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Games that were not finished at all

Zapages

Member
I have to go with Prince of Persia 3D, the game never went gold but was still released as the company (Red Orb) was going bankrupt.
 

bh7812

Banned
riceandbeans said:
Batman: Dark Tomorrow. Big Batman fan, rented the game the first day it came out and it was complete shit. Probably the most incomplete, worse game I ever played. Took me 2 years to figure out there was a second ending and Batman wasn't suppose to fuck things up at the end.

I hope I don't get in trouble for saying it, but oddly enough I initally expected Arkham Asylum was going to fall into the "Crap" category. Not at all, one of last year's pleasant total surprises for me.
 
OnPoint said:
Wind Waker is a big one for me.

Putting aside the feeling of let-down when I didn't get to explore underwater Hyrule (someone mentioned it was never really in the plans, just something that would have been fuck-awesome), it really DID feel like there was a shortage of dungeons.

I still loved the hell out of it, but instead of being THE Zelda game, it was just another Zelda game.

it is sad that so many people hated the art direction (me included, when they first showed it).
As we see now, it is of timeless beauty.
I know a lot of people who still refuse to play it, because it does not look like oot.
 
MidnightScott said:
I totally agree. I thought it was missing something too but I can't quite put my mind to it.

My biggest problem was a last boss that seemed to have poor modivation for starting Travis's "desperate struggle". Additionally, he was a pretty boring character. I also found that the ending seemed to be out of character for the series.
 

WillyFive

Member
Earl Cazone said:
it is sad that so many people hated the art direction (me included, when they first showed it).
As we see now, it is of timeless beauty.
I know a lot of people who still refuse to play it, because it does not look like oot.

Oh yeah. I've met someone like that in real life.

I should have done something, but I held back.
 

WillyFive

Member
soldat7 said:
I'm disappointed to hear Wind Waker mentioned. I'm playing it right now and so far it's 10x the game that Twilight Princess was.

If Wind Waker is unfinished, then Twilight Princess was completely finished and overbaked. It was too perfect, it lacked the same amount of human properties that the other Zelda games did.

Twilight Princess is still an awesome game, but it was obvious that game was done when it came out.
 

Sir Johnny

Neo Member
RedNumberFive said:
My biggest problem was a last boss that seemed to have poor modivation for starting Travis's "desperate struggle". Additionally, he was a pretty boring character. I also found that the ending seemed to be out of character for the series.

I personally think that more than half of the planned game didn't make its way to the final product. I'll just list some examples (very mild NMH2 spoilers):

- There was (is) an overworld, but it was not used. They didn't have the time to finish it? Also, the map menu is at placeholder-level of quality.

- There ought to be 20 revenge missions with their own sub-plot. Where did they go?

- Fucking Schpeltiger stage. It can't possibly be what Suda wanted it to be by any means.

- Same stage, there was supposed to be a combat part.

- Mini games. Ok, they are fun, but how much time anyone of these should take to program? Also, why there is only ONE 3d game? It's almost as if it was programmed first then someone said "oh, shit! We're running out of time! Let's assemble something, whatever, quick!"

- Cheap, unbalanced bosses. OK, polish is not Suda's strenght, but to my memory NOTHING in the original NMH was game-breaking bugged.

- Uninspired scenario. Maybe that was just Suda being uncollaborative :lol

- Uninspired levels.
I mean, come on! When the game starts it looks like the best thing to happen in your gamer's life, then you happen to cross short, bland, boring corridor after short, bland, boring corridor....of course, where THERE IS a fucking level to cross.

- Underused sidekicks (with bonus broken jumps).

etc
 

wRATH2x

Banned
Earl Cazone said:
it is sad that so many people hated the art direction (me included, when they first showed it).
As we see now, it is of timeless beauty.
I know a lot of people who still refuse to play it, because it does not look like oot.
Those people still exist?
Willy105 said:
If Wind Waker is unfinished, then Twilight Princess was completely finished and overbaked. It was too perfect, it lacked the same amount of human properties that the other Zelda games did.

Twilight Princess is still an awesome game, but it was obvious that game was done when it came out.
The thing about Twilight Princess is that it was overdone in some places, and rushed and not finished in others.

I still fucking love that game, but its obvious Nintendo didn't know what do with it in the end. Yet they also held back Aunoma on many things.
 
Sir Johnny said:
- Underused sidekicks (with bonus broken jumps).

This x 1000. Those platforming sections were a nightmare, and I came very close to tossing the game into the trash. The ultra-cheap last boss (one-hit kills by throwing you through a window) multiplied that frustration. My personal desperate struggle was completeing those two sections.
 

beje

Banned
I remember reading about some old games for Spectrum or Atari systems that had an insane difficulty level to hide there was absolutely nothing past the first level.

Also some things about Pokémon Ruby and Saphire where they found chunks of Johto and Kanto in the scraps/junk map areas, meaning they probably intended to include them in the first development stages.
 
wRATH2x said:
The thing about Twilight Princess is that it was overdone in some places, and rushed and not finished in others.

Twilight Princess's problem was that it was a soulless game, with little real exploration, and a 12 hour tutorial.
 

ThatObviousUser

ὁ αἴσχιστος παῖς εἶ
TP was definitely the most finished and polished of the 3D Zeldas. You can poo-poo the direction or pacing if you want, but that fact still holds true.

Awesome game too btw.
 
Andrex said:
TP was definitely the most finished and polished of the 3D Zeldas. You can poo-poo the direction or pacing if you want, but that fact still holds true.

Awesome game too btw.

Agree 100%. The game itself was certainly complete, and had an absolute ton of content. I just felt that it was missing the spirit of exploration that was the cornerstone of past titles.
 
My biggest issue with Twilight Princess was Hyrule Field. It should have been a circular hub as it was in OoT, but instead it was this linear pathway. Wherever I stood in Hyrule Field in OoT, I could point in a cardinal direction and get where I was going. In TP, I had to follow the path around the world, and take the correct exit.
 

Mael

Member
bmf said:
My biggest issue with Twilight Princess was Hyrule Field. It should have been a circular hub as it was in OoT, but instead it was this linear pathway. Wherever I stood in Hyrule Field in OoT, I could point in a cardinal direction and get where I was going. In TP, I had to follow the path around the world, and take the correct exit.

Wtf are you talking about?
the hyrule in TP is realy just as circular as the one in OoT, it's just that lon lon ranch is now hyrule castle.
Look it up, you can travel seamlessly anyway you want around the field(you just have to be far enough in the game so that the whole field is unlocked)
 
Mael said:
Wtf are you talking about?
the hyrule in TP is realy just as circular as the one in OoT, it's just that lon lon ranch is now hyrule castle.
Look it up, you can travel seamlessly anyway you want around the field(you just have to be far enough in the game so that the whole field is unlocked)
Yet still, after 30some hours playing the game, I couldn't tell how to get to certain areas, where in OoT, as long as I knew I was in Hyrule field - which was always pretty obvious - I could go north or the castle town, NE for Kakariko Village, East for the Fairy village, South for the Lake, or West for the Desert. All I had to do was ride in the correct direction.

Here's a TP map. Notice that the central area is not just a single central area. It's a bunch of areas connected by twisty little pathways.

http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/file/zelda_tp_wii_world.png
 
Banjo-Tooie is probably the definitive answer. Sure, it's a great game, and not unfinished in the broken sense, but what other game failed to deliver things that were promised in it's predecessor? People eagerly anticipated resolutions to Stop N' Swop for years, and in the end, we got a cop-out so lame, Rare really might as well have not bothered. Breaking open incredibly easy-to-find Banjo-Kazooie cartridges to get eggs that unlocked really poor rewards is a far cry from being able to visit areas in Banjo-Kazooie that were teased in it's ending.

When playing other "unifinished" games, you go in not knowing what to expect, and feeling that they could have used more work. With Banjo-Tooie, we had been TOLD what to expect, and then it wasn't there.



bmf said:
Yet still, after 30some hours playing the game, I couldn't tell how to get to certain areas, where in OoT, as long as I knew I was in Hyrule field - which was always pretty obvious - I could go north or the castle town, NE for Kakariko Village, East for the Fairy village, South for the Lake, or West for the Desert. All I had to do was ride in the correct direction.

Here's a TP map. Notice that the central area is not just a single central area. It's a bunch of areas connected by twisty little pathways.

http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/file/zelda_tp_wii_world.png


Yeah, the map in Twilight Princess is a convoluted mess. The problem is it's far too big and needlessy complicated for a map that actually houses very little. There's really not much more of interest than OoT, yet it twists and turns all over the place, and there are multiple areas of big empty fields, each nearly the size of OoT's entire Hyrule Field. Bigger is not always better.
 

Guevara

Member
bmf said:
My biggest issue with Twilight Princess was Hyrule Field. It should have been a circular hub as it was in OoT, but instead it was this linear pathway. Wherever I stood in Hyrule Field in OoT, I could point in a cardinal direction and get where I was going. In TP, I had to follow the path around the world, and take the correct exit.

This was especially the case before you unlock all of the spokes, often there was only one tedious way to get where you were going.
 

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
beje said:
Also some things about Pokémon Ruby and Saphire where they found chunks of Johto and Kanto in the scraps/junk map areas, meaning they probably intended to include them in the first development stages.

Not necessarily, sometimes thats just leftovers from the prototype stage
 
That said, I really really loved the dungeons in that game. Thinking about it a little bit more, the whole thing could have been dealt with by removing large sections of the field. If the southernmost field was the only portion of hyrule field, and the rest of the important sections of the world were reached by exiting hyrule field at the right point.

I'm not saying that it wouldn't be major surgery or anything - it obviously would terribly effect a lot of scripted events, but it just seems like northern and western hyrule field are kind of pointless.


http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/file/928519/46445
 

Speevy

Banned
Henchmen21 said:
I noticed that everyone is mentioning modern games i.e. games from the last 10 years. I came here to post this:

cv2.jpg


Wow does that game feel broken. Let's list shall we.

  • Dungeons - Not only are they badly designed, not only do they have bosses you can skip entirely (looking at you Death), but invisible floors? WTF?!!
  • Towns - I don't care what anyone says. It's not a bad translation. They just didn't know what they hell they were doing when they programmed it.
  • RPG elements - If the past 12 years of IGA have proven anything, it's that RPG does not belong in Castlevania.

Frankly, there's a reason that Castlevania III dropped all that stuff and went back to CV 1 style.

Personally there's only 3 good things that came out of that game. The Box Art, Simon's look, and Bloody Tears. Hell even the story is novel. Shame it couldn't be attached to a better game.


I'm sure glad they went back to the old one, really made it like 10,000 other NES games.
 
Strummerjones said:
It's done for two reasons. One, it's a low budget game. They had to maximise their time, and therefore money, on the areas that counted. This happened to be gameplay.

Two, it's a deliberately post-modern game. It rejects the idea of meaningful narrative in a videogame, precesely because it's impossible to have anything that isn't pointless nonsense in a game that consists of nothing but hitting people in the face. Everything in the game is tongue in cheek sillyness as a result.

The way the levels look are an extention of this mindset. What's the point of having elaborately detailed environments when you cant do anything with them? In most games the levels are just empty pieces of geometry tarted up to pretend there are they for something more than just to railroad in where you go. Godhand rejects this pointless illusion and treats them just as uninteresting barriers. Because that's all they are. It even lets you see through walls if they are blocking your view so as not to get in the way of the combat, which is the entire point of the game.

The clues are the things like the daft fruit bonuses harking back to the likes of Pac-Man. As with that game, pretty much everything in the game is there for a purpose, if it doesn't have a purpose it isn't in the game, or has minimal attention spent on it. The bottom line is that Godhand had the balls to straight up tell you it's a videogame, and people hated it for it.

This is a pretty brilliant explanation for Godhand being the way it is.

thefil said:
I doubt it. You're not Alexander.

61924922.png


beje said:
Oh god, I just reminded that horrible horrible spanish translation for FFVII (that was in turn translated from the "engrish" version). It was something like dump text to file -> translate text with with ZERO references and an overall ability to overlook idioms, jokes and false friends -> slap it back into the game -> shelves.

It granted hilarious scenes where female characters would speak or be referred to as males, or strange constructions where you had to double translate back (spanglish -> engrish -> actual spanish) to understand like "party" being translated as "fiesta" (as in "birthday party") instead of "grupo" or "equipo" (team).

Holy shit! :lol
 

Pociask

Member
I'm very sad to see so many people mention Wind Waker. I suppose I'm in a (small) minority in that I didn't mind the tri-force hunt and I loved the sailing.

Don't get me wrong- Wind Waker could have been the best video game of all time had it had 2 extra really good dungeons, and more underwater Hyrule(I thought not being able to explore it worked well with story, though). As it was, though, it will have to settle for only one of the best games of all time. It told a fantastic, complete story. The pacing was great. I hate to say it, because it's such an amorphous quality, but it has the most soul of any console Zelda. It's just a fun, magical game.

Do I wish there had been more of it? Yes. Of course, who wouldn't? But it's a totally complete game. And while it sucks that content was cut, contrasting with Twilight Princess, it seems it's better to come in with less content sometimes. TP was bursting with content, but felt too long, with horrible pacing and little direction, and that is with losing the best side-quest type stuff from WW.
 
First thing that comes to my mind is one of my favourite games, namedly Clive Barker's Undying.

The first third of the game is spent tracking down and killing the first of the undead Galloway family in a brilliantly designed epic quest... then you dispatch each of the other three ridiculously quickly in comparison in shorter areas without nearly as much polish.

That and the entire planned multiplayer component was cut, to be patched in post release.

Sadly, despite great reviews and good press coverage (even good marketing!) no one bought it.
 

webrunner

Member
Anachronox:

What was there was great, but it ended at the end of the equivalent of "Disc 1".


PSI Ops also:
Ended in the middle of a cutscene, intended to be the half-way mark.
 
My awnser would be :

ff12_front.jpg


You can feel that after 5 hours, the story vanished and you just walk around dungeons with minimalist cut scene to say " let's go here, now there, after that we go here " and you just walk through the entire world without knowing why.

Then at the end, story pop back and you get an incredible amout of CGI movie, cut scene and antagonist coming back for a boss fight.

They just forget all the story during the two third of the game.
 

KnuckaWut

Member
av2pw.jpg


this game had massive potential, but the level of slowdown in this game was just unacceptable. i cant believe they shipped this to the public.
 
I definitely put Wind Waker in this category. Not because of any hidden areas that weren't used or other types of content cut from the game--all the Zelda games have that. But simply because it felt like it. Right up to the end of the game, I was hoping to return to the underwater WORLD, not the underwater HALLWAY. And "fishing" for Triforce pieces in the same way as "fishing" for 10 rupies is about as big a sign as possible that something's been rushed. Also suspect is the part where
dungeon #3 isn't there (it's been wrecked) and you're just given the 3rd pearl by the giant fish instead.

Whether there were more dungeons planned or not, and whether an underwater "overworld" was planned or not, the game felt gutted at the end.
 

G0523

Member
For people complaining about the lack of overworld in NMH2, I thought that was a big burden from the first game. I could swear that many people complained about it and that's why it was removed for the sequel. Aside from that, a lot of people were also complaining that the forced mini-games from NMH1 were lame, so they made the mini-games in NMH2 optional AND 8-bit. From that perspective, it looked like they were trying to please everyone.

As for Banjo-Tooie, I understand about the unfinishedness of it (especially the framerate but that got fixed for the XBLA version) but remember, Rare never intended for Stop 'n Swop to be this huge thing. They just wanted to use it for 2-3 games and that was it. The mystery behind it was what made the Banjo series so interesting. I still love the original N64 games, and it looks like they were pretty complete to me.

Also, why are there not more replies for Sonic games, especially Sonic 2006?! That game is THE definition of unfinished! Also, you might as well throw in Sonic Adventure 1 (especially DX), the Wii/PS2 versions of Sonic Unleashed, and practically all of the console Sonic games that were released in the past decade!

Oh yeah, also definitely include Nights: Journey of Dreams because of Sega:

Sega: Hey, Nights JoD is coming along nicely. This is for what system?
Sonic Team: Xbox 360.
Sega: Oh, not anymore. The Wii is printing money now, so make it for that.
Sonic Team: Can we have more time for it?
Sega: No.
 

louis89

Member
Leondexter said:
Also suspect is the part where
dungeon #3 isn't there (it's been wrecked) and you're just given the 3rd pearl by the giant fish instead.
I always considered the tower of trials or whatever it's called as dungeon #3.
 

Yasae

Banned
ColdSoup said:
Kotor 2

I don't know what happened with the game's development but Ugh. What a mess. I recently bought and played the game with some of the restored content and Kotor 2 is the very definition of unfinished. There are numerous glitches from the sound cutting out completely to freezing, to having corrupted save files that ruin games. The games pacing is terrible. Terrible level design for many levels. Levels that go on for too long. The difficulty curve in the game is unbalanced. The first dungeon is one of the worst I have ever played in an rpg.


The story for Kotor 2 is frankly, terrible (Especially after playing Torment). Its incomplete, and at some points seems to be nonsensical and honestly somewhat pretentious. Two of the main antagonists (who I wont spoil for people who haven't played) in Kotor 2 are some of the most uninteresting, poorly written and shallow antagonists I have come across in recent memory (for an rpg). The main cast is far from being fleshed out. And Before the halfway point they run out of new dialog options, back-story and decent character interaction.

The characters are simply not developed enough and come off as rather one-dimensional. The only saving grace of the cast and the game for me, is Kreia. And even she isn't fully developed.
And yet most of those downsides are worse in the first game.
 

Kevtones

Member
It still boggles my mind that people think Wind Waker is better than TP. I guess graphical style and whimsy is more important than content to some people.
 

TheUsual

Gold Member
UnluckyKate said:
My awnser would be :

ff12_front.jpg


You can feel that after 5 hours, the story vanished and you just walk around dungeons with minimalist cut scene to say " let's go here, now there, after that we go here " and you just walk through the entire world without knowing why.

Then at the end, story pop back and you get an incredible amout of CGI movie, cut scene and antagonist coming back for a boss fight.

They just forget all the story during the two third of the game.

Agree completely. I still love this game, the gameplay was super addicting, but the story just had a beginning and an end.
 
louis89 said:
I always considered the tower of trials or whatever it's called as dungeon #3.

You're referring to the tower that opens once you have the 3 pearls, right? You're right, it is the 3rd dungeon. What I'm saying is that it should've been the 4th one.
 
Quadrangulum said:
Lux-Pain has to be included in this category. I'm not sure how a game that was literally halfway localized made it to the shelves. I think Google Translate would have done an equivalent job. Someone had to have played the game before deciding to package it right?

It's a shame really. I think there was a fairly decent adventure game beneath that dreck.

I was really interested in picking this game up; the art style and promise of a really dark adventure game on the DS seemed like a total win to me. But I'm also a grammar Nazi so there's a good chance the game would just annoy me. Shame.
 
Nintendo should do a director's cut of wind waker. Add in everything they probably intended to have before they sent it out to save the cube.
 

Dizzle24

Member
Bloodrayne on PS2. Sure, it's a shitty game to begin with, but when the devs ported it from PC, they forgot to program the controls for the PS2. :lol
 
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