f13.net

Seeing as how everyone's in nostalgia mode how about the flipside?

This isn't about Swamp Buggy Racing (http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/06/swamp_buggy_rac.html) or that crappy game from the back of Practical Wireless that you typed into your Vic20 a billion years ago. This is about games that you thought would be good, games that you evangelised about to your friends prior to release when you finally got your sweaty little palms on the object of your short term desire only to find that the developer had coated all of your dreams and aspirations in pure, unplayable sewage.

For me the game was Pool (http://pc.gamezone.com/gzreviews/r13179.htm) of Radiance: (http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/07/pool_of_radianc.html) Ruins of (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/poolofradianceruinsomd/review.html?sid=2815696) Myth Drannor (http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/pool-of-radiance-ruins/4505-9696_7-30968200.html)

I'd just finished playing through Baldur's Gate II for the third time. Icewind Dale had been conquered using a party entirely composed of Bards. I was looking for the next iteration of the D&D franchise and the remake to one of the classic Gold Box games of my youth called to me like a siren. 'First ever game to use AD&D 3rd Edition rules!' the previews proudly trumpeted. They lied.

Let's start with the technical issues first. If you tried to uninstall the game (and you would after about ten minutes of playing it), you'd better hope you patched it first. There was a bug (patched after a couple of days) that would randomly delete Windows system files when you uninstalled. Woo! Mutliplayer didn't work. For an entire week we tried to hook up and dungeon bash together but we never managed to get two of us connected at once. Attempting to save a game had about a 50% chance of triggering a CTD as well - a known issue that the developers claimed was fixed in the patch but in fact wasn't.

Gameplay wise it had some truly bizarre design choices foisted upon it. Yes it used 3rd ed D&D rules to a point, but they seemed arbitrarily chosen. There were no racial restrictions on classes for example. Half-Orc Paladin? Sure! Stealth classes were irrelevant because you had to have the entire party on the same screen  - and not too far apart either. No point having Sneaky McSneak sidling up to enemies when Clanky McClank the Fighter is strolling along two paces behind him. Open a chest? No problem, you have to have the entire party crammed around the thief while he finds out if there's a fireball trap on it first though....

Most unforgivably for a RPG, you don't get to have much say in the creation or development of your characters. Creation is mostly choosing race, class and name. When you ding, the game assigns new abilities to you, you don't get to choose. Maps are repetitive and dull, 'Oh look another vast array of identical, brown dungeon tiles! I think I just peed a little!' Combat is slow, clunky and either unfairly lethal or mind-numbingly dull. Before long, even the most ardent RPG fanboy found that the incentive to reload the last save and try again just wasn't there. I don't think I've ever been so disappointed with a game ever.

Hellgate: London (http://www.f13.net/?itemid=620)

World of Warcraft.

9 Million People. All the same shit we've seen.

It's the diet crystal clear pepsi of games.

 
                     ^

:heartbreak:

I never actually thought that'd be robot jesus.

My own is DAoC. I evangelized that thing to and fro, even saying "relevant crafting" and "fun combat". I was in that period between thinking I wanted something different than EQ1 and realizing what actually different meant.

God the remake of Pools of Radiance sucked.

 The game I have played the least after purchase was Rainbow Six: Las Vegas on the PC. Everything that is wrong with console shooters all ported to the PC to inflict further pain! Uninstalled it less than an hour later. Pure suck.

The most disappointing game I ever bought? Fountain of Dreams. It was supposed to be the successor of Wasteland, I believed it and it raped me hard.

Ruins of Myth Drannor sucked, but I didn't expect all that much from it.

Just as I have a hard time qualifying my top 20 in terms of "best in what way", I've a hard time qualifying the worst ever in terms of "worst in what way".  I mean, if we're talking about poorly coded abortions made by people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing, I'm sure I can dig up some VIC-20 B.A.S.I.C. coded monstrosity that I wrote myself when I was 6.  Hey, everybody's got to start somewhere.

I'm probably going to have to go with the Atari 2600 rendition of E.T. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(Atari_2600)) for the worst "professionally released and mass-marketed" game ever.  And not just because everybody else says so - it was one of the first games that managed to effectively torture the user.

Neverwinter Nights. Not for the main game, though that was a bit disappointing as well. No, I was mostly disappointed in the craptastic construction set, which for the first 3 months just refused to not shit the bed. It would corrupt modules without warning, completely fagging up everything you'd worked on for months. It got so bad, I ended up backing up the file I worked on every single time I saved it, which made a backup directory of epic proportions. And all that to discover the only way to do anything worth a damn was use the very buggy DM tool on every NPC, or learn scripting. No fucking thanks.

FIFA 08 for the Wii. So much potential, so much pissed away. I spent a whole year getting excited for that game and they couldn't even build a reasonable one-off game of soccer with the Wiimote. Epic fail.

Deus Ex: Invisible War. How much fail can you pack into one shitty product?

Shadowbane. Ow, my anus. But at least when I first started hearing about SB, I didn't expect much. It was only through the magic of beta that I really got excited.

UO.

No, not really. But I remember talking it up for ages, then I never even played it. :(

Guild Wars. I loved it to death in beta a talked it up a lot. But then they killed it by not listening to feedback and released a shitty game.

For me, the most disappointing game ever was probably Heavy Gear 2.  I was a massive fan (MASSIVE) of Mechwarrior 2, and the giant robot genre in general, and a huge fan of the tabletop Heavy Gear game, so when they put the team behind Mechwarrior 2 to work developing Heavy Gear 2, I was really stoked.

For some reason, though, the game turned out to be some weird stealth based thing only with twenty foot robots instead of something which could concievably be stealthy, the "customize your Gear" mechanic was incredibly broken, the missions were very blah (especially towards the end), and the graphics weren't that great (everything from blurry textures to the most boring HUD I've ever seen) despite this being one of the first games to require you to have a 3D card.  Plus, it was competing with Mechwarrior 3 and Starsiege, both of which kicked it's ass to the moon.

Final Fantasy XI.  I was still a huge Square fanboy back when it was announced (mind you it was announced way back before even IX and X were out), and even through all the delays before the game was released in the states, I was hyped over the thought of playing an FF MMO.  I think that game killed a piece of my soul.

That reminds me - on the tangent of disappointing sequels: BattleZone 2.  The BattleZone (http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/battlezone) PC game series started off pretty interesting plot that had ruskies versus the U.S. on the moon in a massive government coverup and this cool base building, tank driving, quasi-RTS mechanic.  That was interesting.  Battlezone 2 ditched the cloak-and-dagger plot and 60s astronaut inspired looks and instead put us up against aliens with a futuristic shine to everything.  It killed the spirit of the thing, bah!  It's too bad because BZ2 was otherwise a pretty good game.

Master of Orion 3   :crying_panda:

Tie between AO and AC2 at launch.  I'm forever regretful I paid for that garbage.

Arcanum.  Has to be the ugliest game I ever played.

Neverwinter Nights 2: What a piece of shit this game is. It runs like garbage, looks like garbage. The original at least had a reasonably apt engine and clean interface. This game is a mess and it's just too bad.

Deus Ex 2: Worst treatment of a great game ever. Ever.

I don't know how to answer.. Perhaps I've blocked out the truly horrible stuff.

Deus Ex 2 is up there though. I didn't last long at all.

And not to be controversial, but FFXII -- Talk about invading my motherfucking. Really, I think it's that bad.

Hmm, what else?

DDO -- Because I was a little hyped about it.. I mean, action RPG mechanics, nothing but story driven quests, with a solid RPG license like that? ... But no.

Top Gun for NES -- The master of hate explains it all too well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofM11nPzFo0)

Easily FFXI

Just thinking about it makes me feel stabby. If I hadn't forced myself to forget about it's astronomical levels of disappointment I could easily write pages about just how terrible that game is. Though that's nothing to brag about and hardly worth the time to consider.

No Smart or Romero titles yet!  :awesome_for_real:

World War II Online.

I wanted it oh so badly to be good, I really did.  A real war, with constantly evolving fronts?  Shit, yeah!  Unfortunately I ignored all the warning signs popping up about how badly the game would suck, and the result was flying tanks.  On the upside, I can say I was there for the shittiest MMO launch ever.

Deus Ex 2, NWN.

Fail at concept.

Here's a clue: a game that disappoints because it isn't robot baby jesus, or even because it's just a soft drink does not equal worst game ever. Category error.

Now if you're talking Deus Ex 2, you're starting to get the idea. If you're talking Master of Orion 3, you're definitely in the right quandrant of the galaxy.

But if you really want an example of a contender, how about Outpost? That puts the whole "Gamespot sold out to Eidos" thing in perspective: heavily hyped game back when game magazines seemed pretty honest, turned out that reviewers had played an early beta build and trusted Sierra to put all of what was missing in the game, and that the final release basically didn't even work in a way that was hard to tell until you were a few hours in. Hard suck in every way possible.

I think there was a Magic Carpet game back in the day that was pretty horrid as well.

Yes. Wow. Bad memories. Ouch.

I was there at launch, and came back a year later. Played as long as I could stomach it. It was a hell of a lot better when I left than when it started, but eventually the huge learning curve and long wait to get to actual combat wore me out. I will give the Rats credit for improving the game beyond belief from where they started, because WOW it was shitty at launch. Taxi to victory ftl.

how about....uh. Star Wars: Episode 1?  :grin:

I played that game on our 2600 when E.T. came out.  I don't think that I or any of my friends ever made it out of the first room.  Even at that young age I was aware that something was terribly wrong with that game.  I can't say that I have played a game since that was so devoid of any reason to exist.

Star Wars Galaxies

I could never really figure out what to do in the game. Sometimes I would fall into a hole and then I could float out, and sometimes the hole had a flower in it or something...what the hell was the point of the game?

Star Wars: Episode 1 sucked so bad that I felt I must have been wrong and we would all the see the genius once episode 2 came out.  Everything would blend together into a perfect storm of 'Oh now I see!!!'  It sucked so unbelievably much that WUA is still in denial.

Morrowind.

I bought it because you guys said it was so awesome -- I got through almost an hour's playtime until I said fuck this game and uninstalled the buggy, unfun piece of trash. Thankfully, I didn't fall for it again with oblivion. Apparently, Bethesda and I don't mix.

Normally I like those sort of games, no idea why that one seemed lifeless, dead, and uninteresting. Not to mention the crashes.

Hell, I played about 10x more of Ultima: Ascension than this game.

C&C: Sole Survivor

Civ 3 & 4.

In both cases I'm playing some SMAC, catch the 4x bug, and convince myself to pick up the next Civ game. After a day or so, I've realized that it's nothing but Civ 2 with a mild graphics overhall, the same stupid AI, and some superficial changes. Nice, but not worth $50; the formula is stale and the anachronism has always irritated me. I've been fooled twice now, so I hold a grudge.

Deus Ex 2 and AC 2 get a tie for being my two biggest letdown sequals of games I loved.

Actually, upon thinking, two games that scored even lower for me, again for being heart renchingly bad sequals - Ultima 8 (super mario edition) and Ultima 9 (oh god the fucking pain edition)

I find it funny that I consider many of the games mentioned by others in this thread to be great.

Yeah that was going to be my pick. It made me cry. Being a massive MOO2 fan, I was so excited too.

I thought I read somewhere that you could just hit 'Next Turn' and win the game; Or at least it seemed that way.

Edit:  Wow. IGN gave it a 9.2/10 (http://pc.ign.com/articles/386/386281p1.html).  :ye_gods: I can't read it; It hurts too much.

Ultima Online.

Worst commercial game: X Men for the NES.
Guess who made it?  JLN, kings of shitty NES games!

Biggest disappointment game sucky: Final Fantasy 8, which was basically where I stopped liking the JRPG.  Of course Fallout 2 came out around the same timeframe IIRC, and playing pure awesome next to some weeaboo angstfest with a shitty CCG that got worse the further into the game you got, punished you for levelling up, and had a magic and attribute system designed to make you hate life itself is gonna make it look worse than it already is.

I can't think of a single game I bought that was way below expectations. I guess I have low expectations.

Maybe the Tactics Ogre game for the GBA, just because it was a major step backwards from the SNES version. For some reason they stripped out all the good stuff.

Black & White.

I bought into the hype.  I read the interviews with Molyneaux.  I loved the idea of a Pokemon who could eat villagers and gradually morph into the personification of my psychotic personality.  The concept of having monster battles sounded fantastic, complete with differing tactics and strategies.  Revolutionary new symbol-driven control system that would throw out the old idea of buttons and icons on the screen.

I got a horse that would eat its own poop while sitting there watching my idiot peasants swarm around waiting to be micromanaged or starve.  Every time I swirled the mouse around trying to throw a fireball at it I would invariably slap it in the head or just make silly squiggles in the air.  Then the enemy god would turn up and its badger or whatever the hell it was would either wander through slaughtering my idiot peasants while my walking glue factory ate more poop, or it would wander off into the ocean and eat its own poop.

My wife will still occasionally say to me 'At least its better than Black & White'.

God, I keep thinking Spore will end up like Black and White. I'd hate to add Spore to this list, for pretty much the same reason you were excited about Black and White.

Admittedly, I did like slapping my pet around. Stupid fucking animal couldn't get anything right.

Worst game that I have ever played is something called Narc for the Xbox. I have no idea why I had a press copy but it was so fucking bad.

Most disappointing would be a toss between Oblivion and Daikatana.

So you enjoyed Vanguard more?

As mentioned, we've split the concept as of the OP.
There's a big difference between WORST. GAME. EVAR. and "Most disappointing game I have played".

My answer to the first.. I'm not sure. The second would be Fable.

You had expectations for Daikatana?

Kind of like having expectations for Shadowbane after the beta leaks.

Ultima 9.
Look its THE last of the series. What a way to crash n burn.

Hey it was the dark ages of gaming. I only had a dial up that was used to download quake demos and nuddie pictures. And I had read in a magazine about a game made by one of the dudes that made nq. I was psyched :)

2nd Vote here for SW:G.

Marrow.

Most dissappointing ?  Bards Tale 3.  Awful.

But what other game lets you build a gigantic tower of bread up to the sun?

Star Wars: Rebel Assault. It even had the word 'Ass' in it. I should've realized.

Interplay's Descent to Undermountain. Space Shooter engine used for 3D RPG. Oh yeah, that should've worked.

NES Hydlide. Horrible game with music that made you want to smash your TV speaker if you hadn't already smashed your NES and TV screen.

Worst game ever? Probably Power Rangers for the n64.

MoO 3 broke my heart.  I tried so hard to love that game spreadsheet.  I probably played over 20 hours just trying to find those few fleeting moments of fun that reminded me of MoO2.

I see your Descent to Undermountain and raise you Stonekeep.

I can't remember exactly what caused it, but a switched flipped in my head when playing this where I went from completely engrossed to never wanting to gaze upon that massive shitpile again.  There was no decline, the change was instant.

To get home.  I think what you were supposed to do was get the pieces for that radio broadcast thingy that was in the movie - there were three or four pieces you had to find and put together, or something.  Oh, and you had to keep finding Reese's Pieces to keep your energy up.  I was little when I played that, but I did manage to beat it - you watch ET launch in his space ship.  In retrospect it was a bad game, but I was too young to be critical about gaming or anything else.  Just "don't like" or "like".  I remember liking it alright at the time, but I wasn't hyped up for it.  I don't remember getting hyped up for any game at that age - I just played whatever my parents brought home. 

What I did have real issues with was the Indiana Jones game we had.  I remember there was a room you go to where you could buy things, but it also had snakes or something running around trying to get you while you did.  And a cliff you would fall off if you wandered off the edge of one screen, and you could *maybe* save yourself, but not likely (for me, at that age, anyway).  For as much as I recall loathing the confusing and difficult nature of that game, I sure did play it often.  Oh, to be young again.

Black and White really pissed me off.  I don't know if it was the worst but every time I think about it, I get pissed off again.  Hard to come up with something else when I'm that pissed off.  Most disappointing, however, was Wish.  Entirely disappointed that it wasn't released so I could raise an army of goats and kill every other goat in the game.  I had plans.  My disappointment had nothing to do with the game, itself.  I actually quite enjoyed picking berries and chopping wood.  It made me feel busy.

I actually enjoyed Stonekeep. The spell system was interesting and it was one of the last of the tile-ish 3d games, and I played those AD&D "3d" games a ton. Descent to Undermountain is the one I was going to name here. Total turd, first complete AD&D crpg failure I can remember.

I'll also give the nod to Civ 3/4, Morrowind/Oblivion, and Black & White. The first 4 because dumbing down consolizing streamlining your game is not what pc gaming is about. While Bioshock is an overall disappointment compared to Irrational's previous work, at least it was a fun game. Civ 3 I only played because it was newer, and finally got used to the sub-par version. Civ 4 I don't even like, it took FfH2 to make me feel like I got my money's worth. I wish Brian Reynolds would return to TBS and ditch RTS crap. Or just legally change his name to Sid Meier.

Black & White was just a turd. As much as I'm a massive Spore fanboi, it could easily head that way if too much focus is put on making it a 'game'. Black & White was actually enjoyable on the first level, when you were just questing and goofing around with stuff. It's when it turned into a shitty RTS that it fell apart completely (I never finished the second level, just replayed the first).

Pete Molyneux....hasn't made a decent game since Dungeon Keeper. Maybe he and Sid should just be locked up so they can jerk each other off on how great they were ten years ago.

I don't think MOO3 was that bad.  If it had been called 'Space 4x Game' instead of MOO it probably would have gone down in history as a quirky title that tried for too much and didn't get it but had it's fans.  You could not actually hit Next Turn and win the game.  It was true that you actually had to click next turn until about turn 350 before anything interesting started happening though.

Auto Assault though?  Just massive disappointment all around.

At least Peter is still trying to make interesting games, even if he comes up short.

What's wrong with Stonekeep ?

Apart from the training bug ?

I'm probably thinking of a different game.

The best thing about Stonekeep was the box and the lore book it came with. I think it was one of the 3-4 times I actually read a lore book.

(http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5325/gskp3os3.jpg)

I remember that game having a lot of GameFaqs moments where you had to do completely unintuitive crap to get past certain puzzles.  The ending pissed me off pretty bad also.   

I thought it was just a stinker.

It's also been made completely and totally obsolete by Etrian Odyssey.

I do remember the style of stonekeep having a certain charm though. Like claymation that fell into the uncanny valley.

Funny Story.  I still have Stonekeep in my bookcase.  Just checked.

Heh.  I must resist the urge to install it now.

Hah, I think Stonekeep is the first game I ever applied a patch too.   :awesome_for_real:

So do I. The box was awesome.

I have it but I don't have any desire to play it again.  For some reason, after all this chatting about it, I have the desire to play this again:

(http://www.sircabirus.com/ultimaunderworld/images/uwboxl.jpg)

which I also have.  Yay.

See, I disagree with that. I thought both Fable and the Movies were decent games, just not spectacular games that lived up to any of the hype Molyneux put into the games. They both could have used 6 months to a year more to really make them sparkle. And the Movies should have just ditched the game part completely and focused on the movie making aspect.

Black & White, though, was fucking balls. Awful in every way. Molyneux's biggest problem is that he can't fucking shut up about how innovative his games are going to be during development.

Dungeon Keeper was a bit of a dissapointment, considering what it was meant to be.

I am reminded that I was disappointed with Magic & Mayhem.

Yeah, I still liked it but there was some serious disappointment once I figured out what was really involved instead of what was hyped.

I loved that game. What was it hyped as? Maybe ignorance was bliss with that one.

I totally missed the Dungeon Keeper hype and thus found it to be good entertainment for a few nights.

Worst game evar for me is Lost In Blue. I kept looking for the fun and all I got was more fucking log fetching. I hate logs. I didn't even get the joy of killing my people off with dysentery and syphilis like I did in Oregon Trail. The worst part is a walkthough can't even help you because you're constantly baby sitting your worthless companion. Ya just have to keep fetching, and fetching, and fetching. It's like someone saw the MMO fetch quests and said "I bet I can make that more tedious." And he did.

Also you make a bed and your folks don't get it on. Even the Sims had the love bed with pixel bumping. If I have to play a game where I'm watching the incessantly boring lives of shipwreck survivors at least add a little boom.

I missed the DK hype. Oh, wait. I do remember, it was supposed to be one where other players could come in and play your dungeon as a first-person hack-n-slash while you controlled it from the RTS viewpoint, right? Nobody ever delivers on that kind of stuff.

Everything Prospero said is why The Sims 2: Castaway doesn't really suck much.

Yeah that, and there would be something more to do than sandbox to no real purpose.

The most disappointing games I can remember playing were Whale's Voyage (Amiga) and BloodNet (PC).

Whale's Voyage sounded great - a mix of FPS ala Captive, space travel, trading and RPG with a storyline. The character creation system was innovative (a simple set of options that described your characters' lives up to that point and gave you abilities based on your answers) and some of the features were nice enough (outfitting your ship) but combat was ridiculously hard and it was a game that only allowed one save at a time. That save must have corrupted on me at least 6 times, meaning I had to start again over at the beginning. I gave up on it.

BloodNet was a cyberpunk vampire game where it was entirely possible to kill key characters when you met them thus making the game impossible to finish. Since it wasn't exactly easy to work out a key character from a non-key character, you'd often end up restarting the game again and again and again when you worked out you shouldn't have killed that jerk in the bar because you needed his help 4 hours from when you met him. Another game I gave up on.

Earth and Beyond. I played the open beta for its few hours and loved the quest-based gameplay. I camped EB Games waiting for a real copy. And then found out that I had already played through pretty much all the quests there were, and that afterwards the game devolved to sheer tedium. What a disappointment.

But I did get a shiny "Founders Federation" ship. :awesome_for_real:

Ultima Online. 

Opening day.  The lag was crippling, the client was so choppy in almost induced vomiting, I got killed by a bird, I got killed by a deer.  Someone stole something out of my backpack and laughed at me.   :uhrr:   Ow00ooOOooo WoooOOOoooooo

Fuck that shit. Worst game experience ever.  Cancelled and went right back to Meridian 59, then eventually Everquest.

my top3 worst would be
Ultima 9
Might n Magic 9
and Star Wars: episode 1

Yes.  Might and Magic IX was the worst ending to one of the best computer gaming series ever.  I was worried after Might and Magic VIII appeared to be a semi-"get it out the door" product but still managed to be a somewhat decent game, but IX just completely blew.  It was the last game I ever ordered before playing first.  I think I truly lost my gaming spirit and barely managed to become anything more than a jaded bastard regarding new game releases because of this one.

I tried the demo for Ultima IX.  Let's just say they never saw my money based on that alone.  All of the angst and venom people talked about for the game?  All true.

Eh, I actually /like/ sandboxes without real purpose. Thus my comment earlier about how trying to shoehorn a game into Spore is the only real way I see it getting fucked up. Just like B&W was, because B&W was an excellent sandbox (the first level) until it tried being a game.

I think this is actually harder than the top 20 list.  There are plenty of games I've played that sucked, but I can't think of any that I had huge expectations for that let me down.  Maybe I'm too cynical.  B&W for example - I heard the hype at the time, but nothing ever captured my interest about it.  I glanced at a pirated copy, decided it sucked, and moved on.  I've a bunch more games that people have bought me that wasn't on any list, and turned out to suck.  But since I never had any expectation that FamilyGamePurchaseWithAMovieLicense_004 would be anything but a shitfest, so no loss.  I thought UO was awesome at the time.  Graphical MUD.  Well, I was playing/building a MUD at the time, so that was sweet.  On Shadowbane, I had a good idea of the issues it was going to have well in advance, so expectations were tempered accordingly.  Never viewed it as the Holy Grail of PvP, but I did enjoy it for what it offered.  Never played Ultima 9 because of the terrible reviews I heard.  I never really got into the Ultima series anyway, although I did enjoy one of them (4?  Came out on the NES). 

Oh crap- I forgot about Ultima IX. What a steaming pile of shit that was. I am getting angry just remembering it. I eventually used the CD for a coffee mug coaster, and later fired it over the fence of my apartment into the pool area, IIRC. I want to kick LB in the sack now.

My aunt in Chicago, who we would visit once a year, had a 2600.  She had Spider Fighter, River Raid and this gem.  Since her house, once a year, was the sum total of my first three years of video game exposure, I have fond memories of this game.

You had to assemble a phone... thing, so you could phone home!  You also had to avoid the scientists and I think get m&ms from your boy friend to keep from running out of energy?  When you found all the phone pieces, your mothership would come and save you.

Most everything that would be a "worst game evar" you wouldn't be able to remember because the game either wouldn't have worked at all or was so bad that you threw it away and promptly forgot about it.

That said, Final Fantasy X-2.

Oh yes, Ultima 9. I really buried that pile of crap in the back of my head. But since the decline already began with Ultima 8, the disappointment was somewhat dulled.

I actually finished Ultima 9.  It could have been a lot better than it was if they had more time, as they had some content that was truly epic in it (at least by 1999 standards).  I'm talking, "Brought Ultima 4-7 back into focus and justified the Pegan debacle and finally tying up the entire Ultima series in a reasonably coherent ending" epic.  Instead, we got an inefficient, buddy game that was mostly jumping puzzles and third person combat.  It played more like a kludgy Zelda: Ocarina of Time than an Ultima game.

Oh well, at least there's always this (http://www.it-he.org/ultima9.htm).

I finished it as well. And that added to the frustration. There were hints of the original plot all over the place (they didn't even bother to remove characters no longer in the game at that point from cutscenes), and that wasn't a bad plot at all.

The engine and the closed-off areas (if you ignore engine exploits) would still have made it a bad game that had nothing to do with the original open world games, though.

While we're on the topic, I could also bring up the Ultima games that were the worst because they never happened: Ultima Online 2 and Ultima X.

I was a hugantic WWII Online fan, & would probably re-up today if it weren't for the fact that you have to invest in a $150 flight stick to be able to enjoy any parts of the game past infantry.  That would include AAA, ATG, tanks, transports, boats, & planes.  Oh, & the over the top control configuration.  Like an earlier poster I give huge props to CRS for the effort they have put into this stinker.  The game is heaps better than it was... Tons of UI improvements & spawn point improvements...  but until there is a better option than blowing a huge wad of cash for a decent flightstick, I am not paying the MSC for this one again.  I would pay a reduced rate for the infantry game though!

Another game I will freely hate on is Anarchy Online.  Hideous launch & gameplay.  Planetside was terrific for two months, then I realized how tedious it was & quit.  Tabula Rasa is a fantastic example of how much NCS sucks.  How much waste can they pump back up the pipeline before they choke us all on crap? 

The #1 turd in the sewer is going to Hellgate.  Looks are ok, game is crap.  Maybe I missed the boat on this, but its a heap.  Runs ok, looks average, combat is visceral, content SEEMS like it would rock, but its vacant.  This game promises a cool backstory, sweet cinematic, & repetitive stress injuries.  BUT WAIT! THERES MORE!!!  You can pay an additional MSC to wear unique hats! 

gar
bage

<<<Season 2 Diet Crystal Duelist. Now with 458 resil, but still zero calories.

I'm noticing an interesting pattern here.  It seems the real worst games 3v4r are the ones that were good enough to get our attention, but bad enough not to deliver what they should have.

"Now... it's personal!" :heartbreak:

Also,

(http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd256/geldonyetich/UnCanneyValley.jpg)

Hmm I think NWN was the most disappointing for me.  To throw in one I don't think anyones mentioned yet in the "very disappointing" category though: Freespace.  I liked that game but I could of lived without it to get what was originally planned and hyped.

Go back to the first post.  That's what this topic is about.

I enjoyed the hell out of some NWN persistant servers.  Sadly they were/are mostly occupied by crazy basement dwellers, & were/are destined for failure. 

Someone locked this by mistake. Fixed.

(http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/9/9d/Lionheart_legacy_of_the_crusader_box_shot.jpg)

I love CRPGs, and I couldn't finish this. I think I literally fell asleep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionheart:_Legacy_of_the_Crusader

That's what I get for skimming.  (No, in retrospect, I've gotten far worse things for skimming.)

Lets see, already covered Battlezone 2 and Ultima 9...

Return to Krondor.
 

I would have totally bought that for the box art alone in my teens.

Ah c'mon. It wasn't that bad. I enjoyed it. Nothing special, but certainly not the worst game ever.

FUCKING good pick! Holy crap HOW can i forget that!?!
I tried to like it , it was Fallout Medieval..with Diablo combat?! I couldn't finish it cause I spent too much time running which results in less levels to take on the end game mobs.

I don't know, I just couldn't get into Return to Krondor because it was so fundamentally different from the previous game.  I didn't even play the retail, I just played the demo and it didn't click as being at all related.  It was trumped up as a sequel to Betrayal at Krondor but it was anything but.  So the whole thing pans out as a one-hit-wonder.

Lands of Lore 2 was similarly a let-down.  Extremely ambitious game, very artistically advanced and (like everybody else then) was having a lot of fun with CD-ROM video integration, but it had neither the charm nor mechanics of the original Lands of Lore.  Then there was Lands of Lore 3 which was, again, something else entirely that didn't have the charm of its predecessor.

Lionheart definitely had my attention as well.  Interesting plot, what with your being the demon-possessed escapee needing to hide yourself from the Spanish inquisition around every corner.  Game mechanics put together from some of the talent behind Fallout.  However, somehow it just didn't come together.  I'm not surprised many of us spaced it, it's a thoroughly forgettable game.

Two Worlds... I liked Two Worlds, in a Gothic sort of way, but it was  slap in the face of anyone expecting another Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Lionheart
The latest C&C (For some reason one of the missions was bugged for me, I reinstalled and everything, no one could give me an answer)
Shadowbane
Black and White 2
Overlord (fun for about 30 minutes, then it's just the same bullshit over and over)
Hellgate: London
Simcity Societies
Every single Empire: Earth game
Dead Rising (what the hell is with everyone loving this?)
Age of Empires 3 (I'm not really sure why I didn't like this one, AOE2 is one of my all time favourites)
Neverwinter Nights 2(I played a ton on-line with the first one, 2nd one is garbage)
Sword of the Stars (combat is just ridiculous)

I'm sure I missed some really horrid shit I've played. For some reason it is much easier for me to make a list of games I don't like than of one I do like...

Medieval Lords

for 1) never working properly, 2) not having bug fixers, and 3) having Starforce.

Voila.  A complete trifecta.  Beat that.

Perhaps you just have poor taste in games. :oh_i_see:  Honestly though, unless you really enjoy the zombie wacking, the game does have a decent number of flaws.

I played it through once, then it just got boring. Killing the same monsters over and over just doesn't appeal to me anymore.

It's like an mmorpg without the good stuff.

Lionheart was an abortion in the later parts (=rushedoutoutofthedoorhalfdone), but I somewhat enjoyed the first parts. Certainly not worse than Sacred for example.

Maybe it helps that I always play Paladin-types in Action RPGs (Tank with light support/healing magic), I heard as anything else it was a chore.

Man, what did I hate. FFX-2 sucked ass, but so obvy.

Hmm. What was that one lame GC game where you're a human in dinosaur land? That sucked. Tak and the Power of Juju sucked, but again: obvious.

It was a letdown after Betrayal. Damn, I loved Betrayal -- that was a wide-open RPG in a time when they, well, weren't. Return to Krondor was okay, but I wanted a better Betrayal, not an "okay" IP-based RPG.

Have you tried Betrayal at Antara? I vaguely remember that to be the other "sequel" to Betrayal at Krondor. It wasn't bad, but Betrayal at Krondor was still the best of the three!

I had been meaning to try Betrayal In Antara, but my interest had been thoroughly quashed by Return to Krondor.  Now my computer is 10 years too new to run it.

Ohh, yes it was.  One of the few pc games I've ever thrown away. 

I'm having a hard time thinking of a certain game I really hated. All I can remember is it was a first person action/rpg and had garish red cover art. Can't find the CD.. may be another casualty. Mid nineties... GAH.

No computer is to new to run anything, thanks to the wonders of virtualization. I still run Master of Magic and Darklands regularly on Dosbox and have a Win95-Vmware running if the Magic the Gathering (because spending money on magic cards a second time, not happening) fancy tickles me.

I doubt that Betrayal in Antara is worth that level of dedication, though.


@Rasix: Do you by chance mean Shadowcaster (http://free-game-downloads.mosw.com/abandonware/pc/role_playing_games/games_s_t/shadowcaster.html)? First Action/RPG of the mid 90 that springs to my mind.

Everquest.

There are some personal reasons. Everquest stole my P&P RPG group, and it was annoying as fuck to try and GM while my buddies were whacking skeletons and not paying attention. I eventually gave up.

But it also had just about everything about games that I dislike, and nothing that appealed to me. It just seemed like someone threw the Monster Manual into a spreadsheet, tacked on some really horrible looking  3-D graphics and fired up the servers.

I remain boggled that it became as popular as it did.

Lands of Lore past the first iteration was just shit. The first one was a fun game, not the greatest but fun. 2 and 3? Shitty shit shit shit.