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Post by FadedOasis on Feb 7, 2011 1:13:56 GMT -5
I'm curious, which games have you played that were simply disappointing? Either a sequel to a great game or one that others said were great. Feel free to rant, I know I will.
No spoilers.
Monkey Island 2
I just finished Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. I thought the first one was so much better. There's an entire chapter where, once you figure out how to solve the current puzzle, you spend too much time watching Guybrush walk across the screen. An entire sequence where all you needed to do was go back and forth between two locations several times.
An example (using no actual info from the game): Someone in the bar wanted an item from the shop, so Bar, harbor, path, ship, island1, path, shop. Shopkeep wants a drink from the bar. Path, ship, island2, path, harbor, bar, buy drink, harbor, path, ship, island1, path, shop, trade drink for item, path, ship, island2, path, harbor, bar. And on every single screen, Guybrush has to slowly walk to get there. I started timing it after a while: at least five seconds between each command, but commonly closer to twenty. Even if I know exactly where I'm going.
And then you have to do longer lines of waiting for the other puzzles. It's just pointless timewasting for a plot wrap-up that feels like a cop-out. If you're waiting around in an adventure/puzzle game, it should be because you're stuck on a puzzle, not because the walking animation is slow. Monkey Island 1 was much better about this, they didn't have all the items for EVERY puzzle on completely separate islands.
And yes, I know it's a 20-year-old game, but this was a re-release. The addition of a "run" feature would have saved me from so much frustration.
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Post by xadera on Feb 7, 2011 6:00:26 GMT -5
Well, there was this one DnD campaign where it was my first 4e game and...
Just kidding, just kidding XD
Hmm... I think Super Paper Mario and Super Mario Galaxy were rather disappointing. Super Paper Mario was nice, but it had a rather poor storyline in my opinion and rather cookie-cutter gameplay, being a bit of a letdown after Thousand Year Door. And Super Mario Galaxy offered some really cool level mechanics, but god, the levels felt smaller than they did in 64 and were even more linear than back then : /
Oh, and the newer Final Fantasies. 10-2 was appalling at how bad it was, 12's story was piss-poor and I just couldn't get into it, and 13 looks... even worse XD
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Post by fivealarm on Feb 7, 2011 12:43:14 GMT -5
Deus Ex: Invisible War was a huge let down.
It was playable but, it lacked the spark that the original game had. The game world felt hollow. There were no memorable characters, the plot felt half-assed and the gameplay was oversimplified in order to make console ports more possible. Near the end of the game the designers re-used areas from the original Deus Ex simply because they were nostalgia fodder, rather than because they had a good idea for it.
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Doctor Wheeze
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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
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Post by Doctor Wheeze on Feb 7, 2011 18:15:24 GMT -5
The poster child for disappointing games will pretty much always be Spore. Shit, this demo still looks awesome. Then they dumbed it down a bunch and made it "cutesy," pretty much just leaving us with watered down versions of five much better games. Everything ended up being either mind-numbingly easy or stupidly frustrating. Playing any given game required no strategy at all, and playing any one species ended up being pretty much the same as playing any other. You take your dudes, you go up to the other dudes, you do a thing until they're either dead or they like you, repeat for the entire game. Not only that, but it was about 3 years between that GDC video and the release of the game, with very little information released in the interim. The release of Spore was the biggest fuck you in gaming history. Ragin about video games. |
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Post by FadedOasis on Feb 7, 2011 18:44:06 GMT -5
Oh shit, I actually made a thread that generated interest.
Galaxy was okay. It wasn't supposed to have the openness of 64 and Sunshine, Nintendo is in an era of calling back to SMB3 and SMW. But I can see your point. I don't recommend Galaxy 2, the levels are just as linear.
OH GOD SPORE. EA YOU FUCKING TRICKED ME. Shit was awesome five years ago, mediocre on release.
I'm tempted to razz on L4D2, but my disappointment in that game comes solely from my playing too much of the first one. I had grown tired of (and frustrated at) L4D before Two was released.
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Post by xadera on Feb 7, 2011 20:01:46 GMT -5
I didn't actually play this myself, but it was my brother's first game that he bought for the PC rather than the XBox so I've been helping him, and fuck is it retarded. Call of Duty: Black Ops.
I normally don't get excited for CoD games, but my brother does, and they do have some pretty nice gameplay. However, when Black Ops was released, it was obvious the developers had no fucking clue what they were doing. For a $60 game, it wouldn't run on my brother's brand new computer, or 3/4 of the computers around the country for that matter. The single player was choppy, but he could still play it, and the storyline was completely bland and fairly dumb, compared to previous incarnations. But the multiplayer had such bad problems. I have no idea how they could have fucked up so bad, but the game was jittery to the point of unplayable, no matter what connection you had. And that's just for people who could even get that far! It took a week or two for Treyarch to make it just work for most people, and about a month for the multiplayer to run relatively smoothly. Around two months later now, the game still has some choking problems, connections are really unstable, and they're coming out with a 5-map pack that'll cost around $15 to access.
So when you're bitching about TF2, just remember there's much, much worse business models out there that are receiving even more money.
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Post by FadedOasis on Feb 7, 2011 21:08:26 GMT -5
For a $60 game, it wouldn't run on my brother's brand new computer, or 3/4 of the computers around the country for that matter. Ahem. It's extremely reasonable to assume that 90% of the world's computers are underpowered to run any new software. Some examples of computers: Cell phone. TI-89 calculator. Nintendo Wii. Oh, don't forget about the safety system in a Honda Civic. You know, the thing that checks your fluid levels, monitors impacts, deploys the air bags, pops the trunk... :-) Besides, something like 70% of all PCs running a Windows OS are office computers, designed for word processing, spreadsheets, and a little internet browsing. :-D This is totally unrelated to the rest of your post. However, I can't agree that BlOps is any more disappointing than the rest of the Cod series. It's all 5-hour single player, then go online and shoot at dudes while completely disregarding the objective. |
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Post by elacordeonachi on Feb 8, 2011 2:32:54 GMT -5
Ooh...most disappointing game. It's a tie for me, and both have a bit of story.
Game #1 NFL Quarterback Club 99 for the Nintendo 64.
A friend of mine, my brother, and I played the heck out of NFL Quarterback Club 98. Daily. We played multiple seasons. Pre-affordable big screen era, but I could plug in my N64 to my 13'' Commodore Amiga monitor, so everything was nice and crisp. We all pre-ordered 99 at the local EB and went and picked it up and rushed over to my house to play. And we hated it. They changed everything, play calling, passing, etc. Happily, since the N64 was Cartridge based, we were able to return it that same day and we went back to '98 'til we moved on to Madden on the Gamecube.
Game #2 Half Life 2
I loved the original Half Life and all the expansions. So my brother and I both pre-ordered it. Yeah yeah, we knew it required a internet connection, but this was the days where most people still had dialup. We figured it was just a required registration kind of thing. Launch Day, got it home and began the install. That's when I got the phone call from my brother, telling me about the size of the patch that was required, both to Steam and to HL2. 5 hours later, we actually got to play the game. And were both underwhelmed.
See, 6 months earlier a little studio by the name of CryTek had released Far Cry. A game with HUGE expansive levels, very few hallway linear areas. Just a beautiful game. Plus when we bought it and brought it home, we were able to play it right after the regular install time.
And here we were stuck in City 17. In a very linear shooter environment. Forced to do things that we thought were completely insane, the worst part being climbing into the prison tram system. Really? No other way inside? I think I'd rather search around a bit, because the bad guys seem to be able to get around well enough. Regardless, the game just wasn't as good as Far Cry.
Now in retrospect I've played through it again more recently, and I will admit, Half Life 2 is better in places than I used to think it was, but the Prison Tram system still annoys the heck out of me. And of course Steam has aged quite well from its opening days to the point that I'm no longer buying anything not on Steam. But at the time I was not a happy gamer.
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Post by xadera on Feb 8, 2011 5:17:17 GMT -5
For a $60 game, it wouldn't run on my brother's brand new computer, or 3/4 of the computers around the country for that matter. Ahem. It's extremely reasonable to assume that 90% of the world's computers are underpowered to run any new software. Some examples of computers: Cell phone. TI-89 calculator. Nintendo Wii. Oh, don't forget about the safety system in a Honda Civic. You know, the thing that checks your fluid levels, monitors impacts, deploys the air bags, pops the trunk... :-) lol, okay, I will clarify then ;P 3/4 of computers that at least met the minimum specifications for the game XP I went through a few long threads of people posting their specs and being unable to play (many of which could easily run Crysis 2 @.@). I might be exaggerating with the 3/4 thing, but god were there a lot of complaints XD Like the initial Poker Night problem x10. |
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Jeziah
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Post by Jeziah on Feb 8, 2011 22:17:48 GMT -5
My friends made me buy codblops to play with them, and when it was proven to be shit I really wasn't disappointed myself cause I expected it to be, but my friends were, so I nominate it for biggest disappointment. Generally speaking.
'Course, when you play multiplayer in hardcore mode its actually not half bad... But that's just cause I rape. And use flak jacket/second chance. I am shameless.
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rhench
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Post by rhench on Feb 12, 2011 5:37:33 GMT -5
I can't be sure that it's my top, but Plain Sight ranks up there. A really cool idea, some interesting innovation, and an absolute lack of support for the product. They released it on Steam and didn't have voice support, or even chat at the beginning. Then there's the totally buggy lobby system, with poor design implementation there. Yeah it's an indie developer, but there's lots of places to see a lobby or matchmaking system appearance, let alone interface. The gameplay is cool, the powerups are interesting (if initially unbalanced, but hey, that's why they updated it), the levels are neat, and it was such a good idea.
It just got utterly botched in the execution. And since it's all multiplayer and NO ONE plays anymore, it's impossible for me to even try to play.
Oh, Evil Genius is really lame for what I thought would be cool. Just a bunch of micromanaging tasks with no real point. I tossed a bunch of stuff off my hard drive a while back, so I can't remember everything that bugged me.
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