RadioRadar Podcast 003: Blitz towards a Guild War

Mine would have to be Fallout: New Vegas. I loved Fallout 3 and it ended up being my Introduction to a vast open world adventure RPG game of the sort so after New Vegas came out I was very excited to pick it up only to find that that it was unplayable. I couldn't even begin to leave the first town without it glitching to the point of not working or just freezing up entirely.

I was personally very let down by Darksiders. God of War and Zelda mixed in one package? Awesome! As a GOW and Zelda fan I felt mislead and honestly, to this day wonder why that game jumps out to anybody over either franchise apart from exclusivity.

For me THAT game was Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii. I had not played a monster hunter game prior to that but I have done a lot of reading about it after seeing the trailer, so it's supposed to be super hard adventure/hunting game where you can pair up with a few buddies to assist you beating down a massive creature. What I found out is that you beat down a massive creature by stabbing it in the foot with an oversized weapon for half an hour. The reason it's super hard is because the controls are horrible, and because your character insists on showing his muscles everytime he drinks a potion instead of rolling out of the way of an attack. And to make matters worse, the little creatures you can kill to avoid your buddy being swarmed only exist on your screen, so everyone gets their own swarm of little baddies, meaning that you see your buddies attacking thin air all the time. So, you've bypassed all the bullcrap, and finally made the monster regret having feet, wheres the accomplishment? In gutting the thing and using it's parts to make new weapons and armor to stab the feet of more unfortunate oversized creatures with new and still bloody oversized weapons. Yeah, my brother watched me play this, and laughs at me to this day for buying that game... But hey.. at least I got a new shiny black controller... Or at least that's what I keep telling myself.

Dragon Age 2... It... It... Just... WHY!?! Dragon Age 1 was such a great game. It had fun characters, epic story, good quests, and it was Nintendo Hard on Normal when it was first released if you were playing a squishy mage like me. When it was revealed that 2 was going to be released within a year it was too good to be true. It was. The game was basically just a bunch of sidequests with no real point to it all. Run from the blight, set up in Kirkwall, bring the pain in the ass witch boss from DA1 back to life, piss off all the male characters because you won't sleep with them, piss off all the female characters because you won't sleep with them, and then somehow we chop off the head of a guy that just wants to go home and blow up a church. This wouldn't have been that bad but the graphics were bland, the dungeons were recycled, and EA basically told Steam users to pay extra for the day 1 DLC which SUUUUUCKED. Dragon Age 1 day 1 DLC an HK 47 like Golem who hates birds with a fiery passion and an extra dungeon that adds a permanent base for your operations as well as some extra lore free for those who buy it new special edition or five bucks if you bought it new normal. DA2 Day 1 DLC: Sir Blandy McAngst a store. For an extra 15 bucks. The worst part is the hints of greatness that would pop up from time to time. A few real tough choices that would make you wonder what you should do, a handful of really charming characters, and the serial killer side quest that generally made me go "oh no" out loud when it got to the end. But this all just made me hate the game even more. The potential for greatness that feels like it was rushed out to meet an unreasonable deadline. It took them over 5 years to make DA1. They tried to make the same game again in one year. Grumble....

Game I was looking forward to that I ultimately hated? Resident Evil 5. I loved every moment of RE4 to the point where I did multiple playthroughs and even played the Mercenaries minigame non-stop until I had unlocked everything there was to unlock in that game... and then played it some more because it really was that damn good. So, I get super-excited about 5. Yeah, people complained about alleged racism, but I paid it no mind because I was super-pumped for the game and knew it was gonna be awesome. When I finally bought the game, I couldn't have been more underwhelmed. Mostly bland environments and enemies that felt recycled from RE4, outdated gameplay controls and mechanics, painfully forced co-op mechanics, and a dreadful AI that I not only had to babysit constantly but also loved to waste my ammo and health (say what you want about Ashley, but at least she kept out of the way most of the time, and at least had the decency to disappear every now and then, leaving Leon to do his own thing)... it was the most disappointing game I had played all year, and it was only amplified by the fact that this was also around the time when Capcom started pulling their on-disc DLC bullcrap that added very little and should've been available on the disc from Day 1. Not only did that game leave me jaded towards the direction the franchise was going in, but it also left me jaded towards Capcom and their questionable business practices.

Homefront I waited so long for it and had to wait 2 hours in traffic to get it got home played for about an hour and drove back to return it for store credit walmart gave me store credit for it i bought a carton of newports

My biggest disappointment was Prototype. Probably the reason for this is because I had expected it to be a game that it wasn't, which was a combination of Grand Theft Auto with super powers which, my opinion, sounds more fun then what the game turned out to be . Instead to my dismay it was nothing that I had expected, it was more or less a sequel to the Incredible Hulk game. This left me with a game that was ok but not with the experience that I was looking for. At least now I still have mods for GTA IV to fill that void of an experience I was looking for when I bought protype.

Dragonball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi -___-. DBZ Budokai 1-3 were some of the best fight games based on the anime ever. Then they added Tenkaichi to the title which seemed to change everything. The 2D fighting turned into 3D fighting, the controls became more fluid, 13 playable characters soon multiplied into over 100, and the graphics made it feel like you were watching the show. Budokai Tenkaichi 3 on the PS2 was the and still is the best DBZ game ever put on console in my opinion. Then I bought a 360 and none of the DBZ games ever stacked up until I saw the previews and trailers for DBZ Ultimate Tenkaichi. I thought "OH ! Happy Day!! They are finally going back to the old Tenkaichi roots." 5 months ahead of time i preordered and payed for my copy in full. I had all my gamestop customers excited about the new DBZ that would finally take me back to that nostalgia that i had so been longing for. The day finally came and boy was i wrong. Sure the graphics were the best any DBZ game had ever had, but they had turned the actions packed fighting into a series of QTE bullcrap. The create a character was phoned in and was about as in depth as a Stephenie Meyer book. I played it for about 3 hours before i took it back to my store returned it and just bought a ps2 and the DBZ BT3 that i was missing all along...

That goddamn phantasy star universe is one of the biggest letdowns for me. I love me some classic phantasy star and PSO when that came out on the dreamcast. So, when i first heard about PSU from an EGM cover story and they mentioned bringing back three planets like the algo system and introducing a story mode I was one happy kid. I pre-ordered the damn thing almost a year in advance of its release and got nothing but a boring hack-n-slash with unintuitive (and downright confusing) gear upgrades and characters that I wanted to constantly punch in the face. Sega and sonic team can kiss my ass.

I am a big DMC/3rd person action game fan, so I was really looking forward to Never Dead because of the idea that you couldn't die but could lose limbs and whatnot. It turned out to be godawful, and I was sad.

I think the biggest disappointment IN GAMING HISTORY was Metroid 2. One of the very fist games for the NES truly marketed towards a mature, what we now call "hard core", audience was Metroid. Then Metroid 2 is announced and its Metroid with more bad ass powers, on a more bad ass planet, killing bad ass creatures, WHILE COMMITTING BAD ASS GENOCIDE!!! And then I played it. Mrs. Aran takes up half the screen, the environments are empty, the music is lame, and the new power ups were really pointless. PLUS YOU CANT EVEN EXPLORE THE WHOLE PLANET!!! The only thing this game had going for it was the save system, and even then the second you come back to the game your lost cause every room looks the same. Maybe if Nintendo had waited, and made a launch game for the SNES that had the same idea of bad ass mass genocide, but had the feel of Super Metroid it would have rocked, but even then thats a stretch. All I can do now is hope to forget.

Going to have to go with Def Jam Icon. After having played the amazingly fun Def Jam Vendetta, Icon was one of the first games I picked up for ps3. My god was that an awful decision. The game lacked EVERYTHING that made Vendetta fun. There were no usable weapons in any of the stages, the whole point of a fight wasn't to beat up your opponent but to knock them down so you could stand in place and SPIN AN INVISIBLE RECORD TO MAKE THE BACKGROUND MUSIC'S BASS EXPLODE FOR MASSIVE DAMAGE, and most offensive of all was the fact that there was no Snoop Dogg. I MEAN COME ON! There was also the fact that the story mode was not even a fourth of the length of it's predecessor and the online mode is a laggy unplayable mess.....but you know, more Snoop next time.

Final Fantasy X-2... Just Final Fantasy X-2 Fucking Final Fantasy X-2

World of Warcraft Cataclysm. Maybe it's cliche but i know this isn't exclusive to just me. WoW was and technically still is king of MMOs but Cata was supposed to keep up on good expansions and it was just simply a let down. ....What, don't judge me for playing WoW

Crap! I just remember one that I was looking forward to more than FFXIII, and turned out to be a even BIGGER disappointment due to the universal praise and acclaim it has. I also played recently, and it's probably going to get me flamed, but here goes anyway: ICO. Yes, ICO, the critical Darling and the predecessor of Shadow of The Colossus, a game which I love and it remains one of my favorite games ever. I was too young when ICO had come out, and I didn't have a chance to play it on the PS2. So I was very damn excited when the HD collection was announced for the PS3. And even when it was reviewed again for the collection, everyone kept singing golden praises about it. Needless to say, I was pumped, and when I started playing it, I expected a sublime, if different, more calm experience than SotC. I couldn't have been more wrong. The visual and artistic aesthetic were certainly fantastic, but just an hour or two into the game, and i quickly started to get bored from the lack of any particularly interesting battles or puzzles, and when I wasn't bored and struggling to keep playing to see if it got better, i was annoyed by the stupidity of Yorda, the obtuseness of some jumps to otherwise simple puzzles (Fuck you, switch on top of the waterwheel.) or the incredibly inane, overlong section of the game in which you do nothing but to keep spinning a lever to raise an elevator for what feels like 3 minutes or more. And it wasn't just the gameplay, the story was extremely simple, predictable, and practically non-existent for the majority of the game. I never felt the supposed strong connection you were supposed to feel with Yorda, mainly because I never feel like she did ANYTHING to make me care for her. Heck, i ended up caring far more for the horse in SotC than I did for this girl. So yeah... FFXIII was a disappointment, but now that I remembered more in depth, this was far, far more of a disappointment for me, and it's probably the game I've least enjoyed playing in what has to be that last 5 years or so.

Lol, unpromoting.

The Conduit for Wii. Back in the days when I only had a Wii, I remember that you guys at GamesRadar had a few articles claiming it had the best graphics on Wii (almost on par with xbox360 & PS3) and that the multiplayer gameplay was great. I literally read every single article about it, watched every video and even scoured the official website for additional info and trivia. Hell, I even pre-ordered The Conduit and traded in 'The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess' and 'Rayman Raving Rabbids 2' to get the money to pay for it. I was that hyped and excited. Then the GamesRadar review came out and you gave it an 8 with a conditional 4 point bonus which raised the score for me to a 12 out of 10. I raced to the shops straight away after school to get it, hoping that I would actually be able to play a decent shooter on Wii with fun online multiplayer. Hahahaha. The multiplayer lagged nearly all the time and it was so basic and unbalanced. The graphics were slightly better than the Gamecube, the controls were extremely customisable yet it didn't actually stop it from seeming clunky and the plot had about the same excitement as watching the growth of a potato. So yeah, High Voltage didn't trick me into buying The Conduit 2; by that time I had an Xbox 360 and was playing CoD: Black Ops and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. Still love the Wii though, I just really dislike The Conduit.

pokemon black/white, i played platinum for countless hours (248) breeding and training but when black/white came around it didn't hook me the same way for some reason, it was probably the better game but i geuss i just played to much pokemon

For me, it was Devil May Cry 2. The original was pretty much the first game that had me truly amazed from start to finish(x10) so I was extremely stoked for the sequel. And then we got...that. It was a simple reskinning of the first game(and not even a good one, at that) and it just turned me off to the series completely. Now I've only just played 3(spectacular game) through the HD collection, and even that was a hard buy, because of the terrible, terrible DMC 2.

My answer should be a bit weird but it's one I have a feeling won't be a oft-repeated one, since it's fucking easy to say "lol ME3 halo cod"... whatever, anyways, mine is Deus Ex: Invisible War. I played Deus Ex: The Conspiracy, an awful in hindsight port since I only recently played the orgasmic PC version, but even with that ports imperfections and flaws, I still loved that game to death and would sit through it's five minute long, early PS2 load screens just to keep playing. So I was extremely excited for Deus Ex Invisible War and... I hated it. It was not the neo-noir techno-conspiracy "insert Tom Clancy back of the cover blurb here" game that the original Deus Ex was but a study into trans-humanism, voluntary human evolution and experimentation and abstract philosophy that a goddamn 16 year old wouldn't understand. Mix that with SUPER-streamlined gameplay (all guns share the same ammo pool, no skill set and reduced character customization), clear console-preference (smaller areas, less exploration and more combat) and the experience is something that is kind of depressing to think about. Tie that all up with the slogan on the cover being "The Future War on Terror" and it's almost enough to make you want to vomit blood in anger. I loved Human Revolution (it did everything Invisible War tried to do while keeping the tone and gameplay of the original Deus Ex in check) and I have put an insane amount of hours into Deus Ex 1 (playing mods and shit) so I love the series still. But that second game man...