Tendo City

Games you wish you hadn't wasted your money on!

With the subcategory 'Games you wish you hadn't asked for for gifts'... 'games you wish you hadn't gotten as gifts' is a good one too, if you have such titles. I don't, actually... I always make nice detailed lists for my parents and stuff so I don't get random games from them, and the few other people who have given me a few games picked well... so all the games that were gifts on this list I'd asked for in some form.

PC
- SimCity 3000 (I thought it'd be a step up like SC2k was from SC... I was very wrong, and never warmed to the game as a result. SimCity 2000 is, was, and always will be, far better.)
- Civilization III (same as SC3k... Civ II is one of the top five games of all time. Civ III... just doesn't match up.)
- TES III: Morrowind (just not worth the time or money. It's got simplstic and overly hard combat, throws you into very hard areas from the start, requires a MASSIVE time commitment not just to play through but to get to the point where you can actually have fun in the game beyond wandering around town, etc, etc...)
- Secret Weapons over Normandy (boring... lacking... unrealistic... shows how far Totally Games has fallen from its early-90s greatness... just an all-around dissapointing title, given the developer's pedigree.)
- Dungeon Siege (gift. Click and hack and click and slash and click and move nad click and hack and click and slash and click and move and ... Gets boring really fast.)
- Age of Wonders II (gift... good game I guess but horribly complex and I'm awful at it. Not worth it.)
- Motocross Madness 2 - overly hard driving model makes it very frusterating to play. Ridiculously tough computers sure don't help either.
-Rally Championship (aka 'Network-Q RAC Rally Championship) (rally racer. Got it because it looked fun, but it's dull, and I greatly prefer racing against other cars instead of just time, and it rails you onto the road, and all the stages look the same so the fact that it's got dozens of courses doesn't matter, and the treewalls look really stupid as usual, but treewalls are one of the game's main graphical features... not a total waste I guess, since it's got nice weather effects and is fun sometimes, but definitely a letdown compared to what I wanted. I should have gotten Screamer 2.)


GB
- The Lion King (gift... tolerable, but hard, has frusterating play control/accuracy requirements, and has no saving...)
- Toy Story (gift, and one of the worst games I've ever played)
- Ken Griffey Jr. Presents: Major League Baseball (parents got a game I already had as a gift so I chose this and Micro Machines in the store to replace that game. One of those games was good. It wasn't this one.)

GBC/GBA, N64, GC, SNES: Nothing. Oh, some of the games aren't great, but they were all at least worth buying, at least for the price I paid... (for instance, if I'd paid $50 instead of $5 for Aero Fighters Assualt I bet I'd have a much more negative opinion of the game...)

If I was forced to pick something for each console, though... hmm...

GBC: Micro Machines 1 & 2 Twin Turbo. Poor ports of fantastic games aren't as fun as the good versions, sadly... (sad given how great MM1 is for GB and MM3 is for GBC)
GBA: FFTA I guess? Fine enough game, but Fire Emblem is much better, I should have gotten FE first and maybe FFTA later... but FFTA is fun too so it was also definitely worth getting.
SNES: Hmm... Super R-Type? Good game but brutally hard since it makes you start the level over if you die... Stunt Race FX? Decent but turning around is really hard and the framerate, of course, is low... both were worth $5 though.
N64: Aero Fighters Assualt I guess... Star Wars Episode 1 Racer sure is annoying though, but the first two thirds of the game make it not quite as bad. But Aero Fighters, while far from great, is just average enough (and cheap enough) that I don't actually regret buying it...
GC: Hmm, none really fit. I guess the closest I'd come would be Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance -- decent, but not as good as Gauntlet Dark Legacy and I should have gotten that game first... Star Fox Adventures was cheap and worth owning (though not finishing), and Burnout's bad soundtrack is more than made up for with good gameplay. :)

First off:

Quest 64

...

I'll come back later...

I disagree about CivIII, I think it improved on CivII in so many ways. I love the concept of physical borders and culture.

What I'm really hoping they do with CivIV is controlling how clumsy the game gets in large maps in the later stages, when you're managing a hundred cities and five hundred units, and you have to wait for eight or nine computer opponents to move. It often gets too clunky to even be fun by that point.

BMX XXX

The only thing on Earth that could take the fun out of nudity.

I always rent every game I play before buying it. I had over 200 NES games of which I played around 50 of them. I have over 30 GC games of which I play over 30. :D However I bought BMX XXX for 7 bucks and needless to say I can totally comprehend why Acclaim went under.

But Turok 1 and 2 and of course Shadowman will always be in my top 100 games of all time.

Other reasons to hate Acclaim: QB Club 1998. And if I'm not stupid enough, I bought the sequel the next year. QB Club 1999.

So onto other non-Acclaim sucky games. I agree about Morrowind. I was real excited about it, went through the 3 hour install, created a character (but I could never find a non-stupid looking model), and started exploring the drab, dark, and washed out world. I think I lasted another 15 minutes.

Hmmm, what else... Well, there are a lot of games that didn't live up to my expectations, but I don't feel right about calling them really bad games. Just not really great games.

R-Type Final - it was fun, but not that fun.

Reason to love Acclaim: the Extreme-G series! It's just as good as Wipeout or F-Zero, overall... I have all four games and think XG2 is one of the best racers on the N64 and XGRA is the best one on the Gamecube (easy, I know, but sometimes "fun" wins over "hard" (that is, F-Zero GX, which of course is also fantastic...). I wish someone was still making XG games... :(

Quote:created a character (but I could never find a non-stupid looking model),

The default character models are truly horrible. Go online and find the Better Bodies Mod and download it... it's a million times better. Doesn't make the game much more worth playing, but at least you look human now...

Quote:and started exploring the drab, dark, and washed out world. I think I lasted another 15 minutes.

Oh, I lasted longer than that, but I'm still low level... I stopped because I just decided that the game was not worth the time it'd take to get decent... when you're thinking about using cheatcodes to modify your character to greatly increase your levels and stats just so you can get to the "fun" of the game, you know you're playing a game with a problem... sure, it's got a big world, and lots of things to do (if you don't mind doing the same things over and over and over), and it's got nice graphics (um, when modded... the clothing is still awful though, sadly...), and lots of quests... but they forgot to include an introduction, and quests that gradually step up in difficulty while remaining possible at the default difficulty, and a magic system which is actually usable, etc, etc, etc... in short, they made an impressive, massive, and in many ways very complex game and, like usual, forgot to make it "fun". I don't get Bethesda... it's like they have this goal of the ultimate massive D&D-inspired huge-world RPG but lose the trees for the forest (that is, getting a massive feature list and creating huge amounts of content comes way ahead of making sure that the game actually works and is enjoyable...)...

Quote:Hmmm, what else... Well, there are a lot of games that didn't live up to my expectations, but I don't feel right about calling them really bad games. Just not really great games.

"You were expecting a lot but didn't get it and it was extremely dissapointing" definitely fits in this thread... all of those PC games except for the last one are ones that got mostly A's and B's as scores in magazines, after all.

Quote:I disagree about CivIII, I think it improved on CivII in so many ways. I love the concept of physical borders and culture.

I've probably played more Civ II since getting Civ III than I have Civ III... that's not a good sign for the game. Not awful no I guess, but nowhere near the standard of the previous game... maybe it's a problem of quality -- when you've just about hit perfection, what can you do but just tweak a few things (I know, Civ II did have some flaws... they just don't matter when compared to the game's greatness.)?

Quote: I think I lasted another 15 minutes.

You definitely didn't give it enough time then.

Quote:The default character models are truly horrible. Go online and find the Better Bodies Mod and download it... it's a million times better. Doesn't make the game much more worth playing, but at least you look human now...

It's not like you ever really look at your face the often and when you have the Masque of Clavicus Vile it doesn't even matter anyway.

It's the whole body, not just the face...

The Sims. What trash. I had fun (if somewhat effeminate fun) building and decorating a house, then I realized the entire game centered around making my retarded man-child doll go to the bathroom every five minutes. I understand your further goal is to found a family so you have several of these dolls to make go potty. Oh, and you can get a job, and then get a raise by clicking on your mirror several times then clicking on AI-controlled dolls several times.

Civ III was somewhat a step down from Civ II, but mainly it was disappointing because Firaxis totally ignored the creative potential for Civ that was evident in Civ II and the player-created scenarios. The greater variety of political systems in Civ IV sounds promising, but I'm not too hot on the religion deal. They could have simulated it much better than by including real-world religions.

If you want the real sequel to Civ II, get Alpha Centauri. It's fantastic... by the same guy who made Civ II and it shows (remember, Sid made Civ I, Brian Reynolds II and AC, and Jeff Briggs was the main guy behind III... IV I think is Sid, but Briggs is working on it too I'm pretty sure.) ... if only Brian Reynolds hadn't quit Firaxis... I know, Rise of Nations is a great game and RoN2 looks fantastic, so he's still around, but I had to wonder what the next Civ-style game would have been like if he'd kept making them... (though the RTS genre definitely could use some shaking up, and RoN did some of that)