My gut instinct on a game was completely wrong.

Tomous wrote:
still wrote:
Drumstick wrote:
captain red dog wrote:F1 World Grand Prix on the N64. I thought it would be amazing, you could crash into the tyre walls and tyres would fall out.

What it actually was, was about 9fps and because the N64 could only do analogue steering it had some weird double tap accelerator. Genuinely one of the worst games I have ever bought.

Honourable mention to No Man's Sky. I was expecting some kind of Elite style experience and being able to at least see other players. I'll never forget how shallow it was on release.

I think either your cart must have had a defect because F1WGP was ace. 93% rated in N64 Mag.

I don't have an answer for this thread at the moment.

Agree. It was a great game. No idea what game CRD was playing!

+1

Absolutely loved F1WGP. It was a great F1 game for its’ time.

Agreed. Remember watching the replays as a kid in awe of the grafixs :datass:

Edgelord.jpg but I was wrong about Ocarina of Time. I'd just gotten into JRPGs at the point it was set to come out and had misread the marketing. I thought OoT was going to be something similar to Final Fantasy; a story and character based game with a strong narrative to lead the player through its run time. The disappointment that it was a puzzle based action game with some light RPG elements meant I was rather disillusioned once I got stuck in on Christmas Day all those years ago.

deathofcows wrote:I am very surprised when this happens, but there's been a very obvious recent example which has made me make this thread.

Super Mario Odyssey's initial reveals put me firmly in the uninspired camp. The gameplay just looked like a fairly logical evolution of the 3D-Mario formula (which it is I suppose), but the art style seemed to me ugly and slipshod. I couldn't quite believe Nintendo would make something as underwhelmingly grey as Metro City, or garishly, intensely red as the Sand Kingdom. Dinosaur land looked like a fan-made high-res texture skin of something better, and the T-Rex itself looked too incongruously realistic and unimaginatively realised at that.

Don't get me started on Deep Woods.

But then I played it and I wouldn't have it looking any other way. The variety and surprise of the environments is consistently engaging, and the actual execution and detail is superb (the chunky, fisher-price-toy textures of The Lost Kingdom! The just-so rust and deterioration on the green-tubes! The varied lighting and weather effects and skyboxes in the little bonus worlds!). It might be one of my favourite looking games overall, ever.

I was wrong and the aesthetic only made sense as part of the whole when played through.

I find I get this a lot with Nintendo games (Skyward Sword looked insipidly pastel-hued and spare to me initially, now it's one of my favourite Zelda-looks?).

I'm not sure if it's because we have a different, action-oriented focus when playing compared to looking at screenshots/preview videos, or just because the harmony of the visuals with music and sound and gameplay adds so much - but the difference in my impression is stark.

What games (their aesthetic or otherwise) did you get wrong, or grow to appreciate in a way you can't un-see now? How can I be so wrong so often?

I’m with you with Mario Odyssey, really hated the idea of new donk city in the e3 trailer but I was completely wrong about how good it would be

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I knew the hype, but I just can't bring myself to care about Tolkienesque fantasy. I like sci-fi but dragons and elves have never been my bag and I couldn't get into either of the first two games. Hype trains never do much for me, but I picked this one up in a sale and hooooly gooseberry fool the internet wasn't lying to me. This game is so good that has ruined decent-to-average games forever. I don't know how exactly CD Projekt RED pulled it off (a lot of people probably worked a lot of really unethical amounts of overtime for this gooseberry fool) but I somehow lost dozens of hours of my life to this gooseberry fool.

Assassin's Creed (any of them)

I thought I'd be into this. Cool games with interesting historical settings about running around on rooftops and stabbing people creatively. Basically right up my alley, I'm a hardcore Tenchu apologist. I've played a handful of these games and thus far all of them have bored me half to death. I'd rather play Tenchu Z again.

For me it's kind of Mario Sunshine. At the time I was working lots of hours and I got it on release tried it one evening and didn't like it much...6 months later I was off sick and too I'll to leave my bed but bored stupid and so I tried it again and I just loved it, I could not stop playing it. In fact now I'm probably unusual in that I prefer it to Mario 64

I posted about this in the currently playing thread, Deus Ex Human Revolution. I hated it whenever I did my first playthrough on the Xbox. I was in two minds about playing it again on Wii U, but I did and it clicked with me.

The game comes alive when you go for a stealth/hacker play style. It was a huge blast figuring out how to sneak past enemies.

I imagine it helped having redone bosses on the WiiU too

K wrote:
Assassin's Creed (any of them)

I thought I'd be into this. Cool games with interesting historical settings about running around on rooftops and stabbing people creatively. Basically right up my alley, I'm a hardcore Tenchu apologist. I've played a handful of these games and thus far all of them have bored me half to death. I'd rather play Tenchu Z again.

That's a blast from the past! I used to love the old Tenchu! Can't remember if it was ps1 or ps2 but was hard as nails from what I remember. Not sure I even got past the first level :lol:

kerr9000 wrote:For me it's kind of Mario Sunshine. At the time I was working lots of hours and I got it on release tried it one evening and didn't like it much...6 months later I was off sick and too I'll to leave my bed but bored stupid and so I tried it again and I just loved it, I could not stop playing it. In fact now I'm probably unusual in that I prefer it to Mario 64

I like you. :wub:

Sometimes you also think your gaming-gauge is pretty well-tuned from years of reading about games and seeing how they go down. You feel like you can pretty well guess the average review score of games before they come out within a decent margin, and are rarely surpised.

But I remember people being excited about Batman Arkham Asylum - but to me I thought everyone had clearly got it wrong. It looked like a typical 3rd-Person, unreal-aesthetic action game and everyone had misread it as looking like something original or exciting.

Then apparently it was really good and I was really wrong despite my 'well-honed' game-reading skillz. They did a Nintendo on me.

I guess I didn't jell well with the Nintendo 64 stuff, I also despite having enjoyed it and all don't hold ocarina as highly as most, I'd much rather replay twilight Princess or wind waker etc..

7256930752

deathofcows wrote:Sometimes you also think your gaming-gauge is pretty well-tuned from years of reading about games and seeing how they go down. You feel like you can pretty well guess the average review score of games before they come out within a decent margin, and are rarely surpised.

But I remember people being excited about Batman Arkham Asylum - but to me I thought everyone had clearly got it wrong. It looked like a typical 3rd-Person, unreal-aesthetic action game and everyone had misread it as looking like something original or exciting.

Then apparently it was really good and I was really wrong despite my 'well-honed' game-reading skillz. They did a Nintendo on me.

Great shout. I remember thinking exactly the same and when that first fight started and it went into slow-mo I new I was wrong.

OrangeRakoon wrote:I imagine it helped having redone bosses on the WiiU too

True. In the original version, it was incredibly annoying that there was barely any choice in how you deal with the bosses.

What did they do to change the bosses in the Wii U version of Human Revolution?

IAmTheSaladMan wrote:What did they do to change the bosses in the Wii U version of Human Revolution?

Not specifically for the WiiU version, but the Director's Cut that was release across all platforms. The bosses were remade as they were a major complaint with the game - most notably that you could play through the game completely non-lethally and stealthily, but when it came to the bosses you had to kill them in a straight-up fight. In the Director's Cut you can tranq them instead.

Basically they Twin Snakes'd it without the ridiculous cutscenes

Albear wrote:
K wrote:
Assassin's Creed (any of them)

I thought I'd be into this. Cool games with interesting historical settings about running around on rooftops and stabbing people creatively. Basically right up my alley, I'm a hardcore Tenchu apologist. I've played a handful of these games and thus far all of them have bored me half to death. I'd rather play Tenchu Z again.

That's a blast from the past! I used to love the old Tenchu! Can't remember if it was ps1 or ps2 but was hard as nails from what I remember. Not sure I even got past the first level

The good news is that every Tenchu game is great for the first level and then goes sharply downhill as you progress.

I miss that series. I'm a real sucker for dead Japanese franchises that peaked on the PS2 and will never get a reboot.

I remember briefly playing Tenchu on the PSP, it had some really impressive fog effects

From Software made the PSP version - they developed it alongside Demon's Souls.

That and the Wii version are pretty good, but they're also basically a completely different series of games, they're all based on sneaking around slowly on the ground and hiding corpses. My favourite Tenchu games were the ones where you were doing backflips off rooftops into hyper-violent stealth kills.

My gut instinct on a game was completely wrong.

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