The Top 10 Most Disappointing Video Games of 2013
07. Remember Me
Don't remember the magnum whaaa?! of 2013 called 'Remember Me' at all? Well you are not alone, but still... If it helps at all it is the game with the yellow-orange box cover on which we see the derriere of a cute girl whose profile reminds us that denim can look good...
Remember Me was created by game studio Dontnod Entertainment but it was published by Capcom.
When game publisher Capcom is the subject the most often noted projects that have come from them tend to focus upon a narrow range of genres: arcade, fighting, and driving games basically. Which may be why it is easy enough to forget that they have, in the past, brought to the gamer world some very significant titles indeed!
It was Capcom and the Street Fighter series that very nearly caused the U.S. Government to institute an official game rating and approval system, and it was Capcom who was indirectly responsible for creating the ESRB to prevent the industry from being subjected to government inspection and approval.
Can you imagine what games and the industry would be like if, like the pharmaceutical industry, game studios and publishers were subjected to on-site inspections and government-paid 'inspectors' granted the power to shut down a game project because they don't like the plot? It would be pretty much like the game industry and gaming in Australia, where they have just such a system. Shudder.
Remember Me is a game and story that takes place in a possible future where memories have become a market and economy in their own right -- in which mega-corporations like Memorize Corp make money in several ways...
The memory harvesting tech was initially used to allow people to share their memories online with friend and stranger alike, with an offshoot industry whose business model was helping consumers to identify and delete memories that were holding them back or otherwise negatively impacting their life. They also harvest memories and, sequencing them, implant a 'story memory' in customers' heads as entertainment. The rumor is they also provide even more sinister services.
The protagonist is named Nilin, who is a memory hunter who also happens to be a member of or work with (that was never entirely clear) an ideological underground resistance organization called The Errorists.
As the adventure begins Nilin has been memory wiped by the Corporation in Neo Paris, and sets out to bring it down and recover her stolen memories. Knowing just what you have been told above this sounds like an awesome setup and plot right? Well, it is!
The game starts strong and it is clear that a lot of effort and talent went into creating it - but about halfway through the game it just goes flat -- disappointingly so -- in fact so flat that a lot of gamers end up walking away from it before they even get close to finishing it.
It doesn't help that the central focus of the game after the prologue and tute sections is a combat system that was pretty much ripped from the Arkham games -- and that would not necessarily be a bad thing if the game retained the cyberpunk theme and expanded on the powers of the memory thief / memory agent / memory cowboy and etc., but they don't.
We have no way to know this as gamers and playing the game, but what happened was that in the middle of the Remember Me Project the game studio that was creating it, Dontnod Entertainment, ran into serious money trouble.
A large chunk of the talent pool that was responsible for the first half of the game was let go while the middle half was being coded and recorded and it shows because by the time you get into the last quarter, it feels like a different hand was at the wheel - and it was.
The sort of disappointment that we end up experiencing with Remember Me is the worse sort for a game to deliver - though thankfully this does not happen often because games under those conditions usually end up canceled...
This bites even harder because there was so much potential and there seems to be very little doubt that, had the studio been better funded, Remember Me may well have turned out a game in the top ten segment but, as it is, Remember Me is a game you try to forget as quickly as you can because it was that disappointing.
That is the version of the story that was written up by Andy Chalk for Escapist - and by the way, paragraphs are our friends.
The situation that lead to the formation of the ESRB wasn't over a single game and it did not happen overnight - and as far as I know it was not a conspiracy.
It started with bloody gore and violence in Mortal Kombat and Doom, and the sexploitation games Night Trap and Rape. When the issue was brought to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee it was a combination of games from Capcom and Midway that were said to have excessive violence.
Remember this was just after Australia created an official government run approval system - that really hurt the games industry in Oceania.
As for the conspiracy - considering that Acclaim, Sega, Nintendo, EA and Id created and funded the initial committee that ended up creating the ESRB.
Good read,but I am confused. To the best of my memory it was in fact mortal Kombat on Sega genesis and night trap on Sega cd that caused all the big issue over video game violence not street fighter. Also it was Sega that worked with video game developers and instituted the first video game rating system not Capcom. You see after huge sale of mortal kombat over genesis over the sanitized super nes version Nintendo went to Joseph Lieberman to try and harm Sega and caused the big out cry over video game violence. I am pretty sure this is the situation that took place and Capcom and street fighter did not have much to do with it. Still enjoyed the article and I still need to check out Remember me. To bad about the original staff being let go.
Er,the Aliens from the Alien series do not live on human flesh and can't morph at will.Maybe you should watch them again.
Actually you are missing the point - if RockSteady had been hired to do the third game it WOULD have had improvements. What happened was the IP owner decided that the level of advancement in the game was sufficient to simply retread the engine with a different story on top and none of you would notice or care. Apparently they are right for some of you - but we do expect more.
He's got a point
You can't be dissapointed, if you don't have expectations in the first place. if you were expecting anthing from these tittles, then its your fault to get dissapointed.
first place whaaat?
You simply cannot expect the quality go up any higher than Arkham city lol, i mean it has to stop somewhere, jesus. insatiable gamers.
I actually enjoyed Batman Arkham Origins pretty much. It was what I expected to be after playing the previous two games from Rocksteady. Articles like this are the beiggest proof that gaming media has gone down the toilet. We get incredibly amaizing games every year, but now for some reason, to the gaming media they always turn out to be crappy disapointments. I seriously wonder what exactly are you guys expecting? Are you not entertained?