Gaming disappointments of 2010

Hot on the heels of my top games of the last year, I've got some bones to pick with a few other games. These are the ones that ought to have been great but for one reason or another fell flat.

Dead Rising 2
Earlier in the year, instead of creating an expensive demo for Dead Rising 2, Capcom decided to create a stand alone prologue to the game called Case Zero available for the reasonable price of 400 Microsoft points. And that's what's spoiled the main event for me believe it or not. Not because it was bad, but because it was great.
Case Zero truncated the overal experience of playing Dead Rising into a managable two hour-ish experience that was action packed, well designed and paced and above all fun to play. Figuring out how to get the most from your time was a challenge but one that wasn't too punishing considering the short length of time you're dealing with. The whole thing stayed fresh and intense from start to finish, never outstaying its welcome or punishing a player too hard for a mistake.

"Just wait here one minute honey, Daddy has to go beat up the bad men with frying pans and plastic swords..."

The full game itself though suffers from being an open world after that experience, for me at least, and there's little of the noticable pace and clever design on show. Gone is the manageable township and back is the dauntingly huge area laden with nasty irritations to kick first time players up the arse. To compound the struggle getting to grips with the location you've got a familiar problem from the original to contend with; terrible psycho placement and difficulty. Having a mission marker direct you into an inescapable boss fight, often far beyond your capabilities at a low level is not fun. Having to go back a save and consciously avoid it or, even worse, restart the game is seriously irritating to say the least.

Add to that the lack of change to the game concept and the omission of voice acting for almost every in game conversation and the mountain of little niggles I could overlook in the original from the early days of the Xbox 360 suddenly seems enough to stop me from wanting to play the game.



Perhaps the latest DLC release, Case West, will pick up where Case Zero left off in terms of level design and pacing.

So, what could be done to improve it? Simply put, make it like Case Zero. Break the game into sections lasting two to three hours, limit what we can see and do so that the particularly tasty weapons are kept back till later and generally reign the concept in so it feel more like a game and less like a sandbox with a restrictive time limit. And when you finish the game, THEN open the world up and let us go exploring after we've already got a feel for what to expect. After all, it is fun to ride head long into a group of zombies on a tricycle dressed as a demented cross dresser from time to time but only if you've not got to go medicate your daughter half way through the massacre.


Front Mission Evolved
Continuing as I mean to go on, here's another lackluster sequel, though one I feel the need to pick fault with for a particularly specific reason. I have not played this game. So why, you might ask, am I putting this on a list of gaming disappointments? Well, a little history lesson is in order.
Way back in the futuristic space year of 2000 Squaresoft were in their prime, releasing a huge number of games for the PS1 in a very short space of time including Final Fantasy 8, Saga Frontier 2, Ehrgeiz and, most importantly for this tale, Front Mission 3. This was a golden age of RPG gaming and marked the first time the Front Mission franchise had made its way to Europe, being layabout teen at the time I made the most of this glut of great games (apart from Ehrgeiz of course, not even Final Fantasy 7 cameos could save that).



A forgotten classic.

Front Mission 3 offered something I'd not seen before; a tactical, grid based, futuristic RPG with big ass robots. Graphically it made the most of the PS1 and technically it was epic, with a deep combat system and an in game internet function that could easily swallow more than ten hours if you invested time investigating every nook and cranny. Its plot was a branching epic revolving around the theft of a new weapon of mass destruction and the circumstances surrounding the event, both political and personal.
I fell in love with the game and have held it high as a niche classic but since that time Square have failed to follow up with a Front Mission release in the UK. Front Mission 4 made it to the US and part five only hit the stores in Japan so for over ten years I've been left in the cold, having to content myself with reading details about the other games in the series and tracking down fan made translations of the original Front Mission for the SNES.
Cut to last year and Front Mission Evolved appeared on a release list. My eyes lit up upon reading the news and suddenly it seemed the perpetually waning Square Enix had finally come to their senses and released a current generation iteration of one of their most enjoyable series. Then I saw my first preview to find something unexpected had happened to the franchise - it wasn't a tactical RPG anymore. No, it was now a Mech Commander-esque affair. I think this particular meme best expresses how I felt when I read that -


-uuuuuccckkkinnngggg Ssssqqquuaaaarreeee!

My only question is why ditch a unique and interesting game style for something so utterly generic, especially given the mech piloting genre is already saturated with more than enough franchises to keep fans distracted? I wish I had an answer, but it seem to be part of what's wrong with Square Enix these days. What might that be you ask? Well that's an article for another time I answer.

That's it for part one of this little look back at the disappointing games of last year, check back later this week for part 2.