Your favorite game and why you think it got canceled/died

If this were a just universe, Sid Meier’s Sim Golf would be a franchise as evergreen as Civilization. The underlying design is rock solid and some of the things it does are incredibly sophisticated. What happened?

Well, first, the engine it’s built on feels like it’s held together with duct tape. I think this is a quality that a lot of Sid’s solo (or mostly-solo) projects have. Transitions in game state and UI appear to be in a competition to be named the Clunkiest Ever. Occasionally, the game just does something inexplicable–hey, Sid, I get why when I’m not on the fairway I can’t select my fancier shots… But why do you sometime let me select one of those shots and then when I try to aim you reset me to the default shot and make a BOING! noise?? UI in general in the game is rarely better than serviceable. Why doesn’t the Escape key do anything?

Then there’s all the bolted-on Sims features. Characters don’t only have golfing skills and attitude bars, they have personality traits. I guess these determine whether they get along with their partners and whether the two end up completing a “story” about dead goldfish or UFOs or wearing women’s underwear? And, dear God, these are the ugliest character portraits you’ve seen since a Might & Magic RPG! Make it stop!

Throw in a passel of bugs and some minor balancing issues, and you’d think SimGolf must be a failure. But it’s not. It will suck away dozens of hours of your life. That’s a testament to the Sid Meier magic. But, boy, does this game need a reboot.

It doesn’t appear to have been mentioned yet in this thread, but

Armageddon Empires.

I weep for the lack of a modern version.

But @Vic_Davis has made clear he doesn’t have time to learn Unity or a modern engine, nor does he care to hire someone. (There was an attempt at an homage version, but as far as I can tell it failed; never tried it).

I get it, I understand. I weep nonetheless.

There was this remake that was published by Matrix whose name I forgot, but it lost most of the charm, and then contents of the original.
But the game is working really fine still, so I challenge your notion that it’s dead!

Edit: haha, so unimpressed by Last Days of Old Earth I failed to link it, sorry XD

I meant dead as a franchise, which I think it could have been. As in, Armageddon Empires 2!

And yes, I link to the “remake” in my post – Last Days of Old Earth.

Maybe I’ll try to make a modern Armageddon Empires engine over the Godot Engine or something if I find the time. And the energy. And then give it to @Vic_Davis so he can do his magic. ;)

That’s my plan too. As soon as I get some time away from my job and after hours consulting and family and…

A brief snippet of new Prey 2 footage, the first showing off the game’s updated UI, which was implemented after the Bethesda’s 2011 Utah event and E3 demonstrations:

Looking at that video, I was tempted to yell “WHO WANTS SOME WANG?”

Pretty much the same vibe as one of SW2’s tech levels.

Sorry to resurrect an old comment, but Paradox owns the Vampire IP now.

Anyone remember that Star Trek game, Secret of the Vulcan Fury?

What the hell happened there?

From Wikipedia:

Secret of Vulcan Fury was cancelled in February 1999, following the continued departure of staff and because of financial problems at Interplay.[8] During the production, three separate producers and the lead artist quit.[9] At the time the project was shut down, it was estimated that less than 5% of the game had been completed.[3] Lead engineer Thom Robertson later explained that the company had massively underestimated the cost of production, having expected to produce nearly seven hours of full motion video for 5% of the budget of a computer generated film such as Toy Story. They also had problems with the filming of the stop motion, as one three-day shoot was ruined when the director had red dots painted across the green screen in the hope that it would help with camera tracking. Further issues arose with the shoot as they had used a painted screen, which faded during the shoot causing problems in merging the video. Additional artists were then taken from other projects in order to mitigate those issues.[10] The graphics designed for a Vulcan character were later used by artist Scott Bieser as a basis for the Klingon captain Klunk for the video game Star Trek: New Worlds.[11]

I remember being pretty butt-sore about Dynamix’s Desert Fighters being cancelled, too.

Fuck you Gilman Louie and your disastrous Falcon 4.

huh? Falcon 4 killed the classic flightsim? I thought the rivet counters did that?

I don’t know who did it, but I’d love to smack whomever killed the ability of developers to make dynamic campaigns in flight simulators.

I thought it was the Millenials.

OMG I KNOW!!!

Preach it, brother.

Falcon 4 was a visible beacon to publishers that hardcore genre games could kill a publisher, and F4 killed Microprose. As for rivet counters, well, F4 was aimed at the rivet counters, and we can extrapolate from there.

After F4, no major publisher ever dared to release a full-scale sim again. Well, Ubi had Il-2 and Lock-On still in the pipeline, but they were a)the first wave of less-expensive Russian releases, and b)Guillemot stated they were “out of the nerd business” after that.

I always thought it had more to do with the fact that they began work on Champions, and didn’t want competition. Which should have been great. If they basically redid the graphics and added enemies and disadvantages with no play content…it would have been a COH beater! Instead…eh

Fuck yes.

Also, it was/is the rivet counters who’ve ruined sims. They drove awesome people like Andy Hollis and others out of the genre. I’m still angry at them all, fuckers, because of them now all we have are souless plane sims rather than engaging pilot sims.