Disclaimer: This article does not reflect any stance or opinion held by MyGaming.
Since people are going to say it anyway, yes. Yes, I really don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m a disgrace, I’m obviously a complete cretin, and I should probably be dragged out into the village square and shot. Then hanged. Then pecked by the crows at a crossroads as a warning to posterity, because opinions are the devil’s work unless they’re yours, dear reader. Yes to all of that. And now, ten games that could’ve / should’ve / would’ve been totally awesome, but totally sucked instead.
Daikatana
Let’s get this one out of the way right off, because obviously any list of this sort has to include Daikatana. It’s the rules. When you market a game with bold proclamations that “[designer] John Romero’s about to make you his bitch”, you’d better deliver. And fast. Of course, things didn’t go quite to plan – Romero had figured seven months of development, which ended up being over three years instead. And then the game was rubbish. And then the company folded.
Alone in the Dark
Technically, of course, Alone in the Dark 5 but promoted as Alone in the Dark in an effort to reboot a series loads of people had probably never even heard of (or possibly pretend that the revolting Alone in the Dark 4 had never happened). Anyway, what started off looking like a sort of Silent Hill with zombies, golf carts, and improvised molotov cocktails turned out to be a big, wobbly heap of bugs, bugs, and more bugs that should probably have been called Alone in the Bug. Or Bug in the Dark. Or Bug in the Bug. Or something like that, with the word “bug” in it somewhere. The best thing about the game was that you could skip from the beginning straight through to the end. Which isn’t really a good thing when you think about it.
And then, just because things weren’t quite bad enough already, Atari went and sued a bunch of websites for giving the game unfavourable reviews. Oh, Atari.
Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust
What’s worse – that this game is a complete abomination, or that Codemasters even financed another game after Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude was a complete abomination? I’m not sure, but either way, it’s a complete abomination. Al Lowe should sue. Or kill himself for starting all of this in the first place.
Haze
It sounded so cool – there’s this hallucinogenic junk called Nova Keta Thyrazine that makes regular soldiers into super soldiers, and black ops rebel assassins, and a big evil corporation plot twist, and other stuff that sounded so cool. It was also going to be the PS3 exclusive that made Xbox fanboys cry – and it probably did, but the sort of crying that happens when you laugh really really hard.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Another year, another Star Wars game. It’s not that the Force Unleashed was especially bad, I suppose, but every Star Wars game that isn’t totally ****ing awesome breaks my heart. I mean, it’s Star Wars, i.e. the coolest franchise ever – how are these guys managing to go wrong? There should be a checklist for Star Wars games:
Does it have Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon and AT-ATs and Boba Fett and a Death Star and some gag about who shot first and all that other stuff that people actually love about Star Wars?
If not, start over.
Fracture
And while we’re slagging off LucasArts, let’s slag off Fracture. Deformable terrain? Rad! Everything else? Horrible. What sort of name is Jet Brody, anyway? It sounds like something gone wrong in the base hangar, which is actually kind of appropriate.
Crysis
What’s the best looking game ever? Probably Gears of War 2 or inFAMOUS or Team Fortress 2. What’s the most photorealistic game ever? Crysis. See what I did there? If I want photorealistic, I can look out the window. If I want a photorealistic game, I can look out the window with a sniper rifle. The trees LOOKED LIKE REAL TREES ZOMG, but everywhere else, Crysis was a relentlessly bland, entirely generic shooter with absolutely nothing special about it whatsoever and the only reason it was critically acclaimed is because it was the only halfway okay PC exclusive in the last decade and because everyone knows Cevat Yerli is probably secretly a dark wizard. Fact.
Ninja Blade
Some kind of bioengineered parasite breaks loose in downtown Tokyo, and a team of superninjas is dispatched to kill stuff with swords. Potential for epic: Substantial. Meanwhile, back in reality: Not so much. Ugly visuals, atrocious voice acting, cut and pasted boss battles, a save system that made you restart an entire chapter if you couldn’t finish the thing in one sitting, and quick time events substituted for actual gameplay for about almost all of the game. There’s really only one word fit to sum up Ninja Blade, and it’s not a word My Gaming will publish.
Damnation
Steampunk is scandalously under-represented in gaming. Seriously, my career as a gamer ends the day someone brings out an RPG FPS based on Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, because I’ll never need to play anything else ever again. And maybe that’s what Blue Omega Entertainment should have done instead of this slop bucket abortion of a game that IGN insisted people “avoid at all costs”.
The Matrix: Path of Neo
I’m cheating a bit with this one, because it was never going to be awesome, anyway. The Matrix series was already the most egregiously overrated heap of unadulterated pig vomit in the history of the universe, and the game wasn’t going to be any better. Not least of all with the criminally self-important Wachowski brothers running things, and pretending that all this pseudo-intellectual simulated reality stuff wasn’t nicked from a crummy first year philosophy textbook. And then, just before the final confrontation of the game, they inserted a clip of the two of them sitting chatting about the Matrix and pretending that all this pseudo-intellectual simulated reality stuff wasn’t nicked from a crummy first year philosophy textbook. I’m sure this was probably meant to be some sort of immensely clever fourth wall metaphor in the greater context of all that pseudo-intellectual simulated reality stuff they nicked from a crummy first year philosophy textbook, but it wasn’t – it was just stupid.
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