[General Discussion] Games you regret buying.

Normally, I wait a bit before buying the newest games, so that I can study all of the reviews for them, buy them at a lower price, and in the case of PC games, wait for the bugs to get ironed out. If a game gets mixed reviews, or just catches my interest in spite of lousy reviews, I'll rent it and try it out.

That said, the fancy limited edition packaging and Sid Meier's good name lured me into buying a copy of Civilization 4. Ugh, what a waste of $50. It runs so SLOW on my computer, which is strange, since the graphics are hardly anything special...this computer runs The Sims 2 decently and Half-Life 2 very well, which makes it even stranger. The original release had tons of bugs, the CDs were mislabeled, and that fancy tech tree poster was printed in French. And under all that, it's still just a slow-moving, imbalanced game that's still not nearly as good as Alpha Centauri, or Civilizations 2 or 3.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas comes to mind, too. I bought the PC version instead of the PS2 version for some reason, and it's quite buggy. The game seems to be convinced that I'm a pirate, so it refuses to start most of the time, and it crashes fairly often too. The content doesn't really appeal to me (though I'm not offended by it either), and the gameplay is decent but strangely repetitive...weird, since it's so open-ended.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I don't think that it's too early to mention Star Fox Command. It got fairly good reviews, and I adore the original Star Fox and Star Fox 64, so I threw caution to the wind and bought a copy...big mistake!

First off, the controls were pretty badly thought-out. I'm not sure if using the touchscreen to fly seemed like a good idea when the developers came up with it, but it just doesn't work well. Basic manuvering isn't too bad, but boosting and rolling are absolutely terrible! As for the game, it consists of a pointless stragetic mode, a bunch of one-minute dogfights, flying through rings to blow up missiles, and blowing up the same exact mothership about twenty times. There aren't any epic boss battles or long obstacle courses anywhere that I found.

I played though it once, having some faith that there would be SOMETHING to make the whole game worthwhile, but there is almost no variety in the gameplay besides the changing background graphics. Even the end battle is horrible...a giant interstellar snake-thing that dies after being hit with one bomb and a dozen laser shots. I played long enough to try one alternate mission, but it was almost identical to the basic route.

The game is just crushingly disappointing...I sold my copy the day after I bought it.

There's nowhere I can't reach.