Games you hate, yet everyone else cherishes.

Pretty much my thoughts when I started playing. I'd say play against bots with a Champion that you like (Lucian is free this week and very easy to use). The only problem is that the bots play VERY defensively and tend to flee behind their towers a lot, making killing them quite hard. If you have any friends that play you'd have a lot more fun playing with them too.

I'm not the only one then :p . Might try against bots, for now I'm busy enough with school. First match I played was 0 kills, 14 deaths and 1 assist. Killed 31 minions, someone said it's not bad but I smelled some sarcasm.

I'll be honest. That's terrible.

I know. :/

Most people's first match goes that way unless they've had prior experience playing Dota, Dota2, Heroes of Newerth, etc. From my experience, it's very common for someone to run straight into the enemy turrets and die in their first match.

I remember spectating a friend's game during his first week of playing LoL. He was playing Annie on Twisted Treelines, and he was actually doing pretty good - he had 0 deaths for 99.9% of the game. His team is destroying the enemy nexus and he's trying to get some kills on the enemy as they retreat to their spawning platform. He follows them up to their spawning platform. To his horror, the GIANT LASER OF DEATH zaps him and he's dead within 2 seconds and he has no clue what the hell happened. I was laughing so hard! They won the game like 5 seconds after his death and he was so pissed that his "perfect" game was ruined in such a manner. Hahahaha!!!!

Sounds like Lux's ultimate to me. Such a broken move. My very first match of LoL played out pretty similarly if I recall. That was around 2 years ago. I'd stopped playing and got seriously into Dota 2 for a while. I was never amazing at it but I could hold my own. Now coming back to League with that experience I average around 4-8 kills a match depending on what champion I pick. I'm still not great at it, but a lot of people around my rank haven't had the experience so they don't play as well.

If you find LoL to be too much, you should check out Strife. It's a really streamlined MOBA that heavily focuses on the combat. Most of the moves are skillshots so there's no cheap "press R to kill" moves or anything like that. You can even choose for the game to pick your level-ups and items for you so you only ever have to worry about how well you're playing. From what I've played it's quite nice. Its simplicity will obviously turn away MOBA veterans but it's a fun way to get into the genre.

Dudes. I just attempted to play Dirge of Cerberus for the first time. I did this because I happen to own a PS2, and I happened to find the blighted thing second hand at a gamestop the other day. Also, I've heard very good things about it from a few of my friends. It was one of those games that was always on my "I ought to play that" list but I never got around to.

Good lord, I wish I'd never have gotten around to it after all.

Now, it's not the genre that's pissing me off. I like shooters to an extent. I LOVE the Devil May Cry series, and I think that's kinda what DoC was going for. I also love Final Fantasy, and VII in particular. I always like Vincent Valentine's backstory and was interested in seeing more. There should be no reason for me to dislike this game. 

Hell, even if it was badly done, I should by all rights still like this game.

My friends, I do not like this game.

The controls aren't terrible, but they're not great either. I feel like the camera is always fighting me. The contrast is piss poor in many stages - so much so that I often can't see an enemy that is directly in my line of fire until he's practically making out with me. The shoulder-cam thing is okay, but damnit. I CAN SEE VINCENT ONLY BECAUSE HE'S WEARING A BRIGHT RED COAT. WHY ARE ALL YOUR ENEMIES WEARING THE SAME SHADE OF BLUE THAT EVERY BUILDING IN EDGE IS PAINTED, VINCENT? HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF CAMOUFLAGE? DEEPGROUND CERTAINLY HAS.

On top of that, changing weapons is very clunky. There are literally not enough buttons on the PS2 controller for everything the game allows me to bind to a button. As a result, I can only scroll my weapons (of which I only have three, so it's not too bad) in one direction. This doesn't seem like a big thing, but when you run out of ammo in the middle of a fight and have the wrong freaking gun in your next slot, it's a bloody problem.

Actually, all the controls are clunky. Not horrible, but enough to be distinctly noticeable; especially when compared to Devil May Cry 3, which uses a very similar control scheme but somehow manages to do it worlds better on the exact same hardware.

The levels are incredibly linear, and extraordinarily boring. Now, this IS a shooter. I was expecting a lot of corridors and alleyways filled with enemies. But sweet baby Jesus, give me something! A little map variation within a level, perhaps. Or some more room to explore and look around. I'm not saying it has to be open world, but there is absolutely no reason why it has to be a straight dayum line from the start of the stage to the end. Let me loose in the city, tell me I'm supposed to find this warehouse or whatever, and I'll go there. I'm not going to forget. All your weird little side mission objectives (which I thank goodness for, or else the game would be even more boring than it already is) could easily be spaced out around a relatively open city. Then I might have felt like I was actually going somewhere, finding may way around through enemy territory, not just mindlessly walking the gauntlet of stormtrooper shooting academy graduates.

I could stand a little more customization on the weaponry as well. I mean, again, it's not terrible, but they really, really, REALLY could have done better. A few more options that weren't just Fire Fire2 Fire3 etc.

As for the story, I frankly don't even know what's going on. Granted, I'm only a couple of hours in.  Everyone's confused.  What I've seen thus far is interesting at least (except for the continuing trend of utterly ed silver-haired villains bent on world destruction. That got old real quick once we got rid of Sephiroth. One was enough, thanks.) The voice acting isn't bad at all, and the cutscenes are pretty good. The FMVs are gorgeous. But the gameplay, man. Ouch.

I looked it up and this thing seems to have gotten pretty poor reviews overall, for basically the reasons I just listed. But for some stupid reason, all my friends think it's awesome.  I have no earthly idea why (then again, these are the same nerds who thought Squall was a good male lead. My friends have poor taste.)

They think it's awesome because it's "Final Fantasy 7, man!".  That's why.  The same reason the "Advent Children" movie did so well despite not having a plot at all, explaining nothing, and giving nobody really any screen time except Cloud.

I played Dirge of Cerberus as well.  I got fed up with the whole "linear" nature of the game, to be honest.  Why did that irritate me?  Several times, I got lost in a LINEAR area!  I had a hard time trying to figure out where I was meant to be going or what I was meant to be doing.  Also, the bosses I did encounter were lackluster and easily defeated by circle strafing and spamming the "fire gun" button.

At no point does the game even become a challenge!  I ended up turning it off long before I finished the game because it was just so boring and poorly designed...  I mean, there are much better shooters on the market, even at the time the game was released.  Heck, there was Final Fantasy 7 if you only wanted to play the game for the Final Fantasy fix.

Oh, and side objectives in that game pissed me off to no end.  I didn't know they existed until it told me I managed to fail one.  So, I opened up my menu and looked at them.  One of the early ones I think was saving people from being executed or dying in fires or some such.  I was like, "okay, seems easy enough".  No, it's not.  In the very first level, they expect you to have the twitch reflexes of a coked up eight year old, as well as know the location of absolutely every single one of these people to save.

Here's how you design a game with "side objectives".  Make your side objectives able to be completed on the first run through of the game.  Add challenge to them if you like (actual challenge, not fake difficulty like you need to have super reflexes or the map memorized before you ever play it), but make sure that a new player has a good opportunity to complete them on the first playthrough.  Now, if your game allows you to come back to previous levels with better gear, you should use this to make the challenges more easily completed instead of just plain old completed.  This translates back to the whole "side objectives should be able to be completed on the first run through of the level".  As such, a return to the level to pick up a side objective you missed should not be necessary, but should make the objective easier to complete.  If you make it absolutely necessary to get further into the game in order to even get decent equipment or abilities that allow you to do previous challenges...  Well, you've just forced your players to grind out for equipment and then grind through your level at least a second time for the objective.

I gotta admit: I'm one of the dweebs who loved Advent Children despite it being a terrible, terrible excuse for a film. It was beautifully animated, the voice acting was excellent (at least in the Japanese version. The English was good, but there's that whole "dull surprise" problem in a few places due to the Japanese cast being kinda over the top sometimes). I didn't care that the plot was confusing. Alright, I didn't care that the plot was more or less completely non-existent. I DID mind the lack of screentime for everyone who wasn't Cloud, but I dealt with it. I was too busy slobering over the animation to really pay attention to much else.

That said, I didn't have to playp Advent Children. I have to actually pick up a controller and play DoC.

I've gotten lost too!  Twice now, and I'm only four levels into the damn thing. I swear, it would actually be EASIER to navigate if the stages were open, instead of so cramped. The map is more or less useless, because there are so many waist-high fences and other f***ery to deal with. I tolerated it in the first stage, because yanno, first stage. But dudes. Once we got out of Kalm, the maps seriously needed to open up. I swear, I wouldn't mind everything else about this game if it would just let me EXPLORE the scenery it keeps taunting me with. Granted, a huge part of why I started playing was the chance to see FFVII's world rendered on better hardware. I'm a big lover of scenery and will tolerate nigh on anything if your game is pretty enough. As a testament to this, I played through and enjoyed all of Alice: Madness Returns despite how utterly terrible that game is as well.

Even on hard mode, DoC is nearly impossible to die in.  The enemies can aim, but they do it so slowly that you're in no danger whatsoever if you have any idea where your jump button is. The ONLY danger comes from the aforementioned camouflage problem. This means that the already criminally boring levels are EVEN MORE BORING.

Even the bosses are terrible. Terrible, terrible. 

I actually really like the side objectives and haven't yet found any of them particularly difficult to win. Granted, I play a lot of Touhou Project, and therefore I actually do have the twitch reflexes of a coked up eight-year-old. XD

the only thing I liked with AC is that fight scene with Bahamut, all others are oh well, hard to understand

I personally hate all games that are Dota styled, Dota, HoN, LoL etc

Those games are too stressful for me and it is like playing a game while your boss is hanging over your shoulder watching you to make the wrong move because that is what everyone in those games act, I don't want to be rated on how I play, I like to just chill and have laughs with people all around the world.

That is why I play Wakfu, it is very noob friendly and it is a chillaxed Turn Based MMORPG, it's actually the only game I ever played that no one ever rages at you when you make a small mistake because every small mistake is easily fixable in that game.

Also come on, You guys gotta love the part when Tifa was kicking that guys as in the church until he decided to go serious.

Pretty much every zombie game released after L4D.

Zombies are the laziest dayum thing on the planet.

Zombie games that don't focus on the survival or zombie aspects of the games are the laziest things on the planet.  If you create a zombie game in which you can actually build stuff wherever you want it (like walls, buildings, etcetera) and then go out and find supplies and craft them...  Much better zombie game than many we already have.  If the game also has all materials be "destructible" in some way so that too many zombies leaning on your wall may topple it or damage it... You're doing an even better job.  If your zombie game has realistic hunger, thirst, sanitation, and sanity meters, you're really on your way to a great zombie game.

The problem is... most game companies treat Zombie games as if they're a way to tell a "human story" like The Walking Dead (which could honestly be done with anything, didn't ever have to be zombies... but zombies were popular at the time... so yeah..........) or they're a great way to simply find a target rich environment to relax with.  Neither of these methods makes the zombies scary or particularly dangerous.

Why is a zombie horde dangerous?  Because they can out wait you.  They'll be around a lot longer than you.  They don't need food.  They don't get thirsty.  They just stand at your door and moan...  To no end.  Forever.  They don't even have to eat you to kill you...  Just plant a single bite.  Fighting the horde is like trying to stop a glacier by trying to push it with a truck.  You don't beat the horde, you just find ways to outlast it or to try to ignore it.  Game companies ignore this because they don't think they can make it interesting.  I say "how can you know you can't make it interesting if you've never tried it?"

I mean, even games like Day Z and whatever else...  The biggest threat in those games isn't even the zombies.  Biggest threat in those games is other players.  That's wrong, that's backwards.

We have no "zombie games" to date.  We have other games with "Zombie Elements" and nothing more.

This just reads like "I want a zombie game, but I don't like Zombie fiction anyway." The biggest threat being HUMANS is a huge theme in zombie fiction, almost from its inception.


I just have an issue with people demanding that a genre be changed to fit what they want, rather than you know, letting the fans of the genre enjoy it.

yeah, the zombie genre has been like that from as long as I can remember, and it has it's fanbase... so I don't why they need to change it now, just because somebody doesn't want the general idea of most zombie games... if you don't want it, don't play it. as simple as that.

It would be interesting to see Tai_MT's version, though. Just for a change of pace. But yeah, the genre as a whole has (and always has had) a theme of "Humans are the biggest monsters there are." It works well, because zombies are absolutely terrifying at first glance. To realize that they're not actually the worst thing you're facing is a very dramatic moment. That said, by this point we all know it's coming. What Tai's talking about is more of a Space Aliens or Eldrich Horror type game, but it would be a nice twist to see those genre conventions applied to a zombie game. Not as a permanent change to the genre, but I'd like to see it done at least once.

It will be nice to see that, seriously. It's just that it's not a required changed for the games to be called a "zombie game"

This was the part I had a problem with. The game he described actually does sound interesting.

Okay, here's my idea, since you guys are so "upset" with what I would prefer a zombie game to be about (you know, the whole world ending, zombies are dangerous, etcetera.  not the soap opera crap that bored housewives watch).

Ever read World War Z?  That's what a Zombie game should be like.  That's what Zombie fiction should be like.

I've always been of the mindset (no matter what it is/was) that if you have a feature, and it's glossed over, ignored, or not a main part of whatever it is you're creating...  Then it doesn't need to exist.  In current "Zombie Fiction", Zombies just don't need to exist.  When the "players" are the most dangerous enemies, or the "humans" are, then what point is there to having the zombies in the first place?  I'll tell you what the point of it is:  Marketing.  People will buy a game because it says "Zombies" somewhere on it.  Don't believe me?  Retitle "The Walking Dead" to anything that doesn't imply Zombies.  Seriously, do it.  Think it would sell?  It really wouldn't.

Human drama is fine.  I get it, it can be interesting.  But, if the focus of your game is about the "human drama", then you don't need the zombies at all.  Turn it into some kind of visual novel without the zombies in it and you can produce a game exactly the same (the fact that 99% of all your decisions in The Walking Dead do not involve zombies is a testament to that fact).

All I'm saying is that a Zombie game should be about the zombies (as in, the main focus of the gameplay) instead of making the human drama the main focus (as in, point and click adventure with black and white moral choices with no consequences).  I would just prefer a Zombie Game that follows the Traditional Zombie Lore...  Heck, I'd even play a Zombie Game that played like Romero's "Day of the Living Dead".

Instead, what we have is "generic shooter #57 with zombies tacked on".  Or, "Tower Defense game #99 with Zombies as the enemy".  We even have "Visual Novel #84" that has zombies in it as an afterthought to make the characters more plausible.  We even have "Open World #8364790976 With Zombies so that combat can seem interesting instead of morally reprehensible".  By my standard, these aren't so much "zombie games" as they are "games with zombies in them".  They are the equivalent of calling Minecraft a "Zombie Game".  There are Zombies and Undead in Minecraft, but that's not what the game is about, they're there as an afterthought to spice up the gameplay.  That's all these other games are doing.  Zombies are there to spice up gameplay or offer storyline excuses for doing the things you're doing.  They aren't the central focus of the gameplay or even the storyline.  They're just kind of there.  You know, to hang out, wave at the kids, moan at the wife, maybe have a few laughs.

I would just like a Zombie game to take the subject matter of a Zombie Apocalypse and Outbreak in a somewhat serious and realistic matter...  Where the point of the game is to survive and not try to manage a bunch of useless NPCs who would honestly be more useful as Zombie Chow than anything else.

See, here's why zombies actually exist as a monster and an interesting medium:  Zombies represent a brain dead society obsessed with consumerism.  They also represent the destruction and failure of society.  They also represent a "cleansing force" that immediately wipe out anyone who doesn't have a skillset that allows them to survive in that kind of environment.  The "Zombie Genre" in general has steered away from these more interesting aspects and gone purely into "What will you sacrifice to survive?", which could be asked of literally any other genre other than Zombies.  Zombies already have all these interesting aspects and takes on human society as a whole...  And someone in the mainstream has decided that it sells better as a daytime soap opera instead.  Sure, that's fine.  I just wish they weren't taking something I found cool and interesting and basically turning it into the next bastardization of a monster.  It's seriously the equivalent of turning vampires into the emo brooding sparkly things that are in Twilight.

That's how I feel about it, anyway.  Agree or not, but at least try to understand where I'm coming from and what these games that focus on "human drama" are actually taking away from the Zombie Genre instead of what they are adding.

not really, remove zombies from that and the human drama won't be nice at all... the reason why the human part takes into effect is because of the zombies.


and really, these companies make zombie games/shows because they sell nicely, it's always about the money. it will probably take a few more years before people get sick of the current style, so I don't see companies moving out of the current zombie niche in the near future.


companies like to minimize costs, so since developing new things will require (normally) more money than just doing what's been done and just change something, they tend to go that way. especially when no matter how repetitive it seems, players still buy the games anyway.