We’ve been banging on and on about the games we love as the year draws to a close and we prepare to face the barren wastes of January 2011 with despair, but it just wouldn’t be Christmas without an unexpected touch of melancholy and disappointment. We’ve played some great games this year, but boy have we played some horrible ones too. Here the staff chip in with those games they had high hopes for in 2010 that, when they actually got to play them, turned out to be a crushing disappointment. If you’ve been burned in a similar fashion this year, have a good old moan in the comments.
First we have Danny lamenting the decline of one of his favourite series and Barry complaining that he can’t drive around in a particularly special van anymore.
Danny:
We’ve reached the top of the bell-curve. It’s steep and shaped like a ramp. This is when the Skate games kneel slightly, kick out the back foot and ollie into the sky. Little do they know that on the other side is a deep chasm. The downward popularity of the Skate games is mirrored by their increasing lack of the creativity and innovation which made them great. The chasm yawns. They should have seen it coming. Tony Hawk’s lifeless body is already down there, turning in its grave at the thought of motion controlled skateboards.
Innovation is what made Skate great. The genuinely superb first game was the first of its kind. A simulation skateboarding game that was fun, but made pulling off a simple board slide feel momentous. The sequel took a piece of sandpaper to the formula and rounded off the edges. Skate 3 inherited a cynical audience from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, stung over and over by rehashed annual releases. So when Skate 3 arrived with little more than a few gameplay tweaks the comparisons became obvious. It didn’t help that Skate 3 was a game about financing your career as a skater, something a large portion of skateboarders refer to as “selling out”. For a series that seemed to understand the plurality of the lifestyle, this was a huge two fingers up to a massive portion of their audience. Skate lost street cred and, more importantly, it lost its buzz. Me personal disappointment of the year then. Skate really needs to drop the dumb, barely iterative design and return to its simulation roots. Otherwise we all know how these games die. Slowly and without grace.
Barry:
APB. It has to be APB. No other game this year even came close to generating the ridiculous amount of disappointment for me that this did. The manner of the game’s catastrophic failure is now well known – developer Realtime Worlds sunk $100 million into an unrivaled character and vehicle customisation system and forgot to build a proper game around it. It crashed and burned after three months, taking the company with it.
And it had all been going so well. RTW had done some astounding work on the customisation tools in the game and an even better job of talking them up on the PR circuit. When I sat down with the beta, I too bought into the hype, spending hours fiddling with my avatar’s design before I’d even jumped into the game proper. RTW absolutely nailed that aspect of the product. And I think that’s part of the reason I felt so crushed by the rest of the game.
It was a steaming pile, essentially. The mission design was barely rudimentary (virtually everything solvable by holding down the F key!), the combat a tortuous affair with no proper character hit boxes, weapon feedback or balance. It was buggy, a performance hog and (initially) lacked the ability to change most of the graphical options. Playing it in the beta, I imagined these problems would be remedied. There was so much good stuff in here, I thought, they just need to beat it into shape. Surely they’d fix the game before releasing it in such a shoddy state? You know the answer.
I’m convinced RTW had, in amongst the mess, an awesome game just waiting to take shape properly. I did, honestly, have some great fun with a few friends cruising about the game in our custom vehicles, hanging out of car windows or van doors and blasting our guns at all and sundry. See that van in the picture above? My friend Neo made that, and I’m bitter as hell we’re still not cruising around in it today. So much of that game amazed so many with its ambition and possibilities and so much of it turned out to be an ugly, uninspired clusterfuck. It’s that contrast, the raising of one’s hopes to stellar heights by some of its clever features only to have them dashed against the rocks again and again by one of the games many issues is what puts APB into that special place for me.
Disappointment of the year? Oh my yes. Hell, given the date, it’s probably my most disappointing game of the last decade.
I hated the hell out of the Civilisation 5 multiplayer. It was so poorly done, so atrociously laggy and fucked up that it was basically unplayable. Makes me think that they had shot Sid Meier and hidden him in the broom closet to develop it. And do not get me started on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, I could write a book on why that game is a disappointing failure even to someone who previously enjoyed WoW.
Oh and even though it wasn’t released this year, I always have the mention the ending of Borderlands. Seriously, the most worthless, horrific, shitfest, disappointment basket of fucking used syringes and dog turds I have ever seen in game development. And if I ever find the man who wrote that ending, I will beat him to death with the fucking game box.
For me, Blur was a massive letdown. Good thing I had Split/Second to back it up.
Was really disappointed with Final Fantasy 13 and Fallout: New Vegas. I really wanted to enjoy both of them and they bored me to tears.
lol pedobear
And also I have to say I was disappointed with Mass Effect 2. “But why?” I hear you cry at your computer screens! I don’t know that I can put a single reason on it. Was it that it felt dumbed down? Was it the constant need to use chest high walls? Being more of a TPS than RPG? The lower amount of customisation? I really can’t say. Most likely a combination of all of these. It felt so much more constricted, too. I loved driving around in the Mako, blasting enemies, crushing them and generally killing everything in my path with it. I enjoyed exploring the planet surface, all the little side-quests you got and such. Everything they removed from ME2 was the things I loved about the original. And the story felt really weak too. The Collectors were supposed to be the main enemy of the game, they made a really explosive entry and then… nothing. Nothing until the mid-point of the story. So you hope to see them more often, but again, nothing for far too long. The Geth were much better enemies, as they were ever-present, around every corner. The merc companies were really boring, too. They had no soul, no character and fighting them seemed more of a chore and a triviality than any real obstacle.
And the ending; seriously? I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t played, but those who have will know what I’m talking about. It was a terrible boss fight, seemingly pulled out of the dirtiest hole in Bioware’s HQ.
These are just my opinions though and shouldn’t be taken any other way.
I have to concur on APB. Nothing could have dsappointed me more than that.
I will also add to the list the new AvP. I bought it on an impulse due to a few things some friends said about it. I played it probably for a total of 10 hours, if that. I only wish it wasn’t tied to Steam because I honestly regret buying it. That and it was advertised on the box as taking up 5GB but instead it took fifteen. That’s a big effing typo, SEGA. There was one silver lining on it though, as the swarm mode made my heart race as no other game had before. Staving off a whole wave on my own, 200 odd Aliens and my Plasma Rifle. I actually had to stop playing and have a drink to calm down. I know that sounds like it made it worth buying, but I do regret that £25 I lost paying for it.
Oh APB how did i totally forget about you?