As a diabetic I feel your pain. Happens all the time... "There are no more refills left, please wait x business days while we contact your provider..."
Like I'm going to just stop being diabetic one day...
A lot of it has to do with insurance companies, they just don't want to pay to keep us healthy.
I actually enjoyed the hell out of Destiny, then Destiny 2 fucked everything up, got patched, got better, and then Bungie turned around and went "LOL - story missions? What's that?" and cut 1/2 the content out of the game. Content I paid for.
No more money for Bungie after that, I'm surprised it's somehow still going.
It's a shame, because if someone licensed the IP for, just spitballin' here... A Fallout/Outer Worlds style game, the bones are there for a REALLY good game.
The assets, art, backstory, it's all done, it just deserved a better developer. :(
You'd start loading a game from tape and then you might as well go have dinner with your family because it would be 30 to 60 minutes before you could play.
Or, it could hit a loading error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you have to start all over again...
Had to be Duke Nukem Forever. I was talking with one of the devs and I was legit curious as to how their process worked because it had been in hell for so long...
"Were you able to use any of the original assets?"
"Oh, all of them!" He seemed super excited.
To use 14 year old assets and be incredibly proud of that? Eesh.
Oh, and Brink! Brink was so incredibly disappointing. They had this well developed world and a fantastic movement system, solid class based shooter... but then it all fell apart in the actual implementation of it.
I really, really, wanted to like Brink, but it was unplayable.
Say you have a level where the enemy is escorting a VIP and your goal is to eliminate the VIP before they get to the destination.
You roll in, wipe the team, wipe the VIP, then someone respawns, revives the VIP, and you keep going back and forth until the clock runs out.
It didn't matter how many times you killed the VIP, all that mattered was if they were alive or dead when the clock ran out. Win/lose. Just crap design.
It's been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.
The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. "YOU DON'T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN'T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!"
And I was like "Yeah, you're right, I didn't play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN'T want me to play are going to be better?"
Surprise... the game stunk up the joint.
But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I'd have a final score.
As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.
A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.
A game can be bad because it's a bad game or it can be bad because it's functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it's pretty bad.
I had to give a failing review to Assassin's Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.
Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.
Yeah, I may have scorched a countertop once... ;) Once!