I noticed something about myself recently; that some of my favourite video games of all time are also some of the most disliked games by reviewers and other games over the years!

It’s a shame really, those great memories I had in some games, wasn’t experienced by a lot of others due to bad reviews. Reviews determine what people buy and what they don’t, but sometimes you just need to try something for yourself.

Take Alice: Madness Begins for instance, it recently came out for the Xbox 360 and PS3, it pretty much got panned by every critic that matters, yet I had been looking forward to that game for about a year, when it arrived I was blown away, by how easy it is to pick up, the graphics are captivating and the music is stunning, yet it only got 4/10 from some reviewers – try it for yourself and see what you think.

So here it is, Games that I loved and nobody else seemed to…

Alice: Madness Returns (Xbox 360)

As I just mentioned, Alice was a game that got bad reviews, but it was a great game! Wandering around the world of Wonderland is a treat in itself, the world is beautifully realised and all levels that you play across are varied in their styles.

The game is solid in length too (you don’t say that much anymore) with the campaign taking me roughly around 15 hours to finish, you can then go back and try to get all the collectibles; something I love to try and achieve in platformers.

Gameplay is very simple and really easy to pick up from the get-go, the soundtrack is brilliant, the supporting characters are all very well designed and there are some beautiful 2D levels to play (see main image) to break up the rest of the game.

4/10 – Really?

So why all the negativity surrounding the reviews? Well it would seem it was too long for most gamers, becoming repetitive and a bit of a bore, if i’m honest, the gameplay never really differs and your different weapons are gained very early on, so by some of the latter chapters things do become very similar but, this wasn’t enough to stop me from playing, especially as this is of course near the end.

The game wasn’t out a week and it’s already very cheap, so if someone is looking for a beautiful looking platform game (there aren’t many now) that will take up a bit of their time then I definitely recommend it!

Cruis’n USA (N64)

Remember this? You might have seen it in the arcades, it arrived roughly around two years after it hit the arcade, technology had moved on quite a lot by then and when the game finally arrived on the Nintendo 64 it was criticised for looking bad and playing bad – yet I still bought it.

I think the reason why was, at the time there wasn’t any other driving games out for the N64, they were really few and far between and I think I just had my heart set on buying it, it also had pretty box art.

There were only 4 cars to use (screw you Gran Turismo!) with an extra 3 hidden vehicles including a police car and a school bus (which, was a nightmare to control). There was roughly only around five tracks too which, actually had some nice details to them, I mean just look at those tree textures…

Best tree textures never.

Rosco McQueen – PSone

I know what you’re thinking – You’ve never, ever heard of this game. It’s fine most people haven’t either, and the people who have know it as a bad game that got bad reviews… I still bought it.

Rosco McQueen was a firefighter that was equipped with his own fire axe and water hose who’s character design seemed to be based on Johnny Bravo who had to try and put out all the fires in an apartment building, which coincidentally had been set by an evil genius called Sylvester T. Square and his little robotic minions. Sounds great right? It was.

I’m only showing you a snippet of the box here, it was too awesome to show it all

The problem was it was way too easy, it was to be fair advertised as a kids game, but that didn’t stop anyone from completing it within at least four hours of gaming, and that’s at a stretch! More like two hours, also the levels were very repetitive and the music as I remember was god damn awful.

None of this stopped me from really enjoying my few hours with that game though – good times.

Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360

Yep, fairly recent this one, and I didn’t even buy the ‘best’ version of the game, that being the PS3 version which, was supposed to be graphically superior to the 360 version. I’m not sure about that, but this Final Fantasy game got some of the lowest scores of any game from the popular FF series.

“Why do you hate my game so much?!”

It was too linear for most gamers, it took too long to get in to (25 hours to be exact), the story was a bit of a shambles and it was rather repetitive.

Then why after all that, did I spend almost 100 hours playing this game?

Not sure, to be honest, I’m the first to admit that I’m a bit of an achievement/trophy enthusiast and will always go out of my way to attain them on games if I can, and I think this is why I spent so long on this game, I completed the game after about 30 hours, yet played it for another 70 hours collecting, battling and generally grinding away at the game mopping up the remaining achievements I needed (one which included owning every single item in the game).

For general gamers this game’s probably not for them, and I almost want to say people who liked the other FF games won’t like it either but the game for me had some charm about it; it looked stunning, the characters were likeable (especially Sazh) and the battle mechanic was stripped back to something you could easily get into.

LOST: Via Domus – Xbox 360

How could a video game based on the best TV series out at the time not be good? Exactly, so why were the reviews so negative?

OK maybe the character models were god awful, half of the cast didn’t do the voices and it was extremely short but simply being able to explore the LOST island was enough for me to pre-order this game at full price and in-game the game looked beyond good for the time:

“Ellioooott”

The game evolves around another survivor of flight 815 Elliott Maslow, who was created so that the story of the game could stand alone as part of the overarching story of LOST and I thought it was a great idea, plus Elliott was much more interesting than Jack was anyway!

When the game arrived, me and my girlfriend sat down and five/six hours later it was over, but we loved every minute of it, finding the secret hatches, exploring caves, solving puzzles, running away from the smoke monster – there were some really memorable moments for me and it’s a shame that more people didn’t pick the game up, true, the game was for die-hard fans of the series but if you weren’t a fan – then I don’t care what you think anyway!

Dark Sector – Xbox 360

Nobody bought Dark Sector, Nobody, it really had very little promotion – it may have elsewhere but in the UK it didn’t even exist to most gamers yet the game was brilliant.

The game was a Gears of War style cover-based shooter, which played a lot like Resident Evil – sounds great right?

You also had a ‘Glaive’, which was basically an awesome boomerang that you could throw at people, dismembering them in the process… that boomerang could also be covered in electricity or fire for added damage – A FIRE BOOMERANG!!!111

The game looked stunning and played very smoothly and was just so overlooked I don’t even think a lot of magazines got around to reviewing the game – a real shame.

BOOOOOM.

The game was decent in length, had great graphics for the time and the story was captivating enough to keep me playing through, also the cool arsenal of weapons as well as your awesome glaive made for a fun game, especially when coming across human soldiers who you could really give a beating to with your new fancy boomerang.

This game is next to nothing now, appearing in bargain bins everywhere, this isn’t a reflection on the quality of the game, just a lack of promotion cost this game dearly, check it out.

If anyone can think of any more games for this list that they feel got ignored and just shouldn’t have then get in touch!