Sometimes developers jump the shark when they make a video game. They do this either believing their vision is inspirational and want to take a chance, or feel they can stand on the shoulders of its predecessors and rake in more money.
Either way, here are 8 games that didn’t do anyone any favors by being released.
Fear 3
Fear 3 is proof that a game doesn’t necessarily need to be bad in order to ruin a franchise. It just needs to be nothing like the previous games with only hints of the horror that they were about.
Fear 3, instead, decided to be more of a Call of Duty type of game with minor hints as to what the actual story was really about. The AI wasn’t really the best and more of just a point, shoot, cover system that any FPS game has. Except that’s all they did.
I guess the previous games scared the developers too much and they didn’t want to continue with it the way it was.
Perfect Dark: Zero
Perfect Dark was a game that melded the fun of Goldeneye with a female protagonist and a lot of silly humor mixed in the game.
It’s believed that Perfect Dark: Zero only made its success because it was a launch title with hardly any FPS competition at the time. The graphics were terrible, the AI was awful and the story was as bland as a rice cake.
It was a complete opposite of what made the original so much fun and played on its popularity to sell Perfect Dark: Zero. Of course, that stopped when people realized just how crappy it was.
Red Faction: Armageddon
Red Faction: Armageddon was a failed attempt at bringing Red Faction back to the tunnels. The problem is that once we were in the open terrain of Mars and able to drive and obliterate any structure we wanted to in Red Faction Guerrilla, along with other fun options that made the game simply fun to play. Red Faction: Armageddon had a significant reduction in what there was to destroy and gave a gun that would disintegrate the structures instead of blowing them up. Part of the fun was causing mayhem, not keeping things tidy!
This was so bad that it was believed to be one of the reasons that THQ went bankrupt: thus destroying any hope that Red Faction could ever return to its former glory. Hopefully someone buys the rights and at least tries to give it another chance.
Command and Conquer 4
Oh man, where to begin with this one. I’ll try to keep it short. I’ve been a huge C&C fan since Red Alert. When I got it, It was one of those games that I spent 6 hours playing straight and thought it was for only about an hour or so. It consumed my attention that much because of just how much fun it was to play. Plus, I had a crush on the actress that played Sonya. I’m sure that had a bit to do with it, too.
Command and Conquer 4 was EA’s attempt at thinking that everyone wanted to play multiplayer and forcefed fans this option in order to unlock other units in single player. It backfired considerably. They found that people who played single player may not have wanted to play in multi-player and those who played multi-player really wanted nothing to do with the single-player. This meant that the “reward” for playing in multi-player didn’t reward those who did, nor did those who played single-player see these rewards as they didn’t want to play against others.
It cost them dearly and, hopefully, if we see another Command and Conquer game, they’ll learn from that mistake and look at the success of Red Alert series of it and go from there.
Quake 4
Quake 4 was the first Quake that was specifically made for the console first and PC second. If there was ever a game that royally pissed off FPS players worldwide, it was this one. The controls were sluggish because the movement was designed for a console controller and were hellishly slow compared to the much faster keyboard and mouse combo. The fighting was awful and slow compared to previous quake versions and just felt like a routine fps shooter instead of one of the best FPSs of the genre.
Thankfully, Quake Live has taken the reigns for the franchise for the foreseeable future and it’s based on the fast paced and rocket jumping fun of Quake 3 Arena.
WWE Brawl
I don’t know who the person was that thought of the idea that a game should be made about John Cena and Hulk Hogan Fighting an evil cybernetic Vince McMahon, but I want to know what they were smoking and how much it costs, because it must have been some good stuff.
The game was to take place fictitious Brawl City, where John Cena, Kelly Kelly, Triple H, and others fight (or brawl) their way through the town. Who is the final boss in this epic journey? Why, none other than a cybernetic version of Vince McMahon who’s using the World Wrestling Entertainment corporation to take over the world. It’s taking one of the tacky storylines that WWE uses to make their matches have a bit more pizazz, but in a whackier direction.
Thankfully, this game was shelved and we’ll never have to discuss it outside of one of these lists that discuss it.
Duke Nukem: Forever
Duke Nukem: Forever was the long (really damned long) awaited return of Duke Nukem. It was so long, in fact, that it was considered vaporware for almost a decade. There were quite a few issues that affected the release when it was finally announced and published. One of them was that all of the cliche’ jokes and crude humor was 10 years out-of-date, making the humor and sexual innuendo found in the game rather lackluster to say the least. The other was that it was simply a boring game to play. The action felt drawn out and basic.
It had what Duke Nukem 3d had, but with a sequel, especially one that we’ve been waiting for this long, we want more than what the previous game provided. This one was just updated graphics and lots of nudity and even that wasn’t enough to make it enjoyable.
E.T.
E.T. was a game released for the Atari 2600 back in the early 80’s. If you’re wondering just how bad this game was, it was considered one of the main reasons for the huge decline in the console sales market until the Nintendo Entertainment System came into play. The reason was mainly due to publisher pressure to release a game on the most popular console of the time, the Atari 2600 around the same time as the motion picture was still topping the charts. Because of this, they only had 5 weeks to actually complete the game from scratch. Granted, games back then didn’t take that much to complete compared to games nowadays, but that still doesn’t leave a lot of room for QA, research and other steps in game development.
It was so bad, in fact, that Atari gathered all of the copies they had left from returns and their unused stock and buried them in the New Mexico desert, never to see the light of day again!
