As I’m about ready to just trade in Suikoden V after a week of playing, I started thinking about all the great or potentially great games I’ve played in the past that were just torpedoed by one horrendous, inexplicable, or unforgivable problem or deficiency. I don’t mean games that sucked, or games that were great but flawed, but games that should have been great but through laziness, oversight, poor planning, or sheer inexplicability were completely sunk by a flaw.
Here are mine!
Suikoden V (PS2) - I got this about a week ago, and even though I had heard that the loading times were both long and constant, this is out of control. Whenever you do ANYTHING - enter a shop, move from one screen to the next, enter a battle, exit a battle, buy an item in the shop, or even in the middle of many scenes, the game jumps to a black “NOW LOADING” screen that lasts anywhere from 10 to what feels like at least 30 seconds, even when doing things as simple as equipping an item. UNFORGIVABLE in what’s otherwise a great game.
Virtua Figher 4 (PS2) - One of the best fighting games of its era, VF4 inexplicably doesn’t support using the analogue joystick on the PS2 controller, forcing you to use the uncomfortable and cumbersome D-pad. For a game where all of the moves are based around fluidly rocking a joystick, and on a system where almost every game exclusively uses the analogue joystick instead of the d-pad, it’s just a confusing choice. Adding insult to injury is the joystick graphic that routinely appears on the screen, imploring you to rock the stick back and forth!
Double Dragon III (NES) - After the success of the first two DD games, III was highly anticipated. The game was fleshed out with two extra playable characters and an even more complicated story than the first two (which isn’t saying much). By all means, it appeared to be DD taken to the next level. Except that, for no apparent reason other than to make the game impossible, you get no multiple lives and no continues - that’s right, you get one life bar, and when it’s depleted, it’s GAME OVER. Added to the fact that even basic thug enemies knock off 1/4 of that bar with one hit, the game was straight-up unplayable.
Magna Carta: Tears of Blood (PS2) - A great-looking Korean RPG with unique character designs, great characer development, and a captivating story. But wait - the battle system is broken. It’s all realtime, and you control three party members, but when you switch members, no AI or auto-pilot of any sort kicks in; your other two characters stand there doing nothing while taking damage. Then throw in a confusing, unusable “Shadow Hearts on Meth” rhythm-based system for attacking, casting spells, using items, etc. and you’ve got one hell of a broken game.
I sympathize with your problem with Metroid Prime. I also was stuck at the timed stage and put the game down for several months. I thought that if it was that difficult for me on the first level, I’d have no chance of surviving the next levels.
One day I went online for a map of the timed stage, got through it somehow, and have really liked playing the game on the planet.
**Omikron: The Nomad Soul. ** Innovative, brilliant game. Combined RPG, fighting, and FPS concepts. Soundtrack and cameo appearances by David Bowie.
What ruins it? A font. :smack:
OK, so it’s a bit more elaborate than that. The Dreamcast (remember that?) port was problematic. Save files were huge and prone to corruption, and the save methodology was bizarre. But the weirdest problem was that the font chosen to display critical information, such as your character’s location, was unreadable at television resolution. I spent many hours squinting at the screen, wondering where the heck I was supposed to be going. At one point, I found it more enjoyable to hang out in one place and listen to the soundtrack than try to finish the game…
Masters of Magic. Probably the most innovative, idea-wise, of all the Civ-type games. Not only can you focus on building up your cities, but also the magical powers of you and your servants, plus, you can voyage to the underworld and control cities there.
The problem? The AI. Most of the time, the enemy armies camp one square outside the city :smack:. So you could just walk in and force them to fight an offensive battle to retake them.
You misunderstand a little. It wasn’t that I had difficulty with the timed escape. I didn’t even try it. When the numbers came up and started ticking down, I got up and turned off the Gamecube. I object to the idea of the timed escape.
I loathe timed escapes. At least previous Metroids left it till the end, where the hassle of going through them was worth it, since one had already invested so many hours in the game.
Ultima Online was ruined for me by the PKers, people whose sole pleasure in the game was running around, killing other characters and then taking their stuff. Grief players.
Great looking huge game with excellent controls from RARE.
Except that it was TOO big for it’s own good and you had no idea where to go or what to do next.
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter (PS2) - A cool new spinoff of the Breath of Fire franchise in which you play a guy with special, totally badass “Dragon Powers.” But wait - the entire game has a time limit. That’s right, It’s an RPG with a time limit. To add insult to injury, any time you use your dragon powers, it bumps off more time - and you have to use them for every boss.
There are different points of view on that one. When I played Ultima Online, there were woefully few monsters or creatures out in the world, so the only way to do anything interesting was to basically play a highwayman. Me and my friends had a lot of fun trying to hold people up. We didn’t just PK at random, we’d basically tell the person to give us their money and give them a chance. If they complied, we’d let them go. If not, we’d try to kill them. We didn’t dismember their corpses though… unless they got really stupid and resurrected on the spot & attacked us again.
Our other option was being a tailor or some other equally boring-ass tradesman. Which sucks, if you’re paying a fee to play the game.
Wait, how do you trade a game you have already played? Freaking BestBuy won’t exchange jack shit for me. Lady Fried and her son came home with Stubbs the Zombie and in his excitement he had torn it open to look at the pictures and shit and he nearly cried when I told him it wouldn’t work on my Windows98 OS. Then she nearly cried when I told her there would be no exchages/no returns.
VC03, I hear you. I gave up on Ephemeral Fantasia because of the stupid time-dependent stuff. If I’m playing an RPG, I feel I should be able to wander around talking to townsfolk and searching for hidden goodies without any deadline pressure.
How about Tecmo Bowl? Great game two player…until you realized you could hike the ball, back up your QB so that all players were off the screen, then throw a “bullet” pass that went 80 yards two feet off the ground to your unguarded receiver who would catch it and score a TD every time.
Or be the Raiders and use Bo Jackson to walk unobstructed into the end zone like Fred Flintstone.
I feel obliged to defend Civ IV, because I think it’s one of the best games ever… but also because I was able to run it passably on a four-year-old computer before the patches, and extremely well after the patches. Not at top graphics levels, but not near the bottom ones either. It’s a BIT of a system hog, but WAY less than any number of other things released in the past year (Oblivion the most egregious example).
No, no - I called it a great game, and it IS. I’ve played it on other people’s computers and quite enjoyed it… that said…
… neither of my computers would run it. One two years old, one three. Both have good graphics cards. Both meet Civ IV’s minimum specifications. Regardless, it wouldn’t run on either - and I had WAITED on that game to get released! I had COUNTED the days. So I consider that to be a horrendous flaw in line with the OP.
I loved Tecmo Bowl, but those weren’t it’s only flaws. When it felt a team should lose, you lost. I can’t tell you how frustrated I would get when it got to the fourth quarter of the Superbowl, and Tecmo decided that Seattle or Cleveland should not be holding the trophy aloft. Defenders would come out of nowhere for a tackle. The opposing offense would run right over every player. The game would not let you win.*
*Exaggeration. I had every team win the Superbowl at some point. But the game would definitely cheat against you.