10 Potentially Awesome Video Games That Were Stupidly Broken

2. Advent Rising

Advent Rising's history is as sordid as the gameplay within it. Originally planned as an epic trilogy co-written by author Orson Scott Card, it was rather disparaging to witness just how far such a determined game fell. Worse, a $1,000,000 contest which had players scouring the game's worlds for hidden items was cancelled by Majesco shortly thereafter due to Advent's terrible reception. The tragic thing about Advent Rising is that there's actually a pretty decent game buried underneath the plethora of technical hiccups. Players were granted god-like capabilities such as super jumps, force-pushes and a particularly handy move in which you could mentally pry a weapon from your enemy's hands and into your own. When everything came together, you were a death-dealing dual-wielder leaping about environments with grace and tenacity. Sadly, such third-person exuberance could only be achieved when the digital stars were perfectly aligned. Most of the time, every portion of magnanimous action was bogged down by an unholy amount of frame-rate issues which made every cool manoeuvre the player achieved look like a jagged accident to onlookers. While anyone playing the game would fall victim to a heavy array of bugs involving collision detection and some ridiculously wonky physics and animation, the real culprit of damnation was that of the fluid-breaking framerate. Advent Rising had quite a bit of potential due to the scope of its narrative, engaging combat (when it worked) and excellent musical score by Tommy Tallarico (which oddly cut in and out at jarring intervals). However, the sheer fact that the game was released incomplete and even required a patch for PC users (entitled "Advent Revising") solidified this title as one of the largest letdowns among gamedom. Advent Rising's ungraceful downfall is more devastatingly historic than anything it might've done right. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-nHaTrHktc