To counterbalance Desslock’s “Best Game of the Decade” topic, I had to create this one. Because game forums are not about liking games, damnit, they’re about talking about why they suck!
The rules here: Released between 2000 and 2009. Not the worst games, but the biggest letdowns.
For me? Secret Weapons Over Normandy. It completely missed what made the 1990s LucasArts flight sims so much fun.
Runner up is Spore, but that’s hard to quantify, so I hesitate to list it. It’s an admirable game design and technically it’s ambitious and impressive, but it just didn’t grab me like I expected it to. I think I might have enjoyed Will Wright’s original concept more, though I won’t argue that that design would have been as commercially successful.
Definitely. That was too easy. Why? Well, we went over it around the time of that Three Moves Ahead podcast.
I don’t think so. When it came out, me and my friends were all playing it. I knew at least 7 or 8 people playing it that week. We’d share some pretty unique tales about what our pets did when we left them alone and came back. It was an absolutely fascinating week.
After that week, I don’t know anyone who ever played it again. But man, during that week, it was incredible to see what kind of weird stuff your pet learned, and how I was playing a game in which a creature could learn so many different things just based on a few basic things that could be done in the game.
I don’t know, I loved it. Who cares if I never wanted to play it again after that week? Longevity is certainly one of the things I look for in a game, but it’s not the only thing. Sometimes I just want to be wowed. And B&W did that admirably.
I’d have to agree on MOO3. Even people that enjoy playing it patched and modded would probably agree that it was a great disappointment considering what was expected of it.
Even though I really liked Oblivion a lot, I gotta go with it. Very good game, but just imagine if it had taken all the good things from Morrowind and improved upon them (which it didn’t) and fixed all of its faults (which it mostly did.) Fuck… coulda been the best game ever. Oh well, fuck it.
Fable
Fable 2
Black & White
Daikatana
Bioshock
Super Mario Galaxy
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (annoying brats with a worthless kiddy plot and generic side missions instead of a mature fantasy plot like in FFT and Tactics Ogre)
Deus Ex Invisible War was probably the most damaging game of the decade in the hearts of fans.
Oh yes, Fable, that was a huge dissapointing game for me.
Daikatana not so much, because i didn’t wait so much. Around that time i was a less experienced/hardcore game.
All five of the Games That Will Change Gaming from CGW’s Nov 99 issue. Less Halo (which failed to live up anywhere near the promises Bungie was making at the time, but it would be hard to deny that it did change gaming) or The Sims (though the series didn’t scratch its potential until Sims 2) as much as Black & White (stillborn tech demo and our first real sign that Molyneux isn’t to be believed) and Freelancer (oh shit, Freelancer, fuck you, Freelancer). All but one of them (The Sims) were late as fuck, they all failed to deliver in varying degrees and, hell, one of them (Ron Gilbert’s RPG Good & Evil) never even came out! I still want to play that game, Ron! What the hell!
Other games that never came out that were disappointments include Starcraft: Ghost and Call of Cthulhu: Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
Yeah, that one was kind of rough. You still got a pretty decent game though, and a great framework for fans to mod a good game on top of.
Black and White was just a punch in the balls, especially after all the previews and glowing reviews. I hate it even more than MoO3 for A: the fact that the reviewers neglected to say how god-awful it ended up being unlike MoO3 which was mostly panned, and B: a “Good Black and White” has more potential than a “Good MoO3”. More disappointed with how that ended up.
I’m still pissed about the $50 I spent on Black and White. It’s probably not healthy to hold that grudge for so long but god damn. Also the game that made me stop reading previews, ignore most reviews, and almost never buy games at full price. I guess it was a good lesson at least.
Kind of a random list off the top of my head, I’m probably missing all sorts of disappointing games here…
Super Monkey Ball Adventure
Quake Wars
Spore
KOTOR 2
Mirror’s Edge
Star Wars: TFU
Every Spiderman game since Spiderman 2 that has inferior web-slinging controls
All the newer Lego Whatever games that keep running different characters through the same generic platform game instead of being inspired by Banjoo Kazooie: N&B
