Dead Rising
The premise is good, the ability to use pretty much anything that isn't nailed down as a weapon is fun most of the time, giving you some interesting ways to kill zombies, and taking pictures is a nice distraction, but the execution of this game is just terrible on many fronts.
First, the controls. When you go into a first-person or over the shoulder aiming mode, you expect to be able to move with the left stick and aim with the right, wouldn't you? Not in this game. It subscribes to the arcane Metal Gear Solid "Oh, you're aiming? Then you ain't moving, pal" system and makes it even worse by using the left stick to aim, something made even more odd by the fact that when you go to take a picture, you CAN move with the left stick AND look around with the right stick. Why in the hell make it different for the gunplay then?
Second, it was panned at the time, but the save system is another thing that doesn't make sense. When you die (which will happen A LOT), you are given the choice of reloading your previous save or saving your current progress and quitting to the title screen. Simple, right? Oh, wait, if you choose to quit and save, you start the whole game over again with whatever stats you had when you died. That means redoing the same missions, fighting the same bosses, watching the same cutscenes (though they are skippable) and saving the same fucking braindead people (much more on that in a minute) all over again. Why in the holiest of fucks would anyone want to do that? If I wanted to redo previous areas with my new skills, I'll just take my ass over there and do it; it's not like the boss fights are anything more than "beat on that guy until he falls over" exercises.
Third, the friendly AI. Oh, I could go on for quite a while about the stupidest, inattentive, helpless, underpants on their head RETARDED friendly NPCs I've ever encountered in a video game. For one, they can't defend themselves even if you put a fucking handgun in their hands; they'll be content to stand around while a wave of zombies crash over them. Of course, if you come over to save them, you have to be really careful or you'll end up caving THEIR heads in with a dumbbell as well. They also are fucking SLOW; you'd think with the entire zombified town eyeing them like a Chinese buffet, they would be able to run as fast as my character, but no. And they have to be right next to you in order to follow you through a door and into another area; if they are more than three feet away when you load into another area, they won't be there and you'll have to go BACK through another loading screen to fetch their ass. You also have to talk to them like three times to get them to go with you. Yeah lady, I don't give a fuck that your baby is missing; if you want to live, you better come with me. Or how about the guy in the hardware store that you have to attack a few times in order to snap some sense into him? If you aren't careful, you'll easily kill him yourself, making the whole venture pointless.
Finally, while there are literally hundreds of things you can grab to use as weapons, quite a few of them are very, very useless. Why would I grab a bunch of CDs from a music store to throw at the zombies when I could just rip the cash register off the counter or grab a nearby bench? The inventory system is fucked up too; every item breaks after a certain amount of use, but instead of the weapon breaking and the game allowing you to go fetch another one or fight barehanded, it immediately switches to the next thing in your inventory, which most of the time is either a food item or worse, a stat-boosting book which leaves your character standing there reading it while zombies tear his face off.
This could have been a great game if the developers didn't get in their own way with some really odd design decisions. I really hope they scrapped a lot of that shit for the sequel.
