8 Dumb Video Games That Made You Feel Like A GENIUS
These games might be dumb, but they made you feel like a golden god.
It's often said that there's fine line between genius and stupidity, and that's just as true of video games as it is of anything else.
It's incredibly easy to take one look at a game and either dismiss or embrace it as a purely dumb, stupid, silly experience that won't leave much of a lasting impression with you.
But even games with seemingly braindead concepts can actually leave you feeling like you're a galaxy brain genius.
It's a tricky balance to pull off, to surreptitiously make the player feel ultra-smart in the middle of a game that might seem so simple and so bereft of genuinely clever ideas.
But that only confirms the secret genius of each game itself, whose mechanics and ideas are far smarter than they might first appear.
Again, it's a gambit that many games have failed to successfully execute, but when it works you'll be marvelling at how this apparently idiotic game has made you feel like an actual genius.
These games all have a fundamental silliness about them, and yet despite their conceptual stupidity, they made you feel like the smartest person in the room...
8. Guitar Hero
The premise of the Guitar Hero franchise - and by extension its cousin Rock Band - is fundamentally ridiculous, that rather than buy a second-hand guitar and start learning an instrument for real, you're going to buy a pricey plastic peripheral and pretend-rock out by mashing some colour-coded buttons.
It's a conceit so silly and yet so pervasive in pop-culture that it was parodied by South Park way back in 2007, making fun of the very idea that people would rather dance around with a toy guitar than put in the leg-work to learn proper.
But the basic wish fulfillment allure of Guitar Hero speaks for itself - if you can survive Dragonforce's infamously mettle-testing "Through the Fire and Flames" on Expert difficulty, you'll feel like a golden rock god.
And rightly so, honestly - as resoundingly daft as Guitar Hero might be, the hand-eye co-ordination and all-around dexterity required to complete the series' trickier songs is undeniable.
Once you get into a hypnotic flow state mid-song, it feels like you've unlocked something primal inside, and hell, it might even give you the confidence to go pick up an actual guitar.