Blimey! This thread's been running quite well. Time for me to kill it.
I suppose my second 'saddest day', but undoubtedly the most bitterly memorable was the release of the Rome: Total War demo.
Back in the late 80's I had spend an unhealthy percentage of my teenage years on an old Amstrad CPC game called Ancient Battles. I can clearly remember back in 1989 thinking a 3D version of this would be well wicked (or some other equally embarrassing 80's exclamation

) and tried to imagine how such a thing would look. But of course back then the computing power required for this was the stuff of a mad mans dream.
Time passed (a lot of time in fact!), and then one day, from nowhere, a game called Shogun: Total War came along, and blew my socks off! Then came a sequel, Medieval, and things just got even better. And then the news I had been waiting so long for... PC Zone previews a new title, Rome: Total War. The realisation of a dream! But I had to wait a further 18 months for it and go through the torture of Time Commanders tantalising me every week (the first series was excellent btw! The second... no comment).
Then the day came. Demo day. Oh my... so much expectation. I had even upgraded to an ATI x800 for this.
And then I saw what Creative had done... It was too fast, too gimmicky, not enough care in the presentation and the voice acting was utterly horrendous. No amount of phalanx's and Roman legions beating seven bells out of each other could drag me out of my misery.
Sure there are dedicated modding teams out there and I have tried to love the game since then, but the damage had been done. Ever since, I've always kept my gaming dreams in perspective.
I feel the pain in many of your posts too. Nice to know I'm not the only person to have felt such misery over a silly game
