Frontier: First Encounters
Despite the bad rap I really liked this game.

Might and Magic 8 was supposedly a bomb, but I really enjoyed it (course I liked the series so for me it was more of a good thing)

Enter the Matrix. The fact that it was based on a movie license should tell you everything you need to know about its reputation. Combat was repetitive and the environments bland, but it was still fun to do the bullet time stuff.

Wow, I must say I am suprised that anyone would call Morrowind mediocre, I am glad you did not listen it is one of the best roleplayers I have ever played, and in my opinion still superior to Oblivion.
As for Batman begins, I have no experience with it, however I did notice it in the bargain bin at Blockbusters recently, perhaps I will pick it up and give it A go :)

Surprisingly, this actually wasn't the case. We're both big supporters of Hideo's drawn-out cutscenes, and don't believe it's a legitimate complaint against the series. Playing an MGS game and saying "ooh too many cutscenes" is a bit like going to Germany and saying "ooh too many Germans."
He also liked the Raiden thing, and thought it did a great job of both messing with the player's expectations and making Snake more cool.
As far as I remember, his biggest problems were:
-the members of Dead Cell are too broad
-too many twists on the same bit of plot, like Hideo couldn't decide which 'shocking truth' to run with and decided to just use everything he could think of, one after the other
-the RAY battle completely defanged Metal Gears, making them irreversibly un-scary
And to be fair, I agree with all of these to a certain extent. I'm just more forgiving of them. And so is he, actually; he's since become a pretty big supporter of MGS2, even moreso now that he's played MGS4.

No, it really was awful. The controls, the interface, everything about it looked like it had been slapped together as a school project. There was really no excuse for it after all the hype and development time. It had a few good ideas, but they were almost all ruined by glitches/poor controls.

I really enjoyed Blacksite. Sure, it was released too early and contained one or two glitches but the visuals were some of the best I've seen of late.

I am glad that somebody else enjoyed this game as much as I did; I put a lot of hours into this one. I also managed to sink a lot of time into a Diablo clone called Revenant that was pretty cool.

You probably shouldn't talk to those people anymore.
Ever.
;-)
I'll throw in: Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
Some people really hated that game and it did have its bugs and flaws. But it was more of an upolished gem. Loved it up until the slightly disappointing end.
Oh, and in a similar way: Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
(almost Deus Ex.. but kind of runs out of steam. get the community patches. )
(some people judge games on polish, some judge them on moments of brightness. Thats why some people hated Dark Corners and Alone in the Dark, and others loved them).

I can understand the bad reviews for the new Alone in The Dark because it feels like not a good game as far as games go, so i think hard core gamers mostly find it lacking for them... BUT i thought the game was great, it had a pretty good (if not slightly predictable) storyline. But the thing i liked most was i found it visually spectacular from start to finish i thought i was actually playing a movie and if you can get past the doing it over and over until you get it right the driving scene through the collapsing city was awesome!!!

The best one I can think of is Blue Stinger for the Dreamcast.
Horrible animations, awful balancing, obcure gameplay points.
super first generation dreamcast game.
To be honest I hated it at first but somehow I got so pulled in that I finished and enjoyed it. Typically if I bring this up in a crowd of gamers I get weird looks

Daikatana.
I lived in Dallas during id's rise and the formation of Ion Storm. I got to read about the drama of Daikatana development in the newspaper, on the gaming sites (howdy Blue and Redwood!) and in the plan files. I played the pre-release demo. Then the game came out and ... well, you probably know the rest. I thought the game was too harshly criticized because I thought the demo was ok (yes, even with the robot frogs). But I never bought it, because all the talk was about how bad it sucked.
So several years later I'm browsing through the clearance rack at EB Games and there it was for $1.99. So I bought it to play on my laptop while traveling.
And it was fun! Not the greatest game in the world, but far from awful and quite entertaining. If it ever shows up on GOG, give it a chance. Or add to the vitriol, if you prefer. :-)

Well, don't believe everything what they say...
Thief series (I, II and III) - three of the best games i ever played. And i have played a lot. Beside that, these are very original... Forget about "first person shooter", get ready for "first person theft" :)

Oh yeah -- I loved Vampire: Bloodlines, myself.
Even with Patch 1.2, it was great.
And yes, with Wesp's or Tess's patches, too much is really fixed up to not use any of those, nowadays.
Alone in the Dark 2008 is a game that really could use some polish with the car physics by tightening those physics up more than anything else. I also wish I could reconfigure my X360 Gamepad, but it's not too big of an issue -- as controls are fine there. But, oddly enough, you can reconfigure the PC KB/mouse controls. Also, the KB/mouse controls are fine in first person perspective, but in 3rd person they are not too good and feel very clunky. Regardless of those issues, I still do like it.

I think they needed to tighten up the graphics a little bit. (Sorry, you left yourself wide open for that one)
I've been trying to think of a game people warned me against that I ended up liking but I really can't think of any. Oh, well, recently a friend said Tales of Vesperia was terrible but I've found it decently entertaining.
I was also once told that Fallout 2 and Deus Ex sucked but those were because the guy that played them didn't get past the beginnings, which were admittedly crap.