Five "Critically Acclaimed Video Games" That I Hate!
Tell Kotaku the check bounced.
The mission of BPM++ remains incredibly simple: ‘create prose that humiliates ‘game bad’ type reviewers, and make readers do that embarrassing snort laugh, you know the one when a little bit of snot jumps out ya nose. Fortunately, I’ve been able to cultivate an audience that hopes I materialize each month like a bargain-bin raccoon, delivering you exposés on obscure games, the ones that peanut-brained self-aggrandizing YouTubers once informed you were "disastrous-donkey-doodoo."
While very funny for me, this perspective as a critic has bestowed upon me the title of “Guy Who Likes Every Game,” a debt I didn’t plan on accumulating. Nevertheless, the bill has come due, and it’s time to pony up before the loan sharks of my readership beat my ass in some internet back-alley. The truth is, I, BPM++, dislike specifically FIVE video games.
These are titles that have been showered with praise by everyone from acclaimed auteurs to respected game journalists. However, to me, they are the equivalent of an interactive experience of an armed robbery of my senses and personal time. That said, I present to you the 5 “Critically Acclaimed Video Games” That I Hate! Brought to you by the same guy who recently played Fight Club for PlayStation 2, and thought it was trying to do some “kinda” interesting things.
5. NintenDogs Lab & Friends
Eons ago, canines and humans entered into a spiritual contract to be eternal best friends, ushering in the ‘age of pets.’ Years later, humans wondered, “What if our new pets could be rocks?” This idea was fucking stupid, since rocks couldn’t play fetch or think. But in our hubris, we graced these rocks with our sacred wisdom, renamed them CPUs, and sealed them inside Nintendo Handhelds, digitizing our doggy friends forever. Fast forward to today, those canines still exist, entombed inside your little sister’s teeth-marked DS in the form of NintenDogs: Lab & Friends.
Nintendo DS classics like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Trauma Center’s touchscreen’s ambitions were lost on the general public, but when NintenDogs allowed players to yell their dogs name into the system’s pinhole microphone, resulting in audio feedback that sounded like a demon being summoned from a McDonald’s drive thru speaker, it took home a damn D.I.C.E award for best handheld game and Outstanding Technical Achievement, beating out God of War, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, and GTA Chinatown Wars. A game where you scream “SIT” at a digital Dachshund beat out chibi-Link and the ghost of Sparta.
For me, pet simulators have always been a weak premise for a “game.” What is the game exactly? Pretending you’re responsible until you realize your Nintendo DS, the device built specifically to help you avoid responsibility, is demanding you bathe a beagle? This is why pet simulators are better as mini-games than as full experiences. No matter how cute virtual puppies are, they will always be nothing more than gimmicks to me. NintenDogs, like every other pet sim, is designed for irresponsible babies who fall in love with the idea of things rather than the weight of their decisions. If you don’t believe me, go ask ya Tamagotchi how the bottom of your junk drawer is treating it. I’m sure it’s gotten real comfy in there with your frayed USB cables and those expired cough drops. Tell it my real dog says woof.
4. Yahoo Games: Pool
Pool fuckin’ sucks, because I suck at it. The game has got too many damn moving parts and colors; it’s just confusing. I don’t get it, but I wanna get it, I wanna be a pool shark with a badass tattoo, and a custom pool cue named Tallulah Mae. The desire to master its trickery has been a recurring dream of mine since I was a child perusing instant messenger chatrooms playing “Yahoo Games: Pool.” In the early 2000s, my older brother (who is nice at pool in reality) would take time out of his busy cellphone mall-kiosk career to hammer geometry lessons into my 4th grader pea-brain before eventually giving up and destroying me without me taking a single shot. That would remain the case until I met “her.”
Naomi0x0, the screen name of a “lady“ whom I had met after scratching in a game of Yahoo Pool so poorly that she asked if I was letting her win, made me feel vulnerable enough to open up and tell her that I was practicing because I wanted to beat my brother just one time. “She“ took pity and became my Yahoo Pool tutor. This resulted in me sneaking to the family computer every chance I could, hoping to hold just one more conversation, spiking my pre-pubescent adrenaline and my billiards expertise. Then it happened. As my bedtime rapidly approached, the eight ball disappeared into the black void of a corner pocket, cementing my first win of Yahoo Pool. “She” typed me, “How did that feel?” I gasped aloud, “Sooo Good!” as my fingers clutched the keyboard.
Well, this must have caught my brother’s attention, who dragged me away from the family computer, reprimanding me about chatroom predators like a D.A.R.E. officer who had been waiting his whole career for this to be his scared-straight PSA big break. In a domino effect, that yelling captured my mother’s attention, who raged about how we both could have put everyone in danger by talking to “older women” online and grounded us both from the family computer, in tandem deleting my Messenger account. To this day, I am convinced he pushed my mom to delete my account specifically because I was about to beat him at Pool for the first time in my life. I’ve never won a game of pool against him, and I’m sure he loves to keep it that way. Yahoo Games shut down its Pool servers in 2016, so now we’re all losers. Anyway, fuck Yahoo Pool, miss you Naomi0x0.
3. Final Fantasy VII Snowboarding Mobile
Twenty years ago, I watched Sony drop a trailer for their “Final Fantasy VII Technical Demo,” a landmark showcase that had rendered Aerith and Cloud in beautiful 360p definition. That trailer had every FF7 fanboy hoppin’ off the porch and pre-ordering a PS3 that didn’t exist yet, except for me. As a child, I learned a valuable skill that many of my peers and adults hadn’t yet mastered: LITERACY. The clues were in the title of the damn trailer, “Technical Demo.” Anyone who thought this was going to be the remake of Final Fantasy VII was a fool, yet still not as foolish as me, who begged my brother to use his Motorola RAZR to play “Final Fantasy VII Snowboarding.”
What is there to say about this little mobile game? It’s the equivalent of getting exactly what was advertised, the snowboarding mini-game from Final Fantasy VII’s Gold Saucer, but now on your phone. Stitched together from cropped JPEGS and powered by the same engine that brought you Motorola Snake, sits a tiny Cloud Strife ready to accept his inevitable snow-blindness. I couldn’t tell if I’d been swindled or I’d swindled myself. It was like getting angry about buying bottled water, then being pissed off when I received bottled water. Although, as I reminisce on my teenage anger with the perspective of a grown man, I’m even more heated.
Why would you take one of gaming’s greats and drag its legacy through the mud with a mobile port that Square pulled from the same junk drawer your Tamagotchi is currently living in? This little mobile game has left me discombobulated for years, plucking at my nerves every time a winter-level theme music plays in my head. To be clear, this piece isn’t just me hating on mini-games. Listen, I love a mini-game when it RESPECTS my time. Whereas, Square designed exactly one gameplay mechanic, outrun your battery percentage, and repeat until you wise up to the fact that this ain’t a FF7 game. Square would eventually make it up to their fans by giving us FF7 Remake and Rebirth, but don’t think I’ve forgotten about this shit, Square. You owe my big brother a Motorola RAZR battery replacement, and the invoice is in the mail.
2. The Beatles: Rock band
Since I’ve been alive, people have tried to make me like The Beatles. My dad said Sgt. Pepper’s was the first album he bought that wasn’t soul or funk. My teachers played Abbey Road during study hall, draining my semester’s hall pass allowance one Lennon vocal at a time. My girlfriend even bought me a Beatles t-shirt when I eventually told her I was into metal. Despite their efforts, I regret to inform the world once again that The Beatles got no bangers, and nothing made this more apparent than the moment I picked up that stupid-ass plastic Gretsch 6128, a guitar revered only because Paul McCartney once sweated on it, and committed myself to the story mode of “The Beatles: Rock Band.”
Music peripheral games “were” a beautiful development in the genre of party games. Their ability to bring together a group of strangers who all desired to imitate the rockstar ethos via rhythmic clicky plastic was a triumph, but my issue with The Beatles: Rock Band is simple; the mop-top glazing is outta control, and nothing is less rock n’ roll than bootlicking. In every other Rock Band game, if you miss a bunch of notes, you’re getting booed off the stage. With the Beatles? You get a simple “oopsie game over.” Oh boo hoo, can’t have John Lennon’s ghost crying any more than it does whenever someone brings up that Yoko and Chuck Berry video. The sacrilege runs deeper; no whammy bar, no drum fills, no freestyle solos. Every essential mechanic Harmonix built the series on, gutted to protect the Beatles from being treated like a real band. Even the overdrive got sanitized. Instead of celebrating your perfect notes, it celebrates how cool the Beatles are. You’re just there.
Personally, my grudge with this game will always be the fact it’s a Rock Band game. Harmonix built a brand on being a cooler alternative to Guitar Hero by giving you a full band, a playlist made for people not in a midlife crisis, and the rock n’ roll ethos of fuck everything, it’s about being cool. Only to turn around, license the band most likely to be playing in your local TJ Maxx and build out a game with the vibe of a copyright filing office. If you like the Beatles, that’s great, keep enjoying them, but Harmonix could have just licensed the songs and made them DLC instead of doing all of this deep throating. In the words of one of those guys, this game can get back to where it once belonged… which is the trash.
1. The Last of Us
“I think we’re gonna have to kill this guy, Ellie.”
The key to being a good video game critic is telling everyone that The Last of Us is a masterpiece. Lucky for you all, I’m a giggly internet clown, with the narrative skills of a ghetto Charles Bukowski. So it’s time to come clean and evaluate the winner of over 200 game of the year awards, the birth of the Sony “walk and talk” game, the equivalent of video game Oscar-bait. But let me be clear: I don’t hate The Last of Us because it’s boring or violent, or because of the frequency of ladders. I despise The Last of Us because it received accolades for offering players a bare minimum experience, built on the foundation of the 2010s pop-cultural zeitgeist. TLOU’s survival depended on the public seeing it as “THE” video game that finally achieved mature emotional game writing. Despite its efforts, TLOU was released in an era that was drooling over the “melodramatic zombie apocalypse trope,” leading people to call it the second coming of video game excellence. In reality, it was just a polished cover shooter.
Now, I know some people are gonna read that and say, “you weird as fuck! Look at buddy over here hatin’ on a masterpiece for contrarian clicks.” I hear you, but this ain’t me hating on video games getting their flowers. Imma always lay my life down for a video game that does something new and beautiful enough that even the people who don’t play games have to sit up and pay attention. That’s my dream. The problem is, TLOU didn’t do that. Instead, TLOU impersonates the popularity of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalypse fiction, the daddy issues of Children of Men, the prestige format from AMC’s golden age of television, and the style of early 2000s graphic novels to Frankenstein them together with cover shooter mechanics that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in 2007. I know this because I spent last month analyzing nothing but mid-2000s cover-based shooters, just to test this thesis.
Stepping back, TLOU is a solid game with some good dialogue between gunfights and a gameplay loop of “toss a brick, hit ‘em with the blick.” However, without these cultural moments that shaped the zeitgeist, this game would have gotten a sequel, done reasonably well, and faded into the cultural background. This context matters because the truth is, TLOU didn’t expand what video games could be; it simply offered a version of games familiar enough for “prestigious critics” to finally feel comfortable showing up to the nerd party. In opposition, historians will point to TLOU, saying that video games didn’t have the complex writing chops that Naughty Dog demonstrated in 2013! But three years prior, BioWare released Mass Effect 2, a sharper cover shooter with RPG dialogue mechanics and three-dimensional characters with backstories that pushed the boundaries of video game narrative writing. The difference was that there was no cultural zeitgeist spotlighting the space-opera genre for public adoption, so Mass Effect 2 remained popular only with gamers.
Regardless of my distaste, I can see the appeal of TLOU. It’s refined enough to walk into the home of someone who’s weirded out by video games and have them say, “Oh, hey, I know this story, I like this, maybe I do like video games!” That’s a victory for the medium. Still, my job as a critic isn’t to bring you anything sophisticated. BPM++’s responsibility is to point at something nobody else is looking at and say: “hey, this isn’t Triple-A excellence, this ain’t never getting an HBO adaptation, but this game is doing something just as beautiful as the so-called masterpieces." You’ll never see it, though, because the New York Times won’t cover it, and a YouTuber didn’t tell you what to think about it. You’re only gonna find it through BPM++. That’s my gig. That’s what I do. You can call my tastes trash, but I’m your bargain-bin raccoon, and I’m proud of it.
If I hurt ya feelings, remember it’s all love and they’re just video games, plus I’ve left my personal list of favorite games below so you can fight me in the comments! Love all yall. Stay Silly. - BPM++ (Yes, That’s two pluses)
Yeah, I strongly disagree with your #1, but you did get me at "ghetto Charles Bukowski", so we're good 😁
100% agree with your assessment of The Last of Us. It is a decent enough game, but the story is the equivalent of "Maybe the real journey is the friends we made along the way."