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

The Gamingforce Disappointment of the Year is here once again... wait, no it's not! This is something a little new for 2012/2013 - we're going to tackle the question of what was the most disappointing game of the year for Gamingforce. This doesn't necessarily mean the worst game of the year as I imagine most of us are sensible enough to steer clear of the real stinkers, but we can't help but get our hopes up only to have them dashed by a disappointing experience. Now it might be you just played a bad game despite your better judgement and you feel that needs shaming so you can slap some points on it here too.

So just as with the Game of the Year thread here's how the voting is going to work: each person has 100 points to vote for games released in 2012 (doesn't matter where, but games have to have been commercially released in 2012) and you can allocate them to as many games as you like as long as it totals 100 or less in the end. The only rule is that you can't award any single game more than 40 points. So you could vote two 40s and a 20, or a 40 and six 10s, or any other combination of points as long as it adds up to 100 (or less).

To vote all you have to do is post a reply with your top games of 2012, how many points you're giving each, and a brief explanation of why you feel the game deserves your points.

Example:

GAME A - 40 points
Man game A let me down so bad because...

GAME B - 20 points
I ended up disappointed with game B because...

GAME C - 15 points
Game C gets some points because...

GAME D - 15 points
I couldn't decide between this and C, so gave both points, but D is rubbish because...

GAME E - 5 points
Bad, but not necessarily terrible, but I figure E deserves some points because...

GAME F - 5 points
Like E, F gets a few points because...


--------

Voting will close on Saturday 12th January at 18:00 GMT (that's Englandland time), at which point I'll add all the points together and work out GFF's top 20 disappointing games of 2012, posting the results in a new thread for discussion/people to complain about.

Get voting.

Disclaimer/Rules:
1. If you allocate any game more than 40 points your vote won't be counted.
2. If your points allocation totals more than 100 points your vote won't be counted (totals less than 100 are fine).
3. Votes for games not released in 2012 will be ignored.
4. Only official commercial releases in 2012 count.
5. No negative points. I'll point and laugh and then ignore your vote.
6. Whole integers only. Fractions and decimal places will also lead me to ignore your vote.
7. Any other such idiocy will also probably lead your vote not being counted.

And as ever, I take no responsibility for Skills fucking with stuff, which if you ignore these points he almost certainly will do somehow.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Assassin's Creed III - 40 points
I love the Assassin's Creed series I really do. I loved the first despite how flawed it was, absolutely adored 2 and Brotherhood, and even Revelations which was feeling somewhat tired and churned-out (and amusingly featured no revelations what-so-ever) I still enjoyed. So I was pretty excited about Assassin's Creed III.

I can't say the American Revolution particularly excited me, that was clearly there more for the US audience, but some of what they were talking about doing sounded really cool. Sadly the final product is a boring mess of a game that fails to push the formula in any interesting directions, fails to address fundamental issues that have existed since AC1, ditches some core mechanics (like, say, stealth) and manages to swap the ever charming Ezio for a plank of wood; a miserable, whiney plank of wood at that.

I did have some fun with AC:III but it was just me dicking about with fun ways to kill guards. Nearly every bit of scripted action was dull or frustrating, or a glorious combination of both. And I've not even touched on the Desmond stuff... ho boy. To go into all the issues I have with the game would see this spiral into a multi-page rant so I'll just say that the more I played the game the more I just wanted it to be over. I've gone from someone who loved the series and would buy any game without question to not giving a crap about the series. It is that poor. Without a doubt my biggest disappointment of 2012.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) - 30 points
Oh Criterion what did you do? This seemed like such an obvious highlight of the year - cross Burnout Paradise with the cops and street race trappings of Need for Speed. Sadly what happened is they crossed Burnout Paradise with the soulless money-grabbing mentality of EA resulting in a hollow shell of a game.

Almost none of the design decisions that goes into this game make a great deal of sense in reality and lend to frustrating or stupid experiences. Skills already touched on it, but for each of the 41 cars (which is somewhat slim pickings when you're talking about real cars) there are only 5 events. Each event unlocks items for the car in question to make it better and more capable at competing in the later, harder events. But once you've done all 5 events and unlocked everything there's no reason to keep using the car, that car is now useless and can't get you any further really.

The campaign is also a pretty shallow affair with 10 Most Wanted cars to challenge and take down. But this isn't like the Most Wanted of 2005, there's no personality or story to these cars they are just white cars that you race against. Unlocking them requires hitting various point thresholds and near enough everything you do in the game will get you some points. In fact they're thrown at you so fast that without really trying you'll unlock the majority of Most Wanted cars to challenge. And that's it, done.

Again this is a game I could easily get into a mass rant about. Ultimately not the worst of games but this should have been just so much better. Massively disappointing.

Mass Effect 3 - 15 points
Mass Effect 3 is by no means a terrible games, there's still a decent amount of the core experience on show throughout the game and the gunplay is perhaps at its strongest in the series. However what truly makes the Mass Effect great is the universe they created, the depth of the world, the characters and then all the choices you get to make within that world and seeing how they play out.

Sadly by virtue of narrative drive you're never really afforded the time to stop and just take in the world. This is understandable given where the story is and where it needs to get to, but still it's a shame to feel somewhat rushed through things and not have the chance to do much on the sides.

Then there's that ending. Now I didn't agree with all the bitching going on on the Internet, the calls for changes and what-not. I don't think they should have released new endings, but they should have done something better first time. At the very least they should have managed expectations a lot better. The biggest failing of the ending for me was it seemingly ignored a lot of what Mass Effect came to represent. Sure I was given one final choice, but for the majority of the end sequence you're forced to just listen and hit a button to continue every now and again. For a game so full of interaction and choice suddenly I had none.

There's many other little niggles and issues I could talk about, but ultimately the lasting feeling I have toward the game is disappointment, and so it earns a place on this list.

Diablo III - 10 points
I had never played a Diablo game before. As has probably been covered a number of times I wasn't ever much of a PC gamer and so Diablo was a series that had passed me by. But there was a lot of buzz for Diablo III, I like loot games, and plus some local friends who had it were encouraging me to nab it so we could play co-op. That was good enough for me and so I purchased Diablo III. Then I began the metagame of actually connecting the servers.

The game itself was fine and I enjoyed chunks of it, but there was nothing that grabbed me sufficiently to keep me coming back time and time again outside of finishing the campaign with friends. The story takes itself way too seriously for how goofy it is and nothing about the setting was particularly exciting. Given all I'd heard and expected about the addictive gameplay of Diablo, well it wasn't happening for me.

Then throw on top the money-grabbing nature of the auction house, the frustrating mess of always-connected gameplay (hooray for solo play lag), divided player servers (no playing with US peeps for me) and the countless, countless errors just trying to connect. Once I was done with the campaign that was me done, which given how bloody pricey it was left me thinking it was probably a mistake in the long run.

FEZ - 5 points
Ah FEZ. Yes this is on my game of the year list because it really can be a wonderful game. But it's also entirely frustrating at times for some of the reasons I laid out in the GotY thread. The game is very quick to nudge and wink at you when something on the screen is part of a sneaky puzzle but you never actually know if you have the tools to decipher it, so you can be left feeling stupid that you can't figure it out until hours later when you stumble upon the key elsewhere in the game world.

There's a lot of love and attention in the game, but it is a little aware of how clever and referential it is being which does give it a bit of a smug tone at times. Plus Phil Fish's attitude is not a particular gamer friendly one. Dear Phil: regardless of whether or not you are some downtrodden indie dev if you release a broken game you fix it, simple as.

By no means a bad game, but this could have been an absolute corker and isn't, which is disappointing.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

With only 7 votes I'm not even going to both collating these. Clearly this was a failed experiment, but some interesting comments anyway so have a read above.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Fluffykitten McSnugglepuss

Is it the fact that Shepard dies at the end that gets people so butthurt because that's just flat out gay. The main character dies in plenty of games, films, books, tv shows and so forth without people crying about it.

Have you actually read what people said above about why they were disappointed with ME3? At no point did anyone mention the fact that Shepard dies being an issue.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?