Games where you most disagreed with the market

[Bofferbrauer2]

I got a couple games that I love but didn't fare well with critics or even other gamers.

First one is Eador: Masters of the broken World. It's one of my most-played games but it only got middling reviews and some truly bad ones due to bugs - the good reviews all looked past them. The bugs are still here for some part and still game-breaking (especially the memory bug; if you play longer sessions at some point a memory error will make all buttons unusable, forcing you to reset the game), but I don't mind them and love the mix of RPG, tactics, civilization and management game.

Next one and certainly a big one is Elemental: War of Magic. Stardock were working for years on this but got stuck on features and released it intentionally in an unfinished state (the developers where so stuck they would never have finished the game). As such, it did horribly among both critics and customers, but I loved it. Stardock later published Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, which was supposed to be more of a DLC campaign originally but totally overtook the franchise, so much so that the original got removed from storefronts and refunded customers afterwards. And while I also like Fallen Enchantress and it's successor, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, they both play very differently to Elemental (and even to each other!), so I still wished I had the original game but like I said, Stardock removed it from storefronts. 

Then there's the first Dune game on PC. It's a mostly forgotten mix of Adventure, Management and Strategy, but I absolutely loved it. It's also the first game I actually finished.

Finally, the first Tutles game on the NES. Many seem to hate it, but I actually love it. Level 2 (the dam) is often played up as being super-difficult, but it's actually pretty easy. Level 3 is a maze, but if you know where to go the entire level can be done within 10 minutes. It's only starting level 4 where it actually gets difficult.

I'll also put Jagged Alliance 2 here due to it's US sales. Critics loved it, but it sold badly, especially in the US where sales were catastrophic: It sold only slightly over 25k copies in North America, just one quarter of it's sales in Germany alone. I could never understand why the US rejected the game so much at the time, dooming Sir-Tech as a result.