Games you've bought that you can't bring yourself to play

[Tuesday Night Fever]

My problem isn't that I buy a game and never play it, it's that I buy games, start to play them, and then never get around to finishing them. I used to make a point to always finish a game, even if I'm not really enjoying it all that much, so that I at least get my money's worth out of it. Then life happened, and now I just don't always have as much time as I'd like to have, so I have to prioritize.

Off the top of my head, these are some of the games I've yet to actually finish (there's a whole bunch more)...

1. Bioshock Infinite - Got to the part where you and Elizabeth are trying to buy a transportation ticket and you get a prompt about whether or not to kill the guy behind the counter. I think it's around the time you get your first shotgun. I liked the game well enough, but something came up that distracted me from finishing it. It's one that I'm looking forward to finishing when I get the time.

2. Prey - I've been absolutely loving this game so far. System Shock 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, and playing Prey for the first time has felt remarkably similar to my first experience with SS2. I've been playing this one in small chunks specifically so that I don't end up playing through it too fast. I want to savor this one.

3. Wasteland 2 - I honestly don't like this game at all. The combat feels incredibly clunky and unbalanced, the writing is awful, none of the characters are particularly likable, and none of the choices feel meaningful since most of the time it seems like one choice is clearly the better, "correct," choice. I was told by seemingly goddamn everyone that I'd love this game, because I love the oldschool Fallout games... but yeeeeah... not so much. I got to what felt like about halfway through the game, and just couldn't bring myself to finish it, despite the same people telling me that "it gets better."

4. Metro: Last Light - For some reason this one just didn't hook me like the first game. Got about two hours in, then moved on to something else. I didn't dislike it or anything, it just didn't motivate me to continue.

5. Skyrim - I've actually tried to finish this one several times now. I'll start a new game, put a whole bunch of hours into it, look back at the time I've spent and feel like I've not really gotten anywhere or done anything important, get bored and quit. Then a few months later, I'll decide that I'm really going to finish it this time, start a new game, have the exact same experience, and quit again for another couple months. I should really just pick up from where I left off previously, and say to hell with whether or not I still remember anything that had happened previously with that character story-wise. This game is a totally oddity in my Steam library, as it's the only one that I've put hundreds of hours into over the years, and never actually finished.

6. Telltale's Walking Dead: Season 3 - Not enough Clementine.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I bought Sleeping Dogs when it was on sale, but for some reason I never feel like playing it.

That's a shame, it's a really good game. The Hong Kong Cinema vibe is great and utterly unique in open world games, where generic-american-cities are so humdrum. They did a really great job with the characters....you actually care about them, and Shen.

I don't know what platform you have it on. The PC version has a terrible FoV, which is something that is ordinarily a deal breaker for me, but this game and Mafia 2 are the only games that get away with it. I would play the original version over definitive. They made some negative changes that I believe made the game worse (especially if you own the DLC).

Whenever I replay it, I look forward to one thing above the others. There's something immensely satisfying about putting on the DLC cop outfit while talking to Winston especially. Several playthrus and I still find it side-splittingly funny to be dressed in full cop uniform while sitting across from Winston who's ranting about how much he hates cops, what he does when he finds cops and he finds it so hard to trust anyone cos they could be an undercover cop. And Shen sits there nodding, in uniform, with that hat and sunglasses.

EDIT: Found someone else's recording:

​

I have the Definitive Edison on PC. I did play it for about half an hour and the FoV didn't seem all that bad. I'll probably give it another try. I have seen a video of Shen in the cop outfit and yeah that's pretty funny.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Defense Grid 2: "It's the best of the genre! The besssst! So much content! The bisssssst!"
Hey, I'm the kind of genre-surfing asshole that likes to try the bist of each then walk away with a shallow sense of varied bistness...this seems like as good a chance as any to jump into one that I'm fairly inexperienced at.

Oh. This...this is it? It only gets more stressful while somehow maintaining soul crushing boredom like a highly demanding production line operative job position? Nope! Nopety nope nope. Was looking for entertainment, not a job that costs me money.

South Park the meaningless innuendo:
Ok, it was a demo, i cant afford to be that stupid with money right now. But having played the first not-shit South Park adventure to find it quite not-shit and fairly entertaining at the time, it seemed like more of the same should be enough to at least get through a demo and feel like perhaps the full game will be worth getting, eventually. On sale.

I quit after the second battle. It felt weirdly hollow, unfunny (apart from the difficulty slider option, but had already heard about that before so the lack of surprise meant no actual humour was extracted), dated, simple, more derivative than usual without the irony...I don't know exactly, it hit hard the realisation that this wouldn't be fun, funny or surprising. Perhaps the first was coasting mainly on novelty. Either way, am not going back.

 

[CaitSeith]

The Witcher trilogy.
I haven't even started playing it. It's just that there are so many games on my pending list (and I know that these games are pretty long) that I end up playing either something shorter or something I'm much more interested on playing first.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Just Cause 2. I?m one of the knuckle-dragging troglodytes who likes to faff about in open world sandboxes, and from what I?ve heard, this is one of the better ones for mindless destruction, but for some reason, I made it as far as the parachute tutorial and lost all interest. I?ve still got it loaded on my Xbox 360, and when I scroll through my digital collection, it still piques my interest, but almost immediately, I can?t be bothered. Weird.

Just Cause 2 needs to be modded a bit. But even then, it's still not really on par with Mercenaries sadly.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

Divinity Original Sin - I really want to play it, and I have a little bit, but its so fucking boring. The dialgoue is terrible, the ease of death is terrible, and the starting city is simply too big I simply loose interest

Please, Don't touch anything - Because I simply don't have the patience

Wasteland 2 - Basically the same as Divinity

I had a similar experience with this game. In theory I should love it, I even play D&D a couple time a week, but I bounced off Divinity hard.

I avoid impulse buying almost completely but Fran Bow has been in my Steam library for quite some time. I got it on sale and I do intend to get to it but my free-time for games is ever more limited so things I'm more excited about keep coming out and delaying anything I "mean to get to".

 

[Ironman126]

Hmm. I'll take another look at it then. I've seen videos of the games and I really love the tank combat. I was extremely disappointed with Company of Heroes 2 then the tanks behaved worse than in the first game.

That's a shame about CoH 2. Not that I was a huge fan of Company of Heroes (Men of War kind of ruined it for me) but I have to applaud a lot of the things Relic tried and experimented with in CoH and Dawn of War.

I definitely enjoyed CoH and DoW. CoH2 made some useful quality of life changes, but it feels like it came at the expense of gameplay. Overall, the infantry combat is better, but the tanks are worse. Plus, the game has balance issues. I strongly suspect that the Wehrmacht fanboys bitched for days about how the Germans were, uh, actually balanced and not unstoppable, blue-eye space marines.

It's not a performance issue, its stability. Shadow of Chernobyl looks likes it's going to start, then never does. Call of Pripyat crashes every few minutes. I haven't tried to play Clear Sky in years because I just don't care. What's bizarre (not really) is that they all ran on the much less capable PC I had when I first played them.

Ohhhh, right. I'm not familiar with the issues in Shadow of Chernobyl, other than the engine just... not being as stable as it was in later titles.

Full disclosure: Shadow of Chernobyl never ran well for me (or anyone, I suspect). Which is a shame because it was my favorite.

I'm pretty sure I know a what's causing your issues in Call of Pripyat though. Any kind of GPU overclock tends to crash your GPU drivers whenever there's a heavy lag spike.

If not that, then it might be an issue with trying to load a save you made close to a group of spawned zombies. It's a really bizarre engine bug that no one's really been able to properly "fix". Simplest solution is to simply... make sure you don't save your game in commonly populated zombie areas. And use multiple saves just in-case.

My GPU isn't overclocked, but it is about 30 times more powerful than what Call of Pripyat was designed for. I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue, as yo suggested.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I have the Definitive Edison on PC. I did play it for about half an hour and the FoV didn't seem all that bad. I'll probably give it another try. I have seen a video of Shen in the cop outfit and yeah that's pretty funny.

The Def. Ed. is fine, I have played it and there are some improvements. My issue with it is that they "integrated" the DLCs in a way I personally disliked. I found the FoV almost unplayable, but I think they improved it in Def. Ed. and you may have more tolerance for it than I do. As for the uniform, I think the seriousness of the scene and the story until that point, with the absurdity of Shen being in uniform in a scene that plays like a Jackie Chan movie makes it hilarious to me. The developers must know about it and that they allowed it to remain despite how it undermines the serious tone of the scene is a stroke of genius. It's an unintended moment of comedy that I created in a dark drama that wouldn't be possible in any other medium, nor even in most other games.

There's also a really great article [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/criticalintel/12969-Examining-Hong-Kong-Through-the-Lens-of-Sleeping-Dogs] from the former, fantastic Escapist contributor, Robert Rath. He talks about Sleeping Dogs's setting and why it's particularly special.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I have the Definitive Edison on PC. I did play it for about half an hour and the FoV didn't seem all that bad. I'll probably give it another try. I have seen a video of Shen in the cop outfit and yeah that's pretty funny.

The Def. Ed. is fine, I have played it and there are some improvements. My issue with it is that they "integrated" the DLCs in a way I personally disliked. I found the FoV almost unplayable, but I think they improved it in Def. Ed. and you may have more tolerance for it than I do. As for the uniform, I think the seriousness of the scene and the story until that point, with the absurdity of Shen being in uniform in a scene that plays like a Jackie Chan movie makes it hilarious to me. The developers must know about it and that they allowed it to remain despite how it undermines the serious tone of the scene is a stroke of genius. It's an unintended moment of comedy that I created in a dark drama that wouldn't be possible in any other medium, nor even in most other games.

There's also a really great article [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/criticalintel/12969-Examining-Hong-Kong-Through-the-Lens-of-Sleeping-Dogs] from the former, fantastic Escapist contributor, Robert Rath. He talks about Sleeping Dogs's setting and why it's particularly special.

That does sound awesome. It's not the fault of the game that I haven't gotten into it. I don't have the same drive to play games that I used to.

 

[Fijiman]

There are a few that spring to mind without having to go and look at them. The first is Left 4 Dead 2, mostly because I have no one I can play it with and the L4D games are games you pretty much have to play with someone in order to really have any fun. The other is Red Dead Redemption, mostly because I just haven't had the time nor reason to get around to playing it yet. I know there are at least a few others, but I can't think of what they are right now and I know that the reason. I haven't played most of them is just general lack of time.

 

[JohnnyDelRay]

There's usually a couple (or maybe one nowadays) threads like this every year, so I usually reply to them as recently as possible. And NO, OP you're not the only one, a lot of people do this, from lurking on these forums for years I can attest, myself being a strong contender.

1st of all, I hate starting games and not finishing them, especially when I can't seem to justify to myself why I'm not having fun with it, such as when it ticks all the boxes, but for some reason, when it's finally *game time*, I'm like...eehhh, do I have anything else simpler or not as insane to play? I just made a thread couple weeks ago about a game like that (Nier Automata) and updated it couple minutes ago. I did finish it eventually.

But for now, there's 2 games:

Killer is Dead
Love the graphics, character design, gameplay is good though boss fights feel a bit cheap. It's also kinda messy as to figuring out what you're supposed to invest your time in. But overall, nothing glaringly bad, it's a good kick, and I also like games like this such as No More Heroes. But I can't bring myself to play it any further than the first couple stages, whereas years ago I'd probably have blazed through it, and even tackled the more difficult settings or game modes several times over by now.


Resident Evil HD Remake
I'm a pretty avid fan of RE series, playing almost every single one at least twice (yes, even the shitty ones. I also love the Revelations series as well). But I can't bring myself to finish this, and I have no idea why. It's everything I loved about the earlier series, polished and updated with even newer gameplay mechanics and challenge which I thought I'd love. But for some reason, the slow pace, the puzzles, the fixed camera, just doesn't do it for me anymore. I guess you can't relive those moments that easily, alone in the bedroom with the lights out, being a young teen and playing through RE2 and getting freaked out the first time you see a Licker crawl quickly past a window in the background.

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

I definitely enjoyed CoH and DoW. CoH2 made some useful quality of life changes, but it feels like it came at the expense of gameplay. Overall, the infantry combat is better, but the tanks are worse. Plus, the game has balance issues. I strongly suspect that the Wehrmacht fanboys bitched for days about how the Germans were, uh, actually balanced and not unstoppable, blue-eye space marines.

The... sort of half-sequel to Men of War, Assault Squad (and Assault Squad 2) kind of followed a similar pattern. Assault Squad was planned as a more polished up version with an emphasis on multiplayer. It definitely was a lot more balanced and polished than the original Men of War, and added Japan as a playable faction, but they kind of dropped any emphasis on the singleplayer, simplifying it down to a very repetitive and very grueling skirmish mode.

And then Assault Squad 2 was more of the same thing, only... kind of an infuriating money grab, because it was mostly just a second set of polish with an extra price tag, and very few improvements aside from the engine and performance.

Full disclosure: Shadow of Chernobyl never ran well for me (or anyone, I suspect). Which is a shame because it was my favorite.

Sadly I never did get very far in the game for that very reason. And because my computer around when the game came out was not exactly up to date.

My GPU isn't overclocked, but it is about 30 times more powerful than what Call of Pripyat was designed for. I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue, as yo suggested.

Aye, probably. If it's similar to what I experienced, the distinct impression I got was that the GPU was getting tripped up by the lag spikes, almost like the way a tailgater might crash into someone if the car in front suddenly hit the brakes. Sort of like where maybe the GPU was still trying to keep processing stuff at its regular fast pace... even though the entire game was seizing up from a lag spike, and then erroring out when the GPU and game weren't really... syncing up anymore? Not sure if what I wrote there makes much sense.

Alternatively, there is this: http://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl

Basically, it's Stalker setup on a modified version of the X-Ray engine. Much more stable, much better performance, and a lot of modding options to go through. It is also a bit more sandboxy, so you may not get as much of the story element out of it as you might've with the official games. Just figured I'd mention it.

 

[sniddy_v1legacy]

I have 1279 steam games....I can name dozens sat there, Fallout new Vegas, Just cause 2, spec ops the line Divinity 1 & 2

Heck I'll just look at my installed games I haven't got round to - Endless Legend/Space, Gods Will be Watching, Mordheim, Rocket League, this war of mine, Bioshock 1,2 or 3 but only installed 1 currently

Ok I need a lottery win and 6 months off work

 

[Poetic Nova]

Way too many games.

I'm in a second year where games make me feel terrible, give up on them easily. Or downright get disinterested in them after 20 minutes.

A very few managed to be an exception. But those are few and far between the games I am unable to play.