Anyone remember Sierra’s Outpost from 1994? I’m still pissed over that one.
Fuck you and your 93% review, PC Gamer. I haven’t trusted a magazine review since.
I skipped Black and White. As a rule I almost always play a game at someone’s house before I buy it.
WarCraft III just doens’t do it for me. I don’t get the hang of developing quickly in that game. All the rest of that sort of genre are ok, but not that one.
Black & White was pretty annoying – I never made it past the second level. Alice, however, kept me thoroughly entertained. Maybe it wasn’t the best gameplay, but the ey-candy rocked, and I never got tired of the little fire-breathing jack-in-the-box bomb.
As for other overrated games? Hmm…Command & Conquer and SimEarth were the only games I ever returned to the store in disgust, back when you could actually do that.
Daniel
Oh yeah. Amazing pile, that was. My favorite memories:
A cdrom-based game that required an “install floppy”…because they forgot some crucial files on the actual cd.
A little “er…we left some features out” letter included, which talked about how painful it was but it was like it simply being time to let the baby bird fly from the nest. Baffling when first read; infuriating after you’ve really put it in context, as said features involved things like roads, swaths of the tech tree, an opposing computer colony that actually followed the build rules, mines that worked properly…
One of PC Gamer’s finest moments, to be sure. Another fine moment was the time they gave some deeply forgettable “4x” space-conquering-strategy game, in the vein of Master of Orion only very dumbed down, a high raving score. Not really mentioned at the time? That the fellow who wrote the review had also written the strategy guide for the game.
As a more modern title, I’d nominate Simcity 4.
I wonder if there’s anyone else out there that played EA Games’ Majestic? This one was hyped for about a year as the game that would “play you” instead of the other way around. The story was kept under wraps, so the only thing people knew about it was that it would take place in “real time” and e-mail/IM/call you and that it had something to do with UFOs and government conspiracies.
There were the pre-game puzzles that would train the players to look for information in all sorts of hidden places. Once the game finally came out, however, it was a huge disappointment. The potential was there, but the puzzles were mind-numbingly easy compared to the pre-game puzzles. The AIM “chat-bots” were fun to toy with (somewhat clever, though), but once you completed a puzzle, the game would make you wait for a day or so to keep you from finishing it in a single sitting.
Then Sept. 11 happened and gameplay was suspended. Suddenly government conspiracies weren’t so fun anymore. It resumed a few months later, but the few people who didn’t mind the monthly subscription fee weren’t enough to sustain it. They also tried releasing a CD version (the original was online-only) but sales were probably next to nil, and EA axed the project in early '02. Most (if not all) the fan-sites that sprang up have vanished, leaving virtually no evidence the game ever existed save in the minds of those who “played.” Maybe it was a collective mind-control experiment after all, but assuming it wasn’t, there was a game that came nowhere close to what was advertised.
Ascendancy. Bill Trotter. I remember the fiasco well.
The only gaming writer I trust these days is Tom Chick, the guy who had the balls to say “Deus Ex sucked.” I disagree – I loved Deus Ex – but I think that proves he’s genuinely independent.
I would have to say both Lionheart and Dungeon Seige were hopefuls for me…and both didn’t have the imagination to keep me coming back. Especially Dungeon Seige, such pretty cover art, such uninspired play.
I’m actually rather enjoying ‘Temple of Elemental Evil’ right now, it gets a bit better once you’re done with the mind numbing quests in the very first town. As for the fighting, I had leveled up to level two before I even finished the beginning town quests, therefore the fighting was a doable by the time I got around to it.
It does crash a lot, so I can understand why it’s on this list, but heck, most of the games I like crash a lot, so I guess I’m used to it. 
Another vote for Black & White. The game’s cool enough, but the controls are awful. I use mouse gestures in Opera all the time, with great success, but I could never get more than a couple of them to work in B&W.
Much as I hate to join the Black & White pileon, playing that game was an exercise in exasperation. There wasn’t any real way to tell the difference between what the pet’s doing and what the pet thinks it’s doing. At one point my tiger picked a piece of his excrement and put it in a wheat field. I praised him, thinking that he’d discover the joys of fertilizing my crops. Instead, apparently he’d been bringing the crap to the little guy working the field, and now thought that people liked to have his poop around. So everytime he took a dump he’d head to the biggest group of people (the creche, layabouts sitting around the town hall) and proudly throw his crap at them. Hooray.
Another game I’ll bring up is Aquanox, a kind of submarine/combat game. Think X-Wing underwater, but with the slowest weapons and worst voice acting ever. I’m pretty sure they only had one woman in the studios, and used her for all the female voices with stupid horrible accents to tell them apart. You couldn’t go upside down, which made manuvering very unintuitive and turned dogfishfighting into either circling around or a stomach-churning series of sinewaves
The real head-scratcher about this game was the Force Heal power. You could be down to a 1 in health, but just press the force heal button over and over, and you’d be back to a hundred in no time. And it was limitless, so it was virtually impossible to die if you used it.
Still, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Dang, when did that get released? I swear I only checked a couple of days ago and there was only news of some stuff that would be in it. Back into it tonight I guess.
I skipped the trivial quests in town - the find-my-pet-rabbit sort of stuff - but if there’s enough EPs to get to level 2 I supposed I’ll have to do them first. Thanks for the help, folks.
After reading the GameSpy list, I must say I also agree with Super Mario Sunshine, though I didn’t know it was highly rated in the first place. The Getaway is another good choice - I took it back the same night I rented it, because the lack of control made it unplayable; it should not take all night to walk up a staircase and shoot 4 guys. Halo’s another good one… face it, folks: it has the second best graphics, second best sound, second best AI, and second best weapons of any FPS; all the indoor areas look the same; and last but not least, it’s an FPS you play with a freaking gamepad. (The PC version has great controls but runs way too slow.) Even Mortal Kombat is a good choice, in retrospect, since MKII showed us how it should have been done.
But Metal Gear Solid 2 as the second most overrated game?? Blasphemy! The story may have been kooky, but it kept me captivated from beginning to end, and it does make sense in a way. The graphics are still among the best of any PS2 title. The attention to detail is simply amazing. The controls and gameplay are top notch. The Snake/Raiden bait & switch was a little disappointing, but it’s just a character model.
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Halo–I hated this game…you can’t play FPS games with a gamepad…it just doesn’t work…what was the big idea?
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B&W–I’m not going to beat this dead horse…it sucked.
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Nocturne–Brain surgery is easier than moving around this game.
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Freedom Force–I know people who have said that this is the greatest game that has ever been made…I don’t get it…I hated this game…it was hard to control, the game play was slow…and after about 1 hour of the cheesy Superhero schtick…it got old
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Warcraft III–An average game that deserved a 75% rating…instead it got 90’s…huh? Plus it was like $65 bucks…WTF
Having virtually no experience with 3rd person shooter games (90% of the games I play are simulation/ AI games - the rest of them are racing games or things like GTA and Tony Hawks) I had no idea how the hell to do anything, and the help files were no help whatsoever. If you don’t play games like that and it doesn’t tell you how to jump or swim, it’s not a whole lot of fun trying to figure the game out.
I’m so glad to discover I’m not alone on Black & White. Most of the time people either haven’t played it or they liked it when I talk to them.
All the reviews I saw for it talked about how it was just about the greatest game ever to exist. I finally got it way after it was new and cool, for only $12. Some people might think that was a sign, but I got Planescape: Torment for $10 doublepacked with another game, and it’s still one of my favorites. But B&W just stunk. It was clunky, it was boring, I couldn’t figure out if maybe when you bought it in the big box it came with some crack that made it more exciting or what. I didn’t even think the graphics were worth the effort.
I’m mad that it sucked so much too, because it was such a neat concept.
Freedom Force is fun enough in small doses, but it’s nowhere near as great as the friend who gave it to me insisted it was. If I play more than a couple of missions at once I get urges to use the cd for a coaster.
Halo was great. As for the gamepad, it took me just as long to get used to using it as it did for me to first learn how to use the mouse. The problem is that, in my opinion, most people think of the joysticks as buttons, and so push them all the way to one side or the other, instead of moving them around fluidly. When you get accustomed to it, it’s like playing the game with two mice for movement… which is very interesting.
But people who say “You can’t play an FPS with a gamepad” make me laugh, 'cuz the simple fact that hundreds of thousands of people do just that proves 'em wrong. Just 'cuz YOU suck with it doesn’t mean it’s the gamepad’s fault.
My least favorite in this category is “Wheel of Time”. It was written up as being this revolutionary game that was going to be totally different because you were using magic instead of brute force.
The actual game was a substandard FPS where you had a bunch of different magical spells that bore a striking resemblance to the standard pistol-shotgun-rifle categories. The bad guys could see you no matter where you were on the map, and could dodge your shots at anything further than point blank range. The levels were so linear that the player might as well been on rails.
I gave up in Nocturne when I couldn’t get past one screen where I would get ambushed by werewolves, and the only thing I could see was the furry ass of the werewolf that was killing me. Now whenever a 3rd person game gives me a crappy camera angle, I call it the werewolf ass-cam.
I just finished “Silent Hill 2”, and that game gave me the werewolf ass-cam several times, usually when fighting bosses. That was another one that’s way overrated. The voice acting and the choices that you’re given are so bad that you don’t really give a crap if the character lives or dies. His confused angst is really damn annoying. Making him run around is a chore. I finished it out of a desire to get my money’s worth, not any compelling reason from within the game.
If it’s so hard for so many people to get good at, maybe there if a fundamental flaw in the design of the system. I’ve played lots of console shooters and in time you can get used to the system, but it is light years behind mouse control. The worst part about the little joysticks is that sweaty thumb/fingers can slip off them and move them too much in a direction. In essence this is penalizing you for enjoying a game enough that it is making you prespire.
Obviously it’s possible to play an FPS with a gamepad, but that doesn’t mean you can control as well as with a keyboard and mouse.
The PC and Xbox versions of Halo aren’t multiplayer compatible… but if they were, I guarantee I could mop the floor with all but the best Xbox players.
No-one has mentioned Unreal II??
Brilliant graphics, appalling gameplay. Oh, and put me down as another for Halo.