Ultima 9: Ascension – removed just about everything that made the Ultima series special (eight Virtues, companions, etc.) and released in such a buggy state, the game was literally unfinishable until it got patched.
Streets of Sim City – great idea…drive around a 3-d model of your Sim City! Except it’s perpetual twilight, fog everywhere, all the buildings are ugly brown boxes, can’t interact with shit, and the “race” they added to make it remotely interesting was a piece of crap. (Rumor has it that Maxis employees are forbidden from even speaking of this game, at risk of termination…)
I really love Rebellion. I take it out atleast once or twice a year and play it straight for a week. The only thing I found annoying was that the Rebels had no chance in any space battle until they got a Mon Cal cruiser. And really the only difference between what the two factions could do was that the Empire could execute captives while the rebels just imprisoned them. It was a clcik happy game but that never bothered me.
Force Commander I think is unplayable. Poor poor camera and troop commands.
Temple of Elemental Evil. An excellent idea marred by so many bugs it was virtually unplayable. It was likely the straw that broke the developers’ back.
Deus Ex: Invisible War. It systematically removed everything that made the original so excellent. No wide-open spaces, no open-ended choices. It was, for all intents and purposes, on rails. Your only alternate paths were a choice between taking the door into the next room or taking the vent right next to the door. In addition, the game was released before the textures were completed, resulting in crappy monochrome surroundings that looked exactly the same regardless of what part of the game you were playing. They actually had the balls to patch the textures later…in stages! I downloaded one before I decided the game wasn’t worth it.
eXtreme Paintball. PC Gamer actually rated it below 10%, mainly because the game shipped with NO AI. Let me repeat that: there was NO AI. The opponent characters didn’t do anything.
The lead programmer wrote them a letter after the review explaining that he basically had been given 2 weeks to get the game ready to ship, and that the patch actually fixed things.
It’s been a while since I played GTA3 / GTA:VC, and I was able to set up their controls to do what I wanted. It just seems a lot more clumbsy in GTA:SA.
I’m definately talking about the PC version. I’ve never owned console versions of this game. I couldn’t tell you if the default controls are the same or not, but I know I could never customize the controls to my liking.
My driving controls are the arrow keys, control for handbrake, shift for horn, Del (above the arrow keys) for look left, PgDn (above the arrow keys) for look right, Insert (on keypad) for look back.
The only time it gets complicated is if you need to control the turret on a tank or the water cannon on a firetruck. I map the turret controls to the number pad arrows for the infrequent times I need them.
My on-foot controls are mouselook, arrow keys for movement, Shift for sprint, End (above arrow keys) for crouch, mousewheel for switching weapons, Enter for use, right mouse for jump. That’s about all you need for the basics.
Put me in with the Star Wars: Rebellion “lovers”. It wasn’t that bad once you got to know it.
Temple of Elemental Evil was a huge disappointment, it almost put me off RPGs. Another big let-down was Civ III. It was just a slightly prettier version of Civ II. How do you go from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri to that? You could tell that Brian Reynolds and not Sid Meier was the brains in Firaxis Games.
But the worst I’ve seen and played was Streets of Sim City, it was just some lame-ass driving simulation with crappy graphics.
The PC version is almost unbeatable, with that God damn Harrier mission. You have to control the bank and tilt with the asdw keys, the throttle with the arrow keys, the angle of the thursters (to hange from VTOL to straight flying) with the 2 and 8 buttons, the weapons with the mouse buttons, and also launch countermeasures if another plane fires a missle at you. There is no way to rearrange the keys to make it easy.
That being said, I still enjoyed the game. 99.9% of the time, the controls were just fine for me.
Are you kidding me? The changes between Civ II and Civ III were enormous. The addition of national borders (yes, pioneered in Alpha Centauri, but new to the Civ franchise in that iteration) and tradable resources alone vastly altered the way the game was played, and those are only the two most obvious changes. The great strength of the Civ games in general is the way it continually reinvents itself without ever losing the quintessential element that makes it a Civ game.
Ok, I never got that far. I got out into the country and started doing truck driving missions and whatnot, then my C: drive threw up and I lost my save game. At this point I’ve started over, but I don’t mind replaying, it’s a great game for the most part.
Not only is Master of Orion III bad, it feels like a rip-off of Pax Imperia: Eminent domain, a terrible game in its own right. MOO III feels like they took every thing that made Pax Imperia a bad game, and slapped the MOO name on it.
It was nothing but a smoother, more cartoonish version of Civ II. The tradable resources were already part of the franchise so that was nothing new, neither was the frustration from that unfanthomable fighting system, which actualy worked on SMAC but went back to caveman vs. tank in Civ III. The game was just a face-lift and it boggles my mind why so many people like it.
I was never a huge game player but one of my biggest disappointments in a game was Enemy Nations. The concept of the game was sound (if not original) – establish a colony, build large shootie things, use them to blow up the other colonies. The graphics were pretty nice (although ever alien race had the exact same units and buildings) and it seemed to have some good ideas. It just had a few major flaws that sucked the joy of gameplay out of it.
One of the largest was that, at a certain point in the game, the computer AI would just… give up. For no reason. Despite having the necessary production buildings and vehicles, the enemy colonies would stop building new buildings, military units, civilian vehicles, etc. It wouldn’t even try to mount a defense with its existing units. It felt like trying to play Monopoly against your younger brother and once you get Boardwalk and Parkplace, he just starts sulking and saying “I don’t care” with each roll of the dice.
Another bizarre bug was that the enemy colony would randomly change races. For no good reason (not that it was ever supposed to change races) and the new race was a draw of the cards. One minute you’re fighting some alien race which excels in warcraft and, a minute later, all the buildings and units are some alien race which excels at agriculture :dubious:
Also, I’m not sure how common this is in this style of game, but you didn’t win until every last trace of the other colonies was gone. So there might be some half-started building foundation in the middle of a forest somewhere, unable to produce or accomplish anything, but the game demanded that you comb the entire friggin’ planet until you found ut and lobbed a shell at it before you won. An exercise in tedium.
Luckily for everyone, according to the above link, the game is now apparently free from the creators. Let the good times roll!
The most disappointing game for me was BattleSpire.
Made by Bethesda and appeared to be an Elder Scrolls game. I snatched it up the day it came out. It was as buggy as Daggerfall, and the first attempt in history to create an RPG without a story, or any fucking point at all as near as I can tell. A game set around around fighting mechanics from an engine that was never designed for more than nominal fighting mechanics.
There was a game that came out in 94 or so…it was supposed to be “simcity in space”…but the damn thing was so buggy, and there was a glitch where no matter what you did, you ran out of a certain mineral and your colony was doomed… For some reason I want to call it Outpost, but I don’t think that’s right…anyone else remember it?
The Atari 2600 game ET is almost universally known as one of the worst games it. It is credited with making the whole video game industry crash in 1983. Several million cartridges had to be secretly destroyed by Atari and many claim they hid them in a special landfill in New Mexico. The game was poorly written to begin with but it also had bugs that made it impossible to complete under many conditions.