They hated it because it fucking sucked, dude. Just one look at the final product and you can tell you how fucked up it is. You don’t even need to play it to see it sucks; that’s how bad it fucking sucked.
4: Niko grew up as a child soldier and has basically been under the thumb of mob bosses his whole life. It’s also the ONLY game where you actually have choices in many cases to not kill someone as part of his revenge story (he wants to find and kill the man who sold out his unit in some war and got all his friends killed).
5: Franklin used to be a car thief, and has since gone straight as a repo man. His dumbass friends, along with Micheal and Trevor, get him caught up in all sorts of bullshit he doesn’t necessarily want to do, but doesn’t really have much choice. Micheal is also an ex-criminal trying to go straight, but having a much harder time at it than Franklin. His hot headedness is what got them into major trouble prior to Trevor’s arrival. Trevor is not only a bad guy and a psychopath, he could be considered the main villain of the game. Most of the plot revolves around Micheal trying to hide the truth from Trevor, because he knows Trevor is a fucking maniac and will possibly kill him and his entire family because he sold him out to the cops when they were bank robbers and Micheal wanted out of that life.
San Andreas: CJ is an ex-gang member who comes home to attend the funeral of his mother who was recently murdered. Things start out with him simply wanting to bring the killer to justice, and gets swept up in more gang violence, police corruption and even government conspiracies.
They’re as much bad guys as John Wick or John McClane or Arnold Schwartznegger in pretty much any of his 80’s and 90’s action films.
I want Disney to rethink removing Kyle Katarn from the canon because I hella wanna see a show or movie following him, if not another awesome FPS where I can be him. Kyle and Dash Rendar (another video game protagonist) are my favorite SW characters.
TLOU - Great story, don’t get me wrong; probably some of the best writing in games for it’s time. But the gameplay got super boring once every concept was introduced. The loop is just not satisfying, and exploration is more or less go check out the dead end before moving on, because the level design is so linear. This is more or less the same problem I have with most big AAA titles; they look great, have a good story, but are just so incredibly boring to play. You can tell the budget went entirely into graphics and voice acting, because the game itself feels more like an afterthought to those; it’s just there because otherwise it would be a movie.
Lethal Company - The game itself is pretty shit and tedious. What makes it fun is not the game, but how voice chat sounds when someone is being chased or getting eaten. 100% a game made for Twitch streamers where more people will be entertained by watching others play than playing themselves.
Palworld - I was interested by “Pokemon with Guns” and then I found out it’s more like Rust with Pokemon. I hate Rust and Ark all those kinds of survival PvP games. The genre itself has all the same weird jank, like everyone who has been copying the idea from DayZ or the like also copied every bug and bad idea, too; even the AAA made ones! They usually run like shit, are balanced like shit, and get so stale alone and are super frustrating in multiplayer unless you’re playing with a large group of friends so you’re not just being singled out for being all alone.
GTA:O - Specifically the online portion of GTA5 has made me never want to buy another GTA or rockstar game period. Not because the game play itself sucks, but rather because it’s extremely fun but the game doesn’t want you to have fun if you’re also making money. I can spend hours and hours doing all the activities that don’t earn you cash and have not one single issue other than maybe some other players trying to blow me up (especially if they are modding). But once that Mission Rep meter starts going up, hoo boy… The game starts breaking in all sorts of interesting but frustrating ways. Headshots stop killing in one hit, traffic starts behaving erratically and non-sensically (like straight sliding sideways at light speed to force a collision), triggers start breaking, the server decides to go down or get super laggy, etc. Since none of this happens in single player or while not doing activities that reward cash, and there is no other obvious function of the Mission Rep stat, I can’t help but think these are actually features put into the game on purpose specifically to slow down grinding so people will buy Shark Cards. The same kinda shit happens in RDR2:O, too.
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy. Sure, you break the law; but in almost every instance, the law is super corrupt anyway and you almost always end up working for said corrupt cops at some point because they have you by the balls.
Vice City is the only one I can’t really find any justification for the protagonists actions other than greed; and that one’s story is basically Scarface where you’re playing as Tony Montana.
The closest I got was learning that the TI-85 I used in my algebra classes had BASIC programming in it, and I found the code for a rogulike dungeon crawler kinda like Eye of the Beholder specifically for the calculator. At the time, I already knew plenty of BASIC myself so I could tweak things as I found bugs or generally didn’t like the stats of an item.
It was an option back then. They just know nobody would have accepted it then because
Not as many people had the internet, and
The internet that they did have sucked ass
There were still plenty of online-only games. They just had a damn good reason to be online. Always-online in single player isn’t needed as DRM. There are plenty of other DRM options that don’t use the internet at all or at least only check once in a while when you do have a connection to the Internet.
It was on PS+ while I had the service so I tried it for the brawler part but it’s like a good anime with a murder mystery plot, it has elements of GTA and Phoenix Wright mashed together with a brawler, and the story is focused on a high school so you get to beat the ever-living snot outta bratty teenagers which is really cathartic.
And despite the serious tone of the main plot, the game is very goofy and over-the-top (again, it’s like playing an anime; complete with all the tropes you’d expect from an anime) and has me laughing my ass off pretty regularly. I had to actually buy a copy because I have barely scratched the surface of it and I’m not renewing my PS+ sub any time soon. Sucks that I got it on sale and the one DLC that adds content is twice as much as what I paid for the main game, cuz I know I will end up wanting it lol
I wasn’t exactly old enough to have experienced this, but I know there was a time that if you wanted to play a PC game, you didn’t buy it on a floppy or a disc; you got a book with code that you had to type up and compile yourself. If you did more than just follow the book, you could understand it and change it to be whatever you wanted!
This is why I wish everything was open source. If I don’t like the way something is done, I can tweak it. Any part of it and make it perfect for me.
They were shitty for different reasons. Notice that nowhere on this meme is “shovelware.”
E.T. is always cited as the cause of the video game crash of '82, but it was really the rampart shovelware, no QA to speak of, and a lack of reviews to inform customers what was worth their money and what was absolute garbage. One bad game isn’t enough to topple an entire industry; especially one that is only slightly worse than the best game ever made for the Atari.
This problem was, however, mitigated a lot by Nintendo through the late 80’s and the entirety of the 90’s by creating the kind of licensing agreements between publishers and the console makers that still exist today, as well as the increase in review publications. Most of the best shit (from consumer friendly practices to the games themselves) from the industry came specifically in the 90’s thanks in part to actual curation of the software allowed to be sold for these systems.
At least you can easily determine shovelware from something worth your time when everything has reviews attached to the store page. Still sucks that you have to wade through all that bullshit, though.