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DanJW

How did it get those scores?

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So when I bought MGS2, I got a free copy of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Since I was bored I started playing it.

Now, I've finished it all apart from the bonus mission, but only out of a kind of masochistic curiosity. You see when it came out the game got some great reviews. But to me it seems pretty aweful. The gameplay is limited and repetitive. The levels are tiny and uninspired. The bad guys look great but the player models look horrible and are animated even worse. The game is incredibly frustrating. Even the user reviews from the time say things like "at last no more cheap cash-ins for movie licence games". But to me this feels exactly like a phone-in by the dev.

To be honest I am comparing it mostly to God of War, whereas it probably falls more into the crowd control genre. But I never ever feel in control. In the last few levels whenever I won it felt more like chance than design. Often I would keep getting knocked down and be unable to do anything. I don't have much experience of crowd-control games, so maybe I just suck at them.

Maybe thats why I keep going back to it every day, despite so often switiching it off in disgust. The game pisses me off and I want to prove that I'm 'better than it is'.

Comments? Tell me what I'm doing wrong perhaps. Or feel free to name similar games that are supposed to be great but you can't understand why.

Phew. I needed to get that off my chest.

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I actually have fond memories of this game, but it's possibly only because at the time I was playing I was very ill. I don't know, but I do know that my affection for the Matrix Video game grew from similar circumstances of being ill, and for that reason I'd suggest these sort of games should be saved for rainy days when your not feeling up to snuff!

I agree with what your saying, but... I still have fond memories :D

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Don't know about The Two Towers, but I had the same experience playing Age of Conan. It has an 80 at Metacritic, but it felt like a half-done game to me, not the second coming or the "fine Beef and fancy wine" compared to World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online's "fast food burger" as the lead designer put it.

Hell, even the camera messes up when you talk to people, showing a close-up of their knees or something equally peculiar, and there are no animations for getting off a ladder. The character just appear in mid-air above it.

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I actually have fond memories of this game, but it's possibly only because at the time I was playing I was very ill. I don't know, but I do know that my affection for the Matrix Video game grew from similar circumstances of being ill.

Maybe you are masochist who get off on being ill and the games are inconsequential:mock:.

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Is that masochiasm? Or is it Munchausen's Syndrome or something?

In films it's always Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy. Because no-one cares if a women is making herself ill (especially in Hollywood).

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I think becaue people so desperately want a good game based around Lord of the Rings that they will settle for a very average game instead.

I've seen the same thing happen in the Star Wars series. Reviewers go in hopeful that it won't be utter shite and then if it succeeds in being playable they whack with a 7-8 score and breathe a sigh of relief.

Apart from my encounter with the half life series, FF and MGS bunch (which I've mentioned before) I've had no real surprises over the years.

... Waitaminute, oh, no. I'm not going to mention Halo.

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I'm not going to mention Halo.

Why not?

I'm not ashamed to admit I was gob-smacked by Halo for the first few hours, but the repetitive nature of its level and character design is what took the shine off.

I still have fond memories of Halo 3, truth be told, and that was pure pap from both creative and story-telling view points. I think it's the vats of polish Bungie was able to cover the series in that makes me forgive it its two-dimensional scripting and wretchedly clichéd settings.

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I think it is because it is just too obvious.

I've played all three of the installments and enjoyed them quite a lot, I just don't understand the perfect ten scores. By that I mean that they are just really good at doing everything competently so that most people make do but to be honest I doubt I'll ever play it again.

COD4 is also horribly, horribly flawed and does not deserve some of the accolades it gets. Frankly, the hate that COD3 gets while everyone kisses COD4's arse is ridiculous.

My last post is almost perfect in timing for the Eurogamer review of The Force: Unleashed, glassic example of a very poor game enshrined in star wars to save its average-as-hell gameplay.

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I feel bad for Force Unleashed, because at least they were trying to do something newish with the combination of physics and animation technologies. That's more than most Lucasfilm games achieve. Hopefully that stuff won't go to waste and someone will put it to good use in some other game.

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I'm still kind of struggling with understanding where Force Unleashed went wrong. This was the first Star Wars game I had been getting excited about in ages. It seemed to be pretty sweet, with the novel technology and systems it used, a smart story, engaging characters... what happened?

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Force Unleashed just isn't very exciting to play; horribly predictable game design, repetitive baddies and spammy, cheap bosses. ;(

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Expect confirmation of the worst kept secret since Lego Batman* after the EU release.

* Not only was this leaking all over the place late last year, I met someone at Develop who had a job interview there. Apparently, during it a voice boomed over the tannoy "Would the Battlefront 3 team please report to..." :)

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Sorry, I just ranted about Force unleashed on a separate thread.

Are you joking Dan? Most of the stuff done in this game have been done else where and better. Psi-Ops had a better sense of force grip and possesion. The Force Unleashed just went with the 'Lets make sure that we can make milestone and bollocks to everything else'.

It makes me so angry to see games like Dark Sector and (to a lesser extent) Alone in the Dark get ignored, but simply put a Star Wars tag on it or a Lord of the Rings one and all of a sudden it is worth paying attention to.

Sorry that I'm so bitter about this game but I really can't help it.

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The thing that gets me, like GTA4, isn't the whole physics engine just middleware? I mean - I know they have to implement it, but it's not like they laboured creating it is it?

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but it's not like they laboured creating it is it?

That will earn you a sharp intake of breath from just about any developer nowadays...

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The thing that gets me, like GTA4, isn't the whole physics engine just middleware? I mean - I know they have to implement it, but it's not like they laboured creating it is it?

Then again, if it's so easy why isn't anyone else doing it?

Since the breakthrough in havok physics implementation in Half Life 2 we haven't actually seen much progress on that side of things. I'm always much more impressed by better physics than I am by more polygons, but I'm usually left wanting.

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