Gotta be honest, my most disappointing games were the modern shooters this year, Modern Warfare 2 (Call of Duty) was a unfinished, glitchy, unbalanced mess. -SARCASM ALERT- Yes, a game should be released with all these glitches and game breaking level glitches. Battlefield Bad Company 2....it's a good game...till you unlock everything. Then it is BORING, there is nothing to do! I mean, the gameplay is awesome and there is a lot to do in game but after awhile of nothing to work for..it gets old. Also, a unique RPG called Demon's Souls, touted as "One of the hardest games of all time" the way it handled multiplayer with the ghost system and the drop in drop out helper/enemy system was cool, it was just...not fun to play. The difficulty was okay, it was just cheap when you accidentally enter a boss zone with a boss you cannot beat (HE is the size of a scyscraper and you cannot dmg him period it seems) and there is NO WAY to get out of it.

Meh.

Every time an interesting character in any game pops up, I instantly start to compare it with PS:T characters. And only very small minority of any gaming characters are comparable in depth and uniqueness.

Sure, I was exaggerating, still... Well let's just say I'm somewhat of a Planescape fanboy :D

Torchlight
Was hooked on the demo and got the full game for the full $20 price.... and found out that there wasn't much more to the game than the demo after all...


Aquanox
There may be a good game in there somewhere but I just can't stand the controls. Maybe I'll give it another shot someday...


GRID
More a disappointment in myself because I can't seem to drive 10 feet without spinning out. Perhaps I just need practice, but its really discouraging. Also I find the graphics bland and boring (maxed at 1080p but without AA).


Postal
The only game I've ever won in a contest. And it sucked. Traded it away for The 7th Guest - much better game though I got stuck in it.

If you ask me, you're not missing anything. The story is gibberish, the gameplay is anemic, and the missions are mostly too brief to be interesting.

I'm not sure if it's the same control issue you're having, but I got most of the way through suffering from major mouse latency. I finally gave up near the end, because my objectives required more precision and efficiency than the game was willing to allow me.

Basically, all it really did for me was make me want to play Descent.

My list isn't too long. There's a difference between merely bad games, games that were disappointing (implying that it had much promise), and a game that you absolutely hated. I really like almost every game in my library, so these really stick out to me, where my rational criticism gets mixed in with perhaps a disproportional, irrational dislike.

Bad:
Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals. Picked this off of Steam for 5 bucks. Got good reviews, but it's barely a game in my opinion. Seriously, it's extremely short, its buoyed by terrible puzzles, and there's no story at all, just a framework.

Disappointed:
Mafia 2-the ending soured the whole experience. I think I spent more time driving to missions than I did on the missions themselves.

STALKER-atmospheric, excellent AI, and some good scares. The Achilles heel of the game for me was its aiming system, which I couldn't stand. If I'm aiming down the sights and carefully shooting directly at someone 20 feet away, I expect to hit them, not see my bullets curve and impact around them. Very disappointing.

Hated:
Syberia-the straw that broke the camel's back was the ridiculous side plot that plays out on the cellphone. I saw it coming almost instantly, but it was so, so frustrated by it.

Resident Evil 4-played this to completion, but man did I hate it. Everything wrong with game design can be found in this game.

Final Fantasy XII-This killed the FF series for me. Poor pacing, undeveloped characters, and too much dungeon crawling.

And yet console gaming media called it "OMG BEST GAME EVAR!!!" I really don't get it, that game is fucking terrible.

recently? darkstar one was horrible. all the star systems were identical. combat was boring.

other disappointments? hm... Star Control 3, Master of Orion 3, Fallout 3 (not liking the three's am I?), Oblivion

Well rejoice! Oblivion is a four :D

Supreme commander was another game that was very disappointing because it was said to be the spiritual successor to total annihilation and didnt really improve the gameplay other than better path-finding/AI and didn't have any of the atmosphere that made the first game so great.

Interesting topic. I've been trying to remember something I felt truly disappointed with, but it's proving difficult. There are some games I know would have disappointed me, but I stayed away from them then as I do now - the Deus Ex sequel springs to mind, as does Blood 2. Then there are those which I disliked or couldn't really get into. Lots of classics on that list (hint: unhalf-craft).

So far, I've been able to come up with:

Temple of Elemental Evil. It did indeed disappoint me. I could barely play it, it was horribly buggy, but worst of all, it was such a fall from grace compared to Arcanum. I had such high hopes for Troika. Oh well.

Mortal Kombat 4. I remember the time I first played it. It was on a PlayStation. I hated it. I hated the PS and I hated the fact I could only play it on a PS. To this very day my eyes inadvertently roll whenever I read something like "gamepads are so much better for fighting games". Sure. If you're into insane button-mashing. If you're the sort who always preferred Street Fighter to MK. I'm tempted to insert a random insult now, but I'll control myself. But it wasn't only the PS. It was the lame 3D (why not just leave it 2D?), the awkward-looking characters, the Street Fighter-ized-ness. I sort of felt betrayed. However, over the years, I've come to love it. Well, OK, like it a lot. To the best of my knowledge, it's the last decent fighting game on the PC. Which makes me even more pissed off at the fact that the rumored high quality re-releases of the first three games is going to be console-only. You go to hell, Midway (or whoever currently owns the rights, since Midway is dead)! You go to hell and you die!
Also, this seems to be as good a place as any to express the desire for MK 1-4 (+Trilogy) to appear on GOG in a nice package. Pretty please?

Starship Titanic. I suppose I was expecting too much. But just to be clear, I don't think it's a bad game.

Sin. See above.

Soldier of Fortune 2. Now this I found almost personally offensive. I spent about twenty minutes with it - and I'd like the last fifteen back, please. It simply shat on all that was good about the original and was unplayable at times because of how bug-ridden it was (my brother finished it, so I got the full report).

Wargods. For the longest time, I thought I'll never see this game. And there was so much to be excited about - did I mention how much I love MK already? So much potential. Well, as you have probably surmised, it was a big disappointment. Curse you, Midway. Again.

<probably more [Midway games :p] to come>

Galactic Civilizations 2

Everybody seems to love it, but I found it incredibly dry and in some ways too shallow. It made Science Fiction look dull. Perhaps the expansions improved it, I don't know.

Dragon Age

Spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, my ass. It was actually hard for me to admit to myself that I didn't especially like it. Never thought it possible. There's just nothing outstanding about it, it's a huge pile of mediocrity. And oh so cliched.

I guess I could also mention Neverwinter Nights. Never expected much from it, but it was the follow-up to Baldur's Gate 2 and it sucked.

Modern adventure games in general

There are so many that look great on paper, but as soon as one begins to play, everything falls apart. In most cases, downright inane puzzle design is the biggest problem. Especially galling when the game aims for a realistic setting.

My biggest disappointments:

Fury - The PVP arena MMORPG that was supposed to revolutionise the industry with prizes for the best players. What was the gameplay like? An FPS where everyone has aimbots. You'd run around in circles trying to find powerups, target a player and mash hotkeys to cast auto-aiming spells to kill them. An absolute waste of $50.

Fallout 3 - I loved it until I played Oblivion for the first time, six months later, then I hated it. Fallout 3 isn't just "Oblivion with guns", it's "Oblivion with guns but without all the diversity and quests that made Oblivion so great". I really felt like Oblivion delivered far more for a much better price.

Spore - I really regret buying this one, even though I got it on sale. Somehow I was under the impression that it wouldn't be some kind of combination of The Sims and SimEarth, but I was wrong. I played through half of a full game and gave up. Never touched it since.

Super Smash Brothers Brawl - Yes, I said it. I'd never played a SSB game prior to Brawl, but once it came out, everybody insisted that I buy it. I can't stand beat 'em ups, and Brawl isn't really any exception. The adventure mode was nice, but I haven't touched it since the week I bought it.


Those are my big ones. This is pretty subjective, and I can imagine a lot of people will disagree with me. Well, maybe not about Fury. That game was all kinds of bad.

Thanks to Auguste's unrelated post I just remembered another game that was really disappointing, Terminal Reality's Microsoft Fury³, basically a Windows 95 port or re-imagining of Terminal Velocity, which seemed like great hybrid between a "traditional" arcade space/flight combat sim and a Descent style 360DOF game, but despite being released after Terminal Velocity the graphics looked a lot worse, the resolution and details were ridiculously low (terribly upscaled to fit in a Windows 95 window). It was just a terrible looking mess of pixels which sadly didn't even play well. Even though I got it for something like $3 I felt like I had wasted the money which I could have bought candy for instead.

I actually liked Bioshock. A lot. I will admit that it doesn't have too much replay value unless your a trophy/achievement fiend (which is why I'm waiting for Bioshock 2 to drop in price before I buy it), but I liked it. I'd previously stayed away from FPS games because I didn't want to play as a grizzled space marine, but I enjoyed Bioshock.

As for Final Fantasy XIII, it was no Final Fantasy VII, but it was still decent. And the story and characters was/were much better than XII. Some parts of the battle system annoyed me, but at least with XIII, I didn't have to spend 40 hours leveling up and doing sidequests just to beat the bleeping game.

Final Fantasy XII wasn't bad...but it was the worse Final Fantasy of the modern era...an MMORPG pretending to be a regular RPG. I agree with everyone here: bad pacing (just getting to and through the dungeons was a pain) crappy character development, and an insane difficutly curve (if you don't do sidequests and level up a lot, you will end up in big trouble). Final Fantasy wasn't perfect, but it was definitly a step in the right direction.

My big dissapointment was Tomb Raider Underworld. After playing the incredible Tomb Raider Legend, I waited eagerly for it, and I got it for Christmas 2008 with a brand new Playstation 3...and was rewarded with a DLC-free, glitchy, mess of a game. What. The. Crap? This was the sloppiest game I'd ever played, and the fact that only the Xbox version was getting the DLC with the "true" conclusion to the game was the nail in the coffin. My mom had bought me the game, so I sold it to Gamestop, and got her a Mother's Day gift with the cash; it was a much better use of the money.

I find fallout 3 to be a big disaippoint for me and i am not even a big fallout fan to begin with. I played the 1st and got bored with it and annoyed with the timer that was there (cant stand that when i am playing a game, especially an rpg with a timer). I tried fallout 2, got bored. But...will never bash either of these games because they are groundbreaking to rpgs in general and are amazing games.

I get fallout 3, game is essentially a shooter. There is no roleplaying skill system at all. You can beat the biggest baddest villians at lvl 1 with very little skill and all reflexes. And as for skills, they have no impact on anything in any of the fights. To make matters worse, taking any over top view game and decking it out with 1st person/3rd person pov is a big kick in the junk. The final thing about this game that annoys me is that it is essentially all combat, there is no roleplaying-very much like wow. Games like this are good for anyone that wants to spend all their life killing rats over and over again. Its really pathetic.