Great games you own but don't like or never even installed

Anyone else have a collection of unplayed or quickly discarded games that are considered "classics" by others?

I am pretty bored of most of my games, but have a lot of titles highly regarded by others that are just sitting untouched on my shelf. Somehow, I can't summon the energy to get into them or even to try them. I am not sure why. They just seem to lack a sufficient hook to get me over the energy activation barrier required to perserve or even try them. I just place them on a mental pile of "too hard" or "too bleurgh". Anyone got similar lists or want to persuade me to amend mine?

Of the top of my head:

Thief I & II - widely praised, and I did love System Shock 2, but have not even installed these. I loved cowering from zombies in SS2 with my wrench, but the idea of creeping round to steal stuff just isn't as appealing.

Mass Effect - there is no Bioware RPG I have not loved, except this slow fuzzy shooter thing. Got to where I was about to pick up the last recruitable NPC and lost interest. Maybe it's just the dull voice of the male protaganist that makes something inside me die?

Half-life - wanted to see if I liked shooters. Enjoyed the opening tour, then when the monsters starting spawning decided I don't like shooters. Too stressful - decided to make a cup of tea instead.

Operation Flashpoint - the idea of fighting in a war sounds awesome, but when I tried it, I found myself lying confused in a field of battle, vainly trying to shoot some soldiers far off in cover and decided a soldier's life was not for me.

Hidden and Dangerous 2 - having enjoyed the original Ghost Recon, I figured this tactical shooter sounds my cup of tea, but I have never installed it. It's reputation of being knee-cappingly hard may have something to do with it.

The Witcher - supposed to be a good recent RPG (and boy, do we need those), but has not grabbed me enough to install it. Something I read about mixing herbs to poison your weapon to beat a boss just made me think "bleurgh".

Gothic II - I really want to play a massive fantasy type RPG, but could not engage with this one at all. Just seemed too clunky and give me a mouse cursor please!

Swat 3 - sounds intriguing - I always wanted to be a policeman - but confronted with selecting a team from a whole preccinct full of officers, I just quit and uninstalled.

Max Payne - played Max Payne 2 enough to unlock the happy ending, but never installed the first. I think it's a victim of the reversed temporal ordering - somehow a fraught revenge story does not appeal after the love story of the second.

Guild Wars - I loved World of Warcraft, but this free MMO makes me flinch. Despite it's high quality graphics, I find it aesthetically awful and the world soulless. Running around as a butch male warrior in a leather mini-skirt probably did not help. My son swears by it though.

Half-Life 1&2 as well as Counter Strike. All came in the same box. I never played any of the games apart from HL1. Played it a bit; then I got stuck somewhere, and the game never felt that exciting that I bothered to search further for the..uh..path onwards.

Homeworld. I like Homeworld 2 just fine, just a shame about the uninspired plot/scenario design (which has gotten a lot of flak from the first game's fans too). But the original Homeworld...

The game operates on the 'rock-paper-scissors' principle. Say you've got Interceptors, that are quickly dispatched by corvettes, which die messily upon contact with assault frigates, who are highly vulnerable to bombers, which tend to explode upon encountering an interceptor. Units die incredibly quick when they encounter their designated counter, so you have to keep your interceptors away from enemy corvettes, and your corvettes at a long distance from enemy assault frigates, and of course you need interceptors to give your frigates fighter cover so they don't die when attacked by bombers, and make sure there aren't enemy interceptors around when you attack enemy frigates with your bombers (or else they'll get massacred), and make sure to keep an eye on your combat support and resourcing ships so they don't get massacred by any random combat unit that happens to be nearby, and don't forget to use your ships' special abilities too, and keep building more units and give orders to your research ships, and manually pick out damaged combat units and order them to dock for repars and and and ...

There's just a ludicrous amount of stuff going on at once, you need to micromanage everything and every second you're not 100% on the ball, you lose units; and as such, the game doesn't leave much room for learning or experiments. I've installed it twice, and uninstalled it soon after both times.

Thief II - Same. Couldn't get into it as much. Thief I was great and a classic but had little replay value for me.

Mass Effect - I'm going to see if I can't force myself to play this one again, and maybe end up liking it.

Earth 2150 - $5 budget game, just never installed it. Meh.

Ghost Recon - Huge stinker. Hated this, it paled next to Operation Flashpoint, which was a bugfest. It was installed for maybe an hour total before being promptly uninstalled, never to see the light of day again.

Call of Duty 4 - Disappointingly shallow game. Crysis blew this away hands down in every category. I made it through one playthrough, forcing myself, and that was it. The only thing that made me not regret buying it was the AC-130 mission. Sad, huh?

Star Wars Empire at War - Poster child for how NOT to make a stupid RTS. Glad I bought this as part of that budget SW game pack for $30. I tried it when it was released and said screw it after 30 minutes.

Far Cry - Doom 3 far outshadowed this. The gameplay was boring as snot. Lasted a total of 15 min on my HDD. Thank god for budget games

Splinter Cell - Horrible, awful port to the PC of what's probably a great console game. Again I forced myself to play about 2 hours and it got uninstalled. This one was free, so no regrets.

Age of Empires 3
i loved AoE2. i hated AoE3. the reason? the time period. the game flouts having huge battles and the like with cannons and muskets and such. but, when you have cannons that can reach a third of the map away, infantry that know no tactics, and a 200 population limit, i found it hard to like. there is no real tactics in the game. if you have a lot of cannons and some anti cavalry units, you can defeat everyone. and i mean, everyone.
so, it sits in my shelf.

Ghost Recon Advanced warfighter
paid $60 to get the collectors edition. dont know why, mayve because i got a $70 gamestop gift card and i didnt know what else to buy. well, i got it then found out it couldnt run on my computer. put it away until last year. played the frst two missions, got stuck, uninstalled when my hard dive got wiped, played a bit of it a few months ago, uninstalled it to make room for ETW.
it was a tactical, but kinda lame, game. the tactical options were limited, and your stupid teammates always got themselves killed. i hte the non rebounding health meter becase there are some places where you get killed very quickly, or your health gets really low and you end up restarting because if you dont have full health for the enxt mission you would die in the next stage. as i sad before, tactical options were limited, and the multiplayer is the definition of lame.

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Originally Posted by Whacker

Far Cry - Doom 3 far outshadowed this. The gameplay was boring as snot. Lasted a total of 15 min on my HDD. Thank god for budget games

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Doom 3?! Wow, Whacker, you just lost 20% of your Nerddom.

ARMA I
Occasionally I try to play it and enjoy it, but I just end up hating it more and very seriously considering using it as target practice.

CR

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Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

ARMA I
Occasionally I try to play it and enjoy it, but I just end up hating it more and very seriously considering using it as target practice.

CR

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thats what i did with my Empire Earth 2 cd. shot it to hell with BBs.
i would have put it in my list, but its not considered a great game.

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Originally Posted by Reverend Joe

Doom 3?! Wow, Whacker, you just lost 20% of your Nerddom.

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I liked Doom 3 a lot. In fact I just got done re-playing it last night. id Software is one of the few dev houses that I've been essentially 100% loyal to over the years. Only game they co-dev'd and I didn't buy or like was Quake Wars.

I feel the need to comment on some of those, some of it is about taste of course.

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Originally Posted by econ21

Hidden and Dangerous 2 - having enjoyed the original Ghost Recon, I figured this tactical shooter sounds my cup of tea, but I have never installed it. It's reputation of being knee-cappingly hard may have something to do with it.

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If someone says H&D 2 is knee-cappingly hard then they haven't played H&D1. :laugh4:

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Originally Posted by econ21

The Witcher - supposed to be a good recent RPG (and boy, do we need those), but has not grabbed me enough to install it. Something I read about mixing herbs to poison your weapon to beat a boss just made me think "bleurgh".

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That's actually pretty much the reason I never tried The Witcher either.

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Originally Posted by econ21

Gothic II - I really want to play a massive fantasy type RPG, but could not engage with this one at all. Just seemed too clunky and give me a mouse cursor please!

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Heresy! I've never really missed a cursor and it would ruin the immersion, admittedly the game has it's own style but when they tried to make it more mass market compatible with part 3 it really lost a lot of it's charm, one could even say all of it, resulted in a big desaster and reputation hit etc. It's perfectly possible though that the german version has far superior voice overs and a lot of the charm could be lost in translation.

As for my personal list:

FarCry 2 - Was really looking forward to this one but it turned out unbelievably lame and shallow. I played it to the end just to see the outscome, which was even more lamerer than the game itself but I could have saved some money there.

Cossacks 2 - I know some here liked it but as a big fan of the first part and American Conquest I didn't like it at all, you have to micromanage every single formation, the AI steamrolled me in every skirmish attempt I made and combined with the performance problems it had at the time I just dropped it. Later learned it had Starforce so I won't ever pick it up again either.

If they won't patch ETW to improve the campaign AI and diplomacy it could make it onto this list as the TW game I spent the shortest amount of time with. Even though it's a pretty good game in many respects.

I've also suspended playing ArmA II, but I hope they will patch it to the point where it's worth picking up again so i wouldn't consider this a closed case yet.

Call of Duty and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

They're both installed on my computer, but I've barely touched either one. I'm not sure why that is, unless I'm subconsciously worried about getting motion sickness while playing them? I don't know. :shrug:

Call of Duty 2 - It's so incredibly arcade and easy, I dropped it after 20 minutes. The PPSh can be fired as a machine gun with almost no recoil whatsoever.

Guild Wars - For some reason I paid 110$ for the Collector's Edition. The only thing I have used where the headset and the music CD.

Civ City: Rome - Another big dissapointment. Recommended by an avid gamer who had his own shop, I was about to ask for my money back after playing 1 hour of it.

Sins of a Solar Empire - Got it dirt cheap and thought "Hey, I've heard great things about this game." I played it a couple of times and was intrigued by a few aspects of it... but I just could never get into it.

This pretty much describes my gaming habits in the last few years: Get game, play for 1 hour, shelf it.

Baldur's Gate 2: I know it's widely loved but it starts slow, the interface is clunky and I suck at making characters.

Devil May Cry: Picked it out of a bargain bin, played for a few minutes, haven't touched it since.

Medieval Total War II: Have barely played it, just doesn't match up to the original.

This thread definitely has some incendiary potential. :laugh4:

Bioshock

Game that pretended to be art, but failed horribly. It was way too easy - so easy that it made no difference how you played the game. You could just run through without thought, without consequence. Somehow it felt like the game had been totally sacrificed for the story and setting. I quit before halfway.

Medieval 2

I guess I was just burned out on TW games. MTW multiplayer was fun, RTW MP was occasionally somewhat amusing, but it just wore off. Could never get into MTW2. I never really cared about TW singleplayer, except for Shogun. The tactical battles had always been the heart of the franchise.

The Witcher

Stodgy and boring. Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation got it spot-on.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...22-The-Witcher

GalCiv 2

I couldn't get around the underdeveloped space battles. For me, a grand space strategy game must have massive fleets blowing the crap out of each other, and preferably look good while doing it.

Spore

Not really a "great" game per se, just a much hyped one. It was a shallow shadow of a game, period. But, I guess I'm a sucker.

Mass Effect

I actually finished it, but not without some pain. People (and critics) kept saying that it was the definitive Bioware RPG, but for me the gameplay just wasn't enough of a step forwards. In all honesty though, the hardcore sci-fi setting, research and background material were very good, as well as the dialog to a lesser degree. By all accounts I should have liked it.

Neverwinter Nights 2

Again, the gameplay failed to deliver. Some of it might be because I tried the Warlock class first; an antithesis of good game design. (The Warlock uses the same few spells time and time and time again, over and over. Other D&D caster classes are much more appealing to me.)

Titan Quest

Dunno if it counts as a "great" game, but anyhow. I can mostly blame myself for this one. I played Diablo (and Diablo 2) to the death, so I had high expectations of this one. However, Guild Wars had redefined the action RPG genre for me - I just couldn't stand the old-fashioned gameplay of TQ.

It's somewhat interesting because quite a few people on these forums have expressed a definite dislike for GW. Perhaps it could be that those people put much more emphasis on story than me? (I always consider gameplay to be the of the first and foremost importance with computer games - they are games, after all. If I wanted to experience a good story, I'd first look to a book or even a movie.)

EDIT: A couple of counterpoints

Gothic II - I thought it was a fun little game. Had no problems at all with the controls even though they felt a bit console-y. It had a nice, semi-seamless world and somewhat novel combat mechanics with player skill included instead of just number crunching.

Far Cry II - It's a shooter that works. No pretentions (Bioshock, I'm looking at you! :whip:), no nonsense. Just a pretty sandbox world with lots of dudes to kill. Almost Painkiller-ish, though nothing can really beat Painkiller, of course.

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Originally Posted by Crandaeolon

GalCiv 2

I couldn't get around the underdeveloped space battles. For me, a grand space strategy game must have massive fleets blowing the crap out of each other, and preferably look good while doing it.

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I totally meant to post this, but I forgot. Honestly with the depth of the rest of the game you think they could have at least put some effort into the battles. Just killed the game for me.

Neverwinter Nights - I just dont like it. Any part of it. At all.
Medieval: Total War - Yeah, its the original, I can't stand the battles. I'd rather play Rome.

Only ones I own that I havent gotten into. Theres plenty of others I rented though.

Call of Duty: World at War - (XBOX 360)

My grudge match with CoD:WaW is legendary. I didn't like this game, i didn't like the concept, and I didn't like the MP beyond the first month. A wholly uninteresting game that demonstrates quite proudly everything that is wrong with WW2 shooters. With all due respect to the developers of these sorts of games, enough is enough.

Soul Caliber II (Playstation 2)

I've never really liked SC games, in fact I've been more of a Street Fighter rat, but the Soul Caliber series has really gotten under my skin ever since this game. 2 was the very first game I ever bought under my own money, earned from a job, and I have to say I regretted it from day one. The combat felt stiff, combos were cheap and half the characters had one move that could be spammed for eternity to cheese opponents. :skull:

Spore (PC)

One word: :daisy: I played this game for thirty minutes before ripping it out of the drive and nearly took a hammer to it. After all the hype, after all the build up, this game showed me (as ETW would after) that hype can never be trusted.

SW: KOTOR II (PC)

I.. i really wanted to like this game. I did. It had a great story, great gameplay that improved on the original and compelling twists along the way that kept you interested. The only problem? Obsidian Entertainment has never been able to finish a game technically. This game to this day regularly crashes on my ATI based comps. I gave up on ever playing it again last year.

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (Playstation 2)

I hated this game. It made me so frustrated on the higher difficulty levels where the AI would spam 8 button combos that could take you from 100%-0% and there was nothing you could do. This is the only game I have physically destroyed.

Ghost Recon (PC)

The original was an interesting game that built on the pretty successful formula from the rainbow six series. The only problem? The AI was a cheating :daisy:. Instant headshots from over 500 yards with an AK is not my idea of a fun time. The only way you could make it through a mission without casualties would be to get extremely lucky. I heard the later expansions fixed this, but honestly I didn't care by then.

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Originally Posted by Monk

Spore (PC)

One word: :daisy: I played this game for thirty minutes before ripping it out of the drive and nearly took a hammer to it. After all the hype, after all the build up, this game showed me (as ETW would after) that hype can never be trusted.

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This man speaks the truth. I'm still :daisy:ed off that I paid full price for it.

I think the only game I've left totally collecting dust is Half Life. Bought it to play Counter Strike, back in the day.

But not even trying The Witcher is a... it is.. it's blasphemy! Do not let the herbs fool you! :smash::clown:

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Originally Posted by Tratorix

Baldur's Gate 2: I know it's widely loved but it starts slow, the interface is clunky and I suck at making characters.

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:dizzy2:

Warcraft 3: It feels like a mish-mash between AoE and WoW, and fails at both.

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Originally Posted by Crandaeolon

Far Cry II - It's a shooter that works. No pretentions (Bioshock, I'm looking at you! :whip:), no nonsense. Just a pretty sandbox world with lots of dudes to kill. Almost Painkiller-ish, though nothing can really beat Painkiller, of course.

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That would have been fine had they marketed the game as a successor to Doom 3, I hadn't bought it in the first place and would have never complained. They did however say it's a huge immersive world (actually mostly consisting of linear corridors between mountains), that you could do lots of interaction with your friends (that was reduced to a standard game mechanic of they spare you the reload once), that you could play out the different parties against eachother (that was just part of the linear plot), that you could be the big fearsome evil man or the nice guy and help civilians(the civilians thing was a VERY linear and scripted part of the linear plot, your behaviour did not seem to have any influence on anything) and that it would generally be a very immersive world (a country with 10 civilians where every militia, friend or foe, shoots at you regardless with the cheap excuse that you're hired as a super secret superduper mercenary). :dizzy2:

I mean yeah, the shooter part was kinda decent but I expected sooo much more from this game and in the end it was just a stream of running from A to B and then back to A while shooting endless streams of ever-respawning dudes on the way. :shrug:

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Originally Posted by Subotan

:dizzy2:

Warcraft 3: It feels like a mish-mash between AoE and WoW, and fails at both.

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Now that I take offence to.

It is a typical RTS.

and WoW was after it. Don't get me started on that game. I hate it and everyone who plays it. Everyone associated with it.

If you want a more AoE feeling play Warcraft 2. Races are basically mirrors except for higher tiers.

You can tell me a game in which this happens is bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2AsWctZ_Wc

Half Life 2 - Got bored of the game pretty quickly. For me this was overhyped in the manner of ETW.

Call of Duty 4 - there's no reason to play either SP or MP after a while - usual frustations of a mass appeal FPS wrapped up in a shinier package.

MTW II - this was the 'wtf' moment when the TW series started to go wrong for me. Most things were less intuitive than you would expect from a dev team who have had 6/7 releases (games + expansions) to polish stuff. Also - hard to care as much for a less superior game for its time after spending countless hours on MTW and STW.

I thought homeworld was excellent - eye bleedingly hard when games were getting easier so everyone could complete them easily on standard settings.

Penumba, got it for £3, but never got around to playing it.

Bioshock was stupidly cheap on Steam, £3.49 or something, and The Orange Box for a great price on a Steam sale. Never actually downloaded either....

Thief II - Never actually installed. I got burnt out on Thief (which is a good game but some of the later levels get too frustrating) and decided not to take it further.

Morrowind - Walking and walking and walking, then running up to someone and rapping on the keys as fast as possible in what is apparently referred to as "combat". Then talking and clicking through line after line of pointless dialogue wondering if I should be remembering any of it.

System Shock 2 - Wandering about aimlessly with weapons that break after three or four uses etc. (yes I know it's a classic but this game depressed me.)

Medieval 2: Total War - For me this was the worst TW game so far. RTW was bad enough but this thing has so little to redeem it. I've not played ETW and probably won't now. I probably played M2TW two or three times before uninstalling it and throwing it on the shelf.

Unreal Tournament III - For some reason I've never felt inspired to take this out of the box. It seems like it might be UT2K4 with a makeover and I don't play FPS much anymore anyway (I picked this up in the 'bargain bin').

Good to know I am not alone. I just want to put in a plug for Ghost Recon I - not a great game, but well worth perservering with.

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Originally Posted by Whacker

Ghost Recon - Huge stinker. Hated this, it paled next to Operation Flashpoint, which was a bugfest. It was installed for maybe an hour total before being promptly uninstalled, never to see the light of day again.

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The first mission is not that great and you probably need more than 1 hour to get acclimatised to the unforgiving stealth based game play. The strengths of the game are:
(1) the tactical aspect - things like carefully setting up your three squads to perform a deadly cross-fire assault on the enemy camp in the first mission are fun.
(2) the variety of missions - it really is extraordinarily good, from night time prison break to urban evac to armoured assault to night time recon etc etc. The first mission is perhaps the most bland and not characteristic of the game.
(3) selecting, upgrading your squad after XP and kitting them out with gear makes a nice SP hook to the campaign.
The more recent Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter sacrifices all these virtues.

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Originally Posted by Monk

Ghost Recon (PC)
The original was an interesting game that built on the pretty successful formula from the rainbow six series. The only problem? The AI was a cheating :daisy:. Instant headshots from over 500 yards with an AK is not my idea of a fun time. The only way you could make it through a mission without casualties would be to get extremely lucky. I heard the later expansions fixed this, but honestly I didn't care by then.

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The later expansions made it worse, to be honest. The first game is easier. You have to play it like a stealth game - he who sees first, wins. The AI is no more accurate than you, I think. It's just very accurate and bullets are very lethal. The one shot one skill aspect of the game is the worst feature, IMO, as it just makes it not fun for most mortal players like me. You have to save and reload. And you eventually learn the map, so that you predict the AIs position. These things are particularly egregious in the timed missions and similar where you need quick and near perfect play to progress. Both things are bad and stop the game being great. (As does never being able to see your gun, grrr). Still it is one of the few games on my shelf I would consider replaying in the near future.

Got Civ IV lying around somewhere. It was a gift but I don't have a computer capable of running it.

(Not sure if it's a great or highly-rated game and I'm not a huge fan of RTS games but it comes to mind as one that's never been installed).

Half-Life 2 Never got into it...but bought it for the mods, which ironically I never ended up playing anyhow.

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Dunno, just something that put me off.

Medieval 2: Total War I hated how generic the armies were (after Rome, but also I felt MTW1 had better unit lineup) and most of all the lack of immersion/believeability. If I had good relations with another faction it did not matter, they would attack you anyhow even if they had 3-4 other enemies. Think I played more Broken Crescent than M2TW vanilla.

Empire: Total War Spent 10-15 hours on the campaigns total. And that was before the patches.

Crysis: Shiny graphics, good enough UI, but just wasn't interesting.

Have yet to touch Fallout 3, keeping it for the dark days, too restless when it's sunny.

Empire Earth and Age of Mythology back some years ago.

Medal of Honour Pacific Assault. Bought this when I finished playing Medal of Honour Allied Assault, which I'd gotten as a gift. Never got around to playing it though, by the time it was shipped, I was back to AOE2 and AOM.

Loki. This one was available cheap, so picked it. Installed it, but didn't like it, so removed it within the hour.

And finally ETW. It just won't work. Tried everything.....literally. Finally I came to the conclusion that it's due to my dual core processor which is 2.0 GHz insted of 2.4 GHz.....so I'm waiting until something comes out to optimise it for Dual Core.

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Originally Posted by india

And finally ETW. It just won't work. Tried everything.....literally. Finally I came to the conclusion that it's due to my dual core processor which is 2.0 GHz insted of 2.4 GHz.....so I'm waiting until something comes out to optimise it for Dual Core.

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Heh, that is not your problem if it won't work at all, since I updated my laptop to 4GB of RAM it even runs fluid on it on roughly medium detail and my laptop also has a 2.0GHz dual core.

Well, actually it's not totally unplayable, I can play the grand campaign smoothly enough. It crashes before all the real time battles though......so, I'm pretty sure it's due to the processor.

Edit : And I just have 2 GB RAM... :(

Spore - As mentioned by others. A sandbox game minus the game is just a sandbox. I am not 4 years old.

Empire: Total War - Bizarrely, I like this a lot more than M2TW but haven't played it much at all. I start a campaign, then realize that the idiotic AI hasn't been fixed 10 turns later and quit. Unless it is evenually fixed with patches/mods, this likely signals the end of the line for TW games for me.

Fallout 3 - Played through it once, which does amount to many hours of playtime, but it was a fraction of the amount of time I put into Morrowind and Oblivion. Haven't bought any of the DLCs and don't plan to. Unless there's a major mod that totally redoes the entire thing, I likely won't be back.

The Witcher - Tried to finish it twice. Both times, I got about 2/3 of the way through and just stopped. I love the world and I think the combat is very fun, but (even with the EE version) the dialog is just horrible and the sex stuff is over the top. This game goes so far overboard on language and sex, that it is no longer 'mature' and wraps back around to being childish. The swearing and sex seem incredibly forced and don't fit well into the storyline. It's an immersion-breaker for me and I get fed up with it before I can finish the game.

Mass Effect - I don't understand the praise on this one. There's no freedom in this game at all. Sure, I can pick which planet I want to go to, but once on a planet it's a straight NWN-style linear quest progression with the bog-standard good and evil choice of actions and dialog. Inventory management is the worst I have ever seen in a game (and that includes PS:T and FO1/2). The 'rover' missions are generic and totally uninspiring. I played it through once and haven't bothered picking it up ever since.

FarCry 2 - Currently installed on my HD and I just don't have the inspiration to finish it. The beautiful world is spoiled by endlessly spawning enemies and no sense of immersion whatsoever. A sandbox game where exploration is pointless and unrewarding. Never thought I'd see that one.

M2TW - bought it when it came out, went hunting for a better video card to play it, and just never got around to installing it. Read the local reviews and impressions here at the Org, and realized that it's probably not worth starting up (especially with my limited gaming time). Didn't buy the Kingdoms expansion, so I probably couldn't get any use from the existing mods.

Doom3 - played it some when it came out, but my PC was woefully inadequate at the time. This meshed with the video card search mentioned above. Once I upgraded, I just couldn't get back into it. I've come to realize that single player FPS's are just not my thing. Especially when duct-taping the flashlight to your firearm is not a built in option. :smash:

X3: Terran Conflict
I thought this might be a little better than the previous one (Reunion?), but ended up bailing on it after a week. The economic side is good, but flying the ships just isn't much fun. I just couldn't get past the slow feel of the ship's movement (there is a speed limit cap, and it's very low), the very small areas between jump gates, and the poor enemy pilot AI (just simple turn and burn, no real tactics). I've been forever spoiled by Independence War 2. I want that game engine for ship movement and combat, and the large feeling of open space, combined with X3's sandbox economic sim. Now that would be a good game. Why do all these game devs feel they have to recreate Wing Commander when they do space combat?

Dead Space
It was fun for about a third of the way into the game, learning how the weapons worked. It has a nice stripped-down UI that looks good and works well. But after the novelty of the slice-'n-dice weaponry wears off, it's just another boring corridor crawl/horror space survival FPS with an unimaginative, derivative plot. Also, I hate games like this that don't let me save whenever I want to, and force me to reach checkpoints where I can save (or the game auto-saves). In a shooter, that imposes an artificial tension-release dynamic. It's the game environment that should be making me nervous and cautious, not my distance from an arbitrary save point.

Neverwinter Nights 2
I loved the first NWN... it wasn't perfect, but for Baldur's Gate fans it was the next logical evolution, and the best of the user-made modules were very, very good. The default campaign in NWN2 wasn't bad, but what killed it for me was the klunky game engine. The camera was difficult to control even after it was patched up. Archery was useless due to the very short engagement/aggro distances. The game had endless pauses for loading.... almost every time you open or close a door. There were constant loads in the outside maps because the maps were ridiculously small in area. The mechanics of managing your party members were also clumsy. There was no way (in the default game without mods) to get a wizard through a dungeon door and into the back of the room, protected by the melee members of the party, without insane amounts of micro-management and character control swapping.

It probably didn't help that I had recently come off a 2 year binge with WoW and its huge, seamless game world and (relatively) smooth interface, but I just couldn't deal with the awful mechanics of the game engine. I got about halfway through the default campaign and quit. I never got around to seeing if any user-made modules were any good, which is a shame, because that was a great outlet for creative writing in the first NWN game.

Mass Effect
Well, it was okay. I can't quite get as far as saying I didn't like it, but I don't think it lived up to some of the hype I've seen here and elsewhere. The problems were noted in other posts, so I won't expand on it. It just seemed like some areas were rushed to get the thing out the door, and I hope they're spending a little more polishing time on the sequel.

Empire: Total War
A mixed bag.... the land battles are fun, although the units on each side are now more identical, which limits replay incentive (why would I want to fight another campaign where the main difference is the color of the uniforms?). I miss the wild disparity between armies that we had in RTW, and to a lesser extent M2TW. The diplomacy is either broken or CA can't figure out where it wants to go with that side of the game. Time will tell, and if they tighten up the diplomacy I'll still play it for a while. The naval battles are a joke, but they can be auto-resolved. This is a game niche where we desperately need some serious competition for CA.

Silent Hunter 3. Bought it, played it a little, decided it was just too much work. I don't dispute that it's a great game, just a little too intense of a sim for my blood.

Jesus Christ, there's a lot of blasphemous sentiment in this thread.

My list: Half Life: I got stuck in that alternate dimension place where there are a bunch of small floating platforms. I didn't know what to do (cuz it was a long time ago and I was pretty noobish, always played games on easy setting, etc.) so I jumped a long way down to a fairly large island with a cave, survived with like 5 health, and that was that. I plan on reinstalling and finishing this one day. As for the expansions, I think I finished Blue Shift but didn't get that far into the other one (where you play one of the soldiers sent in to clear out Black Mesa).

Half-Life 2: Got halfway through but then got caught up in CS:S (MMO's really do suck up time) and didn't manage to finish it. That was, uh...3 years ago now? I'll probably finish this one before getting to the original, though.

Sins of a Solar Empire: I...just didn't find this phenomenal, as so many others did. I think it was because of my genera disillusionment in RTS at the time, and the lack of any actual story or campaign. Definitely the latter played a big role in it. Why wasn't there a campaign? It would have made it 10 times better! What was the point of the opening cutscene? Why the backstory if it has nothing to do with the actual game? Also, the pirates were retarded - I had to DL a mod just to tone them down a bit, cause often enough the pirates would come out of deep space and raid all my planets on the edge of the solar system, even while I was thrashing the AI factions with my mad huge armadas (no unit cap would have been beautiful here). I spent a few dozen hours playing custom missions, found a patch months later and played for a day, and then just stopped.

Star Wars: Empire at War - I got it as a gift and installed it right away, expecting something more that what it was. I cant think of anything specific, but it just bored me, and I stopped playing after half an hour.

Age of Mythology - I find it to be rather shallow, and I dont like the wall building system. Never got into it...

Age of Empires III - AoE I and II are among my favourite games (I played the first one a couple hours ago, in fact) but ensemble really screwed up the third one. The feel of the game was all wrong, and reminded more of Rise of Nations than it did of Age of Empires. This ruined my opinion of Ensemble, and I doubt I shall ever play it again.

Metal Gear Solid 3 - I just cant get into the game, and I stopped playing about halfway through.

Rise of Nations - I just dont like it for some reason. Maybe the music, maybe the whole city system, I just dont know why I dont like it.

Medieval II Total War - I do have fun with it and all, but it just makes me miss the original, so I dont play it very much. Also, I have to complain that my allies always attack me unless I give them money, and that I cant play an extended "conquer everything" campaign without boredom becomming a rampant issue.

Starcraft - Okay, I liked it and installed it, but my brother broke the disc after only a week of having it, so I didnt get to fully experience it...:furious3:

Shogun Total War - Vista hates me.

Medieval Total War, that's right the first one. I know most of you consider it a religious document. But I don't. Here's one of those sequels that has all the originals problems, but due to other changes (setting, # of factions), amplefies all of them. I'm talking about the strategic game not the tactical one. I never got into the tactical TW game. Even though post Rome it was actually playable. Not like the counter intuitive mess of Shogun and Medieval. First the AI was horrible. Stiff, robotic, and highly predicable. And it was totally fixated on you all the time. Shogun had all these problems, but as the ultimate goal was being top dog in Japan. I can forgive. But in Medieval where supremacy isn't the goal, CA purpetrated their most henious crime against the end user. Glorious achievements. My biggest hatred if MTW is GA mode. Objective that don't make sense, forcing you into wars with 3 or 4 factions at once because conquering is 5 provinces for 1 GA point. And objective that change without you being told. I shudder when ever someone demands this be brought back. It's dead, and rightly so. Senate missions in RTW and guild/noble missions in M2TW may not be perfect, but they are in every way superior to GA mode.

Starcraft: Trying to cover up a poor RTS design with a half baked sci-fi story ripped from the pages of Gamesworkshop. No thanks.

Warcraft 3: Solid proof that Blizzard is not capable of producing an actual RTS game. Just a bad RTS/RPG hybrid. Brimming with infirior story lines and fancy FMV cut scenes. Stick to MMO's your actually good at that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lars573

Starcraft: Trying to cover up a poor RTS design with a half baked sci-fi story ripped from the pages of Gamesworkshop. No thanks.

Warcraft 3: Solid proof that Blizzard is not capable of producing an actual RTS game. Just a bad RTS/RPG hybrid. Brimming with infirior story lines and fancy FMV cut scenes. Stick to MMO's your actually good at that.

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Cause tyranids are zerg, right? And Eldar are Protoss?

Yeah, of course.

Warcraft 3 and Starcraft are the biggest RTS's out there. Add in C&C and you've got the RTS genre.

Starcraft has 3 races, warcraft has 4 and heroes. Heroes are a crucial element.

Stick to the MMO based in the warcraft universe that depends on the other games, that they hadnt released yet?

Do not blaspheme against Blizzard. They made Lost Vikings, Diablo and Rock 'n' Roll racing.

Oh, and Warcraft. :2thumbsup:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I hate anyone who likes WoW

I blaspheme plenty. WC rips off the Warhammer fantasy battles you know. Alliance is a wierd combo of the the empire, Dwarfs, and high elves, The undead are the old Undead (before they split them into vampire counts and tomb kings), The Orcs are the Greenskins, and the Night Elves are the Wood elves. And Warhammer rips-off D'n'D, which ripped off LOTR. Still doesn't make Warcraft worth 0.0001% of the praise it gets. I couldn't even bring myself to actually play the missions after a while. I just cheated for victory. I outgrew it, same with AOE. Which is where all of WC design elements come from.

Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. It's a rare game that I purchase and don't finish, I don't spend those dollars on games lightly, but I could just never bring myself to knock this out. The whole hero dynamic bothered me so much, and it was even stronger in the expansion than the original. In fact the missions become just one big 'exploit X super-ability, wait for it to recharge, and repeat' mess until I want to tear my hair out. I will admit that I tried out WC3 MP and got severely annoyed by it before I bought Frozen Throne, so that probably hurt my desire to finish it as well.

Black and White. I had fun with this game. I genuinely thought it was cute to develop a little pet into a big critter, and throwing villagers around cracked me up for a good while. Then I got to the part that was broken. You couldn't pass it (Except under certain completely luck based circumstances) and the patch took months to come out. I didn't feel like waiting, so I uninstalled and never looked back.

The X-com series. I bought these out of a bargain bin knowing that they're legendary in some circles, but I've just never managed to sit down and install them to play. Maybe someday?

GTAII: San Andreas. I installed it. I played for awhile. I got to the point where my character has to get on a treadmill in order to progress...

I own a treadmill. It isn't fun, but actually getting on it myself would make me feel better and maybe even get me laid, so...

This game is still installed on my laptop because I love driving around sometimes, but I actually like the driving better in Vice City, so I never play it and I've never progressed past the treadmill 'game.'

I'm sure I have others, can't think of them at the moment.

:egypt:

Quote:

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I blaspheme plenty. WC rips off the Warhammer fantasy battles you know. Alliance is a wierd combo of the the empire, Dwarfs, and high elves, The undead are the old Undead (before they split them into vampire counts and tomb kings), The Orcs are the Greenskins, and the Night Elves are the Wood elves. And Warhammer rips-off D'n'D, which ripped off LOTR. Still doesn't make Warcraft worth 0.0001% of the praise it gets. I couldn't even bring myself to actually play the missions after a while. I just cheated for victory. I outgrew it, same with AOE. Which is where all of WC design elements come from.

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In your opinion. :wink:

All for PC:
ACW: The Blue and the Grey by AGEOD: Played the tutorial and never played it since. Heck, it's still on my computer. I liked it but never got back into it :embarassed:

Starcraft- Eh... never got into it. Plus the fact it was a ripoff off of Gamesworkshop turned me off nearly completely.

World of Warcraft: Got this because a friend said I should try it out... *yawn* lame, boring, generic. Waste of my time when I could've played other games or read a book. Most other mmo's like Lineage also give me the same feelings. The only good mmo's I've played were Planetside and WWII Online.

Madden Football: After the first 4 games it was boring. Playing against friends was okay but I smashed em every time. Still a boring game nonetheless. Basically sports games in general bore me.

Medal of Honor: Mostly the entire series got boring. Never played mp as CoD 2 and United Offensive were my favorite mp games.

Combat Mission Series (the first 3 games, CMBO, CMBB, & CMAK: All classics and I've played them quite a bit. But they are very time consuming and I play in spurts, especially the HUGE scenarios, thos take forever :no:

GTA Vice City: Got this for my PC from a friend and never installed it, let alone taking it outta the box! And I don't think I'll ever load it up. In fact the GTA series is quite tedious and boring. Tried to get into it but the only fun was using cheats to cause everyone to fight and get the tank.

GalCiv II or something like it: Got this after hearing a LOT about the series. Was bargin bin so I figured it wouldn't hurt. Got really frustrated after a while and just uninstalled and never tried again. My next "classic" is X-Com tho I hope it works for Vista :sweatdrop:

Warcraft 3 was pretty pants tbh.

World Of Warcraft: Hate it.

Starcraft: Couldn't even beat the easy AI, don't like these fast paced rts games.

C&C Tiberium Wars: Didn't like it.

Red Alert 3: All that hype, i just disliked it....

(Most opininons are: I dislike it :idea2:)

Hotel Giant : that's not a game

Industry Giant : can't make it work, even under XP, on several machines. Shame, as Transport Giant is nice(and music awesome)

Great Invasions : 250 hours the grand campaign? Mamma mia, should never have bought that.....

War in the Pacific : see great invasions. Though 250 hours is a very low estimate, there.....

The Guild 2 : spending my time watching my hero walk? No thanks.

Combat Mission : Shock Force : hell, the first mission I could never pass through on easy :skull:

Empire Earth II - Just don't feel like playing it. :shrug:

Medieval 2 Total War and Kingdoms - I only keep them because games in Throne Room use them.

Battlefield 2 - Haven't had the urge to blow something up recently.

Imperial Glory - Occasionally I reinstall it to play some naval battles but that's it.