Worst game evar?

[IainC]

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

This isn't about Swamp Buggy Racing 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 of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor

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.

[Morfiend]

Hellgate: London

[schild]

World of Warcraft.

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

It's the diet crystal clear pepsi of games.

[Ragnoros]

Hellgate: London

 
                     ^

[lesion]

Hellgate: London

[Venkman]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Tebonas]

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.

[geldonyetich2]

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. 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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Kail]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[geldonyetich2]

That reminds me - on the tangent of disappointing sequels: BattleZone 2.  The 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.

[Simond]

Master of Orion 3   

[Rasix]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[stray]

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

[cosapi]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

No Smart or Romero titles yet! 

[Big Gulp]

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.

[Strazos]

Deus Ex 2, NWN.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Strazos]

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

[Khaldun]

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

Yes. Wow. Bad memories. Ouch.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

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.

[rk47]

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

[Grand Design]

I'm probably going to have to go with the Atari 2600 rendition of E.T. 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.

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.

[Drogo]

Star Wars Galaxies

[Margalis]

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?

[Murgos]

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

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[Sutro]

C&C: Sole Survivor

[Zane0]

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.

[Bunk]

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.