Overrated/Underrated Geek Media

[Bohandas]

It as fine, but it just wasn't an experience like the original.

For me it just wasn't an experience period. I played it for like 10-15 hours waiting for it to get to the good part because I'd heard so much about it, but it never did

 

[payn]

I used to attribute its popularity to the popularity of weed during the 60's but then they decriminalized weed and I tried it and I don't think weed would have helped

Lot of hot takes here, but this was very funny.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Lot of hot takes here, but this was very funny.

Pretty sure confusion with a different drug that was popular in the 60s is what is going on here.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Half-Life 2- This game was only superficially related to the first game, it was boring to play, the faces were in the uncanny valley, it had less guns, the revolver looked like a plastic toy, the driving segment was gratituitous and poorly executed, and the opening train sequence was even longer and more boring then the one in the first game. The only good thing about it was the gravity gun.

There are at least two of us!

I've been a long-time HL2 "hater"* in the sense that I don't think it's all that. I remember playing it in 2004 and being like "This is it? Nice art direction and gameplay that feels like it has barely moved on from 1998? This is what people are saying is amazing?".

Because shooters moved on a LOT from 1998 to 2004. We had Halo, we had Far Cry 1, we had NOLF, we had Red Faction, we had Deus Ex (I mean, not a shooter but...) and just countless others - in fact in many cases a game came out and then had a sequel between the time HL1 and HL2 came out.

HL2, like I can't deny it had a really strong visual style, and it had a slightly more intelligent and grown-up feeling story than was common, and whilst the faces were uncanny valley, it was kind of the first game I can think of with "proper" facial animations, but... like gameplay innovations? Basically none, in an era when gameplay was being brilliantly innovated. In fact, its gameplay seemed like an actual throwback, just hunting for health packs and ammo.

Ok but gameplay doesn't have to be innovative, right, it just has to be good? But there too, HL2 falls down. Its gameplay was like... good-but-not-great. It was solid. It had some nice level design, but also had some trash level design, particularly any time you were using a vehicle - the vehicles really felt like total trash, especially compared to games like 2000's Halo, or Far Cry 1, which came out earlier in the year than HL2. The levels also lacked the sweeping verticality or complexity that a lot of other games of that era managed. And whilst some had a great sense of being "real places", many did not.

The physics too weren't very impressive to me - Jurassic Park: Trespasser did most of the same in 1998, and by 2004 it was unsurprising to see some physics in shooters - hell, again Far Cry 1 had arguably better physics than HL2, but it just didn't have the gimmicky gravity gun. Halo had some physics iirc!

Enemy AI was completely sub-par. This was again, 4 years after Halo, which had much, much better AI (by which I mean scripted behaviour that makes them seem real and to do seemingly-smart things, nothing more than that), and one of the cool things about the original HL was that the enemies felt relatively smarter than was normal for shooters - but that trend didn't continue. Far Cry 1 also had much smarter and more dangerous enemies, AI-wise.

It's weird because HL1 was amazing to me, a revelation, but HL2? Just another game, and I've never understood the hype of any part of it except the visual design and the face animation (both of which were pretty unusually good). The lack of criticism for the bad part - of which there were many - is also fairly surprising to me.

This is something that seemed to happen fairly regularly from 2000 until about 2015 or 2017 - a solid 8/10 game from a "beloved" studio got greeted and treated like it was a 10/10 super-stunner. It seems like that's largely stopped happening now, and I think it's been on the decline ever since BioShock Infinite, which was a particularly bad example of this. When it got released, got insane "BEST GAME EVER MADE"-type reviews from a lot of publications, but was an actually not-good shooter, like 7/10 at best, had increasingly ditched any semblance of "RPG elements", and had a frankly stupid and incredibly contrived story that, depending on how you look at it, is either mildly and lazily racist, or really, really racist in the special way only well-meaning well-educated wealthy white guy who thinks he's solved it all can be. But that's a whole other story, and BioShock Infinite was only overrated for about 18 months to two years before people started asking why the hell it got such good reviews, so doesn't really fit this list.

* = I mean, I actually quite like it and think it is a good game, but like, not a top-tier incredible game and never was.

Pretty sure confusion with a different drug that was popular in the 60s is what is going on here.

Yeah weed ain't the one...

 

[Guest 85555]

For it's time it kind of is (except for the kaliedoscope thing). My experience has been that a lot of movies (especially sci-fi and horror movies) made between the late 1960's and early 1980's have the same weird pacing where nobody says anything and nothing happens. Movies made after that era don't do that, and neither do the movies that came before; it's like there was some kind of dark age for films during the 1970's.

Which ones do you have in mind? I am struggling to think of a science fiction movie that has the pacing of 2001. 70s movies definitely have different pacing than movies do today. But most of them don't feel like 2001. Maybe I am misunderstanding your meaning or am not well versed enough in science fiction from that era (but plenty of the space movies I have seen from the 60s and 70s feel like a lot more plot is happening than in 2001)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

IDK, there is like a small nugget of an intelligent idea pack around basically a cybperpunk version of Last Action Hero since its recently been mentioned. I dont think it was good then, I dont think its good now; I think its just bad.

What does "good" mean in this context though?

It was an important SF novel that, at the time, had a lot to say about society and the future, and also a bit to say about cyberpunk as a then-increasingly-messy genre, and potentially an irrelevant one as it seemed to a lot of people we were getting Francis Fukuyama's End of History instead of cyberpunk (which connects more with post-cyberpunk ideas).

But as I've said, history has overtaken it from multiple angles:

1) A lot of stuff it came out with is just kind of how it is now (and wasn't in 2003, or even really 2013).

2) Cyberpunk as a genre came back, which undermined this kind of putting flowers on its grave.

3) We didn't get the End of History, really looks like we're getting a really bad cyberpunk dystopia.

I'm assuming, perhaps fatuously that you didn't read it until recently? And I don't think it'll ever work again as anything but remarkable bit of deeply '90s writing.

Also as noted, it doesn't have a hugely compelling story and characters, and maybe that does mean it's not good? Maybe I agree but even if it's not good it's pretty important, and it's historical revisionism to say it's not, if that's what you were saying (which you may well not have been).

To me overrated for a novel like this would mean it wasn't even important or notable as a novel at the time - nor influential - but this was pretty much definitely influential. In fact I think, accidentally, it helped sow the seeds for cyberpunk to come back.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Underrated: Wings. Just watched an episode of this sitcom and even though it lasted eight seasons it seems to be an underground show. You don't hear much about it like you hear about Friends or Seinfeld.

Add in Fresh Prince and maybe Home Improvement and Everyone Loves Raymond, and it seems like Friends and Seinfeld are the only 90s* sitcoms that get revisited**. In the 90s Friends and Seinfeld were big hits (the biggest, at various points), but so were Wings, Mad About You, Spin City, The Nanny, etc. It seems strange, but I haven't thought thoroughly on if it is different for other decades.
*strictly 90s. The Cosby Show, Cheers and Full House and so on also get discussion, but I'm lumping them in with the 80s.
**in discussions. I'm sure people with streaming or the DVDs watch whatever they like.

 

[Mannahnin]

It's also a weird thing - at some level, fans don't want actors like Johnson or Schwarzenegger to be "chameleons." They want that predictability, but they also like it when they sometimes break out of the box or do something different. It's a fine balancing act.

Honestly, I think the only actor I can really think of whose entire "brand" is being a chameleon is Meryl Streep.

Gary Oldman.

Daniel Day-Lewis. Who's also the only guy I can imagine doing as good a job as Viggo with a hypothetical alternate casting of Aragorn.

Johnson is interesting in that I agree that he doesn't challenge himself (compare with Vin Diesel doing stuff like Find Me Guilty), but I kind of respect that he's trying to make being A Movie Star still a thing. It seems like studios have, at least since the MCU, been shying away from Movie Stars who draw an audience all by themselves but also have inconvenient preferences and contract leverage, in favor of focusing on IPs they own and characters they can re-cast. How many young Movie Stars do we even have nowadays? Folks who will get people to go to the theater for a movie just because they're in it?

Highest Grossing Stars of 2025 at the Domestic Box Office

This list shows the highest grossing stars of 2025 based on the domestic box office of the movies they had a leading role in in 2025 and the two preceeding years.

m.the-numbers.com

 

[TiQuinn]

Add in Fresh Prince and maybe Home Improvement and Everyone Loves Raymond, and it seems like Friends and Seinfeld are the only 90s* sitcoms that get revisited**. In the 90s Friends and Seinfeld were big hits (the biggest, at various points), but so were Wings, Mad About You, Spin City, The Nanny, etc. It seems strange, but I haven't thought thoroughly on if it is different for other decades.
*strictly 90s. The Cosby Show, Cheers and Full House and so on also get discussion, but I'm lumping them in with the 80s.
**in discussions. I'm sure people with streaming or the DVDs watch whatever they like.

Frasier gets a lot of rewatching. King of the Hill.

The one I thought was criminally underrated was NewsRadio.

 

[TiQuinn]

Daniel Day-Lewis. Who's also the only guy I can imagine doing as good a job as Viggo with a hypothetical alternate casting of Aragorn.

Johnson is interesting in that I agree that he doesn't challenge himself (compare with Vin Diesel doing stuff like Find Me Guilty), but I kind of respect that he's trying to make being A Movie Star still a thing. It seems like studios have, at least since the MCU, been shying away from Movie Stars who draw an audience all by themselves but also have inconvenient preferences and contract leverage, in favor of focusing on IPs they own and characters they can re-cast. How many young Movie Stars do we even have nowadays?

Highest Grossing Stars of 2025 at the Domestic Box Office

This list shows the highest grossing stars of 2025 based on the domestic box office of the movies they had a leading role in in 2025 and the two preceeding years.

m.the-numbers.com

View attachment 402049

Yep, forgot about Day-Lewis.