You have certainly led an interesting life, Mr. Zest.

When it was first released it was not bad and it was a great showcase of what was possible with semi-non-linear games and the idea of making the environment a more crucial part of the game, but I don't think anyone is in denial about how awful it aged.

And, oh, the single most overrated game of all time would not even remotely be Shenmue. It would probably be more like the Halo series or Final Fantasy or something.

Shenmue was never highly rated in the first place. It was "hyped", I guess, but there was still way more follow-through than practically all the recent games that have been coming out.

Shenmue really was terrible, even in 1999. I vividly remember my disappointment at the time, and the game has aged atrociously since then. It was initially billed as a proto-GTA3 open-world epic that promised Virtua Fighter quality combat in an immaculate recreation of suburban Japan in the '80's. What we got was hours of pacing up and down the same three blocks, talking to absurdly racist caricatures, and capping off the hours of uncomfortable small talk with exhilarating forklift puzzles.

Those forklifts. Those fucking fucking forklifts.

At one point a real live human being, capable of rational thought and complex reasoning, actually said "Let's stop the kung-fu murder mystery so we can stack boxes in a warehouse."

Yeah, well, that's life.

Compare it to Beatdown Fists of Vengeance which came out about 6 years later:

http://youtu.be/mNp5J131Y_o

I was going to make a forklift joke, but I never beat Shenmue because of that, so fuck forklifts infinity.

Shenmue was fun in a B-movie sense, which isn't surprising, since it's based on a genre full of fun B-movies. I played it with a friend (we took turns controlling it); I don't think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much single-player.

This marks the only time in human history Chocolate Jesus has been remotely satisfied.