10 Video Games That Killed Themselves Trying To Be Popular

8. Splinter Cell: Conviction

Sorry for the memory I'm about to dredge up here, but if you're anything of a Splinter Cell fan, seeing what Ubisoft wanted to do with the franchise back in 2007 was just painful.

Take a look...

Coming off the back of the phenomenal Chaos Theory and faltering slightly by releasing two versions of Double Agent that split the console generation divide in half, Conviction was expected to be their return to a suited-up Sam Fisher, assumedly embarking on more missions in the shadows.

Nope! Instead Splinter Cell was now... a brawler?! Fisher dispatched foes like something out of Dead to Rights, resulting in the worst fan-backlash that side of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It resulted in that initial vision for the game being scrapped, as Conviction emerged being a strange hybrid of what Splinter Cell was and could be.

Fisher wouldn't get his trademark goggles for the majority of the campaign, and the melee sections from the above trailer transferred across into weirdly interactive 'torture events' where you grilled targets by bouncing their heads off the environment.

Clearly Ubisoft wanted to switch up the franchise's genre for that illusive 'wider appeal', but what emerged was a aimless mess, not rectified until the ace Blacklist in 2013.