The Most Disappointing Game Ever?

What would be yours? 
 
Now this is NOT necessarily the WORST game you have ever played; instead it should be that game that you built a mental pedestal for.  A shrine for what would be greatness!!! 
 Until you actually got to play it and then you realized that all your hopes and dreams had turned to dog poop.  DOG POOP! 
 
For me, Spore was pretty bad.  The Getaway was great looking but the mechanics were awful!   And Far Cry 2... so gorgeous... so faulty...

Crackdown 2
 
/thread

Spore yes, but also Borderlands, ending rather than the entire game, but as bad endings go, Borderlands takes the f***ing cake.

Crysis 2 created a new definition for "An abomination of a sequel"

Hello Kitty Island adventure

Crackdown 2  /thread

Dragon Age 2

Subject to personal taste, but can't think of a larger disappointment.

I bought a PS3 a few weeks ago, with Uncharted 2 being a big reason why. After playing through it, I really don't understand all the praise. It's not a bad game by any means, but it just felt... standard. Besides the graphics, nothing really stood out about it, and even those aren't mindblowing. It's more cinematic than most games, but not much more fun to play. After hearing so much about how great it is, I can't help being extremely disappointed with how boring the game was to me.

Also really did not care for LA Noire. That was a pretty big bummer after getting hyped up by all the reviews.
 
Again, these are not bad games, but given how much they were built up, definite disappointments.

Brutal Legend, Borderlands, Spore.

Knights of the Old Republic 2

Out of recent memory, White Knight Chronicles 2.

I've answered this question quite a few times and my answer is still Spore. With the potential of the ideas put into it, the development time put into it and perhaps most promising that it was the post-Sims brainchild of Will Wright it seemed like it could have so much going for it, then when it got here it wasn't a bad game but it wasn't anywhere near as good as it could have been.

Alpha Protocol, Spore, Dragon Age 2

Crackdown 2 was pretty darn disappointing, but I don't think there was so much excitement or hype for that game to label it as the most disappointing ever. But it should have been Microsoft's alternative to inFamous, it's a shame the series has just fizzled out.

Spore - I think this game was hyped up more than Fable, it was supposed to be endless and filled with possibilities, they really made it sound like a game to end all games. Obviously it was never going to live up the hype but in the end, it wasn't even a good game.

Gran Turismo 5 - "The real driving simulator".. Over 5 years in development, simulates less than the competition and failed to even live up to past games in the series.

Final Fantasy XIII - I'm a big Final Fantasy fan, but the series has completely disconnected for me. They need to go back and look and what really worked with the old games. I don't even know what this was supposed to be.

Sonic 4 - This was supposed to be a return to classic Sonic gameplay for the old school fans. Instead we got wonky physics, terrible level design and just generally the same old bad Sonic. Except now they've tainted even the original series beyond repair. That was really the last chance for a good Sonic game for me.

Super Mario Bros. 2

Neverwinter Nights. Baldur's Gate 2 might be my favorite game of all time, and the idea of porting my character over to a whole new world with new stuff was really enticing. Then I load it up, all the mechanics have changed to 3E, you get one party member, and the world is relatively tiny.
It's not that it's a bad game, just not one I was interested in.

Fighting Force - When they first started covering the development of this game, it was described as a game with multiple paths and a lot of interactivity with the world around it. As a fan of the old brawlers it quickly caught my attention and it was probably one of the first games I seriously followed through gaming magazines. I bought it on day one and it was finished probably in less than an hour, or at least that's what my memory tells me. It went by quickly. The game did have a lot of things you could pick up and use as a weapon but not to the extent they had promised. Furthermore the diverging paths were mere road splits that ended up at the same place, so it was rather superficial at best. I think the disappointment of it all was enhanced by the fact that I had traded in my old NES with games to afford the game, or at least it has built my resentment towards this game under the years after when I kind of wish I had a NES again to get some nostalgia in.

The Witcher.

Mgs4, too many cutscenes. I finshed the game in 5 hours 50 minutes, if you download all cutscenes it's 18 hours of it. I was such a big fan of the series, until Mgs4, then I am not a fan anymore. I now moved to the splinter cell series and won't look back. I never been so dissapointed this entire gen. 

Scribblenauts. I was naive to think that game would be anything other than a decomposing arse served with a side of excrement. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Another for Spore I guess.

I enjoyed the game plenty, but it wasn't what I'd hoped.

Microcosm on amiga cd 32. I chipped in with my brother for that game. Look soooooo good with the fmv intro and such. But the game was so bad :(

Killer7, im still baffled how people had fun with a game which such godawful controls. Ye the story and the visuals did push me to finish the whole thing but man I swear there are FMV games that have more intuitive and immersive controls than this!

Dragon Age 2.
 
Sure I had fun, but it wasn't anything at all like I expected.

Worst game ever, i don know, if you asked me 1 year ago i might say Fear 2/ Farcry 2 . Today? Homefront.....

Homefront.. The only thing that i have ever rented in my life and wanted to call the company i got it from and tell them i wanted my money back. Also the only game that i have had where it pissed me off so much on how bad it was that I stopped playing. I would rather pay blizzard 15$ a month for wow and never log in then to ever play that POS again... which i am doing atm anyways..

Maybe not the most disappointing game ever but playing through Halo 3 was a real drag. I've never been much into the Halo universe thou I did enjoy playing Halo 1 and 2 but playing Halo 3 didn't feel special at all to me. Gameplay-wise I thought it was crap boring but what made me get through it all was the music. Love them Halo themes.

I had heard many great things about Call of Duty 4, sadly I ended up not really liking it D:

Metal Gear Solid 4

Grand Theft Auto IV

Crackdown 2

Half Life 2 for me. 
Interesting setting and the gravity gun was cool, I thought everything else was pretty dull.

I think most disappointing, for me at least, would be another vote towards Spore. Spore was so hyped that it was destined to fail, but in the end your choices didn't matter all that much and the progression felt far too linear.

A lot of sequels could fall into the category though because they just don't live up the first game or change into another sort of game altogether - Dragon Age 2 is a good recent example, and Civilization V at launch was pretty bad as well - the AI was incredibly bad and the balance just wasn't there. There is no way it could have matched Civ 4 with all the expansions that had been added over the years but it's never a good thing when a game almost requires mods to be fun at launch.

Blood Bowl would be up there, as well, for disappointments. The lack of star players, the lack of teams at launch, and just generally lacking a lot of the things that have since been added in new releases. Needing to buy a game two or three times is always sort of crap, but when it's something as simple as a board game where all you're doing is modeling existing pieces and implementing rules from a rulebook there really isn't much of an excuse for leaving things out of the video game version.

For me, the new AVP game. That's only because I spent a ridiculous amount of time on AVP 2, and it just didn't live up to the legacy. It was only a mediocre game. The multiplayer was significantly lacking compared to AVP2. 
 
Then Spore. Such a cool idea and even execution, it just needed a bit more. Another year in development would have produced possibly a masterpiece.  
 
And last and absolutely least, Command and Conquer 4. What a way to end it. I better stop typing now because I can feel my blood boiling, and the desire to firebomb ea is building.

Honestly? L.A. Noire. I don't know why I keep letting myself get caught up in the ridiculous levels of pre-release hype for Rockstar games. They're clearly not for me.

Spore 
 
It was also one of the worst games ever.

Legend of Mana

OK, maybe not most, but it was the big one that came to mind pretty quickly.

@firewrkninja said:

Crackdown 2 /thread

/threading yourself is really... silly

Also Dragon Age 2

Um. Devil May Cry 2 and Devil May Cry 4.

Dragon Age 2

Subject to personal taste, but can't think of a larger disappointment.

Duke Nukem fucking forever.That piece of shit game had me so fucking mad.Its my highest disappointed game this year by far. 

Halo 3 for me, most agree its a great game, however i just was looking for something else with it, dunno if it was the graphics or something, but i was hoping for a next gen halo and it was very iterative over halo 2 and thats why it was very dissapointing. Oh and i spore deserves a mention aswell, that game was a massive dissapointment.

Alpha Protocol, Dragon Age 2 and Kotor 2. The last one not the game itself really but the ending. Oh that ending....

Pokemon Colosseum ruined my 2004.