We’ve had lots of good games this year, but we’ve had some disappointments too. Mirror’s Edge had more guys with guns than was good for it instead of smooth parkour action. Spore turned out to be an great creature creature with a mediocre metagame built around it.
Letdowns go with the video game hype machine, and even veteran players call it wrong sometimes. Here’s a few games that have stuck with me as being memorably disappointing. They aren’t the worst, but they’ve made it to the list for not living up to their potential.
Devil May Cry 2
The first Devil May Cry was a breakout game for the PlayStation 2. It showed what 3D action games could really be by making every moment as awesome as possible. In fact, the whole in-game reward stystem was based around how stylishly you were playing, dodging attacks and mixing up your movies. Sweeping an enemy up into the air and juggling them with your pistols is more than encouraged. You can’t just pick up a new sword in Devil May Cry; It has to whirl through the air, impale Dante to the ground, after which he opens his eyes, pulls himself up over the hilt and subjugates the demonic sword by sheer will.
The wisecracking half-demon Dante was the star of the show, whose response to a magma spider’s threats is to casually thump on his carapace and say he hopes the boss has something inside there. The game was also murderously tough, and beating it even on normal difficulty required mastery of Dante’s moves.
DMC 2 felt like a shadow of its predecessor, perhaps because it was developed by a a different team within Capcom than the first one. Whatever the reason, the second incarnation of Dante was far from his trash-talking cocky self. Oddly taciturn, his defining characteristic was that he supposedly flipped a coin to make decisions. It might work for Two-Face, but not for Dante.
Critics decried the new game mechanics too. The challenge of the first game had been replaced by moves you could spam over and over to win.
For those reasons, most fans of the DMC series like to just pretend that the second game never happened, pointing newcomers instead to the third game that represented a return to the difficult, stylish form.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time brought the old DOS classic into the modern 3D age. The game remains a staple on best game EVAR lists, and for good reason.
The game was a new take on the platforming genre. The Prince flowed along cliffs and support with ease and style. The game introduced an innovative time-rewind system, where you could pull yourself back from a fatal fall or another mishap. The characters, both the Prince and the princess Farah, were rich and likable. Even the narrative frame exuded cleverness and charm, which had the title character narrating the story to an unseen audience and saying “Wait… that’s not how it happened” if he died in your game.
The combat wasn’t so great, being more of a breather from the platforming sections of the game than anything else. For the sequel, Ubisoft set out to patch up this percieved shortcoming.
The result was a game with genrally better combat, but without the charm that sold the original. The likeable but troubled Prince was replaced by someone that Penny Arcade famously described as smouldering with generic rage. Fights had enemies spewing blood instead of the sand creatures of the first game. The Persian-influenced soundtrack was replaced with forgettable hard rock.
Ubisoft hinted that they took the negative response of the sequel to heart with the new game released this season, simply called Prince of Persia. The producer specifically said in a video clip that the new protagonist doesn’t smoulder with generic rage. Warrior Within, however, remains as the kind of sequel you wish you’d never experienced, just so your memories of the original could remain unsullied.
Two Worlds
Unlike the previous two titles, both of which disappointed by failing to live up to their excellent predecessors, Two Worlds disappointed by being an original game that was just really, really bad.
Two Worlds was the golden hope of those who wanted a co-op version of Morrowind. That idea had serious potential.
Unfortunately, as soon as you loaded it up, it started flashing warning signs at you that it should not be played at all, similar to the way poisonous frogs have bright colors to warn off animals that might consume them.
It started at the character creation screen. You could adjust the colors of your character’s skin, hair, eyes, etc., but the preview window was bathed in a harsh yellow light, obscuring your design. When you loaded up the game, it was entirely possible you wouldn’t recognize the person you just made.
If you managed to make it past the awful intro dialog to the first combat scene, you might notice some oddities. If you you nock an arrow in a bow, you’ll keep it pointed at the nearest goblin, who is how swinging and whiffing at you because the bow model is keeping him at arm’s length, as if you were palming his forehead.
Let’s say you ignored all that and soldiered grimly on to try co-op over Xbox Live. You and a friend bought the game for that reason, after all. Co-op can redeem the roughest of games.
You’d be disappointed there too. At launch, the online servers were abysmally slow, leading to speculation that only the European servers were working. It’s unclear if this was the case, but it was hard to tell the difference. You might get a game going only to freeze on “trying to connect”-type messages as soon as it started. “Unplayable” encapsulates the experience.
There were many slumped shoulders and gathered reciepts for refunds when Two Worlds came out. All the potential in the world couldn’t hide the final product.
Had your heart broken by a game? Let’s hear it in the comments section.
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