The Count | Top 6 Overrated Videogames

I've had a serious bone to pick with the videogame journalism establishment since 2002. You see, the community of players and journalists is small and sometimes a bit incestuous, so it's only natural that opinions and ideas can become a little contagious. That's why we have top 10 and top 100 lists published and recited and recreated ad infinitum, each one managing a strange sort of revision of the past that has evolved into a twisted group history that everybody recalls in the first person, like it happened to them and they've felt the same from the start. So what happened in 2002? The EGM top games of all time list happened, and it's managed to screw up videogame history ever since. That's why I'm going to do my little part to set things straight. I bring you, the top 6 overrated games of all time.

Super Metroid - Back in 2002, EGM chose this as the greatest game of all time, and all of a sudden Super Metroid is universally adored. Forget that. I was alive back when it came out, I had it, I should know. There is no way in hell this is the best game of all time. Metroid was a great game, it had no glaring flaws, and was generally a strong update of the original. It added some decent but unobtrusive story elements, a few items and abilities, and great boss battles to the mix, but it was not by any stretch a drastic reenvisioning of the platformer. This is just a sequel. It's a good one, but it didn't somehow knock the planet off its axis when it came out.

When I think of the best games of all time, I think of games that actually changed something, like Super Mario 3, the single greatest game for the original NES, and the embodiment of platforming perfection. I tend to think of Tie-Fighter, a masterpiece of accessible space flight-sim mechanics, or Zelda: Ocarina of Time. So while I'm here thinking of Half-Life 2, the most playable, smoothly controlling, and brilliantly paced and evisioned story-based fps ever, or Fallout, the single greatest rpg of all time, one that an entire generation of fans want a sequel for so bad that they are willing to build it themselves, EGM came out with this Super Metroid garbage and everybody started parroting them. Sure it's a good game, but calling it the best ever is an insult to all the games that really did something new and amazing. Now I'm done with this game forever. Let's never mention it again.


Resident Evil - This game came out to good but not perfect reviews. Why? The controls were horrible, the voice acting was a joke, and the gameplay consists of the type of nonsense, do a sliding puzzle to unlock a door crap that I have prayed for years that videogames would just get past. Tacking on a random puzzle doesn't equal good gameplay. It doesn't even make sense. Nobody builds houses like that.

Resident Evil did a lot of things right. It was the first survival horror game, creating an entirely new genre. More importantly, this is the game that gave everybody that classic scare when the dogs jumped through the window. That's awesome, but the key factor here is this is a game that you enjoyed despite the poor gameplay mechanics. It deserves its place in history, but more as a brilliant idea that had its flaws than as one of the greatest videogame masterpieces of all time.


Goldeneye - This game deserves some love because it was the first fps to actually manage to be decent for the console. Congratulations. Can you hear my disinterested golf clap? In August, 1997 when Goldeneye was released, I had already been playing Duke Nukem 3D on my PC for a year and a half. I was playing without the blurry television graphics and the horribly slow and imprecise controller aiming.

Everybody lovingly remembers Goldeneye's multiplayer, and granted, it was good for a console fps, but I was already used to Doom and Duke 3D where I didn't have to split my screen. Half of the maps my friends and I played in Duke 3D were user made, good luck finding that on your N64. Even better, Duke 3D had taunts you could say to each other, holograms you could use to trick people, remote-detonating pipe bombs, the ability to shrink and stomp each other, and freaking jetpacks. In Goldeneye you couldn't even jump. So here's Goldeneye in a nutshell: great multiplayer experience for those who were horribly deprived.


Ico - People love to trot this one out and talk about games as art. It had a nice atmosphere, but all of the mystery came from the fact that nobody really talked and the storyline was basically incomprehensible. Also, everything was brown. Then, 3 hours later, your mostly acceptable gameplay experience ended. If they didn't call this art, would anybody still talk about it?


Final Fantasy 7 - Oh yes, the grand-daddy of all overrated games, Final Fantasy 7. I played it and enjoyed it, like a lot of others, but do you know why Final Fantasy 7 is really overrated? The Playstation made videogames more mainstream than ever before and Final Fantasy 7 just happened to be the first rpg that the kiddy PS-X generation happened to play. Nice, but nobody claiming this is one of the best games ever has any real street cred.

The real gamers had already played Final Fantasy 6, released as Final Fantasy 3 in the US. FF6 elevated videogame story, character development, and especially music to a brilliant new height. The world was vast and changed dramatically over the course of the game. The battle system was highly customizable and, with mastery, allowed you to effectively decimate your opponents. All of the mini-games, underwater sequences, and flight sequences started here. FF6 was the original videogame equivalent of the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. FF7 was just an extension. Besides, Cloud was sort of a baby and the actions and development of the characters just didn't translate as well as they did in FF6, where, despite just being 2D sprites, you knew far more about the lives, feelings, and fears of your party-members than you ever did in FF7.


Diablo 2 - Last but not least, we have Diablo 2. I'm going to preface this one with a little info. I loved the original Diablo. The manual was full of brilliant satanic back-story, the music was completely incredible, and the eternal nighttime of the town, with its sparse but tortured inhabitants, combined with the increasingly horrific scenes you encountered as you returned again and again to the cursed cathedral, venturing deeper underground by yourself until you literally set foot in the pits of hell and encountered the devil himself, lent this game an enduring element of pervasive fear that only the greatest games or movies have managed to make me feel. The sheer creepiness of the catacombs, the first time you hear the soundtrack wash out to a chorus of children screaming, was maddening and amazing. Having met with and killed the devil himself, the game ends without you ever venturing beyond the town.

A little later, Diablo 2 came along to perfect the gameplay formula. But what was the formula? Clicking all over the place. A lot. Diablo 2 traded the single creepy town of the original for a number of vastly different continents that, basically, weren't that scary. Stripped of much of its dramatic tension, the game became an exercise in clicking all over the place, swinging your sword or casting your fireball at the same pallette-swapped enemies over and over, only with different names, strengths and resistances that scaled to match yours. My roommate used to run through the entire game over and over again to level his characters, gaining new equipment and abilities that amounted to absolutely nothing of lasting consequence as the enemies became more difficult to compensate. Welcome to the treadmill, before it offered even the ephemeral rewards that World of Warcraft does.

The single most interesting thing about Diablo 2 was the secondary economy that evolved around it. As the game was botted all to hell, the actual game currency devalued completely and powerful items became the new unit of currency for trade online. On the US East servers, the currency in use was the Stone of Jordan, or SOJ, that you traded other good drops to get. I believe Diablo 2 was one of the first videogames that, if you didn't get your account hacked, allowed you to generate real-world cash, something I have a sort of interesting past with. At any rate, I will talk about monetizing your online gameplay time another day. For now, all you need to know is the common game of Diablo 2 was generally an exercise in clicking from one side of the map to the other and rushing through the story objectives to get to the bosses with high-value drops. Over and over and over. That is, unless you had PindleBot doing the work for you. Then your average gameplay experience consisted of coming home, checking your loot, setting the bot again, and going out to watch a movie.

So that's my list. My beef with the videogame journalism community is finally over. Well, for now I guess. I don't really have many other overrated games. I mean, there's always 7th Saga, but nobody actually rated that grey, cartridge-shaped turd highly except Eddie, who somehow imagines that shoddy, characterless piece of crap has superior sound and graphics to all other SNES rpgs, including Final Fantasy 3 which had an ORCHESTRA. Good luck with that.