Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: I agree with this

[quote name="Bananadine"]Cos I played through it for the first time well into the GameCube years and it was awesome. Much more recently I played Super Mario Sunshine and got mad at it and stopped halfway through. It's like Super Mario 64 except instead of being about running and jumping and exploring, it's about collecting crap. And there's a LOT of crap to collect, and most of it isn't much fun to search for. Plus the tropical island is ugly. At this moment I am about to finish Yoshi's Island, which is like Super Mario World except instead of being about running and jumping and finding secrets, it's about collecting crap. It's a lot better than Mario Sunshine, but it still kinda sucks. If you happen to get hit by a boss, during your first attempt at fighting it, the game's scoring system actually encourages you to give up on winning the fight (thus removing all excitement from the experience) and instead let yourself die so that you can salvage your health points, because they are among the objects you're supposed to collect, and you probably can't get any more of them during the fight. This happens during normal stages too--sometimes a collectible red coin will be waved around just within your reach for a few seconds, only to be carried off because you didn't go for it fast enough. So then you're just stuck playing for completion, rather than for points, which would be fine if the game weren't easy and linear and painfully lacking in interesting secret places for you to reach with your uselessly infinite ability to glide horizontally, but in fact it is all of those things. (The graphics and controls still hold up very well, though. They are excellent! Wickerpedia claims that dudes tried to make this game all pre-rendered because Donkey Kong Country was big then, but then Shigeru Miyamoto just shot them down and went with an awesome cartoonish style with sprite animation that's still impressive--and I'm not talking about the Super FX stuff, although that looked cool too; this game's sprites are just very well done. Way to go Miyamoto!) Also I recently played Ocarina of Time for the first time. It kinda sucked! A game like that needs a neat, precise little tile-world in which any piece of land could conceivably do something or hide something, not a big, dead, expensively-modeled 3D world that's mostly just there to be ridden over (slowly) with your horse, wherein every character or enemy or item has to go through some stupid little 3D animation before you can finish interacting with it. Mario 64 got around this by focusing on the brisk, athletic activity of one character, and making everything a playpen tuned to his abilities, rather than some stupid "world" with towns and a backstory and a commute. Metroid Prime got around it by being astonishingly well-polished. Ocarina of Time does not get around it. Oh god why didn't they let me play the ocarina tunes myself, at my own pace--with barely any more effort, they could have made that a simple little rhythm game, and instead it was a painfully slow cutscene, stuck in there just to punish you for trying to teleport your way around the horse-summoning cutscene and the horse-mounting animation and the horse-drifting-to-a-stop sequence and so forth. And also there's a stupid owl hovering behind you half the time, telling you what to do next just in case you were in danger of having fun trying to figure it out yourself. And also the hit detection is a little off, and I missed the only moderately interesting chain of side quests because just one time when I tried to use an item in front of some lady, I wasn't facing in exactly the right direction so it didn't work, and I went through the rest of the game wondering how I was ever supposed to wake up the sleeping dude in the forest, if waving a frickin rooster in his face and also playing every ocarina tune right next to him wouldn't work (which it didn't). And also there's one of those stupid OCD collection quests in this game too. Also I played the first bit of Grim Fandango. Garbage! I mean I liked the characters and the dialogue, everybody likes those I guess, but other than that it was like a text adventure at one-twentieth speed. Why should I have to painstakingly make my guy climb from one location to another (with the worst controls I've ever encountered in a 3D game) when the puzzle and story would be pretty much the same if I could just type "u" or "w" or whatever and immediately be there? Stupid 3D. Wow, that was a bad run. Oh wait I tried M.U.L.E. too. It was fun! M.U.L.E. wins![/quote]