TimeSplitters?

Hahaha... Haven't played the other 2 (still waiting for a sale on Timeshift,) but I definitely agree with Singularity.
I remember it got a lot of shit for ripping off Bioshock. I never cared. It was a cool game with fun gunplay and a fun story. That's what mattered to me.

Yeah, there was little or no marketing for the game at all, causing poor sales and massive layoffs at Raven. Then Activision blamed Raven. Really sad, but is to be expected with Activision, I guess.

Darkest of Days?

Overrated: Chess

Underrated: Hola

Yes, thank you.

I actually don't own it anymore as I sold all my discs and it was a rare one not tied to some service. It's never on sale on Steam either. I gave them $50 for the game way back though, honestly I could pirate the thing and not feel bad about it. In any case it was a solid shooter with neat ideas that got horrible reviews based on a broken Xbox port, from what I understood.
I played it for 20 hours and quit. It was just really... I dunno... simple. No interesting lore, no interesting characters or locations. Just pretty graphics and MMO style fetching. I got super bored of it.

Hmmmm, really? Except for the first Halo, all these games are awful ports. Final Fantasy has better sound on the PS1 version than on the PC for some reason. Halo 2 required Vista to work at that time, which was fucking ridiculous, and the game itself doesn't have ANY improvement over the Xbox version, despite being released 3 years after the original. Seriously, i have both versions and they are graphically the same. It was a lazy port, at least. The first Halo was an awezome port because it pushed PCs to their limits at that time, the multiplayer was awesome (much better than the original Xbox version, which didn't even support Xbox Live) and it supported mods.

GTA is another case of bad port, at least in my opinion. I have recently played (and finished) GTA 3 on my PC and i regret a lot choosing it over the superior PS2 version. First, the game was meant to be played on a controller and designed with autoaiming in mind. Second, i had some technical issues getting the game running. Third, the crosshair is completely out of place in widescreen resolutions, even though the game DOES have a widescreen option. So yeah, there is a widescreen option there, but it doesn't work. This makes the game nearly unplayable in widescreen resolution because the bullets do not hit the place you're aiming at due to the crosshair being out of place.

I also played San Andreas back in the day and i remember that it ran like shitty on my PC at that time, even though it was a pretty decent machine. I could run Half Life 2 and Doom 3 with pretty much everything set to high at decent resolutions, but San Andreas was a pain in the ass to run. GTA 4 has similar optimization issues. Oh, and there's that Rockstar Social Club crap.

For these reasons i'm never ever touching GTA on PCs again. The next GTA i plan on playing is Vice City, and even though i own the Steam version, i'll get myself a PS2 copy. It's pretty cheap and will save me a lot of hassle.

Your welcome also it is on sale on Amazon for 7 bucks.

You want massively underrated?

Eojjeonji Joheun Il-i Saenggil Geot Gateun Jeonyeok and the Intelligent Qube/I.Q./Kurushi series.

I don't do discs anymore, that was my point. Thanks though.

Oh. Fuck that game. FUCK. THAT. GAME.

To this day, that title has come the closest to getting me to swear off video games forever.

It also has NOTHING to do with spaceships or a rpg-lite system like System shock. Singularity is the story of American special agents investigating an explosion on a Russian island that served as an experiment for a new kind of resource. Its basically a first person shooter with time travel and a REALLY cool environment. Think Wolfenstein (The latest one.) mixed with Metro 2033 and you will have a good idea of what to expect. Good game.

Also, infuriating. I, to this day, refuse to believe that any human being has ever beaten it on hard. I don't care what youtube evidence you folks present, there is a certain section that I start getting angry just thinking about, so I won't even type it out. I couldn't even finish the game it made me so mad.

OT: Bioshock. After playing System shock, I just couldn't get into it. I just don't have any fun playing the bioshock games. They never stay installed on my computer long.

Most underrated? Sword of the Stars. BRILLIANT 4x. Really deserves to be played by all. Such an awesome interface and art style mixed with epic combat and less micromanagement then most other 4x games.

Overrated:
Baldur's Gate - yes, it is historically important, bfd
Planescape: Torment - great writing, huge impact on ttrpgs, but screw its disgusting morals with full force
To The Moon - the pixel art is pretty, but people are mostly praising it for the plot. And it's way easier to distinguish between graphix and plot than between the technical excellence of writing/setting design and plot, as in the case of PS:T
Braid - completely fucking average. One might say whatever is mildly praiseworthy about it was Blown out of proportion.
FF7 - might be a severe case of "not for me".
The Walking Dead and other " little girl" games
Spec Ops and other pretentious shooters (note that this and the line immediately above covers Bioshock twice)
Dear Esther
Age of Wonders - how do you manage to fuck up writing a plot for the campaign?
Syberia, TLJ, and other pretentious adventures
Avadon - so generic it hurts
Beneath a Steel Sky - another historical artifact

Underrated
(GOG games only, because the discourse is different and underrated != overrated x -1)
(also, I tried to be objective and make this list different from "games that you don't like because ur stoopid"; eg Spirits wouldn't 've made the list because it's a very personal preference, while Anodyne only makes it because of the Zelda bullshit, not because "baww some people dare to not like it, call the drama police")
SMAC - deserves even more praise than it gets
Arkania
all the Divinities before DC (haven't played it yet)
Botanicula - this is how to make a save-the-world story
Defender's Quest - near perfect, needs exponentially more praise
Perimeter
Dragonsphere - better than most popular "classic" adventures
Ittle Dew / Anodyne - top-down exploration games should be praised on their own terms; I don't even like Zelda.

Severely underrated as a class: most abstract awesomeness.

Probably okay: Half-Life. My perception of its rep is less "awesomest game" and more "really damn popular game and we would very much prefer to know how the story ends within our lifetimes".

As I just said... :) Some feedback:

Halo 2:

- Halo 2 PC at max graphics settings had somewhat better graphics than the XBox original, also due to slightly higher resolution. It is simply so much easier to discern the enemies from the background with the much crispier and clearer PC version (esp. due to PC monitor vs TV display), including what sort of enemy it is. This was very obvious in e.g. the hangar section in the beginning of the game.

- Mouse(aim) + keyboard makes the game much more playable than the original with the XBox gamepad. One simple example is how hard (= pretty much impossible) it is to jump and aim at the same time with the XBox gamepad. No such issue with the PC version.

Final Fantasy 7:

- Depending what sound card you had, the music in the PC version was even better than on the PSX original. The only exception would be the end-boss fight music (One Winged Angel), as with most PC sound cards you would miss the vocals.But I think you got those with SB AWE32, so again it depended on which sound card you had.

I know many people claim the PSX music still sounds better because it was the original version, but I've let e.g. my gf hear a few FF7 tunes both from the PSX version, and PC (SCC-1 or Yamaha XG) side by side, and in each case she picked the PC version of the music as the superior one. She doesn't even know what the game is so she is free of any preconceptions of what is supposed to be better.

- The only thing I see was clearly worse with the PC version were the FMV videos, where the colors seemed somehow washed out compared to he PSX original (even when running the PSX original through an emulator, so that the difference doesn't come from PC monitor vs. TV display). But other than that, I think it was an ok port that gave PC gamers a good taste of the series.

Final Fantasy 8:

- Unlike with FF7PC, IIRC the FMV videos were even better on PC than on PSX. No similar grainy color problems as with FF7PC either. And IIRC the PC version even included an extra minigame that for the Playstation version was available only in the Japanese version, if you had bought some extra LCD HW gadget for your Playstation.

GTA3:

- I don't recall having similar problems as you with the widescreen mode, but I still opted to play the PC versions in 4:3 because the widescreen mode was fake, ie. it apparently just stretched a 4:3 picture over 16:9. So in my opinion there was no real reason to even use the widescreen mode, it just makes everything look fatter.

Did the PS2 versions even support proper widescreen modes? At least when I've seen them, they've always been run in 4:3 aspect ratio.

- IIRC due to higher resolutions, in the PC versions it is e.g. much easier to discern the road signs and such from afar, than in the muddier PSX versions.


I guess we can never agree with these, but at least I feel the claims that the PC ports of the mentioned games are some unplayable mess are far from the truth. Like in this forum I think someone claimed before that in the PC version of Halo 2 the mouse aim is completely broken, making the game unplayable. I have no idea what he was complaining about as it worked, and works, fine for me. Maybe he was playing some unpatched version with problems, while I was playing it with some latest patches.

the auto aim in console gta games is really lame, feels like cheating.

No!!!!

Overrated: YOUR favorite game!

Underrated: MY favorite game!

OK?!?!?!?!