To me right now is the first Red Dead Redemption. Finally I’m able to play it, I’ve wait for over a decade. No spoilers, zero youtube gameplay videos, zero questions about the game to my friends. It gotta be me, and the game, it happened, and I think it sucks.
Maybe you thinking in “well, you shouldn’t play the second first”. I did not. My first Red Dead game was Red Dead Revolver, I was able to play it a few years ago when I could buy a PS2, but I couldn’t get a PS3 nor a Xbox 360 to play RDR1. It grinded my gears because we got the prequel in PC. When RDR1 came to PC it was so freaking expensive, yet today, I think it is expensive. I was able to buy the game some weeks ago while there was a Steam Sale, and well, I regreat it now.
I don’t like its exploration, its missions, its characters, its world, its secondary missions. its wanted system, and nothing but less important: has a lot of bugs.
That’s my experience in a few words.
What’s the game that you wanted to play but it was a total mess?
Zelda OOT. The controls, especially when first using the slingshot and such, with the camera just sucked. I never got far with that after I finally tried it in my mid-/late-20s. It’s one of those I found much more enjoyable watching someone else do.
Played Goldeneye for the first time at a barcade in my early 30s and I didn’t really enjoy that much.
As I think about it, anything on N64 and maybe Gamecube that I would try once I had time and money later in life just were not great. I had been playing better PC games, even in the same years, and have zero nostalgia for it which probably doesn’t help.
I had a similar experience with OOT, never owned an N64 but finally played it 2 years ago on PC. IMO the gameplay just isn’t very good by today’s standards, yet it was very innovative for its time. Some of my friends who played it in the 90s when they were young still love that game.
I think Link to the Pastis still my favorite Zelda, probably followed by the original. My former roommate was definitely all about OOT and why I tried to play through it back then
LttP was absolutely top of its genre for years and years. It was a drastic refinement of the formula that LoZ pioneered.
OoT was a completely new beast, and had to innovate practically all of its gameplay - gameplay that, I will mention, has been refined since then even more drastically than LttP’s gameplay. It’s rough, and it shows. Unless you played it around when it came out, the adjustment after playing modern games would be … difficult.
I find controls especially for N64 really need their weird controller layout to feel comfortable and the oddball joystick with all the resistant travel and range it has to really handle as well as intended by developers. Tall joystick with a huge gated bowl. Never did translate well to modern controllers. Is it worth buying an N64 to USB adapter and dealing with the grinding plastic flaws of the sticks and bowl if you don’t have that past experience? No idea, probably not?
Yeah the N64 came right at the transition from games being primarily 2d to many groundbreaking 3d games coming out. And they really struggled with the controls and other aspects of the games.
Like I was obsessed with GoldenEye when it was new. Perfect Dark made it irrelevant before GameCube was even a thing, just on the gameplay side, since the controls were pretty much the same. I have no interest in going back to either game at this point. Partially because of the controls, but even the more recent GoldenEye remake for PC wasn’t very fun IMO, despite the move to the best fps control scheme (mouse and keyboard).
They had it more figured out during the GameCube era, at least to the point where I can replay Metroid Prime despite the controls (that game is still on my top games ever list).
I don’t know what remake you are referring to unless it’s the Xbox 360 cancelled remake leak with the Xenia emulator mouse+kb hacked build, but I can relate with the Perfect Dark decompilation PC port. Even with good frame rate and mouse+kb the game is too simplistic to hold my attention anymore. I can play Timesplitters 2/3 and 007 Nightfire instead if I want an old console FPS for some reason, they hold up better.
Trying to look for it now, I can’t be sure what the specific project is called. It wasn’t official, might be the same team that did the PD one. It only had multiplayer maps, extended versions of them, too, like that soviet library one was fully open when only a part of it was open in the OG game.
The two that come to mind are Goldeneye Source or the Goldeneye X project perhaps? I am curious regardless of what you find lol.
It had a playable release a few years ago, though it wasn’t in a polished state. I’d have to fire up my old windows machine to see the install. For all I know they got killed off by DMCA or something (GoldenEye could have been targetted by either Rare/Nintendo or MGM, whereas PD would only be the former, maybe MGM is even more aggressive than Nintendo).
Apparently there is/was a GoldenEye decompiled that was way behind the PD decompiled project, too.
OOT on the 3DS has gyro aiming. They never mention it and if they did it was brief. I noticed at first when the joystick aiming was just a little shaky. Fighting the forest temple boss was super easy in a computer chair.
Ship of Harkinian is incredible, full on “however you want the controls to be” controls. It’s by far the best way to play OOT! I used a Dualsense with gyro and my right thumb stick is used to look around like a modern game.