Half-Life 2, Deus Ex 2, and Quest for Glory V.

When I bring up HL2 being bad even at the slightest bit, it always summons rabid blind insult defense forces. Hope there isn't any here.

It doesn't end there - the new XCOM and DNF are a couple of console-tailored DONOTWANTS.

Frankly I think both Half Life games are overrated. They are way too linear for me and the shooting is kiddie simple. HL2 is the worst though because it really pushes its narrative on you with those in-engine cutscenes that really don't work on me. And the way they get so much praise for being "innovative" makes me sick because there have been lots of games that did what HL2 does.

Oblivion was a disappointment for me. It really put the nail in the coffin for me with regards to hyped AI bullshit PR speak. Also, the way the character progression works is pathetic and the UI was piss poor. And they hid their ass-ugly playdoh-plain distant terrain graphics in all pre-release shots. But I love sandbox style first person games so it still gets an occasional play from me!

FarCry 2 is probably the worst game in recent memory. It's not even worth trying to go into detail on why because everything about it sucks IMO.

Most of the Star Trek games have been not-so-great. But there are a few that I think are ok. They usually try to rework the universe for their game and it ends up ridiculous. Tetryon Gatling Gun comes to mind.

HAWX is super basic and cheesy. Rogue Squadron like and that's not good.

I'd whine about Turok 2007 ruining the series, but all of the Turok games are pretty lacking so 😁

Unreal 2. The change of perspective on the universe wasn't entirely unwelcome, but it wasn't realized very well.

Quake 4. What happened to the metal? Where was my Sonic Mayhem or NiN? Overall, another average and forgettable Raven game.

Star Wars Obi-Wan. This game really is not so great. It was the dark era of creative implosion over at LucasArts. It started getting hype right after the amazing JK1 came out and was initially a PC game.

The Outforce - It hints at having alien races and a story in which a diplomatic space station disappears. Unfortunately all you do is destroy any ship with a design that doesn't match your own. In one level you're supposed to investigate what happened to the space station but nothing comes of it.

Forsaken - This was supposed to be similar to Descent but maneuverability is severely limited and even the weakest enemy can kill you in under a second.

Homeworld 2 - What I enjoyed most about the first game was capturing enemy ships. However that was entirely broken in this game. It's possible to take over enemy ships but they don't come with you to the next mission, you can't pilot them, and you can't even sell them for resources.

Half-Life 2 - I really enjoyed Half-Life 1 and the 2 expansions. When HL2 came out I didn't have internet access at the time and still don't want to support Steam because of it. My father got a free registry code with a motherboard he bought so I played it with his account. In the levels where I had a squad I just wanted them to stay back while I scouted ahead. It worked in HL1. Instead they start following me again, on their own, and die because they couldn't take cover from the sniper. Which was the reason I wanted them to say behind while I dealt with it. Also, forget having them guard one entrance while I cover the other. They just wind up getting shot in the back because they turned to face the wrong way.

Starcraft 2 - I actually had high hopes for this one. Another game where you have to register an account for it to be playable. I didn't learn about that till I received my pre-order from Amazon. The other flaw is that the missions are non linear but several of the after mission movies only made sense if the were intended to precede others. Another thing that bothered me is that, unlike SC1, it is impossible to purchase all the upgrades which are now persistent. This meant I couldn't experiment with different ones in the same play through. Over all it felt more like one of the recent Command & Conquer titles than a Starcraft Sequel.

Bioshock as a whole. It was said to be the OMG THE SPIRITUAL SEUCESOR TO SS2!!! but all it is, is a hyped up plain shooter with barely anything from its spiritual predecessor. It's less than Doom, and it's only graded on the 'experience'. Ken Levine goes on like "ya we're gaming godz uh huh yep we are godz of gamse look at our awards yep we are teh best"...

Heh, funny. Some of my favourite games include Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and Bioshock (; . I think it's not because of all the hype surrounding these games, but simply because I like how they're executed, or certain specific aspects of those games. For example, I think the sound FX in HL2 are amongst the best ever created for a computer game. Play the game with good headphones and you'll understand what I mean.

Anyway, two recent disappointments for me were Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach. There's so much potential in those games, but a lot of it has been wasted IMO. I had fun while playing the games, but they somehow... left an empty feeling after I've completed them. Like an expensive diner at McDonalds. You feel stuffed, but there's something missing. Spend the same amount of money in a good restaurant, and you'll be _really_ well fed. Bioshock 2, on the other hand, had me thinking about the game and some aspects of the story for several days. It certainly hasn't the greatest or best written story in the world, but it engaged my imagination.

In general, I think many people are expecting too much from a game, and/or have skewed memory of old games. I mean, computer games are still a relatively new medium, compared to TV, cinema, books, music. Computer games will definitely evolve quite a bit in our lifetime, and I'm not talking about cheap gimmicks like the Wii sensors or Project Natal. On the other hand, retro gamers often suffer from the "old games were better" syndrome. But seriously, did you try playing your old favourites recently? In our memories, negative things tend to be glossed over, and positive things tend to be "overexposed", that's just how our brains work I guess. Play those classics _now_, and I mean really _play_ them as opposed to reading about them, remembering them, etc. , and I'm pretty sure you'll find they are not as excellent as you may remember them. Another thing about old-ish games is that they've been developed for a completely different target group than today's games. Modern games are fast, colourful, and try to show the user everything they have to offer in the shortest possible amount of time. If they don't do this, the user might choose a different medium to waste his time. It's just a sign of the times, look at how cinema or TV works today. Old games are often very slow and deliberate, requiring large amounts of time to learn even the basics. Look at today's game sales charts - which games are selling best? Which movies are the blockbusters? Which music albums are sold the most? Certainly not the heavy stuff I'm sure.

I could have swore we had this thread not too long ago.

Unreal Tournament 3 was a huge, I mean mega huge disappointment for me. I still play UT 2004 today.

Lords of the Realm III also saddened me.

Warcraft III, very disappointing. I finished Act 1 then just set it aside. I would rather play Warcrft II.

Galactic Civilizations II. Heard so many good things about the game, but I found it very boring after playing Space Rangers 2.

Morrowind. Just couldn't get into it. I tried, I really did. I think Oblivion rocks on the other hand though, dunno. And swaaye, your crazy. 😉

Postal. The mindless killing sounded so fun.

There are others but the pain is too great to continue right now.

the biggest disappointments were almost all C64 games or PC games from around that time (give or take a few years) where the box art, or advertisement suggested graphics that simple weren't there 😀

🤣, I remember those. Or even worse, cheap post-crash VCS/2600 games (; .

Seriously, as a kid I really felt let down from those. You learn pretty fast how crappy the real graphics were but the disappointment stuck...

SKARDAVNELNATE, I bet you've never played a Call of Duty game, where your comrades are dropping like flies all around you, yet miraculously you're always surrounded by friendly cannon fodder. 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. That would explain a lot (; .

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.)

Though Half-Life was not really a disappointment for me, I just felt it like any other FPS. Tried playing again and again, but never understood what's all the hype and hoopla about. I was amazed when I saw hate-mails pouring in the gaming mags (especially Brits' Mags) when the reviewer tries to put a newer game's score on par with HL, or even trying to hint that the newer game might be better than HL.
For instance there was this letter which started with "Am I seeing the slightest hint that the xyz game you reviewed is better than Half-Life?" and another one "How come Half-Life fell to number 2 in the best FPS List" kind of a thingy. After 2 years.

2. Prey.

3. And if it's relevant, Dawn of Mana for PS2.

Personally i don't care too much about games that just suck, but the biggest disappointment always came from the things we expected the most.

So, maybe it is Myst III Exile for me, because i couldn't believe it ended after just three or four days playing in my spare time 😁

For me it was Frontier: Elite II. I had such high expectations and the let down was massive. I loved the original Elite and I loved the Wing Commander series and I was hoping for the next big thing.

Some programmers reached their peak when working on limited hardware. David Braben and Ian Bell are such programmers.

If this is simply about the worst game, then I'd say Outpost.

But if this is about games you initially have high expectation, then I would say the following games:

WarCraft III

Despite its healthy, vibrant colors, its excellent storyline, its role-playing elements, its easy-to-use menu (which makes it easy to micromanage), and its innovative elements like auto-casted spells, WarCraft III has the most disappointing gameplay compared to StarCraft or Red Alert 2 (the games I played prior to playing WarCraft III).

The problem is: I just cannot rationally, logically tell what's wrong with this game. I just feel that the game is boring, where each mission feels nothing but obligatory chore to go through its excellent storyline. This is much different than Red Alert 2, where my reason to go to the next mission is because I can't wait to harass my opponents with terror drones again (and Kirov, and Dreadnought) instead of discovering the next cutscene.

Dungeon Siege

This is also a game with great potential, but turned out to be linear and boring. Make no mistake, I love Dungeon Siege's "free-form" character advancement; the lack of character classes, where we shape the skills and abilities of our character by our gaming actions (just like in Quest of Glory) instead of having to advance through levels. I would also love the fact that we can have NPCs that are smart enough to fight by themselves, where we just have to set formation and tactics, and the AI will take care of the rest. It should be noted that Ultima VII is still disappointing in this matter.

But.... whole gaming experience is just too boring. The game world is sparse and empty, and while we have the freedom to go back and forth between locations, there is no real incentives to do so, because the previously visited locations are already empty. Now, respawning enemies is a pain in the ass in first-person shooter, but non-respawning enemies is a source of boredom in role-playing games.

Mech Commander

Oh, the entire premise sounds promising, and the gameplay is actually enjoyable. The problem is: the game is just so damn difficult! A friend of mine said that IL-2 Sturmovik is the most difficult game ever, but at least I can still handle its legendarily punishing flight model . Mech Commander, on the other hand, makes me give up in the second mission. Maybe I'll try it again when I have more time, or maybe not.

Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries
This game had so much potential, but they really dropped the ball on the musical selection and the number of bugs in the initial release was unacceptable, not to mention the randomly generated missions felt like they were tossed in at the last minute. Even with all the patches applied the game STILL has issues. And why did they remove the 1024x768 SVGA support from the engine? The original Mech 2 ran at this resolution at an almost acceptable framerate on my old Pentium 120 system. As an additional note, some people were disappointed by Mech 4 when it came around because they completely scrapped the old combat specs for new ones, making for less customization, but the new specs are good in their own right if you don't draw such a comparison and still very customizable.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Seriously, this game looked like it was going to be awesome, it has some neat multiplayer modes and the live action, while not perfect by any means, is satisfying... too bad the single player gameplay and joystick support are messed up. There's some missions in the single player mode where if you don't know what to do within a window of 5 to 10 seconds, you'll lose the mission, even if it takes another 3 or 4 minutes afterwards before you'll know. Good thing Bridge Commander eventually came around to set the formula right. ;)

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I find contemporary games are more likely to be disappointing because when they base themselves off of some older license, they tend to fail to find the essence of what made those original games fun. A good example is when they eventually made a sequel to NiGHTS. The original was a really good game because it was very subtle and there was extremely little voice acting. The new one wasn't subtle in the slightest and had lots of terrible voice acting, thus it lost all of its charm in the process. There are exceptions of course. F-Zero X was better than the first F-Zero game and GX was even better than X, yet all three are still good games because they all kept roughly the same basic formula even though they each have plenty of differences.

Or with Sonic The Hedgehog, I've been saying for the longest time, ever since Sonic Heroes came out, that when Sega finally makes a game, calls it Sonic The Hedgehog 4, and returns it to the basic gameplay that made the first 3 (technically 4) Sonic games fun, they will finally get Sonic back on his feet... and guess what they happen to be doing? :)

...NiGHTS, F-Zero GX and Sonic are all Sega-developed things... I must have Sega on my mind right now or something. *shrugs*

Fallout 3 is top of my sucked massive balls list, it really did feel like Oblivion with Guns, 'cept uglier and since the voice acting was the same as Oblivion, the entire dialog was retarded.

Far Cry 2 was another turkey, tons of mindless driving and repetitive missions doing the same fucking thing over and over again.

Godfather 2- Atrocious. But still not as bad as Fallout 3, cause at least this had dialogue.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

If this is simply about the worst game, then I'd say Outpost.

Dungeon Siege

This is also a game with great potential, but turned out to be linear and boring. Make no mistake, I love Dungeon Siege's "free-form" character advancement; the lack of character classes, where we shape the skills and abilities of our character by our gaming actions (just like in Quest of Glory) instead of having to advance through levels. I would also love the fact that we can have NPCs that are smart enough to fight by themselves, where we just have to set formation and tactics, and the AI will take care of the rest. It should be noted that Ultima VII is

I didn't find it all that bad, I actually beat the game. I did however, play Dungeon Siege 2 and found it stupid, pointless and boring.

And yes, Outpost should have never been released.

Battlezone 2

All the coolness of Battlezone thrown away for a throwaway scifi cliche plot and setting, all for that wanting to be "the Intel Pentium III SSE GAME" at the top priority.

Actually BZ1 and 2 are two of my favorite games period. 😀 They don't exactly have a big following but there is a nice little community out there. Two of the BZ2 developers have been reworking BZ2 with new features and fixes for years, the latest having hardware T&L support, MSAA, anisotropic filtering, better mod support, better multiplayer, among many other gameplay fixes and tweaks.
http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/