What games that were bad that you saw potential in?

[Not G. Ivingname]

What games that sucked you saw had elements with a bit more polish could of been great? For example, Sonic 06 has horrible controls, annoying characters a story below the level of a lot of fanfictions I've read, and the title character is only playable for about a tenth of the game. Yet it had a great villain (Mephiles), Blaze controlled how a good 3D sonic should (she actually fast for once and went where the player wanted her to), and it had a few themes and scenes that I really liked. At on time Shadow is shown he is going to be betrayed by the entire human race and is going to be captured by a close friend. Another time, Silver is just sitting quitely after getting conficting messages from Mephiles and Amy (though her's was more brought about by her fangirlism then anything) thinking if murder really is justifiable to save the world. Of course any amount of thought provoking moments were quashed as soon as I had to push buttons again.

What was the game for you that almost was great, but was pulled down to horridness.

 

[Cherry Cola]

I guess I'm going to be boring and say Dark Void.

Because really, it's the first one that comes up in my mind.

 

[Legion]

In before Halo, Modern Warfare, Half Life or any other insanely popular game.

Turok for the 360 had some great ideas, it was just let down by a terribly short campaign, lack of exploration (it was set on a jungle world for Christ sake) and a lack of imagination when it came to "finishing moves".

The guns were pretty nice, although there were not enough of them. The idea of stealth wasn't too bad but the game lacked the opportunity to use it properly. The ability to make dinosaurs attack enemy people was good, but again, the amount of times you could do it were limited.

It had the potential but was lazily made.

I guess I'm going to be boring and say Dark Void.

Because really, it's the first one that comes up in my mind.

Hell, I thought that just from the Demo. The flying seemed great, but as soon as combat became involved I couldn't believe they thought it was good enough for this generation.

 

[Tav73]

Uncanny timing since I just 'reviewed' it. (Review to be taken in the loosest sense possible)

Tunnel Rats 1968, I gave it a chance for some 'black sheep' potential. It jumped all over my dreams and then laughed at me by being really dire.

 

[Eliam_Dar]

Lair, the game had potential, ruined for so many bad choices and glitches, if they had worked on the game a bit more it would have been great. The idea of riding a flying dragon to go to battle is great.

 

[mihajelko]

I guess I'm going to be boring and say Dark Void.

Because really, it's the first one that comes up in my mind.

You arent the only one, the game has alot of fun potential ... but it could be alot better.

Also Wet, the graphics were kind of solid and the game was pretty much fun with all the cool rock background music ... gameplay and plot could do some more polishing though.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Red Ninja. Great concept and some very cool ideas that deserved better than they got. I personally didn't find it to be the terrible game many did, but it had so much potential it hurts.

 

[SnootyEnglishman]

Alone in the Dark has some good ideas. The control scheme for weapons was actually pretty good and the fire physics were awesome. It's they were all executed in the most horrible fashion.

 

[Kyuubi Fanatic]

Prototype. Had a good concept but the game crapped out. I was psyched for over a year based on a 6 page article in Gameinformer when it was announced. That one article, and a single trailer was all they did to market it, and when I saw what a disappointment it was, I understood why.

In fact it's the greatest disappointment I've ever suffered from a game I had high hopes for.

And the potential was there, from a concept standpoint at least.

 

[L4hlborg]

Far Cry 2 wasn't really that bad, but it could've been a lot better. Take away respawning NPCs, add a working multiplayer and fix a few funny glitches and it would be a great game.

 

[DoctorNick]

Two Worlds.

I wouldn't say that you could modify it to make it good so much as you'd have to burn it to the ground and start over. As a connoisseur of RPG rules and mechanics the potential I saw in it was that it had a couple interesting ideas I'd like to see applied in other western sandbox-style RPG's.

Like most RPGs you get XP by killing shit and doing quests which lets you level up, what was a bit different is that besides XP you'd also be awarded skill points after discovering a certain number of locations, thus creating a mechanism that encouraged you to explore the game world in detail.

Secondly one of the major beefs I had with Oblivion was it's fast travel system, namely that you started the game with all of the major cities already on it and on top of that it always felt a bit like being beamed down from the Enterprise more than anything else. In Two Worlds the game is littered with "Ancient Elven Teleports" that you have to find before they become active. Thus the game had what still effectively amounted to a quick-travel system except it actually made sense in-game and didn't break immersion.

Overall it's a completely shit game that you should never ever buy but I can't bring myself to go hock my copy because those two game mechanics endeared themselves to me so I hang onto it as a reminder that there's almost always a few gems in even the biggest pile of shit.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

There was TONS of potential for Brutal Legend, but all that RTS bullshit fucked it up.

Tons of potential for Clive Barker's Jericho, too. But the retarded friendly AI and over-abundance of exploding enemies mucked it up.

 

[twaddle]

the halo series. it doesn't suck but with all the gentic enhacements that the spartans have, we should at least see them put to use. the only enhacements we get to see are he can high jump and he can take more bullets. besides that the game only seems like it's about the weapons. you should be able to punch or throw enemies or run with amazing speed and do more advace move like running on walls if your body has been genetically modifide to be the ultimate soldier.

 

[Scabadus]

Crysis:

I didn't like it, ok? The seamless switching between multiple modes of the suit and the (almost) destructable scenery was good, but the unrelenting difficulty, physics glitches and - dare I say it - poor graphics (actually LOOK at those trees and rocks. Look carefully, as carefully as a graphically hyped game deserves, and they're not very good) just made it a pain to play.
Oh and any modern game that doesn't have any bullet penetration mechanic at all can just fuck off; a thin aluminium sheet cannot protect you from an assault rifle round.


STALKER: Clear Sky:

If the other two games showed how to do STALKER, Clear Sky serves as a great example of how not to make number 4. Buggy as hell, unstable, mercilessly frequent weapon jamming, unstable, laser-guided grenades, action-scene firefights, too many bugs and general instability made this less of a horror game and more of an exersise routine for whatever limb you use to press 'quick-load'.
Did I mention it was unstabl-

 

[Krantos]

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. I wanted so much to like this game, but the developers spent way too much time focusing on minute details for "authenticity" (like setting speakers up next to tanks to get the exact sound) and not enough time on basic mechanics.

The biggest problem I had was the squad. To have a good squad based game you need one of two things: Good AI or Good Commands. Dragon Rising had neither.

Firstly, the command radial (why do they have a command radial on the PC version??) was horrible. If it doesn't pause the action at least give us a way to go back if we make a mistake. It was way too easy to select the wrong sub-menu in the thick of battle, and if you did the only way to go back was to close the menu and reopen it. That's just poor design.

Also, I liked being able to order a flank, or ROE, but I couldn't order them to go to a specific spot. Sure I could order them to a general area, but they'd always move.
I have two examples. In the first one, my squad was protecting a town from an enemy assault. Thinking tactically, I figured it would be better if my squad took cover inside the buildings. They refused. Every time I gave them an order to move inside the house, they'd make a perimeter instead.

In the second example, I ordered them behind a wall to my left, only to look a couple seconds later to see that they had taken cover on my right instead.

On the wrong side of the wall.

It seems like the devs were counting on the AI making up for poor commands, but the AI is so terrible that it reaches comic levels. What finally turned me off the game and made me sell my copy was the fact that the AI wouldn't register if you were in front of them. I was blown up four times in a single weekend. Three were when the AI shot a rocket at a tank with me standing in the way, and one time they bounced a frag grenade off my head and landed it at my feet.

It's a shame too, because the game had enormous potential. It just couldn't live up to it, and the fault is entirely with the developers.

 

[DazZ.]

Fallen Earth.

An FPSMMO will be awesome when the gunplay is actually as good as a decent FPS.

 

[Flour]

Daikatana.

If about half the levels are removed, backtracking is removed, all the tiny and fast(flying) enemies are removed(especially the ones that poison you), the weapons made fun to use and they made proper hit detection it could have been a somewhat decent game.
It would also be nice if loading an autosave/quicksave didn't break the fucking game.

 

[The Anhk24]

Too Human, that game looked so good and i couldn't wait till it came out and when it did i wasted 60 bucks on it to learn it was crap