Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

The GameCube is a console I’ve grown to dislike. Using the word “Underrated” to describe it makes me angry. Back then, the GameCube was an underrated console with very little love, but over the years, fans have described and worshipped the GameCube for being Underrated, treating it like the second coming of Christ. What I’m trying to say is, the GameCube was deemed underrated by so many Nintendo fans, that it became the most overrated “Retro” video game console of all time.

1. Having an opinion purely based on how internet fans act is a terrible, terrible idea, especially if you like something that becomes popular enough.
2. The Wii U has had a similar experience for far less justified reasons (being a Nintendo console with some great exclusives is normal, please stop pretending Wii U stood out by doing this specific thing).

I'd think that the Sega Dreamcast fans would want a word about the GameCube being the most underrated console of all time, if nothing else.

No matter how good the PS2 got, its immediate success as a DVD player and killing the Dreamcast dead is one of the most of unfair moments in gaming history.

I also don't like the Dreamcast and Wii U comparisons. A few Wii U games put effort towards genuinely innovative control ideas, but outside of Splatoon and a couple of others, most notable Wii U games were fairly reasonable and sometimes pretty safe sequels to already successful games. Dreamcast meanwhile was heavily focused on brand new IPs, most of which have kept a strong cult fanbase despite mostly not selling especially well, largely because they really stood out from other games out there. (we're literally getting another Samba De Amigo this year, despite AFAIK the only sequel to that game being a terrible Wii version that was terrible).

@kkslider5552000 I can definitely understand that sentiment about the PS2, I thought it was overrated & overhyped, for added measure.

I stuck with my Dreamcast cuz I...well...just love the console itself. I wanted one when I saw it in a Target magazine.

Plus, comparing the Dreamcast to the WiiU doesn't make sense to me at all.

The majority of new games are just a step removed from mobile-game chores and routines. Farm these tokens, run these scenarios, etc. etc.

The Gamecube is not a retro console to begin with.

@rallydefault The only games that are like that are the online Live-service types. A lot of Singleplayer games are nothing like this.

Games as a service is awesome.
I was so not for this model. I like owning my games, either digitally or physically and had this stance up until this week. I took the plunge on GamePass PC.
With the state of the world and everything being more and more expensive, I thought that maybe I should try it before standing firm on my stance against it. And I love it. I've already gotten far more than what I would have paid buying these games. Anything I really love, I'll buy on Steam or Switch to have forever, but to have access to this many (great) games for $12 is amazing to me.
As long as the option to buy and own still exists for ones I end up really liking when they're pulled from service, either from GamePass or something else like Steam or the eShop, then I'm sold on this.

@VoidofLight
It's all in how you view "chores" and "routines," and I'm guessing you have a pretty narrow view of those terms while I have a pretty broad view of them. For me, Assassin's Creed was one of the first regular games to start doing this kind of thing, with the same exact activities on cycle over and over. Stuff like Red Dead and Far Cry, too: Keep skinning those raccoons and you'll eventually get your bigger wallet!

I hate repetitive activities; it's what mobile cash grabs thrive on, but for me, the only games in that vein that I've enjoyed have been the Harvest Moon games.

And yea, "live service" games are entirely made up of that stuff. I don't know how people can do it without going crazy. Diablo is a huge example right now - I was never a Diablo fan, obviously, but now with IV there is just soooo much bloat and soooo many repetitious activities to keep grinding, grinding, grinding.

Anyway, I'll get off my old-man rocking chair now lol

@rallydefault I would say there are many thousands of games constantly being made which are not at all 'chores' type games, but it all depends on your perspective. Fundamentally games are time wasters and always have been. Are you including almost every RPG ever made since the 80s? Most of them have involved some grinding to get new levels. Are you including most platformers since the 90s because a lot of them have a collect-athon aspect? Do you include Tetris 99 because technically you can do tasks to collect silly icons even though it has absolutely nothing to do with gameplay and is easy to ignore? Do you include the 5 million shoot-em-up games because every time you play they are kind of similar? Puzzle games because they often give unnecessary unlockable rewards for completing certain amounts of objectives?

I realize this is the is the unpopular opinion thread so absolutely no judging, I am just curious where you draw the line. Personally I have 100s of games, and very few I would put in the 'Chores' type category. I have no Fortnite or Genshin Impact or Diablo and don't even know what Far Cry is, just a whole bunch of normal games. I certainly have a few games with some chores (cough Animal Crossing where literally the point of the game is to add some structure to your day), but not many at least in my interpretation. I do tend to prefer games which can be completely beaten in the range 1-40 hours though, with a few exceptions such as Mario Maker with infinite variability and some mid-sized RPGs like Pokemon. Shorter games kind of by definition can't have as much repeated activities.

I think this is mainly only an unpopular opinion because this is a Nintendo website and Nintendo is currently doing it horribly.

I would like Nintendo's games as a service much better if they had buying options like you describe with Gamepass. I think basic NSO is fine for most people because it is dirt cheap and since it is already required for online games, the retro games are just kind of an added perk. But expansion pass, even if they added tons of more games, seems terrible to me. I wouldn't mind temporarily paying for a service to rent some games and basically try them out as demos, but I hate that you can't buy them so are 'expected' to pay for the service for the rest of your life/ the console's life.

Actually my opinion is that Expansion Pass is good, actually. ...but with some caveats. The biggest of which being the family plan, which means I'm personally only currently paying 12 bucks a year. That's not a lot of money, that's 1/5 of one full price game. Considering how many games I have access to, and the three DLCs (well two for me I guess since I bought the Splatoon 2 DLC before it was added), yeah I think I could make the case that it is worthwhile.

But tbh, 12 bucks a year is the big reason why it works for me. I don't care about Gamepass because I like owning games at all and Gamepass would only be worthwhile to me monetary-wise as a replacement to buying games at all. And most streaming services in general are notably more expensive, like I spent 15 a month on HBO Max when I still had it, and I did not use it enough for that to fully make sense in hindsight. I am not focusing all my time on what any one streaming service has, so streaming service money is money I could be spending on games, where most full priced games I will play a lot longer than use a streaming service in the same timespan. But I've been playing Mario Kart with its DLC and those N64 games and I am definitely getting my 12 bucks worth, which is better than getting 12 bucks worth out of services I would have to pay a lot more for. And that's the big thing for me, is that most streaming services only make monetary sense if its a replacement for entertainment, whereas to me its just an addition in most cases. It's a cool extra.

Now obviously its a much harder sell at 50 bucks a year with the solo plan, but I think that could still make sense to some people. But if you can get it cheaper, its smarter to do so, obviously.

And while Nintendo not allowing people to buy these old games is obviously bad and shouldn't happen, I do find its one of the few things where a streaming service for me is miles better than buying these games individually. It is a cool throwback of these retro systems as a whole rather than an eShop, that's basically the point of this as is, but if I could only buy them (especially at VC prices), there's many I would never try (at least not in any sort of VC-like setting). I am paying 2 bucks more than 1 N64 VC purchase for an entire year of the entire service. And if I play through 1 N64 game and literally any other game, per year, it still beats the VC prices for me. And honestly if VC prices were half the cost they were, I'd still be better off as is based on what I have played of Expansion Pass. And its not even something I've done the most to fully exploit every aspect of, is the thing. I never got around to Happy Home Designer, and the only retro games on this service I've played beyond N64 are DKC2 and Mario All Stars. But again, 12 bucks a year, so as is, it works.

But I'll also admit it works for me very specifically. I maintain the family plan is good, especially when Nintendo fixed those early N64 releases, but the whole thing works specifically for me, in terms of what it is and what it has on it. Not everyone is going to be disinterested in other streaming services, own a Switch, have fond nostalgia for the N64 and regret having played so few Genesis games and thus feel this is a relatively easy purchase while also knowing how to not pay 50 bucks a year on it.

I actually like live service games like apex or Fortntie because I think it lets be do something else I can always come back to, sure you can do that with solo player games, but once there over there over, so having something like that to go back to and enjoy whenever I please is pretty nice, and I don’t mind a battle pass as long as it’s done right, but paid games doing battle pass? Unless it’s completely free like splatoon is doing no way will I ever support it.

@kkslider5552000 I definitely understand it being good value to you specifically, but the fact that expansion pass is very inconsistent value is part of why I think it is set up very badly.

For me I:

a) would have to pay $50 because I have no family/friends who play Switch and:

b) The majority of the games I'm interested in on expansion pass I bought in collections before expansion pass existed (most of the Sega games do come in collections and of course some of the Nintendo ones like Mario 64). There are maybe 3 individual games on expansion pass I'd really like to have and don't. I would be happy to pay $20-$40 total one time to buy those 3 games, similar to other retro collections, but no way would I pay that much to rent them for one year.

The amount of worth per dollar I get from normal NSO with Tetris 99, I would argue a better retro collection than expansion pass has, online gaming, cloud storage, and game trials is absolutely insane compared to expansion pass. Plus basic NSO has common free trials and lets you buy 1 or 3 months at a time if you'd like instead of sticking you for a full year! If expansion pass had anything close to that much value and flexibility I would jump on it.

Thank you!

I'd think that, if Nintendo were to offer a service where you got to play every single game they released on day one, plus hundreds of other games from other publishers in a rotating selection, most of us would sign up for it in a heartbeat.

That's basically what Game Pass is offering and, while you can debate the relative merits of Microsoft and Nintendo's first party line-ups, it just seems a shame that the latter isn't offering anything even remotely close to that with either NSO or the Expansion Pack.

@FishyS
Yea, I would say I include most RPGs and puzzle games like Tetris that take place in the same confines every time. I would also include MOBAs like Dota and League, and most multiplayer modes of shooters like CoD. Yea, and I'm definitely not an Animal Crossing guy - I tried to like it on 3DS, but again, the repetition just got to me. (Back to Harvest Moon strangely being the only exception when it comes to those "farming" kind of games.)

My favorite genre is platformers, though, and I think you're a little hasty in your characterization of them. There are tons, tons, tons of platformers that have no collection aspect to them, especially if you go retro (which I mostly do these days). The original Marios, Mega Mans, Castlevanias, etc. simply invited you to play through their varied stages and enjoy the game - no whatchamacallits to collect at all. The games challenge you to improve your skill and learn new abilities, sometimes literally learning new abilities in the game, but sometimes just learning as a player.

I would also say there is a huge difference in collecting something like the green coins in The Messenger, for instance, and grinding out animal pelts/enemy skulls/etc. to craft upgraded equipment in games like Far Cry and Red Dead and Destiny, etc. In a game like The Messenger (or heck, even like A Hat in Time or something like that), you're tackling new areas of the game AND utilizing new gameplay skills to get those collectibles - in "chore" games you're doing literally the same thing with maybe a different backdrop (think some of the earlier Assassin's Creed games - II comes to mind in particular with the feathers and flags, or shooting the same enemies or hunting the same animals).

But yea, if we want to nitpick, you can shrink things down and just pedantically say all games are repetitive by nature - but I'm trying to say the games that make their pretty-much-necessary gameplay loop rely on chores are not my style, but unfortunately they are becoming the big games these days. Just look at all these live service games Sony keeps teasing for the PS5 - ugh; just makes me not want to buy a PS5 even more.

Game Pass is a legit scam in my opinion.
I never like games renting service as I prefer owning games in physical rather playing the games by subscription that I will never able to own them forever.

Sorry for the long replies — this conversation about whether games are repetitive could have warranted a totally seperate thread but it ended up living here.

@rallydefault I wasn't actually trying to insult platformers as repetitive, I was just curious about your opinion. But if you still like platformers, fortunately they are still one of the most popular genres out there with new ones being made literally every week. They're my favorite genre and I have a zillion on Switch.

As for PS5 games, they mostly don't entice me for a variety of reasons. I'm happy to stay on Nintendo consoles both for some of their exclusives and tons of random indie games. I do get your point about many popular games being grindy (heck, a lot of the most popular games are literally mobile games which are 70% about doing your 'dailies') but I also think there are tons and tons of interesting games out there which aren't repetitive at all, including lots of indies and certainly some genres and publishers much more than others for AAA games. Given that there are so many thousands of new games being made nowadays, I don't necessarily care which are the popular ones and just go for the games I like personally.

As well as some games not being grindy at all, I think there are important sub-categories of 'repetitive' games which appeal to different people such as:

• Games selling addiction — includes many mobile games and F2P games. Things like dailies (or hourlies!) just to get you to keep coming back. Although not all of these games are bad, the general practice can be a bit toxic.
• Artificially long games - stick in a million similar side quests or level grinding to make your game last 100+ hours. Includes many RPGs but not all of them or limited to that genre. Personally I'm not a big fan of this practice (give me shorter rpgs and Zeldas!) , but I understand some people wanting to stay with a game for a really long time.
• life simulators/management/farming/etc - real life is repetitive, so why not a comfier or more exotic version for your games? These tend to be pretty honest about what they are selling and are a needed niche but not for everyone.
• rogue lites/randomized games -purposefully similar but also randomly different each time. I enjoy these because it is all about increasing skill or getting new abilities or information, but they can certainly feel a bit grindy also.
• puzzles/racing/multiplayer shooting/etc. — tons of game types are about playing over and over on the same grids or racing tracks or arenas. Everytime you play is different (and sometimes the exact rules or weapons can change) but fundamentally these are about playing a very similar thing over and over and improving your skills.