Simfarm. If you planted low level crop the town grew on you and you went bankrupt eventually. If you planted oranges you won under 2 hours. Very unbalanced game.
Quake 3 Arena. Most of us had 28-56K modems at the time and at 4-800 ping the game was unplayable. There were master players who could do well even at 400 pings but I developed PTSD because instead of aiming properly I had to aim somewhere else and pray that I hit the enemy 400 ms later. The single player bots were weak so I chose UT instead that had much lower system requirements and superior single player. Ironically I started playing Q3A a lot after I started my internship at a company with a whopping 30 Mbit connection. Playing Q3 with less than 20 ping made the multiplayer awesome.
Unreal 2. It was so bad that I actually looked up if this was a fan made pack or an official release.
Crysis series. The dumb AI ruined the whole thing and you could win every battle by abusing the cloak. Cloak - shoot - cloak again and the AI just couldn't keep up at any difficulty.
Star Trek Starfleet Command 3. Liked the campaign battles and mods, hated the bugs that ruined the whole game. The conquest was exciting until you got the best ship then it was just a chore. The AI was also dumb so defeating high class battleships with shitty cruisers was easy.
Quake 4. It felt like a Doom 3 lite edition. I didn't even know why they released it in the same year as D3 ROE.
Stalker - Call of Pripyat. It was so bland that I couldn't even finish it.
GTA IV. It had a fun story but it was way too easy. I'm not a hardcore gamer but it seemed like it was designed for players with less experience. I also hated the taxi service that ruined the whole "driving around and familiarizing yourself with the city" part of the game. Why drive around when you can just use fast travel literally anywhere? I missed the crazy peds and drivers of SA where you hit a car and the guy started chasing you like a madman. It was severely toned down in IV just like the effects of a wanted level.
Classic Doom series with all the wall hugging for secrets and the headache of wandering around trying to find a path or a switch. I recently started playing fan wads and some of them are so much better and funnier than the old maps.
Wolf3D. Same reason, too much walking around and too much wallfucking.
Half life 1 but only because I played it after HL2. It was probably mind blowing back in the day.
Medal of honor 2010. Filled with glitches: npcs getting stuck, scripts not triggering, sudden crashes and the infamous hellfire bug. It was also the game that was banned on military bases because the player had the ability to play as the taliban in multi. They didn't like the idea of their own soldiers playing as a taliban trying to liberate their home from a joint american-european invasion. 😁
Minecraft. Not because the game was bad or anything, I just didn't like the style and still don't understand the hype.
Rage. Yet another example of a too easy FPS even on nightmare. The whole racing and car upgrade part was pointless because you didn't actually have to win anything other than 1-2 mandatory races where you had to beat a seriously weak opponent who never had a chance. So you just drove around, shot a few bandit cars, continued with the story and drove around again. Rinse and repeat, got boring quickly. The game was also waaaaaaaay too generous with the ammo so it was obviously designed for trigger happy players. The shop offered every major gun and upgrades way too early instead of making the player work for it. I never understood how those people living in the middle of the desert or a fucking metro tunnel managed to get top of the line weapons and endless munitions when they barely had clean water and canned dogfood was considered a delicacy. The end part was a huge disappointment with the weak robotic mutants running around and no final boss. Just shoot the mutants, align the satellite and bam, over. They should've kept the giant mutant from the lost city as a final boss to add some excitement. Loved the sound of the combat shotgun though, volume at max tearing through mutants. That was nice.
Battlefield 1942. Again, the game was probably okay but I hated the capture the flag idea and expected a regular shooter. Just not my style.
System shock 2. I loved the game in 1999 but as an adult I can see the major flaws. The poor gun degradation system, the weak psi implants that made the classes unbalanced, too much ammo later in the game, ineffective laser weapons compared to standard weapons, too many insta-upgrades for guns that made the modify skill pointless, exotic weapons that appeared too late in the game and performed poorly compared to standard and heavy weapons you probably maxed already, severely overpowered grenade launcher and assault rifle, too much cash lying around. It didn't age well for me.
Doom 2016. I'm old, it's too much of a button mashing chaos for me.
Honorable mentions I generally hated in games: auto balancing feature that's on by default and you need to edit ini files to change it, automatically opening-closing doors, rubber banding of any kind, games that need constant online presence, endless farming, endlessly respawning enemies, games without a password that forced you to finish it in one sitting, no pause, anything that prevents you from 100% custom mapping the keys, a game that has a checkpoint like every 10 steps and treats the player like an idiot, forced stealth missions in games you have to run a 100 times until you memorize every guard and corner even though you killed like 500 soldiers before, scripted main events that have a teeny-tiny trigger point you need to find, button/door mazes and platforming in action-oriented FPS games, unlimited/huge ammo capacity in games that are supposed to be somewhat realistic, games without a demo so I can't get a taste first before committing to a non-refundable game.
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