The "Games that deserved better" thread

'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - Sith Lords' fits the underdeveloped/failed criteria. I still enjoy the game for what it is, but it's so easy to see all of the missed storyline opportunities in it. I always hoped that we'd see a director's cut/finished version of the game that restored all of the planned storylines and fixed the gameplay issues/bugs.

'Age of Conan'. It was released too early with incomplete content and showstopping bugs. Even though the content got added and the gameplay issues got resolved, the game itself never recovered from the disastrous launch. I had a tremendous amount of fun with this game for the year that I played it, and I'm told that it's still chugging along with a very loyal following, but it could have been so much more.

Eternal Darkness, Beyond Good and Evil, and Clive Barker's The Undying.

The first was a relatively minor success financially, but major success critically. Silicon Knights have stated that they are interested in persuing more stories set within that world, but given their other projects and obligations...It's just sad to see a quality gem like this languish. It still holds up amazingly well for being on the Gamecube. Tis rich in lore, atmospheric, and chuck full of Lovecraftian goodness.

The second I believe is a little more obscure, but it's got such a lovely, charming world with a likeable female protagonist and hilarious anthromorphic side characters. Game still is beautiful, and there was a sneak peak of a teaser trailer awhile back....but so far, nada. Sort of overshadowed by Prince of Persia, but worth seeking out.

Clive Barker's The Undying is officially "The Best Game No-one Played." I adore the whole scrying mechanic, I love the art and the characters and I really wanted to see the story continue as it was left wide open for a sequel. This is Indiana Jones meets gothic horror, and it is delicious.

That's a case of the property deserving better. The game got exactly what it deserved. Releasing a game where items with stat bonuses don't actually improve your stats? That's downright unforgivable.

Really liked last year's THE SABOTEUR a lot. It's GTA in Nazi-occupied France, but I had an awful lot of fun with it.

100% agreed. It took them the better part of 6 months to get all of the skills and feats working right, and another 6 months of tweaking to get the balancing issues fixed. None of the endgame content was working right for at least 6 months either.

They should have completed their content (Tortage was great...everything else was lacking) and spent some more time rigorously testing the product to ensure that it didn't go out the door with any serious defects. The fact that we received a product that continuously crashed from memory leaks is absurd. Whoever did their QA on this project should be shot.

I'm fairly certain the developers were given a drop-dead date and had no choice but to release what they had. If the rest of the game had had the polish that Tortage had, I'd still be happily playing it.

Wind Waker. The game's had a bad rep since its announcement in 2002 thanks to insecure manchildren but it has held up much better than Ocarina of Time (or even Twilight Princess for that matter) and is probably my favorite 3D Zelda. The visuals are astounding, the fighting system is engaging, and the Triforce shard hunt... well, I personally find it exciting and a good use of the world but it's definitely the single most divisive part of any Zelda game, including the gameplay of Zelda II. I think if you've been running around New Austin in Red Dead Redemption completing challenges I find it hard to believe that you dislike searching for Triforce shards. It's just a well-made game and one of the few games from the past decade that will still look good in 30 years. While I'd love to return to that world, the DS games are such shallow experiences that they barely hold my attention.

Prey. Part of my current obscene hatred for space marine shooters stems from the fact that this game got buried by Halo 3/Gears of War hype.

Alternative thread title: "Obsidian Games: A Retrospective"

I second the motion for Eternal Darkness though. (All pretty excellent picks, Wayward Woman.) It was a little unwieldy to play, but it was such an original idea, and considering how long it was in game development hell it's amazing it came together as well as it did. I think IGN actually overhyped it a bit before release but in retrospect it really does stand out.

That was a terrific game, with lots of iconic and fun moments. My favorite bit had to be towards the end, with all the Nazi officers committing suicide at the Eiffel Tower.

Freespace 2, which is the (IMO) best space-flight shooter ever made, but had the misfortune of being released when the PC-gaming public stopped caring about space-flight shooters. Beautiful graphics for its time, intense action and responsive controls. Few things in my gaming life have surpassed the feeling weaving around the lasers of two warring capital ships that are miles long while dogfighting and keeping enemy bombers away from my capital ship.

Also "DIVE DIVE HIT YOUR BURNERS PILOT" is one of my favorite in-game scares ever.

I don't know if it qualifies here, but I'm still peeved over what CAPCOM did with RE5. To go directly from the best to the worst entry in the series is a huge misstep. I'm dreading what's in store with RE6.

Resident Evil Zero would like a word in private.

You got me there. I had that and the remake of the original for the GC, but I never got around to playing either of them beyond the very beginning. Admittedly, I owned the GC just so I could play RE4, and little else.

Yikes! You've managed to remind me of RE:Survivor with that one. I've been successful in my pursuit of total amnesia of it until just now.

YES.

That game had so much potential. They needed to tone down the stupid hard difficulty and the super-bland environments, though.

I haven't played much of RE5, but wasn't its chief problem was that it didn't bother improving the gameplay from a 2005 game? Sure, RE4 holds up today, but the game was designed around how your character controlled whereas RE5 had you wishing you controlled like Nathan Drake.

I don't think it's a stretch. Considering how many revamps Civ's had over the years, it's kind of weird that Alpha Centauri hasn't had any love at all. I never caught it when it first came out so I'd grab a steam rerelease in a second.

A thousand times yes for Alpha Centauri.

I'm pretty sure Sid Meier's recently announced a sequel though. Where a sequel is I can only hope an updated version of the original follows.

Going waaaaaaaaaaaay back on this one: 'Star Voyager' on the Atari 2600. One of the selling points on the game was that it had a keypad accessory for it that was supposed to augment your controls beyond the simple joystick-with-red-button. Back in the day, this was kinda a big deal. Atari also claimed that they'd be releasing even more games in the future that would make use of this keypad in more interesting ways.

The reality was that you only used 4 of the buttons available on the keypad for 'Star Voyager', and there was really nothing that you did with the buttons that couldn't have been replicated by using the various difficulty tabs on the 2600 itself. No more games were ever released that made use of the keypad, so this OK (but not earth-shattering) game quickly went on 'the pile' next to 'E.T.' and other rarely played games.

The idea behind this game was good and I really wish that they had made better use of the capabilities of the keypad. This was a missed opportunity all around.

Control of your character wasn't my issue with the game, my problem was that it wasn't scary anymore. That's what I'm mainly looking for from a Survival Horror game, and RE5 didn't deliver in that area at all. I really had to force myself to finish it.

It wasn't just the scare factor though. RE5 managed to do everything 4 did but other than the graphics, it was worse(lots of minor quibbles that added up, for me). The forced co-op was a big mistake. If you were playing with the computer as your partner I felt it was downright bad at times.

Yep, this was a great game, and it's readily available from GOG for 5 bucks. I have it on my pc as we speak, and I installed the hi-def mods and texture upgrades to boot, so it looks fine in 1080p. My one and only gripe with the game is that it doesn't have any of the fun characterization of the Wing Commander games, and the mission briefings and storyline bridges are pretty damn dry and uninvolving. The combat rules, though.

Eh, not really. Steep learning curves, unforgiving save system, less than satisfying combat... still, the second one was damn pretty to look at.

Well, I don't recall WW ever selling poorly. But I know what you mean, among the 'hardcore' crowd, it's often met with derision. It's a beautiful game and I think one of the most stirring entries. Ocarina of Time was the libretto to WW's opera.

I think KotOR 2 goes without saying. I love it, but man. That poor game.

Some of these are really interesting, and I definitely want to check out the Saboteur on your recommendations.

I was hoping to see something on BG&E2 this year at E3....I'm not holding out hope till I see a release date.

The Unholy War for PS1. It was the best arena fighting game ever made, I guess it still is. It was like a much better version of Power Stone, with far more characters. Each character had great designs and unique powers. Such a blast this game, too bad it went completely unnoticed.

Also agree with Eternal Darkness. The game just had a great atmosphere, music, and story, the gameplay was good but not amazing in any sense. But still the game was mostly a winner.

Guardian Heroes on the Saturn. One of the best side scrolling games, plus its has an Rpg system. Anyone who has played this game knows why its so amazing.

It didn't sell poorly, all those fanboys who bitched about the game ended up buying the fucking thing anyway. But it wasn't just the asshats, even my aunt had a ton of issues with that game despite playing Ocarina almost every year. The game just got a bad rap for being different, which in 2010 is more than welcome in a Zelda game. I was so disappointed to see that Skyward Sword is shaping up to be more of the same with unnecessary motion controls. There's still hope for it, but I was really hoping for a New Legend of Zelda-type multiplayer game where it refined upon Four Swords without all the connectivity horseshit.

I really want to hunt down Eternal Darkness, but I'm afraid it's just going to end up in my 'Games that don't hold up' thread. I'll just remember it for the damn great experience that it was.

The Sabotuer's a great call.

Of course, the all-time champion is Planescape. Screw becoming a cult classic, we deserved an army of sequels and HD-rereleases. I can see a version of it in my head now, getting the Monkey Island HD+vocals upgrade... and it's awesome.

Full Throttle deserved ten sequels, an animated feature film and a TV series. I'm still desperate for the further adventures of Ben to this day...



I also think further RPG's in the Vampire:The Masquerade series could have been aces - that game's reach may have exceeded it's grasp, but when it worked it was a really immersive game. EDIT - because I also realise I'm talking about Bloodlines - fantastic game.

I'd join a modern day nazi party if their final solution included a Psychonauts sequel.

Urban Chaos (1999) for PC, Dreamcast and PS1.

Rough around the edges, but playing as a cop as the city descends into pre-millennium chaos fighting gangs (good combat system), driving cars and arresting people.

Yeah, lemme second both Vampire: The Masquerade and Urban Chaos, both of which I think are stored in boxes out in my garage. V:TM especially, as it had more than its share of intense, entertaining setpieces. That haunted hotel rivals the asylum level in Thief: Deadly Shadows. (which actually could be added to the list in its own right).

Did you ever play the first V:TM game? I would love to see more in the lines of Bloodlines....They just don't make them like they used to.

Graphics aside (and even then, they aren't that terrible) I would beseech you to load up Eternal Darkness. The Gamecube really does have a great amount of power behind its graphics. I may not be uber HD, but it works.

Maybe we should move to the Zelda thread, but I understand what you mean about WW and Zelda taking chances. OoT is great as a solid game of action and adventure, and Twilight Princess was fun and really built well upon that world...But there was something about WindWaker that was just...transcendent. That sort of melancholy beauty that lifts a game from being a game to art...

But we won't talk about that subject here.

Would've loved to have seen the original isometric Fallout 3. Bethesda's was fine, but it's just not the same..

Jacob, I think you probably mean Bloodlines. I played and enjoyed the first Vampire: The Masquerade but Bloodlines shits all over it in terms of quality. It's about time for it get a Planescape: Torment style resurgence and critical re-evaluation, I think.

For a game that did well despite the marketing efforts, Red Faction: Guerrilla. Prior to release, there was virtually no buzz (and the PR woman I met wasn't doing THQ any favors). For a game as fun as Guerrilla, it deserved to sell double of what it did. Still did well, but should have been an even bigger success.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah, of all the latest open world games that I tried, Guerrilla proved to be the most fun. Plus it actually let me disable autoaim completely.

Prototype deserves better than what it seems to get. It seems that everywhere I look on the net, somebody is bashing the game. Prototype has even been mentioned in a couple of Crackdown 2 reviews as being on the bottom of the open-world spectrum.

I'm sorry, but that's just retarded. Prototype may have had some rough edges, but it was still a bloody good time. It may have gone a bit overboard with the different special moves, but it also gave you freedom to tackle things in different ways. I really liked the original Crackdown (and sounds like the sequel is more of the same), but I would easily rank Prototype above it. To me, it seems like the game gets a bad rap for no reason.

I'll kick it old school with some 80s titles...

An oldie called The Eternal Dagger is the best RPG no one has heard of, and my second favorite platformer (after "Bruce Lee", which was popular) before the NES console came along was a fanstastic sci-fi shooter called Zybex.

An adventure classic called The King of Chicago had me and a group of friends hooked back in the late 80s, as every playthrough of that brutally hard game was a different experience.

And I'm still hoping someone will properly remake Racing Destruction Set and Mail Order Monsters.

I thought these games deserved more love back in the day.

If the hard drive on my old pc hadn't wonked out on me I definitely would have finished Prototype. I was maybe about a third of the way into it and was already moving around the city like fucking Superman. I loved it. I've re-installed it, but haven't gotten around to re-starting yet.

Thoroughly enjoyed Urban Chaos. The combat was superb for its time.