Oddly enough, I don't regret buying a single game in 2011. I was able to ignore the hype on a lot of games that I could tell were not for me (Pokemon Black/White, RAGE, Dead Island, a few others). I think this is partially because I learned some hard lessons about regretting game purchases in 2010.
So to derail this topic slightly, let me get into some of the game in 2010 that I thought weren't worth buying! Kirby's Epic Yarn was great and all, but I could've just rented that game and finished the game and gotten just as much out of it; I plan on renting Kirby's Return to Dreamland in the next few weeks. Metroid: Other M had average gameplay, but the boss battles were underwhelming in their simplicity, and the writing was awful compared to how solid the lore and world-building was in the Metroid Prime series.
And I preordered Puzzle Quest 2, which turned out to be a terrible sequel to the amazing Puzzle Quest; there's about 1/5th as much writing in the game, as instead of traveling across the land in a LotR-style quest, you just go deeper into this one sunken tower in a plot ripped directly off of Diablo 1. You hardly meet any characters, and most characters that can "join" you stop talking forever once they do, unlike the previous game. Puzzle Quest 1 had a bunch of quests that would consist of going to a place, doing 1 or 2 fights, then finishing the quest, and my hours with the game passed by like a breeze. In Puzzle Quest 2, you get a quest, then have to fight through like 15 of the same fucking monsters on one floor until you finish it, and it's incredibly unrewarding because of how brief all of the quest dialogue is and how much I don't give a shit about any of the characters or the overall story. Puzzle Quest 1 was highly customizable, in that you learned spells as you leveled up, could "steal" some spells from enemies, could choose a mount who would provide you with a "mount" spell, and you could forge your own items with whatever attributes you want. In Puzzle Quest 2, they basically cut all of that out and you only learn spells through leveling up, and there is a sidequest that only teaches you basically 2 different spells, except they're copy-pasted across all 5 colours of mana to make it into "ten" spells. And equipment is boring now, because instead of each piece giving you a unique perk, most of them just raise you defense, except for whatever weapons you can hold in your hands; however, while there were a couple interesting weapons, there wasn't enough variety or differing effects, so mostly you could just look at the Action Points Spent:Damage Done ratio and pick the best weapon.
Puzzle Quest 2 was just disappointing in every possible way.
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