Games that LOOKED cool

....until you played them.

The first culprit for me would be "Too Human". The game sounded amazing. So when it came from gamefly, I was really excited, the concept sounded so cool, and I've got to be honest, I'm a bit of a Norse Mythology geek. When I plugged it in and started playing it, the controls were nearly impossible. I mean seriously, I died so fast, and there was nothing I could do about it. Excuse me, game creators, but isn't my character supposed to be a GOD? Why the HELL am I able to die? Ok, I get it, it's a game, I can't be infallable, but seriously, why can't i just have a "respawn" option like, say, Bad Company with the super shot... thing. Why is it that Loki, the god, dies and gets taken to Valhalla by a big robot angel?

The next one was Infinite Undiscovery. That... agh. It was just bad. It was like it was trying to be Kingdom Hearts except...it sucked. I have to control all the characters, and while I'm controlling one, the other pretty much does...uh...nothing. I was playing the male character, and needed the female character to shoot arrows at one of the baddies....so I had to call her over and tell her what to do, who to shoot at, and when to shoot, while the male character got his ASS beat.

So, who else has games they were all seriously stoked for, only to play them and find out that they're complete shite?

Transformers, the PC game.

Thank GOD I gave the demo a tray first.

I wanted to enjoy this game. You KNOW I wanted to enjoy this game. I don't need to tell you that. Surely. But it turns out that the controls are like driving on ice, and all the missions involve driving from one place to another place in a time limit. And when the controls are that slippy - nothing crashes except into YOU - time limits SUCK. They ALWAYS suck but they shouldn't suck that much.

It's not even possible to have fun by smashing things because while you're walking or driving around you break a tree and then you have to transform to throw it aside because this 16 foot robot CAN'T FUCKING STEP OVER IT.

And EVERYTHING is made out of balsa wood. The trees and the lamp-posts, and the other cars go bouncing like RUBBER or something.

It BLOWS.

Jak II.

Fuck that game, everyone made me think it's going to be the best thing in the world. It was slow and boring and too dark and gritty for a game that looks this cartoony. Fuck Jak and his fucking goatee. :redangry:

Old skool game: Krusty's Fun House (SNES), a spin-off Simpsons game. My 10-year-old self said, "yay! Simpsons!" ...without knowing I was set to embark on a world of suck.

You play as Krusty. The premise is that you have to lead a bunch of rats to their doom. However, its a race against time, because if the rats fall in, say, a pit, you won't be able to get them out. Ever. You have to turn off the game and reload. It would happen that all the rats got in, save one. Don't like it? Too bad --reload.

New PC game: Sims 3.

I can see the appeal, sort of, but I couldn't get pass the playdoh people. I'm getting a new video card in the vain hope it looks better, but gameplay-wise, it gets boring after awhile. Also, the game (unintentionally?) forces you to play one family at the time. If you switch families, you run the risk of having the previous one 'move away'. So don't get too attached to your little people if you like to switch households a lot. Besides, they tend to have babies when you're not looking. Who's the father? Who knows?

Ceres wrote:

Also, the game (unintentionally?) forces you to play one family at the time. If you switch families, you run the risk of having the previous one 'move away'. So don't get too attached to your little people if you like to switch households a lot. Besides, they tend to have babies when you're not looking. Who's the father? Who knows?

I think there's a mod (awesome mod) that can fix this, though I haven't tried it myself yet.

Gotta agree that the people look unappealing. Also, is it impossible to let us adjust their height yet? :|

Geh, I think sims 3 is over-hyped. I Just want a new computer to put sims 2 back on, because I still have all my awesome hacks and mods for it, like the pirate ship house T_T.

Star Trek Legacy

Any of you who know me, know that I love the vessels of the Star Trek series, (I loved the Armada demo, can't find the full game), and the Star Fleet Command series is just a slushie made from crushed awesome and win juice. So, a Starship-simultor, spanning the entire canon (from the spunky Yuffie-esque NX-01 to the "She's hot, but I'm not sure if she's legal" TOS Enterprise, to the Sex Goddess/Super Genius that is the Refit Connie to the graceful old dame that is the TNG Enterprise), on a console (so it does not have the graphical slowdown that lives in my PC)[a "next-gen" console, even], on a 3-D playing field (my one gripe with the SFC series) sounds like a shipphiles wet dream, no?

Well, they dropped the ball on this one.

In the latest game of the SFC series, you could assign specific percentages of power to systems, or even some specific sub-systems (like, assigning extra power to a shield facing about to come under a severe pounding,or dumping all available power to rear shields and engines to get the hell out of there), which thrilled the tactican in me. You could also customize your own sub-class of ship. Each race had at least one "special weapon", like the Klingon Ion beam, which was basically a mini-Wave-Motion cannon. You could even assign custom weapon groups (say, every third phaser with a bow facing), which could be created or changed on the fly. You could even beam over marines to take over an enemy vessel, or just take out that photon tube that has been giving you so much trouble (they must have a facing down, and you must briefly lower shields in that direction)
In short, this game made you feel like you were commanding a starship. Maybe not to the extent of Bridge Commander (never played it, so I don't know)
One important caveat, SFC 3 will set you back upwards of $100 American these days, unless you get lucky.

On the other hand, Star Trek Legacy had 4 choices for speed, ships that mostly handled like the Titanic imbedded in ice, 3 sliders for power distribution (1 for engines, 1 for weapons, and one for shields). You may have had more ships, and slightly better looking ones, but is that worth the loss of the ability to control shield facings independently, and the myraid other options lost? The story mode has only 10 missions, one of which is bugged to the point of non-functionality with my copy.


So, yea: what the hell, Bethesda?

Lurv wrote:

Ceres wrote:

Also, the game (unintentionally?) forces you to play one family at the time. If you switch families, you run the risk of having the previous one 'move away'. So don't get too attached to your little people if you like to switch households a lot. Besides, they tend to have babies when you're not looking. Who's the father? Who knows?

I think there's a mod (awesome mod) that can fix this, though I haven't tried it myself yet.

Actually, you can just turn it off in Preferences, I'm pretty sure. There's an option that allows or disallows neighbors to do things without your permission.

Krusty's Fun House was agonizing. Aaaagonizing. I rented terrible games repeatedly as a kid because there wasn't that much selection and I was obsessive-compulsive, but I don't think I played that one more than twice.

unskilled78 wrote:

Star Trek Legacy

You played it on a console? You were lucky, son. I played it on the PC, and GODDAMN.

When they ported this sucker over from X-Box, they DIDN'T CHANGE THE CONTROLS! They just assigned the functions to keys! And there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even reassign the keys.

Because of this, there's about an 80% chance, depending on your hardware setup, that your controls won't even work. The first computer I tried it on thought that the stick was miscalibrated up and to the right, causing the ship to drift uncontrollably. The problem? THERE WAS NOT FUCKING STICK, IT WAS LOOKING FOR THE ONE ON THE X-BOX CONTROLLER! There wasn't a thing I could do about it. I had to toss the game.

Wow, that just....Blows, Lysander. I had a glitch similar to that on my Ex's old X-box, on KOTOR, I had to hold the joystick in because if it was in it's ... "normal" position, no matter what I did, my character kinda...floated. It was ok on my PC though...

Lysander wrote:

unskilled78 wrote:

Star Trek Legacy

You played it on a console? You were lucky, son. I played it on the PC, and GODDAMN.

When they ported this sucker over from X-Box, they DIDN'T CHANGE THE CONTROLS! They just assigned the functions to keys! And there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even reassign the keys.

Because of this, there's about an 80% chance, depending on your hardware setup, that your controls won't even work. The first computer I tried it on thought that the stick was miscalibrated up and to the right, causing the ship to drift uncontrollably. The problem? THERE WAS NOT FUCKING STICK, IT WAS LOOKING FOR THE ONE ON THE X-BOX CONTROLLER! There wasn't a thing I could do about it. I had to toss the game.

I played it on both. The PC one was slow, buggy, poorly-constructed... It was easy to mod, though. :whisper:

Quote :

Actually, you can just turn it off in
Preferences, I'm pretty sure. There's an option that allows or
disallows neighbors to do things without your permission.

Word from the Awesome One is that the feature is borked and is of no use whatsoever. Placebo for the sheep, apparently. Or has the Awesome One made a fix? Haven't been there in awhile...

(OT: Behold! My pimping new avatar!)

Delcat wrote:

Lurv wrote:

Ceres wrote:

Also, the game (unintentionally?) forces you to play one family at the time. If you switch families, you run the risk of having the previous one 'move away'. So don't get too attached to your little people if you like to switch households a lot. Besides, they tend to have babies when you're not looking. Who's the father? Who knows?

I think there's a mod (awesome mod) that can fix this, though I haven't tried it myself yet.

Actually, you can just turn it off in Preferences, I'm pretty sure. There's an option that allows or disallows neighbors to do things without your permission.

Krusty's Fun House was agonizing. Aaaagonizing. I rented terrible games repeatedly as a kid because there wasn't that much selection and I was obsessive-compulsive, but I don't think I played that one more than twice.

Actually it doesn't. Fucking. Work.
How they could release a game with such a huge bug is the real question.

Electron Blue wrote:

Delcat wrote:

Lurv wrote:

Ceres wrote:

Also, the game (unintentionally?) forces you to play one family at the time. If you switch families, you run the risk of having the previous one 'move away'. So don't get too attached to your little people if you like to switch households a lot. Besides, they tend to have babies when you're not looking. Who's the father? Who knows?

I think there's a mod (awesome mod) that can fix this, though I haven't tried it myself yet.

Actually, you can just turn it off in Preferences, I'm pretty sure. There's an option that allows or disallows neighbors to do things without your permission.

Krusty's Fun House was agonizing. Aaaagonizing. I rented terrible games repeatedly as a kid because there wasn't that much selection and I was obsessive-compulsive, but I don't think I played that one more than twice.

Actually it doesn't. Fucking. Work.
How they could release a game with such a huge bug is the real question.

It's EA. Them releasing a game sans massive bugs (especially a Sims game) would be like Bethesda releasing an Elder Scrolls game that's totally stable right out the box.

Ah, the winner of this category has to be Spore.

It looked very cool (DRM nonsense aside here). Playing a character/race from the single cell organism days all the way up to the space race? Being able to help your species evolve? It looked awesome!

However, it's a case of a "mile wide and an inch deep". Each of the four phases before the space phase took from 2 minutes to 20 minutes, tops, to finish. And the "space phase" is nothing more than repetitive missions over and over and over again. Yes, designing your own species/monster as well as buildings and vehicles IS pretty cool, but it's one bright point in an otherwise worthless game.

This is EA Games we're talking about.

It wouldn't be them if they didn't ship a game with a major glitch.

I liked Spore. I still like Spore. The thing is, I wasn't actually expecting much. It just couldn't live up to the hype.

I'm going to be revealing my age again here.
Star Strike came out for the Mattel Intelevision in the early 1980's. The commercial for it showed a cool ship trying to bomb a bunch of missile disks to save the earth. When I got it, GOD WAS IT BORING!! All you did was go around avoiding ships (Which were so easy to avoid) and bomb the disks (which were very easy to hit.) Even funner was a glitch in the game. If you crashed your ship on the final disk, it would cause the game to go in an endless loop. Funner still was that the graphics for losing were better than winning.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. I got this game by accident. Still, the game started off fast and pretty. Then came the godawfully long and difficult segments between save points. I did not get one solitary weapon or life upgrade because I was not aware that the game had any until I beat it; THAT is how difficult they are to find. Thus, the final boss took half an hour to beat, and I didn't get to fight the REAL final boss.

Thankfully, Two Thrones replaced the Spartan difficulty with quicktime button mashing sequences that were awesome. That godawful chariot chase almost ruined it for me, though; I can't count how many times I had to start over.

Damn, this is making me unsure again about getting Sims 3...

When I was thirteen, my cousin saw an ad in a magazine for a Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen horseback riding game, which happened to be available for both Playstation and Gameboy. My cousin had the latter, but not the former. In the ad, the game looked great, but the pictures were pretty clearly from the Playstation version, because anyone who's used Gameboy knows that the picture's not that great. I told her, and suggested that the Gameboy version might not be as cool as the ad suggested.

Just the same, I went with her to buy the game. She got it, we took it home, and pretty soon we saw that it was even worse than I'd suspected. I've never seen pixilated horses run so slowly before in my life.

Electron Blue wrote:

Actually it doesn't. Fucking. Work.
How they could release a game with such a huge bug is the real question.

Pescado has, in fact, fixed this with Awesomemod. Actually, awesomemod fixes a whole bunch of other little problems (such as requiring any spawning in homes you aren't playing to have two actual parents and not just appear out of nowhere) while allowing you to actually pick and choose what modifications you want from it using this tool here. It is quite cool. Requires installation of awesomemod itself, of course.

There is nothing that can be done about the sims resembling pudding, however. At least, not yet.

I once bought a game called either Demon Stone or Demon Seed (I think it was Demon Stone) and it was for the PS2. It was part of the Forgotten Realms series.

It looked lovely - really super-cool artwork. But it played like a pig. Huge great cut scenes that you couldn't skip, wonky controls that didn't seem to do much. Awful, awful game. Very pretty, though.

KH2: Kingdom of Cutscenes

Jesus God, that sucked so much.

Aggie wrote:

Electron Blue wrote:

Actually it doesn't. Fucking. Work.
How they could release a game with such a huge bug is the real question.

Pescado has, in fact, fixed this with Awesomemod. Actually, awesomemod fixes a whole bunch of other little problems (such as requiring any spawning in homes you aren't playing to have two actual parents and not just appear out of nowhere) while allowing you to actually pick and choose what modifications you want from it using this tool here. It is quite cool. Requires installation of awesomemod itself, of course.

I... I love you. I didn't know they had that tool out. I hate that Pescado's base mod adds way more traits to a sim. And that you can't really change the aging settings for individual households. This should change quite a lot.

Quote :

There is nothing that can be done about the sims resembling pudding, however. At least, not yet.

I am slightly annoyed that so many people complain that Sims 3 doesn't look and behave like Sims 2 - usually meaning Sims 2 plus its expansion packs, the mods, etc. The Sims 2 Base Game was not all that varied as well. I can understand not liking the cartoon-y style but I think that might actually get better with new mods. Bitching about the style is absolutely okay but bitching that it isn't the exact same game you have been playing for years now, only with an open neighbourhood, is kinda annoying, IMO.

Oddly enough, I didn't even think it looked good when it came out. I bought it because it was a Sims game and I was bored with Sims 2, despite having all the expansions. I even expected a lot of bugs because honestly, how many games come out these days and have none or only small ones? But the story progression bug takes the cake in terms of laziness and sheer shittyness. Really, how did they miss THAT?

True. When I thought about the stuff I missed from Sims 2, it occured to me that many of those things was from expansion packs (still, where's the aliens? >: The ghost babies almost makes up for lack of aliens, but I hope they're going to add them again in the future), and of course they're going to milk Sims 3 as eagerly as they did (still do?) Sims 2. So now I'm looking forward to expansion packs (and CC), even if they make my comp angry.

Anyway, even with how crappy the story progression is, I don't think I can go back to Sims 2, because I've always (kind of) missed it.