You know the ones. The game with the great story, engaging characters, beautiful graphics…but controller your character is like trying to get a a parapalegic man to take his first steps during an earthquake.
Or the game with great gamplay, easy to use interface…but the company that made it went bankrupt a month after releasing it and it crashes every five minutes. :smack:
My vote goes to “Civilization: Call to Power.” Yeah yeah, I know what you’re going to say.
“Bouv, are you mad? That gam,e has NO redemming qualities, and it’s an abomination that the makers illegely put the Civilization name in there, tainting the series forever!”
I do tend to agree with you, but Call to Power DId have some good concepts.
Unique (and in my view, better) way of managing tile improvements. Rather than have to have a settler or worker do everything, a percentage (that you choose) of all the nation’s production goes into a public workds fund. Every improvement costs a certain amount of public works, and takes so many turns for it to be built. The advantage is that you can have basically as many different impriovements being built at the same time as long as you have the public works to do it.
The Future. Rather than just end all tech advances at what the current level in the world is, and from then on out just have you research ‘Future Tech X’, Call to Power had you able to learn advances we are on the edge of getting, or have theories about getting, like nano-technology, cloning (better, bigger, faster cloning,) AI, etc…This, in turn, led to future city improvements (beef vat, some kind of genetic manipulator that made everyone healthy) more wonders (space elevator), governemnts (technocracy) and units (hover tanks, eco-terrorists.)
The bad part about the game? Everything else. The horrible, clunky interface making it damn near impossible to do anything quickly. The fact that you couldn’t view the cities. What the hell? All of the wonders from previous games were gone. No more pyramids, lighthouse, or Newton’s College. All wonders were new. Some were ok, others sucked ass (Emancipation Proclamation? The fuck is that shit?). In addition, there were some units that seem to have been conceived to do nothing but let the PC players annoy the user, like slavers and the lawyer. The slaver would capture your units and bam, that’s it…they’re gone. Off to a foreign city to do work (basically, a slave made a city of size X be able to use X+1 number of tiles.) Lawyers had this un-Godly powerful attack on a city called ‘file injunction.’ When a lawyer did this, the city he did it to made NO progress on whatever it was producing that turn. Even if you bought the unit or improvement, the injuction actually kept it from being finished. The worst part is that slavers and lawyers were ‘invisible’ units, so you couldn’t see them normally except for certain units able to see ‘invisible’ units, of only a few exist. If you happen to get caught without any of those (all of them had crappy attack and defense, so it was easy to take them out) then the opponant can just use a lawyer at every city and there you go…you can no longer do anything.
Stone Keep. It was a lot of fun, had a good story line and fun characters and interesting puzzles - but the game engine was crap. It was almost 3D, but not quite. I really enjoyed the game, but it would have benefited from a better game engine.
Doom 3. Having the monsters (endlessly) jumping out of the dark at me got old after a while. Also, it was just dumb to not be able to use the flashlight and a weapon simultaneously.
Ground Control - it was a 3D real time strategy game with no base building, you had to complete the mission with only the units you started with. The gameplay was great, the units were good, the control system was good. The downside was the missions; there just weren’t enough smaller missions to start you off and improve your units, the enemy bases all had exactly the same layout. They also added planes, but they were so vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire you couldn’t use them, but you had to have anti-aircarft so you didn’t get wiped out by them. And once you completed the missions, that was it, no skirmishes, no matches against the computer at all. Still worth buying if you find it cheap though.
The AI was also terrible, which was a real nuisance as they added friendly fire to the game. For example, there is one unit (your APC) that is your character, can’t be repaired and if it dies you lose the mission. If you move a bunch of units forward and they see something to fire at, they will fire at it. Which is great until your APC decides it wants to sit in front of your big tanks!
Ground Control 2 - so much potential if they focused on infantry as the troops could enter buildings, hide in vegetation, etc. but instead they put lots of big tanks in.
Soldiers of Anarchy - another 3D real time strategy with no base building, this time there’s much more focus on individual people. You assign them different guns, they gain different skills, etc. You can also find/steal vehicles such as Humvees, T-55s, Hind helecopters, etc. Again, the gameplay is great, controls are fine, etc. etc, but again the missions let the game down - there aren’t enough (about 12 in total) and they take AGES to play each mission (missions lasting 5-6 hours weren’t uncommon). Still worth buying cheaply though.
The first one was a fun, intense shooter with some vague attempts at a plot and a rather beatiful attempt to render Ancient Egypt as it might have looked back in the day.
The 2nd game, which introducing some cool news weapons and enemies, just didn’t seem nearly as fun. I think the biggest problem is because what little plot there was made no sense, the locations weren’t tied together as in the first game(you’d jump to a new time period every 3 or 4 levels) and frankly, the bosses sucked. The first game had huge and varied bosses, with the Mother of all Bosses waiting for you at the Pyramids. The 2nd game, the bosses were…well, lame.
**Black Dahlia: **
Interesting and atmospheric, with a nice plot(Torso Murders, Nazis and Norse Myth). It would have been a much better game if the puzzle difficulty hadn’t been turned up to 11 from the very start.
Oh, and a pet peeve of mine. You get to visit one of the most (in)famous buildings his history, The Tower of Babel. It’s impressive looking and you get to go around it, but when the door opens, you go into the basement and fight a stupid worm boss.
All that time trying to get there and get inside and I don’t even get to climb it?
The classic example is Black and White. A really interesting attempt at a literal god-game, with all kinds of cool concepts like your creature, etc. But it was a pain in the ass to use…to move you had to grab and drag yourself over the ground. To cast spells you had to move your mouse to draw a certain pattern in the air.
Damn that sucked ass. You also had to fight other gods. Except you couldn’t really do much except just blast them with spells, wait to recharge your power, blast again. You couldn’t do much with your followers, they just did everything on autopilot.
It was a beautiful game, great looking, great concepts, but really fatally flawed by UI and the lack of any point to the game except looking around.
Second on Black & White. The game also just seemed to lack a point. Go to level. Complete challenge. Go to next level. A lot of games are like this but they have plots also.
Fatal Frame: Fatal Frame 2 and the recently released 3 are brilliant games. Fatal Frame was almost as good, but it was way to easy to run out of film. No film means you can’t kill enemies. No film means you die. I’m all for challenge, but you have to give some flexibility.
X-Men Legends: The game itself was fine. The use of powers was good. What killed me was the loading screens. Dear god that game was slow. Then the rest of your team was comprised of idiots. Could somebody tell me how Storm (who can fly) can just walk off a cliff to her death? This was the most brainless A.I. ever.
This is a joke, right? Like some unit they played around with for fun during debugging and accidentally left in? Foreign lawyer armies?
I was going to mention Soldiers of Anarchy as well. It suffered from conflicting flaws in gameplay — you had to really conserve units while at the same time do the real-time commanding. This made it impossible to play well without pausing, and the main thing that killed it is that this was missing in the original release (fixed in patch and subsequent release). You could too easily lose important vehicles very quickly. Another flaw was the shift in style — for the first half of the game you’re guerillas struggling to take down units much better equipped than yourself, by the time you get to the end you have more powerful tanks and other vehicles than you know what to do with.
I actually liked the large and long missions. These were huge maps and with the changing objectives were really multiple small missions. The size of the map tended to give you more options.
I do think it’s worth whatever cheap price it might be found for these days. It’s enough fun that I may play it again (choosing for the other side). I didn’t like the ending, though … if you can call in an airstrike just before and kill everyone involved, they magically stick around anyway.
Knights of the Old Republic and City of Heroes. Guys, they’ve been making 1st-person shooters for years now. This is not new technology. Don’t make me use that stupid over-the-shoulder view. I know, the graphics are cool, and it helps to know if you’re getting hit from behind if you can see it happening, but you know what? If I can’t play the freaking game because I can’t figure out how to move or target my opponents, I’m not going to play. And if I’m not playing, being able to see when my character gets hit from behind doesn’t help.
I echo the comments on Civilization: Call to Power (although I liked the slaver units! You had to balance when to drop slavery or risk uprisings in your cities, too) and Black & White.
My additions:[ul][]Fallout: Tactics. I loved Fallout and Fallout 2. I loved tactical games like Jagged Alliance and X-Com. Chocolate and peanut butter, right? I couldn’t get past the fourth mission. Not because the mission was difficult, but because the game was just … unplayable. I tried to force myself to get back into it a few separate times but never managed. I wanted to love that game too.[]X-Com: Apocalypse. X-Com was perfect. Apocalypse tried to make it real-time, apparently because that was the thing to do at the time. That only detracted from the experience.Ultima 8: Pagan and Ultima 9: Ascension. Ultima was getting better and better starting with Quest of the Avatar. Ultima 7 was unbelievable, so good that people created an open-source game engine that would use the data and graphics files from the game, but run on a modern OS. Pagan looked beautiful but just had no … no soul, goddamnit! No one cared about the Avatar. Whoop de doo, he’s in the Guardian’s world, and … la la la. Ascension? Catastrophic development process. This is the time to gloriously end the story of the Avatar. Instead, it’s a bug-ridden, poorly-rendered, atrocious piece of filth. I’ve tried to force myself to finish this game several times for the sake of the entire saga, but still can’t bring myself to get past the middle of the game.[/ul]I’ll stop now before I get more despondent over the time I’ve wasted trying to play unplayable games.
I haven’t played KOTOR but in COH, you can go into a first-person view just by zooming in the camera. And what’s hard about WASD movement and click-to-target? Hell, even Wizardry 1 had WAD movement back in 1981.
Star Wars Force Commander
Perhaps in close competition for one of the biggest letdowns in gaming history. The idea was sound – a real time strategy based on the Rebels vs. Imperials of Star Wars. No wookies. No mandalorians. No Gungans or Royal Naboo Starfighters. This was back in the hayday of Imperial Walkers, Rebel Speeders, TIE fighters, and X-wings. Lots of good ideas here including: the relative sizes of things, troops were small, walkers were big, and the landing pads were huge; instead of “manufacturing stuff”, you needed credits to order units and vehicles that would be brought down from orbit on really cool drop ships; and full 3D, 360 degree graphics with zoom and all that. Made for some really cool screenshots if you could get the camera just so…
It. just. didn’t. work.
Aside from bugs galore, you’ve gotta love having your units attacked when you’re constantly wrestling with the camera controls.
I agree, everything about KOTOR II was better than the first, but rushing it to release for the holidays cut out the important parts of the story line- just stupid.
LucasArts eventually got their real time strategy SW game by just stealing Age of Empires and replacing all the Archers, Cavalry, and Ballistas with Star Wars clip art (still kinda fun, though).
I’d have to say Command and Conquer Renegade. A very unique concept (for C&C, which to that point had all been 3rd person): you’re in the C&C world in first person view, running around blowing up tanks and shit all by yourself. And if you get tired of plinking away with a rifle you can hop in a tank or Orca and use that to rain destruction on your enemies. I found that the game had a nice balance to it and some gorgeous scenery but first-person C&C never took off. I guess the multiplayer sucked (I haven’t tried it myself beyond the training level but it seems pretty limited as to what you can do) and the campaign only lasts so long. It’s a damned shame because it would have been so cool to be able to do some RA2 missions in first person view as Tanya.
It’s interesting to note though that C&C Generals and Zero Hour let you zoom in so much it’s almost like 1st person view but not quite… Maybe the next C&C game will let you switch back and forth between modes.