Recently, I subscribed to Yahoo!'s Games on Demand and have been trying out quite a few of their currently offered streaming games.
Oh, there are some horrible games that look SO good at first glance out there!
Diggles: The Myth of Fenris looked cute. It is cute. But can anyone please tell me how any game that doesn’t have the rendering load of a Pixar film can slow down a 2.4 GHz processor with a GeForce video card so. damn. much?
Daikatana is dark. I’m not talking about the storyline, either. I have the gamma and brightness all the way to the right edge of the slider bar and I STILL can’t see a damn thing. When you have to waste ammo to figure out what path you can take, something’s wrong somewhere.
Rune. Also dark as hell. And the controls are really nasty to figure out. And the cut-scenes! If I wanted an e-book, I’d download one!
Soul Reaver II: Legacy of Kain. Again with the weird controls! And when I end up sitting through 20 minutes of expositional cut-scenes in the first 30 minutes of play, it seems just a little excessive.
On the other hand, I’ve experienced Dungeon Siege. And figured out that I majorly suck at Age of Wonders and Stronghold: Crusader.
Dear god, you bought Daikatana!? I hope it was only a $3 sale out of the bargain bin. I was so close to buying it one day about 2 years ago. Your right. The game looked cool, from the back of the box. But once a person reads any sort of online review of that mess, I couldnt imagine paying money for it.
I’ll add Battle Realms. Great graphics, sound, animation. But once I had to deal with the mess of upgrading units in a real-time clickfest, I lost interest very quickly…
Just curious - what type of Geforce video card do you have? They range fromt the very slow Geforce4 MX and GeforceFX 5200’s to the medium speed Geforce4 Ti 4200’s and GeforceFX 5600’s and the very fast GeforceFX 5900’s.
I don’t know that any reviewer thought that it was good (I remember reading reviews, but damned if I can recall any of them), but one of my friends suggested Black and White. The blurb on the back sounded good, and it was on massive sale (first clue), so I bought it. Interesting concept, but bad game play, sloppy controls, and you had to go through the entire backstory/tutorial every time you restarted the game (which involved un-and-then re-installing it). I never got through the missions of the pre-first level. That’s the last time I take a recommendation from a friend. Or at least that friend.
Ooh, those are pretty slow cards; really the name is deceptive, as the Geforce4 MX series is really just slightly modified Geforce2 cards; the Geforce3 is actually quite a bit faster.
The weird camera controls didn’t bother me, but mine had a bug that caused you to get hung up, periodically, and you had to play through all that damn tutorial and backstory every time you reinstalled the game.
I feel the same about Black and White. Great concept, from the makers of Populous, advanced AI, bleh. In all that time, you would think they could have built a game that was actually interesting to play.
Another game was Messiah (from the makers of MDK!..). An absolutely beautiful game in print, but a real shocker to play. It was just so…blah. The graphics had a nasty habit of glitching as the models went from low to high detail when you moved towards it. And it was bloody difficult too. I think it also marked the transition of Shiny Entertainment’s move from fun games to style over substance.
Speaking of which, does anyone actually own the piece of tripe that is Enter the Matrix? I managed to clock it by pressing random buttons on a one night hire.
Giants:Citizen Kabuto…sadly I kinda liked this one but it never gelled quite right with me.
Pool of Radiance. Wouldn’t even install on my D: drive and my C: didn’t have enough room. Once I edited the registry to get that working right I had read so many bad reviews that I never even bothered to play it.
When “Ultima Online” first came out I thought it was the greatest game concept in the history of the world; an online neverending RPG! A game we had all been dreaming about!
Then I played it. Utterly unplayable. The servers crashed every half hour and were too slow to play anyway except at 4 AM. No game balance. Everything was illogical. Within a week I was using the CD as a coaster.
Holy crap, good old Messiah. I bought that in 1999 and tried to play it again a few months ago. There was a point in the game that I just couldn’t get past. I wasn’t dying, the game just crashed every time I opened a certain door, and the only way I could get around that was to play in a safe mode that was one step above just displaying the values of the game variables on a text console. I never even got to inhabit a prostitute.
