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Top 10 Disappointments of the Decade (http://www.gametrailers.com/video/top-10-gt-countdown/62585)

I cant pick just ten. :heartbreak:

MGS2? Wtf? Raiden was badass.. even doing naked cartwheels. fuck that list  :why_so_serious:

I didn't know Factor 5 shut down.. How sad. We need more aerial combat games, even if that one wasn't so great.

re: Doom 3 and Daikatana. The demise of Id in general is a sad thing.

Raiden was a whiney fuckheaded bag of beaver vag. He singlehandedly made me want to skullfuck the MSG creator to death. I thought the game was mostly great (though the nekkid levels were a cockpunch), but Raiden was fucking grating.

Now, I can't really argue with their #1 and #2, though you could easily switch positions. And they missed Shadowbane, but that may be more of a personal disappointment.

How the fuck much did they get paid to not put MW2 on this list?

Missing WAR from my own list. And fucking Lionheart. I'm still kind of pissed about that one. Oh and Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.

Asheron's Call 2.  We are a bit more of a MMO focused crowd here.  That game let down anyone that had any expectations of it.

WAR certainly qualifies. 

I think you could make a list with just MMOs.

The genre /was/ the disappointment of the decade. All the promise of the late 90s and we got WoW.

Pretty much. WoW was decent fun and showed how to polish, but it sure would be nice if someone could get something together that puts it to shame. Or at least doesn't make me laugh/cry when I try to play it.

Was going to post this. I can't argue with their Top choice. What a cluster fuck.

Yeah.

Haven't enjoyed a FPS since Wolfenstein 3-D so can't comment on that genre.

But I'd add Anarchy Online to MMO list.

Any Command & Conquer release during the decade.

Majesty 2, Rise of Nations, Kohan 2.

OH, FORGOT ABOUT SPORE WHICH WAS HERALDED AS GAMING-JESUS NIRVANA, BUT WAS MEH.

Haha... I wonder where I fit in then, since AC2 was the first MMO I even played... picked it up on a whim. I suppose I've been jaded from the very start.

Good call. I was so excited about it when it was first announced, and then it went progressively downhill.

Seeing SW:G game footage made me angry about the lost opportunities there all over again.  :heartbreak:

I'm more mad at myself for putting more than 2 hrs into it. Looking back at that footage, you can clearly see just how hopeless it was.

Don't think I admitted this before, but I lasted maybe a month.... got angry at how shitty it was.. happened to run across a sploit. And cheated my way into getting tons of credits/faction points and started raping everything with 2 ATST's. Unfortunately, that sucked too.

If you had no expectations, I think you could have done OK depending on when you came in.  At launch?  Man, you'd hate the genre forever.

I actually had fun in AC2 (mainly because I exploited and PK'd heavily), but it was still a pile of shit.  The game didn't even have stable chat.  

Taking a crack at the MMO list (in rough order.  It's hard to rank a shit above a turd.):

1.  Star Wars Galaxies
2.  Warhammer Online
3.  Asheron's Call 2
4.  Shadowbane
5.  Horizons
6.  Anarchy Online
7.  Auto Assault
8.  Conan
9.  Hellgate: London (is this really even a MMO?) (replace with Planetside if you need to)
10. Pirates of the Burning Sea

There's more that could be added if we consider their release versions, especially EQ2.  And there have been games that have progressively gone down the primrose path like UO.  And then again there were games with modest aspirations that still managed to suck or fail at claiming a niche (Darkfall, other PVP adherant drivel).  

Going to be hard for me to add to this list in the future.  If it looks like it's going to suck, I'm not going to buy at release anymore just to get a leg up or out of curiousity.  The MMO genre's free pass to my money expired with WAR.

Matrix 2 & 3
Democrats
Palestinians
EU
Vanilla Pepsi
Bears
Fox Broadcasting
Virtual Reality
DRM
Raph Koster

I think I ignore hype too much to really get onboard with most of this. Shadowbane definitely deserved a place on that though for giving a glimpse of an awesome game and dynamic, player driven world buried under a metric shit ton of bugs. I'm also tempted to stick Horizons on it just for the steep, steep slope of what they original envisaged (multi-race (with actually distinct races) faction driven world-wide PvP) down to what actually came out (shitty EQ clone, post WoW). MGS2 doesn't really deserve to be that high though, it was a disappointment to not have Snake but I don't think that qualifies the whole game for the list.

Spore has to be on that list.    I think they could have done away with Galaxies and put just the entire genre at number 1.    Galaxies isn't on my list though, I'd rather play buggy grindy Galaxies than most recent MMO releases.

I would not rank Shadowbane as too much of a disappointment, because from the start, I talked crap about it.. Some friend of mine was really stoked though, and ended up dragging me in. It looked like shit, and the idea of getting assraped everywhere didn't appeal. A couple weeks into it though, I was having a blast. Despite the problems, if I got sb.exed or something... I was dying to log back in. It was a fun game when it worked. I only quit because I lost everything (that Ubi themselves took away... not any PKs).

 I thought EQ2 should be up there as well. Definitely made a thud when after WoW landed.  Although, it plays much better now.

Anyways SGW as the #1 disappointment is saying something.  Dunno is STO will match it.


Maybe WAR will be after 2010?

As has been said, the MMO medium could win the entire list on its own. It is one festering pool of disappointment and despair.

No Tabula Rasa? Granted, it was sorta doomed from the get go, but still...it did release - right?

It's a pity ubisoft put out the new DRM system in 2010, so technically it's in the new decade, but otherwise I would've put them right up there with MW2 (which I also think should be right up there on the list).

And spore has to be up there as well. Not only did it have one of the first activation-based schemes, but it also overpromised heavily and delivered what I could only call a kiddie game (dancing cock'n'balls monsters nonwithstanding).

I'm not watching a gametrailers video for a list that is undoubtedly wrong.

Only if you're counting from some completely arbitrary starting point. Our calendar begins at 1AD so generally we count decades from xx01 to xx10.

lol, that's exactly what I said, but I broke down and watched it anyway to see if Spore was on there.  It wasn't.  Hence, wrong.

Jeez, you're right. Serves me right for being a programmer, all my arrays start at 0.

That means Ubisoft is up there along with MW2. Yay, all is right with the world.

I think Ubi is probably pretty happy with MW2.  :awesome_for_real:

Not this shit again.

To clarify: ubisoft is up there on my list for being at the forefront with bad (for consumers) protection schemes.

MW2 because it went from awesome, to meh, to oh my god this is horrible, with announcement after announcement of features/lack thereof/etc.

Right, thats why people commonly refer to 1980 as part of the 70s.  Oh wait.   

What's the beef with Kohan 2?

How was Rise of Nations a disappointment? It was ridiculously fucking amazing. Rise of Legends I could get behind. But Nations? Bahahahaha, NO. Not a disappointment.

Edit: On second though:


Surprised I got past that comment. Why even game at this point?

You can enjoy the new thrill of being able to look up and down?

Anyway, hard to argue with the list

Like I said, it's a solely a fucked up list just for putting MGS2 there. I guess I agree with the rest. As for the weirdness... that's partly why I even like Kojima games over other military type games. Arguably, Splinter Cell has some better "game" ideas, but storywise, he manages to be surreal in the most mundane/familiar type of settings/circumstances. And.. he can break the "4th wall" in some of the funniest ways. Most games of this type take themselves too seriously.

People were expecting State of Emergency to be good?

Edit: Also literally every single MMO released between 2000-2010 counts for most disappointing.

I was one of those expecting State of Emergency to be good :(

MGS2 deserves to be on there.  Much like the Matrix sequels, it's the kind of fuck-up that's so bad I can't even enjoy the first one anymore.  While MGS1's codec conversations could be a little lengthy at times, and the plot itself was pretty cheesy (but at least in stupid fun sort of way), MGS2 marks the point where Kojima somehow got it into his head that he was a master storyteller with deep shit to say.  To me, it's the most concrete example of the wrong way to tell story in video games.

This.

My brother has played a lot MGS2. He's Down's Syndrome so seems to dig repetitive shit (or rather if he enjoys something will watch it ad nauseam and then not want to see it again for years) and watching him play is pretty much like a movie. He skips through gameplay sections in record time and just seems to snap from one codec conversation/cutscene to another. There literally is more time spent watching writers' inane and mostly stupid dialogue than there is snapping guards' necks. The problem with that listing was that Raiden seemed to be their only reason. A game with more time spent watching an insane and nonsensical plot unfold than playing was a problem. Especially since for the first playthrough at least the gameplay is just about good enough to keep you going.

Borderlands.

Spore, no doubt. I'm imagine Will Wright feels the same way about the end product, since he got out of dodge ASAP. The fact that it came so close, and ended up so bad as a shitty space rts...

EQ2 would be an interesting choice. On the one hand, it had the branding and market position to be what WoW is, success-wise. On the other, despite a truly shitty launch, it turned around to be a really good diku mmo with tons of flavor and content. Disappointment subscription-wise, but not from a gamer's standpoint imo. Actually, I'd say WoW is the opposite, great business but shitty for gamers: beellions of dollars and a trickle of content.

Also, not watching the video for a list. Someone please just put their list in a post.

1.  Star Wars Galaxies
2.  Daikatana
3.  Metal Gear Solid 2
4.  Devil May Cry 2
5.  Fable
6.  Perfect Dark Zero
7.  Doom 3
8.  Lair
9.  Sonic the Hedgehog (3d one)
10. State of Emergency

After seeing the little preview montage, I think Blue Dragon should have been on there. 

RoN was just a ripoff and a bad kludge of Civ mechanics and least desirable feature of other mainstream RTS (building/unit upgrades). Granted, was mostly a DM player, so that tilts my assessment. But even on that account, was a poor facsimile of the AoE family, where AOE and AOM shine in comparison.

On FPS, whatever floats your boat — some people disdain racing games, some people dislike fighting games, I just became bored with FPS after Wolfenstein 3-D. It became the same gaming experience ad-nauseum… …YMMV of course.

On Kohan 2, more of a reflection of the epic lack of market success and how quickly Timegate packed it in and moved on to other horizons (and became even less significant). Did any of you play Kohan 2? Besides 3D, was there anything evolutionary or revolutionary about it?

I actually agree with MGS2 on that list, though perhaps not so high up.  MGS2 was a fun game, it wasn't a flop but it 'was' a disappointment. After the wild ride of MGS we were expecting bigger, better and perhaps something epic. What we got was a sort of anime-ish ghost in the shell type of mind fuck at the end of an entertaining but often times silly game.  In the first game we fought deadly mercenaries, in the second, we fought cartoon characters.  Sure a bit of comedy can go a long way but they went over the top I mean really, a fat skateboard riding man with explosives? I expected better, most people 'expected' better from MGS.

Interestingly enough (or not), I only bought one game on this list (and that was Fable as a gift). I beta'ed SWG and gave up hope 6 months before retail. The rest either didn't interest me at all or my box wouldn't run it (Doom 3). And I still bought plenty of disappointing games. It almost makes me long for the 'good old days' when any new idea or genre was really exciting, and I had the time and energy to overlook anything but gamestopping flaws and just enjoyed the games for what they were. Older, arguably wiser, more jaded, and lacking in free time now, I expect a lot more out of games these days. They have had 3+ decades to figure things out, but 95% of them can't or won't learn from the mistakes of the past and just churn out crap.
 :geezer:

I only ever bought Fable and SWG and enjoyed Fable for what it was. Fable wasn't much of a disappointment for me, because I don't believe a fucking word Molyneux says. SWG was enjoyable for the community we built here.  But the absolute turd that the game was ended up wearing me down (and the community it seemed as well).  I still remember rocking out with Eeto (was that CmdrSlack?),  slicing armor for Vedi, or building useless fucking droids that everyone complained about.  :argh: 

Only other game I played was Doom 3 and I didn't like it at all.  Pretty sad when someone has to make a mod for duct taping a flash light onto your gun.  That game put the final nail in the coffin for my tollerance of monster closet bullshit.

Off the top of my head, and only games I actually bought:

Spore - let's make a sandbox and then ruin it by enforcing an unfun game in to it
Deus Ex 2 - all time consolitis king
Asheron's Call 2 - who needs NPCs?
Bioshock - excuse me while I regen again, and again, and again
Black and White - Monster Pooping on villager was fun. Rest of the game, not so much.

Ultima 8 - my burning hatred for this vile abortion of a game knows no bounds.

Some of these are out of the decade, but the principle stands.

Yeah, the first stage of Black and White was a heck of a lot of fun. Then the entire game sucked. Fable was just bad.

Ultima 8, I actually liked a lot. But I played it after the patch that fixed jumping. Ultima 9....ecch.

Yeah, this.  I loved Fable, loved Spore.  I generally love sandbox games, and they're among the best in certain respects.  Though I can certainly respect why they're not everyone's cup of tea.

A list of "top ten disappointments" seems ridiculous, since it's basically the difference between how good you (subjectively) thought the game actually turned out to be versus how good you (subjectively) thought the game was going to be despite having not played it.  I mean, I found Phantasy Star Online to be supremely disappointing: is that because I believed the marketing, I didn't like the gameplay, or I was looking for a different kind of game?  Either way, doesn't it say more about me than it does the game?

Fable doesn't make my list, it was bad but I knew it was going to be bad, so I couldn't be disappointed.

Now, fucking Lionheart...  :angryfist:

Every thing I ever read about it lead me to believe it was a tech demo wrapped up as a game. I wasn't wrong. Rockstar had another, that was the car component, the name escaped me now.

I was not PERSONALLY disappointed by SWG, but it is pretty much my standard for "Completely broke the heart of everyone who wanted to play it."

Spore not making the list is a little surprising to me (I liked it fine but it was certainly not Robot Jesus), if only because we thought we COULD trust Will Wright, unlike Peter Molyneux.

Spore survives because everyone just remembers the first 15 minutes and has blocked the rest of the game out of their minds.

Funny enough about Lionheart:  it has a really boring video review.  (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/lionheart/video/6073586/lionheart-legacy-of-the-crusader-video-review?tag=summary;watch-review) I know video reviews have come a long way, but I nearly fell asleep watching that.

Reflexive Entertianment has never made anything worth a crap and Lionheart appears to be their biggest endeavor.  Looks like a relatively low budget studio that fooled BIS somehow.