Commandos 3. They screwed up the interface and made it a hell to play.

All Duke Nukem games released after Duke 3D are abysmal! I recently completed my Duke collection by purchasing "Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes" and it's absolutely terrible.

ADDiCT wrote:

SKARDAVNELNATE, I bet you've never played a Call of Duty game

That's true. I mostly play games with sci-fi themes.

ADDiCT wrote:

I think the AI mates in HL2 are more a dramaturgical tool than a gameplay-related feature. Like, they are there to show you there's other human beings around, and how brutal war and death is, but they are not supposed to be helpful in any way.

Which is what I found disappointing about it. In HL1 there were different classes. Often you needed them to access the next area, whether it was by providing a retinal scan or repairing damaged equipment. There was a reason to keep them alive and they really seemed grateful that you were there to protect them. HL2 completely abandoned that aspect of the series.

Trespasser
I had high hopes for this - advanced physics (for it's time), one of the first games to support bump mapping, and promising a different experience than the typical FPS of the day. Instead it was an exercise in frustration to control Ann's arm to manipulate objects.
The only redeeming feature was glancing down at the health meter

I though of a few more... The Pandora Directive, because I had very high expectations but the story was unfollowable and plus everybody was putting Area 51 into their games and movies back then. Also No One Lives Forever 2, because the writing was so far below the original and respawning enemies really suck.

bushwack wrote:

I didn't find it all that bad, I actually beat the game.

Agree, and the worst part of it, DS is built on pretty good game mechanics (character advancement, combat system, streamlined interface, seamless world, etc). If only they managed to put less linear, less repetitive gameplay on top of such solid mechanics, I believe it will be a better game. But I think it is what mods are for....

bushwack wrote:

I did however, play Dungeon Siege 2 and found it stupid, pointless and boring.

"Sequelitis" syndrome, yes?

Malik wrote:

1. Errmmm..DAIKATANA? - Mosquitoes and frogs (or something like those) as enemies in the first level. (Fortunately Demos were available at that time, before jumping straight into buying the full game.)

Er, bro, I thought gamers never held high expectations for Daikatana in order to get disappointed by the game 😁

Ah, another games that got me disappointed. I may be branded heretic by mentioning this specific game, but what the hell.

X-Wing

The game was probably the most anxiously anticipated game during its release. Not only it is the first "serious" Star Wars game (unless you count platformers like Star Wars and Super Star Wars), but it also the first serious contender to Wing Commander franchise that dominated the genre at that time. I anticipated the game with most excitement, since I'd been greatly enjoying other Larry Holland's games like Their Finest Hour and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.

The first time I booted the game, I was blown. The intro is even better than that of Wing Commander II (although I might be biased since I'm a Warsie), and despite the FM sound card I had at that time, the game music gives a pretty good Star Wars feeling. Despite being a big fan of strategy elements in a sim, I was not disappointed when discovering the lack of strategic phase that made TFH and SWOTL great. After all, this is a space opera game, so I could understand the decide to sacrifice such thing for a more coherent storyline. With great expectations, I created my character and went through the game...

....and got disappointed.

I can complain about the repetitive, gratuitous training. I can also complain about the ho-hum storyline. But my biggest disappointment came from a factor that I really hate in a game: artificial difficulty. It is already hard enough to shoot down the much nimbler TIE Fighters in a slow-ass snub fighters like X-Wing or Y-Wing, and it just becomes harder when the player has to use the Force to read Larry Holland's mind, in order to find the right "puzzle-solving" sequence to win a mission.

It was most fortunate that TIE Fighter came out later. Lot less hype and anticipation, indeed, and my experience with X-Wing had made me skeptical that I almost skipped the game when I saw it on the shelf. But I bought it anyway, and you know what, I was thankful I did. Yes, the missions are still difficult and challenging, but gone has the puzzle-solving element that plagues its predecessor. The story is much more interesting, the intro music is a very nice twist of Imperial March, and the whole atmosphere is very immersive that I couldn't help but give a military salute to my computer screen after finishing a briefing.

So, while X-Wing was unexpectedly disappointing, TIE Fighter was surprisingly satisfying. I'm glad LucasArt learned from their experience to make a much better --although less hyped-- game.

Xian97 wrote:

Trespasser
The only redeeming feature was glancing down at the health meter

yeah that was quite a distraction 😁 why did they have to put it there

All of the Need for Speed games newer than Hot Pursuit II.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

All Duke Nukem games released after Duke 3D are abysmal! I recently completed my Duke collection by purchasing "Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes" and it's absolutely terrible.

I liked Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. You really need a good gamepad to get the most out of it though and not a lot of PC gamers have gamepads.

Heh, "Endorfun" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorfun / http://www.mobygames.com/game/endorfun ), what with all of it's sickening subliminal new age messages:

"I am at peace"
"All is well"
"Expect the best"
"I feel joyful now"
"I love being alive"
"I love the world and it loves me"
"I can do anything"

:gag: :puke: :barf: :choke:

Svenne wrote:

All of the Need for Speed games newer than Hot Pursuit II.

Actually the HPII itself was also quite a disappointment for me. Especially after the very satisfying NFS:Porsche Unleashed.

Driving a car in HPII almost feels like 'flying' instead of dragging down the road. NFS PU's control was much more realistic (for an 'arcade' racing).

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Ah, another games that got me disappointed. I may be branded heretic by mentioning this specific game, but what the hell.

X-Wing

Burn the heretic!

It was a difficult game yes (if you didn't protect what you were supposed to protect you were screwed - you'd be sorry if you let the TIE bombers slip past!), but I thought it was fantastic - the flight model was way beyond WC and it the dynamic music and sound effects were superb for the time. One of my all time favourites.
I've still got my original XWing floppy disk version and B-Wing mission disk on the shelf - I've recently bought the XWing collectors CD to try it with the gouraud shaded SVGA TIE Fighter engine. I'm looking forward to hearing the John Willams score through my newly purchased SC55, as opposed to my SB16 that I had back in the mid 90's!

The world would be a boring place if everyone liked the same thing though!

megatron-uk wrote:

Burn the heretic!

You don't know the power of the Dark Side.

megatron-uk wrote:

It was a difficult game yes (if you didn't protect what you were supposed to protect you were screwed - you'd be sorry if you let the TIE bombers slip past!), but I thought it was fantastic - the flight model was way beyond WC and it the dynamic music and sound effects were superb for the time.

Yup, the flight model far surpasses that of WC, but the missions are still frustrating to me. Guessing the correct sequence to win the mission is not my kind of game (and yes, I'm using walkthrough to complete the missions). In all fairness, TIE Fighter also suffers from the same thing in late missions, but those part are relatively easier.

megatron-uk wrote:

I've recently bought the XWing collectors CD to try it with the gouraud shaded SVGA TIE Fighter engine. I'm looking forward to hearing the John Willams score through my newly purchased SC55, as opposed to my SB16 that I had back in the mid 90's!

You mean the texture-mapped SVGA engine?

I have TIE Fighter Collector CD (Totally Games), which uses X-Wing vs TIE Fighter texture-mapped engine. The graphics are nice, but there is a downside: the MIDI music is gone. Yes, it still have MIDI music during intro sequence, but once you get to the main menu, the music is replaced by various ambient sound effects.

If there is a patch to restore the MIDI music, I'll be very grateful.

megatron-uk wrote:

The world would be a boring place if everyone liked the same thing though!

Precisely. The galaxy would be a very boring place without Rebel scum to fight against! 😉

Anyway, you play X-Wing vs TIE Fighter?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

You mean the texture-mapped SVGA engine? […]
Show full quote

megatron-uk wrote:

I've recently bought the XWing collectors CD to try it with the gouraud shaded SVGA TIE Fighter engine. I'm looking forward to hearing the John Willams score through my newly purchased SC55, as opposed to my SB16 that I had back in the mid 90's!

You mean the texture-mapped SVGA engine?

I have TIE Fighter Collector CD (Totally Games), which uses X-Wing vs TIE Fighter texture-mapped engine. The graphics are nice, but there is a downside: the MIDI music is gone. Yes, it still have MIDI music during intro sequence, but once you get to the main menu, the music is replaced by various ambient sound effects.

If there is a patch to restore the MIDI music, I'll be very grateful.

Actually there seems to be two CD-releases. The first, earlier one is a DOS-based package of X-Wing, B-Wing and Imperial Persuit on CD, using the gouraud shaded (non textured) engine of (the original DOS) TIE Fighter. It still uses MIDI music. There is same package of TIE Fighter and its two expansions - both the XWing and TIE Fighter releases are called 'The Collectors CD'.

There is also a later, Win95 release of both X-Wing and TIE Fighter on CD called 'The Collectors Series' that adds the texture mapped and shaded graphics, but, as you state, replaces the in-game MIDI tracks with CD audio.

Further info on the difference between the CD releases is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_X-Win … ulator#Editions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_TIE_F … or.27s_editions

megatron-uk wrote:

The world would be a boring place if everyone liked the same thing though!

Precisely. The galaxy would be a very boring place without Rebel scum to fight against! 😉

Anyway, you play X-Wing vs TIE Fighter?

No, never really got in to multiplayer games - I never usually have time to play on a regular basis.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I have TIE Fighter Collector CD (Totally Games), which uses X-Wing vs TIE Fighter texture-mapped engine. The graphics are nice, but there is a downside: the MIDI music is gone. Yes, it still have MIDI music during intro sequence, but once you get to the main menu, the music is replaced by various ambient sound effects.

If there is a patch to restore the MIDI music, I'll be very grateful.

Man! Now THAT is definate blasphemy for such a great soundtrack! I have the floppy based versions of XWing and Tie Fighter, as well as the XWing Collector's CD, and have always experienced them with my old Wave Blaster (1) 😀

Any Star Wars genere game without the Williams soundtrack is unnaceptable!

X-Wing and TIE Fighter's MIDI soundtracks are creations by Michael Land, Peter McConnell and Clint Bajakian. The Windows versions have looping John Williams CD audio and that's the problem. 😀 You don't realize how much of a part the music plays in the thrill of those games until you lose it.

I remember reading that the deal was that Totally Games didn't want to try to get iMuse to work in Windows 95 at the time.

X-Wing Alliance has a new iMuse that uses digital audio segments instead of MIDI, but sadly they just used John Williams again instead of giving the game its own personality with some original music.

BTW, I absolutely love Force Commander's crazy soundtrack and if anyone has the soundtrack CD of that let me know. 😁 It is super duper ultra rare.

TekWar was a game that wasn't a disaster by any means, but I was really disappointed with the multiplayer that was supposed to be incorporated, but was actually so buggy that it was unplayable. I spent hours trying to set up a playable network game, but only could get it set up (sometimes) so that one player could see the other one, and shoot them, but I'm not even certain if it would register a "kill". And if I remember correctly, the game would crash shortly thereafter.

The actual single-player game was very ambitious, with support for every type of hardware under the sun, and it had interesting (if blocky) graphics. It also supported high resolutions, which wasn't that common in games of this type back then (looked wonderful with my upgraded Matrox Millennium card!). The game coulda been so much better with more work and "polish".

I actually contacted at least one of the original programmers, and I believe he explained that Ken Silverman (of Ken's Labyrinth fame) wrote a bunch of the code, but then abandoned the project without providing assistance on integrating the Multiplayer mode -- thus, the reason it came out unplayable in that respect.

# Far Cry 2, I'm amazed how I could finish that game with it's crappy gameplay with constant respawning enemies.
But the scenery and freedom to finish the missions in any maner you like kep me playing it to the end.

# Mafia 2, the first game was quite hard imho and you couldn't finish it in one day...with Mafia 2 you can and it's dead simple...too bad when the gfx are gorgeous.

# Pinball Dreams 2, I've been a Pinball Dreams, Fantasies etc fan since my Amiga days but what can I say about the crappy sequel to PD 2? and the poor PC port of PD 1... 😵

Amigaz wrote:

# Far Cry 2, I'm amazed how I could finish that game with it's crappy gameplay with constant respawning enemies. But the scenery […]
Show full quote

# Far Cry 2, I'm amazed how I could finish that game with it's crappy gameplay with constant respawning enemies.
But the scenery and freedom to finish the missions in any maner you like kep me playing it to the end.

# Mafia 2, the first game was quite hard imho and you couldn't finish it in one day...with Mafia 2 you can and it's dead simple...too bad when the gfx are gorgeous.

# Pinball Dreams 2, I've been a Pinball Dreams, Fantasies etc fan since my Amiga days but what can I say about the crappy sequel to PD 2? and the poor PC port of PD 1... 😵

Amigaz, there is a revision of that game. That fixes some of the flaws in PD1.

All pinball nuts should have this game if they own one of the consoles it's on.

http://www.gamespot.com/wii/puzzle/pinballhal … tion/index.html

The whole virtual arcade setup makes me wish it had more types of arcade games to check out. 😁 Pretty cool stuff.