Spore
Spore is everything that's wrong with new games journalism and the gaming industry, as a whole - as if we didn't learn our lesson from John Romero and Daikatana, or from David Perry's Messiah, or Peter Molyneux's Black & White, creating one good game does not mean you can change gaming on it's most basic levels, no matter how much the developer says he can do it.
Gamers should have all had a collective moment of clarity when the man responsible for a game where you wake up to an alarm clock, eat breakfast, get a job, come home, sleep six hours and repeat the cycle, claimed he could make a revolutionary new game that would completely change the way we think about gaming. This is the man who tried to change gaming into something where you do exactly the same thing you are trying to get away from by gaming in the first place. I suppose if you wanted to play the life of a lesbian nymphomaniac? But there's much more visually appealing japanese games for that.
In any case, Spore was built up to be something amazing, and for the first two segments of the game, it more or less delivered on it's promises. All throughout the creature phase I was amazed at how interesting my creatures became, the ways new parts changed my creature and their race, seeing my species proliferate across the earth, springing up to replace the races we'd annihalated or absorbed. But then everything fell apart. It gives the impression that Will Wright focused on making one part of the game really good, fun, and complete, so they could show it at trade shows to prove he was delivering on his promises, and then completely rushed everything else so they could make a quick buck. If anyone thought that Will Wright was above this, maybe you weren't fucking paying attention to The Sims.
The moral of this story is simple. The second you start referring to a developer by his name instead of the studio he works for, his career is over.
There are two positive things I can say about Spore. It's about the best damned Lego game I could ask for without actually purchasing a Lego game. For someone really creative, you can do some fucking incredible things. I had a lot of fun making lovecraft-esque creatures from beyond the stars, insectoid spacefarers, etc. If you can get past the part where the sections of the game these apply to are boring, rushed, and completely devoid of gameplay, you can have hours of fun.
The second silver lining is that gamers have, collectively, removed their firmly wrapped lips from around Will Wright's cock, and for the time being, we've stopped referring to developers by their full name - we still attribute halo to Bungie, we still attribute Warcraft to Blizzard, and we still attribute Fallout 3 to Bethesda. Once the next big success comes around and we start doing the name thing again, hopefully we'll all have learned our lesson and firmly clench our buttocks to avoid the impending rape that was Spore.
Fuck, I'm so glad I didn't pay for this piece of shit.
All MMOs from the last five years
World of Warcraft is a love or hate title - you either think it's the best thing ever, or you hate it for one of two reasons - you're a die hard everquest (or etc) player, or you don't really like MMOs to begin with. I love WoW - I come back to it consistently and I've sunk more hours into it than any other game I've ever purchased. Having said that, I don't love the new culture in MMO development of, 'We're the next WoW killer'. The arrogance of development teams is astounding, and it seems every big liscense or well funded development team these days is talking about how much better than WoW they're going to be - Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, just to name a few - and they've all turned out to be massive financial failures with deeply flawed gameplay that, at it's core, is essentially a pale imitation of the game they're claiming to kill. DDO and Warhammer have both had to go free to play (warhammer to a lesser extent) simply to attract new potentially paying customers and Age of Conan, after going so far as to give full copies of the game away with magazine sales, is getting ready to shut the game down - not as short a run as Tabula Rasa, (hey, there's another example of first name last name failure!) but damn close. Half of Korea's MMOs these days aren't WoW clones, but they're still pretty bad so I'm not exempting them from this - hell, I could give Mabinogi it's own entry on this list for how fucking disappointing it was.
I'm looking forward to FFXIV to see if it actually attempts to do anything differently from it's predecessor while still remaining separate from wow - it might actually give me hope here. I also want to note that, until I get a chance to play it, Star Trek Online is exempt from this list. I really want to like it but I'm terrified that the starting zone will consist of me, in an enterprise, facing another enterprise with a big yellow exclamation point over it's head. (bridge?) MMO development should not consist of taking WoW, slapping titties/superheroes/warhammer/spaceships/bland fps gameplay/etc over it and calling it a new game.
My Nintendo Wii
Let's create a game console with the same hardware as our previous generation game console, give it a fucking remote with a motion sensor, and sell it for three hundred dollars.
Ensuring that Nintendo gets no third party support on any but the crappiest titles, this box is only useful for playing first party games. At least the gamecube had some standout out of house games, but most of the third party crap on the Wii wouldn't pass as live arcade titles for the x-box. I'm sorry, but they should have just sold us an addon for the gamecube.
A complete lack of HDMI support just makes it all the more frustrating - knowing that the wii can be emulated at full FPS in 1080p, but can't be played on even basic HD on my television is maddening. Bottom five may seem harsh, but I've never regretted a game hardware purchase more. The only reason I haven't sold the thing off to buy a PS3 or 360 yet is because my fiance uses it to play rune factory. Our Nintendo Wii is essentially the rune factory box. Brawl is also OK too, but I've got to be honest - I've never gotten much play out of fighting games.
Doom 3
This game was fucking terrible. There's a reason we haven't seen a Doom 4 yet and probably never will. You know what I'd take? A remake of the first with a new engine - with the same overpowered weapons, underpowered enemies, and impossible odds. Serious Sam was successful by recreating Doom. Doom 3 was a failure by completely fucking missing what made the game fun in the first place. Considering how many hours I logged in Doom and how much I enjoyed the game for it's simple, visceral gameplay, I could not have been more dissapointed by Doom 3. I can't even give it props for story or originality- everything it did, System shock 2 had done better years before. And as an FPS, the game fails simply by handing you a stream of incredibly shitty weapons. The only guns you get that are worth using you never find any fucking ammo for!
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence
I hate pretentious developers, and Koji Igarashi is no exception. Iga has declared his utter contempt for the original developers of Castlevania in numerous interviews (these same developers later went on to form Treasure, makers of Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Gunstar Heroes, Bangai-O, Sin and Punishment, and McDonald's Treasureland Adventure. With the exception of Silpheed on the Ps2, their titles are overwhelmingly good.) and when some of those developers came back to write some prequels to the original castlevania, he decided to create this piece of shit to invalidate their work.
3d Castlevania has been tried - again and again - by numerous development teams. Castlevania built it's success as being a fuck-hard 2d platforming action game series with huge, lush environments and awesome character/monster design - in these areas, LoI fails, like every 3d Castlevania game before it. It's like the developers at Konami are cursed with amnesia. Either that, or Igarashi thinks he knows better than everyone else, and thinks he can do the same fucking game the same fucking way but somehow create a success. Given the interviews I'd read at the time of this game's launch, I'm going to lean towards the latter.
LoI fails in that, once you have played through the first half hour of the game, you have played the game in it's entirety. You are going to be seeing the same boring cut and paste rooms, the same boring cut and paste 3d models, and the same ugly character model for the entire fucking game. Any platforming to be found is of the boring tomb raider variety - jump over this easy pit, keep moving. Igarashi couldn't even take interesting mechanics from himself, as the 3d environments simply aren't big enough for double jumping, flight, and any kind of large room exploration. Even exploration of sub-branches of the castle, which is something that seems awfully fucking hard to screw up, and has been a staple of the series since Dracula's Curse, just seems like a fucking chore - the repetitive maze like corridors will have you lost in no time, and you'll find yourself crossing your fingers with every turn down a bland corridor that you're going to walk into the boss's room and spare yourself the anguish of fighting one more fucking unavoidable group of boring fucking skeletons.
I don't want to spend this entire post beating up on Iga, so I will say in his defense that if the Dreamcast Castlevania game had gotten finished, it probably would have made this stinking piece of shit look like a fucking masterpiece, but it didn't and this was the garbage we got. Iga doesn't get a free pass because another development team might have made something shittier. This game was fucking garbage, and the fact that it got branded with the Castlevania name at all is a fucking crime.
