I might get some flack for this one, but Baldur’s Gate 2. I’m surprised I didn’t like it, because I loved Fallout and Planescape: Torment, and I picked up BG2 from the bargain bin.
After spending a good half hour building my character, the entire first dungeon consisted of “gather some NPC’s, find minimal equipment for them, charge a group of monsters, then sleep in the hallway for a day and a half until healed.” And because my character wasn’t a fighter or thief, all the spoils were useless to him. (That’s what I got for being a wiseass and going Bard, I suppose. But that’s the kind of RPG player I am. Our tabletop group will have an Undead Slayer, a Special Forces commando, and a philosophy teacher on the run for teaching orphans how to read. Guess which one I am :D)
And after hauling out as many swords, crossbows, and assorted junk I could carry (and losing a packhorse literally right on the doorstep out), I find that they’re nigh worthless. “Hello, kind innkeeper. I’d like to rest on a filthy bed of straw for a few hours. All I can pay you with is trade for these carefully crafted tools of death.” “Certainly, noble sir. I’ll take fifteen of them, and you can go sit in the hayloft for the night.”
Another, more recent, disappointment was Master of Orion 3. Ouch. However, I did trade it back in for full price, and picked up Freedom Force and Tropico with some money left over.
Another vote for Black & White here. It turns out the game just WOULD NOT WORK on any system with a k6 processor. That didn’t keep 'em from listing that chip on the box, of course. Bastards.
I’ll vote for Masters of Orion 3. I had heard that it was complicated and difficult to get into, but I like that sort of thing. What I hadn’t heard is that the graphics looked like something from 1991. I bought it and installed it on my system. It came up in 600x800. OK, fine, I think. It defaults to 600x800. I look in the “Options” for a way to up the resolution. Nothing. Ok… I look for an external “configuration” utility. Nothing.
Hmmm…
I look some more. I find something under options called “Display.” It has no option for changing the resolution. This is getting bad; I have a 21" monitor - 600x800 looks like a bad paint by number picture on it.
I do some checking on the Web. I find that they’ve hard coded it for 600x800.
At that point I uninstall this craptacular piece of programming from my computer. If they can’t bother to support 1024x768, which every frickin’ game I’ve played since 1992 has managed to do, I can’t be bothered to play it.
Wow, a couple of games I really like. MoO3 is excellent. I don’t know why they decided to use 800x600 only, but I can’t see how graphics could effect your enjoyment of a turn-based strategy game.
Battlefield 1942 is awesome, too. It can be played behind a firewall (I did) - you just have to go into your firewall and open the port used by the game. The SP AI is not very good, I admit, but the game is meant to be played online.
I second Heroes of Might and Magic IV and Baldur’s Gate 2.
Heroes ended up becoming Armies of Might and Magic, since they made heroes practically pointless. Also, the graphics in battle were terrible. I gladly went back to Heroes 3.
BG2 started you in a dungeon. Please RPG Developers, do not start me out in a dungeon. RPGs(at least on PC) are about doing what you want to do, not following the rediculous plot you cooked up for the game. Also, taking away one of the my characters just because I got out of the dungeon, is pretty jive. I really liked the original Baldur’s Gate, though.
I’m going to add Civilization 2 to the list. Normally, I like turn based strategy games, but Civ2 was just so slow I couldn’t stand it.
I had severe crash problems with Battlefield 1942. I couldn’t even get the damn thing to run. Then, on the advice of other Planetside (which I couldn’t get to run either) beta testers, I tweaked one setting in DirectX (Click the Sound tab and move the “Hardware Sound Acceleration” slider back one notch) and it runs like a freakin’ charm. God, I hate modern technology.
And the problem I had with SimCity 4 was…I’d carefully spend and manage my money and population would grow. Then they’d want something hideously expensive. So I’d get 89 alerts whining that my little idiots wanted a fire department or something. And I’d get irritated and give it to them. And then it’d break the budget and I’d have no money to play with for 100 years or so.
Master of Orion 3 definitely sucked. I spent an evening or two trying to figure it out in the expectation that it would get fun when I got everything down. Then I got curious and checked some reviews, and guess what- apparently it NEVER gets fun.
Now, developers, lets go through a list of things you should generally NOT DO when creating a game.
Create horrendously outdated “3D” graphics for what is a completely 2D game. Be sure to include bland monochrone backgrounds.
Give it a paper-thin plot line (at the atart at least) so that no one has the least curiosity to continue.
Take a fun and useful battle system, take out half of it, unbalance it so the opponents can do things you never will (even with identical powers in identical situations), and mangle the rest.
Create abilities that emphasize stealth and scouting… and then restrict the game such that no can use them to any effect, by making sure the couts can’t move more than six feet from another character.
Include a crappy interface so ludicrously useless, despite the availabilty of several games with similar systems and much superior interfaces.
Take a game system built around having customizable characters within an epic framwork and remove the customization fromt the system.
7)Take a game system built around having customizable characters within an epic framwork, and remove the epic part from the game by making all of your battles extremely dull and time consuming, without any interesting rewards.
Use bad level design so that your charcters must slowly navigate through long, long, empty halls in the first huge, HUGE dungeon, to find a small room with the exact same enemies as before.
Give a system designed to ensure weak and boring characters, give them huge amounts of power for trivial or pointless tasks and none for defeating huge hordes of monsters. Include extra characters along the way that are much better than any a player can build.
Make the game so badly written that uninstalling it deletes your hard drive. This one is guarrenteed to get a reaction from the fans, I assure you. I recall that the company web forum was basically stopped COLD by the number of complaints and cries for help. Either that or they turned it off. Bastards.
I’ve never paid money for a game except for shareware.
Nongame software has burned me occasionally.
Font Editor was a frustrating waste of money. I think I finally, somehow, extracted one font I created from the bowels of the program’s proprietary catacombs and deployed it in my system, but it wasn’t easy.
I got nothing from Fractal Design’s Dabbler, which came free with my frustrating and useless SummaSketch 6 x 8 tablet many years ago.
I can’t really say GIF Converter and Compact Pro were failures in and of themselves so much as they failed to keep up, update-wise, with their competitors Graphic Converter and Stuffit, respectively.
Gee, not much else comes to mind. Maybe I’m blanking out on the klunkers…
::checks registration database::
Oh yeah. FAX software. Delrina FAX Lite was pretty godawful. Came for free with a modem. I’m a FAXstf user for the rare occasions when I still have to FAX something these days.
And Xerox TextBridge. The day I finally dumped it and switched to OmniPage Pro was the day OCR started to acquire some feasibility. TextBridge sucks.
The Sims. Eech, I played the game for a few days, then stood back and watched the sick and twisted horror I unleased on the unsuspecting Sims. I really freaken me out and I haven’t touched it since.
Black and White. Technically a good game, it never really engauged me. Trying to teach my avatar was about as fun and teaching school kids with ADD.
Mechwarriors 4: Haven’t played a MW game since MW2:Mercs, and blasted through the new game within a week. Replayability? Zip, zilch, zero, nadda.
I met one of the producers for Pool of Radience II. He’s a hard-core gamer with nearly ten years of experience making computer games. And he swears up and down that Pool II was under-rated and really fun if you got past the game’s “quirks.” He also claims the “deletes your hard disk” bug wasn’t their fault.
Looks like my post got eaten. Just once, I’d like to see a designer admit that things might not have turned out well. I’m sure Romero thinks Daikatana was fun and underrated. I’d just like to see someone step up to the plate and say, “I know it was kinda disappointing, things didn’t turn out well.” Instead of “YOU just don’t understand the genius that is MY game.”
Everyone told me I would love this game… and the premise was pretty good.
Playing sucked. It just wouldn’t respond well to the mouse commands, It wouldn’t move when I wanted, it wouldn’t stop when I wanted, I could never punish the stupid avatar when it did something wrong (it just wouldn’t let me - still no idea how that’s supposed to work, I’d follow the instructions they gave and it would just keep petting the stupid thing). I could never get it to go to the right place or pick up the right people or anything else. And then, it would take forever to do the wrong thing.
WWII online is pretty bad. It could be a good game but the development is so slow.
Sim City 4 is ridiculous. That game, at least the first public release, was unplayable after a certain time period. You could have all the money in the world, and have all of the healt facilities possible and you life expectancy would be horrible.
There’s a patch that fixes the bug with the display of life expectancy, among other things, but I don’t understand how that would make the game “unplayable.” The life expectancy is just a read-out for the player’s benefit, it doesn’t affect desirability of your city. The only thing that affects that is your health level (HQ).
If the game makes you miserable and bored for the first 10 hours of play, it is not a quirk. The nmere fact of the absurd number of returns and complaints for this game is prima facie proof it sucks.
If it isn’t their “fault” then whose is it? The programming team by definition must be responsible for everything in the game. Now, that programmer himself and his team may not be responsible for the bug, but nevertheless.