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> You disappoint me

... Mass Effect.  I was so very keen to play you, I watched every trailer video and gameplay footage vid that I could find.  The combat resembled that of Knights of the Old Republic, a beguiling mix of real-time combat and pausing to give orders to your team.  I had loved the humour and richness of Baldur's Gate and was sure that with the chance for Bioware to create their own rich universe, it would be a sci-fi extravaganza like no other.

Instead I found a charmless, slow mix of exposition and gossip, with the occasional brief, unsatisfying fight.  Instead of varied worlds to explore and strip the secrets from, I found only empty and boring moons that I had to navigate in a rubbish vehicle, attacking crappy space worms.  I was neither a Kirk-style wayfarer nor a Picardian diplomat, but the errand boy of the universe.  I was impressed by how detailed your character animation was in the dialogue scenes that I had to encounter every couple of minutes.  I was less impressed when I realized that this was largely the whole of the game.  A series of conversations punctuated by rubbish fights and the occasional CRAP TRUCK VS. SPACE WORM battle for some identical rock to the last one where CRAP TRUCK VS. SPACE WORM had taken place.

Oh, Mass Effect.  I expected so much. I just knew you were going to be my favourite new game.  But you hated me, and so I have shunned you.  For you are the biggest gaming disappointment that I have encountered in recent years.

Okay, I know some of you really like the series.  So, what's your biggest disappointment in gaming?

Hmm... interesting question.  Some of mine:

FF VII was one, mainly because of the utterly tedious battle system, which went about stripping the tactical possibilities of VII's with a particularly rusty knife, partly because of the wanky, stroppy main character, and partly because I'd started to realise that the new wave of JRPG's were plain rubbish.

Turbo OutRun.  Because it was OutRun, but boring.

GTA San Andreas/IV.  Both promised so much, but concerted play made me realise that they'd lost the tight focus that made the first few so ace.

Burnout 3.  Single player was the most tension free, dumbed down, retarded bag of shit I've ever encountered.

Mario Kart 64.  Tedious, feature free, overly long courses, a previously perfectly-balanced set of weapons shot to bits, and battle mode sullied beyond belief.

Renegade 3.  Utter.  Fucking.  Rubbish.

R-Type III - Was well received by the press, but I thought it was unexciting crap compared to 1, 2 and Leo.

Bioshock - promised so much, delivered on so little of it.  If someone could attach a proper game to what was a beautiful and intriguing world, we'd have a classic.

Prince Of Persia WW/TTT - take a genuinely impressive and original reboot, strip out the sense of middle-eastern whimsy, add metal, attitude and button-mashing combo's,  and enjoy your shit pie.

1080 Avalance - it took a genuinely challenging, adult and tactile experience, that was more about the struggle between the rider and the course than between you and your opponent, and turned it into SSX.  Fuck off.

Politwings/F-Zero/Wave Race/1080 Wii - because THEY AREN'T FUCKING HERE YET.

Interesting, I was about to start something very much like this.

Gears of War.

Finished Mass Effect 2 and discovered I quite liked the cover shooting mechanic so I picked up a used copy of the king of them.

Oh my god it's horrible.

The lauded plot consists of one utterly characterless man talking in a stereotype voice and appears to be thinner than wet rice paper.
The same "joke" about the enemy smelling so they must be made "of shit" "LOL" has been made at just about every kill in the entire fucking game.
Quite some distance in I've still only seen a single type of enemy.
The story doesn't even begin to make sense because the "Locust" appear to be normal men leaping out of holes in the ground, which can apparently appear anywhere.
There appears to just be the single gun, and one other that appears to be pretty much identical.
Despite the "Tutorial" level being about 50 times longer than it could possibly sensibly be, they failed to explain something that is utterly vital less then an hour later.
The cover always consists of exactly the same random stone lying in the road/corridor/room with absolutely no explanation but always the same fucking textures.
It fails the very most basic test of a cover shooter as the only way to get a crosshairs of any type is to "not be in cover at all" so you leap out of cover and are facing the wrong way and get shot to death because..
Even on casual difficulty and even early in the game it's mind-numbingly, frighteningly hard.
And it appears to think "Art direction" is something that happens to other games.

And this won awards? This isn't CUS not liking voice acting or plot. This is just very objectively a shit game where every single design decision made was utterly, pathetically, retardedly stupid.

You think that's bad, Dudley?

Try it online.

All the problems you mention in your post, but with the most CRIPPLING HOST-ADVANTAGE EVER tacked on to boot.

Seriously, don't bother with 1, and 2 is only any good with four or five players in Horde mode.

This is more a wistful reflection on what I wish lived up to how great it could be rather than a rightful damnation (Gears of War*) or something that I understand and disagree with (Mario Kart 64. I loved the battle mode. Courses were a little ropey, aye). I still like these games and, well, know that they'd never have been as good as I wanted them to be.

Perfect Dark (N64): mmmfff. How could it live up to GoldenEye? Didn't stop me from wishing.

Evil Dead: Hail to the King (DC): should have been a whirl-wind of death and chaos. It was a pretty lame Resi rip-off.

EDF 2017 (360): it's on a vastly superior system with an amazing on-line setup. Why has it lost half the playable characters and enemies and have no on-line functionality at all?

Deathmask (Amiga): so different from the Doom-clone I wanted I invented a story about my mother freaking out at the ESRB rating as an excuse to return it for a refund.

Red Steel (Wii): you have swords and guns. How could they make such a kick-ass protagonist have such a mundane corridor-crawling adventure?

Twisted Metal Black (PS2): ruined the playful psychopathy of World Tour by getting unnecessarily bleak and over-complicating things. That the Euro-release was gutted really, really didn't help.

There are some other contentious choices I could throw in there but I'll give in for now.

*That fucking thing gives me a headache to remember slogging through it for what I can recall as NO GOOD REASON.

You know Cus, I like Mass Effect but I have to admit that your critique of it was very valid and hit home on a few points - especially the barren alien worlds. I can see quite easily see how it would have annoyed you greatly.

And now for a freshly-baked rant.

 

Enter the Matrix. Such a bag of shit shocking shit. It didn't help that Xeethra and I had played some kickass Matrix mods for Max Payne not all that long before this freshly-polished turd came out. Seriously, how did they manage to fuck that game up?!

Street Fighter IV. It's been a long, long time since I have found a game that frustrating.

Doom 3. Goddamn. I can understand how making a game dark is an easy way to make it scary, but there is absolutely no point having revolutionary graphics and horrifying enemies if it's nigh-on impossible to see anything. When the most popular mods for a game are entitled 'Flashlights' or are so numerous that they have their own dedicated pages on websites alongside 'maps', 'patches' and 'total conversions' then I can only say Houston, we have a problem. To me, it didn't even play as well as the earlier Dooms - the game mechanics were absolutely shite along with guns that sounded like toys. So much so that a group of modders developed 'Classic Doom 3', which was infinitely better.

AvP 2. They removed the unscripted enemies, which is the single most ridiculous change for a game that didn't need changing. Then they added cut-scenes. They screwed it up. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Deus Ex 2. Hmm... an RPG/FPS with upgradable skills removed from the first game you say? And I don't have to be really careful and on-edge when typing in passwords and logins anymore because you were too lazy to develop controls for the PC version properly and just incorporated the PS2's instead? Nice one!

This last one may get me punched through my computer screen but I have to be honest and say... Half Life 1. It may well have been because I was too busy playing GoldenEye at the time, but even then - never, ever understood the big deal. And why would anyone want to be a physicist as a character in a game anyway?

Yeah, that was rubbish. It looked absolutely gorgeous, but it felt like such a chore to play through. Xeethra reckoned it was also unfinished too.

And to think I thought I was alone with this one. This game made me angry. Very angry. But I didn't list it because I didn't like the look of it in the first place and so I guess it couldn't disappoint. Not my type of game I suppose.

I think Dudley is a wrong-o-loid as regards Gears.  Though my enjoyment was enhanced by having it on launch day and not having any expectations, I imagine.  That, hand having a chum to play through with.

I also think those of you who didn't like Bioshock are a bit odd, too.  I played the demo through four or five times waiting to get the full game, and enjoyed it when I got it. It's certainly not Best Game EVAR or anything, but I enjoyed exploring the world they'd made and piecing together all the storyline.

Seriously, the biggest flaw with Bioshock is the HUGE FUCKING ARROW floating in front of your character's face. Once you turn it off and have to actually explore Rapture, the setting and the game make so much more sense. 2k, would you kindly set that to default off in BioShock 2?

I've just posted about Resident Evil 5 elsewhere, but I'll reiterate here as this is the right place for it.

Resident Evil 4 was an absolute gem of a game. Topping it was always going to be a challenge, but seriously - how can Capcom justify missing the mark so badly? It seems to me, that all they spent all that time and all that money on was polishing their own [egos - ed]. They removed the inventory system, they removed the zombies, they resurrected Wesker (again), and then they saddled you with a partner. A FUCKING PARTNER.
The big draw with Resi for me was the sense of loneliness, the isolation, the feeling that it's you against the world and you better be ready for that. To then reduce that by including a dumb AI that INSISTS ON USING HER HANDGUN no matter what weapons or how much ammo she has made a mockery of the whole damn thing. I get that "you're supposed to play it online" but at the time, I didn't have my xbox on live and so couldn't. I was stuck with her.

The final nail in the coffin was going to the trouble to develop an adversarial multiplayer mode, and include it on the disc - but then lock it, and charge their customers extra for what was basically a code. Way to go, Capcom.

I know Davydd is going to grill me alive for including this here, but I have to say it -Operation Flashpoint:Dragon Rising.
See, I LOVED the original Flashpoint, way back when on the PC. I loved the expansion pack even more. But the absolute best thing about it was the mission editor. I remember watching a version of the Monty Python sketch "How Not To Be Seen" which someone had actually scripted using just the mission editor and a .wav of the sketch itself. OK, so the graphics were impressing no-one, but the sheer scope of the thing blew me away.
Flash(point) forward to 2009, and Oh, what have they done???
Leaving aside for the moment that the game is buggy as hell, the AI of your squadmates is borderline broken, and there's no heavy armour or jets; Even ignoring the fact that the mission editor was NEVER gonna come to the xbox. How did they manage to release this game in this state? I struggled, I persevered, I gave up with the AI and dragged in some friends - and then the big kicker, the massive blow to the testicles that pissed me off so much I dropped the disc in the drawer and never touched it again; When you have four-player online co-op... the mission checkpoints do not work.
Let me just say that again; When you have four-player co-op, and you get about an hour into a mission (some of them can take that long or even longer) and then through very little fault of your own, you all die... THE MISSION CHECKPOINTS DO NOT WORK.
CodeMasters, this is an epic fail. Now stop pissing about and bring me a new Dizzy game on Live Arcade. I know you can do it.

Oh they're all valid and (excluding having a plot which I can't see as a flaw) are pretty much all fixed in the sequel, which is excellent.


But how? how do people like this? There's literally nothing redeeming about it and it's not like the world is short of excellent, excellent shooters.

YOU WANNA GET NUTS?! LET'S GET NUTS!

To be honest, my disappointments are pretty much every modern 3D action game I own, apart from, errrrm, Arkham Asylum. The most recent one is probably Assassin's Creed 2. It might well be an excellent game, but I'd gotten fed up and gone back to Gradius long before the Pre-Game Bullshit was out of the way. I can't stand games that have pretentions of cinematic flair and narrative richness when I'm still dossing around being introduced to characters like "Hero's Mum" two hours into the game. I will go back to it at some point, but it's really failed to make me feel like I'm missing out on anything.

What? Nah, it's utterly broken. The trick is in co-op to not die, mind. It actually helps to play the game with people who've done scary US military training, which I can supply if you fancy digging it out of a drawer sometime..

Anyway: Sega Superstars Tennis: I bum Sega. I bum Virtua Tennis. Why couldn't I bring myself to love SST? Because it was a jerky, slow, neon piece of rubbish. Hated. Bah.

The later Flashpoints are broken because only the name remained, and it was left to Codemasters. The original developers went on to do the Armed Assault games. I'm quite interested in ArmA2, but I don't know. I could get it and come back to this thread, or I could just reinstall OpFap and go into the other thread about old games instead, and save a tidy penny or three.

http://kotaku.com/5161328/operation-flashpoint-development-tensions-boil-over

See, I nearly said this, but I think it was actually a fucking amazing game that was trying to push the host hardware beyond breaking point.  I'm looking forward to the X360 HD revision.  Even though I'll have to play it at someone else's house thanks to the GF.

Because people are mostly idiots, Dudley.

And indeed, I didn't say I don't like voice acting or plot.  Fallout 3 for example, is full of both.  Oblivion another, though it has other gameplay faults.  I said below that I really enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate, which have their share of each.  Planescape Torment would be another.

Mass Effect?  More like Massive Text.  In hours of play, you'll spend most of the time STARING at your character's face as he asks someone some questions!  GAPING at someone else's face as they reply!  PEERING at your character's face again as they reply.  BLINKING to keep your eyes moist as you watch the other character reply!  LEANING over to flick the kettle on as one of your party adds something to the proceedings.  RUMMAGING around hopefully for some biscuits as your character continues speaking!  DUNKING the first of many in as the other character finishes the conversation, causing you to sigh and accidentally spill some Hob-Nob onto your lap as you reach back again for the controller.

But that's only one conversation.  True, true, they're all overlong and over-written, but it's not like the whole game is full -- WINCE as you enter an area and another conversation starts!  READ the above bit all over again to save my fingers!  Afterwards you can get back to that old faithful of adventures/RPGs - rummaging around in the scenery for stuff to loot, cool stuff to tool up with.  Okay!  Unfortunately, doing this you will only ever find a Codex Entry.  WEEP as you read yet more of the developers' notes full of back-story.  GASP as you go search on another nearby bit of scenery and find another thrilling piece of information telling you something disinteresting about some minor species in the game!  CHEER as you start a fight with someone!  MUTTER as you discover it's not as good as it was in their previous Knights of the Old Republic game, trying but failing to emulate Gears of War!  SMOKE a cigarette or two after accidentally starting another conversation!

Your reward for all of that?  You get to set course for what you hope will be a rich and conversation-free planet, full of thrilling exploration possiblities.  And then it's CRAP TRUCK VS. SPACE WORM city, baby!

If you found Star Trek - The Motion Picture to be too fast-paced and thrilling, this is the game for you.

As for Gears of War - meh, the plot is bollocks, the graphics muddy, but the gameplay mechanics are sound.  If you are finding it impossible even on a low setting, you simply aren't very good, which to me explains why something so fundamentally free of gameplay as Mass Effect would appeal instead.  It's all about gaining ground, setting up cross fire and trying to get close enough to perform grisly executions.  I moderately enjoy it.  The rubbish plot, macho stylings and over the top voice-acting make me wince.  The second one is much improved in just about every way.  Still looks mostly grey and brown, though.

I would reply to another of you, but I fear I've used up all the server space just by prodding Dudley back in the forehead, for now :p

Do Beardi next!  Do Beardi!

Nah, I've never played the Resi games, my memory of Operation Flashpoint is better than my first impressions of OpFlash2.  The most disagreeable thing he's said was that Bioshock wasn't guff :p

I'm waiting for Marc to see what GhostDoggSamurai said about Deus Ex - Invisible War!  p.s. GDS, I'm totally in agreement with thee.

I agree to a point, but I also think there are things about IW that DE fans blindly refuse to accept were for the good of the gameplay.