2. Shadow Watch
Ive recently come back to XCOM, I knew little of this title back in the day as I wasnt much of a PC gamer. As I played this new console version, I was left with a very familiar feeling. The game is 95% exactly what Ive wanted in a single player console game, however that last 5% is so much crap I want to go down to their corporate offices and take hostages. It re-enforces the feeling I get that there is a guy who gets paid to cripple good ideas. Shadow Watch plays a lot like XCOM, yet where it failed back then was in its slow, monotonous pacing, and sometimes unnecessary difficulty. While XCOM dealt with aliens, Shadow Watch, part of the Tom Clancy family of games, focused on more traditional military adventures.
Update: XCOM was pretty well received, which should pave the way for a similar title that deals with a different theme. Shadow Watch could also benefit from character creation and the expansion of skills (like changing a characters job in FF: Tactics) and therefore access to equipment. It would be nice to see a game where the AI actually employs a formidable strategy to improve difficulty, instead of the traditional scenario where harder means that the enemies can take more damage, do more damage, and have impossibly good aim with the trade off being that they are horrendously reckless. This means they lose I the end, but not before forcing the player to rip their own hair out in frustration, before throwing the fight.