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[JimiD]

A long time ago, back in ZX spectrum days.

My brother and I played Side Arms on an Arcade Box.  It seemed like great fun, 2P sideways shooter with different guns, and combining together for a super character.

We saved up our pennies and bought it for the spectrum.  And boy was it disappointing.  In hind sight, Spectrum couldnt match the colours, but evens so, only 1P and the gameplay was dreadful.

[Deon]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Warcraft 3

It was a horrible RPG, but I bought it for the custom maps anyway, they where fun.

Bleh I meant RTS, the maps where amazing, but in the end it was full of bots and people going DOTA!

DotA, although certainly not my favorite map on Wc3, is still skillfully made. It was even more impressive that IceFrog was editing it with winmpq rather than the default or souped up world editor. As for the bots, are you talking about the autohosters (Which were awesome imo), or the channel/clan bots?

Although I agree that the RTS element was unsatisfying (Certainly not as good as Starcraft), as you said the maps were just outrageously great. I don't think there's an RTS from around its time where several popular maps had people making full-blown physics engines for third person shooters and dodgeball games. I can't really see where you're coming from to say that Wc3 is the worst game you've ever played, is all.

Yeah, Warcraft 3 was one of the best games I've ever played thanks to its editor and custom utilities. You could make any game out of it. My favourite maps were skillfully made atmospheric zombie survivals (like NotD: Aftermath) and 3rd person RPGs with good storylines and big worlds with lots of options and skills. Of course I do not mean those stupid zombie survival clones which swarm the game list or newbie-made RPG maps which do the same, but there were a few really good ones.

[Puck]

No, I guess it was Vietcong: Purple Haze. I played it on the console, so that might have had a lot to do with it. Rented it and it sat in my room for like three months before we remembered to return it.

I'm pretty sure there wasnt a console port of VC, and if there was, maybe that was the problem. Hold on! wiki says:

In addition to the original game, expansion pack Vietcong: Fist Alpha was released in February 2004, with some new features, and was bundled with Vietcong as Vietcong: Purple Haze for the PC. Vietcong: Purple Haze, was also released in October that year as an expanded version for PlayStation 2 and Xbox developed by Coyote Games. There was also an official add-on released called Red Dawn for free to download off the internet.

Different devs. Doesn't count. Seriously. Play the PC version. Would be a shame if you missed out on that because the xbox/ps2 versions were that shitty.

The original devs were actually getting paintball training (teamwork stuff and squad tactics, not this useless personal shooting skill training clueless people deem so important) and visited vietnam to get a better understanding of the wildlife and feel of the surroundings. The Vietnamese guy that does the scouting for the squad "Nguyen Somethingorother" is actually an hommage to their tour guide 

Vietcong on the PC is still one of the best shooters around, a lot of the modern crap still can't hold a candle to that game. Sure, the main complaint about the game was about the level boundaries. But back then, when it was released, they had to choose: either make a remotely jungley looking jungle with fixed boundaries or make it open-world style in a desert 

I really dig "realistic" shooters, and (I tell this story a lot, don't I) I have been playing Paintball on a semi professional level (got the paint sponsored on tournaments) for quite some time. So MAYBE my requirements for a shooter are different to the average gamer.

Here's what I really appreciate in VC:

It was the first shooter that was smart enough to actually decide whether you want to hold or toggle lie down/crouch/sprint. Tap the button, it acts as toggle, hold it and it stops the stance you initiated, once you release the button. Why do I need to go extra lenghts in other games to be able to get a toggle? In the worst case I have to write AHK scripts, and it still wont be as smooth as VC did it.

It was the first shooter that had proper cover usage. And I'm not talking about simply ducking or anything, no. The game looked where you were, in relation to the nearest cover, and once you used your iron sights, it tried to put your gun on to or next to the cover accordingly. Granted, it didnt work perfectly while lying down, and some covers just never worked, properly, because they just were an inch too high, but fuck it, this feature was (and still is!) so UNBELIEVABLY overdue when it comes to shooters, its not even funny anymore.

Leaning. Leaning is fucking crucial. We had this discussion in the neotokyo thread already. Proper cover usage means leaning. YOU DONT LOOK OVER A COVER UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. I seriously DO NOT understand why people play shooters without this. it's like buying a racing sim in which no tires exist and people just accept it. Something is fishy here. Well, it's okay, actually, because it means the average gamer never got in a firefight, I guess. And not getting in firefights is a GOOD thing.

Generally, the feel of the speed and weight of body movement felt sort of right, back then. I think it still does it better than GRAW for instance. Havent played VC in quite some time, tho, so I'm not 100% sure. Most fps are still like... like..... remote controlling a levitating camera with a little bit of pretend head bob. VC player character actually has weight, can "dive" into cover or slide a bit on his knees, whatever. The friggin FIRST time I played this thing I was using cover and sprint like I've been playing nothing else for my whole life. And we JUST came off the paintball field. So that IS saying something.

The AI is actually pretty smart (on the harder levels? IIRC difficulty influenced that. ALWAYS play game on hardest setting, not because that so 1337, but because you might miss out on content otherwise :/). The enemies used cover properly and flushed you out of yours properly, if you gave them the chance. They can do properly coordinated stuff like laying down suppression fire, while one of them closes in for a grenade throw or just a plain and simple flanking move, that would get you killed in teh awesome crossfire.

VERY rarely you could see a charlie guy with ricehat stand around in the open, which had 2 main reasons: 1) Graphical bug. at great distances and weird angles sometimes a rock would vanish. 2) AI overload. The more complex an AI gets, the more it tends to break maybe? I don't think I saw that more than once or twice.

I havent been in the vietnam war, somehting I'm pretty darn happy about, tbh, but I think for almost a decade the PC version was the closest you can get. But dont buy VC 2. I never got past level 3, because that game bored my ass to death.

[fenrif]

At the moment the worst game I've ever played is blacklight: tango down. Horrible inability to ever find a server with more than 2 people, compounded by the fact that you can't start a game unless theres 6 people in server!

Also it refuses to run in non-widescreen mode, which means I get some nice black bars covering like 30% of my screen.

And this is totally not beacuse i just spent a tenner on it and now I feel like a fool for not reading the forums, honest!

[Huesoo]

Sorry, one of the worst RTS I have played. It was a horrible RTS, but the custom maps (as deon has pointed out) made the game fun.

[Dakk]

Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 as the worse online FPS experience I had on the PS3. The whole thing looks like it was put hastily put togheder for release. Your whole team's spawnpoint is in a single room all the time, and people can camp it with grenades at will. Sniper rifles are completely useless in multiplayer because all maps are ridiculously small, lags alot, horribly clunky controls, etc.

The whole game is subpar, but the online multiplayer was awful. I'm not an FPS person, but the other 2 FPS's I played online did a much better job.

Also the whole aspect of "tactical invasion police simulation" is thrown out of the window in 80% of the levels during the campaign and replaced with warzone shootouts.

[Grendus]

I dunno. The WC3 and TFT campaigns were fun. Single player against the computer, on the other hand, blew chunks, the computer was way too damn good. Online mode, especially before WoW (after that, for some reason all the american servers were inundated with Korean players who, despite ping upwards of 300, could still kick everyone's ass). But even for the full box price it was still worth it for the single player. Multi-player was just the cake to go with the icing.

Darwinia is probably the most recent bad game I played. I could be wrong, I never got through the first level. The walkthrough was darn near useless, there was no backstory or even explanation. It was frustrating. Which is a shame, I've heard it was very good, but I guess it's not my type of game.

[dragnar]

Darwinia is probably the most recent bad game I played. I could be wrong, I never got through the first level. The walkthrough was darn near useless, there was no backstory or even explanation. It was frustrating. Which is a shame, I've heard it was very good, but I guess it's not my type of game.

Darwinia was good... but the first level is a VERY bad tutorial. After you finish it you go to the start of the story, lose everything you had, and THEN get a tutorial on how to do everything you just had to figure out.

[Sfon]

Star Ocean 4
Fanfiction-esque writing and broken gameplay. Graphics and sound were very impressive, not counting voice acting, but all else was total garbage.

[Nirur Torir]

I'm surprised they haven't been mentioned yet. Just about any Eastern MMORPG. (Western ones have more intelligible quests, and less of a grind. Mostly.) So very much mindless grinding, with occasional boss monsters that are constantly camped, with everybody speaking different languages. Their gimmicks cannot hide their nature: Grinding, with no apparent goal.

In particular, Silk Road, the first game of this style that I played, back when I was still naive to the ways of the internet.
<Grind grind grind> This takes a while. So many people around, but I feel so alone. <Grind grind grind> Hey, a shrine, with different monsters. <Grind grind grind, browse forums> PvP is bandits vs merchants. Looks fun. <Grind grind grind, level 16> Hey, an orc city place. I wonder why it's so popular. <Grind grind grind, browse forums> Hey, this orc city is the optimal place and level to grind for two months to maximize skill points, so long as no levels are gained. Not gonna happen. [/delete characters]


Runner up, for being a major disappointment: An old DOS game called Ultimate Domain. It was a turn based strategy empire builder that I played a few times when I was very young. You had to manage morale, not over-use the resources like trees and the water table, while researching the technology to kill the two other empires. I spent years wanting to play it again, trying to reinstall it every few years, only to realize that Windows still hates it and that I was unable to create a boot disc. Finally I found DOSbox, and installed the game with great excitement. It was simpler then I remembered, but I built a few balloons anyway, and sent them to my enemies to bomb them.
They had all died out to disease and starvation before the balloons arrived. Yes, the AI was terrible enough that it died due to natural causes before I could kill it. All that time wanting to play it again, for nothing.

[NewsMuffin]

For me, it would have to be Dawn of War 2. It wasn't enough like the original. It felt more like a shitty RPG instead of an awesome RTS. No base building at all. Also, playing skirmish with bots is unbalanced in favor of the AI. I was playing Tyranids and was outnumbered by Space Marines, and I had like 94/100 population. The story mode isn't too bad, but again, it feels a little too much like an RPG. If they took out leveling, it would be playable. The stat changing was fine, but no upgrades should be permanent. Armor upgrades would take longer to get, which would counterbalance having level 7 armor at level 3.

I usually look at the pros and cons of games. DoW 2's cons greatly outnumbered the pros. Even the graphics setting pissed me off. I always run games at 800x640 resolution, and DoW 2 didn't have the option. Even newer games that I own have to option for it. In my opinion, that's just inexcusable. One of the only pros is that most of the out of engine cut scenes are beautiful. I nearly cry at how life like that ork looks when he's standing over that corpse in one of them. Another pro is that the orks are actually manageable here opposed to how they were in the original.

All other games that I have played are not bad.

[Josephus]

What I did like about Dawn of War 2 is that they captured the essential feel of being a 9 foot tall superhuman who can very well just walk through the damn wall if he wants to get somewhere.

[dragnar]

The only problem I had with DoW 2 was that it was totally different from the first one, but LOOKED similar. I bought it expecting another RTS, when it clearly wasn't even trying to be one.

On the other hand, terminator armor is really, really fun.

[Josephus]

Actually, I pretty much fell in love with the Tyranids for their detail. I could zoom in on the Carnifex and see his oozing pores. It was glorious.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The developers for Dawn of War 1 said they didn't include the Tyranids partialy for their lore not fitting them losing or being held back, but mostly because they couldn't do them justice with their grapical options. Guess they got what they wanted in DoW 2.