Gaming pleasant surprises/disappointments in 06

Now that it's over, what were the biggest pleasant suprises/disappointments?

Here are mine:

+Doom for XBLA. Although I wish it was Doom 2.

-No Geometry Wars 2/Mutant Storm 2 release in 06. I love me some Robotron clones and was expecting at least one of these to come out. No such luck.

+Lost Planet. OK, it's not out yet, but I thought this was going to be crap. Now because of the demo it's a shoe-in for Top 20 GOTY next year.

++X '06. The amount of games/good news that werehere were staggering. Bioshock is a console-exclusive, SC 5 is a console exclusive. MS has put their muscles into this gen.

-No user-content plans for XBL. I thought this would be a great way for MS to make inroads with people, but nothing.

+Ubisoft kicking ass. They are becoming somewhat of the anti-EA. They're not catering to the lowest common denominator and should be rewarded for it.

-No good platformer for a nextgen system. I can't even think of what the closest thing to a platformer would be. There's literally nothing that came out in 06. (edit: LOL I totally forgot about Sonic coming out. That was horrific though, so maybe that's why I forgot it).

-PS3. I was originally going to buy all three consoles at launch (especially since I got burned with having to wait a long time for the 360). But this turned out to be a running joke. Ridge Racer 7 is OK, Resistance and Blast Factor are genuinely good and everything else is borderline worthless/on the 360.

-(x5) Wii. Dog shit from every angle. VC could have been great, but it's garbage, the system's power is beyond embarrassing and the lineup is worse than I could have imagined. Nintendo farted out a system here.

Surprise for me is the Wii. I thought it was a total gimmick until I tried Wii Sports. I was sold, I knew it would be a big hit with my inlaws and I was right, they don't play videogames but we played for 5-6 hours straight on Xmas Eve. Nintendo definitely lived up to the mantra with getting people who aren't into videogames to play. Just a different perspective from above.

<3 Xbox 360: Achievements and friend leaderboards are now required to be standard in all new consoles.

</3 Nintendo Wii: I was hyped just like everyone else at the beginning half of the year up until E3, but the release has shown once again it's the typical Nintendo half-assed gimmick with barely-there first-party support and third-party support that ranges from embarrassing to non-existent. Maybe it will be like the DS and get a second wind.

</3 PS3 - LOL

+ Final Fantasy XII being the first real RPG I've played in a long time and a great change for the series.

+ Godhand actually being good.

+ PSP being given the entire library of PSX games for the more tech savvy.

+ I honestly expected Gears to be pretty shitty for the longest time. Yeah, about that.

+ XNA being awesome on the PC side of things, and looking to be awesome on the 360.

+ Episodic content leading to some great games, even if its slower than it could be.

+ MGS Portable Ops coming out of completely nowhere and being a better game than MGS3.

- Sony's hilariously bad launch.

- Cave being all silent on the home side of things since Ibara.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tain

+ I honestly expected Gears to be pretty shitty for the longest time. Yeah, about that.

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+Me too. I at least thought it'd something that doesn't appeal to me at all. Watching a video does it no justice.

+ Drill Dozer is super grawesome, more than i imagined.

- Twilight Princess isn't as much like Majora's Mask as i thought it'd be.

- Unlike everyone else, i hate Kingdom Hearts 2 after the first 4 hours.

+Yggdra Union - Best SRPG since FFT. Really broke the SRPG mold. The focus on formations, rather than individual units works really well, the card system isn't garbage, and for once a SRPG with a challenge.

+Yakuza - It's SEGA. That's bad. But wait, it's actually good! Vintage SEGA. The Shenmue feel was everywhere and I truly felt like I was playing a DC title.

-Twilight Princess- OoT didn't really do it for me and this basically the same exact game. WW is better.

-No 360 for me this year - Self explanitory

-Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - Maybe it's just this one, but it's boring, shallow and extremely easy. Not sure what the big deal is, but this game blew.

-No word on Front Mission 5 from SE. - Guess we aren't getting it.

I'd say FFXII was a surprise, but with Matsuno at the helm I was expecting it to be great from the moment his involvement was announced.

+ Zboz

- The relative lack of original XBLA games. Where are all the ones shown at E3?

+ Wii Sports is the shit.

- Nintendo dropping the ball with the VC. What could have been a treasure trove of classic titles is a barren wasteland of overpriced crap. Apparently Urban Champion is one of the first 2007 titles. Thanks, Nintendo, for wasting everyone's time.

- MK Armageddon being a step back for the stellar series. Deception was much better.

- The yearlong clusterfuck of PS3. From the E3 price announcement to the launch disaster, has there been a week without bad news for Sony?

+ VF5 on 360. The one reason I wanted a PS3 is gone.

-Lumines Live. What could have been the best XBLA game since Geometry Wars turned into a disaster with the multiple microtransactions required to get the full game.

+ FFXII. The first JRPG in years that I enjoyed.

+ Sony's continued failure to lock out homebrew on the PSP. Earthbound on the go is nice (and thanks to Nintendo's idiocy, this is only possible on a non-Nintendo system)

+ Bully: It is better than Grand Theft Auto in large part to being much less generic. I hold out hope that it sold well enough to warrant a sequel on better hardware set in a college town.

+ Capcom: You make Japan worthwhile. You saw the writing on the wall and got behind the 360 with new IPs and Resident Evil 5. Dead Rising was even better than I expected. You brought one of the two useful series to the DS. You steered clear of the PS3 and Wii at launch, sealing their pathetic lineups' fates. If UG&G were on PS2, and SFAA were on XBL, you'd have been flawless. Hell, you even cut the fat that was Clover.

+ Final Fantasy XII: It is so much better than every other JRPG that honestly all copies of everything else should be burned in its honor. This game completely ruined my holiday to-do list. Of course, now that Matsuno is gone, Square is useless again, but at least we got this, VS, and the FFTs while it lasted.

+ Gears of War: This will get mentioned again under the 360, but it deserves its own spot too. When the only thing I can point out to make a game better is to make the single player longer and to give the multiplayer more maps, you know the stuff that was packed in there was fantastic. I foresee more maps via XBL, which is why well-thought-out online capabilities are a requirement in 2006 and beyond. The single player issue will be solved in 2008 with the inevitable sequel.

+ Ubi Soft: Joust called them the anti-EA. I love that description. They have their annual sequels, but they actually bring tons of new, well-thought-out content to the table when they do. GRAW defined what this generation was to be about, much like Resident Evil did way back in 1996 for that generation and 3D games in general.

+Xbox 360: I bought mine in February with the plan being to let my wife have it for Oblivion and Tomb Raider, while the PS3 would be my main system. GRAW began to change that plan, and it was killed completely by Dead Rising, Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and especially Achievement Points. I never would have experienced Veteran Call of Duty 2 & 3 or Realistic Rainbow Six without them.

+ Yakuza: As was mentioned earlier, Sega did something right for the first time since Orta. However, their consistent decline says that they won't get two games right this generation, so they're good for one in the next 4-5 years.

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- DS: I sold my fat DS after the first Castlevania and bought a Lite for the second. Other than the Phoenix Wrights, I still can't find any other solid reason to own one. I can't believe what a let down NSMB and Star Fox were especially. I'm hoping to see more/better third party support in 2007.

- Cavemen: If you're not playing your 360/PS3 on a 16:9 HDTV with a 5.1 setup with component/HDMI, you belong on a Geico commercial. In fact, you should have bought the TV and stereo before you spent the money on the consoles that now you can't fully appreciate. Fuck you for potentially making one game get delayed by one day so that the text size can be increased.

- Nintendo: You had three big time releases scheduled for 2006 in my eyes: New Super Mario Bros., Yoshi's Island DS, and Super Paper Mario. You made a soulless cash run out of a 2D Mario platformer. You farmed out Yoshi's Island to the hacks at Artoon, who, to their credit, stayed so close to the original mold that the game turned out decent. You missed the end of the GameCube's life and the year with Super Paper Mario, which was the most promising out of the bunch. Third parties have always carried you, going all the way back to the NES. Now that your quality needs to be flushed, you better throw some of that cash we keep reading about at developers who still know how to make games.

- PS3: I want to have the feeling of firing up a brand new console again, since it's been 10 months for me. The PS3 lineup is so bad that I can't even lie to myself to make that happen. 2007 is pretty simple for Sony. Get Konami to put a new, good Castlevania exclusively on this, or kiss my ass. I will give one ounce of credit to Sony for actually following through on their promise of no regional lockout. Nintendo completely fucked us, and only the western games (Ubi and Eidos) are not locked out on the 360.


- PSP: I had over 20 games for this thing before I realized that I never played it. After some serious thought, I realized that the games were good from an objective point of view but that they just weren't fun in that format. Having Ultimate Ghosts N Goblins fall to a handheld was perhaps the biggest shame of 2006.

- Wii: This is similar to the PS3. If I were given a PS3, I would buy Resistance. If I were given a Wii, I might buy Trauma Center, a DS port. I want to want a Wii, but it's the DS without Castlevania or Phoenix Wright. It's an as yet unjustified gimmick. Given its hardwre limitations, if this doesn't become the console home for new 2D games, it'll be useless in a year. The Virtual Console beats out the PS3 for the biggest ball drop of 2006. If I had a card with points and a Wii for free, I wouldn't spend the points right now.

+ 360 had a good year; better than I expected.
+ Saints Row came out of nowhere and showed what GTA could be like if they paid more attn to the gameplay
+ Viva Pinata became good after looking horrible for a long time
+ Final Fantasy XII delivered
+ NBA 2k7 became one of the best basketball games of all time
+ Wii is surprisingly fun
+ Sony seriously flubs their launch, giving some breathing room to MS and Nintendo
- The PSP's library still sucks for the most part
- Lumines Live was overpriced
- Microtransactions
- April through mid-August