Kyle's top ten bad PC game purchases

I've been purchasing PC games long enough to have made a number of mistakes. These mistakes have one of two origins: One, buying a game without waiting for reviews because it seems so cool, or two, buying a game because the original was so good. Here my worst choices.

This Means War! (1996)
There was a time when I would buy anything that said "Microprose" on the box. Then I bought "This Means War!". A complete mess of an RTS, it was nearly unplayable on systems of the time despite looking ugly and primative and the controls were awful. Also, the story was notably bad. The worst PC game purchase I ever made.

Afterlife (1996)
LucasArts is another company that once could do know wrong. This game was a big detour from the company's traditional adventure games or Star Wars games, and it's a boring failure. Afterlife is a SimCity style-game which requires you to manage heaven and hell. Unfortunately once you get past the humorous building descriptions, all that's left is repeatedly adjusting sliders to predetermined ideal locations. More homework than fun.

Star Control 3 (1996)
Star Control 2 is one of the greatest PC games ever made. Star Control 3 is a very confused game. It desires to be both a space exploration game like Star Control 2 & a civ-building game. It does neither very well. Additionally, the CD-Multimedia era influence leads to some really ugly graphics and video.

Magic: The Gathering (1997)
Microprose & Sid Meier hit rock bottom with this adaptation of the popular trading card game. Like This Means War, this game is slow and buggy. The game's RPG style shell around the card game barely works at all in shipped form. The AI in the card game aspect is stupid, and causes the game to move far to slow on systems of the time to be playable. The one caveat to the game's inclusion is that with modern fan made patches the game runs pretty well and because of that the game fetches good prices on eBay.

Populous: The Beginning (1998)
An attempt to combine an old real-time god game (Populous) with modern real-time strategy games. Like so many sequels, it lacks the magic, spirit, and gameplay that made the original so good despire the modern technology involved.

Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999)
Take Command & Conquer, and higher resolution but otherwise similar graphics, and increase the video quality and add little creatures to randomly kill your troops. Now you have Tiberian Sun, and sequel that does almost nothing to differentiate itself from the original. Some sequels can get away with this, but the state of RTS's had advanced so much in the short years since the original that it was hard to find a good reason to play this game which doesn't even play as well as the original. But hey, it's got better full motion video.

Ultima IX: Ascension (1999)
Ultima VII: The Black Gate is another of the greatest PC games ever made, and no game yet has been able to recreate the magic completely. Ultima VIII: Pagan lost it's way both in gameplay and in story, but technically was a competent effort. Ultima IX was a disaster from start to finish. After five years in development the game was released to early and suffered from innumerable bugs. As released there were multiple gameplay bugs which made it impossible to finish the game, and too many technical problems to list. Just in case that wasn't enough, the gameplay was weak and the story was a disaster.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption (2000)
Not to be confused with the more recent "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines" this game was supposed to feature a great single player mode in addition to a GM moderated multiplayer mode that could be used to simulate pen-and-paper play. Unfortunately the single player mode plays like a bad Diablo clone and the multiplayer mode is nearly useless. But hey, it looks good.

Master of Orion 3 (2003)
Master of Orion is another of those greatest games and it already had a great Sequel, Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares. Master of Orion 3 is a game created by developers who were fans of the originals. Unfortunately, they failed to capture any of what made the originals great. The interface in difficult to understand, contains far more screens than you reasonably want to deal with and is ugly to boot; the UI looks like a Winamp skin. By default, the fun of combat has been automated away. The combat results may be the most inscrutable interface in the history of civ-building games. If you can located the fun in this game, you are a better man than I.

Chris Sawyer's Locomotion (2004)
Transport Tycoon is the progenitor of most modern tycoon games. It's an evolution from Railrood Tycoon which has stripped away the complexity and added a toy like quailty. Chris Sawyer took his game Transport Tycoon and turned it into Roller Coaster Tycoon, a fun theme park building sim that spawned the boom in budget priced Tycoon games. Chris then took Roller Coaster Tycoon and turned it back into a sequel to Transport Tycoon called Locomotion. Locomotion has the distinction of being inferior in nearly every way, including graphics and gameplay, to Transport Tycoon Deluxe which was released 9 years earlier.