10 Video Games Ruined By Overhype
1. Spore
When a game is mounted as the spiritual successor to The Sims, it's easy to get swept up in the hype.
Spore was Sims developer Maxis' ambitious take on a God game, where players could foster an alien species from the most basic stages of life to impossibly complex space-faring advancement.
EA did an outstanding job selling Spore as the sim game: a procedurally generated sandbox game with a basically boundless amount of possibility for the player to create their own alien race.
And though Spore received solid reviews from critics, the player response was considerably more divisive, with many rightly criticising it for the shocking simplicity of its gameplay.
The mind-boggling scope of Spore's core concept had been boiled down to a series of five simplistic mini-games that sustained interest for a few hours at most.
What was supposed to be a gaming watermark of its era was a bafflingly straight-forward sim that had its esteem blown wildly out of proportion for years before finally coming out.