Great games that sold poorly or flat-out bombed - Page 2

There was an animated movie based on the game SiN. Talk about a definite direct-to-video flick.

imdb did have it only rated 4.8 out of 10 making it mediocre at best.

What about freelancer
i still love that game and it still has a healthy online multiplayer fanbase
but never sold well ?

I LOVED SIN: Emergence...mainly because it resembled HL2...lol...I thought the game did a good job in having the AI actually get harder if you start pwning them too easily...I bought SIN off the clearance rack for 8 bucks....hell of a deal i might add...

I HATED planescape compared to baldur's gate but it was still not too bad. I only died when i ABSOLUTELY had to. Though that green guy looked very cool and the story was very very good, though i hated the lock-you-into-a-crappy-***-movie spells that bugged and let the Glabresu kill mort while everyone else paused and watched him get murdered.

TRIBES 3 : screw all of you for killing off tribes for good.

Crusader : No Remorse

Crusader : No regret

X2

X3 : If you EVER lose a save game in one of these you will hang yourself.

Sin sucked.... I liked the slow mo feature of the drugs in emergence but that was just about it (sh!tty game)

Alien oddyssey.

ANYTHING over at home of the underdogs is good.


GALACTIC CIVILZATIONS II WAS MAGICAL.

Shadowbane: The cruelest game in the world to noobs with all ego and no skills. Every time someone got pwned and quit, they always made excuses to cover up their noobidity. Excuse such as: the graphics sucked, the bugs, the crashes, logging in on the sea floor, getting stuck in walls, getting killed during a lag spike, etc etc... I'm not saying those weren't valid excuses, it was just funny. Funny all the way up until no one was left playing. heh.

Star Wars Republic Commando is one of my favourite FPS and has good reviews but I think it deserved a lot more sales and this game really needs a sequel IMO

Funny, I played a lot of these games. Planescape, Beyond Good and Evil, and Indigo Prophecy were great games. I've been meaning to get Psychonauts since I've seen it cheap (I think as low as $5) but I just have too many games I've been neglecting, I don't need to add another one I'll never really play. Plus I'm pretty bad at finishing platformers. Blader Runner is another one I always wanted to play. I have Homeworld II but haven't even opened the box yet. And I have Eternal Darkness, but had weird stuttering issues that ruined the experience for me and so I never played. I thought it was unique to my game or my GameCube, but supposedly other people have had the same problem.

Looking at the games on my shelf... I can't imagine Sanitarium sold well. I never heard anything about it but my sis bought it for me for Christmas and it was actually a great adventure game. I don't know how well Mafia sold, but it was an excellent game. The Last Express is a classic example of a critically acclaimed game that is ignored by gamers. Luckily I have that. Gothic II is another game in my collection that I'm not sure was that successful, but it was a fun, immersive game. This may have already been mentioned, but Grim Fandango. I grew up with a Mac, so I played any game I could get my hands on and was thankful just that it made its way to the Mac, so I ended up playing a lot of great games that may be considered obscure. These would include The Journeyman Project trilogy, particularly part 2: Buried in Time. And people say old FMV games that used actors were horrible, but I stand by my statement that Return to Zork was an excellent game, although I guess it must've been successful enough to spawn two more games. The Shenmue series, despite their horrible voice acting and unintuitive controls were interesting, unique games with some great presentation and graphics.

I liked the Second Take video. I'm proud to say I go out of my way to play the good games most people miss. I do the same with movies. Unfortunately, most consumers aren't very imaginative and they like the most amazingly dull, uncreative things that it boggles my mind. I especially liked the line about Arrested Development getting canceled while Two and a Half Men is the #1 sitcom. I've seen every episode of Arrested Development and maybe about five minutes of Two and a Half Men, just long enough to know all I need to know to never watch it again.

I second Homeworld 2, it's a great game. Very open ended RTS with great graphics for when it was released. Rob I think you should try it out but have fun getting a copy. I lost my first disc a while back and went to the store to pick up a new copy and it was impossible to find. Had to call many stores until I found one that had one copy left. This was a year ago so have fun now, but I have to say it's worth the try. It also had a really good story.

Anachronox: awesome RPG by Ion Storm with an incredible story (The twist at the end is killer!), fantastic cut scenes (They were later stitched together into a movie over 2 hours long..), and great gameplay. It's funny most of the time, and tear-jerking occasionally. It's one of few games to make me laugh out loud, or cry, and probably the only one that's done both. Too bad it was so buggy when it came out. There are a couple of unofficial patches at it's fan site that fix everything though. Oh, and the TERRIBLE pacing at the beginning. The first couple of hours are SLOW. But then it picks up and doesn't let up.

Oddworld: Abe's Oddessy. Later games in the series sucked IMHO, but the first was a highly stylized and fun platformer/adventure game. Of course, these days the great art design would be lost in the Lo-Res 2-D Graphics.

Omnikron: The Nomad Soul. Mixed reviews, but an awesome game. Kind of like Deus Ex in that sense, which now shows up on greatest game of all time lists, despite only slightly better than average reviews. But, there has never been another game like this one. Nothing like jumping into other people's bodies.

I'll also second Body Harvest and Homeworld 2.

MOO3? Are you serious? That game was a huge disappointment after MOO2.

The natural successor to MOO2 is Galciv2 (which is an excellent game)

A few comments:

Giants: Citizen Kabuto was extremely bug-riddled when it came out, so a lot of people, myself included, never bothered with it.

Homeworld was great. Homeworld: Cataclysm was terrible. I didn't get Homeworld 2 because Cataclysm was so bad.

No One Lives Forever was great. The sequel was decent, but focused too much on the sneaking missions. And playing on hard made you fail any mission if you got seen by a camera. If I wanted to play Thief, I'd play Thief. Let me choose whether I want to sneak around or just kill everyone like the first game, thanks. Either way, the series didn't do nearly as well as it deserved.

American McGee's Alice was ok, but I found it to be highly overrated. It had great art direction, but uninspired gameplay and overall was kind of boring.

I add Rune to the 'underrated' category. It generally got panned in reviews, and I don't think it sold all that well, either. I thought it was fun. I mean, how can being a Viking and chopping off limbs all over the place not be fun? It wasn't revolutionary or anything, but it was a solid game. The Co-Op user mod made it even more fun. Why don't developers include Co-Op any more? I know they think that everyone just wants deathmatch, but there's a big market for co-op play, too.

I remember reading reviews of Planescape: Torment when it came out, but I never got around to playing it. RPGs aren't my favorite genre, so I don't play a lot of them. I also find the mentality of RPG developers to be pretty annoying. Hey, let's throw in 4 times as many bad guys as they could possibly defeat, so they have to trick the AI into letting them pull 1 or 2 guys in at a time. So tedious... so lame.

Actually, I'm changing my vote to Halo 3, and Starcraft 2. lol. jk.

Among MMORPGs, I'd say, "Face of Mankind" has been quite neglected by people and media. It's a very unique and demanding scifi MMORPG with good 3D graphics in which you need to rely almost completely on your personal skills. In "Face of Mankind" there are no character levels or skills and you earn experience points by participating in missions which are set up by other higher ranking players of your faction. As you earn experience points, succeed in combat or other types of situations, role-play, show your loyalty and reliability to your faction and assist or obey higher ranking players, you advance in ranks in your faction. As you advance in ranks, you get the ability to manage your faction's funds and other resources, fine/reward/promote/demote lower ranking players, set up various types of missions on different planets etc. For example, if you join Law Enforcement Department, you'll advance from a street cop who patrols streets and scans people for illegal drugs to an enforcer cop who leads patrolling cops on such missions, then you might be able to achieve the rank of a police detective who moves around with other detectives and investigates more serious crimes or whatever, and later you might be able to distinguish yourself and become a police commissioner who plans the agenda and sets up missions for patrollers, enforcers and detectives. If you have truely awesome role-playing, communication and organisational skills (you need to be very mature and educated in real life for this) and a lot of time to dedicate to the game, you might eventually become the chief of police who handles the entire police force on different planets, sets regulations for the faction, nominates commissioners, dictates current relationships with other factions and who has the power to declare martial law and hand over law enforcement to the army in a town on Earth or an off-world colony in times of serious crisis. Altogether there are eight factions in the game: three clans, three corporations, a global police department and a global army force. Right now there are no computer controlled creatures in the game and it's all about player vs player interaction, but in the end of this year or in 2008 the developers will implement aliens and the game might get some of that dark atmosphere which was in the "Alien" movies. There are no skills or levels, but you can choose to make your character Combatant, Medic, Commander or Trader. Combatants get access to the most powerful weapons, medics can use high quality medikits and they can probably heal others, commanders get special field intel, traders can extract minerals and other raw items on planets at lower costs and they can produce higher quality components and items. There are no combat skills because in this respect Face of Mankind is a first person shooter.