Gears of War 2. It was short, boring, and there were waaaaaaay too many jump puzzles. Especially that stupid worm level, which was omg eww!
GUN, I should have quit playing as soon as they sent me down a mine shaft.
Ultima VIII and Outpost, dammit.
Technically, the latter doesn’t “finish” per se. But the minable resources would run out, because mining was broken. I gather it was intended to allow you to keep mining deeper with greater investment, but then again, it was also intended to have the schism base actually compete, or at least be built according to the same building rules the player had to follow, allow roads, be balanced, etc. According to its readme, all these intentions had to be let go, because just like a baby bird, sometimes it’s just time for a game to leave the nest. (Even if it wasn’t hatched yet, I guess. And maybe that’s true, I don’t know, I’m no ornithologist.) So when the resources ran out, you either lost, or “won” if you’d managed to traverse the research tree to nanotechnology, which yielded infinite resources.
There was sadly no final cutscene of a giant asteroid slamming into the outpost. That would’ve given more closure.
Fallout 3 the game ended at the end of the main story quest. In hindsight I should have seen it coming though, since that’s how it worked in previous Fallouts. Good thing I saved just before it.
Fallout 2 let you keep playing and even had a few bits of dialog to reflect that you had finished the MQ.
Yeah ok, I got one. Unfortunately I can only vaguely recall the specifics, but the game was called Dream Web – it’s a point 'n click adventure from the early '90s that put you in control of a psychotic character who believes he must hunt down and kill these priest characters to free this Dreamweb thing (and I can’t remember what the actual significance of this thing is, just some kind of mcguffin). Anyway, I’ll dive into spoiler territory for those of you who didn’t (and shouldn’t, I should point out) play the game: at the end, upon assassinating the final priest, the pc is gunned down by cops. Then a little ball of light leaves his body and flies away. Ta-dah!
P.S.: Don’t play this game.
Suikoden IV, with all 108 Stars of Destiny, even. Just so I could have a good ending save to import into Suikoden Tactics. Which I haven’t even started playing yet…
Indeed. All sorts of things it was supposed to do but didn’t actually make it into the game. Despite this, there was an Outpost 2 which I gather bore no resemblance to the original.
Fallout 3
Assassin’s Creed. It’s a truly amazing game. I love nearly every aspect of it, even some aspects that other people hate. But I pretty much agree with Tom on the ending. It diminished the whole experience in my mind when I got to the end. (And not because of having to fight a lot of people. I love the fighting system in Assassin’s Creed, so for me there wasn’t enough fighting). But what they did with the story reduced what would easily have been a game I would have listed as one of my favorite games of all time, to just a game in which I liked the gameplay a lot.
Gears of War 2. It was short, boring, and there were waaaaaaay too many jump puzzles.
Jump puzzles? Not that I have a problem with you not liking the game but … you know the characters can’t jump, right?
Lionheart. I can’t imagine why I finished this game. I think it really was the worst game ever whose badness had nothing to do with engine, implementation, or bugs. Pure unadulterated design badness at a high level.
And they can’t look up either. Oh wait, that’s dogs.
The recent Prince of Persia. Anyone who has played through to the actual ending will know exactly why.
Mega Man 3 for the PC by HiTech Expressions.
I think he means puzzles that relied on timing - like getting past the, ahem, giant teeth - and I do think that Gears 2 feels like a loose collection of levels, rather than a cohesive whole. Plus, there’s the whole, it’s-so-fucking-stupid thing. Control, we’re INSIDE A GIANT WORM!!
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Since games rarely hold my interest long enough to finish 'em, I don’t have this problem. Only recently did I get my head out of my ass and realize I should just stop buying the damn things unless I’m sure they’re going to hold me for a while. I don’t think I could stand another NWN2 sitting there, mocking me with how terrible it is and how I’ll never see that money back.
Deus Ex.
When I hadn’t finished the game, the game seemed to have so many possibilities and character stories from friends about how we handled particular situations differently, and how the circumstances played out. I even restarted the game a couple of times and saw how differently the game played out.
Unfortunately the game isn’t nearly as well designed later in the game. By the time I got to Area 51, combat becomes really easy and fairly boring as well. And just playing through that part of the game ensured that I lost any desire to replay the game again and try other possibilities, because of the looming specter of this mediocre endgame that I had to look forward to.
Plus I didn’t find any of the story elements of the ending particularly satisfying. And I did try all three endings.
Brave Fencer Musashi. I spent hours enjoying the game with its Kirby-lite enemy stealing powers and puzzle elements. Then I reached a point near the very end of the game where you are forced to play a rhythm game that is not explicitly labeled as a rhythm game. This is, of course, less than an hour until the end of the game. I spent months laboring on this rhythm game not knowing that it wasn’t a Simon style matching game. In a haze of red-cloud anger, I bit my controller. To reiterate, there are bite marks on my Dual Shock controller.
I later invited a friend to my house to try to beat that boss battle. He did. Quickly. I don’t even remember how the game ended, but I know that I beat it… disgusted and hang-dog.
Brave Fencer Musashi caused me to lose faith in myself as a gamer and a human being.