10 Times You HATED Yourself For Buying A Video Game
3. Spore
Though No Man's Sky was rightly raked over the coals for misleading players about its feature set available on launch, it has at least matured over the years into a far bigger and more dynamic game than anyone ever really expected.
The same sadly can't be said, though, for Spore, one of the most anticipated video games of the early 2000s, as developed by Maxis, the team behind The Sims.
Spore's enticing hook was that players would have the ability to control a species' development from its prototypical stages all the way to a period of intergalactic evolution.
An incredible concept, and one that was appealingly evidenced by early gameplay footage, only for the end product to ultimately be a depressingly scaled-back, simplified rendition of that wonderful idea.
Ultimately, Spore was a high-functioning Tamagotchi comprised of five mini-game-esque stages, none of which offered up anywhere close to the complexity or granularity promised by earlier presentations.
Though bafflingly praised by most critics, the response from players who actually shelled out cash to play it was decidedly harsher, with most feeling that the novelty of the experience evaporated within a few short hours - if that.
And because it was a PC exclusive, you couldn't even trade it in.