Ask the Kliq #20
Every once in a while, you will think about video games and then ask yourself a question that has no rhyme or reason, but that just happened to pop in your head at that exact moment. In some rare instances, not even Google or Wikipedia can provide the answer you need. Sometimes you wouldn’t even need an answer to that question.
This is where we come in.
Our panel of experts is here to take on all of your video games-related questions, no matter how serious or silly they may be. With each new edition, we will submit a question to this elite committee, which will in turn try to provide you, our beloved readers, with the most accurate answer they can come up with.
Do you have a question for us? Just click on “email the author” at the top of this article and add the subject line “Ask the Kliq”, or leave a comment below. The best questions will be featured in an upcoming column.
This Week’s Question
Finding a bad game and talking about it is easy. Same goes when it comes to your favourite game of all-time. What about disappointment? Not pure hate, just the fact that you know a game could have been so much more. That feeling is often worse than simply playing a bad game, because you know that there was a good idea somewhere underneath it all, but that something went very wrong during the development process. Martin, a DHGF reader, seems to think so, and thus wants us to revisit some of these dark times for his own entertainment.
In his own words, and in italic font, here’s this week’s question:
“What’s your biggest video games disappointment? Not necessarily in terms of bad games, but in terms of let down after hype or of missed opportunity?”
Here are your answers!
Michael O’Reilly: Warcraft 3. Still an excellent game but the story was far weaker than Starcraft and I had such high expectations for it. Then I played it and found it to be a terrific let down. After being central to the past two Warcraft games the Orcs were shunted off to their own separate campaign that had nothing to do with the rest of the plot. By the end of it I knew they were just setting us up for World of Warcraft, but it still felt off.
A.J. Hess: I was struggling to come up with something that really sucked but shouldn’t have. I’m still happy finding a bit of fun in games that might not be great but still have some nugget of joy. There are flawed games, and then there are games that are so badly flawed you regret your purchase immediately. Spider Man 3 springs to mind. It seems like everything that was good about that franchise, both film and game, came to a screeching halt. What should have been a blast to play was turned into an unplayable mess by bad controls, worse camera function, and a joyless city to swing around in. Spider Man 2 had been a great open world game, but 3 was just plain bad. Even if the designers had just phoned it in, I feel like it would have been better than what showed up. Spider Man 3 swung through the air with the greatest of reek.
Mohamed Al-Saadoon: Silent Hunter V. I think I mentioned this before but this was my number one most anticipated game of 2010 but Ubisoft had to go and ruin it with bugs, one U-Boat selection, finicky RPG elements and worse of all….The dreaded DRM system from hell which requires a permanent internet connection simply to play the game.
The problem is….where else am I going to get an ultra realistic U-boat simulator?
Ashe Collins: It would have to be Diablo II for me. My friends who were playing it at the time talked it up and down and you could play online and all that. So my wife and I plunked down for full price on two copies the third week it was out so we could try it. Instead of an in-depth strategy or fantasy RPG, like we were expecting, it was a click fest to see how many mobs you could kill running around a map. The mobs in each area were usually just repaints of other mobs, and it was the same damn thing over and over again. Even playing with friends didn’t save it for us.
Guy Desmarais: Remember when wrestling was super hot in the late 90’s? There was the Monday Night War going on, and WCW had already fired the first shot on the video games front with the fantastic WCW vs nWo: World Tour for the Nintendo 64. The WWF was soon to follow with WWF Warzone, a game which was hyped as the greatest wrestling game ever, a juggernaut that was sure to dethrone the WCW game. After all, this one had everything the competitor didn’t have: real theme music, photorealistic wrestlers, motion captured manoeuvres, voice-overs, commentators, etc. This was going to be the ultimate wrestling experience.
Then I bought the game and that’s when the disappointment set in. The commentators kept repeating the same two lines again and again. The theme music was so faint that you could barely hear it during the entrances, and it was just a small part that kept playing in loop. The wrestlers were photo-realistic, but it was just a picture of each being painted on the same model. The motion captured moves were so soft and unrealistic that they had about as much impact as the Pillsbury Doughboy wrestling in a ring made of marshmallows. The worst of all was the control scheme, featuring button combinations for moves as simple as a hiptoss being on the level of Mortal Kombat fatalities. The game had so much speed that I would have had more fun drawing the matches instead.
I went back to the WCW franchise, and was thankful when the WWF dropped Acclaim to go to AKI and THQ. They don’t make wrestling games like they used to.
Now that you know which games disappointed us and left us feeling empty and stupid because we paid to play them, it is now your turn, fine DHGF readers. Tell us all about your biggest video game let downs in the comments section! If you would prefer to leave us a question to answer in a future edition, you’re more than welcome to do so. You can also click on “email the author” at the top of this article and add the subject line “Ask the Kliq”. We’ll put our team right on it.
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