Which Game Has Left You Disappointed The Most
 

Hi Guys: I just started playing Still Life 2 and omg!!! The graphics are so bad the first 2 games Post Mortem & Still Life where beautifully designed and the graphics were smooth and the movement was excellent Still Life 2 looks so cheap :frown: Which Got me thinking what you guys think is the worst game you've been disappointed by? either sequel or orignal.

This ^^.

It was the game that made me realize that current distribution models for games are problematic because customers don't get refunds for flawed products, unlike anything else that's being sold.

Even games from the 80s had less bugs. I found it so buggy (mac version) that it's practically impossible to play, I won't even mention the game-specific flaws. Software that doesn't function should be fully refunded.

There have been countless games in differing genres that have left me disappointed, though in terms of adventure games I would say Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon takes the buscuit.

It was completely unoriginal in its embrace of 3D and it's inclusion of '3D space' within a series that had built a reputation on the point 'n' click premise; an unsuccessful attempt at covering the wolf in sheep's clothing very much in the same way Core Design lost its way with Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness by having created a game that distorted the image for which it was originally known. If I had wanted stealth aspects in a game known for exploration/intelligent discourse and traditional narratives, then I would have gotten Splinter Cell or MGS who do a much better job.

After the amazing BS I&II - much of which was down to the 2D art of the game, here we had a 3D version that failed to capture or 'live up' to its predecessors not only in terms of aesthetics - would you believe that the 2D games were far more beautiful than the 3rd, but in terms of direction.

Sleeping Dragon was a mish-mash of ideas and they never really consolidated what they were attempting to do. It was as if it was rushed out to appease the masses and the over-reliance on 3D movement and 3D graphics meant it was an imposter of the previous two games.

Even the amateur BS 2.5 did a better job and as for BS: The Angel of Death? Well after the first part of the game where you had to escape I just threw it in the bin, for this was not the game series I had grown to love. I didn't want action in an adventure game.

Harsh but fair.

Recently there was Paradise. Starts off well enough, but it's extremely buggy and just ends up mainly without anything really interesting, as you can't even interact with the world (pretty much).

Probably something even older, but that's fresh on my mind.

BS 3 and 4 were like an absolute smack in the face to the orignal two in my opinion.

Still Life 2 was an utter joke as well.

What a positively inspiring topic to discuss ;) Here's my own list of the worst disappointments I had - just don't hate me too much for it:

Monkey Island 4

Broken Sword 3

Still Life 1 (I don't believe the sequel can be any worse)

The Longest Journey

Sanitarium

Edna & Harvey

Barrow Hill

Definitely agree on the Longest Journey.

Having seen so many people rave about it I have tried to play it 3 or 4 times, but have just got bored and left it about an hour in.

Also Shivers 2 was a let down. I realise that i'm probably in a tiny minority here but I loved Shivers. The atmosphere was great, but completely missing from the silly sequal.

Biggest dissapointment Barrow Hill after playing The Lost Crown, which i loved, barrow hill was a big smack around the chops of dissapointment. it started ok, looked nice, but then when you meet the other characters in the game, all 2 of them, or was it 3 ? they looked like they were made using a sketch book and flicked at an enourmous speed. plus the fact that it seemed that the Devs had got their mates in off the street to do the voice acting, very Amateur.

Then there is the story, it was ok upto a point, that point being finding out who the enemy was in the game, watching that CCTV footage in the gas station just made me go into hysterics, were they kidding me ?! :crazy:

overall, the worst adventure game i have played to date :r

Simon the Sorcerer 3(D) - the controls were bad, the humour not up to the standards of the first two and the storyline was cliched and suffered some glaring continuity errors. the only difficult puzzles in the game were only difficult because of the frustrating controls rather than taxing the brain

Monkey Island 4 - terrible story, not as funny as the previous games and much like Simon some blatant continuity errors that gave the impression that the writers of this game had only read a brief summary of the plots of the earlier games

Kings Quest 8 - action/adventure... without the adventure. the complete lack of any characters to interact with was bad enough (it worked in Keepsake but that game had a horde of puzzles to make up for it), almost no puzzles and even less story. I'd much rather pretend this game never existed

Also Syberia was a huge disappointment for me, I still struggle to understand how people love it so much.

Oh yeah, MI4 was terrible.

the first black mirror, it was a perfect example of boring tedium

A lot of games that have already been mentioned, like EFMI, KQ8 and Syberia. Also, after the fun craziness of LSL7, MCL was a huge letdown. TBH, I mostly play RPG's for storyline and puzzles in one setting. Games like Dragon Age, KOTOR and the NWN games are what I'm usually playing these days.

Oh, and a quick question: I keep hearing very good things about the re-issues/remakes of the first 2 Monkey Island games and Tales of Monkey Island. But try as I might, I've never ben able to locate them at any of the retailers in the area(Best Buy, several GameStop locations). Did they get pulled from store shelves, not sell well? Or were they only available online?

Secret of Monkey Island. It's not as funny, nor as engaging, nor as replayable, as the LucasArts titles that came before it, yet for some reason it enjoys an iconic status among AGs. Perhaps I don't have the benefit of viewing the game through rose-colored nostalgic glasses, as I only played it for the first time when the SE came out, but I thought it was overrated.

I'll say Syberia as well. I kept seeing it mentioned in the same breath as The Longest Journey, so I was expecting an interesting narrative with colorful characters and a well-fleshed-out game world. The reality is that the game is cold, emotionless, and technical, with poor dialogue and wooden voice-acting. The puzzles are kind of interesting, but the plot suffers from too much pointless dawdling.

Momento Mori
Whispered World
Darkness Within 2

The first two Police Quest games are some of my all-time favourites and I've always thought PQ3 was such a huge disappointment in comparison. It's so bland and uninspired, it feels like everyone making it was on auto-pilot. Open Season put the series back on track by bringing in a far darker and more realistic tone that still holds up, but PQ3 is just kind of a mess that looks even worse the more it ages.

Most of my disappointments come from enjoying previous games in the series, or by the same writer/developer -- and then disliking the sequel...

Dreamfall (good story, rotten ending, severe problems with gameplay -- clumsy combat, unwanted stealth, repeated timed memory puzzle that was supposed to simulate hacking locks)

Syberia 2 (OK to start with, but it just got more and more depressing as everything that made the first game charming gradually fell apart and you were left with the annoying little toot toot people in their colorless ice world)

Shivers 2 (the first Shivers was so much better, besides which I wasted hours on what turned out to be a dead end due to a bug)

BS3 (keyboard controls were very clumsy, game was obviously designed for a console gamepad, long and unskippable cut scenes when you "died" and were restored to a point before your mistake. And to top it off, the StarForce on the game loused up my CD reader. I was so chagrined about the loss of my CD reader after buying a "legal" version of the game that it put me off playing ANY new adventure games for over a year.)

Paradise (not really a sequel, but I bought it because I'd enjoyed most of Benoit Sokal's previous games. Paradise was buggy, had hotspots show up in the wrong places, and had one of the most unlikable "heroines" I've ever encountered in a game.)

Nikopol (nowhere near as interesting as the graphic novel, and I doubt it made much sense to people who hadn't read the graphic novel)

80 Days (The annoying disco music and the stealth sequence near the beginning put me off of it before I was very far into it. It's one of the few games where my first impression kept me from proceeding with a game.)


And sometimes I'm misled by reviews or favorable opinions in forum posts.

Secrets of the Luxor (It started out well enough, but each level deteriorated in quality.)

Spirit of Excalibur (couldn't get used to the timed game aspect -- things happening all the time while I was trying to think what to do next. Maybe it was malfunctioning on a faster computer than what it was made for.)

Final Destination: The Secret of Larson's Folly (Puzzles were very dry and tedious. Game was 90% reading. Story was poisoned by the annoying assumption that everyone who isn't a Christian is evil and everyone who claims to be Christian is good)

Adventure at the Chateau d'Or (lasted between 1 and 2 hours -- shorter than most of today's casual games, but cost $40 when it first came out)


I haven't played Still Life 2 yet. But if I do, my expectations are so low that I doubt I'll be "disappointed" in it. Annoyed maybe -- I expect it to be a very annoying game.

Bad Mojo
I never understood what to do and it was difficult to navigate the bug.
I admit I never gave it much of a chance even though I had high expectations beforehand. It's still installed on my trusty Win 95/98. So who knows, I might pick it up again some day, although not any time soon.

No mention of Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy? Never before or since have I seen such a promising game go so rapidly downhill in its second half.

More recently, Alan Wake - probably a decent action game if that's what you're looking for, but what a wasted premise. Hey, let's make a game about an author with the ability to rewrite reality - then have him shoot zombies in the woods for the next ten hours! (To be fair, apart for the discarded open world idea Remedy never promised more than they delivered - yet a lot of the disappointment expressed in various appears to stem precisely from the huge and, as it turns out, unfulfilled, potential offered by the setting and storyline).
To me the most fascinating and quite unexpected outcome of Alan Wake's failure to connect with part of its audience is that their disappointment has boosted interest in the technically inferior Deadly Premonition, panned by most critics, but as it turns out much closer to what the disillusioned Alan Wake fans envisioned that game to be.

Broken Sword: The Angel of Death

I was really looking forward to it - kept checking for updates on the Revolution forum and the official website - got it, played it and thought... meh. People kept bitching about BS3, but compared to that, this was/is the most disappointing in the series.

Barrow Hill

Read the positive review here, it sounded interesting and creepy, tried the demo, bought the full game, but after 2 full playthroughs I decided I didn't like it. Voice acting is poor, character animations are cheap, story is meh, and being stalked by floating stones is pretty ridiculous. It does have atmosphere though, I'll give it that.

Amber: Journey's Beyond

Again, read the praise it got here, tracked the game down on eBay, had to play it on my 98 system, and chugged through it with a walkthrough as I couldn't really get into it. I didn't find it scary nor entertaining to play.

The Last Express

1-frame-a-second animations were off-putting, working against the clock was frustrating, couldn't 'get into' the game world or characters, lack of inventory puzzles.

Simon the Sorcerer 3D

Poor 3D graphics and animations, poor story, some questionable puzzles, an empty and bland game world to run around in, humour the weakest in the series.

Syberia and Syberia II

The first one was merely alright, but the characters and narrative didn't do anything for me. The sequel was the least enjoyable.

The Neverhood

Plasticine animation is good and is humorous in places, but it's just puzzles with little-to-no dialogue or story. The game's back story involves having to read endless walls of text. :crazy:

The last 1/4 of that game goes far beyond the realm of disappointment. David Cage owes everyone who witnessed the old lady turning into an electricity monster a personal handwritten apology and a $20 gift basket.