unpopular (or outright bad) games that you enjoy

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. I downloaded and played it a couple of years ago off of the XBLA and enjoyed it, as clunky as it was. The camera control is bad. The story and voice acting are cheesy beyond belief. The audio mixing and lip sync in both Sonic Adventure games are so impossibly bad and are maybe the most offensive things about those games; I have no idea how they achieved that level of fuckery.

The Chao Garden's still pretty good, though.

The Sonic Adventure games are objectively bad, but they carry a certain charm for me (mainly because I played them so much as a kid).

Dead or alive Xtreme 3. I have both the Vita and the PS4 versions and I have played a lot. I had to force myself away from it to play other games since it is an infinite grind. I know people think it is bad but I think it plays fine and you are constantly getting XP and money to buy stuff. If people can grind in MMOs and such just hacking away what is wrong with playing Beach Volleyball? A match is more fun than fighting a random mob in a typical MMO.

Let's see. Just on the NES, I'd say Battletoads, TMNT (you know which one), Simon's Quest, Zelda II and Kid Icarus. All fantastic, fun and sadly misunderstood games. (Except maybe TMNT, but even there I feel I could make a case.)

I don't know how I would feel about it if I played it now, but back when it came out I remember enjoying Infernal on PC, even though back then I already knew the game wasn't good.

Same with Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in USA). It's the only Quantic Dream game I enjoy, even tough it gets bat shit insane and most of it don't make sense, specially on the second half of it. But I remember playing the demo multiple times to see every possible option on the opening scene at the diner. I still hate the whole sequence where you play as a kid though.

Also Marc Ecko's Getting Up, but I don't think that one counts since a bunch of people liked it as well. I'm still waiting for that sequel

And, as @theht already mentioned, Assassin's Creed 1. Still my favorite AC game and the only one I truly enjoyed (I did like AC2 as well). It was so full of potential, it felt so fresh. The only thing that annoyed me was the lack of cinematics (you just stood there while characters talked) but other than that I loved it. That ending after he comes out of the Animus, was a "oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiit" moment to me, too bad they ruined the whole story on the sequels.

@burncoat I was a big fan of Telltale's Sam & Max as well, I share your opinion.

@sfw44: Yeah...

I liked post-Walking Dead telltales games, but I also have a place in my hearth for the previous, "purer" graphic adventure games. Sam & Max games were well written games, and Back to the Future was the best sequel we are likely going to get.

Cheers, man. It's nice to hear I'm not entirely alone on that one.

I got one! I enjoyed Batman Begins on the PS2 back in the day. It was, if I remember correctly, an easy game with forgiving stealth mechanics, so I managed to beat it without too much trouble. Also, the whole licensed video game thing used to work well on me.

Those servers being dead with no LAN support is one of the bigger tragedies in my gaming history. Bums me out every time I think about it.

I liked Omerta a whole hell of a lot, despite that game's problems.

I was going to say SF EX: Plus Alpha, because it has such floaty jumps and looks dated, but to my surprise it got great reviews. I loved the shit out of Skullomania, and my hands were a wreck after I completed 70% of the roster's training challenges. Good times.

I will say Mirror's Edge instead. That game just reviewed okay, and didn't sell gangbusters, but the freedom of movement, the bleached, perfect city, the amazing Solar Fields soundtrack, and the addictive Time Trials DLC just touched my soul and pleasured every sense. One of my favourite games ever, and a joy to speedrun. You gotta have Faith, Faith, Faith...

If VR ever reaches holodeck levels of immersion, an expanded edition of the original Mirror's Edge would be even more of an enlightening experience.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is way better than it has any right to be, and I actually ended up finishing it as a result. Game's okay!

Gun was Red Dead Redemption but 5 years earlier. I had a lot of fun with it, mostly just killing civilians.

I thought of some more. Assassins Creed 3 and Rage.

@militantfreudian said:

I re-bought and played through Batman Begins on Xbox last year and the game is still very good. It's very linear and structured but I like it a lot.

The Division

so much of that game mechanically is poorly balanced, poorly thought out, repetitive and slapped together. And that's not even touching the braindead story. But I like the shooting, the fact it's Co-Op and exploring New York.

I really enjoyed the 2008 Alone in the Dark game. There was definitely a lot wrong with it, and it pretty much deserved the panning it got, but I really enjoyed the combat and exploration once I got used to its quirks. One of the 360 games where I got all the achievements.

You're kind of justifying me bringing it up in this thread! You can't explain away my enjoyment of it!

I've put 100+ hours into each Bethesda game since Oblivion and Fallout 4 is probably my favorite.

Does Viking: Battle for Asgard count?

Tribes Ascend is still the best multiplayer FPS I've ever played, but the community from the previous games hates it.

But then again, it's full of hackers, hitscan weapons are bullshit and Hi-rez kinda fucked up on their business model (and basically abandoned it when Smite became their money-maker... maybe abandoned is a bit harsh, there was even an update fixing some of the issues the community had with that game, but it was kinda of too late for that)

Arkham Origins is secretly the better sequel to Asylum

Assassins Creed 3 esp the George Washington DLC was really enjoyable to me.

I remember liking Brute Force somewhat on the Xbox(but that was a long time ago)

X Rebirth post-version 3.5, I say that as a (300+ hour) fan of X3 as well. It's not quite the X4 I wanted but I love it all the same. The DLC packs have been really good as well, frankly I'm impressed they've put so much work into it despite the extremely negative launch. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the upcoming X4.

Arma

First thing to come to mind are the [PROTOTYPE] games. The open world mechanics and activities were far from polished. There's just enough jank that it's hard to recommend these games outright. Not to mention the story is a bunch of dumb bullshit that takes itself too seriously and the characters suck ass but damn it if I didn't get some guilty pleasure out of the freedom of movement and the badass bio-powers. There's just so much wasted potential within the design of those games that I think could be adapted for cooler franchises. It would have been a real shame if this brand of open world locomotion faded into obscurity but luckily Saints Row IV allowed it to exist in a better video game.

One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 which is one of the best Dynasty Warriors game to come out in the past few years. It managed to encapsulate what was good about smashing through a bunch of enemies by making it crazy. Plus every character was super fast plus they could cancel their attacks by dashing. Thanks to this any Warriors game that is a tad slow is pretty boring now unless it mixes things up in some other way.

Drakengard 1 is a poorly made, designed, and written game that I love to death.

Oni it is still my favorite Bungie game.

Also Valkyria Chronicles 2 is a very good game too bad it and 3 are only on the PSP.

Dark Souls 2 is much maligned despite being an excellent game.

Majesty 2 while not as good as the 1st is still a fun game.

I can't think of any downright bad games that I like.

But, I will maintain that Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age: Origins are by far the best games in their respective series.

Also State of Decay is a really, really cool game.

Two Worlds is a bad, broken, and insane game with awful voice acting but I love it.

@sinusoidal: The sexy parodius soundtrack is amazing. "Lovely Otohmia" is a track I'll often put on during Souls games when I just wanna SPRINT some place. It worked great for just falling through Blighttown in under two minutes.

Anyway, it's hard to judge this stuff because everything is popular somewhere, in some crowd. Street Fighter V almost took last year's Hottest Mess style award, but I love that game more than any Street Fighter game in like nineteen years. It's the first one I've really gotten a little deeper into, including the online scene. It's also got a roster I love, some I expected to like(Mika) and some I had no idea about(Birdie). I'm way into the aesthetic. I like most of the music. I think that game's a ton of fun to play as long as I'm matched with someone approximately my level.

I was also really into One Piece Pirate Warriors 3. It was my first big One Piece game and my first Warriors game, and I liked it quite a bit just as a simplified brawler with fanservicey moves. I enjoyed both playing as the characters I like(Luffy feels incredible to play and I enjoyed being Kuma, too. I played as him during that final alternate mode stage and accidentally recreated the Sabaody arc) and seeing them trying to adapt the whole story. Some parts work better than others, though. Maybe make more than a single stage for a 10+ volume arc next time guys?

Speaking of fanservice and Warriors games, I bought Senran Kagura Estivel Versus on sale last year, and I adored that game for a few weeks. I was in a sour mood over all the anger and depression about the American election, and it turned out that an even simpler brawler with some titillating pinup finishers was just what I needed. That game is not good, but it made me feel much better about everything and I had a wonderful time with it. The individual girl stories can get a bit boring though, and I wish the forest stage didn't exist. It's annoying.

My people!

I just played through Murdered:Soul Suspect this weekend and had pretty darn good time with it. It's by no means great, but the writing (especially on the too-few side cases) is decent, and the voice acting genuinely good. Definitely worth your 7 or 8 hours if you are an adventure game fan.

I really liked XIII. But I was a kid then, so what do I know?

I used to play Thrasher: Skate and Destroy a lot for the soundtrack (Rapper's Delight, White Lines, etc,) but man was it clunky.

Twisted Metal always got all the attention, but Vigilante 8 was always my favorite car combat series on the PS1. Also, I don't think the first three Sly Cooper games ever get the recognition they deserved (though I don't think anyone would ever accuse them of being bad).

I really love both Two Worlds games. The second one going largely unnoticed by the games media actually upset me a bit at the time, because it's dramatically improved on the first, but just got dismissed due to the name.

Assassin's Creed III is a great game. That is all.

Love ACIII. The hate for it is hilarious. Snowy Boston, George Washington, the most interesting character in the series (Haytham), also my second-favourite mission in the franchise (the theater), and I loved building up the homestead. It's better than AC1, Unity, and Revelations. IV is good but I prefer III.

BioShock 2. It's more BioShock, but prettier, bigger, more inventive.

No, it didn't tear a corridor like BioShock, but it widened it, painted it, and hung beautiful pictures on the wall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62rylPzFmOM

It's a great game. That happens to every piece of media that deals in the mythical and tries at all to explain. There are always cracks, there have to be cracks; we're literally writing about something no-one understands. The only successful time travel movies have said, "No, forget it, it just works, we're moving on here."

I just thought of another one. People in this thread have already brought up Assassin's Creed III and I agree with pretty much everything that was said about it.

So now I'm going to bring up Assassin's Creed Unity. I recently picked it up for the first time in the Assassin's Creed Humble Bundle from a couple months ago. I haven't played a huge amount of it yet, maybe 15 hours. But from what I've played it might be my third favorite in the series, after II and III. I find the level of detail and scope of the environments completely staggering, and the way they overhauled the parkour systems makes running and jumping around in the city a hugely pleasurable experience for me. And I really love that they went back to the more open ended nature of the missions from the first AC game. They made the gameplay feel a lot less autopiloted than the previous games, which is great. I bought AC Syndicate not long after I bought Unity and was pretty disappointed with how toned down it was and how it felt like it was returning to that autopilot style of design.

I guess when it comes to games I prefer flawed ambition over conservative polish.

Oh, also, that first part of Unity where you play as a Templar knight during the middle ages is cool as hell. That is all.

This is a judge-free zone right...FF Dirge of Cerberus. I just liked the idea of an action spinoff of a Final Fantasy game starring the coolest FF7 character and having it set after the game and movie. I think it still is the latest FF7 game in terms of storyline.

Unity had lots of cool stuff. I loved how much it was referencing the more ancient origins of the assassins. It took a while for me to get on board with it -- I liked Arno from the get-go; he's got that Gerard DePardieu-esque cockiness that is likeable -- but when you find the old HQ and get all the gear, I was in. I need to finish it.

AC II, Brotherhood, AC III, AC IV, Unity. That's my top 5. Syndicate was very cool, loved London, loved the train, loved the traversal improvements, but it has zero character.

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I will vote for the King Kong game on Mr. Alex Navarro's behalf. I seem to remember him giving it 8.2/10!

Not trying to disparage you guys' love of this game since I honestly haven't played enough of it. However I maintain that Pirate Warriors 2 is a better game by virtue of a) being the game to pioneer a lot of the improvements in the Musuo formula that carried into PW3 and b) not butchering the source material by shoehorning the awesome One Piece story into the Musuo style of level design in a super contrived way. That being said I think both PW 2 and 3 show that there's still some dumb fun to be had with these kinds of games if you apply it to the right franchise with the right kind of styyyyyyle.

Every single story complaint about Bioshock Infinite is totally justified, but I still love that game and play it on a yearly basis.

@mezmero: PW2 is the one where they had a made-up story, right? Because what I'd want from a theoretical PW4 is not to return to what's essentially fanfiction. PW3 ends like that since it was made during the beginning of the Dressrosa arc, and it feels super hokey. I just want them to make all the character models they didn't the first time around. It's a bummer when OP has such diverse character designs and then Captain Kuro is talking to some random chump instead of Jango during his cutscenes. I guess it would be considered incredible lazy if they just released PW3 again with new stages and lots of new characters, but that's kinda what I want. You can't cover 20 years of volumes in just one game, starting from scratch. The developers are incentivized to use the characters that reappear later, naturally. But One Piece is so arc-focused that every story needs its own cast of characters, which leaves stuff like Kuro's chapter feeling underwhelming and plain. They also had a bad habit of sticking to one stage per arc, which works fine for the shorter East Blue arcs, but is murder on enormous arcs like Skypiea and Alabasta. Meanwhile, Marineford is their best work adaptation-wise because they split it into two stages and it involves a ton of returning characters, most of whom they've got models of. Even relative nobodies like Marco and Jozu. I dunno if they're planning something, but do they even have an alternative to fleshing out what they've got besides writing their own story? One Piece has got like, one and a half more arc since Dressrosa finished. And one of them didn't even have any major fighting.

I'd also love the ability to change characters mid-mission. You don't wanna fight the boss as someone other than luffy, but you also don't wanna fight the second in commands as Luffy. A non-gameplay suggestion is to do some more work with the flashbacks. They're a major part of why the story is great, so just skipping most of them feels weird.

Anyway, I'll happily give credit to PW2(and 1, for that matter) for making the gameplay fun. PW3 is just the one I played.

Way of the samurai games

@redhotchilimist: I feel like we've talked about this before... I think the point I was getting at is that I can buy into the nonsensical Musuo mission structure BECAUSE it was a made up story centered around the sort of "military maneuvers". That plot is dumb but better than you might think for what I agree is simply fan fiction. It's better than the story in World RED that's for sure. Basing a game on the actual arcs from the series is seriously distracting to me personally, especially trying to retell it in such a hokey way with a soundtrack that is nowhere near as good as the anime. I will probably go back to it at some point but that story mode was a real slog to play. I never tried the adventure mode or whatever the other thing was called so you'd have to let me know if that is any better.

We'd probably need to talk about it in a more negative thread but PW1 was rooooooough and you might just have to take my word for it. PW2 brought in stuff like: being able to buy character levels with in game currency instead of needing to grind for individual characters, being able to "save" teammates and critical mission NPCs by getting near them to recover their HP, and the team-ups that essentially let you play two characters during a style action. These all seem like no-brainer, quality of life design improvements but this is stuff that Musuo games didn't even bother addressing for the better part of a decade prior to these One Piece games. Good iteration is hard to come by in a lot of games and I think PW2 hit it a way that didn't think that developer was capable of so I try to compliment it as much as I can.

I played a couple of those Army Men games on the N64 as a kid and I really liked them despite knowing they were bad even at the time. I remember bugging my friend because I always wanted to play Sarge's Heroes at his house which he had no love for whatsoever.

Advent Rising.

Alex disapproved of this opinion of mine on Twitter once (I think he did the GameSpot review way back when).

No Man's Sky was so good.

Also sort of liked that Die Hard game on Gamecube.

People sure did hate Final Fantasy 15, and I sure did love it. But I don't think I'd classify anything I enjoyed as a bad game. If I enjoyed it, it did its job, even if the graphics or voice acting stunk.

Is it too early to say Mass Effect Andromeda? lol