The Dawn of War 3 beta. I never bought the actual game

How did they get it so fucking wrong?
All we wanted was DoW1 with a few bits from DoW2 and updated graphics. Instead we got cartoony weightless action where nothing but hero units mattered.

I have around 4000 hours across DoW1 and 2 but barely gave the DoW3 5 hours. I had seen enough and I knew it was a lost cause.

When I was 14 I was utterly and wholly convinced that Avatar: The Game was going to be greatest thing I'd ever played. I can hardly remember why, but I thought it was going to blow my mind the same way Oblivion had the first time I'd left the Imperial Sewers. Of course it didn't, I played it probably three times before sticking with Halo 3 and FarCry 2.

I'm sure there are worse games but Clay Fighter on the Nintendo 64 made me feel really bad as a kid. I just didn't understand that a game could be like that.

Q.U.B.E. Really good reviews on steam but I found it quite dull and disappointingly easy. Q.U.B.E 2 wasn't that much better iirc, although one of it's DLCs was really decent.

Any of the Empire Earth games after the first one.
I just wanted to dick around with an AoE style game that let you go from cavemen to mechwarrior with all the nuclear bombers in between, why the fuck did they think that tactical territorial stuff was the way to go? Nobody liked that.

Red Dead Redemption 2. The mission design was so formulaic and on-rails that it gave me flashbacks to playing Deadly Tide and Rebel Assault in the mid 90s. This, coupled with the boring cover shooter mechanics, made it feel like a chore to play much of the time.

>>23967
Wow really? I've not bought it but the attention it gets makes me think it must suck you off as you play.

SSX Tricky. I mean making any kind of game about snowboarding is next to impossible, but its probably the only game I switched off within minutes of first play.

>>23969

I fucking loved that game. I was probably about 11 when it came out though, so perhaps that explains why.

>>23961
The problem with DOW3 wasn't really the hero units.

DOW1 was a tradition RTS, DOW2 was a hero-unit based RTS/RPG hybrid. DOW3 tried to combine both the large pitched battles with powerful hero units in a way which failed tragically, while at the same time stripping out all of the team customisation and even the unique race attributes, apparently to make the game much more e-sports friendly but really it just sucked all the soul of of the game.

Most disappointing game for me... I think maybe Crysis 3. I could never get far into it, the controls just felt so mushy and disconnected from the action on the screen.

>>23969
You sicken me. If you come back and talk shit about Amped 3 we're going to have a serious problem.

>>23973
I hadn't heard of Amped 3 before, but reading this line of the synopsis has piqued my interest.

>The game ends with a musical number featuring the main characters in the story. At the song’s conclusion the comet hits the Earth and destroys everything.

>>23960
Dragon Age 2. The death rattle of Bioware and EA for me.

>>23969
TRICKY TRICKY TRICKY!

>>23974
If you like snowboarding/skating games and have a 360 lying around I'd recommend it.

Autonauts. It should be right up my alley, I like Clonk, Terraria, Factorio, Starfall, some of them alone, some only with friends but Autonauts just gets the loop wrong. The map can get resources wrong by placing them far apart, so you may have a different experience, but for me I automated what I could and then had to hunt around for the one resource that would let me move on. By hiding it in the map.

I don't mind hunting for unattainable resources because I lack the XYZ for it,but running around a map to hunt for $basic_resouce so I can get to the next level is more tedious than fun.

Anthem. Didn't even have to pay for it, had zero expectations going in, and I still felt injured.

I hear they're taking it back to the drawing board, going to re-launch it. Good fucking luck to anyone who tries to turn that into something fun.

Labyrinth on the BBC Micro. Yeah, it was two whole years before The Legend of Zelda on the NES, but somebody could have had a word with Acornsoft a lot earlier than that.

>>24007

>>24007
Agreed. Very disappointing. Quite a lot of BBC games were.

>>24009

You have to admit that Dare Devil Denis shits all over Flappy Bird though. Even if only for that level start music and the eerily accurate brapping of the motorcycle.

>>24010
Tried that out a few years ago, hadn't played it since I was little.

How did we ever put up with that single-digit framerate, lads?

>>23960

This is going to sound bonkers, but Yoshi's Island. As an adult I appreciate it. But at the time as a mario fanatic it was just too easy for me and I completed it in a week. Time looks back favourably on the platformers that weren't insanely hard now that we aren't attuned to their difficulty.

>>24012
I found I had to really force myself to ignore the flowers (?), I kept trying to 100% each level and it was burning me out.

Nice looking game, a bit forgettable though somehow. Didn't stick with me like Mario World.

>>24013
Forgettable? It had the best music of any SNES game, for my money.

Spyro the Dragon 2: Gateway to Glimmer. I was 9 years old, and it was the first time I experienced a sequel to something you loved being a complete let down.

My parents rented me it from blockbuster and I played it for an hour. I just remember being pissed off at the game telling you how to do things you already knew how to do, because it didn't really occur to me that people might not have played the first one, and I resented the complete absence of dragons.

Manifold Garden. First person puzzling is a genre I love - but this just didn't do it for me. It looked a bit drab, and I never quite got on its wavelength.

>>24018
The music's great, and it looks lovely. It just didn't compel me to go back. When I finished it I was done. The other Mario games somehow make me want to pick them up again - just recently I played through Sunshine again, it's a fantastic game, and I'd just turned 18 or so it has some fun nostalgia in there for me. These days it's quite easy to get an SD card loader running on a Cube, which allows you to force various video modes and so on, but also allows you to change that stupid inverted horizontal look that Sunshine uses, with no option to change (same for FFXII if I'm not mistaken - it's one thing to invert by default, but give us an option for fuck's sake). Anyway just passing that on, as it made the difference between me dicking around for 15 minutes and moving on, vs. finishing the game.

>>24021
Funny you mention Sunshine, because that's my most disappointing Mario game.

To make one Super Mario Sunshine:

-Take Mario 64
-Give Mario a cleaning-dirt-with-water mechanic that gets used interestingly for about five seconds
-Replace Power Stars with 'Shines' except to get them you don't achieve interesting objectives in the world but enter mysterious caves and do self-contained platforming segments
-Replace Toads with 'Delfinos' who have even less personality and are apparently so unconcerned about their island being in jeopardy that they will hoard Shines until Mario does an errand

Honestly I've never felt a Mario game to be so phoned in.

>>24023
I think you could do a similarly reductivist take on any game, really. The beauty of Mario games is in the subtlety of control.

It is clunky in places, I'll grant you. Nearly 20 years old though, eh.

>>24025
It's not clunky though. It's polished, it's solid, it's fun to play on its own merits. What I'm saying is that it is a disappointing Mario game. It feels empty and devoid of character, like they couldn't give a toss while making it.

>>24026
What? It's full of character, and there's lots to do if you want to get all the shines or whatever.

There are places where it feels clunky - the camera trying to find the "right" place when in tight spaces sticks out especially. It's an early 3D game and you adjust your expectations accordingly.