Biggest letdown?

[dmcheatw]

this is probably gonna be an unpopular topic on the eve of the release of les grognards but here goes: what was your biggest let down in terms of games you anticipated and bought?

for me it is easy, Myth III: The Wolf Age. it was highly anticipated sequal to myth 2: soulblighter and myth: the fallen lords (both by bungie) but wolf age was made by a newly formed group of developers and published by take2 interactive. the game was a total bomb failure, and many hardcore myth players never considered the 3rd installment to be canonical

the 2nd biggest letdown i've ever had with a videogame was ETW.

[Moon]

This is probably better suited for the General Discussion Forum.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

For me it has to be Napoleon 1813.

It looked so great, it was so buggy.

[Sergei]

Interestingly, I was terribly let down by the first Myth... no, not the Myth you're thinking of. It was for C64:

Awfully long loading sequences is what I remember, and when you died (and it happened quickly) you loaded again. Maybe it would have been worth the praise it got in reviews if played on floppy cutting the load times or, better yet, Amiga which also had million times better graphics. See for yourself:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/myth-history-in-the-making/screenshots

[gunnergoz]

Spore marks high on my list but probably the all-time champion was a wargame released about the time of the 1991 Gulf War I, and about the same topic, whose title I forget now but it was supposed to have a front line that moved according to the results of combat. I never figured it out or got it to work.

[Michael Emrys]

HoI1 was a big letdown for me. But perhaps the worst was a game that was promised again and again but never saw the light of day: The Road to Moscow. Probably no way that it could have been realized in its envisioned form. Victory at Sea was another good idea that could never be made to work right.

Michael

[Mace]

Rainbow 6 lockdown...showing that a particular publisher can stuff up a good thing.

[Sergei]

Spore marks high on my list but probably the all-time champion was a wargame released about the time of the 1991 Gulf War I, and about the same topic, whose title I forget now but it was supposed to have a front line that moved according to the results of combat. I never figured it out or got it to work.

Patriot by 360 Pacific?

[Flanker15]

Empire: Total War was pretty messed up.

Halo 2 and 3 were so "meh" compared to the first one.

I don't think it would be entirely unfair to put CM:SF v1.00 on this list.

[Sergei]

Elite 2 was certainly a let down given how much fun the original was. Realistic space combat sounds good until you realize that it really means space fighters jousting against each other with their lasers from kilometers away when the target is just a few pixels in size, and zooming past in a split second. It would have been a fun space flight simulator, but even then it just sucked because of the time it took even at maximum time acceleration to travel between planets. But she was pretty. Pretty, dumb and buggy.

Almost equivalent to Elite 2 was Mike Singleton's Ashes of Empire. You were to avoid a nuclear civil war in ex-USSR, and you did so by driving, flying and diving (on submarine) around the huge world looking for key persons who were constantly moving around, and when you finally caught them, trying to bribe them. It was supposed to be a really deep strategy game, but in practise most of the time you are just flying or driving somewhere and trying to get enough resource A so you can bribe person X. It was really repetitive. But yeah, it's a Mike Singleton game.

[Michael Emrys]

It seems to me that the history of computer gaming is littered with a lot of failed—or near-failed—second and third iterations of successful games. For instance, a lot of people thought that Imperialism II was a better game than Imp I, but I found the first one a lot more fun to play. I think I must have played the first one for over a year, but lost interest in the second after just a month or two and went back to playing the first.

Michael

[MeatEtr]

Hands down, the biggest letdown of all time has gotta be E.T. for the Atari 2600. The game was whipped together in less than six weeks and was essentially broken.

[Stoppelhopser]

For me it has to be Napoleon 1813.

It looked so great, it was so buggy.

Agreed. The idea of strategical and tactical gaming and featuring the 1813 campaign were good ideas and I had high hopes after playing the Talonsoft titles round based games.

What was delivered was my biggest gaming disappointment ever. Never had so many CTD's with any software.

[Didz]

Without doubt Napoleon 1813, a potentially brilliant game ruined by buggy code and a few silly design decisions.

However, there are been others that came a close second.

Lord of the Realm II - I mean what were they think, when they decided the campaign would continue in the background whilst you fought a battle. Terrible expansion to a brilliant game.

And more recently Empire Totalwar, potentially brilliant game ruined by a simple lack of historical interest from the design team.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Lord of the Realm II - I mean what were they think, when they decided the campaign would continue in the background whilst you fought a battle. Terrible expansion to a brilliant game.

Yes, Steve, what were you thinking?!

http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1005&Itemid=257

Steve Grammont

Co-Founder of Battlefront.com

Co-Designer of Combat Mission

Co-Dependent Background: He won't say but rumors persist of his involvement at companies such as Sierra and past games like Lord of the Realms II and Civil War Generals 2. Don't mention Onslaught to him though.

:)

To be fair, whilst I can barely remember playing it after all this time, I can't recall thinking Lord of the Realm was all that bad. While the magic of the original title wasn't there it was head and shoulders above most titles in it's genre.

[gunnergoz]

Patriot by 360 Pacific?

That's the one, Sergei, thanks. Much anticipation, equal or greater disappointment.

[Michael Emrys]

360 Pacific were also the same people responsible for the Victory at Sea I mentioned earlier. It looked like a wonderful idea: to be able to play the entire Pacific War, or any parts of it you wished right down to individual ships and planes. But it never worked quite right. A second group then took it over and promised to fix it, but only made it worse. Sad, just very, very sad.

Michael

[Kolyanich]

Hearts of Iron III

[rleete]

Sid Meyer's Pirates. A brilliant strategy game marred by an absolutely assinine dancing video game in the middle. The worst part was you couldn't skip it, or chosse some sort of autoresolution, and if you didn't mater it, you couldn't advance.

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Sid Meyer's Pirates. A brilliant strategy game marred by an absolutely assinine dancing video game in the middle. The worst part was you couldn't skip it, or chosse some sort of autoresolution, and if you didn't mater it, you couldn't advance.

You mean to say that if you didn't mate with it you couldn't advance to the next level. This game I gotta see!!!!

Regards

KR

[Agua]

Don't know if it was a "letdown" because I was pretty dubious that it could be pulled off, but the biggest PoS I ever bought was WW2OL.

[Boeman]

I've been let down quite a few times to be certain, but my first major letdown that I remember quite well was a Commodore 64 game titled "Rush'n Attack" - a port from the original arcade classic.

Being quite young at the time, I was obviously enamored with the multitude of screenshots on the back of the box depicting my favorite coin-up game - in fact, there WERE from the original game and did not at all reflect the actual graphical capabilities of the Commodore 64.

As I popped in the 5 1/4 disk, believing that I'll never have to insert token after token into another cabinet again at Chucky Cheese, I was greeted with stick figures, low resolution graphics, cheesy sound effects and a knife larger than half the hero's body.

Imagine my disappointment!

What's worse, is that the practice of plastering packages of ported arcade games for home consoles with the original arcade screenshots continued throughout for years until the 16-bit consoles became commonplace.

[stikkypixie]

Sid Meyer's Pirates. A brilliant strategy game marred by an absolutely assinine dancing video game in the middle. The worst part was you couldn't skip it, or chosse some sort of autoresolution, and if you didn't mater it, you couldn't advance.

Talk about a repetitive game. I never played the original but playing the new one I wonder how people ever considered it addictive.

[Thomm]

A thread about video games?

Let me make you aware of the following, rather amazing site: http://www.gameanyone.com/

It has full video walk-throughs for major games (Half Life 2, e.g.).

I already used it to good effect when I was stuck in a game lately.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Sergei]

Talk about a repetitive game. I never played the original but playing the new one I wonder how people ever considered it addictive.

Hush, you maggot. Obviously you kids today with your X-stations and Wees know nothing about the glorious 1980's and therefore cannot understand how revolutionary the game was back then. It's like listening to some hip hop rendition of Jailhouse Rock and then forming opinion on the original.