I want quirks in the story. I do not want quirks in my interface. Why must programmers/designers continually strive for new BS in an interface, when most genres have 2 or 3 examples of things that work perfectly well?
Starship Titanic. I bought it on sight because I’m a huge fan of all things Douglas Adams, but the game just sucked.
The Sims - Addicting for two days… then suckage.
SimCity 4 - Must second the guy who said it was more work than play.
Maxis has really disappointed me lately.
At my Improv show last night, I asked an audience member what he did for a living. He’s a game designer. I asked him what games.
“Like Baldur’s Gate or Pools of Radiance?” And he says “Oh no. Just crappy games.” “Like what” “Red Faction” So I told him “That game wasn’t so bad. You could blow shit up and break through walls.” “Yeah that was okay.”
Just thought I’d share.
Sometimes designers do admit when a game is lacking.
I agree with a lot of the examples cited, including MOO3 (where was the game?) I don’t agree with the cite of Civ 3. It’s a great game.
I wanted to add the first release of Ultima Online. Of all the games I have ever bought, it was definitely the most disappointing. the idea of a MMORPG was something I’d dreamt of for years. The concept blew me away. After I bought it I got a boner just reading the documentation.
And then I installed it. Utterly unplayable. I used the CD as a coaster.
You know…overall I really like this game but I was really expecting a lot more out of it. The micromanagement is a pain (why can’t I fund the schools as a % instead of by the indivisual Sim!!) and I was disappointed by the My Sims feature that lets you follow a Sim around. I wanted to see a Sim come home from work, go to the store, go to the movies, whatever. Instead, all they do is get up in the moring, go to work and come home a few hours later. Yea!!!
My vote:
Might and Magic IX.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I want to have ‘the complete set’, I’d toss it out the window. It, apparently, was rushed out the door before the company got gutted… and it shows. Buggier than a week-old corpse in Summer, crappy graphics, confusing gameplay. (I found myself asking: “Now what the hell am I supposed to do?” more than once. And I never did get past the first non-training area…)
I find it interesting that for the most part, it seems the people who didn’t like Black and White are mostly the ones who have had difficluty getting it to run (properly, if at all) on their systems. And, that the game seems to run perfectly on one computer… then be unplayable on a similar computer with the same hardware, software, etc. Bizzare.
<< Oxymoron of the day: Congressional Action. >>
My original post got eaten, so I’ll just say it without th explanation: American McGee’s Alice
Not worth paying $10 for.
Not worth the effort to sell it back for $5.
What a crapfest letdown.
-j
Third the vote for Black and White.
Creature-training has sent a couple of otherwise good Saturday afternoons down the drain. Even after that, there is a point where you cannot go on without getting some help from your creature. When I got to that point, all he did was sit there and sulk. Never could teach him to feed people at the worship site while I wasn’t looking, either.
Everything gets tedious after a while… especially taking care of buildings. It would be nice if those little people could be taught to at least build their own scaffolding, if not their own houses.
Good concept, but maybe not a very executable one.
Master of Orion III, God I really tried. Even if it weren’t for the rotten graphics and the incomprehensible diplomacy messages (does the patch include a Babel fish, I wonder?), the game play is like mowing astroturf. Nothing much had happened before, and nothing you do seems to matter all that much. Then I read that you can win by clicking the Turn button over and over again. The game just sucks.
Sim City 4 doesn’t suck, but it also doesn’t seem to run all that well on anything but a supercomputer. Especially when there’s a fire. In my home town of New York City, the mayor doesn’t have to get personally involved every time somebody overcooked dinner and starts a small blaze.
Hey Duke of Rat and HPL, I like Red Faction! What didn’t you like about it?
I’m suprised no one else has come to Red Faction’s defense here. I can’t be the only one who likes this game, can I?
Games that I have an enduring hatred for:
Hexen II was the buggiest piece of poo that I ever paid for. It was actually impossible to advance in the game without editing the config file when it first came out, it was truly aggravating.
Soul Reaver totally pissed me off. I was really enjoying it until the ending. That ending is one of my game related pet peeves to this very day.
Special award for Most Boring Game goes to FF8…I loved FF7, but FF8 was needlessly complicated. Blah, blah. Can I play now? Nope, blah, blah. Can I play now? Yes, but I no longer want to, horrible game mechanics, JUNCTION THIS!
Hi. My name’s Lightnin’, and I, uh… kinda liked Red Faction.
Hi, Lightnin’!
Yeah, I actually kinda liked it. It was a lot of fun, blowin’ holes through stuff. The Railgun was pretty cool, too.
So I picked up Red Faction 2. sigh
It sucks.
It’s short. The Railgun’s x-ray vision mode only shows targets as targets, not as silhouettes (which was really cool in the first game). You can only drive ONE vehicle in this version, and it’s a sub, and that only on like one mission. I couldn’t follow the storyline at all- and it took me a while to figure out why; important monologue was often played during combat, and the gunfire would drown out whatever was being said. It’s quite obviously a port- it took me a while to figure out that “button three” was, in my case, the spacebar. The multiplayer levels are TINY.
And, worst of all, they hardly ever use the “blow holes through stuff” ability!
The combat armor’s pretty sweet, though.
Oh, I hate the “dialogue/story event/important radio messages during combat” thing. Ground Control, which I otherwise enjoyed, was horrible about this.
Someguy: So we have (BANG BANG BANG) and then (Engines Running Up) and (Missiles Firing).
I missed some of the biggest stinkers.
But my biggest two let downs were:
**Black & White[/]: which friends had said it was great. Which was during that three day period where they enjoyed it. After I told them I bought it, they said, “Sorry about that.”
MoO3: I so hate to say it. I loved MoO and MoO2. But… its just so boring. Move fleet, make spies, yes to good diplomacy, bad to bad, move fleet, next turn… 80 turns later… I win… Or something. Here is hoping for the various Free Orion projects.
I’ll list the problems I had with it.
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Plot starts with the miner rebellion, but about halfway through deviates into some wierd crap about the plague that never really does get resolved in any real way. At the end it’s you againest Mercs, even though the Mercs really don’t fit into the plot that well and don’t show up until the halfway point.
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Some of the weapons don’t work or work too well. I could never figure out the secondary fire on the rocket laucher. The railgun was a pain when you run into those assholes with them(I think at the subway).
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Taking away your weapons a minimum of twice (usually three unless you fail to grab the coat after the giant robot fight at the incenerator). I’m not a fan of this in any action game, but any game that does it three times is gonna earn some scorn.
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The stupid bomb puzzle at the end. quite annoying.
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Bad level design in a lot of areas. Made you wonder how people got around this complex considering how many mines/utilities areas you had to go through( I realize things weren’t working or were locked that, but that doesn’t excuse a lot of what I saw).
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Getting gassed while wearing an airtight suit. WTF?
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The time limit sequences. I can tolerate one, but there were too many(The bomb, after you destory the computers on the station, the race to the transport).
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Enemies that appear out of nowhere behind you. Most notable when you are chasing Kapek through the foggy canyons. Comrades are comparativly worthless(Okay, maybe this isn’t much of a nitpick).
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Geomod function is kewl, but frankley, you almost never need to use it. Why develop an entire engine around it if you don’t make use of it?
The problem is that it is in no way a worthy successor. They in fact regressed from a truly great game. They stripped the tech tree, making many of history’s coolest ideas pointless except to get other good things, turned combat into a farce, and made the AI cheat even more than in the past. The only thing it has better than even Civ I is the graphics. It is a good game, but not worth buying when Civ II and Alpha Centauri are available.
You are funding it as a %; it is displayed by individual Sim, though.
I’l put in Final Fantasy 5. Actually, the game is good, but who’s durned idea was it to make each job class require at least 900 or so skill points to master and then make the average per battle 2.5? Even at the end of the game with an average of 25+ skill points per battle, it can take a while to munch out me boys. 
Probably to make you work for some of those kewl abilites?
If that annoys you, you might want to try FF3(for nintendo). Similar to FF5, but you don’t master classes, but rather just change classes when you need to do so. You can make them better by using them longer, but there are no “abilities” to learn.
A page and a half, and no mention of the release so bad the publisher mailed you a patch CD, and still disbanded their own message boards when the complaints got too numerous: Ultima IX: Ascension.
I got into the Ulitma series with 3, then 4 and 5 blew me away, 6 had the Gargoyle twist, and 7 & 7.5 again blew me away. I blamed 8 on a bad marketing decision (Ultima shouldn’t have jumping puzzles!). And then the wait began for 9: the climax of the “trilogy of trilogys”. The wrap up of the Guardian’s story. The loss of the avatar. The possible complete destruction of Brittania.
What did we get? A bug-ridden engine, no party (I swear I remember Origin admitting was a major complaint for 8), and a linear plot that I would be embarresed to see on a sunday afternoon movie. Sure it was pretty, but a supercomputer was needed to get framerates above “slideshow”.
That was my biggest disappointment. The reigning biggest stinker, though, is (and will probably always be) Rise of the Robots for PC.
The decision by 3DO to cut cost by slashing their better paid, and thus most talented staff, their training budget, and other such nicities will never cease to amaze me. Gall, how do they expect to MAKE any money without half decent programmers and game designers? You can only sell Army Men games for so long. (By the way, HoMM4 was rushed for the exact same reason.)
I think the same guy works security at my building…
My personal choice for worst game: Harpoon II. I was (still am, actually) addicted to the original. Never did get it to run right even with all the patches. Plus, the battles sucked…