[:plant:] The Gamingforce Disappointment of the Year 2012: A New Skills Bitchfest - voting

Need for Speed Most Wanted, 40 disappoints - Others have elaborated, so there isn't much for me to add about why this was so terrible. My first thought with this game was "Burnout Paradise with licensed cars? Sign me up." Then after playing it and discovering how badly EA'd this game had gotten, it just made me sad. The spiritual sequel to a great game, two years later, should not be markedly worse in virtually every respect than its predecessor, period. It was like EA went to Criterion in February and told them to have the game on the shelves in October.

Diablo 3, 40 disappoints - I played Diablo II to death, okay. I wore it out. I knew that Diablo 3 wasn't going to be the same, wouldn't be as good. I knew that. A lot of the important developers were no longer at Blizzard. Hey, it happens. What I didn't expect was a game that felt hardly anything like a Diablo title. The core of the game, the looting, was a joke, with the only things that mattered on gear being damage totals, primary stats, and critical rate/dmg. Go look at some of the top tiered Diablo 2 equipment and compare them to any of the "good" Diablo 3 equipment. The polished visuals couldn't have found the trademark Diablo grit with a microscope. The story was melodramatic garbage that seemed to have mostly forgotten the events of Diablo 2. The Diablo 3 that we got seemed like it was developed by people who resented the success of Diablo 2. Nowhere is this more evident than them needlessly killing, in the first act, the character, and voice, most associated with the first two games. The only reason they killed Decard Cain was to appease Jay Wilson's massive hate-on for the success of Diablo 2. It makes no sense.

Mass Effect 3, 15 disappoints - Here are the 15 points that Mass Effect 3 left on the table in the "Best game of 2012" contest. It had no business getting less than 40 points there, and yet, terrible ending, awful MacGuffin, and Kai Leng (Kai Leng wasn't very interesting in the book, why is he in the game too?) hurt its cause. I would have liked a little more to the story beyond wrapping up loose ends from the previous two games, plus chasing a pretty awful MacGuffin introduced as delicately as a freight train. Look, I understand that a lot of the design decisions in the first two games, Mass Effect 2 especially, painted them into a corner when it came to design decisions here, but just because a character could possibly die in a previous game doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to recruit them here. Let me roll with Wrex, and if my imported save flags him as dead, either give me a placeholder Krogan, or no character at all. Also, sometimes I might want to bring a character with me just because I like the character, not because they fill a specific combat role (hey, this character can use Overload, gotta bring her, or this character can team with my biotic Shep to cause biotic explosions, gotta bring her). The characters they give you basically just do that, fill combat roles. I'm glad you let me recruit Garrus and Tali, but you could do better. What was their excuse for not letting me have my Wrexes and Mirandas? "We didn't want to record that much dialog"? Do better. You can virtually only get the best ending if you also play various Mass Effect related things outside of the single player campaign. I suppose they can't be faulted for that, since the difference between the "best" ending and any other ending is like the difference between getting the regular flu and swine flu. Either way, you're not going to be very happy.

NCAA Football 13, 5 disappoints - No one cares about this game but me, and that's ok. Each July, I get the newest $60 roster update. It is a guilty pleasure that I can live with. Each year, they tweak the gameplay and some of the "season" mode mechanics, generally improving the game from year to year. Why is it worth 5 disappoints? Each year, the menus get slower and slower, this year no exception. I want to play stupid football, not watch menus slide around for 5 seconds each time I want to go from one screen to the next. Also, the achievements suck.

Jam it back in, in the dark.