Heh, I don’t know what UO you played, but I played it for almost 5 years, up until trammel and EA ruined the game. To this day I consider it the best mmorpg ever made.
As for a game that was bad, I’d say Black & White as well, played it for a few hours and just couldn’t keep myself entertained. Sacrafice was another one like that. Really cool concept, but didn’t turn out as good as it could have.
FAKK 2. It used the Quake 3 engine, if I recall right, and was just another shitty platform jumper.
Another vote for Black & White - nice idea. Pretty graphics. But I wanted to throw my mouse into the monitor, after I realized I’d spent 4 hours and still couldn’t make the controls work.
Completely unplayable game.
The only thing i enjoyed about Black and White was picking up the villagers with my giant monkey and seeing how far into the ocean i could toss them. Slapping the crap out of your monkey was pretty addicting too. Running around town like some sort of monkeyzilla was fun too. Hmmm… actually i guess i did enjoy that game quite a bit, just not in the way you where suposed too.
I just started on Temple of Elemental Evil last night. Now I’ve put it aside waiting for the first patch. Memo to self: never buy a game before 1.01 is out!
The interface is … OK … it’s trying to use the radial menu idea. And I do prefer a turn-based game. But when my entire party got killed for the 5th time by the very first monster on the very first quest I lost interest. Then when the game hung during the sixth attempt, I gave up.
NOCTURNE. Such sweet ass graphics, but the controls sucked monkey ass. Not to mention it wasn’t even all that fun.
I’m probably the only one, but I’m gonna say Jedi Knight II. While it looked great, it played reasonably well, it was completely fixed. By that I mean that there was only one way to do each thing, one route to take, etc. So if you found a route through a canyon that apparently led nowhere, it went somewhere because there were no dead-ends in the game. So one just had to hop around at random until you found the necessary ledge or panel or whatever.
By the time your Jedi powers were really high, it was no challenge just to Force Push 20 stormtroopers off of a ledge or Force Pull all of their blasters out of their hands. Also, I found it near impossible to actually control the lightsaber. Yeah, you had different fighting styles, yeah you could do a couple of things. But there was little aiming when fighting another Jedi, there was very little control. Basically, you resorted to running right at someone and swinging blindly, hoping to get in a lucky cut. So you could kill most enemies very easily but others essentially only by random chance.
Check out this list. I’m going spoil your surprise (or maybe not) by saying that Black & White is number one. And I agree.
Add me to the Black and White crowd too. I thought it was going to be about building happy little communities, not boring puzzles. Eventually I started sacrificing all the neighboring villiagers to the fire for energy, but it still wouldn’t let me build the towns I wanted, and I still wasn’t considered evil so I uninstalled the damn thing.
I also tried playing ** Alice**. That looked really cool, but the controls were impossible, and there wasn’t much indication of what you were supposed to be doing.
Lastly, I don’t know if the full version of the game has a “free build” mode, but the demo of Space Colony has turned me off the idea of getting the game. There are too many goals that the evil space creatures make impossible to reach since they keep destroying your stuff.
It was an okay game, but I got flashes of what it could’ve been - it could’a been great. As it is, the art is better then the game.
yet another vote for black and white, because it had so much hope/hype.
elfkin477, what’s wrong with alice? it’s a rather straightforward 3rd person shooter with a creepy soundtrack and a wonderland to explore. however, the gameplay itself is boring.
I really loved Freedom Fighters, I just wish there was more of it - I finished it over the course of 2 or 3 days, and did not play that intensively. Why didn’t the PC version have the multiplayer component that was present on the console versions? I’d love to command a squad of guys against another player.
I’ll vote for Alice, too. Y’know, we’ve come a long way since Tomb Raider. Who out there still thinks jumping puzzles are fun?
Temple of Elemental Evil is tough, I agree.
The patch has greatly improved things, but some of the fights are still very hard. Also, the developers seemed to subscribe to the “when in doubt, up it’s armor class” school of game difficulty. Some of the enemies you fight are much harder to hit than they are in “normal” DnD.
I liked Alice a lot, and although the article puts it down because of the weapons, I really liked the weapons. I thought the killer dice and the jack in the box that spewed fire was a lot of fun
Wow, thanks for rubbing in the fact that I’m still playing on a GeForce DDR. You know, the kind that came before GeForce 3, before GeForce 2, and even before GeForce 256 … the kind that was the first card on the market with that name in 1999.
Just sayin’ that GeForces come a lot slower than a GeForce 4. 
(And yeah, I could spent $30 to buy a used GeForce 3 someday, but when the videocard becomes the bottleneck for the games I play, then I’ll do it.)
The game that annoyed me beyond words lately is The Republic: Revolution. It’s pitched as a political sim in a modern former Soviet Republic as you scheme and backstab your way to power. Absolutely beautiful screenshots - then you find out that the screenshots are only from cutscene “here’s what your action just did” events. For the hours I forced myself to play the game, I spent 99% of it in the top-down map view treating it like a board game.
o. m. g.
They think Halo is overrated!?!?!
It’s just the best multiplayer shooter experience… ever.
With a decent (yet tedius, i admit) campaign.
I’m finding that I’m really liking Neverwinter Nights, as well. I thought I wouldn’t, because I had a huge problem keeping everyone in my party organized in Baldur’s Gate, but the revamped interface is great. My only problem with it is that I get immersed and totally lose track of time. My boyfriend’s sister snuck up beside me and scared the bejebus out of me around midnight last night because I was so engrossed in the onscreen goings-on…
Okay, I have to admit, I’d forgotten “Black and White.” What a steaming pile that was, and after a year of being hyped like Christ Himself was returning to earth as a video game.
that Gamespy list is pretty good, actually, I don’t agree with “Halo” either, but a lot of their choices had me nodding my head. Especially “Starfleet Command,” “Quake II” and “Dungeon Siege.”
I liked Black and White. It was very overrated, but that was because of problems with the AI. See, you could teach your creature to do anything. Anything you could possibly imagine. Want him to water fields only on the third sunday of every month? You can teach him that. No other game has anything like that.
Problem is, it’s hard as hell to teach him anything, because you don’t have any feedback as to what behavior you’re reawrding/punishing him for. So the AI was disappointing, so people disliked it.
That and the tutorial, which was a pain, but was changed in a patch to allow people to skip past it.
I also liked Alice. The weapons were orginal, the atmosphere was excellent, and the enemies looked badass. Unfortunately, the game was too easy, too linear, and the AI was too simplistic.