Unfortunately the long list of comments that went with this post were lost when it was deleted, so here it is again, for the record in a more heavily censored form. 

                                         
And now: The best games I hate.

Certain games just raise my hackles and have me swiping and spitting like an alley cat defending a discarded box of chicken nuggets.  Often I have little to no experience with these games, but even those few short hours of exposure have guaranteed my lasting displeasure with them.  It may fly in the face of critical and popular opinion, but I just don't like them.

Number 5 - World of Warcraft
I haven't played this game and I know I don't want to.  WoW players seem to be such an insular, insane and boring group that I have no idea how the hell I'd cope with such banality.  Why the hell someone would pay monthly fees to play Diablo in an uninteresting generic fantasy setting with a host of griefer morons and in-game spam boggles me.  WoW players are giving gamers world-wide a bad name.  Alright, a worse name.  But still - the number of people I've seen who were previously consumed by WoW and who have come out the other side wondering what the hell was so fun about it to start with makes me believe that I'm really not missing anything.

Number 4 - Company of Heroes
aka Dawn of World War 2.  Yet another RTS that promises all these revolutions and delivers RTS staples hidden behinds gimmicks and hi-res textures.  This game, for all its posturing and prettiness has such frightfully stale gameplay would give you scurvy if it had half the chance.  This game is yet another example of Relic's continuing relaxation upon the laurels of Homeworld.  Dawn of War at least had a geek-cred giving license.  Company of Heroes has no excuse.  And for anyone who thinks that destructible terrain in an RTS was new and cool, go back to Tiberium Sun.  It's neither new, nor particularly cool.  And in Company of Heroes, it barely even worked.  Now, if you want me, I'll be playing Flames of War.

Number 3 - Metal Gear Solid series
I played MGS on the PS when it first came out and kind of liked it, but found its plot to be tedious, the exposition too forced and the gameplay, though fun, rapidly vacillated between "be supersneaky" and "BOSS FIGHT!".  Solid Snake also never really struck me as an interesting protaganist, seeming to be the generic, gruff, super-soldier.  The first Metal Gear Solid title was, well - solid, but from my understanding its been all downhill since then.  And anyway, if I want to play a game like that, I have Thief, Splinter Cell and many others that do it far better.

Number 2 - Final Fantasy series
As previously established in my blogs, I am not really that big a fan of JRPGs.  And though the early Final Fantasy games don't raise my ire that much, from VII onwards I have nothing but loathing and contempt for this series.  Boredom incarnate is how I'd describe these.  Hours spent watching the same animation over and over on a battle scren and then getting to watch a half hour pre-rendered cutscene featuring pointless titillation/exposition/angst and then followed by characters standing around in game with 10 minutes of scrolling text talking about the cutscene.  Screw these games, I'm going to go play Final Flamewar.

Number 1 - Counterstrike
Finely balanced, well designed, fast playing and enjoyable.  In 2000.  Get the f**k over it already.  Even when it came out this mod was, in my opinion at least, below the standards of other mods and games of the day.  But somehow it still gets more players online at any given time than all other FPS put together.  And the biggest problem?  People who play Counterstrike have got to be the most change resistant group on earth.  Play another game.  At least try another game - maybe you'll realise what you've been missing.


Finally:
The games that weren't quite right

These are the games that were disappointing to me - but that I often love regardless.  They just had some dynamic, or level or just something about them that made playing them far less enjoyable and made me that little bit more disappointed.  In each of these I'll detail what my problem with it was and sometimes try and offer a solution rather than just railing blindly against "The Man".

Number 5 - Fable
Now, I'm a realist - following the change from the crazy-awesome open expanses of Project Ego to the more structured Fable, I wasn't expecting too much freedom.  But there's still an issue or four to be raised.  First off - how am I supposed to be an evil bad-arse in this game!  Its so amazingly hard to be bad as to not even be worth trying to do it.  Getting kicked out of town before you can get any trading done or start/finalise quests just isn't an incentive for me.  Then there's the fact that I'm an utterly undefeatable superhero who has cleaved through hundreds of those damn Jackal things on my way to free my mother.  Then, myself and the other greatest hero in the land are about to leave when six (or eight or a dozen - WHATEVER!) or the damn things teleport in during a cutscene and we immediately surrender.  I swear to god!  Give me twenty seconds of gametime instead of those twenty seconds of cutscenes and there would have been nothing left in that room, but me, my mother and a huge honking pile of experience orbs.  Fable 2 looks set to add a lot more and hopefully correct a few of my bigger issues with this game - but just one watch of the GDC interview with Peter Molyneux about what they cut from Fable in order to make their release dates makes me sick to my stomach.

Number 4 - GTA:SA
***** please.  That should tell you everything you need to know about why I am perennially disappointed with the newer GTA games.  For those of you who don't understand it yet, I'll elaborate.  You are everybody's *****.  It doesn't matter how awesome you are, how powerful, how well connected.  Somehow, every bum with an agenda seems to be able to get you to do their bidding with little more than a "sure, I'll do that" from the protaganist.  For example the final act of GTA: San Andreas, had the games writing and indeed - its design been up to me would have played something like this:
CJ, dressed in an immaculate tuxedo gets out of a Limo and starts walking towards his Las Venturas penthouse with large entourage in tow (even if this isn't in game, I always liked to imagine it) when he gets the call that Sweet is out of gaol.  CJ immediately gets back into the Limo, goes to the airport, hops on his private jet and flies to his mansion in the hills overlooking Los Santos.  He then climbs into another limo and drives down to police station to find Sweet sitting on the steps.
"We gotta take back the hood!" shouts Sweet.
"***** please," responds CJ, "**** the godd*mn hood.  I'm rich mother****er.  I own a ******* casino in Venturas with the Triads, car dealerships, airfields - more real estate than Donald ******* Trump."
"But-"
"Shut the **** up.  Do you have any idea of the **** I've gone through for you?"
"I've been in gaol -"
"Shut up!  I've been in Tenpenny's ******* pocket.  I've had every ****ing gang from here to Liberty ******* City after me.  I've broken into ******* secret military bases to steal jetpacks.  Blown up a ******* hydroelectric powerplant.  And lets not forget fighting my way through a ******* aircraft to jack a ******* Harrier jumpjet so I could do black ops for the ******* CIA!  All because people were using you as ******* leverage.  Where's the ******* gratitude *****?"
"But CJ man - I'm your brother!"
"Brother only gets you so far.  If you want to get the ******* hood back, go right ahead.  I'm gonna be up in my mansion, or in my private jet, or helicopter or what the **** ever - living it up with piles of money and my b*tches.  **** you Sweet.  Get the **** outta my life."
Now, tell me honestly, how would that not have been a much more satisfying ending to the game?

Number 3 - Republic: The Revolution
Ambitious cannot begin to describe this game.  To model the rise to power of a minor local politician, wheeling and dealing, plotting and politicking his way to the top.  All the time struggling against a dictator in an ex-Soviet block nation.  The level of detail was astounding - in terms of both the environments and the socio-political structures which formed the basis of the game.  Do you move up in political circles by being squeaky clean and fighting against corruption?  Do you advance by shadowy means, intimidating, blackmailing and even killing your opposition?  Do you just make yourself filthy rich and bribe your way to the top?  Everything is viable.  But - and this is a big but.  The game was hard to play, even harder to learn and because there was just so damn much to do it was difficult to keep on top of it all (especially in the later, larger cities).  If you haven't played this game you definately should, if only to see how close you can come to greatness and yet still fall short.

Number 2 - Thief
Garrett is cool.  Super cool.  So awesome that even Sam Fisher, 47 and Solid Snake bow before his medieval awesomeness.  Thief was a game that encouraged you to be sneaky - foiling guards attempts to spot, tricking their senses, using the environment to your advantage, sneaking in to steal the loot.  And then getting killed by goddamn acid spitting dinosaurs.  Or zombies.  Or cat people.  Or spider-demon things.  Seriously - what the hell?  Thief games are ALWAYS amazing and brilliant and indescribably awesome.  For the first few levels.  And then you start going up against non-human opponents and it just ruins it.  Thankfully there are many, many mods and addons and maps done by the community that let you practice your thievery in a setting not populated by things that can see you and hear you, no matter how damn sneaky you are being.

Number 1 - Black & White
A few years ago on Chez Geek, myself, Metagnome and a few guests on the show tried to name our top 10 games of all time.  And it was hard.  But at number one there was a clear winner.  Peter Molyneux.  And we knew that this wasn't really fair, but we couldn't decide which one of his games should win - and if we hadn't done this then we would have been looking at probably five out of the top 10 games being from Peter Molyneux.  That, just goes to show the amount of respect I have for the man.  Add to this that the number one game on this list is a Peter Molyneux title, while two others are from subsidiary studios or proteges and something should become clear.  For all of Peter Molyneux's brilliance, his desire to create such amazing games frequently outstrips our current capacity to create them.  Black & White is the perfect example of this.  You played as a God, interacting with the world indirectly, through your avatar - which you could teach, train and mould in your own image.  Well, that was the theory.  In actual fact it was like a simulator based on the life of an Age of Empires peasant.  In that you picked up a tree, delivered a tree to a supply depot.  Picked up another tree, delivered that to a supply depot and so on and so forth until finally, you had enough trees that you could commission a structure.  Which you had to create the framework for by combining supply crates and then position.  All the while, you'd be working to try and ensure that your people were not starving to death because they were too inefficient in bringing in a harvest.  I thought I got to play as a god?  And what about the good/evil mechanic.  Well, if you want to be good - its easy, because all of your quests involve doing something good for a reward.  If you wanted to be evil, you just have to be a dick.  And there's no reward for that.  In fact, if you are a dick most of your worshippers leave (or are sacrificed and you're left without a powerbase).  The best thing about this game was your avatar - and thankfully, we're talking about 100m tall oranguatans here - with some amazingly real personalities, otherwise this game would be in my "holy crap this is terrible" pile, rather than one of my all-time favourites.