Now, I could talk about Final Fantasy until I'm blue in the face, but I've already summed that up, and I've discussed it in other threads. So to respond to the OP:
Unreal Tournament 2004.
Yeah, I said it.
I bought this game when it came out for the PC. I was a huge fan of Unreal Tournament, and I had been holding out on buying UT2003 since I knew more was around the corner. 2004 promised lots of greatness. Assault was being brought back. A new gameplay mode, Onslaught, would be introduced, where teams try to destroy each other's bases by controlling power nodes. Vehicles were introduced. It sounded like Epic was taking some great gameplay concepts from Team Fortress Classic, and infusing them with the vehicle coolness from games like Battlefield 1942.
Unfortunately, it sucked! Graphically, the game was an incremental improvement only over the original Unreal Tournament. More polygons and higher-resolution textures does not necessarily equal much better graphics, as I think this game illustrates very well. More disappointingly, even with graphics options toned down, performance was rather poor on decent graphics hardware at the time. But of course, gameplay over graphics, right?
Well, the gameplay left a bad taste in my mouth as well. They may have tried to combine the best concepts from TFC and BF1942, but the implementation was rather poor. The whole, in short, was less than the sum of its parts. Epic seems to be full of good ideas that just don't work out that well when you actually try them. This game was more frustrating to play on so many different levels than anything I had played before. You can't just put together a bunch of awesome concepts and call it a finished product, you have to test it, tweak it, refine it, polish it, until it's fun to play. Valve understands this, and it shows in every product they make. Epic forgot the fun on this one.
