I’m a bit late to the party regarding last weekend’s topic of games readers most regret playing, but it got me thinking despite playing games since the 1980s there are very few I regret. However, I can name at least three games I have regretted buying and playing.
First would be GTA IV. That this game received such high scores has always been a source of bafflement to me. It’s like the game I played and the one the majority of reviewers played were two completely different things. It’s the only GTA game I never finished.
Yes, the game did a good job in trying to create a living city, but it gave every indication that the gameplay was an afterthought – seemingly shoe-horned in afterwards. I never could get to grips with the car mechanics, the mobile phone missions were annoying, there were random difficulty spikes in the missions, and the missions overall were very repetitive and tedious.
Worse was it often took 10 minutes of real-time driving to start a mission, which had to be repeated on a mission failure, which more often than not was due to numerous glitches. That got old fast. No wonder Rockstar introduced mission checkpoints in subsequent games. A tacit admission on their part that GTA IV got it wrong.
Next up, Assassin’s Creed III. Copious loading screens, cut scenes, boring missions, and bland open world. I traded it in rather quickly after about a third of the way through and got little money for it, which I guess means I wasn’t the only one who came to those conclusions.
Last but not least, FIFA 64. This undoubtedly is the worst game I ever bought. I only purchased it at the time as there was no other football game on the N64 – the mighty, and much better, ISS 64 was released a few months later.
This game was clearly rushed and despite having an official license it had copious spelling mistakes. Its frame rate was non-existent, the buttons had terrible lag and was completely random and the game’s algorithm had a tendency to ‘cheat’ – for example when it wanted to score, the ball miraculously went through keeper’s body from 30 yards out. How this game never appears on lists of the worst games ever is beyond me. The game was so bad I boycotted subsequent EA FIFA games for over 15 years in response.
Paul Williams
