What are some games that you highly anticipated, only to be disappointed when you actually got your hands on it? My greatest disappointment was Phantasy Star Universe on the PS2. Apart from the technical issues, particularly draw distances, the game just wasn’t as fun as any of the previous games in the series for me. I should mention that I only played the single player version of the game. The disappointing part was that even their previous game in the series (in all its versions), Phantasy Star Online, though being designed as an online multiplayer game actually had a decent single player mode as well. Phantasy Star was until that point, a series that I trusted blindly for its quality due to its track record. Until PSU, I’d have bought any platform for the series if it were to be exclusive to that platform.
Another disappointment, albeit not anywhere as great as the one mentioned above, was with Halo 2. Overall I liked the game, but they didn’t include the level which they showed in the E3 prior to releasing the game (or perhaps the E3 before that). If this sounds familiar to anybody, it’s video where Master Chief is in a Pelican aircraft with Avery Johnson and some ODSTs. Some of the marines recommend that Johnson aborts his mission, but Johnson decides to continue anyway. The video introduced dual wielding and ended in a chase through tunnels where Master Chief is being pursued on Ghosts. I’ll post the video if I’m able to track it down.
Well, these are two of the disappointments I can think of now. I’ll post more as/if they come to mind.
Another one (or rather two) that I thought of are Transformers War for Cybertron and Transformers Fall of Cybertron. They were both good games overall, but I felt that their potential was held back by being too much like a random shooter. The major drawback being that both games required you to ration ammo and go out of the way to find it. So a significant (not overall, but still enough to make it annoying) part of the game would be used up finding ammo. I found that this hurt the pacing of the game. I would have preferred if they had a system like the one seen in Hunter The Reckoning, where you had base weapons with infinite amount of ammo, but you could pick up more powerful weapons that had limited amounts, and would therefore have to ration their use.
For both games they could have also made better use of the transforming mechanic, but otherwise that aspect was still fun. Another thing I felt they could have improved with the latter game was that the choice of characters was limited, whereas in the first game, they let you choose from a few different characters for each level.
I found disappointing that besides the Skill Stick which was introduced in NHL 07, nothing much really changed in NHL 08. It was a Roster Update. With the Skillstick your Right Stick became like a Hockey stick. By pressing up you would do a wrist shot, moving right or left would move your stick in that direction, by pressing down and pressing up you could wind up a slapshot. That was great in NHL 07, but NHL 08 had no significant change.
The general gameplay was very poor compared to the Pro Evo on PS2. I didn’t like the online section either, compared to it the new Fifa was excellent. I was always a pro evo guy but then I switched. The prv evo on PS2 tho…Now that game was awesome. I still play it when I dust my old ps2 off
