Andrew's Top Ten Games I Wish I Never Bought

You know, for as expensive as games can be, I've sure made some terrible spending decisions in my time. The following is a list of games I just shouldn't have bought. I'll give you a reason for each, be it that I never played it, or it just plain sucked. God, I hope some of these are still going for something on Ebay...
 
Note that this is a list of physical copies; were I to include Steam purchases, I'd probably have to make it a top 30. But those games were either cheap or included in a bundle, so there wasn't nearly as much of a monetary loss and no remorse to be felt.

List items

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  1. Enclave

  This is my top spot for a good reason. What the fuck is this game? Seriously? WHAT THE FUCK IS IT?

  Despite the picture, I bought the PC version. Or rather, my parents bought it for me. Why? Well, this is the only case I can ever remember of me making an impulse buy on a game. I went to the store to pick up something else (I can't remember what), and somehow, I ended up walking out of the store with this. I was regretting it almost immediately. I never even installed the game. Never. Even. Installed it. To this day. It makes me feel really bad for my parents, now that I realize what this magical thing called money is. I was a bratty kid/teen.

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  2. Resident Evil 4

  No, it's not a bad game. I'd freaking love to be able to play it. I just... can't. I get too frustrated by the controls, and too anxious to do much more than sit back and hope I have enough bullets. I can't for the life of me aim properly at the wormy parasite things before they have a chance to take off my head.

  The sad thing? I own two copies of this game! One for Gamecube, the other for Wii. When I figured my big problem with the game was the control scheme, I went out and bought the Wii version a couple years later. It didn't alleviate my problem, but then, I'm not entirely sure I've played it on a large TV set yet, which could have been my problem back then.

  This is one I'll probably keep, though. Having heard so much praise of the game, I really want to play through the whole thing some day. The gamecube version, however, will be offloaded as quickly as possible.

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  3. Battle Realms

  I played quite a bit of this game, but it never caught on. It's not a bad RTS, it was just overshadowed by my other two favorites, at the time: Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. I can't remember if Warcraft 3 was out at the time, or if it was just anticipation for that game that got me to buy this. Either way, it was just an inferior RTS, in comparison. A shame, really, because you'd think an RTS about Ninjas and Samurai couldn't fail.

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  4. The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure

  Here's my experience with Temple of Elemental Evil:

  I spent at least a couple of hours rolling up a party of characters. Another half hour to an hour exploring the town, talking to people, and getting suited up. Then, 5 seconds of combat. Here's a little spoiler: the very first combat in the game is with a bunch of giant frogs who can swallow your characters alive in one attack. My party became frog food.

  When I did finally manage to make it through that bit of ridiculously balanced combat, I pressed my way inside of the temple. There, around one of the first corridors, stands a party of hostile characters. They brutalized me utterly.

  Thus was the end of my time with Temple of Elemental Evil. I've got to give them credit for making the most hardcore RPG *ever.* I guess it stays true to the actual pen and paper module that it's based off of, so maybe I can't blame them. I'll also give them kudos for the most p&p-like implementation of the Dungeons and Dragons system, complete with stances for ending your combat turn (get caught flat-footed, and you'll pay the penalty with death by sword). It's incredibly tactical, and I find myself wishing they'd made another game in the same engine, only *good* this time.

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  5. SimCity 4

  I'll be honest. I suck at running a city. Rather, I suck at running a virtual city. I always want to build, build, build; spend when I haven't got the money, because I want to see an actual freaking city, and not some lowly hovel even smaller than the town I grew up in. So when I played SimCity 2000, and even 3000, I cheated my way to the top and had a whole lot of fun.

  Then, I bought the 4th game. And I'll be honest: I bought it for the graphics. Especially seeing how short a time it was between Simcity 3000 and Sim City 4, it was a stupid purchase. I don't really have a whole lot to say about this one. The graphics that I thought were so amazing just never hooked me, nor did the gameplay. After all, I'm not good at these SimCity games. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson. Well, that least hat was the end of my SimCity Spree. I never saw any appeal in the later entries to the series, nor all the copycat series it spawned.

  Besides, I was done building cities. At that time, it was all about the family building in The Sims. Check out my #8 to see how well that turned out.

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  6. Command & Conquer: Generals

  I think the reason I never played much of this, as with the next game on my list, isn't because it's necessarily *bad.* It's just that I lacked the proper computer to play it, at the time, and thus it was a horrible looking slideshow. A mess. I could barely scrape my way past the 3rd mission before I gave up, never to return. Actually, that's not true; I did try to play it again just a few months ago, but now, it's so horribly outdated and boring. Being one of those early implementations of 3D RTS games, it shows its age moreso than even the older 2D games.

  Also, it's just not as good as most Command and Conquer games, which is probably why it's pretty much forgotten, now. I just wish I had known that before I bought it...

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  7. Motocross Madness 2

  Like I said in my #6, the reason I never really got into Motocross Madness 2 was because back then, my PC was junk. We're talking under 200mhz, 16MB of RAM (if that... I honestly can't remember if it was 8MB or worse), 1GB hard drive, no graphics card. Bad.

  I think I may have tried to play it later on, with a computer at least a little more capable, but I'm not sure it was much better, because I never remember playing much more than a few races.

  On the bright side, I've still got the 1GB hard drive.

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  8. The Sims 3

  I bought the original game back before it was popular. I loved it. I bought expansion pack after expansion pack after that. Didn't like that, so much. I bought The Sims 2 when it came out. Loved it, for a couple of days, before I realized I didn't have the time to play it if I wanted to continue my own life. I obviously avoided each and every ludicrous expansion pack after that, which diluted my enjoyment of the original game, anyway, since there's just so much stuff they yank out to sell to you later through expansion packs.

  So then, years later, some strange force made me buy The Sims 3. Why? I don't know; I keep asking myself that very question. I guess the lure of the whole "one big neighborhood" thing really hooked me in. Also, my sister-in-law is also real big into it, and hearing her talk about it made me want it more.

  So I popped the disc in, installed it on my desktop. Popped the disc in, installed it on my laptop (yay for included Mac versions!). I got to the character creation screen, and was baffled for quite some time. Exactly what character do I want to make? That's something I had never even thought about. I must have spent hours just trying to decide on what my family was going to be. I ultimately went with the very creative decision of making a more idealistic version of myself. I also had a sister. We were living together, jobless, for about 2 days before my interest was drawn away by some other story-driven games. Since then, I've tried to pick up the game again several times, but each time is on my laptop, which doesn't run the game so well.

  But there's also another, more sinister, terrible thing, that is the reason why I secretly loathe this game. In the switch to the 3rd game, EA realized they were sitting on a goldmine. Now, not only were they going to strip out all the cool stuff you were used to from previous games with all of their respective expansion packs full of goodies, but now there was this little thing called microtransactions. You see, now the game ships with a pretty much incomplete library of furnishings for your home, and, on top of the $50 you were supposed to spend on the game at launch, you've now got to fork over $10 or more at a time for furniture sets. Fuck you, EA. Fuck you.

  I've now finally learned my lesson. When The Sims 4 comes out, no matter how good it may look, I'll be keeping my money. Who knows:maybe by then I'll be broke and homeless from buying so many games I never end up playing. Nah, that's what Ebay is for.

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  9. Black & White 2

  I loved the first game. Loved it. Despite the two big flaws with it. One being the showstopping bug that prevented you from progressing through this one level in the game, and one that was introduced in the patch that also fixed the first problem: the nixing of the near-infinite food and wood glitch. But I digress, because we're now coming to the game's sequel.

  The sequel that I bought, but never played. Well, I did play through the tutorial. I started the first level, even. Then, I just put it away, never to return. I can't remember why; probably another game drew my interest, and this was during a time when I had the spare cash to just buy any old game, it seemed.

  Though to be fair, it seems like a pretty mediocre sequel. It gets a lot more needlessly complicated, way too RTS-like (as compared to the rather sandbox feel of the first), and has an annoying focus on unit combat over God combat. Also, the two "good" and "evil" consciences lost their charm between that and the first game.

  I've still got the discs, though, and a means to play them. Maybe I should pop those in sometime and give it another go.

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  10. Left 4 Dead 2

  Easily the game I enjoyed most on this list, yet it was actually the reason I decided to make it. Don't get me wrong; I was never in the crowd of Left 4 Dead 2 boycotters. I *was* surprised and, yes, a little disappointed to hear the game announced, when I' been counting on Valve's standard delivery of DLC for the original game's woefully underwhelming amount of content, but I never felt like not buying the sequel because of it.

  And now that I've played it, I think it's a really great game. All that new content that I feared would over complicate a really awesomely simple game didn't hurt things as much as I thought. The improved graphics and new maps are superb, with some great twists and nice, subtle, inter-weaved story to go along with it. The new characters have a lot more personality than the originals (with the exception of Rochelle). Everything is technically better. But somehow, it all comes together rather flatly. I paid near full-price for the game, yet I've only played each of the campaigns through once or twice within a couple days of release. Single player. And I've never gone back since.

  There are two reasons for that.

  Number one: I really like the original game, too. I play the original campaigns in offline versus mode as a once in awhile distraction while listening to a podcast, and I have a blast. Unfortunately, the option to hack together your own single player versus mode using console commands has been nerfed in the game's sequel. I have a lot of fun playing as infected, but I really like to keep things single player unless I have someone I know to play with, which I never do. which leads me into my second point...

  Number two: I don't want to play with strangers. I hear horror stories about it. On the PC, there is no standardized mic, so I'm not sure everyone will be able to communicate. And frankly, there are times I don't want to communicate, myself. Yet this game is such a team experience that I know I'd only be a detriment to my team if I remained silent. Unfortunately, the other option of playing with friends doesn't work for me, as I don't really talk with enough gamers online these days to have built up a list of friends to play with, let alone a list of friends with the PC version of this particular game.

  But if you want to add me on Steam, by all means, do. Help me change my opinion of this game. Maybe I won't regret my decision to buy it as much as I do right now.