I could say the same about more than half on your list. Civ4 had a number of bugs and not very polished. It felt very unfinished. Another month could have made it a killer game, but it just felt more of a chore to play because of the missing OBVIOUS needed interface features.
Quake 4, blah just another boring FPS, nothing special. D3's only thing going was better graphics, again, a fairly boring FPS. FEAR has great gun battles, and does a decent job at keeping you tense, but is very repetitive on level design. I mean come on, give us some non office building levels.
I wouldn't put hardly any of those in my "must have" list. HL2 of course, AoE3 yeah probably. But yes, I would put the new PoP game and X3 (at least when they do the 1.3 patch, its just like X2, not worth playing or buying until its patched up). Its a matter of opinion what is a must have game, and X3 has a decent sized cult following.

Its funny you critisize companies that sell sequals, and yet all of your games except two are exactly that, sequels. A really bad example of a sequel company is EA, which is quite well known for selling worthless expensive sequels (like the 3 or more worthless expansions for 1942 game).

BTW, I buy most of the games I like. I have a huge retail game collection, probably more than 1,000 games. As the guy below mentioned, its often better to try them out before you buy them.
This comment was edited on Dec 15, 16:12.