Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

I don't know if this really belongs here as I'm not sure it's much of an "opinion," but I'm kind of curious if anyone else is like me because I seem to be alone in this. I've been playing video games my whole life, starting with the NES, and I love them, but they're just kind of an escape and for fun. I play fun games and move on. What has brought this on is the discussion about the new Mario and Luigi and which game in the series is everyone's favorite. I'm super excited to play the new one. I've played every game in the series so far. They were all fun. I cannot tell you which one is my favorite because I couldn't tell you a thing about them. I know there's Fawful and his "I have chortles!" which is funny, but I honestly couldn't tell you which games or how many of them he is in. I just play games, enjoy them, and then except for a precious few of my all-time favorites I'm done with them and they tend to not really take up much space in my mind/memory. Even with the above conversation I loved both New Leaf and New Horizons, but don't care to pick a favorite because they are just both fun, and that's it. They're just video games. Am I the only one like this?

@Xyphon22 it’s decently common for some to not pick favorites. I do agree it’s kinda silly when “best game” discourse devolves from people announcing what games they gravitate towards to a silly opinion competition. From my own experience, I tend to not have a “favorite” and tend to only announce that as a form of describing my attachment or preferences in a given game. So yes, at the end of the day, they’re all just cool games that are fun to talk about. Comparative discussion usually occurs to highlight peculiar or unique trends that can be dissected and possibly replicated. I don’t think it’s inherently meant to be a competition.

But cool perspective, thanks for sharing! I do relate to gaming since the NES days so I feel I have similar exposure to the medium.

@Xyphon22 I'm kind of the same - I can remember if I liked a game or not, but if you asked me anything about it such as the plot or characters then I'd probably not be able to recall much of it after a few weeks. I'm the same with movies that I've only seen once as well, I'd be able to tell you if I liked it, just don't ask why!

@Xyphon22
I still have favoritism in video gaming which I can pick the same character for fighting games or specifically choose the best villagers for ACNH or playing with the better performance or playing with the genre I really comfort.
Nothing wrong for having favoritism, especially if you know your specific favorite things.

@dmcc0 Thanks for helping me not feel alone. My favorite series ever is Zelda. I have played, beaten, and currently own every game. I see articles or forums of people talking about certain enemies or bosses and I'm just like, "Who?" I know Dodongo because he's been in practically every game, but outside Ganon I don't remember all these things. Glad there's at least two of us.

@Anti-Matter I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I was just saying I feel like the only person who does not remember every detail of every game they've ever played. I just like to enjoy games and move on, but most people make gaming sound more like a job or an obsession than a simple fun hobby.

I'm a bit like that as well, I usually forget a lot of specific details about games not long after playing them. Zelda bosses in particular, I see people refer to them by name and I usually don't remember who they are. It's odd because I have a very good memory for facts but not such a good memory for things I've actually experienced.

@Xyphon22 Yup, exactly the same here. TV shows, Movies, Songs, Games - I'm terrible at remembering names, but my wife is the opposite. We'll be watching some TV series or something and she'll comment on how the scene we're watching is linked to some other minor character that was on-screen for like 2 minutes in a previous episode and I'll be "Eh????". Not a fan of Zelda - the only game I've played is Phantom Hourglass and literally the only things I remember were Link, some sailing and a puzzle where you had to close the DS case...and that I didn't like it and likely didn't even finish it.

Rhythm Heaven on DS is one of Nintendo's best games ever. It's better than 85% of Zelda games, the entirety of Warioware, every first party Wii U game with maybe the exception of BOTW and every first party 3DS game.

This would probably be less controversial if I said Rhythm Heaven Fever, because people are cowards when it comes to games not controlled by buttons.

@kkslider5552000 Outta all of the Rhythm Heaven games, it's the DS one I always wanted to get but never had the chance to do so.

Idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but here it is: I haven’t been a huge fan of Mario Party 9 and onwards. Here’s my problem with the games:

• Mario Party 9: Everyone in the same vehicle during the entire party should’ve just been a game mode. It got rid of the chaotic fun of Mario Party.
• Mario Party 10: They thought it was a great idea to keep the thing where everyone is in the same vehicle. The Bowser gimmick was way too one-sided. The boards lacked personality for the most part as well.
• Super Mario Party: Being forced to use a single joy-con to be able to play this game was not a really good idea in my opinion. Also I mainly use pro controller or handheld so it doesn’t work for me. Also, only having 4 boards felt off. TBH I actually really enjoy this game, however, the boards and controls could’ve been greatly improved. The side modes is where this game shined.
• Mario Party Superstars: Now this is actually a very nice game, however I do have some problems with it. only having 5 boards was not much of an improvement, especially considering all of those boards already existed. This game was also light on side modes compared to Super Mario Party. 10 playable characters didn’t feel like a lot, either (especially considering Super had 20 (double) playable characters). Some of the personalities of the maps are also toned down.

Again, I actually have enjoyed all of these games, however to me they aren’t as good as Mario Parties 1-8, and even feel somewhat lacking in content. The mini-games in all of these games are awesome, which I think is the strength of 9 & 10.

I have hope that Super Mario Party Jamboree will be one of the greats of the series. 5 brand new boards and 2 remake boards is awesome, and I believe we have over 20 confirmed playable characters as well as 110 mini-games. There seems to be several game modes as well. They are advertising this as the biggest Mario Party yet, so hopefully this lives up to expectations!

Even though this is a Nintendo site and even as someone who likes older games; something I've always hated admitting is that I'm not that into the NES and its games.

I can play SNES, Genesis, or Gameboy games again and again, but I find myself bouncing off games way more often with the NES than other consoles. I don't even know why that might be, I wouldn't say its difficulty as I'm not unused to hard games.

@ShonenJump121 I agree wholeheartedly. I think it comes down to how NES games control being very different from every other Nintendo system. The stiffness, along with the steep challenge make them hard to revisit

@ShonenJump121

I think it's pretty normal to like retro games but.. not retro all the way back forever.

The discussion of NES can get weird because NES had too many firsts. A lot of the NES games were ground-breaking and worthy of being in the historical record but kind of by definition less polished than games in the same genres which came after. Hardware, software, control schemes... were simply all more polished in snes to a degree. The things which could be improved on were largely improved on. There are exceptions, but being groundbreaking definitely doesn't mean being best forever.

And I agree it's not about being hard. I love platformers for example and although I enjoy smb-1, it is far down my list of favorite Marios. It is very obvious they hadn't really worked out the physics and control as well as they did later in the series. And the level design was ok, but very limited. It is hard sometimes to go backwards from Nintendo perfecting their own formula to what were effectively the rough drafts. Same with non-Nintendo franchises such as the first final fantasy games versus the more famous snes and PlayStation era ones.

Obviously not everything was perfect by the snes era (3D barely even existed), but between significantly better hardware resources and a huge amount of experience and resources developers got from consoles becoming a global phenomena, snes had a lot more ability to add polish than nes did, especially early nes. A lot of snes games feel surprisingly modern except perhaps the graphics. Some games later in nes lifetime like smb3 definitely added a new level of polish but they also used new cartridges with fancier technology which didn't exist when nes was new so you can think of that as an in-between era.

A lot of nes games feel kind of like jank even though they may have been great at the time.

@FishyS I do have a limit, I know that I can appreciate Atari games or older, but I wouldn't say I go out of my way to enjoy them just because I don't have that context. You wouldn't think that the jump from NES to SNES would be that big, it was only a single generation, but its much more of a difference since it was still early for gaming as a form of media.

But, I think we also don't get significant jumps in technology and design like we would in these early generations. RPGs maybe had the biggest jump, I mean comparing something like Mother to Earthbound, that's a very large difference. I did enjoy Mother 1 decently enough, but it does feel a bit archaic comparatively to other entries.

That is not to say every franchise suffered from this. I believe every Mega Man you could get some enjoyment out of, but for some others its not the best idea. Metroid on the NES is rough. I don't even mind early 3d as janky as they might look by today's standards. I was Panzer Dragoon on my Sega Saturn and the way the game looked graphically didn't even bother me.

I've heard people say that the N64 can be hard to go back to, and even though I own one I haven't dived into the games yet, but I will assume much of that has to due with the controller. I played Banjo Kazooie via Rare Replay and that game didn't feel like it aged a day, but how much of that was due to the controller? Maybe a bit, I don't know for sure yet.

It's probably just a different overall game design philosophy as they weren't as polished as later entries in many franchises would and so they can be hit or miss with people. If you like Zelda, you see people recommend Link to the Past or Ocarina all the time, but you don't see those same people recommend Zelda I or II as it can be harder to get into those games.

@ShonenJump121 N64 is a weird case because some aspects of game design just kept improving but they had to semi start from scratch in certain other ways with 3D. Take something like Mario 64. Excellent level design. The controller itself is weird but the controls are ..ok...not perfect by modern standards but not bad. The graphics in many ways have aged less well than snes graphics which bothers some people but not others. The camera? Simply awful. Like bad enough I would be hesitant to recommend the game to people only used to modern games even though it is a classic. Even for me, it makes the game much less fun even though the game is great in most other ways.

Agree on Zelda 1/2. I keep trying to play them on NSO, but they are hard to get into.

@FishyS I think when it came to 3D it was the wild west so everyone was trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. You had the N64 controller doing its thing, The Dualshock and its eventual usage of the two analog sticks.

But this also meant that games would be all over the place in terms of controls of feel. This is sort of why many people look at the 2D games of that era more fondly like Symphony of the Night, Suikoden II and Guardian Heroes since they weren't trying to figure things out like most 3D games were. We already had, during the SNES era.

@ShonenJump121 @FishyS
I feel like NES games, some but not all, are fine if you play them in the same way you would a GB game. Not really great on a huge TV, especially given your other options, and maybe even too "small" for playing on a screen as large as the Switch. But great for a smaller portable. On my 3DS I probably ended up playing more Balloon Fight than some of the retail releases

Mostly because the limitations of the NES just forced a very simple design of games. One that compresses fairly well to 2-3" screens. Obviously GameBoy games are explicitly designed for that and are also designed to be for portable play. So there's that. But NES does work in that space fairly well

The N64 is a bit harder to find an ideal space for IMO. Obviously there are classic N64 games. I'll still gladly replay Ocarina of Time or Paper Mario and I've lost count of the number of times I've given Mario Kart 64 a spin over the years. But I feel like with N64 the game is constantly fighting against the limitations of the N64. And that's kinda true of all of the early 3D stuff. I agree with @FishyS that Super Mario 64 is one that, to me, is on the wrong side of that equation a bit. But for me it's mostly because if I wanted to play a 3D Mario I'd just play Super Mario Galaxy...... which is just better in all the ways Super Mario 64 falls short

The NES is difficult if you "weren't there" because so much of the fundamental design language of games has changed. There was an expectation that games would be full of very obtuse secrets - not signposted things but very obtuse things like invisible blocks in arbitrary places that would give you essential powerups - and, of course, an expectation that games were still about high score chases (but often in a dissatisfying way).

I was there at the time and a lot of NES games still seem decidedly unremarkable, compared to what you could play on other consoles and computers at the time.

There's nothing particularly special about its hardware, even by 1983 standards, and the main thing going for it is the elements of great game design that Nintendo chanced upon by accident, but only truly codified by the SNES era.

We're all a bit blinkered by nostalgia for the systems that we grew up with, and the NES is no exception to that.

@Matt_Barber Honestly, I prefer the SMS (Sega Master System) over the NES. While I do understand & get that many of the NES games are popular & all, I just think the SMS games are superior imo. Or maybe i prefer to go for the underdogs. I dunno if that makes sense but I might as well count this as an unpopular opinion in itself. Plus I do find it interesting & funny that the SMS was a success in EU & Brazil.