What form of entertainment, movie, music, tv, video game etc that you were excited about only after it came out did you realize it was trash?
Mulan. The live action remake was so bad, but I had high hopes because I like the original.
The sequel to "The Man from Earth" which was called "The Man from Earth: Holocene" (if memory serves). The first one was so good, probably my favorite movie ever. It was hard to imagine they would top it, and they really didn't.
No Man's Sky
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3, I don't think I've ever matched this level of disappointment while sitting in a Movie theater since.
Oh, I guess it's cliche but Star Wars Ep 1 for me
VR seemed like it would be exciting, but in a small room and being older it is difficult to not hit something or to not get some sort of vertigo and feel sick. It just isn’t for me despite really wanting it to be!
In general this was my experience as well. There is one important exception for me which was Google Earth. Being able to sit in a chair and drag a huge model of the earth beneath me and view distant places like I was a bird is just magnificent. Doesn’t make me motion sickness the way most games do.
Oh, that’s interesting! My son has the MetaQuest3 and I wonder if that’s available for that to try out some time. Might be cool!
As a kid in the 1990s I was really hyped up about the concept of VR, but lacked the ridiculously expensive gear to try any of the interesting stuff that was out there.
Nowadays I'm idly interested in the concept of VR, but lack the ridiculously expensive gear to try any of the interesting stuff that's out there.
What is the interesting stuff you’re interested in? The only things that appeal to me would be Star Wars flight sims, being a superhero of some kind, or that survival game in the Alien universe.
Streaming for movies and TV series. The idea was great on paper but there is hardly anything worth watching and the execution is so awful. I did multiple trials for different services and they all sucked. Music streaming however is great, it's not even 2 Eur for one month and the execution is amazing.
Hostel! It was mega hyped for a year and Tarantino wouldn't fucking shut up about it, but then it was shit and ushered in that period where no horror movies were made except torture porn :(
The Hobbit (trilogy)
I love the LotR trilogy, just so well done. I knew De Toro started the Hobbit and I was hyped! Then he departed and it was a bit concerning, but Jackson was coming to the rescue so it couldn't be that bad, right?
It did not need to be a trilogy. Adding more characters who are women was a good idea, but doing it for a romance subplot was stupid. Legolas didn't need to be included at all, there were enough characters already and another dude didn't help out.
Then there was the inconsistent tone, the stupid barrel ride crap and goblin caves super mario scene and the whole thing missed the point of the book which was about a bunch of bumbling dwarves, most of which were past their prime, hiring a hobbit to be a spy to raid a dragon horde. Instead we got superhero dwarves doing outrageous stunts and a ton of side characters padding out a trilogy.
Ugh.
If you want a hate binge on this topic I'd suggest watching Lindsay Ellis' two-part piece in the hobbit trilogy.
💯 so much garbage. The 2-3 hour fan made cut-down versions are good though.
Made me even more pissed that they left Tom Bombadil out of LotR.
Good answer.
It's weird, because OP says "form" of entertainment, but everybody is reporting "piece" of entertainment.
I'm drawing a blank of form of entertainment. On piece of entertainment... I mean, I don't know. I don't get excited for things pre-release. Hopeful, at most.
I'll say that the first Spider-Man movie is SO much worse than you remember.
I feel like dictionaries are over rated as a form, since they lead to nit-picky comments like this :P
I bought a kindle to do the ebook thing a while back to save space. It’s so buggy and slow it gave me the ick for ebooks. Like the way it looks, like the idea of it, but the way it works is another ballgame.
I just use a crappy Android tablet I got for $20 on Amazon. Any yes, for that price it's utter garbage, but all I need is an epub reader and an SD card.
I was on vacation, under a shade tree on a beautiful beach, sipping a piña colada, and turned my Kindle on to continue reading this really interesting book I had started on the drive.
Brick.
I was so mad I just put it away. I wasn't going to waste any vacation time trying to figure it out. Glad I decided that too, it was well and truly a paperweight.
Never again
I'm using a very very old nook and enjoy it. I kinda want whatever I use to be just for reading, and nothing else. This way it all points to one thing. I also have like a first or second Gen kindle but it, while technically better, is slow as heck and filled with bloat.
I am tempted by modern colored e-ink, but I hear it isn't super color accurate yet.
Probably BluRays. DVDs were much better than VHS, but storage got a lot cheaper to get me the quality I wanted from films from downloads.
I appreciate that BluRays have a need, so I wouldn't call them trash. I just don't need them.
Also not really a new form of media, but modern video games. There isn't enough of a technological jump anymore. The last thing that got me excited (or at least curious) was VR. But that's not really approachable for me, so I can't enjoy it.
That's because HD-DVD was the real new standard, but Sony killed it.
I largely agree on the modern games thing. The problem isn't even technology for me. It's scale. Modern AAA gaming is made by such large teams, often multiple studios each with hundreds or thousands of people. With that many people, you just end up with generic crap, and the studios are investing so much money on any one game that generic crap is all they're willing to risk making.
Take that budget and spend it on 100 small games made by teams of ~100 people or so and we'd get some really interesting stuff. Sure, a lot would fail, but they can afford that. Let artists make art, not business-people.
Probably BluRays. DVDs were much better than VHS, but
... sony lobbed a crazy amount of payola to beat Phillips, even though blu-ray had worse error-correction and became unusable faster.
Diablo III
The Doom movie.
It wasn't even originally written to be Doom; just a bullshit, mediocre sci-fi nobody would have cared about until they forced the Doom franchise upon what would have worked better with Resident Evil because it was less Doom and more Resident Evil in spaaaaace. It also made me dislike The Rock because he lied his fuckin' ass off about the movie.
Mario Bros would be here, but it looked like crap even from the trailers as a kid.
That movie hurt my feelings. They couldn't even be demons?!
The ending part with the FPS was kinda ok they should have just made the whole movie FPS like hardcore Henry.
Almost falls into the "so bad it's good" category for me.
Almost.
Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace.
I remember sitting there thinking "holy crap! I'm going to see a Star Wars in the theatre"!¡!
Yes I was a freshman in high school went it came out and me and my friends went opening nite and we were so excited afterwards, then I went by myself the next nite and yea it wasn’t good. Even now watching it it’s not great. The pad race was good but that’s it.
Yeah I was a senior in high school and everyone was skipping class on opening day to see it. What a goddamn disappointment!
I don't usually watch series. But I had so much hope after a friend made me watch Westworld. Then when Westworld 2 came out your title describes how I feel about it.
Phantom Menace
Rogue One
Last Jedi
The last Jedi was so bad I wanted to leave the theater after the fight with Rey and the red troopers but I had my 10 year old niece with me and she was into it so I didn’t lol.
I walked out of Rogue One when it hit "Yer a wizard rebel now!"
Happy Gilmore 2. I absolutely adore the first one, and I thought "Well, the second one can't be bad. it's such a great first movie!" Ugh. I was wrong. So very wrong.
Worst. Movie. Ever.
Yea I haven’t seen it yet but a lot of my dumb coworkers were explaining it to me and just from there explaining I was like nah no thanks. I say dumb coworkers because all of them are extremely conservative and all on the anti woke bs.
Save yourself the time. Dont bother with it
I thought it was a really good sequel with a nice twist and redemption arc. Considering the first one was almost 30 years ago, it was a test to see if they could capture the humor of the time while updating it.
Now, the most recent Bill and Ted? That did NOT work, and I turned it off after 30 minutes despite wanting so incredibly badly to want to like it.
The excessive flashbacks were what got to me. If any movie could expect that fans would've watched the first movie 50+ times and be able to quote most of it, I think Happy Gilmore would be on that list.
You’re gonna die, clown!
ET for the Atari 2600. Yes, I’m old.
Pac-Man might not have looked like the arcade version, but it was close enough, and we played the hell out of it. ET was a confusing snooze.
Wasn’t that the game that killed video games for six years? Or at least was pinned as such by reporters lol
The Atari crash was a lot more multifaceted than that, but E.T. is often credited as one of the biggest factors. Though it was arguably more of a symptom of a lack of quality control as the market was being flooded with rushed titles.
The old story is that the game was so bad that the unsold cartridges were buried in the middle of the New Mexico desert.
Supposedly it’s the origin of the term “shovelware” to describe horrible quantity-over-quality types of games. Often with marketing tie-ins to popular media, to entice unwitting customers into purchasing the horrible games without actually reading up on it first. Modern usage tends to refer to the lazy mobile asset-swapped games, or the “1000 in 1” game packs that are just bad recolors of old games.
Yes. They buried the unsold cartridges in the desert.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie. Gawdawful, glad that Douglas Adams didn't have to see it.
It’s a good tripping acid movie
The weirdest part was they included the setups for the jokes, then skipped the punchlines.
I really liked how they had Mr. Prosser (the guy with the bulldozer), wearing a fur lined Mongol hat, but if you hadn't read the book, you'd have no idea why that was funny.
"Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats."
He wrote a significant part of the script before he died. Personally I think he would have approved.
I don't care what anyone says, Cyberpunk 2077 is still a snoozefest. So disappointing. I was so hyped for so long.
Full Disclosure: I haven't played Phantom Liberty because I can't justify buying it when the base game is still so mediocre.
While I disagree, yeah why would you buy an expansion when you didn't enjoy the first campaign. That's just sanity there.
The only good part of the game is the amazing original teaser trailer and the netflix show.
Man, that trailer. We thought we were going to get something with the depth of Disco Elysium and Witcher level worldbuilding, but instead got "future pew pew" fps railroading that barely worked.
I'd say, if you want to, just pirate the DLC and give it a try. It is better than the base game. With that said, if you played the base game after the DLC released and didn't like it, you probably just don't like the game, and that's fine. Personally, I think it's pretty good, but I also mod the hell out of it. There's a lot of smaller things I don't like about the game that mods can fix, like removing the hacking minigame and things like that.
(Tangent: why does every game thing they need a hacking/lockpicking minigame?! I'll be enjoying the game, then suddenly I have to spend a minute on some boring ass minigame that doesn't do anything except take you away from the gameplay. Why? The old-school method of your character just doing a skill check is great, and it doesn't waste our time. Can we go back to that?)
I got my PS5 just before this came out and almost bought it, but before it was released, I remember seeing a lot of reviewers online saying they had to sign agreements that they would not fully disclose the state of the game and I knew at that point this wasn’t going to be good. The memes were thought.
I enjoyed it, but I thought that I was going to get more Bethesda RPG and less Grand Theft Auto going in from all the comparisons I'd heard.
I also felt that while the production values were very high, they got limited gameplay out of the asset creation that they did. Like, for any given piece of city, Grand Theft Auto had a lot more time playing over it than did Cyberpunk 2077. There were huge chunks of meticulously-created map that I maybe saw once in the distance while driving past, if that.
the Dragonball movie. fucking RUINED my birthday it was so bad.
Agreed it wasn’t even in the so bad it’s good category. It was just bad.
No Man's Sky. So much of what was promised was missing, the world just felt empty. It's a much better game now.
I feel like I saw through the hype on that one. I like space games, but you can't make what they promised interesting without some incredible things that the game didn't have. It's just going to be nearly infinite boring generic planets. Without systems to make them unique then there's no reason to care about any of them.
I did follow it up to launch, and I pirated it when it launched because I wanted to see it. Yeah, it sucked. I tried it again a few years ago because they supposedly made it actually good, but I still don't get it. It's still got the issue where no planet is interesting because there are infinite like it. Yeah, you can build a base now, but I couldn't get into it. Some people seem to love it now though, so good for them.
Yes I fell for that game too. I was so hyped for it, I bought the soundtrack (which slapped actually) but yea it was bad.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
I was hyped up for that game. Twilight Princess was from way at the beginning of the Wii era, and then way at the end was finally another game, they had released some cool artwork for it, who was this mysterious maiden figure...
GOD what a trash game.
It’s kind of good to hear this. I LOVED Twilight Princess but missed out on Skyward Sword because life got really hectic. Glad I didn’t really miss out from what it sounds like.
The original Super Mario Bros Movie.
That movie is magical! ... just ... not exactly on purpose, nor too related to actual Mario.
You mean this one? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/
Game of Thrones
WHY HAVE THEY NOT MADE ONE GOOD GAME OF THRONES GAME???
I ADORED the first Inside Out, so naturally I was super excited when I heard the news that a sequel was in the works.
Then the marketing started to roll out, until the release, then the critics.
Quickly realized in was a really bad sequel, that suffered because of Disney's anti-LGBT problems, and generally lacks a soul.
Never bothered to watch it. Don't want to ruin the first movie.
Not only did I really enjoy it, I thought it was really well received critically?
Rotten tomatoes has it rated well too - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inside_out_2
It might be worth giving it a shot.
FWIW, I really enjoyed both of them. The first is better, but the second is worth a watch IMO.
Mass Effect Andromeda. I loved the original trilogy, even the third one, and I was hopeful that they'd live up to what they were promising. Instead, we got a garbage game that completely tossed the idea of exploring a new galaxy. I tried to play it 3 different times, just to give it a chance, and I couldn't go through with it.
I was mostly disappointed by the story, acting, and stiff characters. The environments? Top notch. The gameplay? Pretty solid, although the gunplay left some to be desired. The return of Mass Effect 1 style tooling around in the Mako? Everything I'd hoped for.
Too bad the game being so poorly received pretty much killed any forward momentum on similar games in that vein.
Spore (video game) The original demo was amazing, what actually hit retail just was trash in comparison
As a Guild Wars 1 player, I was very excited and really followed the hype for GW2. Only to be disappointed to how different it was from the one. Can't blame them for innovating, but it was not the continuation of what me and my friends wanted. The shift to being more of an actual MMO made me feel completely insignificant in PvE, using just the basic automatic attack or doing my best to combine my skills didn't make a difference, the mob would kill the monster anyways. In GW1, all of PvE is instantiated just for your small group, so in general, everyone's action is important. The PvP felt very generic and didn't have the uniqueness of the 8v8 of the 1 anymore. I really appreciated the constant gameplay innovation from Mike O'Brien (Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Guild Wars) and the art direction of Kekai Kotaki, but it was just too different of a game.
You can definitely still get that thrill of highly impactful combat, just not at any of the major meta events. The world at this point is so big that if you're anywhere that's not on the event timer you'll probably be roaming by yourself. If you find a small event chain and it's just you pushing it, it can be exciting and suspenseful. Knowing that if you get downed, all of your progress will reset, it's a great moment when someone else runs up and starts reviving you and helps you succeed.
There are also instanced scenarios like dungeons, fractals and raids where you and a team have to be strategic with your classes and builds and how they synergize, and then there's the added dimension of much more demanding movement and maneuvering than in the first game. I loved both games, they're different but both great in their own ways IMO. If you only ever played in some of the starting maps I highly recommend giving it another go.
Thank you for the additional information. I think I did the main campaign when it was released and I didn't follow the rest. It was also not a good time for me to focus on such a big game and my gaming group was fading away.
Most recently, it was probably Rebel Moon. I didn't have high expectations and thought it was going to be schlocky, but it was not the fun kind of shlock in the end.
Percy Jackson series. Followed the production religiously and when it came out didn't even watch the last episode. It was just so unexciting
Not just unexciting, but completely wrong. Despite Rick Riordan, the author, being fully involved in the show, he made so many changes that took away from the books. The series sucked for sure to the point that the first Percy Jackson Lightning Thief movie was actually more accurate to the book.
The two that come to mind are Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Farcry 6.
They might have been ok games if the previous ones hadn't been so damned good.
At least with Breakpoint they tried to make it right with a new mode, but still don't enjoy it as much as Wildlands.
Leveled enemies and weapons are just not something I'm going to play.
Starfield.
All Bethesda had to do was make it at least as good as Skyrim. Not Oblivion or Morrowind, but Skyrim.
But they couldn't even manage that.
Few things have broken my heart quite like Bethesda's downfall.