The original Gears of War.
My God, I literally hated every minute of that game, but I kept playing because I believed there had to be SOMETHING worthwhile in there that was making everyone talk about it so much. Nope, all there was was a gun with a chainsaw on it. I couldn't bring myself to care at all about the characters or the story, which bored me to hell, along with the nearly grayscale color palette.
It seemed incredibly overly difficult, mostly due to how fucking stupid the partner AI for Dom and the others was. I recall a few times where I was downed right next to a bot, or right before the last enemy died, and Dom or Cole would just be standing there, not even in combat, five feet away as Marcus was screaming for him to help him up. I got quite pissed a few times as the checkpoint system was fucking awful. "COME ON! I'M RIGHT HERE! STUPID FUCKING BOT!" I loved the second game as it fixed virtually every problem I'd had with the first, or remedied it, such as being able to drag yourself when you were down.
Destrega for the Playstation.
On the top: A third-person fighting game with open, leveled maps (not a side-view fighter like, say, SF4). At close range your characters fight with CQC while at range they each have magic spells they can use.
Sounds sort of neat, eh?
Except that the CQC is awful, there are no combos to speak of. The magic is all used through a combination of the circle, triangle, and square buttons. One fires a fast moving bolt that is weak, another fires a slow moving bolt that is stronger, and the last fires a bolt in the middle, medium speed, medium damage. If you click all three buttons in a row, your character will throw out their strongest spell, which ranges from super useful and hard to avoid to utterly useless unless you can whip it out right at the perfect time (for instance, one character's has a reach that is just barely out of the CQC range, so to use it effectively you have to ensure that the enemy is literally right on the edge.)
Not to mention these spells are easy as hell to dodge. Some you can literally just trot out of the way from. Others can be jumped over. And still some more are ridiculously quick and powerful, so the characters are quite unbalanced.
Voice acting is AWFUL. Just...terribad. The story, while not the worst I've ever heard, was disjointed and rushed like a trained racehorse. You can knock out the main campaign probably in the space of...Two or three hours? If you watch all the long, boring as hell cutscenes. I'm probably remembering wrong, two hours, tops. Less if you're just an ass kicker at it. I mean, obviously the game was not meant to be story-based, but Christ...
Also, the graphics for the characters were bad even by those standards back then.
