I REALLY Want to Like You!

[Bellvedere]

Oblivion. One of my friends was playing it and I thought it looked pretty cool. I read up on it, and decided to purchase.
As much as I wanted to, I just couldn't get into it.

I was also really excited about Fallout 3. I've started it maybe a dozen times but so far haven't managed to play long enough to get past that first town with the bomb in the centre.

Whenever somebody raved about a Bethesda game I just tuned out after that, soured by my Oblivion and Fallout 3 experience. Recently though I was compelled to give Skyrim a go (that and it was also $20) which I love.

 

[Requia]

Oblivion. I just couldn't ever deal with the inconsistent levels+level scaling.

Also I'm currently beating my head against Space Pirates and Zombies, which has a lovely brick wall difficulty curve I can't seem to get past.

 

[Mr F.]

So, what's yours, past or recently?

Endless Space. I love the style, I love how you can personally customize your ships and fleets to give yourself an edge in combat, I love how the space battles are more than just two sides bashing each other over the head in a quick animation, and the UI is probably one of the best in the 4X genre.

That being said, the game is way too hard to play. I've played over a dozen matches of it and cannot get even close to beating it, and that's even after bumping the difficulty down to the level where "the enemy thinks the Maginot Line was a great idea". Whoever programmed that game's AI advantages needs to go back and rebuild it from scratch because the AI factions seem to have every advantage going for them even when it makes no sense at all. They ignore every negative happiness modifier, even if it would effectively be a mass depression that would otherwise bring their entire economy down to their knees. You could have twice the star systems and economy power as they do, yet they can still build 5 times the number of fleets as you canin a fraction of your time. Heck, I read the game's recommended play manual several times over and done everything I can to increase the efficiency regarding my race's specific win condition, and somehow other races beat me to the finish line by 50 turns or more.

It's frankly disheartening. I mean it's not like I'm inexperienced with 4X games. I've clocked in over 200 hours with Civ 5 and regularly win at it, yet I simply cannot make any headway with Endless Space. It makes me think that I wasted my money getting the game, because a no win situation is no fun at all.

I actually consider Endless Space to be the ONLY game I have ever wasted money on. Things like "A game of dwarves" cost so little and got some enjoyment so I do not really care.

Endless space was A) Expensive and B) Boring. Everything that it does well, Galactic Civilizations 2 does better, bar the combat, and that game is ancient. I have won one game. That was on an incredibly small star system where I locked down the ways across from one system to the other ASAP as it was the only way I could stand a fucking chance at building up. Essentially, I have only won by rushing the AI on the easiest difficulty setting.

But I have more gripes with the game then the difficulty of the AI. The tech tree makes me want to eat my own chin. GalCiv2 had an AWESOME tech tree. Endless Space does not.

Other then Endless Space (Which covers this neatly. As you can see, I love Gal Civ 2 and I really wanted to love Endless Space.), Sins of a Solar Empire falls in here. I wanted to love it. I really did. But somehow it felt SLOWER then its turn based brethren. Yeah, the battles look AWESOME at first. But after a while? It gets meh.

Mass Effect also comes in here. With one, I found the gameplay so dull that I simply could not play it. With three? Two things happened. One, the same problem with the game play, I just found it dull. Two: I screwed up with the character creator and only noticed an hour in my guys chin entered the room about a minute before he did and he looked like he had been beaten with a wrench. Never start games drunk kiddies.

Plus I just CBA to restart after the whole Wrench Face Man.

 

[Matilda Ward]

Mass Effect.
Be aware, I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it doesn't click with me. Which is weird, because I like it's level of open-worldness, I love sci-fi, I hear it has a great story and I'm a sucker for good stories and I enjoy all those things in other games but in Mass Effect, with all those things thrown into one place, I don't know, I think there's something I'm not getting. I have tried twice to get through the first one and I just couldn't. I hear the second one is an improvement in every way but I need to start from the beginnings of franchises. Don't ask me why, I just do. Maybe I should go back and try again... AGAIN.
Heck, I got through Devil May Cry 2 with BOTH characters (another thing I HAD to do) just to get to the new DMC, I'm sure I could slog through Mass Effect.

I agree with you I abhorred the first mass effect, no matter how much I tried to get into it, I just couldn't. Mass effect 2 though, it is definitely an improvement

 

[Corinthian]

Skyrim.

I very much wanted to like it. But after the first few hours, the world just felt so dull and lifeless to me.

Of course, it doesn't help that I thought the combat was absolutely turrible too. And would it have killed Bethesda to have made to paladin-esque armor in the game? I want to be a mace-wielding champion of light, dammit!

 

[Sir Pootis]

TES3: Morrowind.

My main issue is in the gameplay and lack of any direction. I'll explain by recounting my experience.
I begun the game and woke up to an opening sequence, and was immediately told to go and go see some guy, but on my way I came across a cave with a convenient door. Having decided to play as an archer, as is my preference in this kind of game, I see a bandit guarding the entrance, so I decide to shoot him from a difference. My arrow hits for NO damage, and he runs up to me and kills me before I can actually do anything about it. After repeating several times, I finally manage to kill him by going back to the store in town and buying a sword because archery is impossible in this game. So I proceed and get killed by a mage. Giving up with the cave, I decide to proceed with the game proper. I see some sort of miniature creature, and kill it in about 5 hits, and at this point realize my stamina is empty because I had the audacity to run to my objective because I wanted to get there within the next century. Eventually reaching the next town, stopping at every signpost to make sure I was going the right way because you have no sense of direction (I'm not saying games always need objective markers, but at least give me a useful map), I eventually find the guy after searching for about half an hour. He instructs me then to go find ANOTHER guy to proceed, and then I just give up and quit from boredom and frustration.

 

[Frozengale]

Dragon Age : Origins

Now mind you I've played the entire thing and I don't think it's a bad game, but there are just so many little things that bug the ever loving crap out of me.
I don't like most of the characters, Shale's the only one that I find really interesting. Morrigan CAN be interesting but still annoying as crap. Leliana was only interesting after I played Leliana's Song, which is DLC, so if it weren't for DLC I would still say she is crap.
The skill systems seem to be set up in such a way as to just piss me off. Linear skill trees where half the stuff doesn't really matter. Skills that sound awesome on paper but feel like a waste when you get them. And so many non-passives for Wizards that by the end of Awakening I couldn't access all of my spells. Also there is no respec, which is the worst sin any kind of RPG can commit.
The combat is fairly boring and easy. I never found much reason to switch to my rogues or warriors because their combat was just so dull, at least with mages you actually do stuff. I was playing on Nightmare and the combat was easy.... that's just wrong. By the end of it I had just decided to open the console and kill everything using commands except for the boss fights, because the boss fights were the only interesting things.
Good introduction to the world but everything is so bland for the most part. There are a few really interesting ideas that never get explored to any kind of real depth.

Luckily once I finished Origins I picked up DA2 and while it is crippled due to the short development time I found it to be superior in almost every way. The only reason I can't wait for DA3 was because DA2 was a game that I couldn't put down. DA:O was a game that I struggled to play through. Sadly I fear that they will go back to the DA:O formula because people are whiners and can't see the forest for the trees.


Then there is Borderlands.

I actually loved this game when it first came out. Never got to finish it, but eventually picked it up several years later on Steam Sale. And my word I'm not sure why I enjoyed it before. It is quite literally the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and you get the idea. The loot system is the only good aspect about this game. I wanted to love it again, I wanted to feel the way I did when I first played it. But now I see it for what it truly is, a Skinner Box in game form.

 

[The Eupho Guy_v1legacy]

TES4 - Oblivion

I tried playing oblivion about six months after it was released, after completing a marksman/alchemy run in Morrowind (which I called the "Potion Powered Human Gauss Cannon" run). I'm not really sure why it didn't click for me, I completed the main quest once, as well as the Shivering Isles main quest, but I couldn't play for very long before I got bored. My completed run was with a fairly generic sword & board fighter that dabbled in throwing fireballs, fixing armour and breaking locks after finding out that they gutted the marksman skill.

In my last run, I nearly got into the game. I forget what the build was, but I was actually starting enjoy the game... and then it crashed. While I was saving. Which corrupted the save. I don't use quicksaves (Elder Scrolls games and quicksaving don't mix well, I've discovered) and the last autosave was about an hour before hand, so I said **** it and haven't touched it since.

 

[DementedSheep]

Mass effect 1. I wanted to like it because I like bioware rpgs usually but gameplay was boring, side missions were all the same and IMO the world wasn?t particularly interesting.

 

[Pebkio]

Bioshock Infinite.

It was the only game I've ever preordered and one of just four I've ever paid the full $60+. I mean, Bioshock... on a floating city. I can't begin to express just how cool I think flying cities are... I even want zeppelins to be our main transportation because they're the only airships we've got. And I also loved the game mechanics of Bioshock. So Bioshock... but on a floating city now. Whee!

I so really wanted to like that game... and I tried, I really did. I even made light of the regenerating shield thing. But at the end, that was just one of many bugbears that made this seem like "Halo in a fantasy 1912... and also with magic".

---

Dragon Age and 2.

Turns out I'm not as big of a fan of the group rpg thing if it's not on a tactical top-down view. I like it in Tales of Symphonia, that was about it... but that's because I had better control of everyone... and we all didn't cluster in stupidly.

---

Saints Row 3 (I know it's "The Third" but nobody who isn't "sniffing their own farts" gives a crap).

Boy, I sure did enjoy Saints Row 2. It was one of the first games I got with my 360, because they both were Christmas gifts. I had no idea it was a GTA clone... that was better than GTA4. So when SR3 came out, I thought it was going to be SR2 but now with cooler stuff. But everything was corporate, and without contrast.

---

Xcom: Enemy Unknown.

Just kidding, I'm digging the hell out of Xcom.

 

[TIMESWORDSMAN]

Mass Effect.
Be aware, I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it doesn't click with me. Which is weird, because I like it's level of open-worldness, I love sci-fi, I hear it has a great story and I'm a sucker for good stories and I enjoy all those things in other games but in Mass Effect, with all those things thrown into one place, I don't know, I think there's something I'm not getting. I have tried twice to get through the first one and I just couldn't. I hear the second one is an improvement in every way but I need to start from the beginnings of franchises. Don't ask me why, I just do. Maybe I should go back and try again... AGAIN.

Are you using the PC version? Because the console versions are NON. I couldn't play ME till I picked up the PC version, now it's my favorite game.

In other news, Lollipop Chainsaw. I thought, "Suda51's a pretty cool guy, eh makes silly and doesn't afraid of sales charts", but I played that game to the end and, geez, it sucked. Not in the way Superman 64 sucks, but in the "this was almost good but it isn't" sucks, and to me that's worse.

 

[Joccaren]

Dishonored.
I really wanted to like it. A stealth game, with some fun and cool abilities, and interesting setting, and alright gameplay. The fact that the game didn't autosave at all so I could lose a couple of hours progress if I died at the last second of a mission killed it for me, as did the morality which made me play the hard way just to get the good ending.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

Bayonetta,I really liked the art direction and the character enough to finish the game, but getting slapped with bronze and silver medals made me feel like I was playing it wrong.

Sortof happening to Lollipop Chainsaw since I bought it, sort of fathoming that fighters don't seem to be my thing.

 

[TrulyBritish]

Hmm... reckon I could list a few:
Skyrim- The least problematic on the list, found it kind of fun (after having quite a bit of fun on Oblivion) but I just found it rather dull and colourless after Oblivion. And I have absolutely no interest in the civil war at all, both sides are just idiots. It certainly doesn't help I'm playing on a small monitor which won't let me see my compass, health, magic and stamina while refusing to let me modify screen size.
Fallout 3- Like Skyrim, I just found it dull. Once I found out where Liam Neeson went I tried going straight there and just kept getting eaten by gribblies.
Half Life 2- Now I've played very little of it so it could just be a slow start putting me off and the fact I haven't played the first at all. But again, I'm not seeing why it seems to be such a highly rated game. I'll try getting back to it at some point.
Crysis 2- I blame this one on a lack of story at the beginning. Again, I haven't played the first but would it kill developers to put some kind of brief summary at the beginning? Mass Effect 2 did it after all. So I'm playing through it fighting against men who want to kill me for reasons I'm not sure of, there's aliens I'm just expected to know about and there are characters I'm presumably supposed to know as well. It doesn't help that I don't see any of the enemy troops as an actual threat seeing as you can just go invisible and walk past them quite a bit, so there's no need to kill them. Sure the graphics were kinda nice, but lacking story or any necessary action I just got bored.

 

[Sir Pootis]

TES3: Morrowind.

snip

You see, to me that's just roleplaying. Getting killed by a bandit because you're not proficient enough at archery yet should be a spur to get better and is perfectly understandable - starting the game as a ninja Robin Hood would kind of make it too easy.

Don't get me wrong, the game's got it's flaws and does take some time to get into. But if you spend some time leveling up through the easy tasks available in Seyda Need, and can bare with the sub-par combat, then you'll find a real quality game in there.

The same as with having to find people - it's old-school RPG-ing that doesn't rely on holding your hand through everything, and for me that's a lot more satisfying and rewarding.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to have my hand held throughout a game. I only feel that a game should at least give me a chance. When I get slaughtered by the first hostile NPC I find because I wanted to stray from the game's chosen path, i don't feel much opportunity to role-play. The game may get MUCH better later, I'll take your word for it, but I just don't really feel like sitting through the frustration necessary to get to that part.

I also just realized that Chrome's spell-check decided to replace "distance" with "difference".

 

[Razentsu]

It's not that I don't like it, but I feel like I'm forcing myself to play Tekken. More specifically, Tekken Tag Tournament 2. I love the Tekken cast and aesthetic, but I mixed feelings about Tekken's gameplay.

Getting hit with strings you've never seen before sucks. It's not terribly difficult to adapt to new strings, but unless the mid/low mixups in a string are clearly telegraphed, you're almost always going to take damage the first time you see it. Also, damage is high in Tekken, so dang, it suuuucks.

I generally like the "crush" concept, but the high damage in Tekken kind of ruins it. It's great that you can read a low and crush it with hop kick, but I don't think you deserve to do 50% damage off a single read. It's as cringe-worthy as DP > FADC > Ultra in SFIV.

I really hope damage is toned down a bit in the next Tekken game. I really want to love Tekken, but Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 have been very stressful games for me. I've never reached these levels of stress with 2D fighters.

 

[Revolutionary]

Two Worlds and it's sequel. It was just the RPG I was looking for at the time....Or so I thought.
They had all the makings of exactly what I wanted to play at that exact point in time. The only problem was that they both transpired to rather execrable. Oh well plenty of other RPG's in the sea. Man I love Mount & Blade.

 

[FFP2]

Bayonetta,I really liked the art direction and the character enough to finish the game, but getting slapped with bronze and silver medals made me feel like I was playing it wrong.

I only got stone medals for most of the game Feel so incompetent now...

OT: Bioshock Infinite- The story is really good but my word it has the worst gameplay I've seen in a while. You know you messed up when the first game has better gameplay than the sequel with a $400 million budget.

So this is how Daystar feels when he talks about Spec Ops' gameplay... Except that was supposed to be bland.