Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Fallout 4
The changes they made to the game mechanics ripped a lot of the roleplaying out of the experience. I kept hoping to find a lot of what I loved about Fallout 3 and New Vegas in it, and never did.
It’s not even necessarily a bad game, but the aspects of the games that I found fun were either heavily reduced or removed completely, leaving behind an open world shooter with a bad story.
100% agreed. Not only was the Dialoge Choice system of Yes, yes but sarkastic and no (but actually yes) incredibly limiting, but even the story didn’t really do it for me plus the whole settlement thing.
I bought ARK because dinosaurs. That is the only thing it has going for it. The core gameplay loop is watching a progress bar fill up.
I also got ARK for the dinosaurs. I’m fine with watching a progress bar fill up, so I hope I didn’t waste my money.
I have 2,500 hours in Ark.
The thing is Ark isn’t a dino game, it’s a scifi survival/exploration game. You start from nothing and work towards conquering the island and discovering it’s secrets.
I really hope you like it. To me it is best played with friends on a private server, or a server with good rules and active admins.
Got into super breeding. Maxed out damage and health and got a lot into speed on my rexes. Its very rewardimg being able to 1 or 2 shot a 150 rex. Takes like a month+ to get anywhere with it. That rex with those stats took like a year of breeding
Pretty much all the new AAA games. Kind of lost interested the moment games stopped being innovative. It’s nice to have super dooper realistic looking game and millions of small details but I still haven’t seen a game that would really improve on the game play in the last 20 years. They are still full of simple rules and mechanics. For example, 20 years ago it was common to have the “enemy spotted you but just hide and don’t move for 3 seconds and they will move on” rule in games and it pisses me off when new AAA games do it. Modern games are full of this shit. “If you do A in situation B, C will happen”. Just learn the rules and beat the game. There are more rules, more details, animations are nicer but I still find it boring. It’s still just a bunch of fixed rules, NPCs still move like robots, you can still see the algorithms behind everything. I prefer to play an small indie game that actually tries something new than AAA game that tries to build ‘realistic’ world and fails at it.
I agree. I can always see through the mechanics of a game and usually break the economy too and I’m rich beyond belief usually.
Have you broken Starfield’s economy yet? I’m poor af
As a patientgamer it’s against my religion to buy at game this early for such a high price.
Superman 64 is the only game I tried to return to Blockbuster before the rental window was done. They wouldn’t let me so I had to keep it for the rest of the week.
I had never once experienced this. They WOULDNT let you bring the game back early? Admittedly my days of blockbuster a few, I think they closed when I was 9 or 10, but I can’t see a reason they wouldn’t take it early…
Yeah that doesn’t make any sense. They had a drop-off slot at the desk where you just dropped them into to return them.
Okay, but isn’t that game just one big bug?
I’m gonna piss a lot of people off, and say that I really, really cannot stand Halo - the whole franchise, not just the 343 stuff.
The way I see it, my problem with the series is twofold: storytelling and gunplay. The storytelling is weak at best: whilst I’m usually a huge fan of environmental storytelling, there’s just so little information in game for me to go off! It wasn’t until I read the Reach novel that I figured out who the Covenant were beyond just “evil aliens”. I questioned this issue on the site we don’t talk about and was told to read the books, but put simply, if I have to read a book to understand your plot, then you haven’t told your plot well enough. Chief is presented in the game as this incredible figure (as are the Spartans), but the games never really tell you why, and as such I never really care about Chief or his bullshit.
Regarding the gunplay, I find it (and movement) simply too floaty to be enjoyable. There isn’t enough recoil from a lot of the weapons, and the SFX on most of the guns don’t give a great sense of power.
I understand that it’s a massive series of nostalgia for a massive number of people. I understand that it redefined FPSes, and I respect the games for this. They deserve every bit of praise people give them. They aren’t bad games, but I just do not enjoy them.
Which FPS do you enjoy?
Great question! Really loved the Bioshock series, along with Bethesda FPSs (although they’re not great, I rather enjoy the open worlds). Cyberpunk was great fun, although disappointing in a lot of ways. The Doom series is a personal favourite, although Eternal wasn’t perfect, I really loved how the stories were handled in the previous two games.
For me, I like to seek a balance between story and gameplay. My big thing though is immersion, and being able to really understand the Universe the game takes place in.
Whilst not FPSs, the closest thing to Halo that I loved (Space-Opera shooters), the Mass Effect trilogy tops the list.
Have you tried Metro 2033?
I’ve been meaning to; I own it, along with the rest of the Metro series, but just haven’t had the time
Halo excelled at being a FPS on console before auto aim and aim assist were a thing. The terrible, tank-like movement and super floaty, slow jumps would be trash in any PC FPS around its time. But having players move at Quake speeds in Halo would be frustrating, and no one would hit things in multiplayer.
Or would, on a game without modern control assist, anyways. Games don’t tend to be as fast as they used to, and Halo has really sped up as a series, but it is still on the slower side.
The Last of Us. Over-hype definitely didn’t help, but it looked brown and dreary, seemed to mainly involve walking around waiting for press X to do thing to appear on screen, and having plot thrown at me when I actually wanted to play a game.
I dropped that game when I couldn’t cross a bridge because it was blocked by a
ninvisible wallbroken down bus. It was so egregious I got annoyed and went outside.
Satisfactory.
Totally my fault, it’s not a bad game it just wasn’t remotely what I was looking for when I bought it.
I got it expecting “factorio in 3d”, however in reality it was more like Subnautica or Fallout 4 if the base building in those games was the main part of the game.
By the time I had finished loading the first phase of the space elevator I had came to terms with this.
As it turns out, the game that scratched that itch was heavily modded Space Engineers.
I’m one of the weird ones who likes Satisfactory over Factorio. I just can’t get into Factorio for some reason. Also didn’t help that my friends who I tried playing with it – who all had hundreds of hours in the game – are the kinds to be like, “No, you’re doing it wrong - the correct/efficient the way to do it is this way…” People, let me learn the damn game. I get being efficient, but let me learn on my own for a bit.
But didn’t matter, just couldn’t get into Factorio.
thats imo the worst way to start factorio.
a friend of mine tried to introduce me to the game,
but i lost intrest after blue science.did you try it out by yourself yet?
it only clicked for me,
once i learned the game at my own pace.I think I’ve tried a couple times solo, but never really put serious effort into it. So I’d play for like 30min then just quit. I think the bad experience with my friends made me just avoid it. Realistically, it just happened to be Factorio that we were playing that time; it could’ve been any game. And it has happened in other games. The one friend who was the worst offender, I rarely play games with anymore. It’s silly, I know.
However, one day, when I’m bored and looking at my Steam library, I will make the attempt again. I feel like I should, but I just don’t know when that might happen. The picking Factorio part; I’m frequently bored staring at my Steam library!
Idlegames, though I kind of dont want to count those as games in the first place. What make them anathema to fun to me is that they are designed for you to waste your time on them. They dont teach you anything either, maybe some prioritization if you really get into them.
It could be argued that other video games are also designed for us to waste time on. It’s just that the method of wasting time is different. In one you make numbers go up, in another you kill enemies (which might just be to make numbers go up: referring to grinding in RPGs) or try to make the car go fast in the right direction.
I personally enjoy idle games, but I understand that others might not like just clicking some buttons that will make the numbers go up faster.
Eternal Sonata. It actually felt eternal, the whole game is just a super slow slog of boring repetitive combat with infrequent opportunities to save.
It might be tolerance, this is true for me now for almost all turn based RPGs.
Octopath Traveler. The UI was terrible, the loot was nothing but stat sticks, and most of the dungeons, of which there were too many, were just long tree walk with potions at the leaves. Genuinely the worst game I’ve ever played. The three-directional sprites were also extremely lazy. I think I lost my mind right at the start when the lazy script response saw one of the characters’ childhood friend suddenly develop amnesia and treat him like a stranger because everyone needs generic dialogue.
The music and cast of thousands worldbuilding was fantastic, but otherwise, I hated almost every single of the 80 hours I put into it trying to give ti a fair shake.
I got about 1/2 way through the game, but as soon as I hit the first boss of act 3 I just couldn’t progress. He’d wipe the party every time. Walkthroughs were useless.
Yeah, the game had severe balance issues too with classes not scaling properly and consequently being either completely dominant or totally useless based on what level you were.
From the moment it was announced, I could not contain my excitement for Octopath Traveler from the art style to the graphics to the music. I was even into the name. I was so enamored that I bought the collector’s edition.
Then it finally came out and never have I regretted a game purchase so much; not because it was awful, but it was so mediocre. Honestly, if it were awful, I might have been more okay with it, rationalizing how a game could turn out so bad with everything going for it, mourning what could have been, etc. It did everything it promised it would, I just realized that it didn’t really promise much beyond an art style and being a turn based RPG with 8 main characters. The package was delivered, but it turned out to be Game Gear, not Gameboy.
I think buying that game put me off collector’s editions. The package for it was very impressive, but I think I finally saw the man behind the curtain and realized that what I was buying was just a bunch of plastic and art books that I was never really going to touch anyway. The only physical bonus I cared about from that point on was Steelbooks, but I don’t even buy physical games all that much anymore thanks to my Steam Deck.
Honestly, Octopath Traveler put me off blindly preordering games in general. Now I just blindly buy old games, so if they’re bad, I have no one to blame but myself for not doing the research LOL
deleted by creator
I’m glad I’m not the only person to dislike this game! After going through like three of the chapter 1 missions for the characters, the game felt very very samey, and on top of that, it’s probably one of the only story games that I haven’t finished.
Story of Seasons AWL, it was nostalgic but the fact I couldn’t go to Mineral Town/ The City was a bit disappointing and broke the nostalgia.
I didn’t play the remake because of the name changes. I still have my Gamecube copy and the PS2 special edition, so will probably go back to those next time nostalgia bites.
Its very rare that I actually finish a game that’s just plain miserable but I got a nomination since it was also (thankfully) short: Photographs
Photographs is an indie puzzle/narrative game, where you solve dilemmas through a different set of mechanics in 5 different narratives. So far so good, that’s somewhat interesting. It falls apart completely, however, on the absurdity of its attempts to be tragic. Every story in Photographs has to be a tragedy - which in itself is already a negative point. You start each of these vignettes already expecting how it’ll all go wrong, which by the third or fourth time is already stale. You’re just waiting for what will be the inevitable Bad Thing™ that will randomly happen to these people.
But its biggest failure is that those tragedies just don’t hit. I’ll spoil some of those so be wary if you’re still interested in that. In one of those, a swimmer is caught in a doping scandal, which ends with her being scorned, kicked out of the competition scene, and homeless. In another, a newspaper editor decides to only publish bad and infuriating news to get more readers, and ends up being bombed by one of his former employers, after publishing a paper that says people deserved to get fired. The quickness in which things go south and the intensity is absurd, to the point of almost being comical. Worse of all, it also fails in one critical point (one which even big names fall for) which is not building up its characters. You rarely get an idea of who you’re dealing with before tragedy occurs. You’ll often only have a general understanding - old man lonely, athelete stressed, editor scared of bankruptcy - before the inevitable happens, and by that point you’re on the rollercoaster watching a castle fall down, but it was more like a makeshift, straw castle that you never really cared about.
And at the end, you get one final “tragedy” where you as the player will decide one of these stories to rewind and have a chance at a happy ending. Its a distressing attempt at emotional manipulation where the multiple characters will beg you for their lives and futures, but once again…you have no investment in any of these. They’re all 1 dimensional cardboard cuts, all struck by baffling circumstances. You might as well pick at random - for my part I did the one story that angered me the least, the lonely alchemist - but at the end its just one more alternate future for empty characters.
Its by far one of the games I’ve hated playing the most, and a massive stepdown from a developer that made some kickass mobile games before (You Must Build A Boat is still a must have)
Now I kinda want to make a thread for highly rated AAA games that disappointed you…
No Man’s Sky. (boring Sandbox exploration without a soul and very unfun crafting)
When did you play it last? They seem to have a major update every few months. It’s still NMS, just with more stuff every 3-6 months.
I played it for the duration of 2 afternoons a week ago.
If I like exploring and mining, will I like it?
You need to be the kind of person who likes crafting progression in itself. I enjoyed for a good while, chasing better upgrades, building a base and slowly building up a glossary to understand the aliens, but it’s definitely not for everyone, and it’s more wide than it’s deep for sure.
Maybe it’s because I got into it late but I actually liked the exploration between planets. While a lot of them are effectively interchangeable in resources, there’s a lot of interesting environments and creatures that are created by its procedural generation.
One thing that really gets me with that game is that every single planet has only one biome. There are no poles, no jungles, no deserts; it’s just one environment pasted over the entire planet and that feels weirdly wrong and is kind of boring.
I liked it a lot, before they added base-building and all that other stuff that doesn’t align with the game’s original vision.
I really gave the base building a good try, but it did just feel tedious and misplaced. I wish they would expand on npc interactions and the language learning system instead
Terraria, it’s a hot take I think but I just dislike it so much.
I dislike the controls, the appearance, the sorta jank, I just find it to be a more boring Minecraft and Minecraft can already be boring. I don’t understand the love for it and I think it ruined a friendship with a group that really only wanted to play that and league of legends
I don’t dislike Terraria per se, and I highly respect the dedication of both the devs and the community to it.
However, each time I try getting into it, I would make a basic house, spelunk a cave… and then forget about the game for a while. I don’t know why, but I just have trouble with games where you have to set your own goals
Yeah I had no concept of what to do in Terraria.
I am fine with games not telling me what to do cause I love Tunic and Outer Wilds but also there is still a somewhat obvious somewhat linear story available if you want it. The “do it yourself sandbox” games struggle to draw me in fast enough for me to not get bored and confused of learning an entire games worth of mechanics and optimization for no payoff before I put it down. And never pick it back up.
Oh man, I thought I was the only one. I’ve tried to get into it so many times, but I can never enjoy it. I enjoy Minecraft, though.
In other unpopular news, I hate DOTA also. Friends tried to get me into it so many times, and I played a bunch of matches, but found it super overwhelming with all the different heroes and choices and found the entire gameplay boring.
You sound like me lol. Perhaps you’d like Core Keeper? The first game I found that scratches that minecraft itch like no other since I stopped playing minecraft long ago. I found sidescrolling in Terraria no good for me, liking the top down perspective of Core Keeper much more. Just wish you could create more than one storey in a structure somehow. I’m no developer but surely it can be done.
Interesting! Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds pretty co. I’ll definitely check it out
Maybe not the most unfun game I have ever played (I’ve played games since the late 90s), but certainly the most unfun I have played in recent years: Elex.
I liked Piranha Bytes’ old Gothic series a lot despite its weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. The Risen games weren’t that great, but the reviews for Elex were pretty promising. So I gave it a shot, and tried for about 16 hours to find the fun in it. I stopped playing when I realised:
- I couldn’t hold my own in almost any battle because I didn’t have good enough gear
- In order to get better gear, I had to join one of the game’s factions
- In order to join one of the factions, I had to perform a number of tasks for them
- The factions were all just dickheads, and I didn’t want to do anything for them, much less their dirty work
So yeah, no fun to be had with this one.
