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Once-hyped games that are now completely forgotten

The worst part about these threads is how obtuse people can intentionally be. Yeah people still talk about No Man's Sky, but when the conversation rests on how overhyped and shitty the game is then yes, it's forgotten.

"Oh, but I played 'X' game and liked it!" So what? Every serious gamer has one bad game they found endearing, doesn't make it good or universally loved.

My submission - Spore. Spore was going to revolutionize gaming. No one person's game was going to be the same! It's the new Sims! Only milestone it accomplished was getting its creator Will Wright, seen as a gaming God before Spore's release, shown the door at EA.
 
Spieler Eins said:
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The hype this game got based solely on the name "Goldeneye" in spite of no one from Rare/Goldeneye n64 team having anything to do with it was mind-bottling.
 
okay I'm confused here is this thread about forgotten hyped games or people having forgettable experience with hyped games?
 
Boney said:
Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles The Crystal Bearers

"They're making a single player CC with an awesome protagonist that has gravity powers?"
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Then you played it..

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Oh...
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This game makes me sad. Although I liked how it changed it's mechanics around and had fun little mini game sections I found the main combat to be abysmal. All the way to the end I never warmed up to whatever that "flicking" mechanic was. Production values and world were lovely though. Story even had some memorable scenes and got surprisingly dark at times. But damn, if they had just used something akin to Crystal Chronicles GC combat this game might have been pretty solid.
 
Stonekeep

It was the #1 hyped RPG on computers for years. Even surpassing Final Fantasy VII. It featured even live action FMV and digitized actors.Still barely anyone talks about it.Delays killed it.

Mortal Kombat 4 buried the franchise for good since it dared to compare itself with Virtua Fighter and Tekken.
 
Quest 64.

Hear me out. This was like the first RPG on the N64 for a system absolutely starved of them in North America. It wasn't massively hyped or anything, but there was a solid dream beat for it.

As we all know it turned out great!
 
DeaconKnowledge said:
The worst part about these threads is how obtuse people can intentionally be. Yeah people still talk about No Man's Sky, but when the conversation rests on how overhyped and shitty the game is then yes, it's forgotten.
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I disagree, in that I'd argue that the spirit of the thread is how hype can fall away, not how hype can backfire; games where the hype is what you recall, rather than any recollection of the game itself. I mentioned Afterlife, for instance, and I couldn't tell you anything about the mechanics beyond 'heaven/hell themed city simulator'. Someone posted Messiah; I remember the hype, I have no mental image of what the actual game looks like.


Which does remind me of another example:

R5bxFiU.jpg


Demis Hassabis's magnum opus, after Theme Park. It was a political simulation that was meant to be far more in-depth than anything that had come before; heck, he gave a talk to my university computer society about the plans and scope of it - a massive, 3D city in which you carry out your strategies...

I couldn't actually tell you anything much about the game that came out, except that I heard that the massive impressive 3D city was entirely superfluous to the gameplay.
 
mclem said:
I disagree, in that I'd argue that the spirit of the thread is how hype can fall away, not how hype can backfire; games where the hype is what you recall, rather than any recollection of the game itself. I mentioned Afterlife, for instance, and I couldn't tell you anything about the mechanics beyond 'heaven/hell themed city simulator'. Someone posted Messiah; I remember the hype, I have no mental image of what the actual game looks like.


Which does remind me of another example:

R5bxFiU.jpg


Demis Hassabis's magnum opus, after Theme Park. It was a political simulation that was meant to be far more in-depth than anything that had come before; heck, he gave a talk to my university computer society about the plans and scope of it - a massive, 3D city in which you carry out your strategies...

I couldn't actually tell you anything much about the game that came out, except that I heard that the massive impressive 3D city was entirely superfluous to the gameplay.
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This is a good one, at least when it comes to PC centric publications. They heavily hyped the game, I bought into it and bought it. I still have the box and the dvds for it, but I can barely remember a single detail about the game now.
 
I think Lands of Lore 2 can fit the description.
Lands_of_Lore_II_-_Guardians_of_Destiny.PNG


It was the sequel of the praised (for very good reasons) Lands of Lore with modern graphics, actors and we were to play the son of the witch from the first one!

I remembered a huge hype in the magazines back then but who now remember this game? (I played it from beginning to end and have just only vague memories of it)
 
jedezel said:
I remembered a huge hype in the magazines back then but who now remember this game? (I played it from beginning to end and have just only vague memories of it)
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My overwhelming memory was the recollection that it felt like 95% of the enemies were spiders (formally 'spawn of Belial', but...)
 
bit of a side topic, but looking at the magazine blurbs in the OP's post reminds me of how these magazines used to be written and the rhetoric so prevalent in them, during those days.... yeugghhh.
this was with any console specific magazine mind you (wether it was ps2, gcn, or xbox), but its so 'tabloid' level and devoid of anything resembling critical thought.

paraphrasing here, but...
"...no games to play on xbox after its launch period. yeah there's splinter cell but that doesn't count cuz it's not exclusive, and yeah there's panzer dragoon orta, but that sold like crap so it doesn't count, and yeah there was PGR but lots of dudes think its pretty much MSR 1.5, so yea doesn't count. but now there's brute force! finally something to play!" wtf with the infantile, nonsensical reasoning.

who wrote this shit and how did this kind of rhetoric even get past the editing room in a professional magazine??
 
Funky Papa said:
I'm probably showing my age here...



That said, even if TekWar was utter garbage I feel like it deserves a fair bit of credit for basically introducing GTA-like level design 1995.
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"You want the kids to learn TekWar on the streets?"

Edit: It's already been said, but Rise of the Robots is IMO the ur-example of a hyped-then-forgotten game. That game was plastered everywhere in the early nineties and was being promoted as the next Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat. Then the game was released and it landed like a wet fart.
 
DeaconKnowledge said:
The worst part about these threads is how obtuse people can intentionally be. Yeah people still talk about No Man's Sky, but when the conversation rests on how overhyped and shitty the game is then yes, it's forgotten.
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This doesn't even make sense. If people still talk about the game, good or bad, then by definition it's not forgotten. And in the case of NMS, there's an ARG going on to be followed by a big update next month. It's gotten two major updates which are well-regarded this year.

My advice? Keep a tab open to dictionary.com and refer to it often.
 
Evolve was definitely artificial marketing hype.

Titanfall hype was real/legitimate. MS may have been pushing it quite a bit since it was an exclusive, but it had the gameplay to back it up. Hands-on feedback was always glowingly positive.

...and Titanfall 2 is one of the best FPS games ever made. EA simply sabotaged it with one of the biggest release date blunders in gaming history.
 
VandalD said:
Unless someone posted box art without naming it, Fable is the clear winner. Everyone forgot about it.
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I begged and pleaded for months with my parents to get me an XBox for Fable. They finally relented and we got one the day Fable came out, I beat it in 5 hours. I loved everything about the game except for how short it was, hearing about all the cut content bummed me out so much. I played that game for over a month so my parents wouldn't realize how short it was.
 
I think it's more interesting to focus on older games or series which were hyped and potentially very successful at the time, but which have fallen by the wayside (whether unfairly or not).

I'd go for the Red Faction series.

Red_Faction.jpg


I remember it being super hyped back in the early 2000s, with magazines claiming the destructible environments were revolutionary etc. But reviews for all the games were lukewarm and it was received as just another shooter.

Obviously it became a franchise and it's not obscure, but at the same time the games have certainly been forgotten in terms of critical interest and having any sort of dedicated fanbase.
 
Daily reminder that money was actively taken away, from Battlefront 3 to fund HAZE.

And when that game hemorrhaged money they had to cancel the sequel to THE BEST SELLING STAR WARS GAME OF ALL TIME.
 
I haven't played No Man's Sky and am not really planning but that thing is far from forgotten. wasn't there just some big thread about some ARG event they're having? Say what you will about it, but it's managed to keep a little piece of the zeitgeist somehow.
 
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