There are games that generate unreal levels of hype. It seems that the world is alight with a fever with some releases, such that one dare not announce their lack of interest.
Well, that's not accurate. I've never been afraid to say when I find a game boring, or that I don't enjoy something, despite everyone and their mother professing to absolutely love it.
Here's a list of five massively hyped games I just didn't like as much as I was told I should. And perhaps you don't either, you're just too afraid to speak up.
1. Halo
I remember Halo's release well. It was heralded as the next big thing in First Person Shooters on home consoles. Sure yo to that point FPS games were fairly weak - play any PlayStation or PlayStation 2 games in the genre and you'll find clunky controls, a crosshair that jumps across the screen with the slightest pressure on the right stick, and often back then the draw distance and resolution made it hard to spot your enemies until you got closer.
Halo promised to bring console gaming home, so to speak. But boy was it boring! Poster child of Xbox fanboys, which probably didn't Sidney enjoyment, it presented room after room of the same enemies with their annoying commentary as your dull, lifeless Master Chief laid them to waste.
It sure did look nice, I'll give it that, and unfortunately other games of its time didn't borrow from its ideas of colourful palettes and lush vistas. But that's not enough. The game is boring, the story is boring. And I'm in a clear minority.
I recently picked up the Anniversary remake for Xbox 360. I enjoyed that even less. Games have moved on so much in the last 15 years that this vision of the future is nothing but dated by today's standards.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Ok ok. This will piss some people off. The truth is I too was massively excited about this game. The open world structure concerned me, as it was the one thing I didn't enjoy about A Link Between Worlds before it, but otherwise I've enjoyed most Zelda games that came before (a notable exception being Majora's Mask, which could have made this list if I wanted two games of the same series on it).
I popped to my local retailer on 3rd March 2017 to collect my preorder, headed back home, announced my unavailability for the rest of the day, and set about getting into this new, open, version of hyrule.
From the off the story was bold and quite a lot of fun, with some clever twists on the usual series conventions. The world in which is was set is simply beautiful, and it was a joy to explore the starting area. Unfortunately that feeling didn't last too long for me, and I soon started to find that same exploration a chore.
A lot of the problem for me is the lack of guidance. I don't want to be handheld the whole way through a game like this, but there is very little instruction about how to progress that sometimes it is blind luck (especially on a map of this size) that you stumble upon the item you need. That or you've Googled it.
The world is vast, yet empty. The bulk of the "levels" are small temples which contain puzzles that require a level of mastery of the game mechanics and the world's physics. They can be fun, but very few offer a true challenge. The "dungeons" come in the form of four ancient machine beasts that you must navigate before defeating an insanely difficult boss to bring said beast to your side in the battle against evil. Four dungeons in the whole game. Small, quite simple dungeons. Four of them.
The people you meet on your journey are for the most part interesting, a plus point in all this negativity. However I soon (well, 20 hours or so in) grew bored of seeking them out.
Then there are the towers. In a nod to Assassin's Creed you climb towers in order to unlock areas of the map. The towers are about as interesting and taxing to climb as they are in AC. In fact, with a couple of exceptions, the only obstacle to reaching the top is your minimal stamina gauge which will run out if you don't make it to a ledge to rest, causing you to fall and start again. Or die.
Dying happens a lot too. A bit like Dark Souls (there's an over-used comparison for hard games) you will die if you take on a Boss if you're not ready, or if you go to an area for which you are not equipped. Once I tripped on a pebble as I ran along a path, and died.
So. I'm not a fan. Everybody tells me this is the best Zelda game / best Nintendo game / best game evah but I just can't agree on any of those points. I'll get back to it some day and maybe bill change my mind. Not today though.
3. Final Fantasy III / VI / VIII / XV....
Ok so I've picked out the games that most commonly appear on lists of The Best Games Evah. 3 and 6 being the same game, depending on which lump of land it came to.
Final Fantasy VII was a special game for me, being an early PlayStation title and one which showed what was capable on the new generation hardware. The atmosphere was amazing, and I still get a pang of nostalgia in my tummy whenever I hear the music, especially in the opening areas. I even have the battle music as my ringtone.
What gets me is the nonsense that punctuated conversation about the series. At one point 7 is clearly the best game of the series, then along comes news of a reboot, and suddenly out come the hipsters with their "oh 7's not all that, 6 is where it's at," or "meh I enjoyed 7, but 9 was the best!"
XV recently launched to massive hype. Anybody who's anybody described it as the greatest game ever in Final Fantasy. It makes sense that it would be - each game that comes should be better than those before it, or what's the point. Except Final Fantasy doesn't subscribe to those rules with each game more convoluted and ridiculous than the previous. XV doesn't break this tradition, and offers a dull combat system, boring skill levelling, and forgettable story.
I can't even be bothered to talk about it further.
4. Earthbound
For a long time I hadn't played this game. In fact I hadn't even heard of it until recent years when it started to get mentioned on the interwebs. Supposedly one of the greatest games of the SNES library, and apparently artificially highly priced despite there being plenty of supply, I finally got to see what it was all about when Nintendo brought SNES games to 3DS and I was dumb enough to buy a few of them.
There is a feeling of joy in the game. The opening scenes feel good. There's a silliness to things that I do enjoy.
However the gameplay is so tiresome that I struggle to get far at all every time I try to get into it. The inventory system is out of date, the battle system archaic. Perhaps if I can find the patience to scratch its surface I'll feel different, but it seems at the moment another example of the cool kids latching onto a game because it's different and less well-known than the obvious genre titles.
5. Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy
Ahhhhhhh. Just to be topical. Not that that matters, it might be 100 years before anyone reads this, if at all.
The internet has been crazy about this remaster for months, the hype increasing in intensity as we drew closer to release - which happened last Friday.
To aid my decision not to pre-order I went back to the PlayStation originals to see if my expectations of joy were based on genuine memory, or rose-tinted nostalgia. It turned out to be somewhere in between.
The games played just as I remembered them, and I even had a little fun. However, the overall impression was, as with so many retro games, time has not been kind. The games are as good as they ever were - the problem is that gaming technology, and perhaps more
Importantly the conventions and language that dictate how we expect to play them, have changed a lot in the two decades and three hardware generations since, which - beside notable exceptions, including Super Mario Bros with its simplistic styling and perfectly formed platforming - renders the games "old".
As I understand it the remastering of the trilogy extends only to the graphics and sound, which leads me to assume the clunky, aged gameplay is intact. Which in my experience with other titles suggests a massive dissonance between what you see and what you feel.
I'll wait for further feedback before I decide whether to dive in and give this a go (probably when it's half it's current price) but for now colour me uninterested. I'd much rather play the originals and have the gameplay match what my eyes and ears are taking in. Besides, instead of selling out an old game and demanding remasters of more old games, shouldn't we be petitioning for better new games that truly advance the art of video games?
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So. If you even read this far after I dared suggest Breath of the Wild wasn't all that, I hope you enjoyed a little insight into my thinking on the matter of hyped games. It's not the hype itself that is the problem - I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn! - but the blind hype that follows certain titles that isn't necessarily deserved.
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