It's hard to define "overrated" in this context because you need to refer to an objective rating system first.
If you look at it in terms of popularity then again you hardly can because you get into the "matter of taste" way of choosing it.
You are talking of xbox games since that is what you had first hand experience and you do it by talking of defects, but i think only one title in your list could be discussed as overrated since the other two despite being known did not make such a hype.
I totally agree with you analysis of Halo, but i am sure that many Halo lovers out there will strongly disagree and counter all you said there.
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If we define "overrated" as falling short of personal expectations, then these are my top three in reverse order:

3. Final Fantasy series - Boring Boring Boring. You pick some kind of attack, then the computer attacks you back, then repeat over and over. Once you dispatch your foe, you run around the scenery until you encounter another foe. Repeat above.

2. Grand Theft Auto series - Once my young daughter got on the PS/2 and played the game. She got in a vehicle and proceeded to run down all the pedestrians (unintentionally - I think) on the screen. I got concerned about what that kind of gameplay could do to her in the future. Much too violent.

1. Spore - This game had so much hype last year that I just had to buy it. But it sure plays like several different games forced together in one package. The keyboard interface is radically different as you progress through different levels. Very confusing. Very disappointing. Not very enjoyable.

However, I did find a really funny video of Robin Williams creating a creature in Spore.  (Warning PG language in the video.)

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Well, I wrote about this a little while ago, I suppose
http://hubpages.com/hub/10-Great-Games-That-Havent-Stood-the-Test-of-Time

Going with something not covered there, I found the Grand Theft Auto series never met up to the hype surrounding it. Every installment I've bought I've gotten bored of the missions before the first act of the story is completed and just drove around hitting trees and making vroom noises.
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I am going to note that I have played these games, though not all the way through as they did not hold my attention.

3) Bioshock
http://www.metacritic.com/search/process?sort=relevance&termType;=all&ts;=bioshock&ty;=0&x;=0&y;=0
Average metacritic rating - 96 (PC)/96 (360)/94(PS3)

Bioshock is a good game. It is not bad, per se. But it is overrated. The story is OK, but, face it, it's not going to be as interesting as Planescape: Torment is. The combat system is OK, but not all that interesting. There was nothing new there. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded, but there weren't any amazing encounters. Oh boy! A big daddy! There was no shock and awe here, just a sense of a well put together game with a more interesting art style than story, and content no more involved than many decent games. The whole good/evil thing doesn't exactly give the game extra depth, it's just a means of getting different endings. All in all, it's worthy of a 7 or 8, but there's nothing there that makes it better than, say, Deus Ex, aside from being 7 or so years newer graphically.

2)The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess
Metacritic score - 95 (Wii), 96 (Gamecube)

What we have here is yet another solid adventure game from Nintendo, with a good amount of content. But the game, and, in fact, the whole series of games in the last decade or so, seems to be built to include elements specifically to please critics. It has one major problem. It isn't fun. It's very, very well put together. Nintendo puts as much polish on Zelda as Blizzard does on anything they touch - but the underlying game is pretty formulaic. Yeah, they throw a few nice tricks in each new release, the difficulty is about right, but, in the end, it's a hollow shell of a game for me. I might not know exactly what's coming, but, hey, I get to a room in a dungeon, and there's some sort of a puzzle awaiting me! Oh boy! I dont' love Mario, but these days, I find the Mario games more enjoyable than each Zelda release, which just make me want to go take a nap... and keep in mind, I play games that are far more dry than Zelda ever has been, and I am a fan of some of Nintendo's offerings.

3) Black and White - PC
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/blackandwhite?q=black%20and%20white
Metacritic score - 90

This is, in my book, the most overrated game ever that I have played. I will note that I get the same impression from Spore, and feel that it would likely fit in to this same category of amazingly overrated games due to being better ideas than games. I could find other examples that could fit the 2 and 3 slots from past years, but nothing stands out more than Black and White as an example of a concept gone wrong.

This game is absolutely a perfect example of an awesome concept - the AI learning animal you teach to assist you, and it's fascinating and interesting for a couple hours as you learn the basics of the game and see your pet grow in to something somewhat useful.

But, later on, it becomes apparent that the AI's limitations fully constrain your pet, and the game itself is an uninteresting RTS kind of game, though with a somewhat novel method of interaction.

The busy critics that have a game for a week before they review it? They played the game for 3-8 hours or so and proclaimed it as awesome... but little did they know that they had seen essentially everything the game had, and the rest of the game, or at least as far as I had gotten, is frankly not very interesting, and is just an excuse so as to have a complete product.

For some perspective on me, so you understand my point of view:

My first game system was an Atari, so I've been around the block, and I'm jaded. I've played old Atari/NES games, old PC games, attempted to program a game myself (text only, in BASIC, I was all of 10 or so... I didn't get too far) The best things for gaming in the past half decade have been Valve (Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead, plus Steam on the PC, single handedly making the PC the best gaming platform for solo gaming by a tremendous margin), the Nintendo DS, which is so cheap to develop for that small market niche games have flourished on it (There are, I think, a half dozen very good old school dungeon crawler games on it, for example, and Atlus has released a metric assload of fun, quirky games that'll never get 10/10 in reviews but are absolutely worth playing), the proliferation of music/rhythm game (Audiosurf, Rock Band/Guitar Hero, and the continued existence of DDR), and the resurgence in small market, low priced games from small game houses (Mainly on the DS and PC, but also XBLA/PSN, but the former do it better).
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