What game did you regret purchasing this year?

For me it that Elemental: Fallen Enchantress. It is not a bad game but it is not great either and I feel like I over paid as I bought it soon after its release.

Weird, played the game from beginning to end 4 times and never had that problem.

Anyway...

Max Payne 3 I guess? I didn't play a lot of games this year because I was away from my gaming PC, but I bought MP3 for close to full price and then played very little of it because I found it cumbersome and annoying.

Looking forward to giving it a second try though.

Offspring Fling. It got added to the Humble Bundle after I had purchased it at the Thanksgiving sale.

Yeah - lots of people dont have it, but it seems a lot do - and others randomly lose access to their savegames.
Did you have steam cloud enabled?

Not to annoy you, but since I have never heard of it until now I doubt it was "a lot."

Anyway, no, I have cloud stuff turned off.

Death and the Fly. Took me a while to even realize how to start playing the first level. And then the fly moves at an abysmally slow pace.

Probably more but I can't think of them right now.

No, that's fine - I googled for possible problems with it before buying and saw few. Then when the problem happened, I googled that - quite a few... several days into the steam overhaul with the discussion boards brought in and there were quite a lot - quite an angry lot in fact.
There are some rudimentary fixes (renames and overwrites of savefiles etc) but its to do with the save index corrupting - even found an official mod post on eidos boards about it. No reason just the usual half bummed attitude.

...and I asked about cloud because its known to cause the problem (install with cloud on, forever it will be your problem! heheh). but i didnt - same problem.

Ah well - thanks for the reply!

*back on topic now folks - sorry!

Serious Sam III. Definitely. It's not a bad game but it totally lacks the fun that were the precedent games. Got it on a sale on Steam, but I still feel like I've paid a little too much for it.

Journey - shoulda been 5$ not 15$
Final Fantasy VI and VII and Xenogears - although I got them on sale for 7$ each I still regret cos I hate random encounters in those games, especially when you're lost or stuck, dear god.

I've become pretty good in avoiding turds, so hardly any big f'ck ups this years. Also, the fact that it isn't 1998 anymore and companies don't flood the market with shitty games also helps. Indies now do that, but I those are for the most part easily recognisable.

My biggest disappointment was probably the Android bundle 4.

I had high hopes for just about every game and paid not not insignificant price for it. Yet, every game I tried so far is a disappointment. I'm yet to try every game there, but Waking Mars, Crayon, Avadon and Eufloria are just badly designed (amongst many other issues). And while Splice is nice, there isn't really that much of a game.

That is the general problem of indies nowadays. They sell a brand, labels but not good game design.

I usually pirate my games before buying, to make sure I spend what money I have available for gaming on games I truly care about.

However, when I tried borderlands 2 I felt like it had fun characters and a reasonably interesting story, so I bought it. And after playing more, I realized I was playing Diablo II with guns. And I find Diablo boring, so I stopped playing. I guess I should have played more before buying...

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom

Not really a bad or an expensive game, but it looked so nice in the trailers; but when you play the real levels (it has a good amount of easy tutorial levels) it gets really repetitive, annoying and super hard... just to get all those pies. I was never able to finish this game.

At least it was cheap... (:P)

Legend of Grimrock was a big disappointment. I really disliked the rigid tile by tile movement and the lack of third person view.

Naughty Bear Gold Edition for the Xbox 360.

Most of the time i enjoy bad games, but this one is HORRIBLE. I bought it because the premise looked really interesting, it had fresh ideas and it was made by the same studio that made Wet, which i enjoyed a lot.

But man, this is one of the only times that i feel like i should have truested the reviews (this game has a score lower than 50 on metacritic). I played it once for about an hour or so, and i just can't get back to it because of how repetitive and boring it is. Seriously, you'll do the same thing over and over again, there is absolutely zero variation in gameplay. If that wasn't enough you have to play the same levels over and over again to complete challenges and unlock more levels.

Gameplay is just hiding, waiting for a bear to come by, scare him, mess with stuff to scare bears, hide again, scare another bear, and then scare him again till he freaks out and you get more points. And that's it, this is the only thing you'll do the whole game.

It feels like the first Assassin's Creed: they had a great idea, they executed it well, but they forgot to add variation to gameplay, instead they just added the same missions over and over again.

Well, since i'm a collector, i don't care about buying a bad game (heck, i even want to buy the Zelda trilogy for the CD-i one day), but maybe i would have bought another game instead if i knew how terrible Naughty Bear was.