. You don't like it because you don't get it.