To me, it seemed like the bigger the budget, the less I enjoyed a game.
He's the titles that disappointed ME personally (so don't take this personally).
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Don't confuse "disappointment" with "hated". I actually love Deus Ex... but I'm not even done with it yet, fully. I keep trying, trying very hard, to get "into the game" because I'm a huge fan of sci-fi, stealth, and Blade Runner-esque worlds. And yet... I keep feeling like the game doesn't want me to get close to anything and pushes me away. Many character (including the main character) sound so dull, wooden, and lifeless. The visuals hurt my eyes after long play sessions (why is EVERYTHING such a dull gold? Where's the variety of color?). I love the soundtrack, and I like freedom, but then the gameplay seems very directionless and neither the stealth nor the shooting feel up to snuff (especially after I've played so many Metal Gear games and Batman: Arkham Asylum/City). Couple that with a meandering, convoluted, yet hardly emotionally-engaging story, characters the game refuses to let me get to know better (when I want to), very bad bosses, and a very poor way to choose the ending of the game (just pick your button), and I was highly disappointed.
Marvel vs. Capcom 3 - I would add "Ultimate" to this list too, but I figured the first game was by far the more disappointing one. It was unbalanced, void of features and options, bare-bones, had a terrible online lobby (watch the cards hump each other to death) , and I'm not even a fan of the "throw black ink over everything" style they went with. Ultimate improved a few things, and added in my favorite Marvel hero Nova, yet the fact that Mega Man seems to be hated by Capcom so much, and isn't in the game STILL (despite being such a beloved icon), is possibly more disappointing than the actual game itself.
Elder Scrolls: Skyrim - WHAT?! This game? How dare he, right? Well, again, I'm not saying Skyrim is bad. No, no, no. Skyim is such a big game, so people's experiences are bound to be different. MY experiences, however, were VERY bad. For starters, I didn't even make it through the opening cutscene without the game glitching out and preventing me from arriving at my destination to begin the game, so I had to restart. Then weird things kept happening, like people's heads disappearing, quest-givers falling through the floor (and never coming back). I had at one time over 7 quests I was unable to finish due to glitches that prevented me from completing them. Include backwards flying dragons, no magic resistance, and, eventually, game-ending stutter, freezing, crashing, and unplayable lag and I threw my hands up in the air and said "screw it". Sure, there is a GOTY in that buggy mess SOMEWHERE, but I shouldn't have to wait on my ass for over a year for them to fix the damn thing that I paid them full price for just because they were in too much of a hurry to release it on that valuable 11-11-11 street date.... and yet I, the paying customer, had to pay for their greed. They should have delayed it, and I shouldn't have to restart my game because their testers suck at their jobs.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Here's a few games I played this year that didn't actually first come out this year, but I played them, so I think that counts.
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (3DS release) - I'm complaining about a free game I got as a Nintendo Ambassador. Is that allowed? I think so, because I adored 99% of this game. There was one mechanism I utterly despised though: permanent character death. Granted, that has always been a staple of the series, I'm told, but this was my first Fire Emblem game and I was eager to see what the fuss was about. Let me tell you, nothing is as frustrating as being locked in a three-hour battle, making it towards the very end, mid-way through the game, when your favorite character whom you're building levels and relationships with, takes a random critical hit from a badguy and gets killed... making you either restart the whole damn battle and lose all your progress or soldier on without a character that was important to the story. No resurrection spells, no return in the next battle... only two options are "restart" or "let him die". That may raise the stakes of every battle... but it also prevents the game from being as fun as everything else makes it out to be.
Metroid: Other M - I played this last year. I thought I'd give it another fair shake, free from my initial rage. That was a mistake. I hate this game even more than I did before. It's a blight upon the Metroid name that drags Samus through the mud and makes me both furious and depressed that nobody involved in the game saw any problem with this. I hate all the characters, I hate the authorization system, I hate the controls, I hate the voice acting, I hate the story, I hate the (lack of music), I hate the bland, linear hallways, I hate the generic enemies, I hate the game-breaking dodge move, I hate the magic ammo refill mechanic that makes item collecting pointless, I hate the goes-nowhere Deleter subplot, I hate the pixel hunts... there is so much the game does wrong, I still keep expecting to wake up from a bad dream and hear that it was just a nightmare and that nobody is THAT stupid as to screw up a Metroid game THAT badly. Yet, well, there it is, and there it remains, stinking up the Metroid saga, and making Samus's 25th Anniversary this year one of the most depressing, under-appreciated, and barely acknowledged milestones for one of the most influential franchises of all time. I went back and played both Metroid 1 and Prime 1 to feel better about the series... but it sucks that Other M remains the last word in from Nintendo until a new game gets announced. Samus deserved a better game.
Those are my disappointments of the year. Thanks for reading.
