I was desperately looking forward to Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, used my money from work experience at school to buy it on the release day. I tried to love it, it wasn’t a bad game, it just wasn’t as good as TA.
I also bought a PS1 just to play FFVII after watching my friends playing it on theirs.
As of now… I HAVE to have Fallout 3, GTA 4 and Spore on their release dates… I’ll let you know…
They told me there would be a Champions computer game back in the late 80’s. I still wait. (And yes, I know about the proposed MMO. I look upon Cryptic like adders fanged, but they’re the only adders in the superhero MMO pit at the moment, so I gotta deal with them.)
They told me there’d be a Deadlands computer game as well. I still wait.
A friend of mine in the computer game industry keeps trying to pitch a 7th Sea computer game…
And still I wait.
Master of Orion 3.
Disappointed isn’t the word - imagine a child waiting for father xmas to show up and patiently watching the fireplace and then suddenly seeing a bloodied corpse complete with stabwounds and missing the head, still spurting blood, fall into it. That’s how I felt.
Kings Quest 8. It was the first game I ever paid full retail price for.
Wasn’t swordquest the one that was supposed to have some big, in-game contest thingamabob that dealt with the gazillion mini-games in it? (In fact, if I recall correctly, all it was was mini-games…) Man, I remember my friend and I -swearing- up and down we’d break whatever mysterious code the game would throw our way… Sadly, it never emerged.
Police Quest 2
The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Caesar 3, and The Sims 2. The first 3 were mentioned in PC Gamer when my dad still had the subscription and really hyped me up. I loved that magazine.
Arkanoid Doh It Again. (SNES)
I guess it did, I always liked ‘Breakout’ style games, and I think Arkanoid did it’s father, or great granddad one up.
I wanted it for the Board Editor, and the boss battles that were not brick related came as a big surprise to me.
Okami - Unfortunately after all the anticipation, when I first loaded it my first impressions weren’t good, but after a while it sucks you in. I’m replaying it now 
Disgaea 2 - not as good as the first, but head and shoulders above most turnbased strategy. Quite happy with this one.
Seven Kingdoms II - I was utterly disappointed. The gameplay was dreadful and all the things I loved about 7 kingdoms AA had been dropped.
Anything Final Fantasy - no real disappointments.
The Adventure Company’s Agatha Christie series - I bought “Evil under the Sun” the moment it came out and am still playing it despite the single most annoying glitch a PC game can have (crashing your PC every 5 minutes). Aside from that not-so-small glitch its great.
Oooh, I bet you felt screwed after that.
It was a major departure from the style of the previous games, but I still enjoyed it.
I’m primarily a Nintendo guy and the first game I must have is always the flagship Mario game.
Does it count if the game isn’t out yet? Because I’m dying to get Soul Caliber IV. Let me explain this to you–I do not like fighting games. I find half of them boring and half of them tolerable to moderately fun. In general though, I avoid them. But this series is one of about two that I have truly enjoyed, so I’m really looking forward to the next release. We’ll be getting another system solely for this game.
In other news, Elite Beat Agents is the reason why I wanted a DS. I’m a DDR fan anyways, but after playing this a bit at a friend’s house, I was freaking hooked. It’s still one of my favorite games on the system. It’s just plain fun, with songs that I’m actually familiar with.
It was a four-part game series-- Swordquests Earthworld, Fireworld, Waterworld, and Airworld-- each of which had a handful of themed minigames tied together with a mappable overworld. Each came packaged with a DC comic which expanded the storyline, and which were tied to events triggered in the games; drop the right item in the right room, and you’d get a page/panel clue which might or might not be a red herring. Each game was part of a contest; entrants had to solve the game, enter, and the top players would vie in a final game for some sort of prize-- jewel encrusted swords, chalices, etc. The winner of each game would then get to play for some kind of final prize.
Earthworld came out, and was okay. Fireworld came out and was buggy as hell, with some of the minigames so poorly programmed that they weren’t even NTSC compatible. (A quirk of the 2600-- each program has to generate each line of an NTSC frame on the fly, handling logic and sound in the interval between picture lines.) Waterworld was published but only half-heartedly released, despite being very well done-- mostly through mail order, with a few copies remaindered at clearance toy outlets. Airworld was never released, and little if any work was done on the game.
I never “got” the clue-cracking and stuff one was supposed to do, but I enjoyed Earthworld and Waterworld immensely as a kid, and was sucked in by the storyline in the comics. So I waited for Airworld… and waited… and waited.
In the last 10 years, the only game I *had to have was Rock Band. And the various guitar hero upgrades after I got the first one and realized how much fun it was.
Before that, the only game that was a ‘must-have’ for me was a good Flight Simulator. Oh, and freecell/spider. Every time I get a new PDA the first thing I do is find a good version of freecell and spider solitaire for it.
Silent Hill 4: Alias and I are huge survival horror fans and especially the Silent Hill series. It certainly lived up to expectations. It had great atmosphere, a strong story, and they evened out the pace (SH2-too much empty walking, SH3 too much combat).
Fatal Frame 3: Another survival horror, and another that met expectations. Not quite as good as Fatal Frame 2, but still heads and shoulders above a lot of games. Word is the next Fatal Frame will come out for the Wii, and yeah. We have to have it.
Shadow of the Colossus: This game received a lot of hype in the months building up to it’s release, and I wasn’t really enthused until I found it was done by the same people that did Ico. Moved right to the top of my list, and exceeded expectations. Good thing it came out around my birthday.
Ultimate Spider Man: Speaking of birthday games, this was another. Spider Man 2 kicked much ass as far as games go. Good controls and story. Challenging without being controller chucking tough. Ultimate? Not so much. There were several stages where you had to do everything exactly right or you had to do it all over. Not to mention Spider Man had the same goddamn irritating catchphrases every time anything happened. Hated that game so much I could’ve set the disk on fire. Wound up trading it away online.
Final Fantasy XII: Yet another birthday game. It pays to be born in November when games are coming out for the christmas season. It met expectations well, and was a lot of fun. Probably would have been more if I hadn’t based my levels on the later challenges and absolutely slaughtered the end of the story boss. I think I was twenty levels higher than I needed to be.
Ultima Online, and … it’s hard to say. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It eventually failed to grow enough to suit me, anyway.
Also:
The Orange Box, and oh god yeah. It is the best box of gaming goodness ever committed to bits.
I had been reading eagerly about Goldeneye in Nintendo Power for months…when it finally came out, begged my mom to buy it for me. She said if I went out into the yard and did all the yard work, she’d buy it. So I went out there in the hot sun and did all this weeding, moving stones around, all kinds of other stuff. It took pretty much all day. When I was all done, we went to Target and she bought be Goldeneye. That game completely took over my life for a few months…I’d literally get up early in the morning just to play it for an hour before school. At night, after homework and hockey practice, I’d play it for hours more, as my Sharp ghetto-blaster boom box played Chumbawamba and Natalie Imbruglia and The Cranberries and The Cardigans and that song “How Bizarre” by OMC. Oh, it was a good year, 1997.
That it was Argent Towers, that it was.
Wipes tear from eye
As I mention in one of the other video game related threads, I had a level 90 and two 89’s by the time I took on the final boss. (I completed every sidequest including the uber wyrm. My other three characters were all at 85 as well.)
I now had the best weapon in the game. (Although the Zodiac spear is the strongest, it has a slow rate of attack, the sword you get from completing the fishing quest, killing Omega, and taking out the uber wyrm is better.)
I killed the final storyline boss in a matter of minutes. It took me almost 7 hours to take out the uber wyrm.