10 Video Games Better Than The Sum Of Their Parts – WhatCulture
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three or more totally can.At the climax of the 2024 Game Awards, previous GOTY winner Swen Vincke gave a standing-ovation worthy speech about the formula for creating a Game Of The Year contender (essentially, “don’t treat your employees like dirt and your customers like suckers”). It was a powerful speech, and it prompted the thought: What else makes a great game?As well as the outside factors Swen focused on, what happens in the game itself is obviously crucial to how its perceived by the player. If a game is well made, well written and consistently fun to play, then it’ll clearly be in with a shout come awards season. But what about those games that botch nearly every one of these factors, yet still manage to leave the player with a smile on their face?This article will take a look at games that screw up many of the fundamentals of game design, assaulting the player with a hodgepodge of poor graphics, badly executed core mechanics and nonsensical writing – sometimes all three. Yet somehow, each title on this list transcends their base ingredients to create something miraculous. And few games exemplify that concept better than the first entry…The above photo is one of the first images SEGA released of Sonic Frontiers. As a statement of intent it works well, showcasing the large, open areas that Sonic would be exploring in his largest ever game.What the photo doesn’t show, however, is the incredible amount of jank the blue hedgehog would come across in almost every step of his journey.Even after two years of updates, Frontiers still feels like a working prototype for an open-world Sonic game rather than an actual finished product. Graphics pop in with a frequency that would shame the N64, Sonic’s movement is somehow too sticky and too loose, and the Cyberspace levels are a haphazard jumble of assets from previous games that feel like they were put together by a hungover AI.Yet, when you’re just exploring the world, all those problems melt away. Zooming around Sonic Frontiers’ open areas gives the best impression yet of what it would be like to actually be Sonic, and there’s a simple, pure joy in just bombing across the map at ludicrous speeds. It’s perfect podcast gaming, something you can just switch on and enjoy the vibes to while your brain learns about the agricultural yield of 1970s Kentucky.As a game, Frontiers is a buggy, frustrating mess. But as an experience, it’s utterly compelling.
Hello! My name’s Iain Tayor. I write about video games, wrestling and comic books, and I apparently can’t figure out how to set my profile picture correctly. The Untold History of Resident Evil
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