You mean Stronghold Legends?

After being nearly killed by a ghostly warrior in a divine-forsaken ruin, I'm crawling back to an inn, my torch tearing trough the darkness of the night. I'm hungry, thirsty and can't quite make out the things moving just outside my eyesight - or is it just the sleep deprivation? Disease spreading trough my veins doesn't quite help the situation either. Reaching the gates of Skingrad after what feels like a lifetime of walking is a great relief, and so is getting blessing of the Nine in the local cathedral. Healed of the illness that was slowing me down, I draw some water from a nearby well and quench my thirst while at it and then head to the nearest inn. While renting a room, I also buy some bread that I eat while watching the streets of the city trough the inn's window - sun is slowly peaking above the horizon. With a good night's sleep, bunch of potions bought from a local alchemist and rations to last several days, I am now ready to face the horror that has bested me.

So, 'being nearly killed by a ghostly warrior' - Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. Gets rid of level scaling completely, makes the game quite difficult (so much that I have lowered the difficulty so I don't have to waste time by grinding - good news, difficulty slider is USEFUL now!). It makes a lot of other changes, like adding new creatures (very much based on the old designs so nothing out of place), new weapons, uniques etc.

'Torch tearing trough the darkness of the night' - Natural environments which greatly increase variability of weather and adds a lot of neat effects, including removal of ambient lighting in buildings and making windows see-trough, so interiors are as light or dark as the outside weather dictates. And you get an option of dark and very dark nights, as well as removal of ambient lightening from dungeons - fireplaces, torches etc. will still illuminate them, but there's no light 'out of nowhere'

'I'm hungry, thirsty and can't quite make out the things moving just outside my eyesight - or is it just the sleep deprivation' - one of the base needs modifications. The best one makes you hallucinate when you are too tired. It's quite amazing, really.

'Disease spreading trough my veins doesn't quite help the situation' - Yes, I also like mods for deadly diseases :-P

'watching the streets of the city trough the inn's window' - There's a mod for natural environments which actually allows you to see most of Oblivion's cities trough interior windows of their buildings. Very nice for immersion.

Yeah, and there's loads more. While Morrowind is amazing, a lot of parts of that game are flawed by design, coded right into its engine. This is not the case of Oblivion - the base gameplay is quite excellent, and most of the other things can be tweaked.

I actually wrote up a modding guide if anyone's interested :-P Admittedly it's without some bits as they're a bit more difficult to install and I wanted to keep it simple.

Games never betray you.

In your Stronghold example, it's you who betrayed your game. The game trusted you to not cheat and abuse it's wonderful machanics. You chose to cheat. You betrayed your game.

Yes, software doesn't betray people! Software only betrays programmers when they add a block of code which should by all means work, but refuses to do so for some inexplicable reason.

They don't betray the programmers. They just don't listen to the software! "No" means "yes", so "string" means....

When my software is screaming Critical Error! it doesn't mean she doesn't love me anymore. She wants to let me know what I am doing wrong!

My PDF viewer crashed and even said "I'm sorry" even though it wasn't her fault. I wasn't treating her well, that's all.

Funnily enough, that's almost totally the opposite way round for me. I got Oblivion first, and it was my first experience of an open ended RPG like that. I found it...amazing, but quickly got bored of it. Partly that was due to the issues you mentioned, many of which I noticed for myself or read about. The game broke my immersion early on when I realised the main quest was sending me, with no in character opportunity to delay or stop, to defeat the gate at Kvatch, something my character couldn't do at that point. I found some sort of justification, and wandered around for a bit before doing the Shivering Isles questline. I then returned, much higher level, to Kvatch, ready to take on the gate...and the enemies had got stronger to match, and were even harder to beat. At that point I gave up on the game.

Morrowind, on the other hand, was the answer to my dreams. Yeah, the combat isn't great (though things like deciding which potions, magic items and spells to use and when are rather more interesting), and the movement animations for kajiit (my pc) are frankly horrible*. On the other hand, it created a world which I (through my character) was able to...exist in. I didn't feel that I was playing a game, where everything was built around me, but travelling and exploring a world which was both utterly different to anything I'd seen before and yet strangely familiar. To begin with I wasn't a great hero, saving the world, and it was only some way into the game that my heritage was revealed. In the houses and guilds, I wasn't following a linear questline, as there are multiple questgivers. If I didn't like a quest, I'd simply not do it and do someone else's in the guild. It wasn't so much a game as a world which I was experiencing, and I loved it. Some day, I plan to play again once I've forgotten it.

Having finished Morrowind, I installed mods to fix the issues in Oblivion. The game was still broken (for instance, there are many instances where the developers expected you to fast travel, and only coded for that: returning to Weynon Priory, for instance, just in time for the attack. I approached from the Chorrol side, and the attackers just stood there until I walked to the other side and was told there was an attack). After some effort, though, and several stops, I did manage to get through the awful first half of the plot and into the decent second part, which I then completed. The ending, I'll grant, worked out as one of the best in a game. It was mostly a happy accident, in that I realised that I could use Sheogorath's staff (my character having become Sheogorath by then) to Hold Dagon while we got round him. Wonderful, exactly what Sheo and my character would do, and it worked! Martin's comment that 'no tamrielic weapon can affect him', while not intended to hint towards that, worked wonderfully in what would have been a massive cliche if they'd intended to do it.

*When my PC was walking, he was staggering around like my cat in the final days of her life, which unfortunately occurred while I was playing the game through and was quite upsetting.

Metal gear solid 4

mass effect 3

nothing more to say

Simon the Sorcerer 3D - The first game in the series was the second (after Loom) adventure game that I ever played and instantly fell in love with it, especially due to the excellent humour, the second game was even better and I played it a few dozen times (the latest a few months ago) and it still my all time favorite quest.

So naturally I looked forward to the third game in the series and boy was I disappointed! They got it wrong in every aspect, atrocious graphics which made it painful to play (and I'm far from being a graphics whore), huge empty game world which make you spend too much time running on open terrain, clumsy interface which made it a nightmare using the inventory and those annoying and stupid mini-games. Despite my love for the series I simply couldn't advance beyond the second part of the game.

Realms of the Haunting - Got a demo of this game back in the day when it came out and was instantly hooked, a combination between a adventure game and FPS shooter and all in a brilliant horror theme, so I bought the game and it did indeed turn out to be as good as I thought - good character, interesting storyline. The only thing to ruin it was the end (I don't want to say what it was so not to spoil the game for those who didn't play it) which was pointless and turn all the game into just one pointless exercise.

Quake 4 - Bought it after a long time not playing FPS shooters and it was in fact one of the few modern FPS shooters that I bought, I loved the previous games in the series and assume this game would be the same (only with better graphics and maybe better weapons, maps etc.) and I was greatly disappointed at how scripted it were, really suck out the fun out of playing FPS shooters.

I learned not to trust a game from its screenshots with this obscure title: [url=http://www.mobygames.com_/game/wargames]http://www.mobygames.com/game/wargames[/url]
Very obscure title.

Max Payne 3 hands down. Sooo bad and NOT actually Max Payne.
Moving the story from New York to some tropical paradise is obviously crap, but not gamebreaking.
But all Max Payne do is to whine about how miserable he is and how much he hates some rich guys that later get kidnapped and then he tries to save them and get more miserable. I don't even want to mention the Hawaii-shirt...

Skyrim Did'nt care so much for Morrowind or Oblivion but they were fun to play especially after a few mods.
Skyrim is so dumbed down and bad, the voiceacting stinks and the quests are boring and short. The music is much worse than Oblivion to, just a bunch of guys screaming.

The Witcher Starting of good but quickly became a grind. The end is the worst in history. Luckily the second part is one of the best games I've played.

Dragon Age 2 Don't need to explain.

Black & white ...after All the hype..

Master of orion 3 - Well This is Pretty selfexplanatory as Well.

bioshock 2 - not Bad Game at All. I Player it through and enjoyed it, but its such repeat of bioshock 1.

the newest jagged alliances ...did They actually play Them, ja1 and ja2 that is.

supreme Commander 2 - While its Fun and They improved the engine aiot, the multiplayer gameolay is just not Up to supreme Commander 1 not modded Total annijilation. The idiot who thought changing the resource and building System Was good idea ougjt to be whipped.

syndicate wars - looked ugly and confusing compared to Original syndicate Even back Then.

- Puke Numken Forever, for obvious reasons.

- Heart of Iron III, too complicated, too messy, too buggy, 0 flavor, not fun to play compared to the second.

- Sword of the Stars II : I loved the first, the second well its not so bad now, but it looks failed, I just can't play it.

- Total War series since Medievial TW2, graphics graphics graphics, same old shitty gameplay.

- Dawn of war 2 : I didn't liked the change for a more tactical/arcade gameplay.

- Crysis 2-3 : Graphics graphics graphics....

- Half-life 3

Fucking DRM, Man...

HOMM VI is a game who's reputation was almost completely destroyed by DRM, it's often a topic that overshadows the game itself

Nomad Soul
This game really hooked me to begin with but after a while I found that the early engine really didn't cope with trying to be a jack of all trades, trying to do driving, FPS and fighting
Also the body hopping, that the game was built around, was disappointing - it was just a new set of stats and sometimes allowed you access to places, I wanted to take on the person's life and have NPCs react to me like I was that person, character specific quests etc.
I've bought it when its turned up here so I'll give it another chance to beak my heart all over again at some point

Supreme Snowboarding (aka Boarder Zone)
One of those where I loved the demo but when, years later I got the full game on budget, I failed to see what I originally saw in it, lack of a proper career mode with unlockable progression didn't help either!

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Xbox)
Loved it when I was round my friends house and he was playing it but when I got it myself... no so much (a world of not so much, and stuff) I've started it a few times but I don't know if its the horrible camera but something's not quite right...

Sonic Heroes (Xbox)
I've not played them but everyone seems to say that all the later 3D sonic games suffer from the same faults of poor camera and not really working in 3D, which makes no sense because the first 2 Sonic Adventures were great, maybe they tried to take out the parts where the computer just takes over? Doesn't work because you just keep running down the side of a row of rings instead of getting them! Camera is pretty bad, again, too!