‘Nocturne’. Very good atmosphere, but the mechanics of playing just made it too difficult to play. If they had executing it with a ‘Max Payne’ type engine, it would have excellent.
Outpost. Neat idea, building a last-ditch human colony on another planet. Though it would have been better if they had put more than half the game in before shipping it.
“Master of Orion 3.” The idea of having AIs help you out in a large, complex strategy game is a great idea. Regrettably, having them screw up all your plans because you can’t turn them off and because the interface is harder to decipher than ancient Sanskrit was not such a good idea.
“Black and White.” Great game concept. Very little game.
Midnight Nowhere-Killer premise, utter crap in the execution. Your character wakes up in a bodybag in a hospital where everyone’s dead, there’s a bunch of corpses on the wall, and a serial killer is stalking the city. It could’ve been a great creepy adventure game. Instead, it’s a bunch of crappy, pixel-hunting puzzles. I was kinda pissed, because the premise has such promise.
Steel Panthers 3. The first two were classics, and it seemed like such a neat idea to expand the scale (moving around platoons instead of individual tanks and infantry squads). In practice, it was just boring. There were too many units to take care of, so each turn took a year to complete. Infantry was worse than useless. Etc.
I must have re-installed it on my computer at least a dozen times, because it always seemed like something I would enjoy playing. Each time, I uninstalled it 30 minutes later.
Giants filled with British humor and you can be a huge titan that eats things and craps babies to help you. What’s not to love? Except that it’s extremely hard for no reason. Stupid base building missions. Next to impossible jet ski missions.
Sacrifice Don’t get me wrong I LOVE this game. But you can just somehow feel it not coming together.
I second Black And White they needed to either structure the missions tighter or do away with that and turn it into a sandbox creature sim. As it was it was half assed in both respects.
Imperuim Galactica II I should have known it would be full of half implemented features when I realized the load disk was separate from the play disks. You had to swap two CDs just to start it EVERY time! However there was a fun space empire sim hidden in there.
Vampire The Masquerade a vamp role playing game? Count me in. Wait boring levels filled with bad AI? Oh my stupid AI controlled buddies can’t stay out of freaking sunlight in a sunlit hallway we all have to pass? Count me out again.
Deus Ex: Invisible War, for all the reasons outlined here.
Post Mortem, because there’s nothing that ruins a great adventure game faster than a screwy, hard-to-use interface.
Red Faction, because I hate all games with a good, involving story line, that is hopelessly, montonously, inescapably nothing more than a game on rails.
I’ll see your ‘Nocturne’ ** and raise you a ‘Battlecruiser 3000AD’ ** (by the infamous Derek Smart). Haven’t played it before, but I heard it was a classic poorly implemented stinker.
**Daggerfall ** was crippled by bugs when it first came out, but all those patches eventually fixed the problems.
Simon 3D. They took a decent MonkeyIsland-style franchise with loads of British humor, and lumped it with a 3D engine that looks 10 years old. Oh, the levels were pointlessly large and the controls were shocking.
Another vote for Masters of Orion 3. Worst menu layout ever. Until I played this game, I never realised that a game can made unplayable by a terrible interface.
Oh yes, and I wholeheartedly agree with MoO3. Terrible.
Is this Redemption? The DM tools were awesome, but about 5 years ahead of their time and buggy as hell. Shame, too, cause when they worked, they were amazing.
Messiah had an interesting concept. You’re a cherub who overtakes other people’s bodies and uses their skills. Too bad the game blew.
To be fair, didn’t Smart write that whole game himself?
Omikron: I actually loved this game. It’s a really unique game with a little dash of everything, and a truly unique idea: taking over people’s bodies to use. And it is a great game, but it has one major flaw: its just too split over what it wanted to be: an exploration RPG? A Mortal-Kombat beat-em’-up? A run-n-gun action game? Its too bad, too, because it doesn’t do any of those badly; it was simply too unfocused. I have to say I’ve seen few game that immersed me quite so far into their world.
I’ll agree with “Black And White”. I really got sick to death of that damn creature. And my copy had a bug that made my “hand” get stuck in one place, periodically. Finally got sick of the thing, uninstalled, and haven’t been back.
Felt much the same way about “Nocturne,” for the reasons already mentioned. The nonadjustable camera angles were irritating, particularly when there are monsters lurking RIGHT OUTSIDE your field of vision, ESPECIALLY when you can hear them or see them brushing the outside of your frame…
…and can’t do a damn thing about it except walk right into its clutches, so as to either get it into YOUR camera angle, or change camera angles so you can SEE the damn thing and SHOOT it. Assuming it doesn’t rip your head off in that second or so that you can’t see OR shoot, that is… I mean, that’s not entertainment, except maybe for giggling programmers somewhere, snickering about how “they’re gonna hate this part.”
I’d also vote for ANY game that depends heavily on jumping puzzles, or has a “bottleneck” – a segment where instant death happens near-randomly, and your only hope of getting through it is simply to quicksave right before, then simply blindly wander through, finally quicksaving again after you get through. What the hell kind of fun is that?
Arcanum. RPG with an awesome setting - steampunk meets swords & sorcery - but with a very dull combat engine and horribly unbalanced class system. Being a “tech” sounds cool, but the class requirements, plus hunting for plans and the raw materials needed in order to build things, severly hobbled the class. By the time you were able to build a wee pistol that could maybe hit something (depended on how much you trained in guns, too), a mage of the same level could firebomb his enemies with abandon. NPC interaction was also lacking - your party members had interesting backgrounds, but what little plot centered around them always felt tacked-on.
Man, do you ever have that right! You know something is seriously wrong when the game’s user’s manual – a printed manual at that! – mentions important features that never made it into the software! I’ve never been so pissed off at a game as I was at Outpost. Grrrrrrr.
Any of the High Heat baseball series. The baserunning is total crap- the runner at first gets a lead but refuses to advance toward third until the batter rounds first and heads for second. Many times you’ll see a runner on first get thrown out at second on what would be a single to right. Most bizarre is when a ball gets on the other side of a convex wall on the outfield and the outfielder can’t figure out how to retrieve it- inside the park home run.
Uru The other Myst games were all better than the one previous- this third person perspective at times makes you dizzy and the puzzles are not as interesting as those in Riven and Exile were.
Another vote for Masters of Orion 3. It took me hours to figure out the stupid interface. And the pace of gameplay is just glacial. Give me Civ II or Alpha Centauri anyday.
Black and White had sort of the opposite problem. Interesting, intuitive interface, crap gameplay.
Duke Nukem Forever. Great premise, considering the unique humoristic take on the FPS genre in its precursor. Too bad that the execution failed in that the actual game never saw the light of day.
No one has beaten this classic yet…Master of Magic. I loved the “two worlds superimposed” thing, and really dug the spell learning process, the characters, and different races you can control.
What made it the game I will love to hate for the rest of eternity? The AI. To wit, they always camped their armies one square outside the cities they were supposed to defend. You could just march in and take their towns, and if they wanted them back they’d have to attack you.
Superpower. In it, you get to run one country, and if you want, you can try to take over the world! The AI is interesting, and the game can’t cheat, because all the other countries don’t even know which country is the human player. The downside? The combat graphics are FRICKING STICK FIGURES, no exaggeration! There are no “Civ” style governors, so you have to hand manage everything in your cities yourself. The UI is well nigh impossible, and after you open the box, the game won’t play right unless you let it sit for two hours running a special program designed to train the AI.