8 Video Games That IMMEDIATELY Gave You Buyer's Remorse

Spore has been so thoroughly banished to the abyss of gaming ephemera that it's tough to accept it was hyped for years as the Next Big Thing prior to its eventual 2008 release.

Designed by SimCity and The Sims legend Will Wright, Spore was touted as a god game in which players would intimately control a species' development from a single-celled organism to a hyper-intelligent spacefaring race.

Pre-release gameplay previews teased an astonishing scope and degree of granularity with which players could manipulate their species' growth, yet when Spore finally hit stores after countless delays, the end product felt noticeably dumbed down.

Gameplay ultimately amounted to five stages of your species' development, each of which were disappointingly simplistic, linear mini-games, leaving many wondering why EA had hyped the game to the heavens or they themselves had even bothered buying it on launch.

That isn't to say that Spore is completely charmless - the creature creator is genuinely great, but it's just too hollow an experience overall for the price tag EA slapped it with.

It's painfully obvious that the project was affected by scope creep and developer Maxis spreading themselves too thin while trying to execute all of Wright's ambitious ideas.

And so, the final result was a puddle-deep letdown that felt less like a AAA triumph than five relatively mediocre mini-games bundled together.