Your top 10 'Major Disappointment' games or: 'I want my money back!'

[txa1265]

Interesting that a game on many people's 'disappointment list' is on my Top 10 (NWN) ... anyway ...

Grouped by platform ... no particular order. And I only mention things I finished, which leaves out the Mistmare and World War II Combat: Iwo Jima type stuff that was really bad but I pulled myself away from.

1. Deus Ex Invisible War - I love Deus Ex ... I really do. And after reading all of the previews and interviews and looking at the screens I was totally jazzed up for Invisible War. I had been playing NWN (& SoU) and Jedi Academy and KotOR through the fall, and chose to skip the demo and grab the game for day of release, which had worked great for those games. The game performed like crap while not looking stellar, had XBOX ini settings left set to 'on', and after everything else was removed, was just a pretty crappy game.
2. Unreal II - nice engine ... but gratuitous scantily clad women, lousy story, uninspired levels and average shooter gameplay. Another day of release letdown.
3. Dungeon Lords - epic story? No. Groundbreaking combat? Nope. Actual choices? Ha ha ha! Interesting characters? Stop, you're killing me! Dungeons? OK, those were pretty good. This game, despite being some fun, was a major disappointment on epic levels. The fact that the Collector's Edition was a full price buy that amounted to a patch just added insult to injury.
4. Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (DS) - The PC & PSP versions are in my 'Top 10 of 2006', but this is near the bottom - ugly, broken and just poorly designed, it is 'different' in almost entirely bad ways from the other platforms.
5. Diablo - Scared me off RPG's. We just had our first baby (after years of problems) and my wife got me this for Christmas at the suggestion of a friend's husband. I played for hours and hours waiting for something other than boring, mindless hack'n'slash ... never got it.
6. Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend - I actually liked the first one, strangely enough (I take crap for that!). It wasn't great, but it was a nice open and free experience with loads of attitude and fun. This one max'd the 'controversy' but took out the openness, fun and soul of the experience ...
7. MetalHeart / Restricted Area / Neuro Hunter / Etrom - I spent many hours last year searching for the 'great independant game' experience ... supporting the little guy after really liking 'Kult: Heretic Kingdoms'. These were all badly designed, poorly implemented and barely tested ... and just overall bad games. I don't know if Neverend or Gods: Land of Infinity are good, but *these* are the reasons I hesitate to try them.
8. Wizards & Warriors - after loving Wizardry VII and while anticipating Dungeon Lords I grabbed this - it is like the worst of both worlds.
9. PSP RPG's - I have wasted so much money in pursuit of something I could actually call 'good'. Most are mediocre, but it is such a lost opportunity!
10. Star Wars Flight of the Falcon (GBA) - I had been loving the run of excellent Star Wars games I was playing on the PC, then heard about this coming and got interested - it was one of the worst games I've ever played ... you fought the controls and framerates more than enemies.
11. Serious Sam Advance (GBA) - I have pursued good shooters on handhelds forever. This one looked good and after the well-done Duke Nukem Advance, reports were that this was good. It wasn't. In fact, it is the worst handheld shooter I've ever played, with crappy gameplay and graphics and horrible framerates.

 

[xSamhainx]

at work so i really cant get too involved here, but Id have to say that Black and White and Dungeon Keeper II both really let me down in a number of ways.

I grew to appreciate Dungeon Keeper II a bit more as time went on, but I still maintain that the original Dungeon Keeper is a better game and more fun to play. Black and White however, I will likely never reinstall.

Arcanum was a big letdown too, I just didnt like it, but unlike B&W I am willing to reinstall and give it another chance. Someday ='.'=


I havent installed Myth III: The Wolf Age yet, quite frankly, Im scared to after I played the demo!

 

[Jaz]

@fatBastard(): I'm not sure if I was disappointed with Doom 3 or not. Hm... well, let's say I was, but since I hadn't expected any other outcome (I *knew* I'd be disappointed as soon as I read they'd actually make this game), it's not a case of 'I want my money back'. I ordered it more to complete my collection than anything else.
The spawning per se didn't chagrin me so much - I didn't like the fact that it was supposed to be a *remake*. IMO the game had nothing Doom-y at all; dark corridors and screeching jack-in-the-box monsters reminded me more of Alien/s. For me, 'Doom' means cobalt blue carpets, neon green acid, torches with red, blue and green flames, flickering red-and-blue building textures, 'floating faces' wall decor and Arachnotrons. It does *not* mean Id-brown Pinkies (contradictory...), Quake 1 vores and Quake II tank commanders, sorry.

And talking to oneself while gaming is perfectly normal .

 

[bjon045]

#5: Alpha Centauri

Each to his own I guess. I though Alpha Centauri with the latest update and alien crossfire was actually a really good game. Not as good as master of orion 2 but quite good. It was extremely time consuming though.

 

[dteowner]

@dteowner
Wizards and Warriors was a lot of fun for me, but I have to admit I gave up after the Vampire Ring bug--ii just disabled the game.

Too many killer bugs sank the ship, but I think the real slap in the face for me was the unrealized potential. W&W could have been a great game. Although Activision was guilty of kicking it out the door early and walking away, I always got the feeling that DWB was a brilliant concept guy but a lousy implementation guy. Dungeon Lords (well, I should say "reviews of" since I refused to purchase another DWB product) reinforced that feeling.

 

[dteowner]

Each to his own I guess. I though Alpha Centauri with the latest update and alien crossfire was actually a really good game. Not as good as master of orion 2 but quite good. It was extremely time consuming though.

Judged on its own, it might be quite good. I bought it after playing the heck out of a run of Sid Meier and Microprose games (Civ, Pirates, RR Tycoon, XCom, MOM, MOO and a few others) and it just didn't measure up for me by comparison.

 

[Lucky Day]

King's Bounty - a decade before Heroes of Might and Magic there was King's Bounty. At 16 years old I paid $40 for this and finished it in a couple of days. It was incredible - I'd never seen a combat system so good. Thank God someone realized whata great idea it was.

Ultima 9 - The money I paid was also towards hardware to run it. Of course, this is still the only FPS I played all the way through. heh.

Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter: This expansion took 10 hours to finish. IWD rocked and took forever. This was just a dungeon crawl with a shoddy backstory and made no sense. It was $30 at release. Luckily, Black Isle apologized by released the next expansion for free so long as you had a copy of HoW. 72mb. I had already knew Interplay was in some trouble financially but this event made it obvious.

 

[Neo]

Here's a short list of some games I played which weren't worth playing. Remember, my list doesn't contain only RPG's, but also a lot of others.

Sacred: A complete rip-off, and a bad one too. Everything in this game just bored me. Played it for 3 hours.
Morrowind: Wandering around, killing people and getting the best armor was kinda fun, but the main quest was so well hidden at certain points I didn't even bother following it after a while.
CoD2: Call of Duty 2, destroying the game's name. People are so positive about it whilst I dislike it. I love Multiplayer (only do single-player once just to complete it), and the multi-player was bad, very bad.
Deux Ex 2: Took me only 30 mins to install it, play it and remove it again.
Warhammer 40k: Fire warrior: one word; lol
Bad Day L.A.: The worst... game... ever. A friend seriously gave it to me with the words: "Play this, and laugh your ass off. This game it the worst, period!" And he was so right...
Oblivion: Though I kept playing for 25 hours, the main quest, again as Morrowind, was annoying. I quit at the part where I had to do 8 different oblivion gates.
The Sims: come on. Making a character and "live" with him/her. Try it in Real Life, with yourself. A lot more fun.
Doom 3: Making fun of horror games.
Tombraider: Angel of Darkness (ps2): This game sucked so badly, I broke the cd on purpose.

 

[Fenris]

Hmm... since I usually buy non-CRPGs only after Reading a lot of Reviews, so I haven't a lot of Disappointments there... the only Non-RPG Games I bought and would have wanted my money back (welcome to german costumer-rights ) are Comand & Conquer Tiberian Sun and Warhammer, Shadow of the horned Rat.

With RPGs I was much more careless, so here is my List:

Descent to Undermountain - I loved Descent, I loved D&D... what could have gone wrong ? simply everything...

Pool of Radiance 2 - once again the D&D Trap... I should have known better...

Ultima 9 and especially Might and Magic 9 - a real Legendkiller, this one

Blood and Honour - once again the strange compulsion to buy everything with the D&D Label on it...

Birthright - Dark Alliance... D&D, what can I say

Dungeon Siege - though thanks to Lazarus something good came out of that one

Dungeon Master 2 - not really a bad Game but a Dissapointment as Heir of one of the greatest Games of all time...

Throne of Bhaal - what a dissapointing Ending for one of the best Series of all times... still thanks to the Modding-Community not a total loss.

Neverwinter Nights out of the Box... really, really bad... unbelievable that it turns into such a good game after the AddOns and with the community-content.

At least I avoided Dragonshard, Stormreach, Demonstone, Oblivion, Lionheart and Dungeon Lords

 

[Arma]

I do have a list, but quite a short one, as I made a good thing of all the titles I really hate. But still, Lionheart was a disappointing game, with a good start, and terrible end game. Legacy of Kain : Defiance was a game I had great expectations about, but when I finally decided to play it ... oh the camera, the horror. Same goes for the original Dungeon Siege (never played any of the subsequent games in this series) - by the time it came out, I had heard and was expecting a great RPG game but strangely I had missed out on the fact that it was a Diablo clone. In the beginning it was fun though, but by the the middle game it came out as a virtual screen saver than a game. I have a few things to say about Morrowind as well, which as pointed somewhere about, while maybe mildly interesting at several points, with terrible journal (I like to have my quest organized) and horrific orientation (I had trouble finding place even with a walkthrough and I believe myself to be not that dumb).

 

[xSamhainx]

wow, lots of disdain for classic games. Tough crowd

btw Arma, you misspelled "dumb".

Not being a grammar nazi, just thought it was funny, considering the context!

 

[TheMadGamer]

Divine Divinity - Very interesting game but crashed randomly very often. Checked the forums and found out that it was not my system but a virtually unsquashable bug inherent in the game. *sigh*

That's too bad Divine Divinity didn't work right for you because it is actually quite a good game. I played through it twice, about a year apart on two different PCs and never had a problem... or at least I never had a problem that I noticed.

Since I come from the days before even Pong it's hard for me to say that any game is a dissapointment... for example, eventhough Oblivion fell short in some ways, I'd never say I was dissapointed by it.

But if you guys twist my arm, and twist it real hard, I guess I'd say that Descent to Undermountain was pretty bad... I didn't even play it more than 15 minutes after I got it installed it was just so grossly horrible.

 

[HiddenX]

Greatest dissapointment:

ARCATERA - the buggiest game ever - lots of quest stopping bugs.
I had some email traffic with the developers back then

The only highlight:
Hans Paetsch - the greatest of all german story tellers (his voice is legend) - was the narrator of the game.

 

[Arma]

Heh, a nice mistake on my take ...

 

[Corwin]

Yes, the original Dungeon Siege was a total waste of time and energy, but I only bought it so I could play Lazarus, which is why I didn't include it on my list!!

 

[jalong]

Here's my list of disappointments and/or unadulterated crap....

Lionheart
Beyond Divinity
Oblivion
Dungeon Siege
Restricted Area
Diablo 2
Heroes of Might and Magic 4
Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire
Ultima IX
Fallout: Tactics

 

[Arma]

Actually, I'd argue in defence of HMM4. It was a good game, good overall concept for the evolution of the series, though unpolished and unsupported after the initial release since we all know what happened to 3DO and good heavens for that. I liked some of the campaigns. They had some good story. Even had one map RPG style. Well, most people in general seem to bash it for not being HMM3. I admit for not liking the engine, though.

 

[Dr. A]

That's too bad Divine Divinity didn't work right for you because it is actually quite a good game. I played through it twice, about a year apart on two different PCs and never had a problem... or at least I never had a problem that I noticed.

Hmm, I'm gonna get a new system next year so I'll probably give it a go again. There were many things that I loved about the game - the humour, the beautifully detailed art style, the gameplay (mix and match abilities from different classes. So it was incredibly disappointing to encounter the unsolvable crashing issue. Thanks for the recommendation

Actually, I like Neverwinter Nights. Even the OC. A lot. And (pathethic, i know) that was the first D&D RPG i had properly played. Maybe that was why i liked it a lot. I hadn't played the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series at the time. haha. But damn, I got hooked on NWN.

It's interesting to note that no one mentioned being disappointed by Gothic 3 despite a lot of complaints. I myself am gonna play it only with my new system and after a major patch is released. So lucky for me, no major bad impressions of the game. Although holding back from playing the game is killing me slowly inside

7- Hellgate London: Would be disappointment. Open cinematics are very well, alright. But, it is only 'cinematics'. Did you see the ingame videos? Your avatar does not walk, he flies on the ground. I hope they will change it until the release.

No predictions allowed in this thread, Nostradamus!!! C'mon man, trust Bill Roper...

 

[jalong]

Actually, I'd argue in defence of HMM4. It was a good game, good overall concept for the evolution of the series, though unpolished and unsupported after the initial release since we all know what happened to 3DO and good heavens for that. I liked some of the campaigns. They had some good story. Even had one map RPG style. Well, most people in general seem to bash it for not being HMM3. I admit for not liking the engine, though.

I think I'd characterize HoMM4 as being more of a disappointment for me than a poor game. I know that opinion on the merits of HoMM4 seem to be sharply divided within the HoMM community, with many people feeling it was the best of the series. However, after loving HoMM2 and HoMM3, HoMM4 just didn't seem to fit, and it felt like they ruined the game play. I probably should give it a 2nd chance one of these days...

 

[Maylander]

The problem with the HoMM series is the fact that HoMM3 was such a grand game everything afterwards will be dissappointing unless you pull off a small miracle. Both HoMM4 and 5 are good, or even great, games, yet to the old fans they will never equal HoMM3 which is the king of turn based strategy games. Personally I love all 5 HoMM games, but 2 and 3 stand out as the best turned based strategy games I've ever played.