As of today, the studio behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand is no more. Clover Studio was shuttered by main shareholder Capcom. At a Board of Directors' meeting was held, and it was decided that Clover should dissolved. The reason? According to the Capcom IR release:
"Clover Studio Co., Ltd. has met the goal of developing unique and creative original home video game software, however, in view of promoting a business strategy that concentrates management resources on a selected business to enhance the efficiency of the development power of the entire Capcom group, the dissolution of Clover Studio Co., Ltd. has been raised and passed at a Board of Directors' meeting."
There’s definitely no denying that some games might have been undeservedly bashed by critics. The reasons why vary from game to game, but there’s a lot of diamonds out there in gaming that have been obscured by plenty of rough.
Return Fire (PS1). It has a Metacritic of 71 but it is one of the best games on PS1. https://www.metacritic.com/...
Warframe. Started life with a 64 on meta but improved quite a bit over the years. I put north of 1000hrs in.
I suppose that's just a case of the score not updating as the game slowly got better. The PS5 and Switch versions are 85/86.
Can we address how odd it is for the idea of hated by critics seems to work at anything below 80%? 3 of these 10 have a critics score of 70 or higher and only 1 has a score below 50.
I would say anything below 40 would be bad / hated, 40-59 is ok but missable, 60-69 is functionally average, 70-79 is good, 80-89 is very good, 90-94 is outstanding GOTY candidate, 95+ is genre defining
These are the games that championed ideas, mechanics and systems that would ultimately be a much bigger part of the gaming space in the future.
@Escamotage The job system mainly, and how you can set up your party. For me in the original late stage of the game I would give my A team the same skills but nerfed. Vaan was my tank/bruiser/soilder, Penelo was my healer white mage, and Fran was my black mage of course. But I gave Vaan the ability to use both white mage and black mage skills but nerfed a few levels under the true mages. Penelo could use a bit of dark magic and Fran could use a bit of white. So if either mate ran out the other could step in, same with Vaan, with the gambit system it was easy to set up that they would complement each other in battle when needed.
My B team was set up similar but a few levels below my A team. Then when my A team got new weapons and armor, their old gear was passed down to the B team.
In Zodiac age you could not do that, in such a degree as I had it in the original.
Kill Switch is one of my fav shooters from that generation, highly underrated in my opinion.
I'm one of the few people who preferred the original Red Faction to the first Half Life.
Red Faction came out in May 2001 on PS2 and Half Life came out on PS2 in November 2001 . So I played Red Faction 1st .
1. Indigo Prophecy - No
2. God Hand - Hell yeah. Still is. What a game. But Adaptive Difficulty sucks.
3. Metal Gear Solid 2 - Gameplay-wise, sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't. The AI stuff was already Cyberpunk fair and Political Miss-information was old stuff as well. Furthermore, these themes don't really play out during the gameplay portions of the game. So they might as well have been a movie spliced into a game. Which is my main criticism of the MGS series. A lot of Talk and hardly any of it is part of the gameplay or affects it in any meaningful way.
4. Dark Cloud - Couldn't say. But Procedural stuff sucks 99% of the time.
5. Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow - The Xbox version sure was and kinda still is. The PS2? Not even close. The Asymmetrical MP was cool though.
6. The thing - The system was kinda cool in theory. In practice? Meh. But it should've been brought back for other games for sure, and expanded upon. At least some type of variation of this mechanic.
7. Final Fantasy XII - While the System was kinda cool. It did lends to your party playing on Automatic. Became monotonous after a while.
8. Kill Switch - Kinda. But Metal Gear, Splinter Cell and Winback already had it first. Then there was Time Crisis.
9. Mercenaries: PoD - You spelled Monster Attack way wrong.
10. Mortal Kombat: Deception: Tobal No. 1 or Ehrgeiz.
I have to agree on Splinter Cell, Xbox version was much better, even the Gamecube version performed better than the PS2 version. But the Xbox version was on another level.
Iceball2000: There are plenty of comparisons on youtube, I would suggest you watch them to find out.
The Xbox verison is basically the pc version in terms of graphics, so it looks and runs amazing compared to PS2, and handles lighning/shadows very well (important in Splinter Cell as you use the dark for stealth). The levels are complete and are not devided into sections like in the PS2 and Gamecube versions. Lastly, the PS2 has longer loading times. That's some of the differences for you, there's probably more that I'm forgetting.
That said, the Splinter Cell games are great on any platform.
Good list, I would include Okami (brush mechanics), Viewtiful Joe (time & zoom mechanics)
During a Gamescom 2024 interview with Wccftech, Shinji Mikami confirmed he would bring back the God Hand series over other franchises he worked on
strange choice.. game was good but not great.
i'd prefer to hear him say Vanquish 2.
lol it’s so true. Man, I miss the days when people could just joke around and not have a care in the world. Nobody took any of this stuff seriously… where did we go astray?
Just make a zombie game... Stubborn man.. Do it. Because you are very good at it.
So 3 successful original IP's equals getting shut down... yikes!
Capcom quit sitting around nukeing studios and go make my damn steel battalion LOC 2.
I own Viewtiful Joe, Viewtiful Joe 2, Okami, and God Hand (the last two of which I'm still in the midst of playing). Clover Studios was one of those gaming divisions that I'd probably purchase a product from blindly, so strong was my faith in their work. Sorry to hear about this; it's always a shame when the biggest money-maker isn't the most artistic or best designed game, but the ones that appeal to the masses :(
Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, God Hand, Ico, SotC . . . how do these games just go unadopted? What are people playing instead?
This fuc#in sucks
i think most of us longed for creative and original titles, but the sales number just isn't big once these games are released. it's amazing how games like WWE wrestling rake up the huge dough everytime it's released. nothing against wrestling games in general, but it's still the same game with updated graphics and storylines. i blame the marketing department for this mishap.