Videogames you love, videogames you hate thread

[Rökkan]

I remembered a game to post here, since the other thread reminded me of it when talking about the moral-based choices of Bioshock 2 and how it affects gameplay.


Epic Mickey


I was so excited for it and was so eagerly looking forward to play it and to beat it that I was ALMOST buying the collector's edition when I was in Florida, and I was SO GLAD I didn't.

I started to play it and it seemed all pretty exciting for the first twenty minutes.

After that, I just got more and more bored of the poor excuse of camera and SO platform-friendly gameplay (yeah let's make most platforms not smooth and straight and make it so that mickey has a really hard time standing on anything not smooth and straight). It really played like an early 2000s cartoon movie tie-in 3D platformer game. But it was okay, because I was excited to see how the story would develop and how I could interact with the world and make my choices change how my character, the world and the story grows!

And then I progressed from binary choice to binary choice. They'd mostly consist of pretty simplistic choices, "would you want to do this the hard way and BE GOOD or the easy way and BE BAD". Occasionally, the choice of me going the easy way would bite me later (lightly, but it would), so, because of that, I convinced myself to try to be as kind as I can be, fearing that my bad behaviors would cause big repercussions and a bad ending.

But eventually, nothing really mattered. Most of the game, including the ending, does not change if you work your ass out to make the most kind choices and to do a lot of sidequests and collecting stuff. Hell, re-painting or erasing the world wouldn't practically do anything - all of your painting and erasing would just disappear and reset when you get out of the place. So this is why the game left me really frustrated. I worked, and I worked pretty hard to be good, and legitimately got frustrated when I couldn't find that last piece to complete a mission the "kind" way, or accidentally doing something that automatically destroys my chances of finishing a quest, only to, when finishing the game, noticing that NOTHING of that mattered at all. I could've been the biggest jerk to everyone, not bother to do any of the sidequests, and the general progression of the game, and the ending would be the same. Any other item that you get that isn't a Power Spark is completely useless, and knowing that I could've completed the game without getting myself frustrated and forcing myself to do boring shit and got the SAME reward out of it, I pretty much felt like the game completely screwed me over. And this frustrated me a lot, because the game had just so much potential, but everything falls short - gameplay, story, graphics (the character models and their animations are just SUPERB, but the environments look like, as I said, early 2000 game). I loved the concept of it to the very core, but the game ended up being a complete chore.