I really enjoyed Crysis, why? Because of it's physics and sandbox2. I love dicking around and finding new exploits/glitches with shit like this, so a game built around DESTROYING TREES results in me going ocd and breaking every single tree into the smallest possible forms and then seeing what shit I can do. Anybody who expected DEUS EX from a game where the selling point is FINALLY A GAME WHERE TREES DONT LOOK RETARDED WHEN THEY BREAK is somewhat dim.

I would say the halo series are overrated, outdated interms of gameplay and generally the least important games in the FPS genre (the Turok series is more frigging innovative). They are just bad games and the height of mediocre. People make a deal out of it's story, but it's a dull story, but y'know it HAS ONE that people get all masturbatory over.
FF9 is another disappointment. We had a great new way with FF8. A character driven science fantasy story, it could only get better?
Fuck more cliches than an episode of Star Trek. The point of FF9 was to "reconnect with the fans"(fans being people who judge games based on how much fanwanking and INJOKES, rather than the game's individual merit) as a result it was an embarassingly shallow and detached game.
I would also mention Goldeneye, but I've said all I ever want to say about that horrid piece of shit a few months back, and want to wash my mouth of it.
Company of Heroes is fun at first but it's so grey, and the missions don't have much variety (hold this point til reinforcements come, move towards enemy). It's a game that for me personally gets so boring very quickly. Which is a shame, it should be so good.

Also Leric just admited he's a big perv

FF9 is another disappointment.

I thought so at the time (like yeah I thought well this is a great game but not as good as Final Fantasy 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . ) but in retrospect it has aged much better than pretty much any other PSX game.  If you go back and replay it, it feels much more solid as a game and its personality feels way less artificial and less like a Japanese fad than Final Fantasy 8 and 9 or other PSX RPGs.

Gears of War

I do not particularly like shooters but seriously I don't think anyone can say Gears of War is a terrible game and really have given it a fair assessment.  There are a few retarded missions (STAY IN THE LIGHT . . . !), but overall it's still one of the best games on XBox360 and was one of the first good games on the platform.  Single or multiplayer I think it's a meticulously-built piece of genius.  I think the only really solid criticism are that the STAY IN THE LIGHT . . . ! levels are the worst levels ever seen in a video game and that the game was all about giant evil monsters but never really delivered memorable boss fights against those giant evil monsters.

God of War

I don't know about you guys but I always feel like the God of War games are for people who don't understand the fine acrobatics and tight back-and-forth action of Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden.  I guess that they are sort of okay and everything, but in my experience all that a new God of War game does is make me want to replay Ninja Gaiden or something.  God of War might have a slightly less retarded story that DMC or NG, but it's still a far cry from being good.  Also Kratos always reminds of like someone from System of a Down or something and I just can't deal with that.

Dead Rising

Someone on a podcast or something described Dead Rising as "the best terrible game ever" and I think that is a pretty fair assessment of it.

Meh I just threw DOA in there because besides Soul Caliber it's the only other 3D fighter I can think of that I have any interest in (well besides the questionable fighters like SSB and Power Stone). DOA is more of a casual interest than a game I love, although I do like it more than VF or Tekken (plus it gets cred for actually working on my crappy internet connection).

man SSB is like the best fighting game ever.

Enter the Matrix

Everyone fucking hated the game, but nobody hated it enough.

weird that no one here is mentioning gta4 since its getting 10 all over the place. personally i feel like it deserves it because i have so much fun playing it but i'd assume some of you would consider that extremely overhyped and overrated.

I feel that way to an extent. I mean, I respect the fact that it is a highly enjoyable game. But people are putting it up on this pedestal and I feel that if they let gta4 be the definitive paradigm when it comes to "what makes a game good", It will be detrimental to gaming overall. My main argument for such being that I believe a game is less likely to work the more complicated/content-heavy you make it, and the pride behind GTA4(maybe the series overall) is exactly those things.

I mean, how likely is it for indie-game developers to make it, if having an in-game radio with hours upon hours of unique scripted content (just so you can say it has an in-game radio that is "practically real") becomes the standard that all games are expected to live up to?
I mean, getting immersion and a feeling of reality from a game has been what makes them great over the years, but you play them for the parts that make the game unreal. The real parts are there just to make the unreal things more believable, and they simply aren't worth putting twice as much work into the overall game.
I just don't think the work it takes to include virtual comedy clubs, and making it so you can enter as many buildings as possible is worth it just so that you can increase the feeling of believing "I'm in a real place." when you blow up police cruisers and run over multiple pedestrians just for the hell of it.

the whole point of FF9 was to bring back the classic "fantasy" feel of final fantasy.  I enjoyed it because the characters weren't the typical whiny emofags that Nomura shoves in every game (and Amano is a 10x better artist), it was a shorter experience and wasn't bogged down with pointless sidequests or annoyingly long dungeons, and the characters were much more interesting.  Amarant and Quina were kind of a throwaway characters, but the rest of the cast combined with the special town events were really good.  I hated how you couldn't control trances, but I enjoyed the ability system much more than the broken junction and materia system. 

And the ending... fuck I loved how it came full circle.

so i've been playing ff9 for the first time ever on the psp recently, and i've gotten to disc 3 so far and it's not good at all!  i never thought ff8 felt like a japanese fad, but ff9 is just like the quintessential japanese fantasy rpg, complete with black mages (in existential crises........) and whatever else; its setting seems like much more of a fad than ff7 or 8's.  i'm curious what you think about it has aged so well.

Well I guess I'll be straightforward and qualify what I said by saying that I really do love all three of those Final Fantasy games.

Anyway, 7 and 8 seem really rough around the edges, and their gameplay mechanics and inconsistent visual styles and awkward translations and the general morbid seriousness of everything doesn't seem as awesome today as it did ten years ago.  8 in particular is pretty much a complete train wreck from a design standpoint (all of the effective battle strategies revolve around different forms of spending a lot of time doing nothing and winning easily afterwards) even though its story is pretty interesting most of the time.  Final Fantasy 7 is an important game and everything and I still like to replay now and then but it feels extremely crude and sort of halfway between generations and I can really understand the internet meme Final Fantasy 7 sucks even though I disagree.  But Final Fantasy 9 to me seemed really polished and realized; it was like the intent was not to revolutionize RPGs or break new ground like the previous two had tried to do but rather to color by number and focus on making a generic but pretty good game.  

Need for Speed Pro Street. It wasn't hyped to my knowledge but it takes a huge shit on the Need for Speed name. No cops, no pursuit, no vast beautiful tracks or big cities. It was basically a very crappy version of the Grand Turismo games. It had like 1/4 mile drag race, 1/2 mile drag race, race around a short ass track 3 times, and drift around an obscenely short track with only yourself and win by scoring points, which could be racked up forever by backtracking.

but really you're right; it just feels like it is trying to do what games that came before it did, but better.  i don't think this is a good idea!  polish is all well and good but i don't think it should be a substitute for actual creativity or new ideas, and it doesn't really go a long way to make up for poor writing, either.

Seriously I would get sick of video games pretty fast if every game I played was revolutionary and completely ground-breaking in every way or whatever.  I think that polish can serve as a substitute for creativity because maybe you like shooters so you just want a well-built and straightforward shooter and maybe you like RPGs and you just want to kick back with Final Fantasy 9 or something.  There is definitely a difference between something like Army of Two, which is just a complete and grotesque mess of a half-assed derivative third-person shooter and something like Uncharted which is just as derivative but still fun and interesting.  I think what we're really debating is the difference between not revolutionary and hackneyed and I guess we just disagree which side Final Fantasy 9 falls into.

but at least in 7 i didn't recall any drastically inconsistent visual styles (or do you mean comparing midgar to some random backwoods town?

Well the super-deformed models on the maps looked nothing like the models in the battles and neither really resembled the concept art that closely in terms of proportion and all that.  Like during battles the backgrounds suck and the models are okay but it's vice-versa during exploration.  Also the very concept of pre-rendered cutscenes that are so different from the gameplay graphics is kind of off-putting and it kind of looked stupid in the first place.  And then there are some pre-rendered scenes that are backgrounds only and the character is still a chibi model and then other scenes where everything is pre-rendered.

Like when you look at the graphics now it's just weird and the game seems schizophrenic because it can't seem to decide exactly how it wants to look.  There was still quite a bit of that in FF9, but at least the designs were consistent between environments and battles and movies and all that, and the exploration models were the same as the battle models etc.  The difference is significant because FF9 seemed like it was trying to achieve a singular aesthetic while FF7 didn't.

And really to explode the discussion I think that's one of the reasons classic games look so appealing.  There is the factor that cartoons (sprites) never really look worse because of technology, but additionally you can consider that when everything is sprited, everything always looks consistent all the time.  The consistency in terms of how the game world is presented to you goes a long way towards whether a game is generally considered to look good or not.

Final Fantasy VII is good when you don't view it as something that "changed and shaped" the genre.  You over-qualify and claim how so many others tried to follow it -- how about we point out why those games are sucky, because they're just trying to reuse something that was already used.

FF7 - 9 weren't bad.  8 was very different and awesome in it's own little way -- I don't like it as a Final Fantasy, but just as its own thing.  I liked a lot of games in this thread -- especially Chrono Cross.  It was a little overhyped and could get extremely confusing at times, but overall, I don't think anyone could have executed it better.

And now to contribute:
Wii Play.  Despite everyone saying how awesome this game is, I played it once.  I got bored quickly and realized it was the biggest waste of money ever.  It has a few minigames that are fun one time around.  They'd be fun if some of them were incorporated into something like Mario Party.  But instead, it feels like they put a bunch of "sample applications" or technical demos that you'd find in an SDK to show off it's power, and then released it as a game.

--Terin

I haven't played FF9 since it's release so I don't feel qualified to defend it but...

the tone wasn't as serious, but without that the story sort of lost some of its gravity and impact, as well, i would say.

This was basically the whole point of the game.  It wasn't supposed to be serious and they were going for a completely different appeal than the previous Final Fantasy games which focused on more modern aspects of visual design.  FF9 is best compared to the other games in the series as The Hobbit is compared to Lord of the Rings.  LotR is filled with paragraphs of lore, mythos, and unnecessary details while The Hobbit was just a straight up adventure story. 

The details of the quest in FF9 weren't important it was the journey to the end.  While one could argue that this is merely pandering to low standards, for a game released in 2000 it had a number of things going for it.  They didn't want the player feeling too connected to anyone character because they themselves weren't wholly important, their quest was.  Zidane changed from a Robin Hood type thief to a disillusioned adventurer (there was a reason behind him taking up Vivi as a little brother) and Vivi was supposed to be a tragic hero (hence him being created for destruction, 3 year or so life span etc.).  I thought the relationship between Steiner and Beatrix was played out well (Steiner was supposed to be a lawful knight who was too naive to realize that his own leader was being controlled) and the battle with Bahamut at the beginning of Disc 3 was especially well played out.  Kuja does begin as a typical monologueing villain (you probably aren't that far yet) but once he figures out his true purpose his mentality is completely shattered and he goes insane; a symbolic foil of Vivi's character that's ironic because Kuja led to Vivi's creation.

Had FF9 been made today there probably would have been a much better translation (as the game was rushed... I'm pretty sure this was common knowledge even back then) and there would have been more attention paid to the individual characters but I think they threw in Quina and Amarant to balance out the rather melee centric party design.  Leveling up Quina was a pain but she and Freya had some of the better abilities in the game.