I like this outlook :)

You.. do? Am I getting better and better in spreading that? Cool! Thanks!:)

The list begins and ends with Final Fantasy 7.

If you've ever followed any of those "best game" fan polls, or "best character" polls, Final Fantasy 7 always finishes top five, if not number one. Every. Time.

And now people are screaming at Square to re-make FF7.

I'm not going to say it's a bad game, but it's just...not that great. It's not deserving of the hysteria the game causes. It was in the perfect situation. A solid game, that opened up a new console and style of game to a mass audience like never before. For many people it was the first RPG they ever played and at the time it was a true break through in technology.

That still doesn't make it great. I'm not going to go crazy and say every FF is better then 7...but games like IV & VI? Definitely, and they don't even get half the love.

The other contender is Halo.

Pretty much the same reason. It opened up the floodgates to a new genre for a wide variety of gamers who never heard of the genre before or played a good example of it. And it added a lot of bells and whistles to please their audience.

I liked Halo 1...On the PC. And I liked Halo 3. I've logged many hours into them. Still doesn't make them great games. People try to claim Halo caused a revolution in gaming, or changed gaming forever. And maybe it did...for consoles. But everything Halo did we PC gamers saw years, and years before Halo ever happened. And there had already been very good FPS's on consoles already. So where does the "changing gaming forever" aspect come up? Because it was the first pretty online FPS that most of the gaming public had played. And just like FF7, it's completely blown out of proportion due to it.

Although the Cortana/Master Chief intellectual AI/human love thing was an intriguing twist for the story.

Honorable mention to Half Life.

I don't get why this is so vaulted. I liked Half Life 1. I didn't beat it for whatever reason, but I got to end game. It was fun. Nothing new though. Even for when the game came out (I admittedly played it years later), there was nothing new to it. Everything in Half Life had been done already. It just took the concepts, refined them into good control, and added bells & whistles. Nothing wrong with it.

Half Life 2? I bought it when it was on sale super cheap on Steam, and I hated it to my core. Perhaps the game improves after a period of time, but I'm the type of gamer who was bred on Platformers, RPG's, FPS's & TBS. I want to play a game at MY pace. If I feel like being a little stealthy? I should be able to. If I want to plan out my attack? I should be able to. I want choice in how I engage my circumstances. In Half Life 2, it was clearly engineered to be "The Action Movie Game", so you're just stuck on this track that moves super fast, with no ability to plan for anything ahead of you. You have more control over how you handle things in say...Unreal Tournament then Half Life 2. A good example being a bridge I crossed early on. I made sure to check it was clear. I got half way through, and a bunch of soldiers leap over the walls of the bridge and opened fire. There's no way to plan for that, and if you're playing blind you have no idea it's coming.

I get why people liked it. "Whoa, there's a helicopter chasing me, AWESOME!" but it's not for me. There's also the fact that it really didn't offer much new. I suppose the gravity gun was new at the time, but that's about it.

Most of the games that get all the praise are ones that took concepts or functionality from other games, refined them a little, and added bells & whistles to please gamers. Kind of a sad realization, honestly.

Sad? You don't have to be ground breaking or innovative to make something good. Most of the time it's realising the potential of things, mix them together in a way that fit and add some shine that makes great things. I don't see how that can be negative.

Can I use a car analogy here, can I, can I, oh plz let me!

OK I won't but is it ok if I use the word wheel? :)

Sure. Go ahead. :)

Well I see your point, but that's not exactly what I meant. Let me give you an example: I engage a bunch of critters with my party. I fight, my main char dies. The others keep on fighting and whoom, my main char is there again and can rejoin the fight. That's what I was trying to say. In most other games, when you die you lose your progress after your last save/checkpoint and possibly some cool new stuff you had acquired. Therefore, it sucks to die because you have to do it again. I haven't played the game enough to say whether this "integrated quicksave/load system" adds a nice twist to the game, but I can assure you that it wasn't the reason why I stopped playing. It's just a little thing that seems to have roused quite a lot of debate.

BLAZEMONGER!

Touted as a game "so blindingly awesome, it just HAS to be spelled in all caps", or some such nonsense.
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If you had GEnie, Prodigy, or CompuServe, you might remember this bit 'o vaporware.

I like Half Life 2 but mostly because it was on the orange box and it and Portal kind of got me into first person shooters. It was just what I needed; it had a story I could enjoy, some characters I liked, Ravenholm, the silly physics “puzzles” and just generally the portal gun that broke up the game play enough.

Also the origin Half-Live was fairly innovative at the time from what I remember. Something to do with how it did its story telling; all of it was in game from the same perspective rather than breaking away to do it.

Well... It is of a very, VERY big importance to the story. I just take it as a special ability of your character, since all of the other party members CAN die - and the game is as much about them as it about PC.

Yes it is what I mean :D
Oh silly mix ups.

TimeShift. Certainly not the "first" game to use "chronic" (sic) abilities, but I think it's the first that allows for them to affect more physics elements than any other game at that time, and actually provided an in-game, pseudo-scientific reason for their functionality. Like, the "Stop Time" ability allowed for one to walk on water or through lighting bolts because the molecules and charged ions were "frozen" in place. Even so, the game tried too hard to be Yet Another Halo Killer.




Does anyone at all remember the BLAZEMONGER! posts? I feel really old now.

But it was parody, wasn't it? Did many reviewers wrote how awesome it was? Overrated it rated too high, if something wasn't even rated... Well..

I loved the old Diablo... for whatever reason it was much more fun then the second one. The expansion "Hellfire" was already broken though.

It wasn't a parody. It was Original! With a capital "O"! But since you say we're splitting hairs over "overrated" and "overhyped"...