Onimusha Warlords
Praised at it's release, I thought it was nothing more then a pretty and very shallow version Resident Evil with swords. Thankfully its progeny were much better. Not to mention a certain bug in it gave a Capcom staff member the inspiration for the excellent Devil May Cry.
Jak 3
Not so much a game as it is a tool for spontaneously invoking tourette's syndrome.
Shadow the Hedgehog
Sega had already dug the Sonic series into a pit of despair. This just proved Sega was willing to enlist the help of massive tunnel boring machines so they could toss the once proud franchise into the molten rock of the earth's core. And yet somehow over the years Sega has managed to f*** up Sonic even more.

We all wish for a game like that. Maybe one day we'll have something like that (not from Derek Smart, of course)... here's hope.

I was agreeing with you. Not with your theory, of course, but that it is "likely a victim of my "has to be played initially while it's current tech" theory." How we conceive of things does affect how we experience them.

I think it's pretty good so far and I'm pretty far into it, so unless the ending is completely off the rails bad, I don't see how anyone could hate it unless it was hyped in Europe (there was zero marketing for it here). If you don't like adventure games or psychological thrillers, you won't like it, but as far as the genre goes, pretty good. NYC locations are really nicely done, too. I live there, so these games tend to annoy me with their inaccuracies. Also, considering I'm familiar with traumatic memory, I think they did a really interesting (though not necessarily accurate) job of portraying that in a videogame. If you like the game, I'd also recommend reading Van Der Kolk's work on traumatic memory.
Oh, incidentally, at points, the game has Xenosaga syndrome e.g. it shows you things you should be doing interactively, but I didn't think it was too bad. Then again, I love the old FMV games like Tex Murphy so take it fwiw.
@Stonebro
Agree completely w/comments on Bethesda, but I think they need dialogue writers more than script doctors. Honestly, their dialogue is abominable and generic. I looooove their games, but sometimes I wonder if English is a first language for many of the people writing it. It's "Eye of Argon" territory sometimes.

Here's I wholeheartedly agree on. If there was a game I was gonna mention in this thread it would be Morrowind. Being such a huge fan of Daggerfall, I waited anxiously for Morrowind's release, much to my suprise it barely resembled Daggerfall:
- Completely dead world, it was a desert so to speak. It tried to had a few different type of areas but they all resolved around the weird "exotic" dead trees which I never found interesting in the least. At least in Daggerfall the different areas really were different, with their own architecture, people and dungeons.
- No custom aiming mechanism and you could just tick "use strongest attack" from the menu, this made the melee fighting in the game just mashing the mouse button with the random dodge here and there.
- The storyline had nothing on the conspiracies and noble family drama that Daggerfall, dead ghosts haunting the cities and all that misused power. With Morrowind we're left with a wanna-be epic storyline with silly reasoning behind everything.
- The humour, did they really have to add that to Morrowind? Such as the infamous naked guy running about, oh really?
- Removing of quite a few skills since Daggerfall. I know they had to consolize the game to some degree (which I think is mostly responsible for making the game such a terrible mess). My biggest gripe is the climbing skill, which proved to be very useful in the deep dungeons of Daggerfall. In Morrowind I could no longer be a cunning thief that climbed on top of buildings and entered to rob stores from their balconies, I was given an inhuman ability to jump on the roofs of the said buildings instead. Plus the melding of offense skills together just overly simplified the game and made few weapon types completely useless.
- The removal of Wereboars.
- They never added the ability to marry and have sex with NPCs.
- The soundtrack, I know the huge selection of three tracks Morrowind has are great in their own right. But Daggerfall had 182 songs (from my memory, correct amount might be +/- 5), one for each season for each continent for each time of a day for each dungeon and city. It was dynamic and changed according the weather and such events. Plus the music represented one of the best orchestral/classical style music I've heard in MIDI form before and since.
- The Dunmer, I know about the island, alright, but really? They could have at least tried to do some makeshift ideas to allow more interesting races into the game.
- Relating to the previous one; Voice acting. There are about a hundred and a thousand unique (with their own names etc.) Dunmer characters that all share the same voice actor.
There are quite a lot of other gripes that haunt the back of my mind but it's getting late so I'm going to leave it at that for now.
I did like the game, but it was the biggest letdown in video games for me since I was expecting a true sequel to Daggerfall. I guess I should make a rule never to expect developers to respect the original games when they're working on sequels, I have been let down by that so many times, then on the other hand I've been happily surprised on how much some sequels have upped the original game in terms of quality and quantity.

I am not following you. It's not the case that *I* cannot play a game for the first time outside it's tech window, it's the case that NOBODY can. Anyone who understands what I am talking about understands the concept, though I will state that different styles of games, and even individual games themselves have varying windows, if you will.

Lets See..:
Fable 2:
I love first Fable since I could be a quick and agile assasins or complete and utter brute or a amazing wizard and still play the game without feeling being left out of anything. The storyline wasn't half bad although kinda predictable. Also the money making system wasn't that broken compared to two. Anyways, I bought fable 2 expecting it to be great....dang was I wrong or what. The combat system was oversimplified in my humble opinion and they took out some really great spells and moves, like Assasin Rush, and the chargable Fireball(me love the fireball!). You could get too strong too fast if you just wanted a couple of days in real life which brings up the BROKEN AS HECK money making system which even a nine year old coulb become a milllionaire without going past Bowerstone(IIRC that is the name of the first real town as in with a bar). The minigames..meh. The story...crap and cliche. It was not a RPG at all. I still play the original whenever I can and would love to have the item that allowed me to play it on the 360.
Oblivion:
Meh. Fun at first then a sore feast after level ten.
Deus Ex: IW
At first awesome game then as I just didn't finish the first playthrough (on Cairo II). When I came back to it...GAH! I think I just got a more of a taste for complex RPGs (or something like Mass Effect and Fallout 3 and shooters with light-rpg taste to them like Far Cry 2 and Bioshock)
That is in no pacific(I swear I think I mispelled this word) order.

Trespasser is worth hunting down on the cheap, if only to appreciate the potential it had. Or you could just watch the awesome LP of it. http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Trespasser/

I loved Black and White!! That's why Black and White 2 was one of the bigest disappointments for me...

I waited ages for it to come out only to find that its not a god sim, but rather a soccer mum sim... think of it this way, all you ever do in it is smack the kid (animal), feed the kid or water the plants. (or on a clumsy day, set the house on fire).
The gesture system sucked too.
What i really want is for someone to take the ideas from the game & blend it with C&C so that the player actually has some godlike control over the world.
... and seriously, mouse click combat!!! Who the f.ck came out with that retarded idea?

I actually loved Morrowind, way more than I ever liked DF. Mostly because of non-randomly generated world, that, I think, gave it way more personalized feeling - and, of course, I've played it BEFORE ever playing DF, that might be the reason as well. Still, I found it to be more interesting and, in a way, even larger than DF ever could be, with a single exception of way too small dungeons.
Also, you write way too long posts. I always feel the urge to respond for some reason :D

in the history of gaming, there is only 1 greatest disappointment ever: Trespasser.

The first mechwarrior was horrid for me. Played MW2 and found the original on SNES, turned out it was just bad.
Next up in Ep1c phail is the Starship Troopers FPS. Will crash if you run in widescreen, ran slow as molasses yet you could see the triangle points on a troopers helmet because it was all shading no models. Gameplay, horrible, painful, uggghhhhh......
My least disappointment has to be 3000 A.D. games. The last one of the series was the best and most refined, and I actually had 2 weeks of truly fun gameplay, but then it was all bland. As if in real life, I was patrolling space. Takes hours for a fight to happen. Hmm, spend my time with practice shuttle drops and infantry deployments on the surface of the planet I was over. That was really fun because in real life that was how a commander of a ship would be entertained, watching his marines run around doing exercise. Maybe watch his mining drones get to work so he can earn money. In the end the only thing that ruined me was lack of time compression. Minor combat damage resulted in 20 minutes worth of repairs and engineers complaining.............BC wasn't total fail and I did enjoy it, but it failed at the fact it had 1000x the potential. I want a game like that so bad.............

There's truth in your words. Yet, some developers have managed to do it without breaking a sweat (well, how would we know, but the final product has been more satisfying than the original game).
I guess it's just a matter of the year and the developer. If the current trend says something against our (us gamers) wishes, they're probably just gonna follow it whether it's good or bad for the game.
I think that worked very well in Oblivion, so I guess it's just something personal against the whole exotic style of Morrowind. I mean both Arena and Daggerfall were very "basic" fantasy themed, albeit having a tons of their own stuff in there. Oblivion doing the same general style of Arena and Daggerfall made me like it almost as much, but I can still see the obvious dumbing down that happened with Morrowind as well (the skills for example, are much, much worse in Oblivion than in Morrowind).
It's actually rarely the case I do that, but when I have something troubling my heart, I usually set out to write it down, even if it ends up a bit rambly.
I have to say that is weird. It's one of my favourite underrated games of all time. I don't know what the target audience is but it works fantastically as a survival horror style adventure. You really feel like you're alone in an island infested with dinosaurs. I mean, take a look at the first city you can find, trying to reach the main Jurassic Park building while evading all the velociraptors with only six shells in your shotgun just screams out: "I am the proper way a Jurassic Park game should be."
Please elaborate why it was such a disappointment for you. I know a lot of people seem to hate the game, and I wanna know why since I personally like it very, very much.