Now thats a name I haven't heard in ages.
I'm almost entirely sure my feelings on
Vampire Rain are from proper context. I've played utter shit that makes games
believed to be utter shit look like anything but. You think
Superman 64 is bad? Try
Fighting Arts, an N64 fighting game with shoddy hit-detection, controls that don't work, and 7 frames per second. You think Shadow the Hedgehog is horrible? Try
Bubsy 3D, a game which makes it look like a fucking
masterpiece. Think your average Wisdom Tree game's bad?
Action 52. In my case, I usually divide my games up and rate them on if they're objectively good (as in, if the gameplay is good), or if the work's contextually good (as in, the game has a phenomenal story or interesting ideas). If a game has excellent gameplay, but no story, that's enough to get it over the bar with me. If a game is a piece of shit mechanically, but the story is great or has such brilliant ideas that it almost makes up for it, then that's almost as important. If you can nail both, you've got a game that I'll almost invariably support. This may be why I am absolutely fucking
brutal towards anything Quantic Dream shits out, but will happily investigate the likes of that mediocre
Alone in the Dark game from a few years ago.
There are a few games, however, that I consider to transcend my usual scale. For example,
Duke Nukem Forever is unimpeachably shit on every level. Its plot is trash, it has constant framerate issues, it controls like garbage, the shooting mechanics are sloppy and unresponsive, the physics are nonsensical, it does literally nothing original in its entire run-time, and it doesn't give a shit about its own lack of quality (take a good look around in the city levels, and prepare to see the most bland, uninhabited city since backgrounds were done in PNG format). It's repetitive and unfun as hell, and it's got a psychopathic
look what we got away with, hurr durr mindset that makes one wonder if the developers behind it were about 12 years old. About the only thing I enjoyed about it was Duke's quips, which lost some impact when Duke suddenly comes across as the biggest asshole in the world halfway through.
Revolution 60 is another good example of this - it's essentially
Quick Time Events: The Video Game, with a boring, predictable story that takes itself completely seriously. Its laughable graphics could be forgiven if it had literally anything else going for it, but it doesn't, and so it's free to join Quantic Dream's games on the shitlist.
One game that I did find was
infinitely better than literally every gaming mag said it was was
Operation Raccoon City. To hear most mags talk about it, it was the game that dethroned the likes of
Daikatana,
Battlecruiser: 3,000 AD, and
Deadly Towers. In truth, it's a damned good game that attempts to do very interesting things with the
Resident Evil license. It has a tragic story, however: It was intended to launch as a $30 budget title, since the Delta Force campaign was coming in a few months for $20. Capcom of America got greedy, though, and launched it with outdated early-build code for $60. The devs legally bitch-slapped Capcom over it, and Capcom backed off, marking down the price and releasing a patch that fixed the biggest issues, but the damage had already done. If you can find a copy on-the-cheap, check it out. It's got solid multiplayer and does some really clever things with the story in an alternate-universe retcon wherein Birkin grew a conscience and sold Umbrella out to the US Government.
