12 Hugely Delayed Video Games (That Ended Up Sucking)

9. SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs

The Delay: SOCOM 4 was originally expected to launch between September and November of 2010, but in July of that year, the announcement was made that the game would in fact not reach fans until 2011. Fans were then left in the dark for a whole half-year before, in January of 2011, it was finally revealed that the game would be releasing in April. The Result: The first three SOCOM games were excellent online shooters that in many ways helped pave the way for the console multiplayer landscape as we know it. It turns out that the excitement for a fourth game totally dulled during the lengthy gap between the third and fourth main games (over 5 years, with a few spin-offs in-between), and the delay from 2010 to 2011 doubtless didn't help this. SOCOM 4 sold disappointingly upon release because of a lack of interest, the extremely bad luck of PSN's infamous server outage taking place the day it came out, and because, frankly, the game just wasn't very good. The campaign mode is as forgettable as it was in the previous games, but what about the online? Bucking the trend of the previous titles, it's curiously boring: the maps are bland and forgettable, and the game is extremely glitchy online, both with matches freezing up your PS3, and being able to obtain headshots even when you're aiming clearly at someone's shoulder. The game essentially killed the series stone dead, and the impending follow-up, H-Hour: World's Elite, had to be funded through Kickstarter.