Every year, the staff sits back and reflects on the year that was and every year we come up with our best of lists as well as our list of the games we felt dropped the virtual ball. This list is the latter. Below you'll find the games we thought were both overrated as well as disappointing. It's an important distinction: a game may very well have been a good game yet still a tick overrated. Disappointing games are usually the titles we had high hopes for but simply didn't live up to expectation.

Please remember that these picks are personal selections chosen by the individual writer and do not reflect the opinion of, well, most likely anyone else. So sit back and revel in our loathing. We'll get the good vibes going again in a few days with our "Best of" and Most Wanted features.

Bill's picks:

Most Overrated Game:

Guilty as charged. I gave the game a "B" in my review here at GameShark and on reflection that was about a letter grade too high.

There's simply not much 'game' in L.A. Noire and despite brilliant voice work from what was half the cast of Mad Men, this was open world gaming at its worst, filled with a city jammed packed with nothing to do and no one to see. I appreciated what the game was trying to do, but in the end I'd rather just watch a good cop movie.

Most Disappointing Game:

I truly disliked this game. It wasn’t just disappointing, it was crushingly disappointing. While Origins had a feel as if BioWare was taking the Baldur’s Gate idea into the modern age, Dragon Age II slaps that idea aside for what is basically a mindless combat model with terribly limited party options. I remain absolutely stunned that this is what BioWare came up with after the brilliance of the original. If there was ever a case for not mucking up with a successful formula, this was it, and what we got with Dragon Age II, while some may call it risky, I call it simply a really, really, bad idea.