Games you hate, yet everyone else cherishes.

I kinda liked the first Halo, but the next three in the series didn't appeal to me as much. Not that it was the same thing over and over, the plot just didn't appeal to me as much.

Master Chief died, wut?

- To the Moon (had to drop it, couldn't stand such stupid drama/gameplay.)

- CoD (same stuff over and over).

- WoW (it was good at the beginning when the social aspect of it was priority over gear).

For me it is Zelda and Fallout.

I have tried playing Zelda (various different releases) so many times and I just can't get into it, at all. I don't feel very rewarded when playing, the story doesn't pull me in, and this might be totally unfair because I freely admit I've never beat one but they all feel the same to me. I had the same issue with 3d Dot Game Heroes, so I guess it is just not the genre for me!

Fallout, it's entirely the setting that doesn't do it for me.  I tried the first and third release of the game and I guess that post-apocalyptic world doesn't appeal to my senses.  The story and mechanics are fine though.

And then yeah the usual Call of Duty, Halo, etc. but that's just me not liking shooters. Although I don't mind Borderlands (odd it is a shooter AND post-apocalyptic... so now I must rethink my reasons for disliking these games...ahh!!).

CoD. Nuff said.

The old stuff was good, but BO1 onwards is TERRIBLE! You will hate me for my other hates too I promise :p

Borderlands can pretty much be safely categorized as it's own genre, it defies normal trends and goes beyond what people typically envision in similar games. It's basically a shooter version of dragon warrior or later final fantasy back in the day.

Borderlands, I find, is more akin to games like Diablo in which the main draw is simply the loot.  However, Borderlands games aren't really meant to be taken that seriously...  They're more a comedy game with a loot system and a combat system tacked on.

I have a new game that I hate that everyone else seems to love as well:

Fallout:  New Vegas.  My reasons are thus:  Exploration is pretty much eliminated, map is about one fifth the size of Fallout 3, karma is gone in favor of "allying with factions" which is pretty freakin' boring, the upgrades for weapons really aren't that interesting, followers are kind of boring, Quests are easy to find and even easier to complete, the "Realism" mode or whatever it is called becomes fairly pointless about 3 hours in when you've figured out how to scam NPCs at Caravan games and then buy out all their food, water, and repair kits afterwards, and finally... DLC really was kind of underwhelming.

Dragon Age 2. How could anyone love this cancer game? They screwed everything we love in Dragon Age: Origins and made a non brainer action RPG. 

Borderlands isn't post-apocalyptic.

Better than that poor excuse of a game that calls itself Fallout 3.

What is Fallout New Vegas except a smaller version of Fallout 3 with nothing added except a convoluted "choose your side" mechanic that somehow manages to be completely linear with every single fricking path you take and gun mods? Seriously, did anything else (involving game mechanics and/or gameplay) in the game even change? Not that 3 was really that great either, personally I kind of miss wasteland.

Mechanically? Nothing. I'm not saying that New Vegas was great or anything (above average at best), but Obsidian showed more respect for the setting and the game's lore than Fallout 3.

Halo

I'd rather play Star Wars Battlefront II any day cnt wait for Battlefront III!

and Myst

I cant stand that f###ing game!

FF8!! All I can say is good try but WTF Happened with the 200 million dollars!! yea! 200 million to make FF8!! OMFG!! (ff8 means final fantasy 8!) 

Chrono Cross!  Its Not a Chrono trigger Sequel!!! Get the heck over it and Make me Chrono Resurrection SquareEnix dorks!

and wtf happened to Rare! The made Perfect Dark, GoldenEye, Banjo, DKC, and the went to Xbrick and made garbage..pure garbage. You killed my my fav games company besides Nintendo & Squaresoft.

YES Squaresoft is better than Square Enix!

I-I cannot even comprehend this. I can understand hating that genre of game and thus disliking it because of that but you actually played it and found enough you disliked about the game itself to hate it? Please explain this to me, I have to know why this is, that game is as close to perfect as any game has ever come that I've played in the last 10 years at least. What about this game makes you hate it?

The reason I had no interest in "The Last of Us" is because it basically looked like any other dime a dozen zombie world apocalypse simulator with fake false choices and an "engaging moral dilemma storyline".  Basically, it was "done before, done absolutely to death".  Oh, and for those who say "It's about the drama and tension between characters!"  If that's the case, why do we need the zombies at all?  The setting could just as easily be that Mad Max Universe in which gasoline is scarce and roving gangs of people slaughter each other wholesale.

I also really don't want to hear "But, you've never played it, you don't know blah blah blah".  I haven't played all of the Call of Duty games either.  Pretty sure I know how THOSE games play out.  Pretty sure I know what the multiplayer is like in all of them.  Zombie games have been absolutely done to death at this point, and we can't wring any more "interesting narratives" out of them that haven't already been done a bajillion times before.  I have no interest in a game that is basically just a rehash and reimagining of the 90000 games in the same genre that came before it.

If anyone can make an argument about how "The Last Of Us" did anything unique or interesting that hasn't been done before, then by all means...  Convince me.  Otherwise, I'll go back to being all crotchety about the game and the genre which is currently in the same threshold of "done to death" that "World War II Shooters" is in.

Oh, it really doesn't help when "zombie games" really aren't about the zombies.  It also doesn't help when they're not really about "surviving" and more about "railroading players" into doing tasks and taking courses of action which would often result in the characters dying in the real world.  This crap gets old fast and is boring...  It's not like it's even that hard to tell your narrative without the zombies (which is often what 90% of these games do).  You could easily place it anywhere else with some similar circumstance that isn't zombies and it would work just fine.  The only reason many of these games include "zombies" is because gamers seem to be obsessed with them at the moment.

Sorry, I just get really angry whenever someone says a game like "The Last Of Us" is "really good" or "close to perfect".  It's good in the same way the "Avatar" movie is good.  It's good in that you've seen the movie before when it was titled "Dances with Wolves" and didn't take place in outer space with nearly naked blue cat people.

Ok, Tai_Mt you are just wrong in this regard, because the last of us is far from another "dime a dozen" zombie game.

1. It really isn't meant to be that much of a zombie game. The zombies themselves aren't really zombies in the traditional sense even, they have their own unique spin on how they are created that makes the mechanic of fighting them more interesting than usual mob shooting galore. I'm not into spoilers and such even if you probably won't ever play the game, you seem to be set in your mind that post apocalyptic zombies = bad game and I doubt anything I have to say will change that.

2. The story is where the game shines the brightest. As I said, this game isn't about zombies. It's about the hard choices that have to be made in order to survive and move on in a terrible situation. It's about a grieving man who lost everything and is now numb to the world slowly learning how to open up again to another human being, and the tragic realization that sometimes no matter how hard you try you can't shelter the ones you love from harm. It's about a young girl, growing up in this world where survival itself isn't a guarantee. How that's shaped her and how that and the things she's forced to witness/do shape her beliefs and the people she puts her trust in. The interactions in The Last of Us are some of the most human and believable that I've ever experienced before in a game. So what if it takes place in a post apocalyptic nightmare where all that man has made has pretty much been given back to nature? Yes there are other settings that the story could work in, but that's true of 99% of all stories in existence. Even so it isn't your typical zombie environment, the game takes place dozens of years after a zombie outbreak and the environment is truly unique to any game I have played because of it. The outbreak isn't a man made virus meant to wage war but an evolution of a known fungal species that is slowly but surely taking the world back from humanity and returning it to nature. This type of extreme is needed for the story to work, it's inherent in the theme and not just a trite fad thrown in because the Walking Dead made people obsessed with zombies all of a sudden. 

3. While the story is the highest point the game play is very fun and fresh as well. You aren't going around popping off 1000's of rounds of ammunition at everything that moves and you also aren't a super-charged melee tank that charges in axe swinging and steps out of combat unscathed. You are required to actually think tactically in order to even survive this game. (This caught me so off guard that I died in the damn prologue when I first played.) Ammunition is scarce but worse than that full frontal melee combat is a bad idea most of the time. Exploration is encouraged because you can collect materials to fashion together useful items such as shivs to stealth-kill enemies and medicine to heal yourself. However using some of the same ingredients as the medicine you can make molotavs so you sometimes have to decide between an offensive or the ability to recover yourself if things get bad. Also unlike standard fair games each of these items has a powerful use, nothing you can have is useless weight. The combat is brutal and one misstep can kill you in an instant. Joel is not immortal, he's human as is Ellie, and the game makes that painfully clear. You watch your surrounding or you die, not because there might be 100 zombies waiting to mob you that you are expected to go around, but because 1 enemy can easily kill you and taking on 2 at once when they both know you are there is usually a horrible idea. It's really hard to explain everything, just watch a gameplay video sometime (or else at least don't cast down judgement on a "zombie-clone with a ripped story" in the first place without even trying to test if your presumptions might be wrong.) 

4. Comparing it to call of duty is laughable, I can't even tell you what The Last of Us' multiplayer looks like because I'm not interested in multiplayer anyway but the game didn't sell or become popular off of it's multiplayer, it succeeded because the game itself was great, and there isn't a modern call of duty that could ever say the same. This is common knowledge though, if you get 100 game playing people together and ask them if Call of Duty offers anything new and fresh to it's franchise you'll get an almost unanimous NO because the game doesn't exist for that, it exists for it's multi-player. That is the only reason one can say assuredly at it doesn't do anything ground-breaking and that you can predict what happens without playing it. Because people flaming pay for that kind of consistency, it's how that game exists. If The Last of Us were like this it never would have become popular, there are 1000's of zombie games out there, however 950+'s of them are not touched by anyone not in their particular niche because they are just "clones". Honestly, everything has been done to death before. Horror stories, romance, medieval games, futuristic games, rpgs and everything else. Saying that there is "nothing new that can be done" in that setting is basically saying nothing new can ever exist, because while zombie games are popular right now there are a blue million more rpgs out there than there are zombie games. More of them encompassing themes such as medieval, futuristic, steampunk or otherworldly than zombie games could hope to compete with in matters of shear numbers. This clearly doesn't mean that nothing new or interesting can ever emerge from an rpg game in a setting that's been done before. (You are on an rpg site, so you must agree with me there at least.) If that type of game isn't your forte, that's fine. If you don't like zombies or post apocalyptic worlds or shooters (not sure which but you clearly have an inherent dislike for at least one if not all of those conventions) then say it isn't your cup of tea and move on. Just don't slander it for failings that you merely presume it has, however. Like I said in my first post, I understand and respect that people have different tastes. But claiming you hate a game because it isn't a type of game that you would play and then presuming to say that you know exactly how it plays out because "nothing can be done" to allow it to stray from the path of mediocrity that you attribute to such a game on the spot is just irritating. Then saying you don't want to hear someone say that you can't know because you haven't played it, what gives you the right to criticize it otherwise? Presumption is a tool for the foolish, using it in an argument is just stupid. Using it to filter your own preferences, fine. But debating the value of something that your presumptive filter has flagged as trash using only that presumption is just... it's wrong and it's infuriating to me.

I dunno, I pretty much have no interest in zombies whatsoever. I avoid zombie games and zombie movies, and as such, I didn't give The Last of Us any consideration until a few days before its release date. I bought it on a whim, based on the incredible reviews that started popping up a few days before street date, and as a game designer, I sometimes feel obligated to buy and play a "critically acclaimed" game just to see for myself what all the fuss is about. It's why I played Red Dead Redemption (totally not my type of game), as well as Dead Space. I loved Red Dead Redemption. Dead Space, not so much. But in the end, I wound up loving The Last of Us. Zombies or no zombies, it doesn't matter. To me, the game was exhilarating and tense. Not without some issues, but easily the best game I played in 2013. I don't know why someone would be "angry" at someone saying The Last of Us is "really good". You're allowed to not like the game, and I don't see any need to "convince" someone that they SHOULD like it.

As for the topic, I'd have to go with Infamous. There were a few things that really annoyed me about that game and I ultimately found a hard time enjoying it. I didn't bother playing Infamous 2, though Infamous: Second Son might have some promise.

*Sigh*

1.  A zombie is a zombie is a zombie.  "They aren't zombies in the traditional sense".  Doesn't make them any less zombies.  If you were making a case for why Edward Cullen isn't a vampire, you'd have some ground to stand on.  However, you're talking about "fungus zombies", which are really the same as any other zombie.  The Flood in Halo are zombies.  The Necromorphs in Dead Space are zombies.  The T-Virus in Resident Evil makes zombies.  Zombies are zombies are zombies.  We're not even getting into the "Special Infected" of games like Left4Dead or Dead Island.  We're also not even getting into the "Rage Zombies" from 28 Days Later.  If the zombies were made of wires and cables in a game, they'd still be zo--  Wait a second, Mass Effect did that with Husks!  I don't care how your zombie outbreak starts a game, they're still zombies.  It's still the same scenario that is ultimately glossed over by narrative that really has zip to do with the setting and more to do with some writer thinking that adding zombies to a soap opera sounds like a great idea.

2.  A game about the hard choices that need to be made.  Okay, sounds compelling.  It's too bad it's got that pesky zombie thing strapped to its back to drag down the narrative.  I mean, it's not like we couldn't make the game "The Stand" with a Superflu that kills people instead.  Believe it or not, pathogen outbreaks that don't result in massive amounts of zombies are quite rare in video games.  I really could also do without the whole "Nature is taking back the world from humanity" angle.  I mean, I watch enough anime to know that it's basically 90% of their moral lessons.  Not that the message isn't good or interesting... It's just that it's always presented in such a boring and preachy way.  Last of Us probably doesn't really spend much time on the angle (after all, they don't spend much time on the zombie angle as you've admitted, so why would they spend much time on anything else to do with the setting?).  My issue isn't that the "story has been done before".  My issue is that "this reiteration of the same story doesn't need to exist because it offers nothing new and tacks on gimmicks and LCD material to get people to buy it".  Is the movie "Avatar" a great movie?  Yes it is.  The story is interesting, engaging, and fun.  It's a fun experience.  Here's the question though:  Is there a point for it to exist when other movies have tread exactly the same ground, but not in a sci-fi setting?  When you're ripping the story nearly note for note from things that have come before it, does it need to exist?  If the main focus of the story and the game is about survival and moral choices when morals don't mean anything anymore...  You could just as easily set that in a Fallout Game.  Heck, I think we already have.  There's no need to try to do the exact same game with a "zombie twist".  I think the game would heavily benefit from NOT being a zombie game, but keeping the story largely the same.  Tell the story, but use something not quite used before with new moral questions that haven't ever been asked.  But, that's just my two cents on it.  You don't need to take it so personally that I'm basically saying the game really doesn't do anything that hasn't already been done before.

3.  You just described 90% of Dead Island's gameplay right there.  Thank you.  No, I'm not even kidding.  You use Melee weapons for about 90% of the game until you can manufacture ammo yourself for guns.  Until that point, guns aren't a good idea because ammo is so scarce and they do zip for damage against a zombie unless you hit them in the head.  Fighting any more than a single zombie at once results in you taking a lot of damage, and fighting more than two often results in your own death.  Choke points are important as well as "high places" and "hit and run tactics".  This is nothing to say of the "Special Infected" in the game which can kill you in two hits (or less!) and sometimes don't telegraph what they're doing, or hide really well and explode in your face when you didn't expect it.  The same "crafting" mechanics exist in that game, and a lot of recipes use the same materials so you're forced to decide what to use your hard-earned materials on.  There's no "choose between health and fire" instances, but having to choose between repairing your fire axe and picking up a VERY EXPENSIVE med kit is a very tough choice.

4.  I'm not sure you understood what I meant by "I know what to expect when I see a CoD game despite having not played them all".  If you make a game about surviving in a zombie apocalypse and you're touting "tough choices" as part of the experience...  It's nothing new, and the choices really haven't ever been that tough.  Let me give you an example of the last game that tried this:  The Walking Dead.  You make some tough choices (they're not that tough, they're arbitrarily stupid and contrived, but for the sake of argument...) and play through the game feeling like you just experienced something amazing.  Most people didn't look past this initial experience.  They didn't look to see what was going on or even consider choices that the game didn't give you.  I did.  I played the first episode (because it was free and everyone raved about the game).  I kept banging my head on the desk at the lack of anything resembling common sense, decency, or intelligence within the game.  It's only compounded when you realize that 90% of the "hard choices" in that game really don't make a whole lot of sense if you give them more than five minutes thought.  Even the first "who do you save?" instance is completely contrived and stupid.  A woman is holding a gun and a zombie is holding her ankle.  Somehow, she can't hit the zombie or shoot the zombie in the face, despite showing us she didn't have any fear of shooting these zombies or hitting them earlier.  So, if you don't pick her, she dies.  This is a choice that doesn't need to exist, and more than two minutes thought on it proves how utterly stupid it is.  That isn't to say there aren't some genuine "hard choices" to make or to watch the characters make in The Last of Us.  It's just that, I can't imagine them being any less contrived or silly and easily worked around by thinking about it for more than two minutes.  Most zombie games play out that way.  It's just how they are.  It's a mark of the trade.  If it truly does not step into this territory, then it might be interesting to play and sit through.

Also, most definitely can something new exist in an already treaded ground.  That, my friend, is the reason I play games.  I'm looking for things that haven't "been done before".  I'm looking for unique and interesting experiences.  Heck, I bought the game "Towns" because I liked the idea of controlling the NPC village of an RPG game instead of controlling the heroes.  I thought it was interesting to play from the perspective of the villagers who just try to attract heroes in order to clear out the dungeons and to make the town safe for their way of life.  It plays a lot like Dwarf Fortress (and it's millions of clones), but it's premise and execution were such that it was "unique" and "new" enough to enjoy the experience.  It's a game about aesthetic beauty, villager happiness, and attracting tough heroes that you then try to supply with armor and weapons so that they keep your city safe.  I like different, I like unique, I like interesting.  I'm looking forward to Final Fantasy 15 for that reason.  It looks unlike any other Final Fantasy game I've played.  I'm looking forward to Destiny because it looks unlike anything I've ever played before.  I'm looking forward to Titanfall for that same reason.  New and Unique can most definitely be done in the "tread before" genres.  Here's the problem though:  It doesn't happen much, or at all, and when it does, it usually flops.  Anyone remember "Brink"?  I enjoyed (and still do sometimes enjoy) that game to no end.  Sure, it's a "dime a dozen shooter" in most regards.  So, what do I love about it and what makes it unique?  Kills don't reward you with jack.  It's a game about "using teamwork" and "playing the objective".  Most kills tend to only result in something like 20 points max.  You hack a door open though, and you're getting upwards of like 400 points.  You can get a ton of points for simply healing teammates.  But, nobody ever played it.  Those who did hated it because "The AI is stupid".  Well, yes it is...  But the game is kind of meant to be played by human beings...  The AI just fills the empty slots.  In any case, the lack of a playerbase never stopped me from enjoying that unique romp into a shooter.  I love unique and interesting.  I wish it were more common to see unique things instead of reworkings of old games.

I like zombies.  I like apocalyptic games.  I like shooters.  What I don't like is when I pick up one of these games, pop it into a console, and realize it's just like the other ones I've played.  So far, from what you've described about "Last of Us" has basically just confirmed everything I already thought the game would be.  Basically, the only "new" part about it is that they're "fungus zombies" instead of any other kind of zombie.  I guess that's unique, made from the mushrooms which mind control ants.  Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be much there to recommend a play of the game in a market already saturated with the same kind of game.

Also, I never said I hated the game.  I said it was uninteresting to me because I'd seen its ilk before.  Though, I think I am allowed to criticize things I've not experienced.  After all, I think Twilight is little more than wish fulfillment fantasy (with naughty parts) for little girls.  I think Justin Bieber wouldn't know how to write or perform a good song if his life depended on it.  I also think falling off a cliff would probably hurt and kill me.  Reasonable assumptions based on personal experience and extrapolated conclusions from that same experience.  I really do hate the braindead argument of "If you haven't experienced it, you don't have any say in it!"  Okay, let's apply that to the real world.  We aren't allowed to put people in jail for murder now because the only people that could determine if that was a bad thing would be other murderers.  Likewise, poor people aren't allowed to criticize the rich, because they've never been rich themselves.  The argument of "If you haven't experienced it, you can't talk about it" is really only rooted in a way to make people shut up.  It's a method to shut down debate instead of actually having it.  It's the same as saying "shut up, your opinion doesn't matter at all".

Oh, and whomever told you "presumption is a tool of the foolish" was a foolish human being to begin with.  People presume things all day long every single day.  If you see a guy pointing a gun at you, you're going to presume he's going to shoot you, yes?  Of course you would!  Nevermind that you just said "presumption is a tool of the foolish".  You're basically telling us that to presume the man will shoot us is foolish.  Sure, he may not.  However, I don't think it's foolish to assume your life is in danger if a man is pointing a gun at you.  Presuming is most often used to determine things we'd like or dislike based upon prior experiences so we do not waste our time, effort, or money on things that would not benefit us.  We also make presumptions based upon personal safety or safety of our families.  You can't know for sure that guy won't shoot you or your wife until he actually does...  But, it's best to presume he probably would and act accordingly.

---

Okay, let me just make this point.  It's a point Yahtzee once made, that I think rings true the more I hear it.  They are actually quite intelligent words and a great way to live your life as well as put things in perspective:  "It's worth remembering that all reviews are subjective personal opinions and if you personally enjoyed a game, then they really shouldn't get to you.  Unless, of course, there's a despicable little niggling doubt in the back of your mind that maybe you're not having as much fun as you've convinced yourself you're having, which doesn't go away no matter how many times you try to slap it down with the wet flannel of weak excuses."

As for myself and Harmill's perplexed nature at my "anger over someone saying The Last Of Us is really good"...  Well, I suppose I've just played too many video games.  You see, there is only one game I've ever played which I consider "The Greatest Game Ever".  Do I think others will share my taste?  No, I don't.  I often only say it's the "greatest game ever" in jest, because I know after immediately saying it, someone will come in and prove that there are better games.  However, it's my favorite game, and so I think of it as "the best ever" despite all the evidence to the contrary (here's a hint, no such thing as "the best game ever", it's subjective personal opinion, though some games do some elements and mechanics better than others).  Now, here's where it gets interesting:  I've heard people say a game is "Really Good" so often that the phrase is meaningless.  How many kids will tell you that "Call of Duty" is really good?  How many raging hormonal angsty teens will tell you that "Gears of War" is really good?  How many times have you personally told another human being that?  What does that mean?  It's a blanket endorsement that doesn't tell anyone anything, except to expect more than they should.  In my personal life, I've actually taken to telling people "Well, -I- enjoyed it, but I don't know if you will."  No, that doesn't mean I'm all "Holier Than Thou".  It just means that I don't think there's any value in the phrase "It's really good".  It's just the easiest way to get people to play something without really giving them any details on it, and without addressing any of the flaws it may have (and I don't think I've played a game without flaws).  My irritation with the phrase "Close to Perfect" stems from the same mindset.  How do you prove that?  Strange to project your own personal opinion onto everyone else and try to substitute reality for it.  It's also a really good indicator that the person using it hasn't considered that maybe there are better games out there and they just haven't played them yet.

Now, this has gotten far too long, but I kind of felt I had to address most of this stuff.  Tell you what, let's agree to disagree.  I have no interest in "The Last Of Us" because I think it's an overhyped mediocre game without having played it, but having seen lots of trailers and reviews for it.  You think it's one of the best games you've ever played and could talk endlessly about all the features you enjoyed.  Just please bear in mind...  I'm probably a lot harder to please than most people in the world.  That doesn't make me or my opinions right, it just means I don't get caught up in hype, reviews, or "word of mouth" as easily as anyone else.  It just means I'm more willing to bash the crap out of a game to find all the little flaws and annoyances than other people who are perfectly happy just enjoying the experience of the game and the narrative.

So, is "The Last Of Us" any good?  I don't think anyone can say one way or the other with any certainty.  Opinion being what it is and all.  Would I enjoy the experience?  Probably not.  Would other people like you?  Probably.  But, I also like watching a grown man lose his marbles over old Ultima games and not knowing what a Paladin is.  Color me cynical.

If we're adding more games to the list, can we add Smash Bros Melee and Brawl?  I much prefer the slower methodical almost "dancing" like quality of combat in the original game than the twitch reflex gameplay of the later two games.

^ I just have one sentiment: I've yet to see something really unique in my whole life... Even just a unique idea, especially for games...

Are we talking "truly unique" or are we talking "shades of unique"?  I would have to admit that I've never seen anything "truly unique" in my life.  If we're talking "shades of unique", then we might have an interesting discussion on "what is unique enough to take notice?". 

I guess, "truly unique"... Though I think I will never see one