T w e n t y S i d e d
So, last week I talked about how RE9 felt like 2 games superglued together. Since then I’ve played through the game 3 more times in the hunt for the platinum trophy and I am fully committing to what I wrote before. Leon’s sections of the game are an action-packed blast akin to RE2make and REm4ke. It still keeps the weird particularities of Resident Evil games’ identity but isn’t exactly hard. Grace’s sections are scary and have you feeling underprepared and nervous at all times. It’s a very entertaining, though messy experience.
I’m basically bedridden with the man flu right now and don’t have much else I want to discuss, so I will instead ask you all a question. What’s you’re favorite 7 out of 10 game? Like, you know it’s objectively not great but you still love it anyway for whatever reason.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Got to be Tales of Berseria. The game is easy and you have to fight the camera, the story peters out at the 33% mark, all the sidequests hit at the very end, and there’s wonky bits that defy explanation. (The subtitles for the sidequests are clearly speech-to-text. But… it’s English speech-to-text. Which means they already had an English script for the actors to read. So why didn’t they make the subtitles from the script?) (There’s an optional conversation that’s voice-acted, except for two sentences, which are silent, and separated from each other by a good bit of voice-acting. How does this happen? Is it a rewrite? It’s an optional conversation in the middle of nowhere, why did it get a rewrite to add two silent sentences?)
But I really like Arthur as a villain, and the hero has a compelling arc through her murder-rage adventure, and it’s a game where you either set fire to or utterly destroy half the villages you set foot in and still come off as likable.
(Final Fantasy 8 is more… Roulette/10.)
Can’t say that it’s my *favorite* “7/10 game” but Good Robot might fall into that category for me. I get that in a sense the game was flawed because the intended playstyle was to go in guns-a-blazing for some frenetic action, while the achievements and structure instead encouraged cautious sniping… but I personally enjoy the feeling of control and accomplishment provided by successfully clearing a map through cautious sniping, so it hit exactly the right spot for me.
From recent memory I’d award Like A Dragon: The Man who wasn’t there or Outcast: A New Beginning that 7/10 love it trophy. LADTMWWT has the best ending of any Yakuza game in my opinion, but the gameplay itself is seen a dozen times now. The environments (Sotenbory) is seen half a dozen times now and there is almost nothing new to it. But I liked the main story and a lot of the side stories with tons of call backs.
Outcast is visually and acoustically marvelous. Movement can be leveled up to great, but the main story fumbles all the time and crash&burns at the end. While the side content and side characters are classic Outcast greatness.
The shooting gameplay can get a bit samey with low enemy variety, especially as there are only 3 different bosses and 2 of them get repeated multiple times.
And of all-time: It’s Scrap Mechanic. The possibilities to create insane machines is only limited by the framerate. Unfortunately that limit can be reached in an instant when you take your creation of the lift and physics apply and also the 3 frames per minute.
Damn it it is Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man who erased his Name. That’s what you get when you type stupidly long game names without looking them up. :-(
I adore the Yakuza series but they are almost all 7-8 out of 10s. There’s just too much going on in those games. And the never-ending exposition can be a bit grating. I have the 100% in all the numbered titles and that took TIME so I know and love them well regardless.
That’s a great question! And in many ways, 7/10 games can be a comforting place. A 10/10 game demands your attention and focus and emotion. But a 7/10 or good 6/10 game doesn’t necessarily require that of you. This is starting to sound like I’m spouting relationship truisms. Anyway what does come to mind… For me it’s 6/10 games that come to mind, but I think the ethos is the same. Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb. Starship Troopers (2005). For 7/10 perhaps Blue Fire, I need to get back to that. I know, maybe the mid 2000s Tomb Raider reboot games, I did enjoy those, but do they stray into the 8/10 category I wonder. It’s not like I cared about the story, so maybe not.
I don’t have any. I always play games I 100% enjoy. Now, there are some games I love, which other people may rate as a 5, 6, 7, or whatever out of 10, but I’ve never given much attention to what other people think of my entertainment.
If I ever stumble upon a game which I would rate as mediocre, there are sometimes other aspects of it that make me enjoy the overall experience.
E.g. for games like LoK: Soul Reaver 2, I know the combat system isn’t anything to writre home about, but the world building, story, and nostalgia always pull me back in. So, to me, that’s a 10/10 game.
I’ve never really been a fan of the 1-10 rating system, because different numbers mean different things to different people. That’s why much I prefer Steam’s rating – did you enjoy it overall or not?