What are the great tragedies of gaming?

The games that never came out but should have. The games that went through multiple iterations and you wish desperately that they had come out in a previous form. The games that are lost to time, but shouldn't be. What are your greatest gaming tragedies?

Mine are: Fez II's cancellation, Red Dead never coming out on PC, Silent Hills never coming out (that's a given), and MGSV being rushed out (goddammit if it had had one more year of development it could have been one of the greatest games ever made).

I think Bayonetta 2 being a Wii U exclusive is pretty tragic. Even though its cheaper than the other consoles I just can't justify buying a wii u for one or two games.

The second disc of Xenogears.

ETA: also, the collapse of SEGA as a console maker. The Saturn and the Dreamcast had some great things going, but they were left to die because of a mix of poor timing and bad management.

Bioware being bought by EA and Rare being bought by Microsoft. I'm not saying they havent made good games since then but you can see their influence on the design of their games. (less so Microsoft, but Rare's been making avatar clothing most of last gen)

Other than that the obvious 'Prey 2 should have happend', or that concept in general. I cant believe the closest thing we have to it is Star Wars: Bounty Hunter and Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter. (which was more of a generic FPS anyway) Also the original idea behind Fable of having a true reactionary world with npc's that had lives, goals and emotions that drove them. Which was obviously far beyond what the original Xbox was capable of. (as much as I like Morrowind the npc's are lifeless info hubs)

BC was a game I wish came out.

Square never making a real FFT sequel is maybe the biggest for me. Especially as mobile continued, still exists now, digital games became a thing, and tactical games have come back. Just proves how stupid Square is.

MGSV is one of the greatest games ever made already.

GoldenEye XBLA is a big one for me, especially since reports claim the project was practically done.

THQ shifting focus to mostly AAA titles, and closing because of it. It was the final nail in the mid-core (games that are not quite AAA) console market.

Knights of the Old Republic 3 and Battlefront 3. I also wish Jedi Knight would have continued. Best sword fighting mp game of all time for me.

@grapesoda said:

Yeah, really good games that get little popular recognition because they were on hardware that nobody owned is a pretty big one that doesn't afflict most other forms of media.

As for OP's request about specific games that were lost to time or were tragic cancellations or whatevs:

• MGSV shipping with, at best, a third of a competent Metal Gear story sure is a bummer. There's an entire third act pretty much missing and instead Baby Liquid just flies off with little resolution. Even if the shipping story was loosely the plan all along, there are just so many gaps in between significant story missions that I choose to interpret as "we ran out of time to script actually interesting missions with cutscenes, so we padded it out with a lot of filler missions with some Kaz voiceover and maybe you have to Fulton some ultimately meaningless NPC not worth a voice actor, so thank god the gameplay is good."
• The Prey 2 demo that the press saw sounded really cool, even though it was a vertical slice demo that maybe never could've existed or if it could it wouldn't have lived up to those promises.
• Star Wars 1313 could've been an original experience, when most other big budgets Star Wars games are you just being the good guy Jedi man (or if it's a BioWare/Obsidian game you can also be the super bad Jedi man). I mean, it was probably going to have Uncharted gameplay but Star Wars, but the setting and story seemed like they would have been atypical and have an edgier tone than Star Wars is usually allowed to have anywhere other than books.
• The "more full" version of Wind Waker, where the game had another dungeon or two in what was already a fantastic game. Yes, I know, those dungeon ideas aren't like "lost to time", apparently they've said in interviews that pretty much any good idea that got cut from Wind Waker made it into a dungeon in either Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword (Twilight Princess's Dominion Rod is notably exactly like the mind control song mechanic you learn in Wind Waker, except it only gets used in a single Twilight Princess dungeon and is otherwise near useless for the rest of the game, so if I had to nominate a dungeon idea/mechanic that was almost certainly ripped from an entirely different game, that's the one). All that being said, the Tingle Triforce scavenger hunt near the end of Wind Waker isn't something I hate as much as other people seem to, but the theoretical version of that game where it instead had 1-2 more dungeons would've been cool. It's too bad that the Zelda asset generation/dungeon design pipeline has changed such that no polygonal Zelda has ever had as many dungeons as Ocarina of Time; that motherfucker had 9 dungeons if you count Ganon's Castle, plus the like Ice Caverns and Bottom of the Well that are both somewhat significant minor dungeons. It seems to have averaged out to maybe like 6 dungeons per game?
• I still long for the day when they make a proper sequel to Deus Ex that is more akin to a cyberpunk Fallout 3/Fallout 4 (but with a variety of locales you travel through linearly, not just open world madness) instead of the streamlined, overly-guided experiences of Invisible War/Human Revolution/Mankind Divided. Now the only RPG elements are light inventory management and just some augment upgrades. I miss dumping XP into skill masteries which could've been an OK system if the skills were more balanced, and also I miss when the augments made you make some hard choices about your "build", and also I miss that you had to work your ass off to upgrade them instead of just "do all the stuff, get XP, get most or all of the augment upgrades by the end of the game" which is how Human Revolution/Mankind Divided shook out. I miss having to find awkward, cheesy ways to climb around the environment by stacking boxes or making weird sprint jumps, instead of all the "alternate routes" in recent games being really signposted, like "here is the designated breakable wall" or "there is a vent to everywhere". Hacking minigame is fun though, I'll give them that; OG Deus Ex, you just ran a script and hoped it finished before someone saw you, and the upgrades just made the script run faster I think.
• I still long for the day when they just make another game as good as Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Super Paper Mario still had the writing but had dull platforming gameplay, Sticker Star had dull RPG combat where the experience points don't matter because they don't exist and every attack is consumable AND it has the most bland writing of the whole series, at least Color Splash is back to good funny writing even if the combat system is the same (still bad). You took an RPG where Mario has one party member in a battle and generally does single digit damage for the entire game, and you managed to dumb it down by removing the party members and XP gains that allowed some minor amount of build customization in how you approach battles.

• What Resident Evil has become post-RE4
• Bethesda buying the rights to Fallout and turning a CRPG into a mediocre FPS-RPG
• Deus Ex Invisible War killing the franchise
• Metal Gear Solid V, in general
• Konami, in general
• Capcom, in general
• Every Mortal Kombat game after Ultimate MK 3 (excluding MK9)
• Not making a Freedom Fighters 2
• Tactical Sim Shooters being abandoned by the industry as a whole
• The original Prey 2 getting canned
• Star Wars 1313 getting canceled
• Star Wars Battlefront
• Call of Duty post-CoD BLOPS

I agree with this for sure (well not the Fallout comparisons but otherwise). How about a lot like the original Deus Ex in all design principles? Besides modernizing the gameplay, updating tech and presentation, and doing some balancing improvements you really wouldn't need to do all that much (although even balance wise I like the original Deus Ex a lot... so what if you hardly ever swim, when you do it is pretty fucking awesome as a shortcut!).

I mean the high bar is surpass the best level design in any game ever but even if they get 75% of the way there it's a gem and WAY WAY better than any Deus Ex has managed since. I haven't played Mankind Divided but Human Revolution's level design is a joke compared to Deus Ex. The level design could not be more obvious in the ways you mention. Going up to the first club you can't get into and then seeing an alley way and boy shocker there is a vent right back there to get into it, no way!

Then getting the cool story stuff like "Flatlander Woman" in there. That series really is such shadow of the original. It is my favorite game ever so it's a high bar for me but I would be willing to take something lesser. I just think everything since has been so much less.

Insomniac post ps2 era. Besides a few gems, most of their output has been really mediocre.

Here's another one: where are my squad tactics third person or first person shooters? Stuff like Brothers in Arms, Freedom Fighters (good call @stonyman65, one of my favorites) and Rainbox Six. That genre has really disappeared which is a shame. That genre with modern tech and RPG progression and stuff could be great. I also thought Brothers in Arms multiplayer was really interesting. It was always an afterthought but basically having all these AI squads you could order filling out a multiplayer battle was really interesting.

@artisanbreads: Yeah, I don't really want Deus Ex to be like Fallout, but at least Fallout 3 and 4 manages to be a first-person shooter AND feels wonky and open-ended in the ways an RPG should where you can spec all kinds of weird ways and approach things not from the one preordained path the devs would really like you to approach it from. The 3 newest Deus Ex games just feel like kinda good shooters with an upgrade tree slapped on, but completely lack the variety of NPC and world interactions that original Deus Ex had. You can just visualize the design document for Human Revolution as you play it, where the ingress options to an area are "climb a fire escape, go in through window", "find vent in side alleyway", "maybe the enemy sightlines are bullshit so you just have to use stealth or tranq every one from afar", "go in guns blazing which is always a terrible option because it aggros the entire zone and is basically never effective", and sometimes "use conversation augment that doesn't ever really require that you go do any possibly missable detective work on your own because the questline progresses in a very predetermined way so it feels like you didn't even earn it."

@bisonhero: Yeah I see what you're getting at and we are definitely on the same page. I mean, given how tech grew from when the first game came out it is insane how basically the scale of every single element is dialed back. Less build variation, less you can do in the story, less player agency, WAY smaller levels, less navigation choices, less NPC interactions, shorter length, etc.

TF2 still bums me out.

@sweep: There is something almost Shakespearean about the whole affair. Great use of dramatic irony in the opening act.

Valve basically paved the way for Overwatch's success with how they have been treating that game. I can't completely place on when I started playing TF2 in it's lifecycle (definitely before the Cheater's Lament-gate because I remember getting it and the shitstorm) but I have been with the game for long enough to see it slowly get worse. Frankly I'm amazed and grateful that it still has an active playerbase, even in Australia. It's optimization at this point is horrendous.

A couple more where I heavily spoil some games!

I would've loved to play whatever the original storyline was for The Wolf Among Us. They've never officially confirmed the exact reason, but due to some external pressure (question mark?) the devs had to scrap a very large portion of their planned storyline for episodes 2 and 3 (preview for episode 2 at the end of episode 1 shows there was going to be a much larger focus on nonmagical cops investigating Bigby and almost discovering all the fairy tale stuff, which is instead very quickly swept under the rug at the start of shipping episode 2 and a bunch of scenes from the preview never happen) and possibly had to scrap their entire storyline and tell a different one instead (preview for episode 2 at the end of episode 1 has Bigby and Crane both basically say "A serial killer!?" because when two women die in a very specific killing in a short timespan that's a reasonable guess, but then in the actual rest of the season that shipped those lines are never uttered and no one even floats that theory despite it being reasonable and instead you spend the whole season investigating just those 2 deaths that turn out to be an isolated incident of 2 disobedient prostitutes and the climax is kind of a he-said-she-said of who actually ordered the murder which is all just kind of dull compared to "serial killer on the loose!").

Also, Broken Age. I'm not one of the people who thinks Double Fine/Tim Schafer is some kind of charlatan, but man, that game. I still don't think Double Fine has quite the same magic as golden era LucasArts, so even the parts I like in Broken Age aren't amazing. But also the latter half of Broken Age really suffers since they had used up basically all the money and had to make that half with a significantly reduced team, and there is a whirlwind ending that felt like they cut a bunch of it because it basically makes no sense as-is. It still wouldn't have been great, but I would've liked to see the version of Broken Age where they didn't rapidly run out of money because of San Fran cost of living which leads to paying a fortune for office space and salaries and whatever. And/or maybe Tim just never quite figured out a great resolution to the whimsical premise of this boy and this girl in two different worlds. Also, maaaaaaaaaaaaan, act 2 spoiler, they turned Shay's parent AI (which they clearly were in the first act when it shipped) into actual parents who are just impossibly oblivious, and there's no way that wasn't some kind of bizarre rewrite, because they're so terrible in the second act and they make way more sense when they were like malfunctioning overprotective AI on a ship where the only human was Shay. The story makes sense when Shay is on the ship, in a Truman-Show-esque scenario where his entire existence is guided and he is coddled due to weirdo parent AI, so of course he wants to rebel and do what the cool wolf says to do and unwittingly do the evil stuff; the whole plan seems idiotic if the ship also has two normal adults on it who somehow happen to be too stupid to realize that they're being played. Why overcomplicate the plan, when it's already a very overcomplicated plan to abduct some maidens? It's just the worst.

I'm surprised people said TF2, I had so many years of fun with that game. I mean nowadays it has seen little updates, but Valve has kind of abandoned every game they have besides Dota anyway.

I understand the MGSV thing. There's not exactly just one thing missing, but it really isn't far from being my favorite Metal Gear game. I think if the story was just slightly more fleshed out throughout the game, and the epilogue/later missions were as substantial as those towards the middle of the game I would really adore it top to bottom.

Oh yeah the general story and ideas behind Assassins Creed 1 but as good game.

As far as recent tragedies go, I'd say Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is pretty high up there. Setting aside the fact that it was a technical mess, that slam function screwed that game up on such a fundamental level that it's just heartbreaking.

I think it's a tragedy that more than half of the MGS games were prequels. I would have liked to see more of the future instead of mucking around in the past. Big Boss became a lot less appealing over the years.

I agree with Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz: "I don't like the idea of prequels. They make the filmmakers back in to material they've already covered and it boxes in the story."

Mercinaries 2.

The first one was an amazing gem of a game. The second one....

Still makes me sad

Bioshock Infinite on Vita.

hmm probably project copernicus and the whole bankruptcy stuff. probably wouldn't have been the best mmo ever but it was still interesting to see what could have been.

When this:

Turned into:

im going to say my biggest tragedy besides the final 1/3 of MGSV is the ending of MGS4. I LOVE LOVE LOVE MGS4 and had one of my favorite moments of all time on top of that sub fighting liquid. but man i wish snaked pulled the trigger to end his existence for one last sacrifice for the good of the world. I understand why they made some of the changes but it would have been so perfect!!

also... maybe agent never coming to fruition even though we (the public) never knew exactly what it was going to be.

PS. Apparently the makers of shadow of colossus wanted like 45 different bosses? holy crap

I watched some Color Splash get played recently and it just seems like no one at Nintendo understands what to do with Paper Mario. The idea that the battle system of the first two games, which I understood just fine when I was 8, somehow needed to be made more simplistic is all sorts of baffling.

I'll also throw in Rare getting bought by Microsoft. While I think Nuts and Bolts is pretty great and understand that people like them some Viva Pinata, pretty much everything else they've done in the past 14 years has ranged from "okay" to "depressing." Of all the various "companies getting bought out by large corporations and turned into ruined husks of their previous selves" they're the one that bums me out the most. Maybe Sea of Thieves will turn out well, but that will hardly make up for the last 8 years of making avatar clothing and kinect sports games.

Speaking of companies buying things and then not knowing what to do with them, I also think the treatment of the Might and Magic franchise by Ubisoft has been pretty tragic. Heroes V was good and Dark Messiah was a goofy fun physics murder simulator, but everything they've done since then has been all over the place. There's the surprisingly good puzzle game with fake-anime art, the free-to-play browser/mobile game that I don't think anyone touched, the shoestring budget attempt at reviving the RPG side that I probably liked more than it deserved, the HD-update to the most popular game in the series that didn't bother throwing in either of the expansions, and the two sequels to Heroes that the fanbase likes to forget. VI is merely mediocre, but VII is still apparently a burning, buggy, trash fire even a year after release.

Most if not all the "MGSV is unfinished" ideas are based on assumptions, not facts. It may be a tragedy to some that it's not what they wanted, but I think a lot of people are using the perception that it's unfinished just to avoid the idea that they purely didn't like it. The structure of the latter half of the game isn't great; but it's also very similar to the structure of the last chapter of Peace Walker (main missions and story doesn't unlock until you play a bunch of extra ops and meet other gameplay requirements). Plus, Kojima and co. always said the stuff that Metal Gear fans would enjoy in terms of story would mainly be in the tapes years before release. No one has to like it, but people's ideas about why it is the way it is are usually baseless. Because, at best, it's just as likely that it's "unfinished" (in the way people usually intend when they say that), as it is the fully intended product from the developers. I'm more willing to say any tragedy lies in it simply having unsatisfactory design, but won't go as far as to call it unfinished or rushed. Only the people who were involved in making the game know that status of its completion.

Any ways, luckily the whole Konami tragedy has resulted in Death Stranding. Unluckily it has resulted in Survive.

Some that haven't been mentioned (that are actually games that never came out and not just people trying to throw shade at games that did come out)

• Mother 3 - M3 never being officially localized (seriously, it's one of the best games ever made)
• Beyond Good & Evil 2 - Fuck you Ubisoft and your yearly "it's in development/pre-production/whatever". I'll believe it when I see it.
• Megaman Legends 3 - Volnutt is doomed to stay on that moon.
• Half-Life 2: Episode 3 - Yup.
• Tacoma 1 - Can't believe they're making a sequel to a cancelled game.
• Chocobo Racing 3DS - The last shot anyone not named Mario has had at a good kart racer.
• Chrono Trigger Resurrection - Fanmade 3D remake of the game. Was still in early development when cancelled, but the game looked AMAZING at the time of its development and was my first introduction to rule #1 of fangames: "Don't announce your game until it's ready to be released"
• Phantasy Star Online 2 - I played the English version of this at PAX one year. And it was the last time it was ever shown.
• Lunar Knights - Or Boktai 4 in Japan. The game was localized to feature new protagonists and a half-baked storyline when it really was supposed to be following the events of Boktai 3.
• Skies of Arcadia 2 - On the one hand we got Valkyria Chronicles out of the ashes of Skies of Arcadia 2, but I still would have loved to see more sky pirates in my JRPGs.
• Persona 4 - THERE WAS A LOVERS ROUTE FOR YOSUKE THAT WAS CUT.
• Final Fantasy: Fortress - A Nordic Final Fantasy game being made by the Bionic Commando people that would take place in Ivalice, the same world as Tactics and XII. The concepts looked amazing, but Square-Enix decided to screw the studio over so hard that they went out of business. You should really read the story on this one. It's kinda batshit insane.

Tis the season for vampires so I'm going with Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines being shipped in an utterly broken state and will never be 100% fixed. Looking back, that game could have been an absolute classic had they not run out of time and budget.

This guy. How good he WAS.

Silent Hill: Silent Hill 2 has held a special place in my heart for over ten years now. I never played through Silent Hill 3, but I bought Silent Hill 4: The Room on PC...only to find it didn't work on my PC for some reason. Well that sucks. Years later Silent Hill: Homecoming came out, but didn't seem to have what I was looking for, so I never picked it up. Then the same thing, but arguably worse, happened to Silent Hill: Downpour. Well that really sucks. And then we had the Silent Hill HD Collection which turned out to be a broken ass mess that was cobbled together from random alpha/not final builds of both games. Again, I didn't want to mess with them. (And as an aside, if they couldn't find the source code or the latest build for either SH2 or SH3 to repurose them in order to make $40 again, they sure as hell aren't going to find the proper code to release them as vanilla PS2 classics like 5+ years later. So Silent Hill 2 is probably lost forever, unless people are passing around copies of that not-so-great PC port, and I will never be able to play a proper version of Silent Hill 3) And then we randomly got a weak Diablo style clone with Silent Hill: Book of Memories that felt like nobody bought. When Silent Hill felt like it was finally dead, we randomly got Silent Hills...only to have it be cancelled by Konami. I guess I should probably a Wii and then track down a copy of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories or finally look into PS2 emulation and see if there are any Ok versions of SH2 or SH3 out there. And I know a lot of this sounds like me not buying 5 games I probably should have, but it always felt like Silent Hill was turning into something I didn't want, or was released as a not so great game anyways, or had some technical issue which either prevented me from playing it (like with SH4) or didn't want to tolerate (like the HD collection).

Mass Effect 3: I am that guy...I'm sorry to be that guy...The ending to Mass Effect 3 really bummed me out. I went from playing Mass Effect 2 over the course of 4 days, staying up til 6:00 AM, only to go to sleep, wake up at noon, and play it all day again. ME2 is still considered one of my favorite games ever, and I've played through it to completion 3 times in a year leading up to ME3. There were plenty of uneven parts, but ME3 was still a good game, at times even a really good game. But that ending soured me on almost everything. It took the Extended Cut and randomly playing the multiplayer and spending an unusual amount of time with that to me to be less harsh, but there are still many things about that game that bums me out, including an ending which I still think today is straight up awful.

I don't remember that at all. When was this?

Silent Hills still hurts me to this day. What could have been...

It also pains me that the Blood IP is endlessly being squatted on so that nobody can do anything with it. A modern Blood remains my pipe dream game (but not my Pipe Dream game). Even an updated release of the original like Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior got would be excellent.

Mortal Kombat: Fire & Ice is another one. Man... if only. A followup to Shaolin Monks, ostensibly with refined mechanics? Gimme.

And for a game that did eventually come out:

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine game. Really good, even. But after its harrowing predecessor, it was massively disappointing. It had exactly one scary moment, and it was near the beginning when that song, Mors Praematura, starts playing and you have no idea what's going to happen. I'm listening to it right now to remind myself, and the sheer dread is as powerful and intense as ever. If the whole game were like that, it would have been legendary amongst horror fans.

No true sequel to Okami.

Everquest Next being cancelled.

• Almost every MMO released roughly between 2005-2012. or as I like to call it: The Great MMO Gold Rush. Once everyone saw how well WoW was doing, the fucking breaks were off. Company after company tried their hand, but if didn't close down within a year or two or release, it slowly faded away into obscurity...and that's assuming the game even came out at all which many didn't. I consider it such a tragedy because there were a lot of genuinely unique ideas and/or solid games that never got the budget, leadership, or playerbase they needed to survive like Auto Assault and Warhammer Online. Others like Rif, TERA, and Wildstar despite still trucking along, never blew up like they had hoped and while I wouldn't call them failures, I think their over-reliance on shit-talking WoW before their releases is just kinda depressing when you go back and look at it.
• Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes. Ya fucked up. Ya fucked up big. The two "hottest" things in the world right now are Star Wars and superheroes. This particular tragedy isn't so much about those two games in particular as much as it the fact there are no games to take their place. SWTOR doesn't provide even a fraction of the freedom found in SWG (before it all went to shit obviously) and the only other superhero mmos, Chmapions and DCUO are just kinda...not good games.

The existence of Silent Hill Homecoming and Resident Evil 6

Daikatana

The video game crash of 83.

We're so fuckin' spoiled these days.

Oh, TimeSplitters 4. Rest in peace Free Radical.

• Valkyria Chronicles never getting a proper console sequel
• The state of Japanese developers in general today. Remember Clover? Capcom? Konami? From being at the forefront of console gaming to being relegated to mid-tier developers.
• The death of arcades.
• Console fanboys and the wars they bring.

The amount of time spent staring at the idiot box playing these goddamn things.

That is a good one.

I feel like every fanboy is a tragedy, Console and PC fanboys. Battlefield, CoD, and Counter Strike and fanboys. DotA, League, and Smite fanboys. Overwatch and Paladins fanboys. The list goes on and on. It's not just about consoles. Everything is turned into some sort of "war" these days.

We will fight the heathens! We will fight the heathens!

...Sorry.

First up, Hellgate London. Had potential, and we see games that have essentially refined that mess of ideas into good products of today.

MGSV. Mixed feeling and a lot of "what it could have been". It had cut content we know that much. Last episode tracking down Liquid, battle gear and unbalanced mission 45, rather these ideas were sound or able to come together at all is questionable, was the game rushed? Don't know for certain. Only thing I feel like is that it could have been better, it is good if not great as it is, but it could have been so much more. And if it was meant to be a decoy for MGS5 well...who knows, it is all over now.

Xenogears. The game is a mess, it was rushed, it had cut content, hell just look at disc 2, but I fucking love this god damn mess That's not all, it was also just episode 5 of a 6 piece saga. Were there suppose to be 5 other games? Who knows, if only they have a chance to get to them...In come Xenosaga. A proposed 6 Episode series that is a re-imagining of XG, but it was cut short after Episode 3.

Admittedly Episode 1 isn't the greatest thing, but it was at the very least decent enough as a starter. Episode 2 tried to fix some of the complaints but ended up setting the whole thing on fire. News of the plug being pulled happened in between 2nd and 3rd. However Episode 3 is totally fine if not genuinely good at the very least. They finally struck the balance for the art, combat, gameplay, refined some technical details and quality of life issues that the genre had as a whole. They had it, they figured it out, but it was too late.

They gave me hope and took it all away, only to show me it was actually possible and within grasp. I am an empty shell of a man now.

I really liked that first E3 video of the x-com shooter when it was still a fps. Like, it was my most anticipated game at some point. I thought it looked really good, and having no attachement to the series I had no problems with it not being turn-based. What they ultimately made of it wasn't nearly as exciting. It could have been Bioshock and ended up being the boring parts of Mass Effect.

I'm probably also the only person in the world who would have wished for RedLynx to make more Pathway to Glory games instead of Trials. I wouldn't call the downfall of the n-gage the greatest gaming tragedy, but that it took Pathway to Glory with it is still a shame.

While you're not wrong, it IS an absolute cult classic despite all its flaws. There might not be that many people who played/finished it, but most of those who did usually seem to adore it (like I do).

I wouldn't have MGS V as a tragedy. Nobody was telling Kojima what to write for that game and his conduct around that game's hype soured me on him a bit.

@drdarkstryfe: I agree that losing the mid-core titles is a shame, though the guys behind games like Bound by Flame and Lords of the Fallen are doing their best to take up that mantel it was unfortunately the uDraw tablet that did THQ in. They had moderate success with that on the Wii and thought it would do just as well on the other consoles. It did not.