What game most disappointed you?

My son is really pumped about Pokémon Pokopia (out this Thursday) and Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream (out next month), so much so that he recently told me he wasn't watching videos about either in case they made him less excited. He doesn't want to risk losing the hype. He's nine years old and already wise enough to know that sometimes YouTube videos lie to him or use misleading titles, but I really think if I do my job he'll be yelling at journalists for giving low scores to games he hasn't played by the time he's a teenager. The cycle must continue.

We're not there yet. Pokémon Pokopia reviews dropped earlier this week and so I got to tell him that journalists seem to love it. IGN's Rebekah Valentine gave it 9/10 and it's currently the highest rated Pokémon game on Metacritic. Still, he's worried about being disappointed. What if he plays it and doesn't like it, he asked, on the walk to school. So I got to impart some important fatherly wisdom. I got to tell him about Peter Molyneux.

I've never been as excited for any game was I was for Black & White. I had already played Bullfrog classics Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper, and now some of the same people were producing what seemed like the game of my dreams. The dream of any kid, surely. Here was a sandbox where you were god, and you had an AI creature that was effectively your pet, AI worshippers who were as fascinating to watch as an ant farm, and a physics simulation that let you experiment with all of it, shaping the landscape to your whims and tossing fireballs just to see what happened.

I don't mention that "telling off" meant slapping the monkey.

I learned about a lot of the above before release by reading the Black & White developer diaries on Gamespy, written by Lionhead (and Games Workshop) co-founder Steve Jackson. The developer diaries didn't shy away from all the challenges and bugs encountered during the making of the game, but the bugs only seemed to make it more exciting to me. I still remember this story about a pig 25 years later:

"Andy had been working on facial expression animations for the ape and was testing how they worked in the game. He called up his ape and watched as it wandered around the local village. The ape was hungry and duly began looking round for food. There was a pig snuffling away in the mud. He bent over, picked up the pig and was about to pop it into his mouth. Then, to our great astonishment, the APE disappeared completely!

"This caused much consternation amongst the game programmers, who all offered different explanations for the bug, each blaming everyone else. In the end, Jonty Barnes came up with the correct explanation. The hungry ape had picked up a pig, itself hungry, in the middle of eating its meal. Just before the ape could swallow its bite-sized porky scratching, the pig took its next mouthful. And the nearest food was the ape! This tiny pig had eaten King Kong in a single bite!"

Even when broken, this was the promise of deep simulations in game design. Black & White was obviously going to be the best game ever made. 

I told my son about the giant cow and giant monkey, about how they would sometimes eat villagers and how you'd tell them off, and about how sometimes they'd take a giant crap on a villager's house and destroy the roof. He smiled. "It sounds like a good game," he said. I am become Molyneux, pitcher of worlds.

That's why I was so excited about it, I said. The problem was that it didn't work very well. It turned out to be far more about story quests than anyone realised, and those involved a lot of tedious busywork. It was difficult to control and the monkey would take the wrong lessons from your punishments. He'd eat a villager and you'd tell him off and he'd learn to eat less in general, rather than learn not to eat villagers. (I don't mention that "telling off" meant slapping the monkey.)

I also tell him that I still remember the game fondly. It wasn't terrible, after all, and I even feel appreciation for how excited I was before it came out. Anticipating something, being excited about it, can be part of the fun as long as you don't get too carried away. Even if it leads to disappointment sometimes, you don't want to get so cynical that you can't feel excitement anymore. (I don't mention that he should never crowdfund a Peter Molyneux project.)

Sage wisdom, I think. Good parenting, me. Also if any videogame makes my kid sad I will destroy it with my bare hands.

What of you, readers? Which game should your dad have beaten up?