The Witcher. Literally the only reason I haven't touched my copy of The Witcher 2 (which I'm aching to play) is cause I refuse to do so until I get through the first game which is like a particularly annoying chore to play. I just can't enjoy that bloody game.
I'd hardly say it's a chore, the combat system needs some serious getting into though.. I gave up on it 3 times before I got far enough into it to get sucked in, then it was a very smooth ride. From the first hour and a half - two of gameplay I never would have imagined the game would easily get into my top 10 and that I would complete it 3 times
The Witcher. Literally the only reason I haven't touched my copy of The Witcher 2 (which I'm aching to play) is cause I refuse to do so until I get through the first game which is like a particularly annoying chore to play. I just can't enjoy that bloody game.
I'd hardly say it's a chore, the combat system needs some serious getting into though.. I gave up on it 3 times before I got far enough into it to get sucked in, then it was a very smooth ride. From the first hour and a half - two of gameplay I never would have imagined the game would easily get into my top 10 and that I would complete it 3 times
I'm in the swamps, which has really interesting things, but I occasionally run into enemies that fuck me up hard and that's usually when I quit. Part of the problem with me getting into that game is that I have a slight hardware issue which leads to Geralt jerking around whenever he moves.
Mass Effect/Dragon Age series- My wife and my friends keep telling me these games are tailor-made for me, so I've given them their chance time and time again, but I just can't get into them. There is nothing specific that I seem to be able to pinpoint, but both games lose my interest about an hour in, and I simply have no fun whatsover playing them, and always come out feeling like that is somehow my fault. So I try them again in a later date, and the same thing happens all over again.
Braid- A pretentious piece of crap, an empty platformer with a level of douchiness proportionate to that of its creator. I bought it shortly after LIMBO, thinking it'd be a similarly great indie game, and it was anything but.
Prototype- When Prototype and inFamous were both in development, it seemed like it was pretty clear to me which one was the superior game. I eagerly awaited Prototype's release, with inFamous relegated to a mere afterthought. After playing both games, though, I can see how mistaken I was. I now regard inFamous as a superb series that I am quite fond of, while the first Prototype still goes unfinished, an empty experience after the inFamous games have been sampled.
Halo- I really, really like the lore of the series. The story is really cool, and I like the in-game universe. Shame about the games...
Battlefield 3- I'm one of those rare birds who buys FPS games for the single-player, and I'd heard that the campaign in BF3 was pretty good. I'd just finished both Bad Company campaigns and was looking for more. Now, I knew that BF3's campaign was more like CoD: MW than Bad Company, but I still wanted to try it out, because hey, I like the MW campaigns as well! But good God... what an incredibly bland, uninteresting game! I don't think I've played a more "meh" FPS campaign in recent memory. Which is a shame, because it's an absolutely gorgeous game, but...
I couldn't stand the gunplay. I'm not sure what the hell it was, but I didn't feel like there was any...Oomph behind my weapons. I just hated it. It felt like I may as well be using air pellet guns. Not to mention moving around made me feel like I was a gun being carried by a robot or something, I dunno.
I don't much care for military shooters, and I don't care to be a part of a flame war, but COD's gunplay felt proper to me. That's all.
I really wanted to have fun in BF3. Huge maps, lots of players, vehicles, jets...but I just couldn't get over the feeling of the gun mechanics.
-Painkiller. Yathzee loved it(and 90% of the time, I agree with him), it sounds like a cool idea, it has a heavy metal soundtrack during the combat and I really got into the Serious Sam games. So why did I get bored?
-Left For Dead. It's a zombie game made by valve. So why could I not bring myself to finish it?
-Iron Brigade. Made by Double fine, tougue in Cheek Humor, Diesel-punk Mecha. Can't bring myself to care much, despite really wanting to like it.
-Bioshock. I love the concept and the atmosphere worked....for a while. After a while, though, I didn't feel like I was underwater, but going through rooms surrounded by aquariums, and being continually sidetracked from my goal by a collapsing ceiling or a stuck door felt really irritating. Not to mention once you have it out with Ryan, you might as well stop playing because the story just kind of peters out.
The game itself had a lot of potential. I really found myself gelling around the darker, more gothic aesthetic of visuals, and I liked the designs of the enemies and bosses. The gameplay wasn't terrible either. Still, I was never quite able to like it. Devil May Cry 2, I think, is an example of how you can do a lot of things right, but if the individual elements don't complement each other, the whole fails to become more than just the sum of its parts.
"Lacking a cohesive vision", is perhaps the best way to describe it.
Dragon Age Origins, Darksiders, Skyrim and Dishonored come to mind.
I'm not quite sure why, but all 4 games have me progressing up to 20-30% of the way before making me realise that something is making me not enjoy this at all.
CAPTCHA: beyond me. Yes, why I don't like these games is beyond me.
They feel so dead, and while that might be the point of fallout 3, being post apocalyptic way, it wasn't dead in the "What is the point of this all" way that might be interested. It just left me with a completely blank stare with no charm apart from the occasional glitch with skyrim not being much better for me.
But I digress, I know there are good reasons to like the games (epic landscapes, lore, well designed skills sets etc) it just doesn't cut it for me unfortunately.
Dragon Age Origins. I couldnt stand the combat and I stopped playing 3 or 4 hours in. A game that I managed to force my way through however was Dark Void. It showed flashes of greatness with the jet-pack combat, but the terrible story and clunky controls made me hate it.
Skyrim. Every time I try to play through the game I just get horribly bored early on and drop the game. Also repeat playthroughs of Mass Effect 1 if it counts. I'm a completionist by nature so that means I need to practically do everything in the game every playthrough. It just makes the game feel like a terrible chore for me, which is a shame because I didn't feel like that in my first or second playthroughs, nor do I get that feeling from ME2 or hell, even ME3.
Psychonauts. I was initially interested because of all the people saying it's the greatest game of all time.
At first I thought I was in for a treat with all the amusing characters, good voice acting and nice level design, and then it made me actually play the game.
Jesus Christ, the platforming gameplay wasn't simply mediocre, it was absolutely terrible. I seriously couldn't last 5 minutes without wanting to throw my computer out the nearest window, which would probably have been easier than finishing the level.
I get that sometimes the story can excuse for uninteresting gameplay, and I don't have a problem with that. I loved The Walking Dead and I'll openly admit that the "gameplay" in that was pretty bad. But when the gameplay is so awful that it stops me from continuing the story because it's barely playable, then that's just stupid.
That game was a waste of my money, and it only cost me like £5.
I want to like you. For months I kept telling myself it was me, not you. But it was a lie. It was you.
You presented yourself so well. I actually liked the combat you put me into. I was so proud to see you bring dynamic and cool fantasy combat scenes into the genre - which is something most fantasy games lack.
But you were so lazy. After being introduced to a very bland city, I could see how you wanted to be your older brother Mass Effect, but you didn't just pull through on that. Your older brother had a new breathtaking scenery EVERYTIME. You just reused different parts of the same mine, sewer, dungeon or warehouse. Also the enemies I met were the same. Were you Templar, Elves, Darkspawn or Bandits all fought like they had trained in the same academy - which made your rather fleshed out lore from Dragon Age 1 seem pretty bland.
But your parents BioWare could always tell a story. The only problem was that you seem to have dipped into the bottle, when it came to choices, and actually being interesting. My companions were whiny bitches, and I wasn't even allowed to do anything that could keep all of them alive. Also siding with one side or the other in the end of the game either showed Mages as hellbent abominations or the Templars as zealous psychopaths. There was this faction of Mages and Templars who united which I was sent to kill AGAINST MY WILL numerous times.
What were you? High? Drunk? Angry? Couldn't we have talked about this?
Dragon Age 2. I want to like you. But you gave me a bunch of tedious chores, in an uninteresting repeating setting with companion characters (Sebastian, Fenris, Merril, My Brother, Anders) who were whiny ass pricks I couldn't stand being around. Pretty annoying when you need a mage or warrior in your party.
Maybe we will be friends again in Dragon Age 3. But for now I go back to your former self in Dragon Age: Origins and enjoy the good times we had, before you wanted to be cool.
Most recently, the PC port of Dark Souls. It really sounds like something I would like, but when I fired it up I found the controls so agonizing and the overall port so terrible that I couldn't bear to play it. And I found the PC port of RE4 acceptable. Yeah, I know I could mod the fuck out of it and fix most of it, but I just don't feel like going through the drudgery...
I first played it shortly after it came out almost ten years ago, but for some reason quit at Hollow Bastion. I think back then the novelty of Disney + Square was enough to keep me interested. The second game I quit somewhere around Port Royal. I haven't even touched the spin-offs, as I'm not big on handhelds, and I'm a little put off by how much of the content is only available in Japan (and EU gets even less than US). Still, I've watched the opening to KH 1 and 2 countless times (because they're absolutely fucking fantastic), and the KH2 Final Mix secret ending was so flippin' amazing even though for the longest time I had absolutely no clue what it was about.
I've been on a nostalgia trip lately, so I went and played through the first game just last week. The novelty wore off quick. It was awful. I was planning on a full playthrough, but by the time I reached Hollow Bastion again I just wanted to rush to the end. The platforming is atrocious, as is the camera. It's not all so bad once you get Glide, but it's too little too late. The game is also chock full of minigames, none of which are even remotely entertaining. There's a fine line between time killers and time wasters, and Kingdom Hearts minigames are of the latter kind. Not one of them made me want to play more after pulling my hair out to get the measly rewards.
The trinities are just a lazy excuse for exploration and backtracking, with no context whatsoever. Take a look at Zelda or Pokémon to see it done right. And for fuck's sake, they punish the player for using the guest party members instead of Donald and Goofy! Also, if you're going to enforce a cap on gummi blocks that I can't possibly know of before I hit it, at least let me manually discard them without running to Cid so that I don't have to leave all those chests lying around. You can discard items, so why not gummis? Damn. Did they put any thought on this whatsoever?
The leveling is there to add something to grind late-game. You don't know how much damage you're causing or taking, and you won't notice any difference in gameplay unless you're vastly over- or underleveled for your current area. So why have levels at all? Why not just teach new skills over the course of the game, and allow customization through equipment and ability builds?
The plot would have been fine, but all this talk about light and darkness makes me want to hurl and punch Sora in the face, both at the same time. The Disney worlds mostly feel like filler, and after the first game they really have no place in the series at all. They're reduced to a marketing gimmick. The whole Ansem/Xemnas/Xehanort thing seems intriguing enough, so if they wanted the story to be about that, why not do just that in the first place?
Speaking of filler, you could remove half the worlds without hurting the plot at all. The main storyline is infinitely more interesting than the half-assed rehashes of old movies, so they're pretty much there to pad out the game's length. And was it really necessary for me to run through Hollow Bastion twice? The worlds in general have very little direction or sense of connectivity. Deep Jungle I think is the worst offender. Just run around blindly until you hit a cutscene!
Mind the heartless though! There's a lot of them, and they're either a snoozefest to fight, or an exercise in frustration. It's amazing how something can be so simple and so clunky all at once. Magic can at least be cast through shortcuts, but I didn't use any of the special attacks once during the game. And does every single enemy really need some sort of an evasive maneuver? Jesus. And fuck Large Bodies and Fat Bandits. Double fuck the Fat Bandits in Cave of Wonders. And fuck Black Mushrooms and their stone form too. And fuck Squenix for wasting my time.
The most elaborate challenges presented by the bosses can be summarized as 'finding a way up there to punch them'. I beat the final boss at level 52, without synthesis or summons, and popping two elixirs during the fight. Strategy? Cast Aerora, hit it, hit it again. Guard if it does something really obvious, but only if you feel like being fancy. I died once during the game, and that was against Chernabog. I didn't think to dodge his one damaging move, since the rest of them were barely scratching me. I hear Sephiroth is supposedly pretty tough, but I just can't be bothered to put any more hours on this game.
I was smiling and teary eyed at the ending, but I feel that just means I have no standards. As painful as it was, I'm still sort of glad I finally got around to finishing the game. Some of it makes no sense to me though. How the hell does Kairi return to Destiny Islands at the end? Wasn't everyone supposed to be stuck on their own worlds? I mean, they make it a point to remind the player that Kairi is not originally from Destiny Islands, and then do nothing with it? And what happens to Sora, Donald and Goofy? They close the door, then go through it to look for Riku and Mickey? And if not, where exactly is Castle Oblivion, and how does Riku end up there? Kingdom Hearts is light? Seemed pretty dark to me! And how come the Heartless are actually hearts without bodies and souls, and the actual heartless are called Nobodies?
Kingdom Hearts to me is like a fairy tale version of Metal Gear; convoluted beyond belief, thrives on endless repetition of concepts and catchphrases, and each new installment turns everything you thought you knew on its head. Both series leave me sitting on the fence being unable to decide whether I think they're the hottest shit ever, or just ridiculous and dumb. MGS is infinitely better gameplay-wise though, and I can at least stomach playing through the games. Kingdom Hearts on the other hand feels like driving railroad spikes through my big Mickey-sized feet.
TLDR Fuck Tetsuya Nomura. Stop trying to remake Sephiroth, or to fix The Bouncer. It can't be done, and zippers and leather don't make everything better, especially not Disney cartoons.
Mass Effect 1. I bought the trilogy just a few months ago, and naturally wanted to start with the first, but the graphics were, naturally, not great for today's standards, and the gameplay just to bad. If I shoot with guns, the guns should feel like in a shooter. Sad, really, because I do love the rest of the series.
Dragon Age: Origins. Apart from very few and isolated moments, I found the story bland, as well as the wold. And towards the end I got tired of the quite repetitive gameplay, set the difficulty on easy and just got it done with.
Dragon Age 2. What I didn't like there is the same stuff that is criticized in most reviews. I thought the outset of the story had more potential than its predecessor, but here, I couldn't even bring myself to finish the game (yet).
Battlefield 3. I don't know why, it seems to be a great game, and I was a fan of Battlefield Vietnam and Battlefield 2, but it just didn't intrigued me.
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
