Weekly Nuke Wrap-Up: Disappointment

Time to wrap up last week’s (two week’s? whatever) topic: Disappointment.

Just a reminder (since it’s been a while in internet time since I started this), I asked you to write about the games that let you down. Were they ambitious beyond the technology of the day? How about the games that somehow failed with everything going for them: big budget, big name developers, and a marketing push to put a summer blockbuster to shame?

For this topic, you had to have had hope for the game in the first place, so no shovel-ware or bargain bin knock-offs.

Lots of good responses this week, so lets get to them.

Ok, the first response was from Shakerag, who wrote about a couple of games that disappointed him:

Minor disappointment: Chrono Cross. I was kind of expecting time travel, you know? Not just flipping between two realities.

Major disappointment: Final Fantasy X. I was so hyped up for this, being a long time FF fan. Game started out pretty great … until I realized it was, like, TOTALLY FUCKING LINEAR until the very ass-end of the game.

Second up was Adushan, who wrote about technology at the expense of gameplay. Also Diablo 3. Sorry these segues suck, but I’m pretty tired.

…Anywho I mentioned the unfortunate choice of using voxels in Outcast. I guess another technology which kind of fizzled out and died were Voodoo graphics accelerators. Oh man, they were sooo close to being the future. Until no one supported them.

Oh and game-wise how about Crysis? I keep expecting entertainment, and get sucked in by the astonishing graphics, but there’s just something missing. Like entertainment (ooh sick burn!)

And lastly Diablo 3. But only if you play it once. On the first run-through it’s disappointing, but keep playing it again and again and you realize there’s great replayability.

Ouched’s thinks Bioware is over forever:

Dragon Age II broke my heart. It was the canary in the Bioware coal mine, as every game they’ve made since EA inserted their tentacles into my once beloved Bioware has not lived up to it’s predecessor. Mass Effect 2 was in production before EA bought them outright, so I tend to view ME 2 as the last true Bioware game.

Stephen was let down by Sonic 4 and Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland:

It’d have to be Sonic 4: Episode 1. I know, I know, the Sonic Cycle, the games are always bad etc. etc., but everything Isaw and heard about the game until buying seemed great. Then I saw while playing that the animations looked like a glorified Flash game and the controls were so sluggish as to make it practically unplayable.

Also, Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. “No load-times!” because instead of just loading a new area when you get to it you have to skate down a bland, empty corridor until the next area loads. NOT AS ADVERTISED.

Peter Silk is disappointed by many things:

I think the linearity of FFX was the only thing that made the random battles tolerable. It’s still the only FF game I’ve finished for that reason. 5, 6, 7, 8 I just couldn’t quite get past all the backtracking, getting lost, being in fights I didn’t want to be in. 12 was just the point where I stopped caring, despite the lack of random battles. I don’t think X was an amazing game, but it remains the one I was able to keep with until the end, with 8 coming just short (9 I hear is great but I missed).

Anyway, as for my own disappointments, I think Escape From Monkey Island ranks up there. I was in denial about that game for a while, but sooner or later I came to accept that it just wasn’t as good as what had come before. It was a reasonable adventure game, but as an addition to the Monkey Island series it failed on many levels.

Also in adventure land, the Back to the Future series was very disappointing, considering it combines two of my favourite things: adventure games and Back to the Future. Could have been so much more but felt like a second-rate effort.

Finally Fahrenheit. The demo promised so much, and the game almost completely failed to follow through, and added the insult of a very silly ending to the injury.

The later Tony Hawk games really disappointed me. the first Underground game was pretty good imo, but everything else after was just… not good (Bam Margera as a main character in the second underground completely turned me off of the rest of the series).