Games that disappointed you

[Kemmler0]

Half Life 2: This game actually fooled people into believing it had a story line. It was like mass hysteria. I am so sick of people telling me how good the story line is, and then standing there slackjawed when is ask them to explain it to me.

It is exactly the same as Half Life 1, which was brilliant obviously, with a shiny new skin and the afore mentioned story line problem with added plot holes.

I will never get that hour back.

 

[CyberAkuma]

Oh boy, where to begin.

The latest game that really dissapointed me was Guitar Hero 3 - Legends of Rock on the PC.
The reason? Rediculous system requirements, and incompability with almost all guitars that aren't sold with the GH3 bundle.

I was so looking forward to this game, and I even bought a Guitar Controller for the PC.
I was so happy because I got the guitar controller spanking brand new for a very reduced price.

When the game was released for the PC - oh boy what a mess it was.
For starters, how about the minimum system requirements - 2.4 Ghz CPU, 7600GT and 2 GB ram.
The recommended hardware - 8800GT or a Radeon HD2900.
The fact that the game had higher system requirements than Crysis is just despicable.

This was a splendidly miserably bad port to the PC where probably the coders didn't care about optimizing it for the majority if the PC users and they pretty much laid the rest of the work they should have completed on the users by upping the system requirements to rediculous levels. The game runs on my PC but it lags heavily when many notes come at once making the entire game pointless.
Also - the guitar I had - which was spanking brand new had a lot of problems with the game. It would strum for notes without me touching the strumbar, star power triggering not working properly, ugh.

Resident Evil 4 for the PC - a truly despicable port that looked more awful than the PlayStation 2 version of the game.
The game where missing out on 3D effects and lightning when it came out, also no support for mouse and there was no way I was gonna play that game with the keyboard. Yet another proof of lazy coders not doing what they were supposed to do. I mean come on, the game was ported 2 years after the PS2 version was out. To add further insult to injury - the movie-sequences in the game where pre-rendered and they looked WORSE than the graphics in the game.
This game was one of the main battleships of the GameCube when it came out - reduced to nothing but a pile of ashes on the PC. I returned the game really fast to the store.

I remember a very old game on the Dream Cast - Arabian Nights : Prince of Persia.
See, I loved the other old Prince of Persia games, I could spend hours playing the very first classical Prince of Persia on the very old Mac laptops my dad used to have.
Even if the game was entirely in back and white I loved it in every possible way.

The sequel was... well basically an expansion map pack but still no way near as big of a stinker as the 3D incarnation of it was to become.
Severly broken controls and camera which lead to extreme frustrations when jumping over botomless pits required exact precision. It made me so angry that I never ever touched a PoP game ever again, until my friend really convinced me to try Two Thrones.
Now I have regained some faith in the franchise.

That's all I can think of for now.

 

[Zera]

Im gonna have to add Guitar Hero 3 for the Wii as well. They hardly put any work into this one. The graphics look worse than the ps2 version in my opinion and you cant download songs. And it may be just me but I didnt like the line-up of music this time around. and I could of swore that the guitar was not responsive at times.

 

[hooliganyouth]

Y'know...

as a Warhammer 40K fan I have to say that I was disappointed by "Fire Warrior". It wasn't bad but it wasn't all that great either. I have actually played it twice - once then sold it then bought it again after a year or two to give it another shot. It just seems like there's so much potential and "Fire Warrior" just didn't do it justice.

 

[The Irrelevant Gamer]

I have to agree, and further expand on what CyberAkuma said about Resident Evil 4 for the PC. This will go down as one of the worst ports of all time, and is very nearly a crime against humanity. Ubisoft should be ashamed. Yes that is correct. Ubisoft ported it because apparently Capcom couldn't be bothered. The trouble is Ubisoft didn't seem to bother either. When you port something to the PC you should at least make an attempt to integrate mouse controls, but Ubisoft didn't even bother to do this on the main menu, and it was all downhill from there.

Also, hooliganyouth, I have to disagree about Fire Warrior. It was bad. It was really bad.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

as a Warhammer 40K fan I have to say that I was disappointed by "Fire Warrior". It wasn't bad but it wasn't all that great either. I have actually played it twice - once then sold it then bought it again after a year or two to give it another shot. It just seems like there's so much potential and "Fire Warrior" just didn't do it justice.

I too was disappointed by Fire Warrior; decent plot and level design, but dumb-as-a-post AI, floaty animations, mediocre multiplayer, and frickin' spyware embedded within the GameSpy interface.

And I even own 2500 points of Tau for the tabletop game.

-- Steve

 

[jimmythenoob]

hellgate london...i never got my hopes to high for it but when it came....i swear its one of the worst games ive played in the past 2 years, in near enough every game i play i find somthing about it i like, here i found none.

 

[Basil The Baker]

Spyro a new beginning

any "hardcore" spyro nerd will let you know making it linear is a pile of saggy balls.

 

[hooliganyouth]

And I even own 2500 points of Tau for the tabletop game.

Imperial Guard and Inquisition myself.

 

[kieranlol]

Fable and Kotor 2 =/

 

[raankh]

STALKER: Oblivion Lost / Shadow of Chernobyl / Whatever Colon Title You Wish
(pun intended)

Even after all the hype and obvious failings, I still had hopes .... In particular concerning AI and ALife.

Man, was I disappointed.

 

[jimmythenoob]

STALKER: Oblivion Lost / Shadow of Chernobyl / Whatever Colon Title You Wish
(pun intended)

Even after all the hype and obvious failings, I still had hopes .... In particular concerning AI and ALife.

Man, was I disappointed.

personally i didnt like stalker at first and left it be, then i went back to it a few months later (although with updated pc) and couldnt leave it be.

 

[Kesash]

Well my latest venture into gaming, Hellgate London has been a BIG disappointment. Such a good IP, totally screwed over with shoddy coding, bad game design decisions and in general a lack of care that SHOULD have been taken to make an excellent game.

Heaven forbid if Warhammer ends up sucking, as that is my LAST great hope to keep me going in MMORPG's.

What do you expect from EA? It's par for the course from "E"xtreme "A"cquisitions (I'm being nice!) Release, Patch, rinse, repeat.

(Heard in the background) "WE ARE EA! YOU WILL BE ACQUIRED! RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!"

 

[Kesash]

Master of Orion 2--for all the really great stuff they put in, they took out the one thing that totally differentiated that game from every other: simultaneous research of each technology area.

Cheeze, did you ever play MOO3? NOW THAT WAS SUCKAGE OF SEWAGE!!!

 

[Kesash]

So far, the most disappointed game for me has been...

Mass Effect.

OH GOD YES! I'm playing through this right now.

Folks, this is one game you don't need to believe the hype about!

I had more fun playing Starflight I & II (yes, I remember those!)

*Realization Hits* Mass Effect is nothing more than a dumbed down remake of Starflight with pretty lights and sounds!

 

[Dom Camus]

I'd have to vote for FF-XII.

What really shocked me wasn't the dull plot (in completely the wrong style for FF) so much as the way they didn't seem to understand what made their own genre work. (I'll spare you the details of my long rant on the bad design of FF-XII [http://bateleur.livejournal.com/223910.html].)

For a long time I just assumed this was some kind of epic level incompetence until a friend of mine pointed out that it was probably deliberate, shifting the game towards a more grind-oriented MMO-like style. At which point my verdict changed from incompetence to worst design decision ever.

In fact this game actually managed to un-sell me a PS3. I would have bought one automatically just to play FF-XIII. Whereas now I have no interest in FF-XIII, so I've held of buying any next-gen console until one of them has a couple of titles anywhere close to worth the cost of the machine.

 

[Phantom Planet Is Missing]

Bioshock. Where's the Deus-Ex or even System Shock 2-level RPG factors? Again, pretty but dumb. A total waste of time.

Right, I'm pretty tired of this.

It's an FPS, first and foremost. It never pretended to be anything else, ever. Look up one of Ken Levine's interviews, at no point did he say it would be an FPS RPG, just and FPS with some RPG elements. As similar as it is in some ways to SS2, it is distinctly not System Shock 2, merely a spiritual successor.

I enjoy it quite alot on those terms.

 

[soladrin]

halo 3, flame me if you will, its the worst in the series, the campaign was a piece of shit even compared to 2, yes, it had some big battles, but theres not a single level that made me think "oh i wanna try that in a different way" where as even in halo 2 i played a lot of the campaign again and again, in halo 3, i just finished for the story and gamer score :\ the multiplayer is okay, not that amazing either, hardly anything new, "but theres the new deployables!" so? most of them suck, or dont change a battle at all the only ones you can actually use is the power drain and bubble shield, the others probably help your enemie just as much. And after 2 matchmaking matches i was bored with for next hour again. Most of the new weapons suck or just arent fun "im looking at you spikers" the only new weapon i like are the maulers, dual wield shotguns are fun but thats about it, halo 3 = biggest dissapointment this year.

 

[mintfresh]

KOTOR II, because it was unfinished, after the first one this was a real letdown, especially that they hadn't finished making the droid factory level.

Halo, I'm not a huge fan of FPSs, but I do play some of the good ones, but I just found this to be just generic mediocrity done very well. There was no innovation, just polished versions of things I'd grown bored of years ago. That only applies to single player though, multiplayer and co-op were much more fun.

Fable, just didn't deliver what it had promised.

Deus Ex: Invisible War didn't bother me much, but then I played it before I played the original, had it been the other way round I'm sure I'd have enjoyed it less. Also, I liked FFX-2, it had one of the best battle systems of a FF, and a return in some form of the job system. I think a lot of people (not all, but some) never bothered to get past the girl-power j-pop veneer, to find that the game was actually fun, y'know, fun? That thing games are supposed to be. I feel it would get more respect had it not been a FF game.

 

[madmurch]

G-Police 3, for never existing. Just what happened to sci-fi flying games for the Playstation? Did they all migrate to the PC while I was playing "G-Police 2 - Weapons of Justice"?

Command and Conquer: Tiberium Sun. The first cut-scene with Joe Kucan and James Earl Jones was great - then McNeil showed up. Bugger. He actually said "you son of a *****!" in a friendly, welcoming manner! The Writers Guild must have been on strike back then, too.

Assassin's Creed, for reasons that I guess have already been mentioned: not enough gameplay variety. Still, I had always been a bit cautious about it, so this wasn't exactly a huge disappointment.

And finally, Final Fantasy XII. A good RPG in some respects, but the ultra-generic plot and the fact that every character has very similar stats stops me from loving it as I loved FFX.