Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Mark VII

My most disappointing computer game would be AH's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. My friends and I just wore out the board game version since we were always playing it. The computer version was just useless and a waste of the money and time put into it!

I was a Beta on that one. AH wouldnt listen to us at all. All of us begged for them to make it 2 player mainly with an AI as a "training" tool. AH wouldnt have any of that. They had very specific things they wanted us to "playtest" and anything beyond that they wouldnt listen. It wasnt until it was released that they even attempted to put an E mail option into it.

I would have named this one as the worst, but I didnt buy it. I got mine free [:D]

(for the record, I asked them to remove my name from the list of playtesters, but it had already been printed)

ORIGINAL: Big B

ORIGINAL: irrelevant

ORIGINAL: crsutton





Actually, HPS Simulations (a very good company) put out a version of Jutland about two years ago. Some love it but I found it to be very boring. The graphics are not too good. It is a real time game but the lack of decent graphics make it drag.

John Tiller was the designer. I am a big fan of his but did not really like his series of naval games.

This game was a great idea that just really really sucked. Playing it was about as interesting as listening to paint dry.

Well I'm glad to hear that HPS and John Tiller put out a good quality product, because in between game turns of WitP and ship-art, I am about to start their monster campaign game - "Sicily'43" (me and Patton will beat Monty to Messina!).

It looks like quite a change from Witp (1,000yds per hex and 2 to 4 hours per turn) but it does take some 350 turns to cover the month long campaign, and like WitP it accounts for about every square yard, vehicle and man fighting in Sicily. (and did I mention I can try my hand at similar artwork?).

Anyway that's good news - I can fight on both sights of the globe now, and worry about Germans, Italians, and knocking out panzers.[;)]

Tiller's Panzer Campaigns series is just excellent. About 4 years old now but they just keep adding titles and have put out tons of patches-not to fix bugs but to improve the game. HPS is one of the best for responding to player feedback. My favorite titles are "Smolensk 41, Bulge 44 and Alamein 42. They are all great though. Easy to play and learn. Sicily 43 is fun and hard to play as the terrain is so restrictive. If you enjoy it, get some of the others. Well worth it. By the way, Smolensk 41 is four years old and they have never reduced the price or sold them retail. Good companies with good support don't need to.

Cripes! I have hijacked my own thread.[:-]

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

Off the top of my head i'd probably say GNB Vol V. Never saw a more shoddily built and transparant attempt to squeeze a few last browns out of a dead rotting corpse of a game engine. The artwork.....aieeee.....i could have done a better job using Windows Paint.

I loved GNB II in spite of its bugs. Bought III and IV but for some reason my search planes would not spot the enemy (not a good thing). I screamed and yelled but got no help from the company. When I got a new computer, I loaded them and had the same problem. Bad support is even worse than a bad game![:@]

ORIGINAL: tabpub

AH's (or was it Victory Games...or both, come to think of it)
Civil War.
A board game that worked pretty well on the strategic aspect and should have been able to been done as a computer game; as far as I am concerned, it was a coaster that cost 29.99. Never supported and buggy as heck as I recollect.

I was a big AH fan but they never really got a good computer version of any of their board game. Just could not think out of the box.

It isn't really a war game, but a long time ago, I bought a game on the Mac based on a Tom Clancy novel, probably Hunt for Red October. Playing on a top of the line machine at the time, it didn't even work out of the box.

ORIGINAL: aletoledo

Similair to Mark VII, I loved the board game "squad leader" and so was excited when the computer game came out.

I expected something at the level of the close combat series mixed with X-Com, but it was unplayable without a manual or a decent tutorial even.

Yes, the Squad Leader fiasco is a soap opera in itself. My understanding is that the people who brought us the excellent Combat Mission were actually developing that game for AH. Somehow there was a divorce between the two parties and AH ended up putting out the total piece of crap that they called Squad Leader-while the successful Combat Mission did eventually make it to the market. Hope they do a CMII one of these days.

AH's only real decent computer game was the Stalingrad, Crusader and D-Day series that they put out in cooperation with Atomic games. Very nice games actually, but that apparently ended up in a nasty divorce as well and all support for the series came to an abrupt halt.

My info is all third hand. Somebody here might know the real stories.

I don't know if SF games fit in your category but by far the most disappointing game I ever bought was MOOIII because f the big build up, the anticipation and expatiations I had while it was being developed. [:@][:@][:(]

ORIGINAL: crsutton

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

Off the top of my head i'd probably say GNB Vol V. Never saw a more shoddily built and transparant attempt to squeeze a few last browns out of a dead rotting corpse of a game engine. The artwork.....aieeee.....i could have done a better job using Windows Paint.

I loved GNB II in spite of its bugs. Bought III and IV but for some reason my search planes would not spot the enemy (not a good thing). I screamed and yelled but got no help from the company. When I got a new computer, I loaded them and had the same problem. Bad support is even worse than a bad game![:@]

Same here. GNB2 was excellent. I looked forward to 3, but the crackhead search plane pilots killed it for me.

High command was another candidate. Unfortunately, this game had a great concept but was missing both reliability and a Ai that could meet at least minimum requirements. They (360) probably did not consider beta tests an important thing.
UMS was also a bad one.
And I have a game named "Operation Mittelmeer" - operation mediterranean. It was that bad that I uninstalled after 15 min. But as it was from the same low budget bin as mentioned from someone before I did not return it.

first pc batle of britain after playing fighter command on the apple for years. can't even remember the name of it. dumped it off on my brother-in-law. i was drooling waiting for this. it was awful, a bad flight simulator, a bad strategy game just plane awful. (pun intended)

ORIGINAL: Terminus

You mean you never had it? Infant...[8|]

BTW: It was Universal Military Simulator...

I was meglomaniacishly drooling over this one, until I started reading about it and opened a copy in the store. Right then I realized it was not for me... to say the least.

ORIGINAL: patrickl

Hi,

Pacific General.[:(] Stop playing after 3 hours.

OMG YES!! That game really sucked!!

ORIGINAL: Admiral DadMan

ORIGINAL: patrickl

Hi,

Pacific General.[:(] Stop playing after 3 hours.

OMG YES!! That game really sucked!!

Beat my time with it. I only lasted about 90 minutes.

Das Boot by Three-Sixty Pacific. "Gee, they made Harpoon and that's great. I'll try it."

ORIGINAL: Kid

I don't know if SF games fit in your category but by far the most disappointing game I ever bought was MOOIII because f the big build up, the anticipation and expatiations I had while it was being developed. [:@][:@][:(]

I second that.

ORIGINAL: Yamato hugger

ORIGINAL: Mark VII

My most disappointing computer game would be AH's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. My friends and I just wore out the board game version since we were always playing it. The computer version was just useless and a waste of the money and time put into it!

I was a Beta on that one. AH wouldnt listen to us at all. All of us begged for them to make it 2 player mainly with an AI as a "training" tool. AH wouldnt have any of that. They had very specific things they wanted us to "playtest" and anything beyond that they wouldnt listen. It wasnt until it was released that they even attempted to put an E mail option into it.

I would have named this one as the worst, but I didnt buy it. I got mine free [:D]

(for the record, I asked them to remove my name from the list of playtesters, but it had already been printed)

Amen

While I did like "Great Naval Battles of the North Atlantic"(AKA GNB's I), I felt "Task Force 1942" just beat it to pieces, in every way.
The follow-ups just sucked, and even accelerated, they just drug on and on, with the noise of anti-aircraft guns being the only thing that kept you awake.
While it was nice seeing Japanese Jills skimming by, I could match that excitement watching jelly run down the refrigerator door........
(Oh..LOOK!..Ron,Mogami, and Mr Frag !!!!)

Hi, I liked SSI's Waterloo. The units were blocks. (The little stick men were the messengers taking your orders to units) But the game was very playable and had few bugs. It never locked up and once you got used to writing orders was a lot of fun but the AI was so bad you could win playing either side.

AH sucked at everything and I soon learned not to buy anything they made for computer.

PTO by Koei would have been a good game except for the phase where you decided what to do next turn. It never made sense. In Dec 1941 the japanese would decide to defend Kwajalean and the US would decide to attack Northern Japan. The only way to score points was to do what you were ordered to do. Koei made several really fun games. Ghangis Khan and a game about China. I first saw these games for playstations not PC.

They were good because you could have up to 8 persons playing. (I don't really like games where you only have the AI.)

Medevel Total War would have been the best game of all time except you can't play multi player. (you can fight battles but not do any campaigns)

SSI's (GG) War in Russia is the game I spent the most time playing. My brother and I played one another for years. The Soviets never lost a 2 player game (both of us could beat the Ai inside 2 years with either side)

We were both excited about "West Front" but it had issues. (You could build equipment but not issue it to units) And again the AI never won. (As Axis I always just wiped Allies in Italy out and moved everything to France. I even bombed England.

There are simply too many games where I bought them took them home, loaded them and got disgusted to mention. (If I had all the money I wasted on bad games I could drink Pilsner Urquell for several years)

There was one really good looking game on Civil War with production and several view of combat that really had me excited but the cursed thing would not work. I tried for months to figure out how to play it. But it always crashed and the Ai was simply stupid. Broke my heart because I love the American Civil War more then any other subject. I forgot who made it but it was an expensive piece of crap.


Really in fact I would say that the odds are when you buy a computer game it will make you sick. For every game I bought that actually worked I've bought three that didn't. And among those that worked only 1 in 10 were worth playing. But still thats the way it has been from the time I first bought my Commodore 64.

Remember the first games for IBM PC's? Kingdom and Startrek. All those text only games? Didn't even have color. (C-64 and Atari at least had color)

The first really good game for IBM type machines I recall was SSI's battle of Gettysburg. And Battles of Napolean. I remember I thought WIR was great because it was actually in color.

SSI's computer football was played by a league here in town for years after you could not find a C-64.

People here talk about bugs. My gawd bugs are more common in computer programs then spelling errors in the "Nasby Letters"

"Spaceward Ho !" was a real HOOT![:D]

ORIGINAL: doktorblood

This one was pretty weird.

Hey - that was the one with the little colored blocks and the quasi-3d perspective? I remember that! I could never quite figure out how to play it, but the idea was a decent one for the tech of the day.

I had (mercifully) forgotten about UMS. You're right - that one ties P360 in my mind.

Patton vs Rommel.

Didn't even stay on the drive for a day, but at least I got it from the bargain bin ...