Unpolished games

[Damon Plus]

I´ve heard always that Blues Brothers for the Nes was a very bad game. Last week, a friend gave this game to me, and I tried it. It had quite good graphics and music, and pretty good control, at least most of the time. I was very surprised because I enjoyed it, but the first good impression it left dissapeared as soon as I started the second stage. There were A LOT of unavoidable cheap hits.. Very narrow passages that you can´t cross without being hit, spikes on unexpected and difficult to avoid places... Add to that the somewhat difficult control of the main character at times and you have a game that could´ve been really good but it´s not.

Which other games do you feel coul´ve been a lot better if they weren´t rushed?

[pseudonym]

incantation for the snes. i wanted to like this game but it's problems really prevented it. the controls are rather screwy; the sound is average; the level designs are generic, hardly challenging, and poorly designed in certain areas; the enemies are sparse, usually every few screens or so, and they’re simple to kill anyway but they take A LOT of hits to kill; the bosses all have incredibly simple attack patterns so you shouldn’t have any problem killing any of them. the only thing it really has going for it is that the graphics are really nice. the problems themselves are somewhat minor and with some tweaking this could have been a good game.

[Vectorman0]

The two most recent GTA games (Vice City and San Andreas), seem extremely rushed to me. I can't stand either of them because of the massive amounts of glitchs and bugs that infest the game to be everywhere.

[tholly]

Xbox - Unreal II: The Awakening

i just got done playing this and i have to say...when considering how good the first Unreal was for the PC this game seems like a piece of crap

sure, it was a decent game, but it was really lacking
it just didnt have the Unreal Feel of the first game

[Dahne]

Good ol' SaGa Frontier. One of the worst games that I love. It feels like a prototype that was never finished, but, with just a couple more months, coulda been great.

[tony_good]

One that springs to mind immediately is Driver for PS1. Decent game, but look how rough the graphics are! Even for PSX, they should have done better with the appearance of the game!

[SirDrexl]

The two most recent GTA games (Vice City and San Andreas), seem extremely rushed to me. I can't stand either of them because of the massive amounts of glitchs and bugs that infest the game to be everywhere.

Well, for the Xbox version of VC (and GTA3 for that matter) they did manage to fix some of the bugs. One in particular- I don't remember exactly how it worked, but there was something about how in the original PS2 version you could use the Hunter to hit targets and get credit but the bullets fired wouldn't count so your accuracy rating would go up. Also, I remember reading something for GTA3 about a "purple nines" glitch that was fixed for the Xbox version.

[Slate]

Driver 2 was the REAL problem. Problems:

The cops in the game are mindless nazi zombies
The cops in the game will do whatever it takes to kill you and then some (that includes killing themselves)
This game has the most glitches i've ever seen in a Single game.

You get the idea.

[calthaer]

Xbox - Unreal II: The Awakening

i just got done playing this and i have to say...when considering how good the first Unreal was for the PC this game seems like a piece of crap

sure, it was a decent game, but it was really lacking
it just didnt have the Unreal Feel of the first game

I got this one for the PC, and you are incredibly right about this one. I'm not sure that it lacks "polish" per se, but it more than lacks in the crucial area that the first game succeeded in so well: imagination and game balance.

First off, they changed the whole balance of the game. You could generally take a lot of hits in Unreal (as long as it wasn't a boulder), and it took a lot of hits to take down most foes. Compare that to the two-shot kills for most enemies in Unreal 2 - both you killing enemies and enemies killing you. This means that, instead of staying in the game and collecting abundant health / armor stuff, you are reloading to replay fights over again instead of just enjoying one fight for longer. This is one thing that ruined it.

Secondly, the levels have no ambience. They traded the epic vistas and memorable architecture of Na Pali for generic sci-fi and space station crap. What about the Sunspire? What about that monastery on the plateau? The islands floating in the sky? When you actually did hit a sci-fi part, it was cool, like Terranuix. The temple of Chizra Nali, water god and those annoying slime-spitting slugs. Those giant boulder-throwers...all that was so interesting. Long stretches of ruins, towns, and space stations...the game was just plain awesome. U2 had none of that. Sure, the level objectives were slightly more interesting, but who cares about that when the atmosphere sucked?

Anyways, enough of that. Cliffy B should have stuck with level design instead of trying to do game design / project management. He just isn't cut out for it.