What's your worst ever video game-related purchase?

@amyggen: They made a lot of shitty NES and SNES accessories that were basically useless. The Power Pad in particular being far more egregious than the Power Glove.

@cashbasket said:

Battletoads is at least fun even if it's insanely hard

Now, I own a copy of Bayou Billy. That's even harder than Battletoads, yet thousand times worse.

Bioshock Infinite. Without a single doubt in my mind. I spent too much money on a digital on steam, couldn't sell it back, played it for about two hours and knew it was the most garbage purchase and decision I had ever made.

I bought a BradyGames strategy guide once. It was for Mortal Kombat 3. This one, in fact.

I also bought a racing wheel, which hardly got used before I gave it away years later.

Game Genie, maybe? This was pre-internet. No googling for codes. If the game wasn't in the book that came with the device, I had no way of finding the codes outside of magazines and asking local game shops if they had codes.

KOTOR 2 left a pretty harsh sting. It starts slow, too. At first it's just noticing the game doesn't look as good as the first one did. Then you notice off things here and there. Rush jobs. Shitty design choices. It's not until near the end that the game reveals to you that it is not even finished. That the last several hours are on fire broken might as well be alpha code.

Money was extremely tight when I was a kid so there aren't many frivolous purchases in my history. Most game purchases occurred after I had rented the game a couple times and found it on discount several months later.

The Sims 3 for Nintendo DS. Aliens Colonial Marines (duh). Game of Thrones the Game. Iron Man for Xbox 360

Little Big Planet. I got so hyped up by that demo where they jump on the skateboard that I had preordered it off of amazon. Then I saw a youtube video of the first guy to make a Mario Level 1-1 and I got a pit in my stomach as the thing looked substantially uglier and slow and floaty. I played for about an hour and didn't touch it ever again.

Hoo boy. Maybe it was TF2 crates. Or the Wii. Or the Halo 3 collectors edition. One of those.

NOPE! I remember now! I once bought a Wii video capture device off a shady website. It never came.

Watch Dogs i think.

@corruptedevil: Yeah, that's true.

SOL: Exodus

Just, ugh. What a let down. I'm never getting my TIE Fighter 2...

When the N64 first came out, games were scarce in my area. For Christmas that year I got a N64 and a copy of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire. I was totally into Star Wars at the time, so that was cool but I wanted more games. So I headed off to the mall with my Grandma and brother with my xmas money and ended up at Software Etc. where I bought the only game they had out of desperation... Mortal Kombat Trilogy. As a kid if I had money, I just had to spend it immediately.

I paid $90 for it- got an awful game and a couple bucks back after taxes. Super disappointing.

Most short sighted was probably buying and modding a Wii arcade stick just to play Tatsunoko vs Capcom. Since then there have been multiple PC and PS3 adapters for the thing so it turned out ok.

Though nothing I've done rivals Jeff's purchase of the lifelong subscription to Star Trek Online, and I've never spent more than $60 for a game, I must say it is the chronic purchasing of well reviewed games which has resulted in a 150+ game catalogue on my Steam account. I've maybe played 10 of the titles.

Maybe Halo 3? I waited till it went to 40, figuring I'd liked 2's campaign even if I'm not a multiplayer guy. Sadly.... it's the game I remember being less worth the money I spent than any other.

I pre ordered X Rebirth... What a crazy pile of shit that was.

I paid for a six month sub for WoW and only played it for a month. I've probably done worse but that's the most recent face palm.

Pre-ordering the limited edition of (vanilla) MvC3 with steelbook case, comic and 2 later-released DLC characters. Then the Ultimate version gets released nine months later as a brand-new retail release and the game I have is all but abandoned. I didn't buy it until it was $5 and about to disappear from XBL forever due to The Mouse's stranglehold on Marvel copyrights.

The most recent one for me is Wildstar for $48 through GMG. I played a few phases of the beta and didn't like it, so naturally I went out, bought it, and have played maybe 4-5 hours of it.

Another one was Unlimited Saga at full price when it came out. I actually like some of what that game does, but the lack of a proper leveling system killed it for me.

@amyggen: that's the worst part, I did. I'm going to go drink 20 ounces of nacho cheese to try and forgot about this.

I bought a fight stick... and never really used it, should give it another go since i bought Mk on the steam sale last week.

SEGA 32X.

The XBox 360. I used it so little that my launch day 360 never red ringed.

The PSP. Really regretted it until you could kinda play SNES games on it. Then it kind of, sort of redeemed itself until the novelty of playing FF6 with garbled or no sound passed.

Saitek X-52. It just felt like garbage compared to my trusty Thrustmaster stick. I spent so much time trying to convince myself it was awesome that by the time I realized I hated it, it was way too late to return it.

Neverwinter Nights 2. Back in the day, I had a pretty good PC when NWN2 came out. It performed like dog crap for the longest time. Once it was patched and playable, the controls were the worst. The editor was no where near as intuitive as the editor for NWN. Try as I may, even to this day, after fifteen minutes of fighting the camera, I give up and go back to NWN.

The first PC -I- had full control over when it came to the parts had a Matrox Mystique. By the time I saved up enough for the rainbow runner, it was discontinued.

Rogue Squadron on the Game Cube. For some reason, I thought it was going to play like TIE Fighter. I bought a Game Cube because of Rogue Squadron.

I bought paper Mario sticker star on launch played it and hated it.

A $300 arcade stick for PS2. I never really used a stick before, having grown up in the 90s after arcades turned into rhythm, lightgun and prize game houses. But turns out I much prefer d-pads.

Dude, I got "Yo Noid" on NES for 5 bucks after seeing 3 screenshots in a game magazine i don't remember. I've said for most of my life that it was the first game I've ever returned... come to find out while moving a couple of months ago, that I NEVER DID. It's been with me the whole time, leaving a prepubescent "me" to believe I'd sold it down the river.

I bought MW3 Elite Edition and didn't even play enough to prestige once. What a waste. Plus it didn't come with something awesome like MW2's night vision goggles.

I'm a card carrying member of the Wii Balance Board ownership club.

Back in the SNES era my folks brought my brother and I to a sports memorabilia show. We won a raffle that ended up being worth $30 of credit for anything that was for sale. My brother and I, in our infinite wisdom, convinced them to spend it on a copy of Shaq Fu.

Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires. Never played a Dynasty Warriors game and even though it only cost me 20 bucks at the time the game was so shitty 20 bucks seems like a fortune. People that like these games I just don't understand how it's possible to play these game for longer than 30 minutes at a time it's unbearable.

Same, as well as the Kinect... But I didn't buy those, they were bought for me.

Probably the dozens of Steam games I never played.

Also all the Sims 3 bullshit items I bought when it first came out. I binged a bit hard on microtransactions.

Man, SMNC was one of those games that had SO MUCH potential, and was just fucking ruined by the developers not doing shit to fix ANYTHING. I don't regret spending money on it, since I had a blast playing it with my friends, but man it sucks to think back and wonder how good the game could have been if it was handled by competent devs. I remember they kept releasing more and more cosmetic shit each update, and fewer and fewer people were playing... Ugh.

Edit: As for games I regret buying, it's difficult for me to think of any. Nowadays I almost always wait for a sale before I buy a game, so even if I regret it I at least got the game 50% off or something. One that DOES pop to mind is Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. I hated Dear Ester, but I fucking LOVED Amnesia, and Frictional Games was saying how good the sequel was, so I pre-ordered it for 10% off. It's not necessarily horrible, but it was nowhere near what I was expecting, and it was easily one of the most disappointing games I've played.

I've mentioned it before, but the disappointment was so huge that I don't mind retelling it:

Maabus. FUCK, what a letdown. The trailer made it seem like the greatest thing ever pressed to CD-ROM, and I was young enough to fall for it. What I got after two years of desperately wanting it? Well, it certainly wasn't this:

It was more like an endless parade of instadeaths and guesswork, far more unforgiving (in a bad way) than even the most notorious Sierra adventures. Also a tight time limit, because of course.

And yet, although it's painful to play, I've always found it fascinating. It was such a bizarre game. I'd love to see an interview with the devs.

Edit: That said, if for some strange reason you find a copy, get it. It's really the kind of bad everyone should see for themselves.

Superman 64.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY7ajv7zkHU&feature=kp

I bought a Kinect a year after it was released. At that point I should have known that it was a failure, but I thought, "hey... this might turn out pretty good."

I've got quite a few...

• I bought a Friends Trivia game on the PS2 way back when... Bad move.
• I bought Run Like Hell for the PS2 and wasn't into it. I don't think I ever got past the first area
• Joint Operations Typhoon Rising - I loved the Delta Force series before it but JO was a huge disappointment.
• I bought Quake Wars and never played it once. $60 wasted.
• I bought a second copy of Fallout 2 on Steam because I thought I lost my copy...Only to find my copy the next day. Bummer.
• I bought BMX XXX...yeah....

I bought The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct for a full 60$ when it was released on PC.

Years ago I spent thousands of dollars on a F2P MMO that ended up getting closed. All that money.... :(

Any and every racing game I've bought. Any and every GTA game I've bought.

Nothing wrong with these games, they just really aren't for me. But somehow I've managed to convince myself over the years that "this will be the one that gets me into the genre/series."

I bought the whole DLC pack for Age of Empire Online hoping I would get around to play it a while back.

They just announced the servers are now officially down.

I have never played the game.

I feel really dumb.

Silent Scope for the PS2. I was young, didn't have internet and didn't know any better. I still keep this piece of shit as a reminder.

I bought nearly 20 steam games this past sale. I have a macbook, theyre mostly windows games.

what's the point of playing a game that would have ceased to exist anyway? o.O

Holy CRAP! Run Like Hell! RLH!!! I had completely forgotten about that game until your comment. I remember renting it when I was younger and my friends and I would try to beat it a lot. We actually got a decent length into the game too from what I recall, though I can hardly remember. I guess that goes to show the quality of the game if I can't even recall it! I vaguely remember being on a ship overrun with monsters or something, and there were these mini monsters too, and you were following the orders of this scientist lady survivor on the ship... That's all I can really remember.

Man, I can kind of relate. I spent a LOT of money on this grindy Facebook-like game, I think at least 200~ dollars, but it caught me hook, line, and sinker, and I was completely addicted to it. It's because of that game that I NEVER touch any of the numerous micro-transaction games on Facebook and the Iphone/Ipad/whatever. Funnily enough, while I don't remember the name of the game I played or even how to access it anymore, I think it also shut down.

Heh... Why exactly would you do that?

Battlefield 4.

I enjoyed BF3 very much, it was my game for two years. I even had premium!

So I purchased BF4 and premium on good faith. I mean... BF3 was really good, how could they fuck it up?

=_=

for me it was way back when i had a snes. being in Australia I would sometimes buy imported games use a converter to play american games. 2 of those games were the hunt for red october and lethal weapon both side scrollers.. total rubbish a good friend of mine at the time finished them both.

It might be the Wii U.

@random45: I ask myself that every time I open steam. I dont even like playing computer games but maybe if the library gets big enough ill build a pc.