1UP ranks botched PC game launches

Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness. It was rushed for the holiday market, and had SO MANY bugs, that Sierra had to release multiple patches, which was VERY rare back in 1993/1994.

Multiple bugs made the game crash or unwinnable... It wasn't until about 3 years ago that someone online finally removed two terrible bugs from the game that crashed it instantly (And during fight sequences that you couldn't skip if you wanted to beat the game).

I am shocked that they over looked the king of the alpha release, Fallout 2.

Highlights include not actually being able to beat the game due to lack of key NPC dialogue options and the trunk of your car would become sentient and periodically attack you and chase you around (best bug in any game to date).

Note, each patch corrupted all your saves so you had to restart from the beginning. Those were good times.

This IS the worst ever:
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor

From MobyGames.com:
The first US version of this game was a technical desaster: not only that the installer accepted no other drives than C: - one could live with that although it's a sign of sloppy programming - the uninstallation program would accidentally erase some core components of Windows 9x, rendering the system unusable after rebooting.

What about the Myth 2 uninstaller bug that could erase your C:\ drive?

I guess its not bad enough to make this, but America's Army on PC had major issues with lack of servers and bugs all over the place when it launched - of course, bugs remained a problem patch after patch.

Anyone remember the Diablo 2 launch? It was practically unplayable online because the lag was so bad.

I never had problems like those mostly because back in the day Pc games rarely make it to Mexico so you had to import them or wait a year or 2 until they get here. I travel to NY when I was a kid to get Diablo and Hexen 2 and those games never appeared in Mexico until 1 year later.

Then there were some distributors bringing games to Mexico since they find out there was a good market and things were pretty much cool until one of the most hated Mexican Villains of all time Ernesto Zedillo literally fucked the economy in ways that if it happened to the U.S or U.K God Help Us All so PC games were even more rare than before, fortunately things turned okay after some years and several trauma caused to the middle class but it seems many distributors bankrupted during those years

Nowadays Microsoft brings the most popular PC games to Mexico except for WOW which you can buy online so between Steam and MS things are Okay.

Now I can buy most of my games at the same time as the U.S and I don’t have to wait as long as Europe or Australia.

How can anyone forget the debacle that was Battlecrusier 3000? It's hype to disappointment ratio has to be the highest of any game.

Daikatana . . . where is Daikatana?

Is my memory fuzzy or was U9 not that bad? If I remember correctly, I ran it on a Pentium Pro with Voodoo2 cards in SLI and I quite enjoyed exploring Britannia in 3D. Not super fast, but I played some of U6 on an 8086... must have been one frame per second. Even got the dragon edition box. Of course, I've long lost interest in Ultima now that the single-player experience is dead so I only hesitated a bit before putting that dragon edition into the trash recently.

Daggerfall was terrible at launch. Yet there was something so intriguing about it's freeform world.
(i think i ended up buying and returning that game at least 3 times over the space of a year)

Wii Guitar Hero

Xwing VS Tiefighter - The game wasn't bad (infact it was a great multiplayer game.. but it was too early for internet multiplayer), but it just wasn't what so many people expected. No campaign. No story. No iMuse. One of the few games I bought on launch day. And one of the few I returned.

Ultimate IX came in such a nice box to. Shame shame.