I reckon that was UT2004.

I really liked the Gears of War PC port. Compared to the ports we get today it was like a PC exclusive. Extra levels, mod tools, greater graphics options, perfect mouse control, etc. Loved that game and still pissed we didn't get 2 and 3.

I don't play multi so I can't comment on UT3.

Bulletstorm is a great game as well with a good PC version (though not as good as GoW's). That was actually People Can Fly, but Epic put it out.

Oh lawdy Gothic 3 sooo much. It actually became playable for some of us.

Yea, that place during the {whatever} Society mission, when you have to rescue a certain professor.

Lovely! I thought those had been lost in the internet quagmire a long time ago. It might be time to boot up old Moo3 for another playthrough soon.

Not that they were poor games to begin with (far from it, IMO), but sims such as Jane's F/A-18 and especially Falcon 4.0 have been quite improved in some areas over the years. Mostly by fans, I believe.

I would disagree with you. BG 1 was splendid game at it's release and had hardly any serious bugs (I played it thru over half a dozen times back in the day with no crashes or bugs that prevented progessing with story). There was nothing inherently wrong with it and I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy it even today without any mods despise technical limitations of it's time.

Obviously this does not mean I wouldn't enjoy it more using BG2 engine and some of the mods available for it if I replayed it today but I would hardly call it broken at the time of it's release; actually quite contrary, I'd say it was best one of the best cRPG's released at the time.

I'm not saying BG was broken, only mediocre. And the low resolution means that it, unlike BG 2 and the other IE games, hasn't aged vere well when you play it on modern, large screens.
Also, the creature AI was horrible, since calls for helps weren't implemented. So it got too easy to just shoot down enemies one at a time without their comrades reacting.
One could argue that the game is broken when you need to move your characters near enough to activate the whole enemy party to give them a fighting chance...

Bottom line: Baldur's Gate was a mediocre game which needs mods to become very good, while BG 2 and Icewind Dale are very good in their vanilla form and can be played without mods.

Yeah, I played BG2 before 1 and when I came to play 1 I gave up because of its limitations, the enemy re-spawn was pretty bad and running out of time to do stuff at the start and being forceably moved alone was annoying (can't remember the specifics)
I will have to go back and play with the 'trilogy' patch at some point, I lost my char in a HD SNAFU before I got round to playing throne of Baal too!
Playing IWD right now though!
can I ask, is the messy journal system updated to a BG2 standard quest list with the patch - that always annoyed me...

Temple of Elemental Evil for sure. A broken mess rescued by the (Co8) community.

But that's the only one I can think of that was downright bad and unplayable.
Mostly it's only after the fixing and modding that the original starts to look bad.

Medieval 2, Total War One of my all time favourites, with Stainless Steel installed that is. Historic units and a less broken diplomacy helps a whole lot. And it irks me nowadays that Empire, Napoleon and Shogun still haven't improved on AI, it's still the same dullard, the diplomacy is broken as hell and battle tactics just bad. Just keep improving the graphics will ya.

Oblivion, leveling, terrain, removing ladies underpants.
Sure, the most rabid Morrowind fans were (and still are) well unhappy, but for the most it was just fine from the start. Annoying quirks, but a great game.

Fallout 1 & 2 These were buggy as hell, but needed no rescuing. While it's real nice there are patches and improvements, they were and are the greatest.

Oh yeah.

KotOR 2 was generally considered pretty bad (I disagree though).
But if the reason for dislike was the huge lumps of content cut to meet the deadline,
then The Restored Content mod should be of some relief.

Arcanum is a good example