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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3303 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I don't want to add (much) negativity here, but I'm someone who was around when the original God of War games came out and thought they were 7/10 at best

94/100 Universal Acclaim

Your and my memories of God of War's reception at the time differ significantly. And I'm not entirely sure it belongs in the same category as Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. But, what struck me most about God of War was how playable it was. Especially coming from PC games, where being able to save whenever you want is the expectation, I found a lot of acclaimed action games on console borderline unplayable. You'd regularly lose 10-30 minutes of gameplay at a chunk if you died in a difficult section. In rare cases as much as an hour, with some unskippable cutscenes thrown in to add insult to injury. God of War started you either at the entrance to the room, or a room before, tops. And there were often save points in all the places you'd really want one. There was just so much focus and polish on it being fun, with very few exceptions. The rough edges that were infrequent exceptions were standard in other games.

94/100 Universal Acclaim

Your and my memories of God of War's reception at the time differ significantly

I never said that God of War didn't receive near universal acclaim. I said I judged it as 7/10 at the time. I recall being absolutely befuddled at the good reviews it got and finding that the actual reviewers just didn't seem to care about the fun of an interesting combat system that its contemporary competitors had, but rather about the presentation and the visceral feeling of controlling Kratos as he rampaged over Greek mythological creatures. Which sorta makes sense, because game reviewers often play lots of different types of games but don't delve into any single one all that deeply and so tend to make mostly surface-level judgments.

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