Yea, it is an interactive, animated movie.

If those enemies would have been a bit more mature-like and some weapons perhaps a bit better and not so automatic plasma-gun. It would have been better. In Crysis, I was pretty happy with human enemies then came the aliens, they whooped my ass many times, those ships and all. And I 2 days ago finished half-life 2, there was kind of so many same things. I still think that crysis is better. But Half episode 1 was really short but I enjoyed more that than the main game.

I do agree that the humans in Halo use archaic technology, but I think it makes it easier to relate to them when their guns go "bang!" instead of "sizzle!". Some us-and-them thing going on. And yes, the weapons do suck against some enemies, but that's the case with all games. Such as Gears of War, which you wouldn't like either. It also brings me nicely to my own list of overratedness.

Ah yes, Gears of War. Words can hardly describe the loath I hold for this thing. There is no plot and the characters are uninteresting, which I could forgive if the shooting was any good. Alas, no. You just cover your ass, get up, dump about a ton of ammunition on one enemy whilst he does the same to you, take cover again, recover health, dump another ton on him and - with any luck - watch him die. Move two inches so that you can get a better shot at the next enemy. After eight hours of this, the game finally has the decency to end. Too bad that the sequel wasn't any better.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. The cel-shading is bad enough as it is, but I also felt that the game was way too easy and somehow unsatisfactory. Everyone else seems to think very highly of WW, but I find it the worst Zelda game I have ever played.

Mass Effect 2. Holy shit. The 8th best PC game ever made according to Metacritic, 4th if you believe Gamerankings. This is a game that combines the battle system of Gears of War, the AI of a wrist watch and the intricate level system of a block of flats to a user interface that fails to acknowledge that people have used double-clicking for the past quarter of a century or so. Seriously, how could BioWare fuck up the UI so badly? Why didn't they outsource the PC port to whoever ported the first game? I used to think that BioWare has pretty high production standards, but it turns out that I was wrong. It's unlikely that I'll ever lay my hands on ME2 again, and it's all because of the UI - all other flaws I can tolerate. Somebody, please, make a UI mod.

Deus Ex. Not without merits, this one, but I still didn't like it, partly because I suck at stealth games. I never had that sense of freedom that I was told there would be, the plot is a hilariously predictable mess of conspiracy theories, none of the characters is interesting, Simmons was easier to kill than an unconscious housefly, and I think that I spent more time staring at the screen than actually doing anything because hacking/lockpicking/bypassing is so uninteractive. Thank goodness for the augmentation that let me run through the game that tiny bit faster. Mind you, I bought the game for a fiver and made a small profit when I sold it away, so that's all right.

E: typo fix.

Football!! not FIFA or Football Manager or even Emlyn Hugh's International Soccer but actual run around a real live park and kick a ball football (soccer to the Americans), because the question was "most overrated games of all time?" - No mention of 'computer' or 'video' and if THAT'S the question then the answer is football - don't get me wrong, its a good, simple, easy to grasp game that rewards both team work and individual flair with low entry requirments financially but that just means it should be about as popular as Rugby or Formula 1 (in this country) but people go WAY crazy over it - you meet a working class guy in this country and he asks you 'What team to you support' no preliminary 'So do you like watching football?', like if you haven't arbitairly chosen a team you're some kind of weirdo or gay, or both!
Then at the International level it's like a sustitute for going to war to see which nation is the best
And there's rioting at both levels where people kill and die
So yeah - Football - why all the crazy?

I'm pretty sure they are revoking your citizenship right now ... ;-P

It should be mandatory when presenting one's idea of an overrated game, one should also include an example or two of titles they believe are excellent; i believe such a requirement would help establish the credibility of the poster.

After all, if one were to claim that games like Baldur's Gate and Morrowind are overrated but then proclaim Fate as a deep, immersive role-playing game, then whatever opinion they have should be utterly disregarded.

Credibility should count for something.

Moreover, I see too many opinions here that appear to list a game as overrated simply because the poster did not like the game. That is not enough to qualify a game as overrated. Overrated games are games that are heralded by both gamers and critics, usually receiving high scores from all sides despite the game being less than deserving.

Personally I find myself taken aback by all the hate for the Half-Life series. Either you are relatively inexperienced gamers (i.e., as in only being a gamer in recent years) or you're forgetting the place Half-Life has in gaming history.

What other kinds of immersive, and innovative first-person shooters can you name from 1998?

Up to that point most shooters were little more than run-and-gun find-the-key kill-everything-that-moves shooters. Whether we're talking about the original Unreal or Quake 2. Don't get me wrong, these games were fun, but Half-Life broke new ground in action, pacing, puzzle-solving and storytelling that these other games (and games for years to come) simply could not touch.

Indeed, it blows my mind that games to this day still fail to achieve the level of immersion and facial animation that Half-Life 2 achieved.

So, with all due respect, either you're looking at Half-Life with 20/20 hindsight or your opinion is not factoring in these important details. They ARE relevant and any intelligent opinion must factor them in or you're just being arbitrary.

However, I digress... now to add my own choices for the list:

Myst (the original): a series of pre-rendered images wrapped into a point-and-click adventure that was tedious and uninteresting. Until the Sims came along it was touted as the most successful game of all time. Blah. The 7th Guest was, while far from perfect, a more engaging and fulfilling game.

Quake 3: spastic garbage for twitchy action junkies. Barely a game and only for those who wanted to play multiplayer deathmatch. Unreal Tournament was a better overall game that at least brought something new to the table and offered more gameplay modes.

Deus Ex (the original): I'm currently on my first playthrough which has taken me two months because the game is just painful to play; I end up losing interest but force myself to play just to see how it ends. It irks me that so many continue to sing its praises as one of the best games of all time when it is little more than derivative, poorly written, poorly designed garbage.

The mechanics are dreadful. It attempts to be a role-playing game yet it plays like a clunky first-person shooter.

Let's get one thing straight: there is ONLY one way to play this game: stealth. Any sense of freedom is an illusion. Running and Gunning is simply NOT an option (especially at higher difficulty levels) because the AI's ability to auto-target you means you'll be killed really quickly on all but the lowest difficulty setting.

However, even as a stealthy game it fails miserably, since there will be many times you will be mysteriously heard by a guard ten feet away, through a wall with the door closed. And once you max out your pistol/rifle skills, killing guards becomes pathetically easy. You'll only be discovered if you make a mistake or are discovered by the aforementioned glitchy stealth.

While the story at times shows flickers of brilliance, it is absolutely bogged down by everything-but-the-kitchen-sink poor writing. It's as if the writers took every episode of the X-Files and its numerous conspiracy theories and threw it into the game. But worst of all it presents the story in a matter that is both confusing and uninteresting. The game suffers from a serious case of more-is-less.

Most characters in the game are dull and flat; even your own character JC Denton is an absolute bore.

Deus Ex has to be one of the most painful games I've ever played. And for those of you who deride Fallout 3 in this thread, should play Deus Ex if you haven't already. Fallout 3 was flawed at release, but that game was 100x more immersive, fun and open-ended than Deus Ex. Indeed, Deus Ex feels like it was trying to borrow the structure of Fallout 1 & 2 but ultimately failed.

Starcraft: this game wasn't bad but didn't deserve the fanaticism it ultimately got. It had an aging engine at a time when RTS games were going with 3D rendered graphics. Its gameplay is recycled from Warcraft 2 and brought nothing new to the table besides an interesting backstory. Total Annihilation, Starcraft's closest rival of its day, was a far superior game in terms of mechanics and graphics lacking only an interesting storyline.

And finally:

Star Control 2 - feel free to check out my review on the GOG store page. This game is absolutely dreadful. Poor balance, poor pacing, poor design do not save the great music, voice work (UQM version) and writing. A game that is about exploring space should at least make space exploration rewarding, but on the contrary, this game's artificial time limit - not to mention, punitive economy - makes that impossible. Clearly the overly-effusive fans of this game are those who've played through the game multiple times and thus have the foreknowledge of the location of key systems.

cod and halo....pretty obvious to me LOL

Actually, Unreal WAS quite immersive with all the log entries you found, friendly NPCs and such. I think it's quite comparable to HL in it's presentation - still, HL added quite a bit.

Myst (the original)

Amen to that.

Quake 3

Aye, althou Q3 fans will skin you alive :D

Deus Ex (the original)

And theere you go, largely a personal opinion. It was built on Unreal engine so yeah, there were problems with stealth engine (not as bad as you claim thou.) I have actually finished the game by running and gunning on medium difficulty AND it was my first playtrough, so I have to disagree with you on that one.

Futhermore, it was the first game of it's kind and thus an experiment on a large part, considering that, mechanics actually worked quite well, althou I still hate that awkward aiming mechanics.

Skills made sence and were quite satisfying in the end, game allowed you to finish it multiple times in a different manner, there's a MAD ammount of hidden things that will let things play out slightly differently etc. etc.

The game's strenghts, however, were first proper FPS RPG (that I know of anyway), plot where your every decision was reflected somehow at some point and it still amazes me that only so few games were able to successfully recreate that. I STRONGLY disagree that it's poorly written, and note that I love story-based games, Planescape: Torment is my favourite, after all.

To wrap this up, the game didn't have any mistakes to learn from. It was first of it's kind, so yeah, it's broken at some levels. So are most revolutionary classics by today's standards.

Starcraft
I think StarCraft was actually most important for UI improvements and it's presentation. Yea it used 2D graphics but guess what, they actually were pretty nice, still, it added something that pushed the genre forward.

I agree however that RTS games should have rather followed TA example.

I did the same and ultimately felt that I should've just read a plot summary, watched the endings on YouTube and spent the saved time on something more interesting and constructive, such covering the ceiling with duct tape.

EDIT:
Torment is my favourite game as well (hell, I've bought it three times already), and I though the plot of Deus Ex was complete garbage. They just took obvious conspiracy theories and secret societies and glued them together, and quite badly at that. It was so predictable that early into the game, I even made a short list of things I was expecting to be mentioned throughout the course of it, and every single thing on the list was, and then some.

I like Deus Ex...

I'll also say that I find Zelda games not to my tastes. I can understand people who like them, but I never understood why they appeal to such a large audience. In other words, I think they're just a bit overrated

In reguard to Half life, yes it WAS brilliant (I haven't played no 2) maybe the hate displayed here is also due to GOG fanboy, anti-DRM Valve hate too?
In reguard to Deus Ex, no it WAS brilliant, there were often at least 2 routes though levels, both stealthy - one was sneak up on bad guys and silent kill them and the other was drop down into the sewers and hack / lock pick past security stealth before you even consider trying to run n' gun
and in terms of plot - an AI tells you that God is the dream of perfect government!!! - How often does THAT happen in a computer game, really!

That is quite the contradiction. You praise Half.Life for what it was at the time, yet, you bash Deus Ex by todays standards.

Even though, Deus Ex was a brilliant game. It might also be overrated, because it is by some seen as the second coming of Christ.

The thing you critize are the same things Quake players critizied when the game came out. The Freedom of choice part isn't just shoot or sneak. E.g. you have to enter a base, apart from the pick/hack/shoot ways, there is also very several "physical" ways into a building (jumping, swimming, building a ladder with boxes etc).

And while the writing some times if over the top, the game adresses some very good issues.

Using terrorism as an excuse to impose tougher laws, corporate control over the goverment, health care issues, the treatment of veterans... just to name a few.

All of this has been an issue especially in the US since the game came out. It's downright creepy (WTC missing in 2050? The game was made before 9/11) how this came perdicted social issues and development.

And, on a final note, I found playing it as a shooter easier than the stealth part (I suck at stealth, to impatient). You just have to use cover and flanking, which the level design supports. You can't play it like Doom, of course. But I found the enemies easier than the soldiers in Half-Life 1.

Bottom line, you demand credibility, but your post comes of like that of an CoD fanboy, sorry to say that.

(ten digital cookies for everybody how got the "second coming of christ joke")

Edit: Even though I completely disagree with what you said about DX1, I respect that you named it, knowing the backlash it would create. Boy, a lot of panties in a twist (including mine ;) )

What? putting the 'JC' in 'JC Denton' and all that?

Here are your cookies

http://pc.ign.com/articles/386/386515p3.html

Oh, and ADAM jensen as the first person that doesn't reject augmentations, and out of his DNA (rib) will the future man be made... Yeah, they like to go all religious on us ...

Modern warfare for sure, I couldn't believe how short and linear the single player game was.