So I've seen a topic for most surprising game, or something along those lines, and I've also seen a favorite/least favorite game topic. What I want to know is, what's a game you were really excited about, pre-ordered, looked up news and previews for everyday, only to be let down once you got it? I have a couple.

Blue Dragon. I was stoked when I first read about this game in one of the Game Informers that gets sent to my house. I thought it looked like a genuinely fun game that I thought I was going to have a good'ol time with. Wow was I wrong. The story was so bland and uninteresting, and the characters got on my nerves to no end. I did like the battle system, because it was unlike any RPG or JRPG I'd ever played. Overall though, very disappointing.

Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Don't get me wrong, I like the game, but I was expecting so much more. After the constant delays and setbacks, I was expecting the second coming of Jesus...in form of a Wii game. It's just not nearly as fun as Melee was. Granted I liked the addition of some of the characters, but there were some I was just surprised and saddened to see there. With all the hype around this game and the months of anticipation, this game suffers from what I call "Halo 3 Sindrome".

Speak of the devil it's Halo 3. I don't know if it's the fact that I'm older now than I was when Halo 2 came out, or what, but I just didn't enjoy this nearly as much as I did the two before it. As much as I want to put the blame on me and how my tastes have changed over the years, most of this has to be due to the game content and the choices the developers made. I know it's hard to revolutionize a franchise twice, and still be able to please the core fans, but Halo 3 really didn't do anything that pushed the franchise forward. Granted the online play is fun, mainly due to there always being someone else to play against, the single player campaign is really only good for one play-through by yourself, and maybe another in multiplayer. I'm not sure what to chalk it up to, but Halo 3 was fastly under what I was expecting when it was first announced.

I think I have to agree with you about Halo 3-it just seemed to be lacking in some spark or something that would have made it an absolutely awesome game...but I guess the multiplayer makes up for this.

For me, 'Black' wasn't quite as fun as I thought it would be, and CoD: Finest hour for Xbox, compared to CoD on PC, was just awful.

I'll have to agree with you on "Finest Hour".

Horrible.

i will have to say Battlefiel 2142, i pre-ordered it, spend a thousand dollars upgrading my machine to be able to play it. And it was shit.

Where to begin? It seems like there's ten disappointing ones to every good game I play these days...
To start off this thread lets mention every stinking game that have had the misfortune of being handled by Peter Molyneux. The man is a hype machine, and I'll admit to being drawn in by his talk of (in retrospect) impossible gaming scenarios. I should have learned after Black & White, but I didn't , and I currently own a copy of every single Lionhead release. They are to this day, the most disappointed I have ever been with any games. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them, it's impossible not to enjoy them, because at the end of the day they're magnificent games, just not what Mr Molyneux promised they'd be.
Then there's some random picks like TESIV: Oblivion, Battlefield 2142, Fahrenheit and more recently Burnout Paradise.
Weren't disappointed with Halo 3 in that my expectations of the game were very (read rock bottom) low to begin with, so to my surprise I enjoyed the game.

Killzone. I didn't actually pre-order it, but came rather late to the party having absorbed a host of fawning reviews stocked to the rafters with superlatives. So when I booted up the 'game' to find myself squinting at a monochrome slideshow seen through the eyes of a partially-sighted person with axle grease smeared on his spectacles, I was understandably nonplussed. After several tortuous hours of fighting the viciously hostile control system, while having my eardrums perforated by my voice-throwing enemies' endless, unintelligible screeching, I resigned myself to being twenty quid down and booted up Okami instead.

Portal, wasn't fun wasn't funny short as hell.

Call of Duty 4. I had such high hopes for the game. Nothing gets me more than paying full price for half a game, and a less than challenging one at that. Of what could have been had Infinity Ward not jumped the console shark and followed the path of Halo 2 using online play as a crutch to keep from having to develop a full game.

Devil May cry 2. That game was so bad. I hate being a fanboy but fuck it I still play the stupid game.

The only recent dissapointment I can think of was Burnout Paradise.

I wasn't dissapointed in Halo 3, as I wasn't really expecting that much in the first place.

Also, I seem to be the only person who genuinely enjoyed Blue Dragon. Go figure.

Halo 3... i mentioned in one of my gamespot reviews that its "supposed to be a next gen game although its the same as its last-gen predecessors". This game was hyped to the max... usually if a game is hyped it can become a massive let down because its never as good as its "Hyped!" to be. If there wasnt such a thing called hype... though we cant escape it... people wouldnt expect the game to be as "perfect" or as "shit" as the hype has made it out to be. Being a genuine fan of the Halo series... the sequels after combat evolved seemed dissapointing. Even after Halo 3 it felt unfinished... the blatent time limit removed copy of Halo: combat evolved's final level had just been pasted at the end of Halo 3.

Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends: rise of shittyness.
Age of Mythologies. - I just expected more.

Fire Warrior. One of my favourite IPs with an awesome back story, and it's even centred upon the race I collect in 40k, and the voice cast was incredible; but the game turned out to be a mediocre shooter with weak AI and tedious multiplayer. Nifty story, but poorly implemented as a game.

-- Steve

Anton P. Nym:
Fire Warrior. One of my favourite IPs with an awesome back story, and it's even centred upon the race I collect in 40k, and the voice cast was incredible; but the game turned out to be a mediocre shooter with weak AI and tedious multiplayer. Nifty story, but poorly implemented as a game.

-- Steve

I feel your pain they ruined the perfect chance to make a good 40k game (I'm IG though)

shatnershaman:

Anton P. Nym:
Fire Warrior. One of my favourite IPs with an awesome back story, and it's even centred upon the race I collect in 40k, and the voice cast was incredible; but the game turned out to be a mediocre shooter with weak AI and tedious multiplayer. Nifty story, but poorly implemented as a game.

-- Steve

I feel your pain they ruined the perfect chance to make a good 40k game (I'm IG though)

While my moral standards usually forbid the creation of quote towers, I'm going to agree with you both here. Here was a game where they could have created a brilliant, groundbreaking insight into the world of 40K the insight of an infantryman in a world dominated by daemons, tanks, alien monsters and endless waves of conscripts. Instead they made a piss-poor shooter, with inferior graphics and was so disappointing I actualy hurled the game out of the window.

But you should have been IG. Then you would have legions of tanks, heavy guns and fellow soldiers to fight with, you would have to use tactics and you would really get a sense of the scale of 40,000.

Seconding Fail Warrior and Rise of Repetition.

Also, anything that's undergone the ea hype treatment(spend the entire budget on marketing instead of the game)

anyone who knows me personally is well aware of how much I hate Baten Kaitos for the GC. I watched all the trailers and gameplay videos and could only conclude that this game would be a jrpg masterpiece--great graphics, interesting combat, excellent music... and it had all of that. just my luck, everything else was terrible. the story was god-awful, and i would've suffered through even THAT, had the characters not have been so painfully one dimensional. and let's not even go into the voice acting.

seriously, the characters were so terrible i couldn't finish this game. hate you so much, baten kaitos.

also, farenheit broke my brain. i guess that counts as disappointment.

by the way--anyone who watched the trailers for silent hill 4 was disappointed. they were incredible. too good for any game, really, and the game was only decent. i enjoyed it, but man was i let down. find em on youtube or something, you'll be amazed, one is 7 minutes of pure terror.

Pro Evo 6. After 5, the best footie game ever in my opinion, 6 was like a slap in the face.

Well first of all, Assassins Creed just didnt deliver.
Sounds stupid: Splinter Cell Double Agent. I looked forward to it because I had loved the first two. The Rubics cube puzzle was so out of place, and you didnt even have to use the famous goggles the entire game

This is good stuff guys, I just thought of another one that escaped my memory earlier,

Rainbow Six Vegas 2. I really don't know what I was expecting here, because I absolutely loved the first one. But this just seemed like an exact copy and past of RSV 1. Am I wrong to assume that a sequel should take what was bad or wrong about the first game and improve on it, while leaving in what was good the first time around? If I am please tell me.

And I agree about Assassin's Creed. I was told it was great and exciting, and it turned out to be neither.

I noticed I seem to have pre-ordered a lot of these games that I was disappointed in. I hope Bourne Conspiracy and Star Wars: Force Unleashed don't follow that trend :(

Assassins creed as i played it for 20mins round a friends house and killed lots of people but when i got it i found i had to do more tings then kill people, it should've been called fuck about for a while and do much creed

OriginalUsername:
Pro Evo 6. After 5, the best footie game ever in my opinion, 6 was like a slap in the face.

I agree completey, and the latest ones even worse. I have been disappointed with a few games over the years. Devestation looked good but turned out crap, Perfect Dark Zero, every Mario since 64, every film based game that ever existed.

Most dissapointing game ever, well, ill have to make a list.

1: Unreal Tournament 2003/2004, it does not live it to the godlike game that is Unreal Tournament '99.

2: The Halo series, people keep banging on about them, but they are just meh.

3: Half-Life 2, don't get me wrong, if I was a women, I'd sleep with Gabe Newall (I know he is a walking bloated cheeseburger)cuse I allways get a semi over a half-life game but it compares no way near to Half-Life 1.

4: Starwars Battlefront II, I expected a much more brilliant game than Battlefront I, I was mistaken.

This has been done i'm sure. Quoting myself again

conqueror Kenny:
Lost planet. Could a game be an worse?

Nothing comes close to the disappointment of Driver 3. I rented it, and it was so bad, I returned it in the SAME DAY.

conqueror Kenny:
This has been done i'm sure. Quoting myself again

conqueror Kenny:
Lost planet. Could a game be an worse?

Baroque.

Now contrary to all of the above pretty much, I loved Cod4, Burnout Paradise, Oblivion, Assassins Creed and Halo 3. There are very few games that dissapointed me or that I dislike but I would have to go with Enchanted Arms which was absolutely rubbish, they took the best bits of Final Fantasy and then ruined it.

Oh yeah and Chrome Hounds, that was a waste of time. And I loved Lost Planet.

Well admittedly being an assassin wouldn't merely involve killing the person conveniently stood next to you else it wouldn't be much of a challenge. Your response seems a bit zero punctuation oriented.

I was really disappointed with Super Smash Bros. Brawl when I first played it. Looking back on that cold night of Mar. 9, standing in line at the midnight launch to receive my copy, I realized that I hadn't given any much thought to what SSBB would be like. Would it follow the footsteps of the excellent Super Smash Bros. Melee or would it shake things up a bit?

So, I returned to my dorm and popped the disc into my console ASAP. The first thing I noticed was the absence of the announcer guy on the title screen. Seriously, what the hell? There was absolutely no reason to boot the guy out in the previous games, so why do it now? Well, I disregarded it since it was a trivial gripe at best, but then I got into the gameplay and came to realization: It's exactly like SSBM. I was shocked! A game that had been hyped and advertised for three or four years was a near-perfect replica of its predecessor, which featured several distinct changes that separated it from the original Super Smash Bros. and which made it awesome.

It saddens me that a Super Smash Bros. Melee 2.0 is receiving near-perfect 10-scale review scores, which I suppose is largely due to the online multiplayer; but that's largely broken due to the existence of lag.

Brawl eventually grew on me but I still can't shake off that bitter feeling of being had.

For some reason, i don't preorder games and i just assume that Gamestop will have it anyway after 3 or 4 days after it's release and get it. But i didn't like Burnout paradise too much, played it for like 6 days and stopped.

Also SSBB. I like the game, but something about it just makes me not like it! Maybe it's my friends saying that it's the best game in the world (or was) and their expectations because all the dojo updates were really just singular items and stage here and there, or that the game completely hates me, but i just don't like it as much as i thought i would. i thought that me and my friends would be having a blast online, but we hardly play and my friends are all serious about their matches. (DAMNIT let me listen to Mr.Resseti!)

i'm hoping that MGS4 won't disappointed me.

Shadow Hearts 3... good game, nothing compared to Covenant.
Super Mario Galaxy... if it takes me considerable effort to run in a straight line in a platformer, it fails.

Metroid Prime 2. i adored the first one so much, and was really looking forward to a new story. Everything about it wasn't up to the standard of the first. Turns out the multiplayer was the best bit, and even that was mediocre compared to Goldeneye. And plus everyone i played against had never played prime before so it got tediously boring.

Twilight Princess although solving the WindWaker problem of being too short, was easy enough to last as long (if not shorter). It seems since the early GC games Nintendo has been catering for 'the casual gamer'.

World of Warcraft for me. All my friends played it hardcore, but for some reason I just couldn't seem to understand, nor copy their addiction. In fact, I found the game borderline boring at times. I guess WoW just wasn't my kind of game, still, it was a huge dissapointment, since all my friends applauded the game and had nothing but good words about it.

shatnershaman:
Portal, wasn't fun wasn't funny short as hell.

Sir. Your just wrong, just so.....damn......wrong (exept about the short part).

and for me, i would have to say Super Smash Bros. Brawl