If you want to skip the musing, I've thrown in a few discussion questions at the end. However, this is a forum, there are words involved, so if you've ever used the phrase "tl;dr" and nothing else in a post, I suggest you start from the first paragraph and have a go at reading a long post. I ain't summarisin' nothin'. You may even enjoy it 
This morning, I laid down a few hours to go through the last two planets and complete Serious Sam II. I felt... odd about it. The first two Serious Sam games are very entertaining at first, and then get repetitive, fast. Serious Sam 2 (yes, it's called 2 even though it comes after Serious Sam: The Second Encounter) switches this about by sending you to an entirely different, beautifully drawn planet every few levels, holding off on most of the boredom factor. Regardless, towards the end, I found myself wishing the enemies would hurry up and die so I could see what the next bit looked like, rather than enjoying the combat, despite the arsenal of massive, destructive, grin-inducing weaponry; and the last level is, to put it bluntly, bollocks.
According to the statistics, I killed no less than 1,159 enemies in 41 minutes on that last level, with the expected completion time being an hour. AN HOUR. An hour where you're essentially in a massive field slowly working your way through over a thousand bad guys towards a big pyramid-shaped boss. For most of this, the only visible terrain is a set of reconfiguring walls that shift around to form slightly different box-shaped arenas after each enemy-spawning has been wiped off the face of the planet. It was difficult, seemingly endless, and boring.
Why did I do this level? I didn't get anything out of it and expected only another lengthy, annoying search-for-a-weakpoint-and-try-not-to-die boss fight at the end (SS2 doesn't do killable bosses). I didn't even get to enter the large pyramid I was heading for; the pyramid itself was the boss, and it did nothing but roll slowly towards me and open up a central section to reveal a) a large gem thingy that was its weakpoint, and b) a flood of fast-moving, tough, hard-to-hit flying vehicles that swooped around before crashing into me one after another, destroying me. F9 and try again. It was a couple of retries before I noticed the damage-boost and hover tank sitting on the ground near the pyramid and killed it. Dull.
It got me thinking about game completion. I remember playing through all of Fire Warrior despite being painfully aware from about 10 minutes in that the game completely sucked. It wasn't a particularly painful experience, but I didn't get much out of it, either. I struggled through the last few levels of Bioshock with gritted teeth, convinced that I was going to explode if I heard another "Welcome to the Circus of Values!!!!! *crash-like noise*", and swearing under my breath at that damn Little Sister as she told me to 'hurry up, Mr Bubbles' even though I was in front of her, taking damage from an endless stream of Splicers. I felt my soul crushed by the horrific disappointment that was the last three levels of Prey, a boring, frustrating series of boss and demi-boss encounters where the game's trademark flair and capacity for breathtaking 'wow!' moments had decided it wanted to run off with Far Cry's outdoor levels. I want to finish Hellgate: London, but I doubt I'll be able to.
Unrelated side note: I predict that within the first 5 or 10 posts there will be a post of "tl;dr", having read the first bit and deciding to be facetious, oblivious to the fact that I called it.
I don't get this effect with books. If a book's not very good, I can usually quite happily put it down. Having said that there are numerous novels I've been completely confused or put-off by and yet have struggled through to the end; one of Iain M. Clark's books for example. I can't remember the name (might be Feersum Endjinn or it might be something with 'weapon' in it, I forget), but this book has put me off reading anything else by him, even though the one I read before it - The Player of Games - was pretty good, if rather strange. Similarly, with films; I remember watching the title sequence and a whole minute-and-a-half of Sweeney Todd before I clicked the close window button and put on Shoot 'Em Up instead.
There seems to be a stronger completion drive with games; maybe it's the interactivity. You invest more of yourself in a game than you do a book or a film. With the latter two you're merely an observer; you can be a very tightly-drawn-in observer, but an observer nevertheless. Your knowledge that the serial killer is *obviously* going to get Rachel if she goes out on her own at night to fetch the purse she left in the woods is not going to make any difference at all to Rachel's actions. She goes out, and after a few minutes of faint strings in the background and lots of moonlit shots of her increasingly panicked face, dies. She won't respawn, either.
In a game, though - even in a one-dimensional murderfest like Serious Sam or Painkiller - your awareness that X enemy is going to appear there at time Y will of course affect your strategies the next time around, whether on a second playthrough or after a sigh and a press of the quickload button. Does this affect your desire to see it through to the end? Does quitting imply failure? When a game's good, it's you vs. the enemies. When a game's bad, it's you vs. the game; it's personal. There's also, of course, the possibility that there's something just as good around the corner.
Skipping levels in the middle of the game doesn't seem to feel quite as bad. I have completed Halo four or five times (mostly in attempting to get better at it so I could beat it on Legendary, something I still haven't done but haven't attempted in a long time either). Of those, only two of them actually included the Library level. (I accidentally deleted my save, made a new profile or something at one point, otherwise it'd just be once). I had no qualms about skipping that. I still got to beat the game's final level and give the game its proper ending. Kudos goes to Bungie for holding back on one of the best bits in the entire game for the very end. More devs need to do this!
That was a long musing, wasn't it. Never mind, we're at the other end now. Any examples where you forged through a bad game just to see the ending - and any where you didn't? Most important of all, any examples where you struggled through some bad bits to get to the end and found it entirely worth it?
[Edit for forgetting to remove a joke I decided would be better off placed at the beginning rather than the end...]
This morning, I laid down a few hours to go through the last two planets and complete Serious Sam II. I felt... odd about it. The first two Serious Sam games are very entertaining at first, and then get repetitive, fast. Serious Sam 2 (yes, it's called 2 even though it comes after Serious Sam: The Second Encounter) switches this about by sending you to an entirely different, beautifully drawn planet every few levels, holding off on most of the boredom factor. Regardless, towards the end, I found myself wishing the enemies would hurry up and die so I could see what the next bit looked like, rather than enjoying the combat, despite the arsenal of massive, destructive, grin-inducing weaponry; and the last level is, to put it bluntly, bollocks.
According to the statistics, I killed no less than 1,159 enemies in 41 minutes on that last level, with the expected completion time being an hour. AN HOUR. An hour where you're essentially in a massive field slowly working your way through over a thousand bad guys towards a big pyramid-shaped boss. For most of this, the only visible terrain is a set of reconfiguring walls that shift around to form slightly different box-shaped arenas after each enemy-spawning has been wiped off the face of the planet. It was difficult, seemingly endless, and boring.
Why did I do this level? I didn't get anything out of it and expected only another lengthy, annoying search-for-a-weakpoint-and-try-not-to-die boss fight at the end (SS2 doesn't do killable bosses). I didn't even get to enter the large pyramid I was heading for; the pyramid itself was the boss, and it did nothing but roll slowly towards me and open up a central section to reveal a) a large gem thingy that was its weakpoint, and b) a flood of fast-moving, tough, hard-to-hit flying vehicles that swooped around before crashing into me one after another, destroying me. F9 and try again. It was a couple of retries before I noticed the damage-boost and hover tank sitting on the ground near the pyramid and killed it. Dull.
It got me thinking about game completion. I remember playing through all of Fire Warrior despite being painfully aware from about 10 minutes in that the game completely sucked. It wasn't a particularly painful experience, but I didn't get much out of it, either. I struggled through the last few levels of Bioshock with gritted teeth, convinced that I was going to explode if I heard another "Welcome to the Circus of Values!!!!! *crash-like noise*", and swearing under my breath at that damn Little Sister as she told me to 'hurry up, Mr Bubbles' even though I was in front of her, taking damage from an endless stream of Splicers. I felt my soul crushed by the horrific disappointment that was the last three levels of Prey, a boring, frustrating series of boss and demi-boss encounters where the game's trademark flair and capacity for breathtaking 'wow!' moments had decided it wanted to run off with Far Cry's outdoor levels. I want to finish Hellgate: London, but I doubt I'll be able to.
Unrelated side note: I predict that within the first 5 or 10 posts there will be a post of "tl;dr", having read the first bit and deciding to be facetious, oblivious to the fact that I called it.
I don't get this effect with books. If a book's not very good, I can usually quite happily put it down. Having said that there are numerous novels I've been completely confused or put-off by and yet have struggled through to the end; one of Iain M. Clark's books for example. I can't remember the name (might be Feersum Endjinn or it might be something with 'weapon' in it, I forget), but this book has put me off reading anything else by him, even though the one I read before it - The Player of Games - was pretty good, if rather strange. Similarly, with films; I remember watching the title sequence and a whole minute-and-a-half of Sweeney Todd before I clicked the close window button and put on Shoot 'Em Up instead.
There seems to be a stronger completion drive with games; maybe it's the interactivity. You invest more of yourself in a game than you do a book or a film. With the latter two you're merely an observer; you can be a very tightly-drawn-in observer, but an observer nevertheless. Your knowledge that the serial killer is *obviously* going to get Rachel if she goes out on her own at night to fetch the purse she left in the woods is not going to make any difference at all to Rachel's actions. She goes out, and after a few minutes of faint strings in the background and lots of moonlit shots of her increasingly panicked face, dies. She won't respawn, either.
In a game, though - even in a one-dimensional murderfest like Serious Sam or Painkiller - your awareness that X enemy is going to appear there at time Y will of course affect your strategies the next time around, whether on a second playthrough or after a sigh and a press of the quickload button. Does this affect your desire to see it through to the end? Does quitting imply failure? When a game's good, it's you vs. the enemies. When a game's bad, it's you vs. the game; it's personal. There's also, of course, the possibility that there's something just as good around the corner.
Skipping levels in the middle of the game doesn't seem to feel quite as bad. I have completed Halo four or five times (mostly in attempting to get better at it so I could beat it on Legendary, something I still haven't done but haven't attempted in a long time either). Of those, only two of them actually included the Library level. (I accidentally deleted my save, made a new profile or something at one point, otherwise it'd just be once). I had no qualms about skipping that. I still got to beat the game's final level and give the game its proper ending. Kudos goes to Bungie for holding back on one of the best bits in the entire game for the very end. More devs need to do this!
That was a long musing, wasn't it. Never mind, we're at the other end now. Any examples where you forged through a bad game just to see the ending - and any where you didn't? Most important of all, any examples where you struggled through some bad bits to get to the end and found it entirely worth it?
[Edit for forgetting to remove a joke I decided would be better off placed at the beginning rather than the end...]
