Biggest Gaming Purchase Regret - Jan. 1 2010, to May 2011

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Let's keep it simple. List your [size=150]ONE[/size] biggest gaming purchase regret for the time period specified, and why.

Me?

Final Fantasy 13 - $60 and a 20-hour waiting period for the game to begin.

Elemental - Beyond the bugs and bad UI (which has mostly been fixed, I'll admit), there just doesn't seem to be any point to it. It's soulless.

StarCraft 2. I wasn't interested in the competitive multiplayer, and never really cared for the story in StarCraft. I really could've waited until the custom maps I am interested in are out, and saved myself money in the process.

Final Fantasy 13. I've belabored the point enough in other threads.

My top two are Black Ops and Dragon Age: Origins, with BLOPS easily winning out. The SP was fine, and I'm sure the MP too if the game could run well constantly. At launch I was one of the people on PC that could boot up the game, but it ran like molasses, sapping nearly all my CPU. It's not an awful experience anymore, but I still get constant stuttering which prevents me from having any semblance of fun online.

Generic military shooter is now with generic MMO as something I stay away from.

My [size=42]ONE[/size] biggest gaming regret for the stated time period is, after consideration... the same as yours. $65.84 spent (wretched Tennessee sales tax), in moment of weakness after racing out to Wal*Mart to buy Final Fantasy XIII. For me, it's one of my old hang-ups that always comes around to bite me on the ass with JRPGs; I *hate* ATB battle systems. Give me true turn-based like Dragon Quest or Earthbound, or give me full real-time like Crystalis, because I just can't stand ATB systems. Wading through a menu while the clock is ticking just angers me. I can sit through a 45 minute cut scene with a grin on my face, but the moment I'm faced with little bars that build while waiting for my turn, and then, after waiting, I have to hurry up and make a decision... I just see red. I get sad. I get annoyed. I go play something else. It's a facet of my personality that I wish I could purge from my psyche, but it's always been that way; couldn't get into Chrono Trigger but loved Chrono Cross (ATB vs. turn-based), cherished FFX but couldn't bear more than an hour or two of FFVII (again, same thing.)

Mario Kart Wii. It's the only game my girlfriend ever wants to play, and I'm really, really frigging sick of seeing those tracks. VS. mode isn't so bad because at least we can play free-for-all and then it sometimes becomes as much about skillful driving as item use (except for those times when you get constantly bombarded by a long string of unavoidable attacks) but I can't stand Balloon Battles any more. The girlfriend hates six of the battle mode tracks so we only ever play on four of them, two of which are mind-numbingly boring even the first time you play on them, and there's no skill involved because we're so evenly matched that it basically comes down to which team of annoying A.I. morons decided to actually try. I swear more matches end with her and I tied in individual points, but one team winning by some insane margin because they all went ape-sh*t on everyone while the other team cowered in the corner in a puddle of their own piss. On the rare occasion where one of us does get a great deal more points than the other, the other team wins anyway because of this same exact problem. I once finished a match with 17 points by myself, and my team's overall score was 19. My girlfriend had 8 points, and her team won the match with a total of 39 points! Seriously, why the f*ck are we still playing this garbage!?

Epic Mickey. So much anticipation for it and so many hints of greatness throughout. But, ultimately a mediocre, if not horrible game experience. And I paid full price, which I never do.

Easily FF13.

Star Trek Online lifetime sub. Hellgate London taught me nothing. Shoot me now.

Elemental for me. Could have been FFXIII except I got it on sale for 20$. Think we're seeing a trend?

So far 2011 is turning out one disappointment after the other (the exception being Portal 2).

My personal biggest one is Brink. I was expecting innovation, and an amazing world that would be cool played in single player, and made cooler by adding in co-op and multiplayer into the mix. Instead I got a below average multiplayer only game, with the only "innovation" being the addition of bots with intentionally broken AI.

Runner up: Sims Medieval. Take the world's most popular sandbox game (not including Minecraft) and set it in medieval times- what could go wrong? Well, they could take out the sandbox aspect and force you into a fixed home, and force to you follow quests which lead you by the nose in order to unlock anything in the game.

cyrax wrote:

My top two are Black Ops and Dragon Age: Origins, with BLOPS easily winning out. The SP was fine, and I'm sure the MP too if the game could run well constantly. At launch I was one of the people on PC that could boot up the game, but it ran like molasses, sapping nearly all my CPU. It's not an awful experience anymore, but I still get constant stuttering which prevents me from having any semblance of fun online.

I feel your pain, I still have the Black Ops stutters myself.

Dark Fall: Lost Souls. Although it provided some jump scares and genuinely freaky moments, it fell flat on its face in a way only an adventure game can: pixel hunting and poorly explained objectives.

Fable 3 for me. Enjoyed Fable 2 very much and I was expecting something that improved upon that one. It didn't. The combat was probably worse and I hated the infamous second part of the game. It was not a bad game per se, I still enjoyed exploring the world and I finished the game. My expectations were much higher, however. Not unrealistically I'd reckon, you would expect a sequal to be better... I regret pre-ordering it and paying full price (50 euros) for it.

ahrezmendi wrote:

StarCraft 2. I wasn't interested in the competitive multiplayer, and never really cared for the story in StarCraft. I really could've waited until the custom maps I am interested in are out, and saved myself money in the process.

It just doesn't do it for me, combined with buying it at full price makes it a downer for me.

Dragon Age 2 - disappointing in almost every way possible.

The Witcher 2 is here to ease the pain though

stevenmack wrote:

Dragon Age 2 - disappointing in almost every way possible.

I'm still not sure what I'll feel about that when I get around to buying/playing it.

I regret nothing! That said, I've been pretty cautious about buying full-price games over the last year or so. Most of the games that I haven't liked much cost me <$10, so they were still reasonable purchases.

Star Trek Online was probably the worst $/enjoyment game. Space battles were fun but repetitive, and the ground combat was terrible.

Black Ops. I bought it because I hadn't played a Call of Duty and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I quickly discovered that I'm more of a Halo guy for multiplayer, and the single-player was an absolute chore to finish. It took me about 3 weeks to beat the 5 hour campaign because I kept getting bored and needed to continually step away.

Thankfully, I got it on an Amazon sale for $40 and was able to trade it back in for $32. Still, $8 and 7ish hours of my life down the drain.

Dragon Age 2. Although being a sequel to Dragon Age I would never have not brought it even if it got a 2 for reviews.

stevenmack wrote:

Dragon Age 2 - disappointing in almost every way possible.

The Witcher 2 is here to ease the pain though

Oh, you're so wrong.

davet010 wrote:
stevenmack wrote:

Dragon Age 2 - disappointing in almost every way possible.

The Witcher 2 is here to ease the pain though :)

Oh, you're so wrong.

If you're going to call people's opinions wrong, at least take it outside.

One I'd add is Space Siege, which even though it isn't a 09/10 game I got as a preorder bonus for Alpha Protocol (which is itself, an Obsidian game, but I don't want to put it on the list). It's just a long trudge, and I see it as the best example of why game length isn't something to strive for if you don't have anything fun to put in those hours.

A PS3.

I bought it as a present for hitting my weight-loss target. Bought one game for it which I never finished. Now I'm watching my back for identity theft and credit card fraud.

Speaking of Obsidian games am I the only person who liked Alpha Protocol far more than New Vegas?

Well I finished Alpha Protocol and considered another playthrough. I barely got 2 hours into New Vegas.

Final Fantasy XIII Collector's Edition- $150NZ ($120US) for a mediocre game I didn't finish, and a bunch of low-quality stuff printed on high-quality paper.

Runner-up is probably the Batman: Arkham Asylum collector's. It was only like $60 ($30US), but the stuff in it was trashy.

I'm starting to see a pattern.

Dragon Age: Awakenings. Buggy, rushed, and far worse than the masterful Origins. The silver lining is that it taught me not to trust Bioware to produce a quality game on a fast development cycle, so I took a pass on DA2 (which, according to people with tastes similar to my own, is crap).

On the PC it's hard to go past Elemental. Even now it's still an ugly, impenetrable mess. It's also the worst because I banked on it being the game I'd still be playing now.

On the console it would be Demons Souls. I tried, but I just didn't connect at all with it.

Kinect. I love the idea, but Elysium's article says it all.

To a lesser extent, Mortal Kombat on PS3. I loved SP, but everyone has moved on to other things now, and I have not been able to enjoy the MP.

Oops, that was [size=30]TWO[/size]

VVVVV and L4D1+2 for my friends, they never played it, one of them didn't even redeem L4D1+2 =P
A waste of 30bucks.

As for myself, I didn't regret any of them, I made a lot of crappy purchases in 2009 so I became more careful on buying games this generation.

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