Is that the same year they changed the camera for the long pass so it was like a third-person view from the football? If so, that’s the year that long passes became roughly 50/50 to complete, regardless of who was throwing and who was catching.
That must have come after. 2k5 just made the receivers randomly drop. Because, you know, they’re not pros, they’re still in college. Never mind that college QBs routinely complete 60-65% of their passes.
These years were the years that I stopped playing the college football games. Yick.
I’ve wasted so much money on computer games over the last couple of years.
I used to only buy games when I was bored. Now I buy any game I think I’ll enjoy. I used to spend weeks on a single game, now I switch games every day, rarely focus on one. I’ve killed my own (gaming) attention span with over-indulgence.
My worst purchase recently was MLB09:The Show. I imported it from the US in response to a review in a magazine, paid £50 for a game I’ve played twice. My eyes start to get sore after staring at the strike-out zone for too long and I tend to prefer a good game of PES09 instead.
Coming in close behind are my 3 EVE Online subscriptions. I haven’t played the game in nearly a month. I don’t consider it a complete waste though as I can still train my skills.
Sacred 2. It can crash your computer at least 5 different ways. I will never buy another Ascaron game again.
Europa Universalis (which is made by the same people who made Diplomacy, also mentioned in this thread) is an acquired taste, much like urine therapy. There are things it does better than Civilization–I think it manages to abstract away or minimise a lot (though not all) of the micromanagement that can make Civ tedious for people who (unlike me) don’t have OCD. On the other hand the multiplayer is not very good and the game has no real goals or victory conditions, so you basically need to be willing to just enjoy, on its own merits, a dense sandbox game where every country in the world ever is simulated and Portugal occasionally gets the notion to sieze control of Russia. I enjoy it in small doses, although it’s a title of debatable worth and “Europa Universalis vs. Civilization” could be a thread on its own.
Offhand I would say that the biggest waste of my gaming dollars (speaking as someone who paid actual money for Battlecruiser 3000) would be Black and White, which I bought on release day after following 1) a lot of hype and 2) reviews. I think this was the game that made many people realise that game reviewers are frequently full of it (writing for Something Awful, Zack Parsons described Black and White as “the nadir of reviewer integrity […] the crown of soulless reviewer hype”). The game’s premise was that you watched while Peter Molyneux stared creepily at you, giggling occasionally and masturbating at his own cleverness. Later, after having resolved to kill and skin good game ideas in order to make a good game suit, he dances in front of a mirror while asking “would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.”
I kid, of course. In actuality Black and White allowed you to use your mouse to control Peter Molyneux’s bloated ego. If you allowed his ego to eat too much, it became fat; if you allowed it to throw villagers into the ocean, it became evil. You could teach his bloated ego to do things, like uproot trees and throw them into a lumberyard. The premise (artificial life you control indirectly because it has a will of its own, and you subtly influence it to becoming a reflection of yourself) was clever, but the implementation was godawful – such that the following game in the series gutted the entire concept and crawled inside its corpse for warmth, making it effectively any other real-time strategy game, with slightly different props. Both games in the series allow you to do an inordinate number of things with turds: throwing them at people, using them to poison granaries, using them to fertilise fields and installing them on your computer.
Really, though, I’d say that in general wastes of my gaming dollars have come not from games that were completely irredeemable (even Black and White had its moments) but from games I paid far too much for, generally by buying them on launch day. Supreme Commander, for instance, was a title that looked at the overcrowded RTS genre, scratched its head, and said “wait. But what if it was really, really big?” Beyond this it’s the same uninspired RTS game we’ve been playing since game developers figured out the formula, without Command and Conquer’s quirky charm, Rise of Nation’s scope, Dawn of War’s inspired freneticism or Earth 2150’s attempts at innovation. It’s definitely worth $15 or $20, but I paid $50, which is $30 that could’ve gone to coke or shares in investment banks.
Other contenders in this field include Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 10 (on the box: “System requirements: haha. Hahaha. HA HA HA HAH–wait, you’re serious? HAHAHAHAHA middle finger”), coming from a product line that has added virtually no innovation (beyond “more planes”, “more scenery” and “incrementally better graphics”) since the 1980s (it makes me feel dirty when I buy them, and yet for some reason I keep doing it) and Call of the Duty of the Brothers with the Medal of Honor, which are generally fun, but not worth the money I keep spending on them when they first come out.
I’ve bought quite a few PC games that were useful only as coasters:
Master of Orion 3, already cited
Ultima Online when it first came out
Star Wars: Rebellion
PATRIOT
Strike Commander
Universal Military Simulator II
See, I had a computer so I was playing real FPS’s not watered down, hard to control, ugly looking ones.
You might be boycotting the wrong company. The 2K# series of games is made by 2K sports, not EA. The EA equivalent of NCAA 2K5 was NCAA Football 2005. From what I’ve heard, 2K games are consistently inferior to the EA ones.
I meant NCAA Football 2005. The one EA made.
I know what I meant. GET OFF MY BACK
You’re kidding, right? You thought Hexen II and Duke Nukem 3D were better than Goldeneye?
I’ve gotta go with Really Not All That Bright on this one. Most shooters on the PC at the time did nothing for me…except Half-Life, which was an amazing game.
But Goldeneye launched a year earlier, and not only set the standard for shooters beyond that point, but also offered one of the best (still!) multiplayer experience I’ve ever had.
Let me see: one game with a hubbed, open, destructible, complex environment and he other a detailed, interactive world and some of the craziest weapons ever conceived in an FPS? Yeah, by a mile.
Let’s not forget Goldeneye’s other contemporaries like Quake 2, Jedi Knight, Outlaws, and all of the Build engine games. And what followed just a few months after Goldeneye’s release? Obscure minor titles like Unreal, Rainbow 6, and this little thing called Half-Life.
With no competitors Goldeneye stands out. Placed in context then it’s a weak game that happened to ship right at a time when people were exploding with interesting ways to push the FPS. The interesting experiments were things like Shogo (another contemporary), Jedi Knight, and Unreal where new engines and environments were toyed with while Goldeneye was just a bland imitator.
Clearly you’re using different critera than I imagine either Really Not So Bright and myself are using.
I couldn’t disagree more that a “hubbed” and “open world” is somehow inherently better than one that isn’t–because, well, they aren’t. It may appeal to you more, sure, but I often find “open worlds” to often be a detriment in providing a consistant and compelling gameplay experience.
Also, Duke Nukem “interactive”? You could shoot barrels (wow!), flip the occasional light-switch, and maybe turn on a projector. I’d argue Goldeneye was far more interactive (and much more meaningfully so) with its location-dependent injuries (shoot a guard in the arm, he flails it around in pain), alarms (which both you and enemies can interact with), and tons of destructible objects (computers, chairs, consoles, etc). I’ll grant Duke Nukem had “crazy weapons”…but meh. Once the novelty wore off, who cares?
As for some of your latter examples, I wanted to note that
[ul]
[li]Unreal was released in May 1998, 9 months post Goldeneye[/li][li]Rainbow 6 in August 1998, a full year after[/li][li]Half-Life in November 1998, a full year, and 3 months post Goldeneye.[/li][/ul]
All of which considerable time differences, especially during that era when development cycles were often considerably shorter than they are now.
I’d also argue none of them offered a “superior” experience to Goldeneye, but different ones. I can’t take anything away from Half-Life as I thought it was an amazing game, but it played considerably different from Goldeneye and drawing comparisons between the two just because they share the same perspective doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
I’ll add that IMHO Rainbow 6 sucked giant donkey balls and Half Life, though admittedly awesome, was a totally different type of game. I never played Unreal, but I thought it was strictly a multiplayer game anyway, no?
Yeah, I’m not a big Rainbow 6 fan, but putting that aside, it’s even less apt for a comparison to Goldeneye than Half-Life, seeing as one’s a squad-based tactile shooter and the other isn’t.
Oh, and:
GameFAQs’ Top 10 + 90 games of all time, #7
IGN’s Top 100 of all time, #29
(Half Life and Half Life 2 are the only FPSs higher on the list)
IGN’s Top 100 Readers’ Picks, #7
Anyone holding Hexen up as a model of FPS play is just asking for a fight.
I played Hexen. I moderately enjoyed Hexen at times. Ultimately, Hexen was the biggest waste of my gaming dollar ever.
ETA: Although I see now you’re talking about Hexen II, which I never played. Still, Hexen was a mess.
Madden '09 for the 360 – the series has taken several steps back. They haven’t made any *meaningful *improvements to the on-field game in years, but they have added several new layers of controls that you must master to have a chance. The AI doesn’t prove a credible opponent in Franchise mode. The menu layout is awful; cycling through roster positions and teams is needlessly time-consuming and *literally *painful during long sessions, due to the finger contortions required. There was nothing about the game that I enjoyed.
I paid $60 for it new, then dejectedly sold it back to GameStop for $21 two weeks later. That’s how much I hated it: I wasn’t even willing to hold on to it for a few days more so I could sell it on eBay for twice as much.
Spore. It is okay as a light-weight game, but ultimately was disappointing. I haven’t touched it since September. And I bought it at launch–$50, not worth it.