Oni.

In my most unpopular opinion, the only good thing Bungie ever made. Way more satisfying than console-friendly auto-aim shooting aliens without gore.

Oni has some great sci-fi details, even when missing a deep overarching story. And breaking people’s necks with a cool 360 swing with proper sound effects of the neck bones being chipped is sooo satisfying. And that was an unfinished project by the way: you can notice there was no environment work done.

Coming in at a 45 rating on Metacritic: Hyperdimension Neptunia.

Is it a bad game? Yes. It’s really bad. It’s an ugly game for PS3 standards, and the battle mechanics are borderline insane. It’s a JRPG where you can’t manually heal, but instead set a % chance to heal automatically in battles… which means sometimes you game over because RNG wasn’t going to let you heal. But regardless it’s one of my favorites. I’m a sucker for the core concept of the schoolyard console wars, with little gaming references everywhere and silly humor. I also love the theme songs for each console nation. It really drives home how different the console cultures are supposed to be as you are traveling around solving their problems.

And I mean, come on… When you first start the game and you are in the tutorial dungeon it plays this song during exploration and this song during battles. Games today would never do something that silly.

The later games polished the gameplay, expanded the character rosters, gave more depth to the story, and dealt with some very dark topics (Gehaburn trauma)… but to me none of them captured the lightning that the first one had.

Sleeping Dogs

Zelda Twilight Princess may not have been exactly hated, but nobody really seems to love it. They all go gaga over Ocarina of Time instead, which just feels like a worse Twilight Princess in just about every way. Nostalgia I guess!

Also, you know, Twilight Princess has you be a wolf (in sections for part of the game, and then later you get unrestricted wolf mode (but it keeps kicking you out of it grrr!)). Huge therian feels. That’s a big part of why I love it.

– Frost

While not hated, most fans of the series prefer Darksiders to Darksiders 2. I personally prefer 2, I love the loot system.

Salt & Sanctuary

I mostly just hear negativity towards NFS Heat and Unbound, but I found both of them to be incredibly fun and engaging. Grab a friend and make stupid builds like offroad supercars or spongebob VWs. Or try to make actually good builds, either way they’re really fun games. On the other hand, I never enjoyed Forza.

I liked Duke Nukem Forever, I kept waiting for it to get awful and it never did! Surprisingly fun game.

Digimon World for the PS1.

I know it was a greatest hits game, and this is probably cheating because the game is “for the fans.” But I feel a lot of people bought it and evolved a sludge monster who pooped everywhere. And then the restarted and got something they wanted, only for it to die and they have to start all over again.

But I loved the show and I loved trying to get the monster I wanted. Now, years later, the evolution requirements are demystified and I play through it every year or so.

Splitgate AR. The game experience is unmatched compared to any FPS I’ve ever played. Sure, the gunplay feels close to Halo, but you need to be very aware of portals you can use, and possible enemy flanks. Races can teach even beginners how to use portal play to move all around the map really fast

I sort of get why most people couldn’t get used to it. When players are zooping around everywhere and you play like a sitting duck especially when you first step into the game, it probably feels like a tryhard game, and it’s really difficult to step into that kind of game given the current era of fps games with skill based matchmaking all around. But once you learn playing around portals, there’s no other fps that become as intense as it.

I liked and finished Unlimited SaGa twice. The soundtrack is phenominal and the graphics are all hand-painted watercolors. The combat system is a bit opaque but with tinkering, can be figured out.

And yet, it’s regarded as one of the worst titles on the PkayStation 2.

I still use the track “DG mixture” when I need a consistent sound to set my soundboard for my shows.

Burnout Paradise is the first that comes to mind. In my head it’s the best racing game I’ve ever played. Whenever I see discussions of the Burnout series on the internet, everyone raves about the series but noone mentions Burnout Paradise.

I imagine it’s because they just liked the older ones more, but I never played them so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unreal 2, which is a very boring singleplayer game. But then, a year after its launch, they released a multiplayer addon for it, and it’s still the best multiplayer FPS I’ve ever played. Most people remember it as “that disappointing, singleplayer-only sequel to Unreal.”

Also, VR Troopers, a fighting game for the Sega Genesis. OK, in hindsight, this game is actually terrible. But we played it all the time in elementary school. I mean, it had the VR Troopers in it! From TV!

I don’t want to go back into the depths of time to try to remember an obscure game I played decades ago. So I’ll do a recent one that people didn’t necessarily hate, but didn’t like as much as its predecessor and were pretty open about it.

Doom: The Dark Ages

I ended up liking it more than Eternal. It wasn’t as fast paced, even though it was still fast, but you could FEEL the combat more in Dark Ages. The devs made the movement and hits FEEL more substantial. I was skeptical about the shield, but ended up loving it. Chaining together the shield attack, melee attack, and gunplay felt great. I liked the levels more than Eternal too. And they added a lot of lore to deepen the Doom universe. Main story was whatever, but that’s typical for the Doom franchise.

Donkey Kong 64 is a game I see constantly criticised but it was always one of my top N64 games.