The Top 7... Worst Parts of Best Games : The most criminal imperfections of all time
Nothing's perfect. Stare closely enough at anything - even a masterpiece - and you're bound to find flaws sooner or later. They might be small. They might be insignificant. They might not detract from the overall quality of the piece at all...
Except when they really, really do. With these seven games, in fact, you don't need to stare. Their flaws are so huge, so obvious, so frustrating and so effing obnoxious that you can't help but notice them, despise them and wonder how the damn things got included in the first place.
Do we usually end up loving these games anyway? Yes. Would we love them a lot more if they lanced these particular features like the foul, cancerous boils they truly are? Oh hell yes.
The best parts: Beloved Disney characters; beloved Final Fantasy characters; successfully merging the two; gorgeous animation; Hollywood-grade voice acting; genuinely heartfelt story.
The WORST part: GUMMI SHIP
This selection shouldn't stir up much controversy, as you probably saw it coming from the moment you read the headline.
Everyone hates the Gummi Ship. Everyone. People who try the games for a few hours hate the Gummi Ship. People who worship and adore the entire series hate the Gummi Ship. People who cosplay as Heartless and draw fan art of Sora kissing Riku (yes, they exist) hate the Gummi Ship. People who have never even played Kingdom Hearts hate the Gummi Ship.
Why? Because the Gummi Ship sections are as completely unnecessary as they are completely unavoidable. After just one taste of the mind-numbing and repetitive "Star Fox for Dummies" gameplay, you'll never want to see that blocky jalopy again... but you'll have to, because Kingdom Hearts forces you to travel by Gummi Ship dozens upon dozens of times. Sure, you can customize it, but that's about as appealing an opportunity as designing the stationary for your math homework. Besides, you usually just ended up with junk like this:
Ha. Ha.
Dishonorable mention: No matter how big a fan of Disney and The Little Mermaid you are, we dare you to make it through all five of Kingdom Heart II's Atlantica "musical challenges" without wanting to tear your own ear drums out.
The best parts: Epic sci-fi campaign; overwhelmingly addictive multiplayer; larger than life heroes; smart enemies; imaginative weapons and vehicles; expansive environments; simple yet sophisticated combat.
The WORST part: THE FLOOD
The first two-thirds of the original Halo are a revelation. After years of being trapped in dark, linear passages, fighting endless swarms of repetitive enemies with uninspired weaponry, we were finally set free.
Now, we had beaches, mountains, valleys and soaring alien towers to run and leap across. Now, we had jeeps, tanks, helicopters and extraterrestrial hovercraft with which to cover vast swaths of ground and sky. Now, we had a diverse set of enemies who could not only think and talk, but almost inspire sympathy at times. Now, we had crazily inventive guns shooting ammunition in all the colors of the rainbow.
And then... then, we had the Flood. Suddenly, we were stumbling through a never ending series of murky hallways, each of which looked exactly like the one before. Suddenly, we were waging war against an army of videogame clichés - slowly shuffling, brain dead zombies. Suddenly, we were relying on the dullest and most predictable weapon in our arsenal, a shotgun. Suddenly, we were bored.
The Flood are the antithesis of everything that is new and unique about Halo. Unsurprisingly, they're also responsible for the absolute worst levels in the trilogy's history - "The Library" in Halo 1 and "Cortana" in Halo 3. Pure torture.
Sigh...
Dishonorable mention: We thought about choosing the Halo games' endings for this section, but then thought, "What endings?"
The best parts: Mind-boggling attention to detail; groundbreaking realism; fantastic mission design; authentic characters; eclectic soundtrack; infinite replay value.
The WORST part: SOCIALIZING
Don't get us wrong - we love Roman. He's like digital family. Little Jacob, Dwayne, Packie? They're awesome. And we adore Brucie. The activities you meet these friends for can be pretty fun, too. Darts and pool are surprisingly realistic for minigames, the effects of drinking are hilarious ("Hey! Yellow car!") and causing mayhem at the strip club never grows old.
At some point, however, we just want to play the damn game. We want to finish the missions. We want to watch the story unfold. We want to make some infinitesimal sliver of progress after losing hours of our lives to bowling, juggling, cabaret singing and eating buckets of Cluckin Bell fried chicken. We want to effing shoot something!
But these jerks won't let us, calling and demanding our precious time between every single mission. Say "no" and you're penalized. Say "yes" and you may very well spend more time with these whiny **** than you do with your real friends and family. The social system in GTA IV is more than distracting. It's exhausting.
Dishonorable mention: The radio stations in GTA IV are amazing, as always. The television stations? Not so much. The series' humor has never been subtle, of course, but that became painfully obvious with the addition of visuals. Plus, turning on your TV to watch a fictional character watch his TV is kinda depressing.
Another lonely Saturday night.
The best parts: Captivating fairy-tale adventure; timeless gameplay; iconic heroes, heroines and villains; challenging dungeons and puzzles; an unforgettable aura of innocence and imagination.
The WORST part: WATER
How, you ask, could a franchise as established and worshipped as The Legend of Zelda possibly have a flaw? And, even if the series did suffer from some irritating imperfection, how could that imperfection possibly be something as simple and harmless as... water?
We don't know, but look at the evidence:
- The most controversial and polarizing of all Zelda games, Wind Waker, just happens to be the first Zelda game set entirely on or around water. Many fans hated the world's new look as much as they hated Link's new look.
- Even folks who dug the changed art ****couldn't stand the changed mode of transportation. Sailing across the water in Wind Waker is a tiresome pain. Too much blue...
- Want to get out of the boat and do some swimming? Link "drowns" within a minute. In other games, he's hurt instantly. The kid can defeat Ganon a thousand times over, but he can't swim?
- The most hated level of any Zelda game - perhaps of any game ever - is Ocarina of Time's Water Temple. We've had nightmares about that place...
- Yet the Water Temple is really pretty horrible no matter what Zelda you're playing. The phrase "water temple" has become geek slang, synonymous with "hellhole," "virtually impossible to solve," and "the equivalent of a complete rectal examination." Seriously, look it up in the dictionary.
- The fishing minigames are always the most dull and pointless.
Case closed. Like a cat, toaster or Gremlin, you DO NOT want to put The Legend of Zelda franchise near water. Bad **** is bound to happen.
Dishonorable mention: Tingle. What an ****
The best parts: Zombies; zombies in a mall; killing zombies in a mall; killing zombies in a mall with any weapon you can grab, from a baseball bat to a lawnmower to an oversized Mega Man helmet; oh yeah, did we mention zombies?
The WORST part: TIME LIMIT
In case our enthusiasm wasn't obvious from the preceding paragraph, let us be perfectly clear. Battling zombies in a mall is one of the greatest ideas in videogame history. The premise was stolen from movies, sure, but transforming it into open-world interactive entertainment - with players in complete control of all the slicing and dicing - was a stroke of genius.
So why restrict that genius? Why give gamers only a limited "72 hour" taste before yanking them back to the beginning, again and again and again? Why imprison such wild, carefree, no-brainer fun in such a needlessly overcomplicated and confusing structure? Why ensure that failure, repetition and stressful multi-tasking are the norm? Why?
If the developers were attempting to mask a meager amount of gameplay, we'd understand, but Dead Rising has enough great material to fill weeks and months. Forcing us to experience that material in stupidly short chunks doesn't make it seem longer, more realistic or more exciting... it just makes us more likely to quit.
Dishonorable mention: Maybe we could get everything done in 72 hours if the other survivors weren't a bunch of idiots, if the janitor didn't keep bothering us on the phone every ten seconds or if we could read any of the text on our standard definition TV's.
The best parts: Cinematic production values; a breathtaking yet believable universe; immersive character customization; mature storytelling with moral significance; plus, badass aliens.
The WORST part:
Yeah. The slooooooow elevators in Mass Effect have become a bit of an internetjoke in the past several months, but no amount of humor or excuses (loading?) can make us forget what we lost in those boring metal boxes. Our time. Our energy. Our brain cells. Our will to live.
The rest of the game was definitely worth the wait... but that doesn't mean we have to forgive the wait itself. If man can travel across the vast reaches of space in an instant, why can't he do the same between floors? Or at least take the stairs?
Dishonorable mention: In all honesty, Mass Effect's hopelessly clunky and seemingly half-finished inventory system is worse than the elevator rides... but we barely understood it enough to finish the game, let alone to write a paragraph about it now. (And yes, we know that both problems were more or less corrected for the PC version. Have a cookie.)
The WORST part: BLUE SHELL
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