Once-hyped games that are now completely forgotten

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Look at this trailer as well.

Game sucked so hard that it's not really talked about anymore.
Preview here, preview there, ads, ads, ads, ads everywhere. It sucked sooooooooo bad.
 
The thread derail by the Titanfall Haters is made so much worse by the appearance of the Titanfall Defense Force. Seriously guys, just ignore the drive by trolling and stay on topic for Christ' sake.
 
Not sure if mine's a good example, but:


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This game was hyped to the heavens.
Roberta Williams was revolutionizing the adventure game genre with this one! Oh yes!

-550 page script
-over 100 pages of storyboarding
-over 200 people involved in the development
-multi-million dollar budget
-insane marketing campaign
-took four solid months of filming

The game had a rough run when it came to reviews and although it received a (shitty) sequel, the days of Sierra Online adventure games were over and instead of saving a dying genre it just helped in expediting its death.

The only reason some people might remember it now is because it had some fucking brutal/gory death scenes (especially near the end of the game).
The brutal and gory death scenes were all I heard about when the game was coming out, too.
 
Talk about hitting a nerve, I never claimed it didn't sell well but everything is relative.

It doesn't even work "relatively":

For fun, try searching all posts that contain the names of specific games within the last week:

Titanfall - >1000 (search caps out at 1000 entries)
Watch Dogs - 607
Battlefield - 604
Infamous - 500
Killzone - 464
Call of Duty - 445
Knack - 263
Killer Instinct - 215
Ryse - 127
Resogun - 93

TF is pretty dead on Twitch though for a game that's supposed to be the next big hit title. No one seems to care to watch anyone play it.

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Meanwhile...

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Are we seeing how flawed this method may be yet?
 
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Star Hawk. Successor to much beloved and one of the best online shooter at start of ps3 gen. It was by Dyaln and very much anticipated

Innvoative game play check
Base building check.
Good tps controls check
Good graphics check.
Hawks that turn into fucking robots check.

Eventually it came out and nobody even bought and played . Now no one even remembers it and may have killed the franchise
 
Maybe that's because people would rather play the game than watch people play the game?

It always amuses me when people bring up Twitch as a way to judge a game's popularity. Like "Look, no one's streaming or watching it so that must mean no one is playing it."

Really? That's a stretch and a half.

I'm not sure that's a stretch. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. The top games on twitch are the two most popular games in the world outside of phones (Which is a big exception, of course). Maybe it becomes considerably less representative later down the list.
 
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Star Hawk. Successor to much beloved and one of the best online shooter at start of ps3 gen. It was by Dyaln and very much anticipated

Innvoative game play check
Base building check.
Good tps controls check
Good graphics check.
Hawks that turn into fucking robots check.

Eventually it came out and nobody even bought and played . Now no one even remembers it and may have killed the franchise

I just enjoyed the WWII aesthetic and style of its predecessor much more. Didn't care much for the sci-fi setting, personally.
 
I'm not sure that's a stretch. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. The top games on twitch are the two most popular games in the world outside of phones (Which is a big exception, of course). Maybe it becomes considerably less representative later down the list.

Yea, it doesn't take moving very far down the list before that correlation starts to fall apart. By the time you reached 7th place we're at Payday 2. By 16th, Dungeons & Dragons (on the back of a single streamer really). ArcheAge is currently sitting ahead of GTAV. Majora's Mask is above Ultra Street Fighter 4. Sonic Adventure 2 is ahead of Team Fortress 2 etc.

The top games have more to do with their competitive scenes than anything else, and once you move past them, everything else seems arbitrary as hell.
 
I'm not sure that's a stretch. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. The top games on twitch are the two most popular games in the world outside of phones (Which is a big exception, of course). Maybe it becomes considerably less representative later down the list.

Yea, it doesn't take moving very far down the list before that correlation starts to fall apart. By the time you reached 7th place we're at Payday 2. By 16th, Dungeons & Dragons (on the back of a single streamer really). ArcheAge is currently sitting ahead of GTAV. Majora's Mask is above Ultra Street Fighter 4. Sonic Adventure 2 is ahead of Team Fortress 2 etc.

The top games have more to do with their competitive scenes than anything else, and once you move past them, everything else seems arbitrary as hell.

I've always looked at Twitch as a quick snapshot of a game's popularity to watch, at a given moment. And even then, not everyone streams their game when they're playing. Personally, I've never streamed a game of Titanfall and I play it quite a bit. The only game I ever streamed myself playing is Super Time Force, and that was just once because it was brand new. (I got up to 32 viewers.)

If you compare Twitch's lineup at multiple times throughout the day, it will look very different, with only the usual suspects showing up near the top.
 
It's been posted a couple times, but dark void is a great answer for this. It seemed to get a lot of hype on some podcasts I listened to then just nothing.
Yep, I was waiting for it a lot, whole premise was interesting. But then I played the demo and it was so bad, I don't wonder at all why people avoided it and soon it was almost forgotten.
 
My suggestion would be Jade Empire by Bioware. It's rarely brought up, even in Bioware specific threads except by lone posters who say "I loved Jade Empire!" It doesn't seem to be a often thought of game in Bioware's library. I recall there was quite a bit of hype because of the asian setting and the idea that it would mix faster action based combat with rpg elements. Also, because Bioware was coming off the great Knights of the Old Republic.
 
My suggestion would be Jade Empire by Bioware. It's rarely brought up, even in Bioware specific threads except by lone posters who say "I loved Jade Empire!" It doesn't seem to be a often thought of game in Bioware's library. I recall there was quite a bit of hype because of the asian setting and the idea that it would mix faster action based combat with rpg elements. Also, because Bioware was coming off the great Knights of the Old Republic.

I tried to play it last month, and I can understand why it's rarely brought up : boring and forgettable dialogues, cluncky gameplay if you don't play with a gamepad (I bought it on PC), the shoot'em up sequences, and worst of all, the Holliwoodized and cliche asian setting...
I endured for two weeks before going back playing Prince of Qin again.
 
I tried to play it last month, and I can understand why it's rarely brought up : boring and forgettable dialogues, cluncky gameplay if you don't play with a gamepad (I bought it on PC), the shoot'em up sequences, and worst of all, the Holliwoodized and cliche asian setting...
I endured for two weeks before going back playing Prince of Qin again.

Oh man, there are so many parts of Jade Empire where it's painfully evident that the game was written by clueless white people.

I thought Bioware would have learned from the experience but then they introduced the world to Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3. The only prominent Asian character in the entire series and he plays a...ninja.
 
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The concept art for this game was hyping people, but then they released those really early beta screenshots...and the game ended up with a terrible camera...well..

Some people are surprised it got a 3DS spin-off and a Sequel as it did.

Well, it actually sold pretty well; it makes a lot of sense that Disney would green-light sequels. I don't think it did well enough to stay exclusive to Nintendo platforms though seeing as Epic Mickey 2 was also released on Vita, 360, and PS3.

It does seem like it's mostly been forgotten now thanks to it's complete mediocrity. Which is a shame because the idea (not the finished game) of Epic Mickey represents everything that good Nintendo-focused 3rd party support should be imo.
I kind of wish they just axed all of the half-baked adventure elements and just made "Super Mario Galaxy: Mickey Mouse edition". Maybe focusing on making a "pure" platformer with lots of fan service would have set the dev team on a more stable path.
:P
 
Well, it actually sold pretty well; it makes a lot of sense that Disney would green-light sequels. I don't think it did well enough to stay exclusive to Nintendo platforms though seeing as Epic Mickey 2 was also released on Vita, 360, and PS3.

It does seem like it's mostly been forgotten now thanks to it's complete mediocrity. Which is a shame because the idea (not the finished game) of Epic Mickey represents everything that good Nintendo-focused 3rd party support should be imo.
I kind of wish they just axed all of the half-baked adventure elements and just made "Super Mario Galaxy: Mickey Mouse edition". Maybe focusing on making a "pure" platformer with lots of fan service would have set the dev team on a more stable path.
:P
The thing I really dislike about Epic Mackey is that they had to know the game was bad/not ready when they were preparing to release it. Yet instead of taking more time and making hard decisions to ultimately make a better game, they just put it out there as a bad game.
 
Rise of the Robots

Total hype everywhere. More column inches than just about any game I remember. Was going to revolutionise the beat em up genre.

Um... In reality it was a mess, reviewed badly and vanished within months of release.
 
I read through 9 pages, apologies if these got discussed, but my 2 contributions are:

Boogie (Wii)
Max Payne 3

Max Payne especially, it was advertised and hyped to high heaven...once in a while it pops up in 'disappointing sequel' threads, but that's it!
 
I read through 9 pages, apologies if these got discussed, but my 2 contributions are:

Boogie (Wii)
Max Payne 3

Max Payne especially, it was advertised and hyped to high heaven...once in a while it pops up in 'disappointing sewuel' threads, but that's it!

Say what?

I'm going to have to disagree with you here on the Max Payne thing. All three games were critically acclaimed, have won multiple awards, and are considered modern day classics.
 
The thing I really dislike about Epic Mackey is that they had to know the game was bad/not ready when they were preparing to release it. Yet instead of taking more time and making hard decisions to ultimately make a better game, they just put it out there as a bad game.

Probably disneys meddling. The same thing happened with the sequel and 3ds spinoff, both games werent ready at all (even more than the original) but Disney forced a november release to coincide with the Wii U launch
 
I feel like "forgotten" games will be those that were neither good nor spectacularly bad, that didn't sell well but didn't kill a studio, and so forth. We'd mostly be looking at games which were mediocre and which sold mediocrely and which had few unique events around them.

Daikatana, for example, is very memorable. Perhaps not for the reasons John Romero wanted, of course.

I remember Bubsy. He had a few games which legitimately sold well, and Bubsy 3D is remembered now as a lesson of how difficult it can be to transition to 3D.

Geist is remembered as one of those times Nintendo tried to branch away from their "kiddy" image.

You're looking for stuff like "I am Alive," which had big hype, then turned in to a downloadable title that was apparently not terrible but not very good, and which didn't sell particularly well but didn't kill Ubisoft or anything like that. I think "Ninety Nine Nights, N3" is another good example (you might remember it as a launch title, however). Mediocre game which garnered mediocre sales because it was at least a launch title.
 
Probably disneys meddling. The same thing happened with the sequel and 3ds spinoff, both games werent ready at all (even more than the original) but Disney forced a november release to coincide with the Wii U launch

Makes me more concerned with Battlefront 3, thanks. =\
 
The Tony Hawk series.

They were the biggest thing in gaming for quite a while and now I never hear a word about them. Or Amped, Skate, or 1080 for that matter.Too bad since they are still fun and unique in the gaming landscape today. Of course if they hadn't cranked out a million versions with little innovation maybe the skateboarding/snowboarding genre wouldn't have imploded so spectacularly.

But hey if space combat sims and real horror titles can come back from the dead perhaps I will be able to dust off those carefully honed combo skills again in the future. Or maybe I will just have to face the fact that I should have been studying the whole instead of playing that dang "Tommy Hawk" game on my "SuperStation" like my mama always told me. ;)

I suppose in the same vein you could consider Guitar Hero forgotten... until you trip over all the plastic shit in the middle of the night, or move houses and curse yourself for buying into it in the first place while never quite having the heart to toss it in the dumpster.

I mean somebody in a coma since 2005 could wake up and really wanna jam with you right? right?

I do have to give Activision props for one thing, they manage to be so money grubbing in their exploitation of any fad that they not only kill their franchise, but the whole genre itself.

I'm really hoping they Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero the brown military shooter out of existence someday soon since they seem bent on milking that teet for all its worth.
 


I remember hearing a lot about this game from media outlets back in the day, and it actually got pretty good reviews.
It's a genuinely good game. Plenty of fun to be had from both the single- and multiplayer mode (although the latter sadly didn't have any staying power in my circle of friends).

Some releases of it also have some stupid DRM that requires the disk to be in the drive and which may or may not work depending on your OS/Virus scanner/Driver config.

IIRC: Get the Killer App mod and the unofficial patch before starting a game, since saves are incompatible. The mod is crucial... or was, back when I played it.
 
Sure you did. Sold two million units in the last year.



I'd say Die Hard deserved better, but thank god we have movies to make us forget this one (by being worse).

I played the shit out of this game. It really had almost nothing to do with Die Hard, but luckily Die Hard Trilogy on PS1 was a game that did the name Justice. Doesn't stop Die Hard Arcade from being a fun game though.
 
What about Zombies Ate My Neighbors? It was so hyped that I remember Andy McNamara, in the 1993 E3 edition of Game Informer, saying that it was easily his most anticipated game for the year.

That was quite a statement when you look at even a small sampling of other games that came out in 1993:

Star Fox, Syndicate, Mortal Kombat II, Day of the Tentacle, Link's Awakening, Samurai Shodown, Mario All-Stars, Secret of Mana, Sonic CD, Myst, Doom, and 7th Guest

In a historical context, Zombies Ate My Neighbors might not even fit in the top thirty most influential games that came out in 1993. Relative to Mortal Kombat II, Myst, or Doom, probably no one even remembers or cares what it even was.
 
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