Overrated?

Lists are probably the most basic sort of video game article one can write online. Instead of trying to come up with an original argument or an actual point, all you have to do is take a bunch of games, judge them by some arbitrary criteria, add a few lines of rudimentary comments and viola! Easy as pie! 

But, people love lists though! As lazy as so many of them are, we just eat them up. I am also guilty of this, I’ll read best of lists, I’ll read worst of lists, but the lists I find most interesting are those of the most overrated games. They are always a great source of debate. And when I say great source of debate, I mean they start a lot of fights.

Now people on the internet will fight over anything and this is definitely true for lists or rankings, but it seems to me there is definitely something particularly inflammatory about discussions about the most overrated games. The main reason for this is that no one can really agree with what overrated actually means. Does something that is overrated actually have to bad? If everyone agrees that something is overrated is it still overrated? By what criteria is something rated highly in the first place? So a lot of arguments in regards to these lists bog down to fights about semantics. The other major thing is that to be overrated someone has to actually like a game in the first place and believe me people do not react well when you say something they like is overrated! So needless to say a lot of these lists can be very inflammatory! 

But, I still think lists like these are interesting to look at as they make you judge a game on criteria beyond the basic question of whether you like it or not, instead to judge something as overrated you have to consider other perspectives as to why people would like this. When you do that your mind can go to some interesting places and gain some insights about games that you wouldn’t have thought of normally. I find this particularly true about old lists of this sort, because we are normally forced to view the past through the tyranny of present preoccupations and by actually reading things people were saying at the time we are forced to view things from the radically different perspective of the past. By doing this I think we can learn a lot of interesting things.

With this in mind, I am going to go over a list of Gamespy’s most overrated games from 2003. I ran across this list at random a few years ago and it somehow stuck in my mind, so I thought I would use the opportunity granted to me by this blog to talk about some things in it which I find interesting.

I will not be covering the entire list today, mainly because the entry is kind of long as it is, instead I will be covering #25 to #20 and doing the rest at some future date.

25. Neverwinter Nights

This one actually confused me, not that this is on the list, but the list’s particular reasoning . NWN was a massive critical hit for the time (95 on PC Gamer, 91  Gamespot, 90 on IGN), but most of it is also incredibly dated in terms of graphics and gameplay and it is probably one of the weakest storylines that Bioware has ever done.  So one would guess that the list would judge the game disfavorably on that ground. Instead of focusing on this aspect, the list offers different grounds. Part of the appeal of NWN when it was first revealed was that because it offered a faithful D&D 3.0 rules adaptation, had robust multiplayer support and had the option for one player to host an online session as the D.M. it could basically replace the need for pen and paper sessions. From the article

“Neverwinter Nights promised to change everything. Here was a complete role-playing game   engine for your PC, created by BioWare (the geniuses behind epics like Baldur’s Gate), and featuring the complete Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 rulesets. Neverwinter also promised a complete editor that you could use to create just about any scenario, and a “Dungeon Master” mode where you could run your friends through a campaign, jumping in and out of NPCs, and triggering off scripted events. THIS was the future of role-playing!

The actual game it’s self did not live up to these lofty expectations.

“ But the much-hyped DM tools? They were an enigma wrapped in a mystery controlled by an incredibly obtuse and almost completely undocumented scripting system. Forget running an adventure; most budding DMs couldn’t figure out how to get doors to work …the promise of a universal online role-playing game with a human DM remains unfulfilled.”

This is what I like about these lists, they reveal what the hopes and expectations of gamers were back then, the idea that NWN could basically be this stepping stone between the electronic world and pen and paper, essentially NWN was going to be the program to allow you to replicate your weekly roleplaying session in a video game. So if this was the expectation these people had going in, I can’t blame them for being a bit disappointed, but I really don’t think those expectations were reasonable. It’s been nearly 20 years since the game dropped out and the goal of having a game which you could run your D&D campaign in still has not been met and I don’t think it is fair to judge NWN by a standard which still has not been meant to this day.

Instead I think we should remember it as a valiant effort, because it is still arguably the game which came closest to achieving this unattainable goal and I think most people today do remember the multiplayer and modding aspect of the game very fondly. I myself spent most of my time in NWN playing modules like Penultima or Shadowlords which made people forget the lackluster campaign. So while I get where this list is coming from I would argue that this game is not overrated, at least by the criteria they use. 

24. Super Mario Sunshine

This is an interesting one. Whether or not a game is overrated is somewhat relative. By today’s standards I would say SMS is more divisive than overrated, a lot of people love this game (92 on Metacritic and I myself adore this game) and a lot of people don’t, but the two sides are probably mostly even in terms of size. Therefore I don’t really think the game can be considered overrated nowadays,  especially as it is arguably one of the less talked about entries in the Mario series. 

But that was not the perspective at the time of the article.

“Ever since the release of the GameCube, Nintendo gamers were desperately waiting for a new 3D incarnation of the Mario franchise. Given the massive success of Super Mario 64 on the N64 console, hopes and expectations for Miyamoto’s cash-cow franchise were incredibly lofty. Super Mario Sunshine turned out to be a really, really great game in its own right, but it certainly wasn’t the quantum leap that most of us were wishing for. The gameplay took a lot of direction from its predecessor, but overall, the whole package seemed to be lacking in longevity and innovation.”

So even though SMS is nowadays over shadowed by Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy, when it first came out people evidently thought that it was going to be a game changer that would be just as far a step forward as Super Mario 64 was. I mean I love the game, but Sunshine wasn’t that in the slightest! SM64 invented the 3D platformer, while Sunshine is merely a very good example of that genre. So by that criteria the authors of this article are right. But is this a fair standard? Let me put it this way, is there any platformer which was as much of a step forward as SM64 was? Still by the standards of the time I can definitely see the why the authors of this lists would consider the game to be overrated. 

23. Battle Arena Toshinden

This is the first example on this list of a game which has been forgotten. People still have some pretty strong opinions on Super Mario Sunshine and they at least remember Neverwinter Nights, but Battle Arena Toshinden? There are frankly a bunch of games on here which I have never played and only know by reputation, but I have literally never actually heard of this one.  

Battle Arena Toshinden was a series of  very early 3d fighting games released on the PS1 which were meant to compete with Sega’s popular Virtua Fighter series. The series seems to have been very popular in part due to its next gen graphics, but the gameplay seems to have been lacking and the popularity of the series seems to have just withered away.

So if a game was once very highly regarded, but now has been almost completely forgotten I would say that it is definitely very overrated. 

22. Star Fleet Battle Series

For the most part this Gamespy article has actually been pretty fair in it’s arguments and lacks a lot of the early 2000’s in your face attitude, but this segment is just incredibly obnoxious. Just a bunch of trekkie bashing and implying that the only reason this game has any fans at all is due to the delusions of sad pathetic Trekkies.

“Star Trek fans are kind of a funny bunch. There is, somewhere in the depths of their souls, a part of them that truly believes that the show is real. How else can you explain the frenzy over Starfleet Command? …Then a strange thing happened — the quasi-religious aura that surrounds Star Trek the TV show seemed to descend over Starfleet Command. Internet forums and chat rooms were filled with rabid gamers espousing the virtues of an entirely average product and viciously flaming anyone who dared say anything bad about their long-awaited “realistic” simulation. “

I really don’t have any investment in the series personally, but I am just going to side with the Trekkies on this one and declare it not overrated  just out of spite.

21. Morrowind

You will actually find plenty of people who will argue that Morrowind is overrated, that it’s not as good as you remember and it has since been far surpassed by later games, most notably Skyrim. Whatever the merits of these arguments, they are still arguments that really only make sense in today’s world. But, this list came out in 2003 when Morrowind was only a year old and Skyrim was a decade away, so any argument they advance that Morrowind was overrated would have to be based on different criteria. Now what were these reasons? Mainly that it’s very buggy, not that well balanced and has shitty character models. 

“Unfortunately, this did not prevent the game’s freeform gameplay from eventually devolving into one samey errand after another, given by townspeople that all read from the same script. However, these flaws are not readily apparent when first playing the game, and only emerge over many hours of playing time. As a result, Morrowind left a great first impression, but proceeded to slide slowly but surely downhill from there. Toss in game-slowing copy protection, unavoidable “crash to desktops,” the worst character animation of 2002, and a framerate that cannot be tamed by the most expensive of hardware, and you have an ambitious but seriously flawed RPG.”

Honestly, this just feels nitpicky. I’m sure the game was buggy when it came out and not well balanced, but is that it? I mean people still make this same criticism about Skyrim and it is still regarded as a great game, because minor flaws like that get overshadowed by the good things.  Honestly this entry just feels really nit picky, with the authors seeming to brush aside what was so revolutionary about Morrowind in favour of small quibbles. So I don’t think Morrowind deserved to be called overrated a year after it came out. 

20. Impossible Creatures. 

This is the first game in this list where I am going to argue it wasn’t overrated on the basis that I  I don’t think anybody ever thought it was that good. I actually do remember playing the demo of this game when it came out and I remember it being decent but not great.It seems critics at the time agreed with me as it only has a 72 on Metacritic and while Metacritic scores from the early days of the internet are pretty dubious, it doesn’t really seem to have gotten many glowing reviews. IGN did give it a 83 and Gamespot gave it a 79, but those sites were notorious for giving 8/10’s at the drop of a hat for any game which was merely good. 

So why was Impossible Creatures  considered to be overrated? When you read the actual section in Gamespy’s article they talk about the hype the game had. 

 “the next big thing was an RTS game that was one part Island of Dr. Moreau and two parts 1930’s pulp-fiction campyness. The premise was genetic testing on animals gone mad. Two animals could be cross-bred with each other, allowing players the chance to create literally thousands of breeds, each with their own unique characteristics of attack, defense, stealth, etc. A cheetah’s body could be melded to a killer whale’s head for an extremely fast unit with a literally killer melee attack. It promised to be an RTS where players could develop their own armies to cater to their style of play. The possibilities were nearly endless, and the insane animal combinations were a marketer’s dream. Most publications (ourselves included) were drooling over Impossible Creatures virtually sight unseen.”

What was released was by no means a terrible game, but it was nothing revolutionary. The multitude of animals didn’t alter the same basic strategy: gather resources and develop your armies quicker than anyone else and beat the rush. Gamers quickly shrugged this off as just another strategy title destined to collect dust on a shelf.

This is actually a pretty common mistake that this article makes, they conflate games which are highly anticipated but disappointing, with games which are overrated. I think this is an important distinction to make, as at no point in the history of this game did people think it was great. They thought it might be great and that it probably would be great based on the previews, but that is not the same thing as people playing the game and thinking that it was great. So I am going to say that this is not overrated.

Okay, that will be enough for this entry and I will try to come back soon with two more entries which will hopefully cover the rest of this list. What games which are on the list but not covered, do you have some strong opinions on.