Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@VoidofLight not only do i agree, but I think you're on to something. I'd say I prefer games that let me figure things out for myself as opposed to games that obviously signal or direct the player to the next point of interest. I didn't like Horizon: Zero Dawn either and, while I recognize it as a "good game", it never got to me like BotW or Elden Ring.

I see that people have been busting out the ol' Dark Souls critique again. I dont think that it qualifies as an unpopular opinion anymore 😉 how about looking at it like this: Miyazaki has been quoted as saying something to the effect that he makes his games challenging so "players will feel the satisfaction of overcoming seemingly impossible odds". It's a deliberate choice to manipulate a specific emotional response from a player. Put in an easy mode and then those odds aren't "seemingly impossible". The line of thought that the games dont lose anything by having an easy mode is flawed.

@VoidofLight
I'm the opposite.
I do not like to wander around in huge place without guidance.
I do not like to find certain things without hints or pointing arrow to show the location especially for the games I have never played before or the games with different language (Japanese only). I will ended by being clueless and frustrated.

And thus I like to play games with guidance or pointing arrow to tell you what should you do or where should I go by following the pointing arrow from Ni no Kuni, Fantasy Life, Yokai Watch games, Yonder the Cloud Catcher Chronicles.

@VoidofLight I actually used to hate games that didn’t, maybe not hate but had waay less interest, probably why botw wasn’t my most favorite game ever.

That all change last year tho, with hollow knight, it didn’t tell me where to go, and I was rewarded for wandering, if I wanted to really find something, I could just look it up. I really didn’t think just wandering could be so rewarding and fun! Probably why I’m gonna need to play breath of the wild again.

So that’s my story from not really liking open world games ( like botw) to loving them, just because of one indie game, and I agree with you with HZD, I love the game so far, the story to, I think it’s better then botw, buuuut the open world just isn’t as good as botw, it’s so limiting!

Oh my good it’s a whole thing, @roy130390 how the have I not heard of this before lmao.

@VoidofLight
100% agree. One example is the modern lego games. While the world is not as big as eldin ring or botw, they still are pretty decent open worlds. But one problem I have is that they show you where every character, vehicle and gold brick is. Instead of searching the world for collectibles, it is more of a checklist. I think that is why I like Minecraft and botw so much. There is no goal, and it makes the player feel like they have more choice in the game.

I don't know how well this will go down, but I think Super Mario Land 2 is a better game then Super Mario Bros 3.

I think the courses are better designed with unique themes that aren't found in other Mario games, the bunny ears powerup is fun, the game has a great overworld that lets you play levels in any order you like, the bosses are different and varied from one another, and the game looks better even taking into account the hardware differences between the NES and Game Boy.

I think this game gets lost in the SMB3 vs SMW debate, and it easily stands on the same level as those two games.

I think SML2 is better then SMB3, and only falls short of SMW(which has the benefit of better hardware) as the best 2D Mario game of all time.

I think this summary really nails it.

Are you seriously still going?

Lol, the irony here.

My Little Pony: A Maretime Bay Adventure was announced today. As someone who loved the movie My Little Pony: A New Generation, and the previous generation, Friendship Is Magic, I'm actually happy about this and looking forward to this game. Especially since I do enjoy games based on my favorite cartoons (last one I played was Smurfs: Mission Vileaf on PC, loved it).

@Ralizah Yeah that's true, Raccoon Mario is quite a lot easier to use. I used to have a really hard time flying with Cape Mario when I was younger. That's also true, while the game came out one year before I was born, I did love playing it back when I was a kid, alongside Super Mario All-Stars, Yoshi's Island, and the Donkey Kong Country series. Platformers were pretty much my jam, and they still are today.

I actually had a similar experience with Majora's Mask. I'm not sure if it's because I didn't grow up with it, but I just couldn't get into it for some reason. I got stuck very early on. I do recognize that it's a beloved game for many, and believe me - I would've loved to get more into it!

@WoomyNNYes Ah yeah I've seen some success from drifting earlier, so it's pretty much just a matter of practicing with it. I occasionally play on 200cc when the online picks the class on its own, I'd say I'm fairly decent at it.

@VoidofLight I used to think I wouldn't be that into Breath of the Wild, but I gave it a shot sometime after I first got my Switch, and surprisingly, I really liked it. It's pretty much all thanks to the game's gorgeous landscapes and how the progression works, not to mention that it's quite exciting to find something new while you're playing. Especially if it's a new shrine or tower.

@Sunsy
My Little Pony on modern consoles??

Aaaah...! 😃
And the game is published OG Games.

@Anti-Matter Yup! Trailer got posted today. Really happy as a fan of this series that this is happening. Loved the world the new movie had, and it's going to be fun to explore it.

Given it's My Little Pony, I have a feeling this will be unpopular with a lot. Me personally, I'm happy.

@Sunsy
I wonder if I can change the gender of the pony as I want a male pony and want to give the name Ixion (FF X).

@Anti-Matter From the looks of it, you don't make your own pony, you play as Sunny. Unless multiplayer mode let's you play as Hitch, he's a stallion. Guess I have to wait until the end of May to pick up a copy to see what the game is like or if he's playable in some form.

I don't really like open world games, because then I don't know what to do or what I should be doing.
I like boundries.

I do think it is a shame that linear experiences have been sorta turned into a dirty word. Until Night City, I think the two best videogame spaces ever made were Rapture and Columbia. They were linear, level based, games but set in large enough spaces that there could still be a limited degree of exploration, discovery and environmental storytelling. Had Rapture or Columbia been open worlds, I think a lot of what made those spaces so special, would have been lost. As when you are leading people through curated pathways, you can pack a lot of detail into those paths, which isn't quite as sustainable when you are having to have things take place over a huge space where the player can be anywhere at one time.

Other examples of this for me at Deathloop. A game which is a series of large, explorable, levels but a game I very much feel would have benefited from smaller, more curated spaces as you are lead through a tour of Blackreef, much like you are through Rapture in Bioshock.

On the flip are games like Fallout 3/New Vegas, Skyrim, Biomutant, BOTW, Far Cry 6 etc which are filled with so much reused, or dead space, and this helps a lot in making the important locations stand out by contrast but had you just made a smaller map, just with those key locations, I think it would have been a way interesting game. Like there is this obsession with size, but I don't think the scale of a map dictates whether you can be lost in a game or not. In fact, Rapture proves that.

Mario Kart 64 is not a fun game.
I have false memories of it. I played it with my friend in the NSO app the other day, and we sucked really bad at it, it's impossible to control and the courses are pretty bad overall. Both of us also thought Star Cup was our favorite, just to find out it had some of the worst courses in the entire game lol

And we were really excited for Yoshi's Valley, but it's impossible to take the skinny road without falling down.
Banshee Road or whatever its called is the most difficult course. We had to play it like 5 times to get in 4th place and be able to go to the next course.

Call of Duty and its various ripoffs and Final Fantasy XIII did serious damage to the word "linear" and its never fully recovered.

I mostly just hate both extremes in most cases, especially in 3d games. Like companies don't realize that there is a middle ground between "hallway simulator" and "open world the literal size of a US state".

@kkslider5552000 Games like Tales of Arise do well with the more linear areas, but then you have things like Pokemon Sun and Moon and Sword and Shield, where the game is legit just a hallway simulator.

@VoidofLight "Pokemon Sun and Moon and Sword and Shield, where the game is legit just a hallway simulator"

Its sad, because its true.

Pokemon Black and White aren't all that great.

I mean, they're good (like most Pokemon games IMO), but there seems to be a growing feeling online that B&W were the "good old days" of Pokemon, or even the peak of the series. I imagine this is because we're getting to the point where people who grew up with B&W are of the age to be very vocal on the internet, and to feel a lot of nostalgia towards these titles (we saw this with RSE and DPPt previously, and it still exists with RBY and GSC in my age group). But personally, I find them to be significantly less enjoyable than previous entries, and I'd argue that they started (or scaled up) a few of the things that people criticise gens 6-8 for.

• I'll start by saying the graphics are great, especially in-battle. I'm not a fan of the UI in this game, including the sterile tone induced by "black and white" theming, but that's a matter of personal preference.
• While I commend the idea of "rebooting" the Pokedex by only including new species in the main game, and I actually really like some of the new designs here (I, for one, adore Trubbish), I think in practice this kinda fell flat. Too many Pokemon just felt like uglier versions of Pokemon I had used before. And, while I appreciate some types getting relatively good representation this gen (Bug and Grass in particular), it did feel like some other core types got shafted in the process (Water). I also find Unova to have one of the weakest selections of starter Pokemon.
• Too add: too many of the new Pokemon are either available too late, or evolve at too high a level. Why introduce two new bird Pokemon on the final route? Why do we have Pokemon that evolve in the 60s?
• While the story is pretty decent (and arguably the best in the Pokemon main series)...the cost of this is railroading the player through the region, a trend that would continue in future games. I'll admit that the greater emphasis on cutscenes was not a new thing to Black and White (there were a fair number of unnecessary cutscenes introduced into HGSS to my chagrin), but I believe this to be the game where it went to the extreme, with every sequence of the game punctuated by character interactions, and pretty much everything in the game having to be done in a specific order. I think the Gym Leader involvement in pretty much every step of the journey is emblematic of this. Although some like the increased role of Gym Leaders in the story, I found this resulted in the essentially the same loop for every city: arrive in city, meet gym leader, solve gym leader problem, do gym, leave city - all with no player agency in the order of this sequence.
• Region design. While I'm unsure if I'd call it the worst region in Pokemon (I need to replay gens 6-8 to refresh my memory on those), it is a far cry from regions 1-4. The main criticism of this region is that it's linear - which I've touched upon above, and is somewhat rectified in the sequels Black 2 and White 2. The main game is essentially city > route > city > route, whereas at least previous games had split pathways and backtracking to mix things up a bit. One positive thing I'll say is that, unlike Alola and Galar, the routes are quite open and there's a decent amount of exploration to be done within them, and there are a few reasons to revisit routes once you have progressed in the story. However, beyond that, the main thing that bothers me about the region is that it is that it lacks cohesion. Based on New York City, Unova is a sprawling metropolis with some of the most "urban" cities we've ever seen in Pokemon. But why is it that I can step out of one of these cities to arrive in a desert? Or an electro-charged cave? Kanto, the most urban of the previous regions, at least had a believable topography with the most extreme biomes in the corner of the map (rather than dotted between cities). It feels like they had to tick some biome boxes and just put them wherever was convenient on the map. I know Pokemon worlds have never done a great job of feeling "lived in", but more than any other entry in the series, progressing through Unova feels like going through a Super Mario Bros map rather than a region that people are meant to live in.

I do appreciate this game's ambition but to me it just feels like a lot of steps in the wrong direction.