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2007's Ten Biggest Gaming Letdowns
Game|Life offers up an anti-top-ten list, noting the three blog authors' biggest disappointments from 2007. Chris Kohler's biggest letdown echoes my own feelings on this topic: "No LittleBigPlanet. PlayStation 3's software library got significantly better this holiday, but there's no killer app. I honestly don't know if LittleBigPlanet would have been one. But I think it's going to be mine. It's going to be the thing that glues me to PlayStation 3... when it ships. I was all ready to start building worlds and sharing them with my friends and generally start being a jackass by now, but it won't happen until next year -- late next year, if you believe the rumors. I hope they're not true. And I do hope LittleBigPlanet sets the planet on fire when it releases." Any gaming 'event' this year an epic fail for you?
To begin, I'll echo the biggest disappointment as being the Wii's lack of anything good from companies not named Nintendo. A number of my friends are regretting the purchase of the Wii because of this reason, wishing they'd bought a 360 instead. Surely having both is best but I certainly haven't felt so much of the same sentiment from 360 owners I know.
Anyway, my disappointments:
1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.
2) Lack of availability of the Wii. I'm not used to having to put so much work into acquiring a $250 piece of technology one year after its initial release; my mornings are usually quite busy. As a result I still don't have one.
3) FFXII: Revenant Wings (DS). I expected much better than what it turned out to be. Even looking at videos of the game on IGN didn't quite get across the abysmal pacing and unbelievable lack of variety in this game. Its supposed depth doesn't amount to anything in practice.
4) Mario 3v3 Hoops (DS). I think this came out in 2007. If not then nevermind. Anyway this game is a giant turd.
5) ArenaNet slowly turning Guild Wars into a grindfest. The one MMORPG that let me play PVE at my leisure and not "fall behind" decided that it's a much better idea to just go into WoW me-too mode rather than stick with the original tenet of skill over time played. The Eye of the North expansion released this year completed the transformation.
6) Bioware going to EA, Blizzard merging with Activision. Let's just say that these *cannot possibly be good things* considering Bioware and Blizzard haven't exactly been in need of an improvement in any way. (Well, Blizzard graphically perhaps but Activision doesn't help there.)
7) Forza Motorsport 2. Great racing engine, cool graphics, good customization, good online mode. But... what is with no music during races? Or having to play your ass off to unlock even the ability to *purchase* a lot of the cars? This isn't supposed to be a 100-hour RPG, it's a freaking racing game. Nobody wants to spend days driving cars they don't like to get at cars they do; there's no storyline or change in gameplay to keep you interested in the meantime. Seems the developers forgot they were making a *game* rather than a training sim for racing teams to study tracks.
I like basketball!!1!
Boy is it pretty. And smooth. And climbing things is fun for the first half-hour or so.
... okay. Actually everyone's good except for Altair himself, but I have heard worse.
The voice acting is
But seriously, I was looking forward to being immersed in the role of an assassin stalking his target patiently, taking just the right moment to strike, then blazing a bloody trail out of town. But nope, I get to listen to "Thief! I'll have your hand for that!" over and over and over and over and over again until I get sick of it and decide to have my two-dozenth very high-profile swordfight in the middle of the street -- which the guards will mercifully forget all about when I walk away for a couple minutes to climb the next Generic View Point Tower.
Talk about a wasted opportunity.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I do not own Halo 3 and I have no intention of buying it or a 360 but I'm going to defend it anyway. The whole "640p" thing was because it renders to two 640 row framebuffers which are then composited and slightly scaled vertically to achieve some cool lighting effects. People were only able to notice the slight reduction in vertical resolution by counting pixels on framegrabs. Until I see a study showing that people are even capable of distinguishing 720p and 1080p video sources (not still images), I will continue to believe that all of this fretting over resolution is nothing but fanboy wankery.
That's a challenge to all of the resolution whores out there. I'm sure someone out there can put together a simple double-blind study to test this. Get some volunteers and set up a game to play a demo in 720p or 1080p. Don't let them pause the demo, or get close enough to count pixels, just have them sit an appropriate distance from the screen and ask them which sample was higher resolution. Call it a hunch, but I predict that less than 60% of the volunteers will get it right. If you somehow manage to test "640p" versus 720p I don't see how it could be significantly higher than 50% for a sufficiently large sample.
What about all the games SEGA churns out.
But all in all, Pojut is 100% right. If you're going to bash a game for no reason, bash a game that isn't 4 months old. Hell, there are far more worthy targets out there if you're going to sit and unjustly bash old games. Bioshock (an excellent game, I might add) didn't live up to 1/4 of the hype heaped upon it (no game could have), so from a certain perspective, it's by far the most disappointing game of the year. Why don't you pick on that one while you're at it? I'll tell you why, because you're another idiotic anti-Halo fanboy. I've seen very reasonable arguments put forth as to why Halo isn't good, but yours isn't one of them.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Anyone that played Morrowind before and then Oblivion saw the huge difference.
Morrowind was a PC game that got ported to console. Oblivion was was a Console game ported to PC. A "port" as commonly known with PC players. And as most "Ports" it sucked in the same ways like them. The RPG part dumbed down overall with more emphasis on fights, made more lowest common denominator accessible for the "casual gamers", had simplified controls due to the lack of keyboard and mouse, horrible user interface, again due due bad res of the typical console "monitor" (NTSC TV) and controls.
It might have helped Bethesda's pocketbook (bigger market, easier to sell the bonus quests due to missing moddability on consoles, etc) but it made the game itself worse in the eyes of (PC)gamers and especially long time ElderScrolls players.
No it's not a full FPS (yet) but it certaily is a lot less of a RPG like it was.
Bungie could only manage to get Halo 3 to run at 640p resolution and not the minimum standard 720p for real next gen games.
Wait, what? How is that a "minimum standard" for "real next gen games"? You know that the Wii's maximum is 480p, right? If you consider Halo 3 to be even borderline "next gen," then you can't say Metroid Prime 3 isn't, as its single player mode blows Halo 3's away.
Mine was Unreal Tournament III - the textures and graphics are noisy and the interface clumsy.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
All of the Halo games have had wicked awesome explosions, sure. But they also have a deeply engrossing storyline, fantastic multiplayer, good AI, and unsurpassed world physics. Halo 3 is the best game in the series and was my favorite shooter (and many other people's) of the year. By no stretch of the imagination was it a bad game. Star Wars is full of light sabers and lasers - but obviously, if you look at it more closely, there's an intricate storyline with fantastic characters (in Episodes 4-6).
Sure, BioShock and Portal are arguably better games than Halo 3 but they didn't sell nearly as well. The reason? Exposure. Most people haven't even heard of Portal. There certainly aren't Portal trading cards, helmets, action figures, and TV commercials.
For christ's sake, you can't even BUY Portal on a console -- at most, an hour long game -- without buying a $60 package that includes another game I've already beaten (Half Life 2) and two expansion packs I don't want. If Joey asks for Portal for Christmas, his mom won't be able to find it in a store.
Sales figures are a result of many other forces besides the quality of the game itself, and that's reality. Microsoft went to bat for Halo 3 with their pocketbook, executed very well, and they reaped the rewards from it. BioShock and Portal did not pony up, and since most people don't know what they are, they aren't purchased at nearly the same rate. It has nothing to do with the average American only liking "wicked awesome explosions."
rm -rf
I remember when Spore was the next huge thing to hit gaming, and every game show had breathless gamers watching previews. Then we waited. And waited. And waited.
Years passed.
Still no Spore! It's an ambitious game, yes, but once you hit the third or fourth year of development, it starts seeming like it'll never get here. Games with extremely long dev times have a history of disappointing. I reckon "No Spore This Year" should be on the list as a disappointment of 2007.
Wither Spore?
I think it's more likely that you bought an HDTV for the sake of being able to say you have an HDTV and so you fret over things like the resolution of games because admitting that it matters little threatens the rationalization of your purchase and makes you feel like a fool.
I'd say you're both a little right. I bought an HDTV after seeing my friend play a game on his. The picture was so clear and nice I couldn't help but be impressed. So it's not entirely unreasonable that there IS a difference between HD and standard and that difference is noticeable. But on the other hand, we're talking about a difference between 80P of resolution. Honestly, while I can tell the difference between 420P and 720P fairly easily, I struggle sometimes to tell the difference between 720P and 1080P. So crying over 80P seems pretty dumb to me.
Wow, lots of points to make. I'm lazy so I'm not gonna quote or anything, but here goes.
The people who can't see the difference but still care are idiots. I know that's not the most logical response, but it's the only way I can seem to rationalize a stance like that. In my opinion, elitism like that is nauseating. As for the 5 or 6 people who CAN see the difference, good for you. That's quite an impressive skill. However, if a lapse of 80P is enough to ruin a game for you, maybe it's more of a curse than a skill. Or maybe you're just being ridiculous.
The Half-life episodes weren't 8 hours each. I don't know if you were drunk and thought you were playing when you were really watching Ben Hur, but I can assure you that I beat both episodes in under 6 hours. Episode 1 was 2 ½ hours, Episode 2 was 3 ½. They were great games, but they were short, plain and simple. If you add in Portal, the original single player content of the Orange Box added up to about 7 ½ hours of gameplay.
As for 50+ hours, show me a FPS game that's taken you fifty hours to beat. Hell, show me a "good" one that's taken you 20 hours to beat. I've played a lot of FPS games, and it's rare to find one that lasts more than 12 hours.
Yes, no dedicated servers and a 16 player limit is a bummer, which is simply a testament to how much fun the multiplayer portion of Halo is that it can be remarkably fun and exciting even without these features.
Lastly, I don't even know why I bothered replying to you, since I just read that you have never played Halo 3 and never will. You know, one time my brother and my brother-in-law were having a heated debate about a certain type of automobile. I know very little about automobiles and hadn't driven it. So you know what I did? I went and watched TV. Then next time you feel like participating in a discussion about a game you've never played and know very little about, go watch TV instead.
Deus Ex?
sigfault. core dumped.