Most disappointing game you've ever owned?

[Runa216]

I could really go out of my way to piss people off by complaining about some of the highest rated games...so that's precisely what I'll do!

1 - Final Fantasy XIII - I know I already said it, but it took all the best parts of Final Fantasy and replaced them with boring, linear, shallow nonsense.

2 - Grand Theft Auto IV - III was revolutionary, vice City was all that was with better characters, setting, and gameplay options, and San Andreas was all that was good about Vice City with a much bigger, expansive, varied world, and an equally good story with equally appealing characters and more RPG elements. GTA IV took all the things that made VC and SA a leap ahead of their predecessor. Gone were the entertaining characters, instead we got Roman and Brucie. Gone was the asset management and all the extra missions that came with them. gone was the RPG elements that made you customize your character. Gone were the pretty, expansive, and varied locales, replaced by gray squares and cubes. The only thing it did right was try to make its own original plot rather than mishmashing together a bunch of movie references.

3 - modern Warfare 2 and 3 - First one had a great story with great characters, second one was 5 hours of nigh-incomprehensible garbage; all style, no substance. IT was like if Michael Bay directed a videogame, just going from one action scene to the next with no exposition or breathing room for contrast to make the scenes more effecting. the third one was the worst, clocking in at a mere 3.5 hours, it was little more than a glorified map-pack.

4 - Gears of War - Loved gears 3 and thoroughly enjoyed gears 2, but gears 1 was clunky, boring, cliche, poorly designed, and bland. it wasn't good, it didn't even look good for its time. trying to play this mess of a game almost put me off the gears series until I gave in and gave it another shot a few years down the line becuase I picked up Gears 2 for 10 bucks at a garage sale and liked it.

5 - Halo - The entire series. While to this day I confess I think the controls are tight...I find it fails pretty much everywhere else. the narrative is only good if you read the supplemental novels to explain the history, the game looks and feels sterile, like nothing is organic (I know that's what the halos are supposed to be, inorganic, but they jsut feel empty and boring as sin.) the game suffers from..I don't know what, but nothing looks or acts realistic enough to be engaging. not to mention this series is responsible for popularizing two things that made me hate First Person Shooters: regenerating health (shields, whatever, same difference), and being limited to only two weapons. now that we've lived for over a decade with those things being common, I can go back and not hate it, but when it was first introduced, I thought it was the dumbest thing in a videogame. I still think its dumb, but I'm outvoted.

6 - God of War - I just don't see the hype. The Combat is simplistic and repetitive, the puzzles are boring and easy, the story is poorly told, and the main character is not relateable at all. This is a game where you're not only playing the bad guy (which could be fun), you're playing a brutal, hateful mass murderer who's vicious and despicable, so much so that he killed his own family (seriously, if you haven't played it yet, too bad for the spoiler.) that's not tragedy, that's just pathetic, and the fact that you play through like 90% of this game without so much as a hint as to why you're carving a blood-soaked gash through greece just makes the rampage even worse. Also: enemies have too much health. instead of being hard to kill, they just take forever, meaning the game's like 2 hours inflated to 5 by repetition. also the level design fucking sucks.

7 - Ocarina of Time - Oh this is a big one. After all the talk about how it's the greatest game of all time, I can't help but smash my head into my desk, because everything that made this game special was done better before or after it, even in its own series. Not only did 90% of the game's ideas form in the original and Link to the Past, but Link to the Past had considerably more content to it (more dungeons, more items, etc), and every game since Ocarina has had better combat. While I admit I'm biased against the N64 and PS1 era, b ut the graphics were even atrocious. yeah, okay, they were 3D and 3D was relatively new, but I can look at NES and SNES games and smile happily, I can even look at PS2 and Gamecube graphics with a smile, but that era was a generation where everything looked like shit and everyone was willing to forgive it because "OMGITS3D!" No. it does not work that way. Thats not even to complain about the game's design; too many things relied entirely on luck or guessing, after consulting an FAQ, I just eyetwitched, realizing that there was no way I would have figured that out on my own, and there was no hints about it in the game that I found. Hell, I got to the final dungeon without the fire arrows only to consult an FAQ telling you that it was impossible, in spite of the game not telling you that or hinting at it in any way. Poor design choices, mediocre level design, atrocious graphics, hit-or-miss audio (some tracks were epic, some were just grating and annoying; forest temple anyone?), sloppy combat, and a minimalistic story (which was okay since the original and Link to the PAst had minimalistic stories, too; it wasn't until Wind Waker that the story was front row and center.) That said, it was merely 'good' for its time, a good way to show off what the N64 was capable of, so I give it credit, but after all the "OMGBESTGAMEVAR!" talk, it didn't even remotely come close. Huge disappointment there.