Every year, some games just don’t tickle my fancy. For one reason or another, the six titles below just left me unsatisfied. It’s probably my fault, and I probably need to give each of these games more of a chance, but at this point, they’re my biggest disappointments of the year.

Now that you know my list of disappointments, and the list of games I didn’t play, you can try guessing what my fave games are! Whee!

Fable II
This is the last 360 game I bought, about two months ago. The main quest is a lot of fun, admittedly. But all of the stuff that Molyneux was pimping really hard, like the social functions and the dog, left me completely cold. I mean, really? A dog whose sole purpose is to look cute and pop “TREASURE” up over his head when the game decides you’re worthy enough to receive some stuff in a hole? A digging animation from 1999? A menu system that takes ~45s just to eat an apple? The ability to fart on command in front of your wife over and over until she decides NOT to divorce you on grounds of being gone for a week (but doesn’t care when you’re gone for ten years)? Argh.

Fallout 3
I’ve played for about 5 or 10 hours on the PC, and the game has crashed about ten times. I never save, so this REALLY sucks. Plus, the last time I played, I got stuck in a hole that I could not walk or jump out of. And it’s not like this hole was intended to capture me; it’s in some dumb random place. I haven’t booted the game up since then. Furthermore, while I never intended to hold it against its predecessors, it does so itself by giving you so much of the SAME as those games, but without even a modicum of charm or heart or soul or whatever you call that spark that makes a great game amazing. Fallout 3 is sexy, but offers the user NOTHING worth remembering in ten years. I felt the same about Oblivion, as well. It’s soulless.

Football Manager 2009
I love FM08. I also loved FM07. I liked FM06, and that’s when I started playing the series. However, this one just isn’t doing it for me. I’m still playing my 08 games. I’m open to the idea of a 3D match engine, but it doesn’t feel right. It just feels off. Ad to that that everything feels really… I don’t know, imprecise, and that the injury engine, as cozen put it, “[built like] Passchendaele 1916.” I just can’t get into it this year. I’ve heard that a patch was released in the past few days, which might be enough to get me back on the wagon… but that, mixed with the fact that my dumpy work laptop can’t run the new game, is really putting me off playing.

Grand Theft Auto IV
Maybe this should be in my top games. I did beat it, after all, and that takes a lot of time. There is a lot about it that I do like — it LOOKS stunning. On another level, really. Driving under trains in fake-Brooklyn, staring at billboards in fake-Times Square, getting shot in fake-Bronx (ha)… it’s absolutely worth playing just to look at. But, I have the same problem with it that I had with other GTA games (excluding San Andreas, the only one I really loved): it’s junk food. Once I have played through a GTA game, I don’t retain anything; there’s nothing about them that I think about and want to write about. They’re just incredibly well-made junk. By the end, I didn’t even want to turn the game on. It had become a chore. San Andreas gave me characters I cared about, at least; while Niko Bellic had potential, he completely lost it at some point when he was the exact same sociopath from III and Vice City.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots
I forgot to originally add this, but I’m going back just to do it now. This is the only PS3 game I’ve played much of, and I beat it. I loved MGS, MGS2, and MGS3, in that order. What made thme great was that they pushed the definition of player and console and game to the absolute limit. Not only does MGS4 fail to do this in the same way, it’s also got one of the most irritatingly preposterous scripts in the history of script. And not in a way that’s amusing, like MGS1 and 2. Definitely one of the most interesting games I played this year, but hardly one of the top 20.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl
I didn’t play it much, to be honest. The Smash Bros games just don’t do it for me. Maybe the fact that I never had an N64 or a Gamecube or a Wii means that I don’t “get” it, but it feels floaty and imprecise and random and unbalanced. It’s fun enough with a bunch of plebes who can’t play the game for a drunken night of hitting each other with fans, but I just can’t get behind it as a “good game.”

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix
Chalk this one up to the Xbox 360 controller. I can’t buy an arcade stick, because I’m waiting for those new ones to come out with SFIV. This means, sadly, that I can’t play this game effectively AT ALL (unless someone miraculously releases a 360 controller that ships with a SNES or PS2 D-pad.