With all due respect... You think that Squall is a whiney bitch but Cloud isn't? The dude complains 90% of the game.

I must say Final Fantasies were a bit blech, compared to the hype. I've played FF1-FF8, including the Japanese versions of NES/SNES Final Fantasies (fan translated). But at times they were somewhat entertaining, though.

One disappointment was also Empire Earth. I loved Age of Empires 1-2, so in paper EE seemed like a perfect game to me. And in theory it is, but I can't understand why the gameplay that is so spot on in AoE games feels so pointless and boring in EE.

I can't quite put my finger on it what is the exact difference. Maybe AoE single-player missions are so carefully designed, while EE missions feel like a generic empty map where you just try to find your enemy and kill him, or something.

It's a different kind of whiney.
Cloud: "Fuck, my best friend went insane, I don't know who I am, people around me are dying, the world is being threatened by my now-insane former best friend, and the damned lion-thing is getting more tail than I am!"

Squall: "I'm alooone, nobody looooves me.. whaaaa, oh this bitch loves me.. whaaaa.. we all came from the same orphanage and don't recall it because magic is rotting our braaaaiiiinsss!"

Diablo II: I just don't understand why it was so popular. Boring clicking simulator.

Mass Effect: It's not a bad game, but it just fails to suck me in.

Borderlands: Looks good, but the game itself is pretty straghtforwarded and repetitve shooter.

Jack Orlando: among the worst adventure games I've ever played. So much wasted potential.

Jet Set Willy.

Manic Miner was the pinnacle - I was expecting the same. Instead I got some super bastard hard thing with little to zero chance of ever getting anywhere near finishing it (in fact you couldnt complete it because of a bug).

It totally destroyed the 'complete this room to see the next' vibe.

Never really got over that.....;o)

Well, but, you see, it wasn't a clicking simulator -- the player actually got to do the actual, real-world clicking themselves (and there was a ton of it), which was just mindbogglingly awesome!

Diablo II is an ok hack n' slash if you're just playing through it, but where it really shines is the endgame.
Nowadays when I play again, I normally make a level 80 character in 3-4 hours, deck him out with some awesome gear and do whatever I want to from there one. The last Hammerdin that I made I played for 3 days straight and got to level 94. My highest ever was a 96 Wind Druid.

There's plenty of things to keep people interested in the endgame:
-Trading (always interesting because prices can change radically due to ladder resets)
-PvP (dueling, team duels, etc, work extremely well in D2)
-simply leveling (getting past the 90s takes a lot of well co-ordinated effort)
-soloing content, i.e. clearing the Chaos Sanctuary alone in a matter of minutes in an 8 player game. Insane exp.
-doing stuff like the Ubers (added with patch 1.11)
-simply accumulating wealth and making new characters for all kinds of purposes.

In other words, there's a lot to do in the end game to keep yourself occupied. The game on its own can be a bit of a bore, especially if you're not entirely sure as to what you are doing.

I've seen several let-downs come about that's made me a gamer that scrutinizes their prospects before buying.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Emergency 2012
Grand Theft Auto IV
Homefront
Just Cause 2
Medal of Honor
Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing (PC release)

The thing about Deus Ex Invisible War was that - to me - it wasn't a bad game. It just could live up to my expectations after the original Deus Ex, which I still think is one of the greatest games ever. So IW was a big let down.

Half-life 2: some levels (Ravenholm - or what's it called) were absolutely great, but I didn't like the driving levels.

Good thing I hardly ever spend more than 10 euro's on a game.

The last game I was really disappointed by was Zelda: Twilight Princess. Sure the overworld might have been 10x bigger than that of Ocarina of Time, but it had half the content. At least Wind Waker had lots of islands and a decent town (Windfall Island).

Add another one to the ones i alreay mentioned earlier is


Homefront short, annoying and a seriously crap ending that made me just go what i spent hours playing this to get an ending like this crap.

I loved the idea of the game just pity thats all that wa good about the game.

I'm no Diable 2 pro so maybe this is a dumb question but how on earth do you make a lvl 80 character in 3-4 hours?

You don't. Not without a fan hack/patch. Saying level 30 - 40 would have been highly questionable. Saying level 80 means either a typo, a good bit of embellishment, or a very sketchy memory of the game. To get to 80 would mean beating the entire game twice (the second time on a harder difficulty) and making a little bit of headway into Hell difficulty to boot. Like most RPGs or variants... 0-20 goes extremely quick. Levels become exponentially longer level per level after that.

It requires rushing, so the help of a friend and a bit of preparation.
Your friend rushes you through all of the game. All you have to do is make a Town Portal at the relevant "quest object", so Andariel kill in Act I (if you are rushing multiple people, only 1 person has to come through and the others can stay in town, as long as you are all in the same party. Typically, I bring along 3 more characters, since I have 8 CD-Keys, but you can only have 4 connections to the game from one IP. With a proxy, you can fill the game up and then simply use all the other mules for Hellforge in Hell difficulty for a shot at a decent rune). Staff pieces in Act II, Summoner and Duriel. In act III you need to kill the Council and then Mephisto (no need to collect all those rubbish body parts, except for just the Flail), Act IV simply Diablo, Act V Baal.

Here it gets tough, your character will be ~5 or whatever, the ones sitting in town will be 1, but you need level hmmmm 25 I think to be able to speak to the Ancients. You thus need to find some noobie who is level 25+ and has not yet killed the Ancients and has not killed Baal yet. You persuade him to join your party so that your chars will get the quest (since as I mentioned earlier, all they need to do is sit in town in your party while someone does thei Baal quest) and in exchange you take him along for the run in Nightmare. The downside is that this person cannot see normal games any more, only Nightmare, though I think this was changed in the latest patch, so it should be better now? However typically people do Baalruns to 40 in Normal, then do their Ancients in Nightmare and they can go on to Nightmare Baals straight, until 60, when they move to Hell Baals. There can be quite a few people looking but sometimes you have to look for this person for an hour or so. You then repeat all of this for Nightmare and get someone else for BaalQ.

In Hell you get to Chaos Sanctuary (Act IV Diablo) and start doing CS runs. Open a game, join to it and have a bunch of others join. You go to River of Flame and kill all the way through to DIablo with everyone running behind you. Due to the exp algorithm in the game, you get an insane amount of exp, i.e. you can go from lvl 1-15 in one run. The downside of this is that at level 25, this gets very, very slow, i.e. you need about 8 or so runs to get from lvl 25-30. Either you can keep on doing this, or you can do Normal Cows, of which you only need about 2-3 runs max.

Once you are 30, CS experience picks up again at an insane rate and you can keep on doing those runs until... well whenever, but it's faster to get to 60 and then do Ancients and start doing Hell Baals until you can equip all of your gear (Enigma's STR/lvl is key here), and then do... whatever!

This was the standard way of doing it. There's also been a "new" method around for a couple of years now I think which involves Uber Trist. A high level char goes to Uber Trist and kills DIablo and Baal. Uber Mephisto spawns these annoying skeletal mages, all you need to do is trap Mephisto in this specific house so all he does is spawn minions full stop. You then have a Hammerdin there simply killing them all. Meanwhile the low lvl chars will be sitting in a corner and accumulating a ton of exp. This method is much better because you don't need to be making new games or anything like that and exp is ridiculously fast. I think you can go from 1-87 in 1 hour (but obviously you must have been Hell rushed first). The other advantage is that also high level players still get a lot of exp from this and it is not uncommon for people to sit in the game who are level 90+.

The downside is that you need an extremely well geared Hammerdin to do it. These runs can also be quite expensive, typically spots in them are sold on d2jsp for forum gold, but once you have an awesome character you can start selling them yourself.

So that's it really. If you're unlucky with finding Baal quests this can take longer, but if everyone goes swiftly and you have pro friends helping you, you can easily do 1-85 or so in 3-4 hours. Maybe try it out some time!

To think, people called us Single Player people 'cheaters' because we used an inventory management program.

You post is a prime example of why I always hated Battle.Net