I’ll go first:

MarioKart Wii being the 10th highest rated MarioKart is genuinely one of the most insane takes I’ve ever come across— that game easily competes with MK8Deluxe as being my favorite! The tech in the game is unrivaled, and the amount of iconic courses (e.g. Coconut Mall, Grumble Volcano, Moo Moo Meadows) is insane. All without any post-launch content too (unlike MK8Deluxe & MKWorld)! All packed in, day one, for only $50USD. Crazy!!

I wonder how many of the reviewers played only with motion controls and if that hurt the score.

MK Wii is definitely up there as one of the best MK games. Probably top 3.

78 for Fire emblem Radiant Dawn is a crazy score. I'm sure it would be at least 84~86 range if released today. The ethos during 7th generation was "gaming need to be easy and accessible to sell to anyone", and this was even more true for Wii Games. There was also a big amount of criticism because a strategy game don't make good use of motion controls, the horror!


78 for Detroit Become Human is also a crazy take. It's easily a high-80 game

Code Veronica and Skyward Sword were definitely not 93-94 games. Scores for the remasters/rereleases feel more in line with the average sentiment.

I don't want to come in with a bunch of rants on AAA games or some indie darlings I feel are very wrong and way too high. Be here until I am 98 years old.

God Hand. One of the best beat em ups ever made. Critics didn't get it because it's complex and highly challenging. Over the years people have come around and realized how amazing it is. 

This could be a thread about what me and my friend call "Fuck Japan era" where in the 2000s there was a high western racist take in Japanese media, esp games.  I won't dive too much into that for this thread but my avatar is one of the games I will mention. Armored Core got shat on by reviews. Jeff Gerstman admitted he didn't care so he would assign AC reviews to a freelancer or new guy. They didn't want to either.  Only after it became popular to suck From Softs dick did an AC game get great reviews. Funny thing is AC6 is probably middle of the pack for AC games. I consider the best one Armored Core For Answer. Also directed by Miyazaki. The games speed is insane. The best mech in the series with White Glint (avatar). Patches from Souls games first appearance.

Gungrave has a cult following enough to even get a PS5 game which fans enjoy but critics never understood it and docked it. They are really fun arcades games. They were purposefully made and this is the devs give or take own words. So a drunk salary man could come home and play the game. They are simple fun but not a Simple 2000 game.

Nightshade PS2. A Sequel to the excellent Shinobi PS2 game. This game got a lot of hate but I have now finished it 3 times in a the last month. It's a good game. Some bosses are trickier but other than that it's pretty much more of what made the first game so good.

Ghost Rider PS2. This is one of those 7/10 games. Not the 4's and 5's it was given. It is a solid Devil May Cry clone licensed from the awful 2007 movie of the same name. The combat is solid. While levels are mostly just combat after Combat where PS2 era DMC was more RE but with stylish combat. It's still fun for what it is and between levels you have motorcycle segments which can be fun.  Honesty, after Soulstice it;s the best western take on DMC I have seen. 

Sticking with the PS2 theme. PS2 contra games. After the abysmal PS1 contra games.  Konami went back to the drawing board and in my mind got it right. Shattered Soldier and Neo are really fun games. They are brutally difficult but oh so fun.Shattered is classic side scrolling Contra and Neo is a top down game. Neo has a playable Samurai and you can run on helicopter blades. Shattered has the 2nd player from NES contra as the villain! 

I will probably post more later but  I don't want this post to be 5000 games.

Fallout: New Vegas is a rather notorious case, in that a one point shortfall in Metacritic rating (84) made the venture unprofitable for Obsidian.

Fallout 3 has a 93 MC rating. Fallout 3 was admittedly really neat when I first played it, having never played the series before, but its story was really as linear as any Japanese RPG, and the ending was very anticlimactic, to the point where they released a DLC to fix player complaints. It has a lot of nice set-pieces for its time.

New Vegas outshines it in every way. They did the best they could with the game engine to improve the visuals. It doesn't look hugely different, but it is brighter and more lively, and manages to convey that the Mojave Wasteland is a land trying to heal from the Great War. The actual game mechanics and story structure are where NV truly shines above its Bethesda-made predecessor. There are true branching paths and multiple endings, the stats really mean something outside of combat, and the writing is much better.  Rather than a general "karma" rating, you had a reputation with each faction - and both your good and bad interactions were figured into that reputation; by helping the NCR in some missions while working against them in others, you could obtain a sort of "mixed" reputation with them, for instance, instead of being outright villified or lionized depending on what your most recent action with them was. Your choices had weight in part because many of them were irrevocable, unlike 3 (and 4). And these things all factored into the endings.

Was NV perfect? Absolutely not. It had all the same flaws and bugs that 3, Oblivion, and pretty much every other Bethesda title had. Given that, other than already having a basic framework built on the previous games for them, they had less resources and money to make the game than Todd Howard did, Obsidian did a fine job.

In retrospect, I would reverse the scores of the two games, or at least drop 3 down to a 87-89 range while awarding a 93 to NV.

Earthbound.

I was always amazed at how fervent the fandom for Earthbound was. In its day, it got absolutely pilloried in game magazines (even in Nintendo Power) as being childish-looking and clunky compared to Final Fantasy III (VI) or Chrono Trigger, while providing no clear direction on where to go. And even a friend of mine said, "there's a reason why Nintendo had to package it with a strategy guide." The infamous scratch-and-sniff ad ("This game stinks!") didn't help. The sales kinda-sorta reflected it. It sold 150,000 copies, which honestly wasn't bad for an RPG in the mid-90s, but Nintendo paid Marcus Lindblum to localize the entire game, not to mention the cost of the packaging.  They didn't make a profit on it.

The critics definitely got that one wrong, judging by the response when it was released on Wii U VC. Some of it may have been the whetting of appetites of RPG-starved N64 owners over pictures of the eventually canceled N64 version of Mother 3 (Earthbound 64), not to mention Ness being a charter character in Super Smash Bros. 

Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness and (to a lesser extent) 64.

Not perfect games, and the camera could be a nightmare. But they were an ambitious attempt to bring Castlevania into 3-D, and had great atmosphere and music. Unfortunately, they also came out in the shadow of Ocarina of Time. I guess I could also say the same for Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, though that didn't get reviewed too badly. It was probably my favorite third party N64 game (even counting Rare). It did 3-D Zelda before Ocarina of Time did.

Digimon World games.

Binary Domain getting a 74 on Metacritic is crazy to me as it's an incredibly fun game and its destructible robot foes that shatter apart as you shoot them makes the combat so satisfying. 

On the other end of the spectrum, GTA4 doesn't deserve anywhere near a 98.