The Not Quite Best Games of 2011

[realist1990]

just because Resistance 3 ripped off other games doesn't make it bad..it's just cleverly taking the best bits out of other games and using it..there is a lot of games I had wished had "borrowed" other games ideas instead of coming up with their own shitty mechanic

 

[themerrygambit]

Why no mention of Serious Sam? I really don't think he gave that game enough credit...

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

I wonder if we could ever get a worst games of all time list. You see best games of all time lists with things like X-Com and Super Mario Bros. always near the top. But what games are so wretchedly bad as to be remembered years later as having caused pain to so many?

Wouldn't be possible. You'd have to look at:

1) The "blockbusters" that are carbon copies of older, better games, with none of their charm or energy, that we seem to get so many of nowadays (ditto sequels, etc).

2) Going back a bit, you'd need to include what I like to call "coin-op conversions from hell", the likes of which "Double Dragon" for the C64 would represent nicely. You have an entire legion of Golden Axe, Space Harrier, Afterburner etc imitators that were just awful.

3) Then you have the whole "granny games" section, by which I mean games that barely classify as such and that only your grandmother could think would be fun ("Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool". Yeah, I played it. Yeah, it really is that bad. Worse than "Barney's Hide and Seek". Reportedly worse than the "Barbie" games on the Sega Megadrive. Not that I would know. Ahem...)

4) Then you have what I like to call "the curse of the adventure game". Early on this would be text-based, later point-and-click, but this is the kind of "game" where the only way to ever progress would be to try using every object on every other object within the game. And even then the logic would be obscure. Text-based is worse because sometimes the game wouldn't recognise what you were trying to do, even if it was right. Basically the kind of game that you have to use a walkthrough to solve, and even then it's not worth it.

5) Bible games. Just bible games. If you've ever played one of these wretched things from the 8-bit era ("Super Noah's Ark", anyone?) then you'll know what I'm talking about.

6) And then you just have the legendary failures: "ET the extra terrestrial", "Superman 64", "Kane and Lynch 2", etc.

Add in the fact that everyone has a subjective viewpoint and everything's gonna be hated by SOMEBODY.

Now go through all of that and tell me how the heck you're gonna sort out a definitive list of "worst games of all time"? I mean, there's so much bad, so much mediocre. It's like any art form: a helluva lot of it will always be produced solely for the money, with no real creative vision behind it, sometimes under extremely stressful or hurried conditions, getting shoved onto the shelves for Christmas without being properly finished, etc. You just gotta know where to look for the good stuff.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

So the problem, and you should really understand this without me or anyone else having to spell it out for you, is that you've judged a game with a 90% focus on multiplayer on its single-player experience. Perhaps if you'd given the award to the "BF3 and MW3 Single Player Campaigns" instead of the games as a whole, people would understand.

So why aren't these games just released as multiplayer online arenas, and they don't even have to bother with their linear, set piece to set piece, badly-written single-player campaigns?

This is a very good point. I understand the reasoning behind the shift towards focusing on multiplayer, since they generally involve a lot less effort to develop than single player campaigns and yet have much more replay value. But that just brings up the question of why the same developers who operate on that logic still do pour all that work into making the campaigns at all.

I remember Yahtzee complaining about developers focusing on multiplayer and singling out Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament as targets of blame, and I didn't bother to argue with it at the time, but now's a good time to bring it up again: He was wrong about that. Really, if anything, those games (and all of Valve's multiplayer games from '99-'07) did it the right way: If you wanted to play a game against other people, you would buy one of those games. If you didn't, you wouldn't. It was pretty cut-and-dried and nobody forced you to buy what was essentially two games if you only wanted to play one. Sadly, they have always been the exception rather than the rule, and the only game I can think of to do it since 2007 was Brink, and given how much its "single-player/multiplayer integration" was hyped I'm not sure it counts.

 

[Lancer873]

I have to say that I felt MW3 was indeed the most disappointing to me this year because there was a while where I was considering buying it due to the story because the previous game, as mediocre as it may have been, set it up in a way that I wanted to see what happened next. It looked interesting and I was hoping that they'd do something good for the next one, but apparently they took the thing that was the most interesting to me (Both the Russians and the Americans being portrayed as partially justified douchebags and the main characters being secret fugitive badasses on a mission to stop a senseless war) and threw it out the window in favor of another modern-cold-war-round-two game where the Russians are evil and Americans are the shining saviors of the human race and it's better to be dead than red. At least with DNF I realized there was no way it could recapture the old-style of gaming because hunting for secret doors in non-linear spread-out levels and such just wouldn't work in the modern days, and that's what I liked about the Doom era the most.

Resistance 3 was one of the more pleasant surprises because, while I was fully confident Insomniac would make a good game, I was surprised at the way they rounded it off and listened to the fanbase and improved the game accordingly. I would've been begrudgingly satisfied with an updated Resistance 2. I did get the HL2 vibe, especially in Ravenholm Mount Pleasant, but I know that basically all the changes were specifically requested by a large chunk of the fanbase (the removal of health regen and the return of the weapon wheel) and were more-or-less present in the first Resistance so I didn't really peg it as a rip-off, but I can definitely see how some could see it that way.

I certainly agree with Deus Ex. The last boss battle was kind of a step in the right direction, but even then they were a step downwards, and the game was never terribly tricky. Not to mention that I've never been a huge fan of save-scummying and it was pretty much necessary in that game with some of the random-ass cases where I'm not aware that I'll piss the guards off if I do something, like the police station once I talked my way in. Walk into that restricted access area? Sure, go right ahead. Walk into an office? STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM! Grab a credit chip off a table right in front of a guard? No problem, enjoy! Open up that drawer with a proenergy bar in it? DIE YOU MONSTER!

 

[gim73]

You can't say Arkham Asylum is "in fact" better than Arkham City because that's not a goddamn fact, it's an opinion. Yahtzee's been utterly dismissive of other opinions lately.

He's always been dismissive of other peoples opinions? The whole Anti-Wii thing, for instance.

And yes, he can say that MW3/BF3 is shit, because he only plays the singleplayer. So you people feel that the multiplayer is "70% of the content"? Fine, but he isn't reviewing that content, now is he? So every time he starts a review, imagine a big neon sign flashing before your eyes saying "THIS REVIEW IS BASED SOLELY ON THE SINGLEPLAYER EXPERIENCE OF THE GAME", and then maybe you could stop complaining about it?

The anti-Wii thing is easy to have. I'm an RPG fan and I've always had an anti-Wii thing because Nintendo has been the piss-bucket for RPGs since the N64 era. Leave your dirty handheld RPGs out of this too. I got this big frakkin TV so I could play my video games on it, not so I can get a 3" screen and try to read the tiny text. It's like I have the Dreamcast controller and they are trying to force me to play a game on the memory card. Motion controls and 3D gimmicks don't really matter to an RPG, so nintendo is just a waste when it comes to RPGs. With VERY few exceptions, I've never said 'I regret buying a Xbox 360 rather than a Wii'. As opposed to my desire to get a PS3, which is MUCH stronger.

As for why MW3/BF3 deserves the top of the crap-list, it really comes down to them being cookie-cutter games with nonsense storylines and shit-tastic gameplay. The stories make VERY LITTLE SENSE. In MW3 they gas like every city in Europe, then invade at the same time, and there is something about kidnapping the russian presidents daughter so they can get nukes... REALLY? 'I've got the power to kill tens of millions of people in a single day! Woohoo, I don't think it's enough, I need to be able to kill everyone left without having to deploy my seemingly endless supply of soldiers.' Craptastic! Now I'll get to BF3 and it's glaringly stupid plot to terrorize us with suitcase nukes. First, you find a case with three spaces for the bombs, but only one nuke in the case. Nobody comes to the conclusion that there was only ever one nuke. Nobody wonders why one nuke was left behind (meh, I don't need three nukes, two will do me just fine. Leave the third for the americans to find and worry about. Maybe they will blame the russians for selling nuclear weapons to Iran...). In France they go to stop the first nuke and the bad guys have dozens of guys and large canisters of GAS in the building. Why did they bring gas and men to a city they wanted to nuke? Did they expect somebody to get wind of their operation and try to stop them with three russians? Since everyone in the game except the civilians has a gas mask, why bother with gas? Same thing in New York, lots of guys taking over a train to transport an easily hand-carried nuclear device to the city center. Only reason it goes off in Paris is because the guy slips it on the train on a timer before you could get there and nobody was any the wiser. It's like this villians WANT somebody to try to fight them, and ultimately defeat them. Also the viewpoint of BF3, where you are being interrogated at the end by somebody else about the events of earlier in the game seems to be taken right from COD: Black Ops, except they were ripping off Alpha Protocol, which is at least fifty times better than both of these games combined, and it itself is only a shadow of what Deus Ex Human Revolution turned out to be.

Oh, and a game can't stand without a solid single player experience. Even an MMORPG like World of Warcraft is STILL a solid game if you could play it offline by yourself.

 

[Bobic]

I wonder if we could ever get a worst games of all time list. You see best games of all time lists with things like X-Com and Super Mario Bros. always near the top. But what games are so wretchedly bad as to be remembered years later as having caused pain to so many?

5) Bible games. Just bible games. If you've ever played one of these wretched things from the 8-bit era ("Super Noah's Ark", anyone?) then you'll know what I'm talking about.

Hey, Super Noah's Ark probably wasn't that bad of a game. Sure it was baffling as hell but it was Wolfenstein 3D with a fresh lick of paint and who doesn't love Wolfenstein? Ok, yes, no-one but Nazi sympathizers would choose it over Wolfenstein, but still, I'm sure you could have fun with it.

 

[ChupathingyX]

The gameplasy in Resistance 3 is similar to the gameplay in the Ratchet and Clank series...just in 1st person.

Ratchet and Clank was released before HL2, so as far as gameplay goes, no, they didn't just "rip it off". Maybe they took some inspiration in locations, but other than that, no.

I find it hard to believe Yahtzee wouldn't do just a couple of minutes of research to realise this (is he even aware of the Ratchet and Clank series?).

 

[Wartys]

Well, I guess what I predicted was true. Yahtzee didn't put Call of Juarez: The Cartel on the list because it is boringly bad, even though it is much worse (in my and I'm betting quite a few others' opinion) than Duke Nukem Forever (a game let down by unrealistic hype through development hell, mediocre gameplay and trying to extensively borrow cliches from popular FPSes throughout history, and say what you may about Duke's personality here) and Dead Island (a game that while competent but initially buggy, was a substantially jarring change in tone from the original, beautifully-done trailer), while some would argue worse than Mindjack too (indeed, fucking fucking fucking fucking bad bad bad bad don't don't don't don't play it).

After watching Extra Credits' take on CoJ:TC though, I am just infuriated with the game (perhaps even moreso than even DNF's Alien Hive). It's not just that it's boring and ultralinear with an unnecessary dose of hardcore edge, it's also laced with unfortunate implications and blatant untruths. Of course, it seems nobody gives a damn about the game anyways. For a fully-priced release, when Ubisoft decided to delay the port a couple months, I never saw it in the top ten best-selling games and hardly if ever saw it in the top twenty. By the time of the console versions' release, the bad reviews were already pouring from critics and community and Techland just didn't care as they were focusing on Dead Island.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

Minecraft is more of a "game" than any "crafted experience" ever could be. Why is a game a "crafted experience" now? Isn't a game more of a set of systems used to create the illusion of a world? To this end, wouldn't that make Minecraft the most game-like game that came out all year? I dare say "creativity toy" doesn't cut it. Open-world sandbox with a set of engaging core principles behind it is what makes a game.

I'm not a Minecraft fanboy, not in the slightest. But I'd have assumed it makes the cut more than any cinematic, "immersive" "experience".

 

[CardinalPiggles]

I'm actually playing through Deus Ex:HR for the time now. My character is diversionist (damn I just made up a word), and going through a police office building without anyone seeing you is pretty fun, but you know what's not, that first fucking boss fight against an augmented dude with a minigun on the end of his fucking arm and when he isn't shooting you he spams grenades that kill you instantly if you get too close to the blast and that's very difficult when your in a small room with lots of obstacles playing with sluggish controls! *takes a breath*, but yeah, otherwise a good game. (I hate you Barrett).

 

[xshadowscreamx]

L.A NOIR and deas ex HR are both games i must get this year

 

[duchaked]

I played some Resistance 3 before putting it down and calling it off as complete BS
BUT I was forced to play it with Move controls so that might have been an unfair handicap for the game lol

I played through both MW3 and BF3 (didn't buy then, gosh no) and...well I enjoyed myself enough
but I wouldn't encourage their behavior. esp CoD under Activision

 

[Hal10k]

The gameplasy in Resistance 3 is similar to the gameplay in the Ratchet and Clank series...just in 1st person.

Ratchet and Clank was released before HL2, so as far as gameplay goes, no, they didn't just "rip it off". Maybe they took some inspiration in locations, but other than that, no.

I find it hard to believe Yahtzee wouldn't do just a couple of minutes of research to realise this (is he even aware of the Ratchet and Clank series?).

Ratchet & Clank: heavy emphasis on platforming and collecting various items in typical cartoonish platformer fashion. Possesses light shooting elements with a minimal focus on aiming or ammo conservation. Levels arre broken up into multiple, open hub areas connected by corridors. Just your average 3D platformer, but with guns.

Resistance 3: possesses little to no platforming elements. Aiming and ammo conservation are integral to gameplay, as with every first person shooter made since 2001. Levels are composed of mostly linear stretches, with few to no areas where open maneuverability is permitted.

I question your logic, good sir.

 

[ChupathingyX]

Ratchet & Clank: heavy emphasis on platforming and collecting various items in typical cartoonish platformer fashion. Possesses light shooting elements with a minimal focus on aiming or ammo conservation. Levels arre broken up into multiple, open hub areas connected by corridors. Just your average 3D platformer, but with guns.

Resistance 3: possesses little to no platforming elements. Aiming and ammo conservation are integral to gameplay, as with every first person shooter made since 2001. Levels are composed of mostly linear stretches, with few to no areas where open maneuverability is permitted.

I question your logic, good sir.

Did you just say that Ratchet and Clank has "light shooting elements"? I recall the R&C commercials back in the PS2 era being specifically focused on the weapons and the destruction they can cause.

In the Resistance 3 episode of ZP, Yahtzee mentioned things such as health kits, not constantly taking cover and more straightforward action.

All of which have been featured in the Ratchet and Clank series.

To say that Resistance 3 is an outright "rip-off" seems misinformed. Maybe Insomniac took some inspiration, but "rip-off"? No.

 

[jmarquiso]

I'm actually playing through Deus Ex:HR for the time now. My character is diversionist (damn I just made up a word), and going through a police office building without anyone seeing you is pretty fun, but you know what's not, that first fucking boss fight against an augmented dude with a minigun on the end of his fucking arm and when he isn't shooting you he spams grenades that kill you instantly if you get too close to the blast and that's very difficult when your in a small room with lots of obstacles playing with sluggish controls! *takes a breath*, but yeah, otherwise a good game. (I hate you Barrett).

Barett's the first of three of these terrible bosses. There are environmental solutions with all of them, but it sucks to focus on stealth and have this happen. The fourth "boss" is a good mix of everything learned in the game.

Check out the Zero Punctuation review, and how he talks about the boss fights.

 

[Penguin_Factory]

it's impossible to get past those horrible boss fights and terrible ending.

I still don't get what the big deal is with the Deus Ex boss fights. They're like five minutes of game time combined, out of 12+ hours. I just ignored them and moved on.

 

[DioWallachia]

"You know why I hate the two specified realistic war games? Because they're horribly written and the gameplay is so dull and repetitive that it puts me in a fucking trance. And I'm pretty sure that's not a sensation that pitched do-or-die war battles are supposed to evoke, so there you go"

People still dont get it? i am pretty sure that even in the Extra Punctuation reviews you made it already clear. Oh wait, they have to read the article to notice and reading isnt on the list of things that the educational system have to teach

OT: You know, because i dont live in a place where the news of new video games (or any video game export for that matter) reach this place i was really surprised that Gears of War was developed by Epic Megagames (Know now as Epic Games)
To think that a shitfest like that get up to 3 games makes me wonder: Is the series popular because the gamers feared that if they DONT buy the games from Epic the company will shut down and never see another Unreal game or even a sequel to Tyrain?? Dont they know that if they buy a Gears of War the developers will think that you want more of it?? Why not just donate your money if its so important for you for them to make other games??

And while i am at it: WHEN WILL YOU MAKE A GAME THAT WILL SURPASS TYRIAN IN TERMS OF AWESOME, Epic Games?????

 

[DioWallachia]

Ratchet & Clank: heavy emphasis on platforming and collecting various items in typical cartoonish platformer fashion. Possesses light shooting elements with a minimal focus on aiming or ammo conservation. Levels arre broken up into multiple, open hub areas connected by corridors. Just your average 3D platformer, but with guns.

Resistance 3: possesses little to no platforming elements. Aiming and ammo conservation are integral to gameplay, as with every first person shooter made since 2001. Levels are composed of mostly linear stretches, with few to no areas where open maneuverability is permitted.

I question your logic, good sir.

Did you just say that Ratchet and Clank has "light shooting elements"? I recall the R&C commercials back in the PS2 era being specifically focused on the weapons and the destruction they can cause.

In the Resistance 3 episode of ZP, Yahtzee mentioned things such as health kits, not constantly taking cover and more straightforward action.

All of which have been featured in the Ratchet and Clank series.

To say that Resistance 3 is an outright "rip-off" seems misinformed. Maybe Insomniac took some inspiration, but "rip-off"? No.

Lets talk about this line that divides a game from being "inspired" and from being a "Rip-off" because i am still waiting for someone to say "all these shooters are a clear rip off of Doom and blah blah blah" or "The Star Wars prequels are just a 3 movie rip off of Citizen Kane badly done"

So lets try to be honest here and see what we can work out. Why you think that Resistance 3 ISNT a rip-off? Because for me it feels like the developers were going for the nostalgia cash in since R3 isnt like R2 in terms of gameplay (as Yathzee pointed out, it isnt as brown and boring) You will think that they will just have the same as R2 but with some innovation but the change of mechanics makes me believe that it IS a cash in in nostalgia.