PC games with good idea, but bad execution

Cafe Society
21

Hamsters ate my first post.

American Macgee’s Alice. Awesome premise (a mental patient named Alice experiencing ‘Wonderland’- only Wonderland is a dark, scary, adult take on the original, where insanity is real, and not just all fun and tea parties).

It used the Quake 3 engine, I believe, so there was no real excuse for it to be bad. The graphics were actually well-done, but the gameplay SUCKED. There were maybe 6 weapons, all but one of which was utterly useless. Boring as hell- I stopped playing after about an hour and uninstalled it immediately.

Very disappointing for a huge Alice fan.

22

I see that Outpost and Balck and White have already been mentioned, I couldn’t agree more. I am gonna go ahead and add MDK2 and it is not a typo I am talking about the second one. Every single aspect of that game was amazing but one little thing. The damn jumping puzzles that were especially numerous when you played as the professor. Actually made me give up on the game. I now believe the first one is superrior as it doesn’t have as many of the damn things.

I do not agree with Red Faction however. It may be a rail based shoot em up but I am playing it for the third time right now and am still having a truckload of fun. Its like watching Total Recall while getting to shoot some of the bad guys personally and not having the Governator take care of them all.

Also Duke Nukem Forever did come out and was very fun and funny just like the 3D version. Unfortunately it had faaar to much jumping for me to have a chance at it.

23

Republic: the Revolution. Awesome idea – you get to try to overthrow a corrupt government in an Eastern European country. You recruit agents to work for you, and use tactics like leafletting, bribery, blackmail and demagoguery to get the job done. Basically a whole new take on turn-based strategy. Bonus points for a kind of Simlish that sounds vaguely Russian.

So why does it suck? Well, because the system requirements are insane and the UI was designed by monkeys.

Grrrrrrr.

And I rather like Black & White, if only for the opening sequence. It’s one of my favorite opening sequences to a game, along with Half-Life. Past the opening, though, it (B&W) kind of fails to develop into much a game and is a little too linear to be a sandbox.

24

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Command and Conquer: Renegade yet… it was a very cool idea to be able to walk around in the C&C universe. But instead of sticking to actual commando type missions the game revolved around a very strange storyline with mutants and a UFO. The game was quite beautiful but very lacking in detail and the AI was just stupid. The enemy soldiers almost always let me shoot first and they seem to take a timeout while I reload. This led to me getting massacred in MOHAA, which has a very vicious AI. Still, I’ve greatly enjoyed Renegade and I still play it. But I think it could have been so much better…

25

Tusculan stole mine…

Another fun one was a game called Stone Keep. It was a fun almost-3D role playing game. I thought it had a great concept and fun execution, but the game engine was rather lame.

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If you’re thinking of that side-scroller Duke Nukem game that came out, that was not ‘Duke Nukem Forever’. ‘Forever’ is supposed to be another 3D game.

I’m pretty sure the game is not going to ever come out; it’s a prank. Big clue: The game is called ‘FOREVER’…

27

I would have to go with High Command. I remember being excited about a game where you controlled all aspects of Germany during WWII but was put off from the first installation. The game crashed constantly and when I finally got it working, it just wasn’t interesting.

I love complex war games, espcially something like Pacific War which I used to play a single game of for a week but High Command just didn’t have anything beyond its complexity to make it very interesting.
I would also like to comment that it’s a shame that current game makers with all the power at their disposal can be constantly shown up by old games. Hell, I’d take a good game of Battlehawks 1942 over most of the current garbage that passes for flight sims. The game came on one 3.5" floppy yet was replayable for months.

Right now I am playing Command HQ…oh the joy of it all!

28

Tell me about it. I don’t mind jumping puzzles that much, but this game introduced

KICKING puzzles? And you can’t even kick. So they’re really “repeatedly walk into things puzzles”. With Resident Evil-style control. Bravo.

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Trespasser. This is what happens when technology gets ahead of gameplay…this review pretty much nails it:

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I played Trespasser to the end, and Black and White. Do I qualify for video game sainthood?

I don’t remember the name of the game, but it was by the creators of the close combat series. It was in 3-D, which sounds like it would have been a Good Idea, but, most of the time was spent flying around trying to manage teams of morons, and surrender wasn’t an option. The platoon was almost wiped out, along with the enemy, and all that were left were 3 troops on either side who wouldn’t do anything except cower in the corners of the map.

31

I was all ready to blow up at you, because I love the game, but then I remembered the jumping … AIEEE make the screams stop!

My problem with Black and White was that it was too easy. Get the poisoned grain, drop a tiny bit in enemy storehouse, wait for village to die, take out grain, re-populate village, repeat.

32

The Wheel of Time . Great Books with so much potential. Some of the things that put me off were:
[ul]
[li]bad graphics[/li][li]no choice in character selection. Gimme a few choices if you’re not going to let me make my own character.[/li][li]crappy controls[/li][/ul]
The game could have been so much more. Give me a Neverwinter Nights like game based on WoT instead, thank you!

Tikster

33

As I buy most of my games from the bargain bin, I’ll throw in a couple of lesser known games that had the potential to be great:

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.

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.

34

I completely agree with Outpost and Black and White – I was really, really looking forward to both of those and was extremely disappointed.

Same with SimeThemePark/Theme Park World. Hopefully Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 won’t make the same mistakes; I keep wanting a game that balances the park simulator/coaster builder games as well as the first RCT did, but with a nicer presentation.

I’m not sure if SimCopter and Streets of SimCity qualify. There’s definitely something cool about being able to drive or fly around a city that you’ve built, but not if that’s the whole game.

35

Not to mention the sheer ridiculousness of Aes Sedai circle-strafing. Yea, Moiraine was a badass, but I can’t see her circle strafing around Trollocs. Well, I can, but it makes me laugh my ass off.

36

Wheel of Time Heh I only played the demo but when I saw that fog snake I laughed so hard I gave up. Talk about not understanding the source material at all. The whole level should have been creepy and slow instead you got monsters in the shadows and a fog snake chasing you around.

37

I mentioned this one over in the “Video Games You’re the Only One Who Has Ever Played” thread but it fits here too…

Central Intelligence - A CD-Rom based game from the mid 90’s. A coup has occured on a small Caribbean island. The new govenment has kicked out all western diplomats and corporations and is in the process of signing new treaties with the Chinese (who seem to have been behind the coup in the first place). The island is one of the largest suppliers of oil in the region and is of strategic importance.

You have been sent in with a small band of operatives to see that the govenment on the island is replaced with something friendlier to western interests. Your operatives cannot do everything alone so you have to recruit local help.

Missions are things like bribing newspapers to alter the slant of their articles, blackmailing government officials to influence votes, distributing propaganda at schools, passing money and equipment to the rebels and the like. You have complete freedom to do whatever you like and the island is huge with short video clips from every location.

Sound good? Forget it. The game, to put it mildly, sucks!

First, the game is real time. You can change the speed at which the “clock” runs but there is no way to pause it to plan your next move. While you are issuing one set of commands you are also constantly getting reports from your various operatives and agents and there is a “news ticker” constantly running across the top of your screen. You have to be looking three places at once or you risk missing something.

Second, issuing commands is a pain. The game is controlled through a series of nested menus. Just about everything you want to do seems to require about a dozen mouse clicks and if you find yourself in the wrong menu you have to back all the way out and try again.

Third, there is no map! As I said, the island is huge. But, they don’t tell you where anything is! Want to put a spy at the presidential palace? Find it first. Want to spread some propaganda around the college? Find it first. Want to break someone out of jail? Find it first. There are hundreds of sectors on the island and the game doesn’t tell you what is in 99% of them (beyond “urban” or “forest” or whatever).

Fourth, the game doesn’t even give you a clue as to how to proceed. Yeah, you have an incredible amount of freedom to do whatever you want, but you have no clue as to what might or might not work or even a suggestion as to how to go about overthrowing a govenment. So you spend huge amounts of time simply trying things to see what they do.

I could go on. The most frustrating part is that the game should have been fun but wound up being too much like work. Too bad. There’s a certain amount of fun to be had in poking around in someone else’s country doing things that would have the secretary disavowing any knowledge of your actions if caught. I really wanted to enjoy this one but in the end it was just an exercise in frustration.

38

Tropico you control a small island and you can play as a benevolent ruler or tyrannical despot…only the despot part didn’t work.

Going to lose an election and decide to wack your opponent? Too bad they’re just replaced and you lose the election anyway (one time I wacked five guys in a row you’d think #3 would clue in and drop out of the election). Stuffing ballot boxes only had limited results as well.

Lock up the competition? Just makes all their relatives pissed off so your problems compound.

Set up sweat shops? Causes such discontent for little extra product so it’s not worth it.

Really the best way was to play it totally straight like any other sim game. In that respect it was ok but not worth money if you already had better more complex sim games to play with.

39

I love Splinter Cell, and the single player demo for PT is great. But the online demo is terrible. As a spy, try to get in, only to get nailed the second you try to do anything but hide–and then spend another minute or two getting into the building again. As a merc, spend a lot of time stumbling around looking for spies until suddenly someone snaps your neck.

At least the demo saved me $50.

40

Seems to me that the complaint is that you aren’t very good at it. Given that you lost on both sides, clearly the gameplay isn’t horrendously slanted towards either, and as people were having success getting you, I don’t think you can really dismiss the execution of the multilplayer game.