What was your worst buy this year? (and best non-buy)

Being the grognard that I am, my worst buy was Jutland - there's a decent WW1 naval combat sim in there, but it's buried under a useless, practically non-existent interface, the worst camera controls ever seen, and a pretty stupid AI. Oh, and an UBISoft-worthy DRM scheme on top for extra shitfuckery. Plus when I contacted them for tech support they treated me like a pirate. I blame CSL. Steam and Iron is worlds better.

Best non-buy: Hitman, I guess? It's the only game I can think of that I would have been willing to buy based on the strength of its predecessors that turned out to be bad.

Well, so far, given the big slump in PS2 play here, it's looking like PS2 was the worst "buy" for me (I did pony up some spacebucks for stuff)

I actually bought Halo 4 and am loving it. The CoD-ification of the multiplayer works nicely, and it manages to pick up the pace of action a bit without changing the essential high-inertia feel of Halo.

My worst buy was Diablo 3, which I just hated, and my best non-buy was Resident Evil 6. So glad I didn't jump right on that after I enjoyed 5 so much.

Bad: Planetside 2 Alpha - does ANYONE want to take this off my hands?

Good: FTL and Kerbal Space Program. Gaming nirvana.

Haha, man. I want to make fun of you, but that'd just be kicking a man when he's down. I miss the emails that were on the verge of accusing me of personally destroying naval wargaming forever if I didn't buy their games.

I regret buying Legends of Grimrock.
It's a beautiful game, and a great throwback to classic gaming. But my reflexes are too slow to do the puzzles and I got stuck very early on. I just wished Steam would allow me to gift the game to someone who would be able to play and enjoy it.

Best non-buy: Dark Souls.
Every time I see someone mention it I get curious again. But I'm a casual gamer who likes easy combat, preferably while never dying and a with hefty dose of hand-holding, so it really isn't the game for me. The atmosphere and art-style seem awesome though, and I can understand why other people like it so much.

Most other games I've bought I got my money's worth out of (thank you digital sales!) or I simply wasn't interested in in the first place. It's been a good year.

Worst Buy: Diablo 3. I played Diablo 2 for 5 damn years, and ran at least 7 characters to Hell/Hell completion. I played Diablo 3 once to completion of Normal and never went back.

Best Buy: Dark Souls. I bought this because I was curious about the fanatical devotion it imbued in its adherents and expected to get frustrated and quit. It's now my most played game on Steam. (after another 1.5 hours, anyway)

You love me. I'll do another LP sometime.

Hmm, I will have to tentatively say Diablo 3, too. Only tentatively because Blizzard has spent several months patching the heck out of the biggest issues, but that doesn't make up for being a failure at release (lag, loot, skill balance, inferno balance, etc). There is some promise here, though. If they eventually patch in runes and somehow manage to pull randomish maps out of their hat, then I'd say it's on track to being a worthy successor to D2. GOTY 2015?

Regardless, my worst buy of 2012 by a fair margin.

My biggest disappointment of the year is Far Cry 3. I was expecting an open-world sandbox type game in which I would be free to explore or follow quests as I saw fit, all within the context of a main story arc. Instead, I got an on-rails, point-to-point, second-rate FPS which not only doesn't allow exploration but actively prevents it. Coupled with a woeful checkpoint save system which performs saves before long expository QTE sequences that cannot be skipped and that godawful UI makes Far Cry 3 easily my biggest disappointment of the year.

Thankfully, I didn't buy it; it came bundled with my recent video card purchase, which makes Far Cry 3 also my best non-buy of the year.

How odd. The Far Cry 3 I bought was exactly opposite to the one which you seemed to have played. Maybe your version, being a GPU bundle-in, was different.

I think I agree, I think Dark Souls is going to go down as my best non-decision this year. I don't necessarily like easy combat, but I don't like trial-and-error education with the stakes as high as they apparently are. And since I am really not into fantasy, sounds like this game is doubly not for me. I've been checking out a Let's Play over at Something Awful that has been fun to watch but I am absolutely certain that if I bought this game, I would play it a few minutes and then toss it back on the pile, probably forever. Best left to the fanatics.

So are you saying that you never had the screen fading to black with a big old "Mission Failed" message and then dumped back to the previous checkpoint save if you deviated from the specific path that the game intended you to follow? How odd indeed.

There is a mechanism for that, but it's usually pretty wide. If you go into the yellow outline near a mission, you get sucked into it and will fail it if you leave the area. It's only really restrictive in a few of the missions where going out of bounds would make the thing trivial. I will say that the missions are by far the shittiest part of Far Cry 3, and are sadly required to open the world up.

Far Cry 3 = Modern Warfare 2

L'Oncle is right, many of the missions have fail states if you're detected, if you kill a bad guy with the wrong weapon, if you fail a QTE. It's retarded. Worst example of on rails gameplay in a while, especially because of its jarring contrast to the game's "open world" pretentions.

Also the fact that I have to craft a better wallet in order to hold more than $1000 is one of the dumbest things of all time. Do the designers not understand how wallets/money works? The hunting/crafting aspect of the game is illogical and directly interferes with the "open world" gameplay.

The missions have serious rail shooter problems. The game itself is usually pretty open world and do whatever you want, but the missions are all ass because it seems they couldn't reconcile telling a story with you being able to just walk around most of the events in question. It's basically the same style of Open World as GTA: you're open to do whatever the fuck until you start a mission, at which point it will be heavily scripted.

I imagine they do. I mean, if you wandered around picking up $10-20 at a time, just how much of that loose cash do you think you're going to be able to stuff in your wallet? I dare say they've been overly generous here.

So even if this was the case, how is making a wallet out of sharkskin instead of pig hide going to fix Jason's loose change problem?

Really they introduced wallets because for some reason they decided the game needed loot. Once they introduced loot, they needed some way to stop people from just grinding straight to the best weapons. Wallets are their way of gating progress.

I try not to buy games at prices expensive enough to regret any more, but that said, Endless Space, which while not without its redeeming qualities (it really does have a lovely UI) really isn't enough actual fun in terms of its mechanics to be worth the £20 or so I paid for it at the time.

Starting to despair of ever liking a new turn-based space 4x game. Maybe I'm just jaded and can't help but see the numbers and the grind any more, or maybe the games used to be better about hiding their mathsiness with a sense of personality.

There are several indie efforts coming out in this regard, such as M.O.R.E., Deep Space Settlement and others that might scratch that itch. :)

My worst buy was Borderlands 2, because I hated the first one and hated the second for exactly the same reasons (bullet sponge enemies, generic levels and encounters, pointless looting, bad interface, etc). Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

My most dissapointing game was Far Cry 3, not because its a bad game but because (for me at least) it is a huge step back from Far Cry 2 in almost all respects.

The worst game I played was Assassin's Creed 3, a game so buggy, bloated, and cut-scene heavy that I played it for 6 hours without finishing the tutorial. I spent most of those 6 hours angry.

I just embrace the game-y-ness of it because having to craft bigger wallets out of sharkskin is as inane as carrying around thousands of dollars in your back pocket. I'm not sure why anyone would argue for/against it on the grounds realism is all.

I would actually have preferred dispensing with currency in favor of a full on barter system, functionally similar to the one in Dungeon Master 2, because I had a lot of fun collecting random crap and sussing out what the merchants would accept in exchange for whatever I wanted. But I'm sure this is why no one is paying me to design games.

Worst buy: assorted "classics" I picked up at GOG.com because they were at a sale or something (as opposed to the games I actually sought out there). Not because GOG isn't an awesome idea (it is) but because of the ensuing disillusionment that proved to me that, yes, some games are only good when viewed through a twenty-year-plus-thick lens of nostalgia.

Best non-buy: Diablo III. Heard of the assorted DRM/auction house nonsense, decided to try the beta to see whether I was willing to put up with (and pay for) that. Beta left me cold, so I never bought the thing and I feel I dodged quite the bullet there.

Worst buy , Endless Space, I don't think I finished the Tutorial... :|

Best Non-buy : COD BLOPS2 , all my friends stopped playing it already.

Worst buys: Planetside 2 Alpha Squad - played the beta, found its performance and mechanics kludgy, despite my love for PS1; Sword of the Stars II: Fixed Edition - runs poorly, wholly inscrutable, and just not worth the effort.

Best Non-buys: COD BLOPS2, Far Cry 3, AssCreed 3, Guild Wars 2, Halo 4 - I resisted the hype, I don't have the time, and I don't care enough. I might buy some of them once they hit heavy discount pricing, though.

I win Worst Buy easily:

Steel Battalion Heavy Armor. It's really that bad. I hid it from sight because it makes me sick just looking at the game case...

I remember you used to be majorly into WoW. What's your story with this? Yet another "I'm tired of WoW" person, like me, or was there something about the xpac itself you didn't like?

As for the OP, I'm pretty satisfied with my game purchases this year. I made very few purchases, and played the shit out of each and every one of them. As noted in another thread, D3 was a disappoinment in the end, but I really can't list it as a "bad purchase", all things considered.

Burned out on it just like so many others, I guess. Cataclysm raiding kinda sucked, worst expansion for raiding by far, and I just got out of it and didn't get back in. Having a job made that a very good thing.

Have nothing against the xpac itself and the talent stuff (among other changes) is, imo, a damn good idea. Just... un-clicked for me and didn't reclick, and I'm not going to invest time hoping it does because what if it does. ;)

Most Regreted:
Secret World - I like the idea and the investigation quests. Loath the combat and character mechanics.
Dark Souls - Might have to give this one another chance, but the melee combat is so damn slow and clunky. Instantly wished I'd sprung for Dishonored instead.

Bullets Dodged:
Dungeon Bowl - Could have been interesting, but inherently just not as sharp a game as Blood Bowl.
Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition - Fuckers.
Planetside 2 - I want to like this, but so much of time I find the game just boring. Zerg zerg zerg.
Diablo 3 - looks pretty! So tempting, yet I know I'm sick of this sort of game.

Worst buy: I bought a big Total War bundle on steam with 5 or so TW games in it. The Total War games have never clicked with me. I like the idea, I think I'm going to like the games, and I don't and I don't know why. Played a fair bit of Napoleon TW before admitting that I was just doing it to try to justify the purchase and actually wasn't enjoying any of it.

Bullet dodged: Hmm. I've been pretty careless this year and if I was interested, I just bought stuff. So I didn't dodge many bullets. I suppose the closest would be that I realised I was getting too invested in Kickstarter and games that might never happen and I "only" kickstarted about 3 different things.

I shouldn't have bought X-COM at full price. I never played the original and I don't much like turn-based tactical combat, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway because of Firaxis and the unusual setting. Immediately got screwed by the unbalanced strategic layer -- I first went for scientists instead of engineers, and consequently was unable to build pretty much anything for most of the game. Tactical missions played too slowly and got old very fast. Seems I always either had to chase down the last alien hiding in a corner, or else got scripted ambushes air-dropped on me. Constantly reshuffling limited equipment items isn't much fun either. The most entertaining parts by far were the wacky cutscenes, and so I eventually just fast-forwarded until I saw the amusing defeat ending.

Unfortunately I'm hooked on Diablo clones so once again burnt by one, this time- Realms of Ancient War.
Seems like half the game is missing- no maps, no in-game voices, no tool-tips, terrible quests even for a ARPG, blandest loot I've ever seen, at least the graphics were decent.
And it was supposed to be improved for the PC version, yeah right.

Oh god I want to learn how to play so badly, but everything is just... impossible.

I think you need to give it another chance. I'll agree the game isn't for everyone but I've never heard anyone complain about the melee combat, most consider it the best part of the game and one of the best melee implementations ever.

Yeah, I've heard that and it's largely why I got it. So far I'm not seeing it. Everything is so slow, and you have a surprisingly little finesse and variety of action. Having fenced for some 15-20 years I'm somewhat finicky in this regard. Not terribly fond of the camera either.

The only reason I'm even contemplating looking at it again is that so many here seem to love it.