Going back a ways, Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I bought it, played it for a while, then quickly went back to playing HOMM3 with expansion packs and random maps.
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Also RCT4 mobile, which managed to keep the bad stuff introduced in the previous game but not the fun or cool stuff of 1 or 2.
RCT3 wasn’t the worst sequel I’ve seen but the new look didn’t go over too well with me, and the product placement was so blatant and intrusive that it nearly ruined it. I did like the scenarios but even with the expansions it felt short and lacked the creative aspects the previous games have.
The mobile version (RCT4) has so many problems that it feels like they got so far into it when the entire team quit, and the company said screw it, lets release it anyway. It hasn’t crashed that much, but objects (rides, paths, scenery, etc) flicker in and out in a way that unpleasantly reminds me of the shoddier Atari 2600 games, gives me a headache, then gives me another headache from the unpleasant memories of the shoddier Atari 2600 games. Shop collection meters don’t seem to accrue money correctly, there isn’t too much of a ride/shop/decoration selection, you can’t raise, lower, or rotate rides (including the prebuilt coasters which take up massive amounts of space), you can’t build so much as a path underneath a coaster no matter how high the track is, and things like entertainers, path queues, security, janitors, etc, are all gone.
I really wish they’d have just ported 1 or 2 directly instead of giving us an even simpler version of 3. Even a more or less direct port of 3 would be better than this. Gah. Just awful. I suppose the one nice thing is the IAP isn’t too intrusive and I haven’t (and wouldn’t) spent a penny on it.
I’ll say Skyrim and Oblivion as well.
Oblivion was simply not as huge a step up in graphics and playability over Morrowind as I would have expected from 2002 to 2008.
Morrowind (with expansions) had such a cool, sad story to it: the PC witnessing the final fall of three gods who should never have been gods in the first place. I would actually care to see a novelization or film adaptation (maybe animated) of the story of the Tribunal. By comparison, Oblivion, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit, took a step backwards, towards the stereotypical RPG storyline of “Oh no, the world is in danger; save it by solving these quests in order!”
Yeah, that was a fantastic idea but it was so poorly implemented, and so it never really was emulated by other studios (though IIRC there was one RPG that came out around the same time that also had a “draw your spells” and went even further with a sort of spell grammar… Arx Fatalis I think ?)
I dunno, I thought the idea itself was really clever and elegant; and people rarely do anything new with interfaces and control schemes. Shame it never got anywhere.
As for me, I got to say KOTOR 2. It was such a fucking tease of a game - it followed a great predecessor, the characters were way more interesting, the writing was stellar and was throwing a number of curveballs at the Star Wars universe, you really wanted to see what the recurring themes were all building towards… and then it took a steaming dump and called it a day. Ending ? Errr, sorry, we didn’t really have the time to get to that, here, try that : rocks fall, everybody dies, now fight these flying lightsabers that make 2 out of 3 possible character classes useless, THE END. Happy now, bitch ?
Icewind Dale was kind of a letdown too, but there it’s not really the game’s fault so much as my own expectations. It looked like a* Baldur’s Gate* sequel, was made by the same guys as Baldur’s Gate, I went in expecting the breadth and depth of* Baldur’s Gate*. I got group *Diablo *with pregrened maps instead.
It was still fun, mind you. Just a big “That’s it ?” at the time. But once I grokked what this new franchise was about and re-adjusted my expectations, I looked forward to Icewind 2 and played the hell out of it.
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
Morrowind (with expansions) had such a cool, sad story to it: the PC witnessing the final fall of three gods who should never have been gods in the first place. I would actually care to see a novelization or film adaptation (maybe animated) of the story of the Tribunal. By comparison, Oblivion, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit, took a step backwards, towards the stereotypical RPG storyline of “Oh no, the world is in danger; save it by solving these quests in order!”
[/QUOTE]
To me, the greater loss was the uniqueness of the setting. *Morrowind *was, much like *Planescape *come to think of it, a journey through a thoroughly alien world, with different rules and a morality system that had nothing to do with ours, or the typical Tolkien copy/paste. You really looked forward to seeing what was behind the next hill (and were guaranteed to find something that’d blow your mind).
And then they 180d straight back into bland pseudo-England. Bleh, BLEH I say.
*Skyrim *was slight progress in that regards - surprisingly few games deal with vikings, and the whole “humanity willingly under the thumb or racist elves” angle is also relatively original. Still, I miss my fucking silt striders, man.
[QUOTE=Dave Hartwick]
I still see Planescape: Torment recommended from time to time. I picked it up after reading a few OMG YOU MUST TRY THIS GAME posts. I was able to get into it a little but it soon became a race to see if the lame combat or the flavor text bonanza would get me to quit first. The text won. Still, a valuable experience, because if I see somebody recommend that game I know we have terribly divergent taste in games.
[/quote]
“Huh. Well, I suppose it’s not for everyone, but still the quality of the writing…”
“…Oooh OK, he’s just a terrible person with objectively bad taste, nevermind” 
You’re right, that is one aspect common to both games. I might have really enjoyed Morrowind if it hadn’t been so clunky and difficult to manage.
What other games are like that? I suppose there’s Fallout and Lone Survivor but I’d like to find more.
Yup, I liked Human Revolution a lot, with the exception of the boss fights and I opened this thread to nominate Deus Ex 2.
That’s a great point. For as cool and immersive as Oblivion’s world was, there was nothing so novel as a whole city inside the shell of a monstrous crab. And the Dunmer slang/invective peppered throughout the dialogue in Morrowind was instantly believable.
“S’wit!”
I guess it is about taste. I found the story* and characters in DA:O much more interesting than the aimless wandering and weak plot of Skyrim. I enjoyed Skyrim and all but I have maybe 100 hours in Skyrim and 300+ in DA:O. With your comment about disliking the linear nature of FO:NV compared to the open world FO3, it’s obvious that we have different tastes.
*The plot of DA:O was about as stock-standard as you could get but the story, as in who said what and the interactions, made the generic plot interesting and replayable through different races/classes/genders.
Spore tops my list of disappointing games. Will Wright had wanted to make it pretty complex, but EA ended up toning down the complexity because they didn’t want it to be overwhelming for players. What could have been a really interesting concept ended up being a watered-down, boring, click-and-attack game with zero charm.
I honestly tried hard to like the game, but I just couldn’t. It’s simply not a fun game to play.
I avoided it after hearing the reviews. Where did you read that EA ruined it by toning it down? I’d be curious to read that.
I don’t know if that’s ever been proven. All we know is that the earlier tech demos of the game were more realistic looking and appeared to be more complex. There were also more stages of evolution that seemed to be more seamless (an aquatic stage that bridged the bacteria and land stages).
We know something happened that made them discard all that, but I don’t think we know if it was playtesting, executive bullshit, or whatever else.
Different strokes and all that but RCT3 was one of my favorite games ever. I played the hell out of it for a long time. I never bothered designing my own rides because I was terrible at it but I loved making parks and got pretty good at it. I liked Soaked and Wild too (Soaked more so).
Warhammer Online was kind of heartbreaking. When it first came out it had problems, but lower-tier world vs world/pvp fighting was some of the most fun I’ve had in 18 years of playing MMOs.
Spore and Black & White for me as well. I looked forward to both for so long, and they were so much less than promised, the combination really was the last straw for turning into a complete cynic about upcoming games.
Might I suggest you do what I did, and skip forward to Mass Effect 2? ME2 is basically the game everyone said ME1 was. The plot is much more streamlined (and starts out much faster), and the interface and gameplay are so much better that it isn’t even funny. Just read the ME1 plot synopsis on Wikipedia, and leap right into ME2.
MOO3, even though it might be fantastic, but I gave up after 30 minutes.
Civ4.
Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader. Great concept, horrible execution.
Neverwinter Nights 2. Something was missing. The only Bioware game I never finished.
*Outcast *was kind of like that, though the gameplay is more simple - it’s more of a third person shooter than an RPG. But I have good memories of it. Great soundtrack, too, I think it was one of the first games to be fully orchestrated. Too bad the Voxel engine was more temperamental than a rottweiler on meth last time I tried to run the game on a modern computer :(.
The first Longest Journey was also interestingly foreign - it’s an adventure game I’m really fond of. The second game I haven’t played much, it didn’t quite push my buttons in the same way for some reason.
As for more modern fare, Iquite enjoyed Remember Me - the gameplay is nothing to write home about, but the gameworld and art direction are top notch. It’s obviously the least “alien world” of them since it takes place in future Paris, but good cyberpunk is hard to find these days :o.
Well, it doesn’t help that the writing team hated having to write a generic Forgotten Realms story (though it shows in amusing ways).
I can wholeheartedly recommend the Mask of the Betrayer expansion though, at least if you liked *Planescape *- same lead writer, close recurring themes. And speaking of original premises, how does participating in an assault on Heaven itself (on either side of the fence) with an angel, a magical bear and a dreamwalker in tow strike you ?
It’s ostensibly the direct sequel to NWN 2’s main campaign and you can import your character from the end save, but you don’t have to and you won’t miss much story-wise if you never played the OC to its conclusion.
I agree that MGS4 was a bit of a let down, but not quite for the same reasons. I have nothing against the long cut scenes, but the story was a bit crappy and really messy. MGS2’s story was weird, but most of it was from Raiden’s perspective, and the smaller scale made it seem more reasonable (I don’t know if that makes sense). I can’t agree it’s not great (that’s implied in your post, I think) but MGS3 was certainly better.
For me, it was the lack of charm and “extras”, I suppose. The huge arsenal you can amass can be fun for experimentation, but I like the simplicity of MGS1 - there’s really one weapon in each category, and only one (the FAMAS) designed for big battles. In both MGS3 and 4, you have far too many automatic weapons that just don’t really belong in a sneaking game. Most disappointingly, there’s almost no one to call on the codec. I have no idea what they were thinking. One of the best things about MGS1 is calling Campbell and “Miller” for tips, Mei-Ling for silly proverbs and others for random conversations. I love it when they have something to say about the situation you’re in, and it’s fun trying to provoke them into calling you.
“Snake, we’re not paying you to be a scarecrow, you know.”
“Snake, we don’t need a rat trap, we need someone to stop that god damn nuke from getting launched!”
“Snake, is killing rats really that fun? Torturing small animals is a
sign of a warped mind, you know.”
Then there’s the ketchup, the cardboard boxes, Meryl’s backside, Mantis’s memory card-reading, etc.
In MGS2, Otacon will call you to complain if you mistreat his sister, you can make your own character think stupid comments while others talk to them, and “Campbell” says all kinds of amusing stuff when GW is breaking down. One of my friends claims his brother really did switch off the console when “Campbell” told him to, perhaps thinking it was some sort of test.
With MGS4 it felt like they remembered all the “normal” game stuff, but had no time left for the silly bits.
Yeah. Fucking Kiefer Sutherland. I don’t think I could play it without thinking of Jack Bauer every single time he opens his mouth.
I don’t think anyone would be in the minority about thinking the MGS4 plot was a horrible miasma. If anything, those who actually enjoyed the plot would be in the minority.
As I’ve said before, Hideo needs to hire himself a good editor. Just because you think of an idea that seems really great, and even if it is indeed really great, it doesn’t mean you should necessarily use it, especially if it adds nothing to the overall direction you are trying to take things. Because no one will be able to figure out what direction you actually do intend to take things.
The long cut scenes were a bit ridiculous, but they weren’t the problem. If anything they were a symptom. A symptom of someone whose gotten so far into his own head at how clever he can be that he can’t see anything from the perspective of someone who can’t see into that head.