Roundtable: Worst game-buying decisions

Welcome one, welcome all, to this week’s Roundtable discussion.  After a couple of heady topics, we’ve decided to go a little light on you this week.  The topic – what is the one game you regret buying the most?

Enjoy, and don’t forget to join in the discussion in the comments section below.

Andrew: Alright guys, I know you’ve all got one – what’s that one game that you played for an hour and ended up throwing to the ground in frustration and dissapointment, never to pick it up again?  For all the reviews you read and the research you did, what was the one time you feel like you really got burned by a game?

Justin: The game I regret buying most has to be Romance of the Three Kingdoms II, for the Super NES.  My god, how awful this game was. A friend and I bought it for $70, which was absolutely ludicrous at the time.  We figured, cool box art, expensive game, it must be good right?  Well, being 8 years old probably didn’t help but I think it’s still the only game we played for less than a day and never ever popped it back into our NES.  The sting of knowing we could have bought two games instead of this made it hurt even more.

Andrew: For me it was FarCry 2.  My brother bought it for me for Christmas, on my own recommendation.  I played it for an hour on Christmas day and NEVER touched it again.  That game was ridiculously bad.  Games aren’t “open world” if that world is about the size of my back yard.  It was also a really good example of really BAD storytelling.  I’m sorry, but the need to keep finding more medicine to combat the main characters raging case of Malaria is not a hook.  Once you start, the story does nothing to engage the player, nothing to keep them playing at all.  So I didn’t.  I traded it in for a used copy of Dead Space and was better off for it.

A few months later one of my roomates actually went to Africa and actually contracted Malaria and actually was in a hospital for 2 weeks straight after returning.  Actually.  My first conversation after he got back went something like this:
Me: “When are you coming back to the apartment?”
Roomate: “As soon as the doctors let me leave.”
Me: “Doctors?  Wait don’t tell me – another international hooker story?”
Roomate: “No.  Malaria.  Asshole.”
Me: “Bah you’re fine.  I played that game.  Pound some pills and buck up.”
Roomate: “This is serious, Andrew.”
Me: “You’re right, we should never speak of FarCry again.  When you get back I will have eaten all your food.”

Cam: Unlimited Saga was purchased on a whim my freshman year of college for 20 dollars. Now, there is a popular theory that if something is 20 dollars or less, it might as well be free. But in this case, I probably should have just made an origami version of whoever designed Unlimited Saga out of the 20 dollar bill and burned it in effigy. I think in my mind I got the game mixed up with Xenosaga somehow (which I later bought for 20 dollars AKA for free). The game is just trash. The story and characters are stupid. There is no world map. The combat is awful. You move around on hexagon tiles until you hit an enemy or something like that, and I don’t even remember if there was any background art while you were moving. See, I can’t even remember the game. I wiped it from my memory. I don’t know if I still own the game, but I hope not because that would be embarrasing.

I learned a valuable lesson from that experience though. No game studio is infallible, not even your favorites that have never let you down. I still love Square(Enix), but I was more careful after that. Everybody makes mistakes. Aside from just bad games that you shouldn’t have bought, have you guys had any big let downs like that, say from a favorite franchise or developer?

Beau: This isn’t exactly a bad game (I’ll never know since I didn’t get to play it), but back around high school or so, I got Age of Mythology as a gift from my parents. I went to install it on my computer and just got the message, “This game is not compatible with your system.” It wouldn’t even let me try to run it at maximum crappiness or anything. I was pissed, but figured I’d just exchange it for something I could play. Naturally, Best Buy decided to be giant assholes about their policy of opened games, and told me I could only trade it for another copy of the same thing. After I told them it was incompatible with my system. I was incredibly pissed.

Fortunately, my dad was even more pissed, and went to Best Buy and ripped them a new one until they just refunded his money, which he then gave me to get something else. Thanks, Dad! Screw you, Age of Mythology, for being completely incompatible with a fairly nice computer.

Justin: Any PC game can be hit or miss, especially back in the day when troubleshooting graphic issues and bugs we’re much more challenging (without high speed internet and websites devoted to specific games with specific problems).  I remember my brother gave me Ultima IX for X-Mas. I can still remember the nicely glossed box with the manual inside, reading it during the entire install, and then playing the game. It was an utter mess, lagged always, and I averaged 10 frames per second.  They patched it multiple times but by then I didn’t care.  I just wanted my avatar to die.

Dustin: I have to mention two separate occasions. The first is more recent and despite its popularity, I totally hated this game: Halo 3. I understood the buzz over the first two, as they are some of the most played multiplayer games ever, but honestly, I hated the third installation. I thought the story was pretty lame and I never had fun playing it online. I hate when a title seems rushed and then really leaves much to be wished for. I haven’t picked up my copy since the first week I got it, but I can gladly say that if it never came out, I wouldn’t have cared.

If I look at games from earlier in my gaming career, I’d have to state how incredibly disappointed I was with Perfect Dark Zero. Sure it got decent reviews, but after playing hundreds of hours of Perfect Dark on the N64, you could understand my disappointment when the multiplayer fun and deep story mode from the first version wasn’t really up to snuff.

Granted, most of you will probably say “Hey, these games were fine and were pretty popular!” But to me, that isn’t enough when you’ve got the reputation of a great series potentially at risk when moving up to a newer-generation system. That’s just my opinion, though. I think games should get better when you put in better graphics and the ability to store more information (features). Why downgrade just to make something shinier?

Justin: How many Atari games sucked you in with it’s cool box art only to disappoint when you popped it in. Like this.  You’re like, “Holy a cow, a giant dragon serpent. I can’t wait to play this!”  Then you pop it in and play as a stretch out Q-bert looking character.

Cam: I don’t remember that because I’m not old.

An interesting game for me is Chrono Cross. I bought it because at the time it was touted as a sequel to Chrono Trigger. If I recall correctly though, it really didn’t have many big connections to the original. But the main problem was that it wasn’t a very good game. It was weird though because it took me a while to realize that. I think I was playing through, hoping to find something that would bring back the great memories of CT, but eventually realized that there would be none. That and the fact that there were tons of characters – I had constant anxiety about who I was excluding from my party – caused me to never get drawn into the story. Also, the combat system was poop. So I was pretty disappointed. I think this was prior to the Unlimited Saga saga.

Brandon: I think one of my biggest disappointments was Final Fantasy 9.  The Final Fantasy series is my all-time favorite game franchise, so I have pretty high expectations.  In some areas, the game was great- fantastic FMV, the best of the series to that point easily, the combat was the same as always but I liked the return to a “class” system, the item combination system was cool, etc.  But the story just didn’t pull me in the way 7 or 8 did.  I really struggled through the game and finally quit before reaching the end of the third disc.  I have since had people tell me that FF9 is their favorite in the series and that it becomes really awesome in the 4th disc.  Well, I wouldn’t know.  I do wan’t to go back and play it again to see if I can make it to the end, but just never seem to have the motivation.

Justin: I had the exact same experience with FF9. Was too slow for me, the story dragged, and I never finished it.

Dustin: I actually liked FF9 more than FF8. I never finished 8, but I do recall beating Final Fantasy 9. There were some pretty fun mini-games in 9 at a fair that I spent a ton of time playing too.

Andrew: FF9 was a dissapointment for me too, though I certainly wouldn’t call it the worst game I ever bought.  I did finish it, after all.

However, one gripe I had with the game was how easy it was come disc 3 or 4.  I remember my favored party being completely tricked out, ultimate weapons and all, towards the end of the game.  I had never been able to get my characters that strong or that decked out in previous games.

Also, the main character, Zidane, had a tail.  A freakin’ tail.

I don’t remember the minigames in FF9 at all.  The best FF minigame has to be the card game in FF8.  That S was addictive.

Brandon: I didn’t really think it was all that easier than any other FF game.  I was level 99 with my main party in FF8 before disc 3 was over.  Once you figure out how to safely level in the best place (i.e. junction Death to your attacks and head on out to the Island of Monsters) its just a matter of time investment.  Did the same thing with FFX.

Also, that is false.  Blitzball > all.

Beau: Which game was Blitzball from? I get all the FFs mixed up. Blitzball was badass, I never finished the game because I just kept playing Blitzball.

Justin: Blitzball was from FFX.  And yes, it was a great minigame…I wouldnt even call it a miniame though since i spent hours upon hours playing it.

Dustin: I didn’t like FFX that much. Blitzball, more like Snorezball. I played it for a bit, but it was too slow for me, considering if I wanted to play a ball game, I could throw on an old FIFA or Arch Rivals.

Brandon: I completed multiple seasons in Blitzball.  If memory serves that was actually the only way to get Wakka’s ultimate weapon.

Andrew: Oh man.  How did I forget about Blitzball?  That game was terrific.  I think you’re right, Brandon it was the only way to get Wakka’s ultimate.

And with that, we’ve gotten a bit off topic.  Let us know about your most regrettable game-buying decision (or your favorite Final Fantasy mini-game) in the comments section!

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