Jeff’s most overrated games of 2008

Unfortunately, my list for Best game of the year is going to be a little delayed as I try and catch up on the vast quantity of games I can now get back to after completing (for now) Fallout 3 (I don’t want to give any potential contenders short-shrift).  So, to compensate, I’ll just list what I believe are the most overrated games of the year, as I think I can probably do that already.

1) Grand Theft Auto IV (360/PS3/PC) - Sitting at roughly 97% at Gamerankings (for both the 360 and PS3 versions), GTA4 is not only the best rated game of the year, it’s one of the best rated games of all time.  It somehow received perfect scores from both IGN and Gamespot… exceedingly rare for both publications (IGN typically rates games higher, but very very rarely gives perfect scores).  Despite my initial skepticism and general apathy towards GTA games, after seeing the ridiculously positive reviews pour in, I wanted to love the game.  And certainly, the game has some admirable qualities.  The characters and general storyline feel somewhat realistic and mature (and not in a “lets show a bunch of nude women” kind of way); Liberty City is massive, detailed, and (sort of) living; and the game mechanics work better than they have in past GTA games.

The problem with the game, though, is that those mechanics just aren’t all that interesting anyway.  There’s only so many “Drive from point A to B, engage in shoot out, chase a guy” type missions before it gets boring… and we’ve already done a bunch of those in previous GTA games too.  GTA4 tries to improve on this by making the characters you engage with more interesting and empathetic.  Unfortunately, this actually partially ruins the game too, as you get random calls from “friends” who want you to drive from one end of Liberty City to another just to go play a stupid, time-consuming mini-game of darts or pool or whatever.  In any case, I don’t hate the game… but I didn’t finish it either.  Maybe I’ll try to get back to it at some point, but there’s just no way this game is one of the best games ever made.  If this is the “Godfather” of games as Game Informer gushed, then I guess I need to wait for Citizen Kane before I’m really impressed.  I’d probably give it a B or B+.

2) LittleBigPlanet (PS3) - At 94.7% on Gamerankings, LittleBigPlanet is also one of the best reviewed games of the year (actually, it’s only behind both console versions of GTA4).  When I first saw LittleBigPlanet, I gushed.  The game is still gorgeous, and its toolset is impressive.  But for some reason, I’m underwhelmed.  It’s extremely creative and is whimsical fun, but is just a bit overly simplistic and the art-style feels a bit restrictive.  It’s a unique art style in that it has a sort of thrown-together feel to it, but it also makes everything look flat and uninteresting at the same time.

Now, granted, I haven’t run through the entire developer content yet and have been distracted from playing it as of late, but Sony hasn’t really made me feel too bad about it with their apparently draconian and unnannounced level “moderation” and their apparent (albeit obvious) desire to turn the game into a microtransaction hell.  Unfortunately, while the moderation is supposedly getting a little better, the microtractions will probably only get even worse.  I have yet to play any user level that would be worth buying and I find it unlikely that would change all that much once users are allowed to charge for their crap content.  Additionally, I found the organization of levels to be completely idiotic, as they all just appear on a big planet and you have to manually move around the globe to check out what one-word adjectives people are using to describe the levels.  You can filter on the adjectives, although it’s not particularly useful.  Has anyone heard of an easily searchable and sortable list where I could check which levels have been the most highly rated overall?  That would be too simple, I guess.

3) Guitar Hero World Tour (all) - Boy was 1up wrong about this one…  The game is much much worse than Rock Band 1.  It has a decent music set, but the interface is terrible.  To begin with, even just looking at the list of songs in Quick Play mode sucks compared to Rock Band, and particularly Rock Band 2.  The single-player mode doesn’t even compare to the World Tour mode of Rock Band 1 (ironically), and is actually even worse than Guitar Hero 3 (tragically) as it doesn’t have the same feeling of progression.  During play, solos are not pointed out to you as they are in Rock Band, the freestyle drumming sections are very limited and when they exist, surprisingly hard to see AND hear, and you strangely share a single hard-to-see star-power meter in multiplayer.  Oh, and while you might think it’s nice to be able to activate star power whenever you want on drums, it’s actually a complete nuisance to try and hit both cymbals at the same time without screwing up and losing your multiplier, and it doesn’t work half the time anyway and you end up having to hit the cymbals several times before it registers. There is no saving people in multiplayer if a single band member “dies” like in Rock Band.  Even if the user songs weren’t being heavily moderated they’d still be worthless to me: the top-rated songs all sounded like midi-garbage to me.  I realize Neversoft doesn’t want to just copy all of Rock Band’s ideas, but they should at least make sure their ideas don’t make their game dramatically worse than Rock Band.  Even the hardware isn’t that impressive.  Despite wanting a replacement for my Rock Band 1 drum set, I’ll probably be selling all the components to this game… I’m surprised I haven’t already.

Runners up (which, I suppose is better since it makes them less overrated, but worth mentioning anyway):

• Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) - I’m sure I’d get all kinds of hatemail for this if we were a bigger site, but it is what it is… Perhaps I just haven’t had enough opportunities to play this with friends, though Nintendo could have probably partially remedied that by getting rid of friends codes and making it easier for people to play and talk to friends.  Other than that, this is basically a fan letter to Nintendo fans that plays basically the same as the last game in the series.
• The World Ends with You (DS) - This had fairly strong reviews and was apparently a surprise hit, as it was hard to find a copy until Square Enix boosted production of it.  I was able to rent it fairly recently and, while it is sort of fun, it is also somewhat mind-numbingly complex.  Combat takes place simultaneously on BOTH screens in completely separate arenas, one that you control with a stylus and the other with the D-pad.  Your character is kind of an asshole and the plot is more baffling than any Final Fantasy game that I can remember.  There’s a food system, clothing system, and pin system that amount to various buffs and ability systems.  I didn’t really fully understand it all yet, and to be honest, I wasn’t even really supposed to yet… but I was already several hours into the game.  Exactly how long is it going to take before I’m able to even understand the basics of the gameplay?  Would I ever actually be able to keep my eye on two battles at once, one where I need to constantly move around with a stylus while also attacking with a stylus, and the other tapping various patterns on the D-pad to get a desired result in a “slot machine” at the top of the screen?  It seems to demand an awful lot for a portable game, but perhaps someone would have even less patience to figure things out on a console.
• Blast Works (Wii) - I managed to pick this up for $10, which is perhaps worth it at that price… though I’m not sure much more.  Destructoid seemed to love the game, but it gets old pretty fast.  I didn’t stay with it long enough to get the unlockable games that they seemed to love so much, but the game itself just didn’t entice me enough to stick around for them.