This is quite a strange observation regarding Mass Effect 2. I've been playing games for 23 years and Grim Fandango was always number one until January 2010 when Bioware released ME2. But I do miss the planet exploring of ME1.

On the other hand I don't think your expectations can be downgraded enough to classify Dragon Age 2 as a good game. That was for me the biggest disappointment this year so far. Even Ray Muzyka hinted that during E3 at the MS conference.

DX3 will use Steamworks.

Dragon Age Origins

It was the biggest dissapointment of all time for me. I excepted a Baldur's Gate style of play but it was more like Diablo. DA2 did not dissapoint me since I knew that it was going to be even worse.

I don't usually muster up high expectations for games, so I can leave myself with very little room for disappointment. That said, there are two games that fall under this category.

The first was Mortyr 2. The first Mortyr was one of my favorite games when I was a kid. I loved it. The time travel aspect was awesome, and when it came to game mechanics... well, it doesn't take a whole lot to impress a five or six-year old. But then I got Mortyr 2. Not really a bad game, but it lacked the feel of the first game. I just felt supremely underwhelmed.

The second was Morrowind. Made out to be the best RPG ever, it turned out to be a boring game with bad combat and awesome music. Okay, it wasn't that bad, but I didn't really like it that much.

Any game not made by Valve. It seems like you can't top perfection.

I never even bother remembering my expectations. This is tough.

Xenosaga? Episode I and II mostly. They failed to bring back the greatest parts of Xenogears and instead just went with too many cutscenes. But Episode III managed to blow me away.

Neverwinter Nights. Oh boy, Bioware's new Forgotten Realms game following Baldur's Gate! Oh, it's a hack and slash with more auto-attack and only one character to control. Click skeleton, wait for skeleton to die, wait for auto-attack to pick new targets and kill them, loot room. *uninstall*

Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Whee, more *pick thing up, move it, jump onto it, pick up other thing, move it, jump onto it* This totally wasn't a completely obnoxious segment the first time I played it in Half-Life 2, I adore doing it again for the 20th time.

Oblivion. I came from Morrowind and I think the complaints by comparison have been done to death. So I won't rehash them. I didn't care for spears or medium armor, though.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Okay, I'm actually only starting to play this for the first time. I skipped it back in the day because of Penny-Arcade's criticism of the dark and edgy. But, I never realized just how bad it was.

FEAR 3. I have to explain this. This game exceeded my expectations. But it did it in a completely different way than I expected. I expected a passable FEAR game. I got a very good shooter that doesn't feel anything like FEAR.

Black & White is the poster child of this. Man, I can't believe how excited I was for it back in the days...

Soul Reaver. I'm a big Legacy of Kain fan, and this particular installment seems to be a fan favorite. I hate it. It's an ugly brown game full of tedious sliding block puzzles, and the story - for which Legacy of Kain is famous - doesn't start to get good until the ending cutscene.

On the other hand, Soul Reaver 2 is my favorite in the series.

I saw this thread and immediately thought of Dragon Age: Origins. It has the distinction of being the only Bioware RPG I haven't bothered to finish. I just got bored with it. I like the combat, but a lot of fights felt like filler to me. The story wasn't spectacular, either. I'm not going to even bother with DA2. Maybe someday I'll give it another chance, but I shelved it for now. I totally agree on NWN2. I was initially disppointed by the technical issues and the so-so campaign, but then patches and Mask of the Betrayer came out...awesome expansion. NWN2 (with the expansions) is among my favorite RPGs now.

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Couldn't have said it better myself. Big disappointment. Huge.

Another for me was Torchlight. I'd heard so many good things about it with people praising it left and right that I bought it. While it's not a genre I'm crazy about I do enjoy me some hack and slash and loot collecting every now and again. This one was a big let down for me. Boring as hell. Thankfully I only spent 5 bucks on it (although I still feel I paid too much).

To a lesser extent, I'll add Braid as well. Another one that was highly praised. Again, I only spent 5 bucks, but I found the game was boring and just didn't like it. Never finished it.

Hah, yeah. Actually I thought of Alpha, but as I never had big expectations to begin with, it didn't come as a huge disappointment when I couldn't get into it and gave up..

Other than that I echo the sentiment. Boggles the mind how different tastes can be.

NWN1, I came from the usual direction. Baldurs Gates, Icewind Dale and 2. Still NWN1 was the best thing ever for me. Maybe it helped that I actually sidestepped and went through KotOR first, so the gameplay changes in NWN were, to me, a step back towards BG instead of a giant leap away!

Morrowind, I just can't see what the fans see here. :D
I tried it before NWN, and it was just bad all over. I was immediately repulsed by the flapflapflapflap combat and ugly graphics (compared to NWN which I later immediately took to liking, and any other current game). Struggled on for a while, maybe 10 hours into the game before giving up.

I tried Morrowind again years later. After first trying and loving fallout 3, then deciding it's worth testing Oblivion as well as the system didn't seem all horrible. Loved Oblivion as well. After all that decided maybe I had missed something with Morrowind, spent 2 hours installing the game, 30 minutes playing and then gave up again, probably for good.

But hey, opinions are like alien visitors, everybody's got one.

There are so many and most of them are in the last few years.

As I came from a competitive cod4 clan I'll speak from that side first

The two biggest disappointments were cod waw and mw2 - Both were buggy at launch, waw was borderline unplayable at the beginning, they forgot to put the recording tool in and various other glitchs killed it before it even started.

MW2 - The lack of dedicated servers killed this game, yes it looked great and played great but it was just horribly laggy throughout the whole experience, After the success of cod4 was really hoping for a good fps to play and it wouldnt let us play it in the way we wanted...

BC2 - Was to easy to blow the points up using landmines, if you knew what you were doing the bases would fall like dominos.....

Single Player wise
Dungeons - Was hoping this would be the closest thing as we would get to a new dk, Played the demo for about 20 mins and realised this was one of the worst games ive ever played, Uninstalled still unhappy at how bad it was.....

Deus Ex 2 - As much as I loved the first it seemed way to easy, didnt like the ammo feature so i pretty much used the sword to kill everyone...

RE4 and RE5 - Yes RE4 was good but the last two games for me just seem to take the whole survival horror premise(what its built on) away from the entire game, no longer does it seem very scary, just seems like another action game and I found that very disappointing, Nothing seems to beat the quality of number 2, or constantly being on your toes in number 3 as nemesis chases you around endlessly kicking your ass.

Knights Contract - Looked good from the trailers and things ive seen, one of the most frustrating(in a bad way) games ive played, your partner is an invalid and just runs into death pretty much every time, although you cannot die you can get incapiciated, to get back up you must spam the A button over 50 times before recovering, I gave up when it felt like I was getting carpel tunnel

DA2- Played the demo and was like this looks really bad and about 20000 people said the same thing.

I could easily list 20 others but will stop rambling

I thought that Braid had some very cleverly-crafted puzzles, but... I didn't find it much fun. I couldn't say exactly why, but the puzzles just felt sterile and unsatisfying. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the problem was that the levels were too carefully engineered. Solving them was mostly about planning - which works well for games like Obulis or The Incredible Machine, but perhaps not so well for an avatar-centric puzzle platformer.

Although the two are only loosely similar, I can't help but compare Braid to The Lost Vikings. TLV is a more organic experience, I feel, and a blast from beginning to end.

I've only recently really gotten into PC gaming, so these are all console games (or ports).

Omikron - It was going to combine all of these different genres and be set in a 'living city' before that was really done, but it didn't really do any of those genres particularly well, and late 90's David Bowie simply can't top 70's Bowie.

Shenmue - Same complaints as Omikron, actually (except for the Bowie part). Game was super hyped.

GTA 4 - They wanted to make it more realistic, and they did. But the GTA 3 series of games had a certain arcadey feel to them that ended up making them better games.

Final Fantasy 13 - So very many things wrong with it. The biggest complaint you hear is the linearity of the maps, but my biggest gripe was the combat. Just keep hitting X.