160 replies to this topic

[theginganinja]

I just remembered another game. This one is disappointing in the extreme due to its mind-numbing gameplay. It's called Defcon, if you've ever heard of it. I saw it at a used book/game store for 5 bucks, and the box promised me that it would let me play global thermonuclear war. Excited, I grabbed it and installed it as soon as I got home. Starting an instant action match, I quickly found out that this was not my kind of game.
If I had literally hours more patience, then maybe it could've worked for me. The premise is this - you pick a side of the conflict (you can choose between the U.S.A., Latin America, Africa, Russia, the rest of Asia, and Europe if I remember correctly), and then set up missile silos, airbases, missile defenses, fleets of ships, submarines, etc throughout your territory. You then spend hours (no joke - I mean hours) of in-game time (which can also be real time if you activate that feature - although why it was included is beyond me) moving those ships around, and using scout planes and the like in an attempt to find out where the enemy installations are, and so on.
Eventually, the game decides you can launch nukes. So, you pick your targets - ranging from enemy installations to any of the major cities shown on the world map; and then you of course launch nuclear ICBMs, subs with medium-range nuclear missiles, or bombers carrying short-range nuclear weapons. And then you wait. For hours. Again. Eventually, they will get somewhere near the target, at which point you get to hope they don't have too many anti-missile systems in that general vicinity - or that you have lots of missiles aimed at that target. Preferably both, since your missiles may as well be made of paper for all the damage they can take.
This "nukes allowed" stage continues until one side is defeated by having a certain number of cities and/or installations destroyed (it's probably you being defeated, unless you have an absolutely brilliant tactical mind and a certain amount of omniscience when it comes to enemy installations), likely after running out of nukes (an entirely possible, and even likely, circumstance).

Edited by irishwarrior, 15 November 2011 - 08:51 PM.

[Grayson Pryde]

@Irishwarrior:If you want to play a "real" world war then play Hearts of Iron 2. This could be the game you were searching.

[Moppelkotze]

Grayson Pryde, on 16 November 2011 - 07:53 PM, said:

@Irishwarrior:If you want to play a "real" world war then play Hearts of Iron 2. This could be the game you were searching.

But nuking there is not much fun.

[DocBach]

Homefront was terribly bad. The one cool thing to me was when you went over the Golden Gate they say that the California National Guard's 185th was assaulting the bridge, which was a unit I use to be in, but the rest of the game was total crap.

[buckyballs]

Starcraft 2, biggest letdown ever.
Also the reason Blizzard is now dead to me and Diablo 3 can go **** itself for all I care.

[Miles Tails Prower]

Final Fantasy 13.

Sonic Generations.

[Kodiak Jorgensson]

Dawn of War Retribution was pritty dissapointing for me, Dawn of War 2 chad Chaos rising where great, Retribution really let go. stripped most of the RPG elements from the other 2 game and the campaign was so linear for an RTS literly a single path to follow on the levels, no real flanking abilities.

[Fiachdubh]

Oblivion, started playing Morrowind again around a month ago and it is so far and away superior to Oblivion in every way, well ok not graphics, but every other way. Morrowind is a stunning achievment, Oblivion is a console game. Saying that it would probably be a great game for anyone who hasnt experianced Morrowind (which would win just for letting you become a werewolf anyway).

Dawn of War 2 is also a pretty good game that feels like a dissapointment compared to the original. DoW just had such a great sense of humour and was much more fun to play. DoWs storyline free expansions didnt live up to the original either. I like a good story in my games.

One game that was a letdown because it was genuinly a steaming **** and not just in the shadow of a superior prequal was Gaelic Games on PS2. It looked and played like a game that might of been released 10 years earlier and still would of been awfull back then too.

[phalanx]

Oblivion was a crapfest. But I heard that they fixed everything with Skyrim.

[Amechwarrior]

Phalanx, on 21 November 2011 - 12:22 AM, said:

Oblivion was a crapfest. But I heard that they fixed everything with Skyrim.

They made the menu interfaces worse in my opinion. For PC at least, it takes far more clicks and menus then should ever be necessary just to see if you are poisoned. It is almost like they said "Meh... Modders will do it..." Everything else seems better.

As for disappointing games:
Armored Core 4

I had never picked up an Armored Core title before this one and heard great things about the series. It had all these awesome customization options, but no guide on what or why I needed to tune things or what system was better or worse then another. The early missions felt bland, short and environments sparse and at the time it got pushed aside for other games and I never had an urge to pick it back up. Looking back at the reviews - it apparently gets very challenging in the latter levels. However the bad interfaces, lack of a guidance for customization and lack-luster opening missions left me feeling disappointed in one of the few remaining mech franchises.

[Phades]

Mechassault, Tribes:Vengeance, FFXIV, Global Agenda were all disappointments.

I am hoping Firefall, Tribes: Ascend, and The last guardian will not be disappointments.

I am fully expecting planetside 2 to disappoint.

[FlystreesVagann]

irishwarrior, on 15 November 2011 - 08:58 AM, said:

By the way, I think Conviction is a good game - if you ignore the fact that it is supposed to be part of the Splinter Cell franchise. If you think of it as a stand-alone game, it's actually pretty good. If, on the other hand, you start comparing it to the more stealth-oriented games that make up the rest of the series (with the goal of this game just as tactical and stealth-oriented as those ones), you are of course going to see it in a quite negative light.

But you can't ignore that fact it has SPLINTER CELL in its name,Ubisoft, for reasons I still can't figure out, decided to bring Maxime Beland on as the Creative Director for Conviction. His goal was to fix the series. He failed.

He said flat out in interviews that stealth is boring. Sneaking around is no fun. For whatever reason he assumed that the whole time people have been playing SC that they were really wanting to play a 24 or Bourne game. So, that's the game he made.

Even if I put aside the fact that it's supposed to be a Splinter Cell game, it's still mediocre at best. It's very unoriginal and poorly executed.

[buckyballs]

Amechwarrior, on 21 November 2011 - 01:03 AM, said:

Armored Core 4
I had never picked up an Armored Core title before this one and heard great things about the series.

Oh god, I tried to forget about AC4...yeah, it's the worst of the series. Worse than the PSP games.
As if I didn't have to be angry about with them moving it onto the 360, it also had to be a feculent nightmare nothing like the originals (which had a tradition of solid gameplay).

[REDSLATE]

Halo: Reach.

Let's completely throw out the established canon and create an incredibly bad attempt at a "tragedy." Then, let's ruin the online play with unbalanced armor abilities. I hope Halo 4 isn't a failure...

[AC]

Atlas3060, on 15 November 2011 - 08:16 PM, said:

Spore made me cry. Well not really cry, but rather facepalm repeatedly because of the DRM and the rather rushed attempt to get your sorry gaming bottom to space them do... well that was about it.
Sure nuking a world was fun but after the 20th I stopped caring.

But surely EA can't hurt me any further! I mean they can't really destroy all the titles I love that they've bought or created?!
Then C&C4 came into being.
I went into a fetal position wondering when the next hit will come.

Spore was suppose to be this new amazing adaptive game play where ANYTHING was possible, then ended up being a cartoony elementary game with TONS of limitations and no clear goal or purpose.

[mecheze]

My most disappointing game i ever played was Infinity blade, it cracks your skull, really.... metaphorically of course. Its just one story, and goes over and over and over again... The story is always important in the game, thats how gamers minds expand....

[eXecute]

I would have to say Front Mission Evolved for the pc. Its a console port and a worst one at that and takes hours to look for a match and instead of having every thing unlock you don't and you need to level up your rank to get every thing but can never do due to the face you have to wait 4-5 hours for a game. The single player was awesome.

[Melvin]

Sid Meier's Pirates!

It was far too short, and the battles were boring. Once I realized that the Governor's daughter wasn't going to get nekkid I gave it up.

[Adridos]

Melvin, on 02 December 2011 - 02:19 PM, said:

Sid Meier's Pirates!

It was far too short, and the battles were boring. Once I realized that the Governor's daughter wasn't going to get nekkid I gave it up.

That game was actually quiet fun. It's just that type of games you play to have fun from time to time and they get boring really fast if played continuosly.

Edited by Adridos, 02 December 2011 - 02:47 PM.

[Aresye]

Even though I had some fun with multiplayer for awhile, overall MechWarrior 4 was a huge letdown for me. It really felt like a step backwards from where MW3 left off.

MW3 had a very gritty atmosphere, just like I envisioned when reading BT novels. A kind of futuristic portrayal of modern war. Your objectives were originally strategically based, but obviously changed when the second dropship went down, which put the entire game in a kind of, "Fight with what you've got, get yourself off this planet, and hit whatever you can as you try to escape."

The superb voice acting and tie-ins with BT canon really immersed you in that universe. From the radio interceptions, open broadcasts, and sheer brutality of the gameplay, you really felt like you were fighting a very angry clan of Smoke Jaguars, generally giving the entire game a very dire feel to it.

Then came MW4. Voice acting was terrible, every enemy death had the same canned animation, and combined with the generally un-gritty and colorful atmosphere, the entire game felt very arcadey.

- When you got legged in MW3, your entire screen violent went from the battlefield to the sky, with a very loud thud. You could hear your gyro screaming, the actuators firing to get you up, etc. What does MW4 do? You just gently topple over without a thud, you silently get up, and carry on.

- MW3 had a satisfying "crunch" whenever you blew off a mech limb, in addition to watching it fly off the mech violently. What did MW4 have? The limb disappeared without a sound, leaving a charred looking tip, which brings me to:

- Battle Damage. MW3 had some nice damage, where you could see wiring, internals, etc. You could tell a mech was in bad shape just by its looks alone. MW4 just thought of as many ways to put black splotches on the model, and nothing else.

- Every base looked the same in MW4. Where's the building variety? The base you attack in the earlier part of the campaign looks exactly like the prison rescue base. Then of course there's the city levels, which were cool apart from the fact there was nothing in them besides street lights.

- Nearly everything was destructible in MW3. You could even shoot or step on the guys on the ground. Trees went up in flames, buildings crumbled, glass shattered, etc. MW4 was the complete opposite, and includes some of the worst sprite animations I've ever seen.

MW3 was the last true MW game in my eyes. MW4 was just simply tolerable enough to play, however I think it's very obvious Microsoft didn't give a care in the world when it came to the series. It was simply a second priority game to them, and just a way for them to earn some cash on the side.

I think once we get the ball rolling on the franchise again, people will look back on what Microsoft did and realize how close they came to simply killing the series entirely.