It took nearly a decade, three console generations, and some "epic" help for gamers to get their hands on Too Human. This flawed gem from developer Silicon Knights was anything but a watershed moment for the developer. I believe this game failed with the core gaming demographic is because of two things: Denis Dyack and combat controlled by the right stick.
Folklore received heavily mixed reviews upon its release back in 2007. Though it was praised by many for its dark atmosphere and emphasis on lore, it was hit hard by some for its incessant back-tracking, messy storytelling, and hit-or-miss Sixaxis controls. Though it was never deemed a complete failure (and surprisingly, got more than a couple 9/10's) there was something about it that doomed it for the bargain bin.
Dynasty Warriors wouldn't generally be considered broken, but it has been negatively seen by a large portion of critics out there. This series saw its best ratings early on, but as time passed, the ratings continued to drop. Warriors (as a whole) isn't safe from the ire of the gaming masses, but it's still a game that I love to call my guilty pleasure.
If you play games with any regularity, it's inevitable that you'll eventually come across a roughly-made, unbalanced, unpopular, or straight-up broken title that you grow attached to regardless of how low the score on Metacritic drops. Whatever the reason, I'm betting that every gamer out there has at least one of these awkward, ugly ducklings that they hold dear—and I've invited a group of guest writers to kiss and tell.
The decision to lock out used games would be a major gamble for Microsoft to make. While the decision would likely be cheered by the industry, the possibility of fewer consumers and doing irreparable harm to relationships with retail partners has serious implications.
It's easy to figure out why gamers lusted after this thing when developer Capcom released it back in late 2002: It's the mech equivalent of a racing game's steering wheel—on steroids—complete with the foot pedals and about a bazillion other useless doodads.
What a difference 10 years can make.
In November 2001, Microsoft was making its console gaming debut with a machine that sported a larger-than-life controller and on-board hard drive. I was interested, but kept my distance for a few years.
In honor of Brad's gaming brick wall blog post and the comments that followed, here is College Humor parody video. Would some of those classic games have been as revered without the legendarily tough stages? You be the judge.
Some years back I played Dead to Rights and found its plot so captivatingly, amazingly ludicrous that I wound up writing a fifty-odd page review of it. It was relatively well-received by people who worked on the game, and even wound up being mentioned in 2005's prequel, Dead to Rights II. Now, to celebrate the release of Dead to Rights: Retribution, I've decided to repost the review here, now with illustrations! Hopefully the occasional image and video will help make it a little more palatable—yes, I'm well aware that it's TL, and I won't be offended if you DR.
So I finally got around to playing half an hour of Halo 3: ODST last night, and while I'm not planning to write a review of it any time soon, I wanted to comment on the weird experience I had with the game.
I was playing a friend's game, so I just sort of dropped in medias res, and had no idea what was going on plot-wise, so I'm not going to bother commenting on that aspect. What I will say is that for the first fifteen minutes of my playtime I had a blast. So much fun that I couldn't remember why I'd hated Halo 3 as much as I did (by which I mean "not really that much at all").