Games that you tried so very hard to like.

[Mafoobula]

Batman: Vengeance (Gamecube)
A Batman game with the art style and most of the voices of the 90's animated series. It was supposed to be brilliant.
Except... the controls were god-awful, and everything killed me in very, very short order. For this, and a few other reasons, Batman: Vengeance is likely the single worst game I have ever played.
I'm not even kidding, anyone who has played this awful, awful creation knows that this is not a game, it is a test of a person's will. A test that I, life-long gamer that I am, have failed. I think I might've made it halfway before giving up.
But yes, I really, really wanted to like it. The 90's Batman cartoon was one of the best parts of... the 90's! But then I played it and... ye gods... I became a bitter old man at the age of 16.

SSX: Blur (Wii)
I played SSX: Tricky for the Gamecube, and... well, maybe "played" isn't quite right. I wrestled with it. I struggled with it. Every successful trick, every shortcut taken, every big air, I had to work hard for them. But in the end, it's the closest thing to a sports game that I really, honestly liked. For all the explosive yelling and days wasted, it was the second game I had become addicted to in my entire life.
And then I picked up Blur for the Wii. How perfect is this concept? Use the motion-sensing controls to control your guy! Shoot, the art style was updated a little, everybody looked great, my favorite characters were still there... this was going to be great!
One little problem: The controls didn't *&^%ing work. At. All. At all! And you had best believe I tried to work with them. Turning gently, turning hard, turning the nun-chuck so far this or that way. Nothing doing, my guy still refused to turn at any more than a long, gentle curve. And doing tricks? Best of luck, sparky.
... So much money, wasted. So much potential, wasted.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Half Life 2. Three times I've tried playing through it but I always lost interest. I can tell it is a good and well designed game, but my brain seems hellbent on simply not getting into it. At this point I have pretty much just given up.

Also, Street Fighter 4. Again, I really tried but I just could not get comfortable with it, and there was the niggling feeling that I was just forcing myself to play it to try and get myself to like it. Needless to say that never happened.

chalk up another one for half life, i have tried so so so so many times...but i just can't get into it. I want to, i really do, but sweet jesus if i don't get bored and turn into a zombie napping in my chair within a half hour every time...

fallout 3 vanilla does this to me, once i change the music and add some very neat mods to the game, then it becomes good enough to play, but vanilla annoys me to death.

 

[Rude as HECK]

Fallout New Vegas. Despite having spent so, so many hours on Fallout 3.

Minecraft, but that's my fault for lacking the imagination to play it properly.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

Brutal Legend and Minecraft.

BL, I was super excited about it, and throughout the whole game I was so damn determined to like it. I really did, but the stage battle at the very end killed it for me and was instantly taken out of my PS3 and placed onto my shelf. Maybe some day I will finish it.

Minecraft because I got bored. It's legos in a game, how could I not enjoy it? I mean, I had fun when I first started playing it, but after a while the charm wore off and I couldn't care anymore. I tried building stuff and downloaded mods to have fun, but nothing.

 

[Gorilla Gunk]

Brink. Tried so damn hard to love that game, but it broke my heart.

I also really tried liking the Mass Effect games but they're so stiff and bland.

And MGS2: Sons of Liberty. Got the HD collection and tried for hours to get into that game but the antiquated overhead camera angle just turned everything into a headache. I see no reason why they couldn't have updated it.

 

[babinro]

Final Fantasy Tactics

I'm supposed to love that game. I love 'lesser' wannabees like Gladius and Advanced Wars. I also love the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole. You'd think it would be a match made in heaven yes?

No. The game is terrible. I can't explain why...but I'm overwhelmingly bored with the title despite trying to get into it on 4 separate occasions over the years.

 

[dills2]

skyrim (i like oblivion though)

 

[BarbaricGoose]

Skyrim.

Tried my best, I really did. I loved Oblivion, so I thought I'd love Skyrim, but boy was I wrong.

skyrim (i like oblivion though)

Hey, look at that--we're buddies now!

 

[Diddy_Mao]

Dead Rising, Dead Space and Dragon Age.

I bought each of these on the general agreement from other gamers, critics and (in the case of Dragon Age) friends who said they were good games.

Dead Rising I stopped playing roughly the 5 time I died and had to start over.

Dragon Age I just couldn't get into. For some reason I'm much more critical of Fantasy settings than I am Sci-Fi and nothing about the Dragon Age set up really did anything for me.

Dead Space was a problem of expectation. The Marketing and whatnot had set the game up as "Silent Hill in Space" and what I got was pretty much just DOOM. So it's not so much that Dead Space was a bad game, it's just not what I wanted.

 

[Volstag9]

Darkest of Days.

For those who don't know its a time travel game where you travel to times and places like the American Civil War and gun down Confederates or Unionists with highly advance weapons. Sound like a good concept right? I thought so.

Sadly the game was buggy and unpolished. There were a lot of things wrong with this game but i got so hyped up about it i had to give it a chance. I guess i thought it was ok but it was far from great.

 

[Ddgafd]

White Knight Chronicles. Initially creating my own character sounded good until your sidelined by all the other characters he get the really cool knights and your left shouting hey I was helping you from the start why do I get the crappy new knight? On the other hand because my guy was so ignored I could wash my hands of the stupidity of the other characters when they rescue the princess and gets kidnapped again on 3 different occasions in the same manner. Just wanted to scream ok we killed the boss, saved the princes now lets get out of here before another guy comes along and kidnaps her AGAIN while you stand around patting eachother on the back.

This, pretty much. The "princess gets kidnapped again, oh no!" shtick is a blatant attempt to lengthen the game time, the characters are inept and annoying and the combat has something cool going for it, but it's nowhere near enough to save the entire game. The fact that enemies can hit you from across the map, but you have to walk up to them, is ridiculous.

 

[Jak23]

Borderlands, it's just so bland!

 

[Black Arrow Officer]

I tried SO HARD to get into Dwarf Fortress. I love building colonies and watching them grow and expand. But the interface is so god damn horrible and confusing that 4 hours later I still had no clue what was going on.

I also tried really hard to squeeze any enjoyment out of Saints Row the Third. There was none. The humor was flat and rarely clever, the exploration and customization were stripped, and the story was nonexistent. Massacring cops and gang members in free roam only is fun for so long considering how brain-dead the A.I is. By comparison, starting massacres in Red Dead is actually fun because the game is actually challenging and the A.I is actually acceptable.

 

[Saulkar]

Half Life 2. Three times I've tried playing through it but I always lost interest. I can tell it is a good and well designed game, but my brain seems hellbent on simply not getting into it. At this point I have pretty much just given up.

Also, Street Fighter 4. Again, I really tried but I just could not get comfortable with it, and there was the niggling feeling that I was just forcing myself to play it to try and get myself to like it. Needless to say that never happened.

Here! Here! Half Life 2 was built like a brick, solid and unrelenting. I never once had a single quirk or glitch but the game never clicked! Like a brick I could not break through the entry barrier. It is just too old with game mechanics that were copied over and I experienced in other games. It just does not have anything unique about it that will entice players from this generation to go back and play it. It has solid gamelpay and a great plot but nothing really genre defining post 8 year release.

Another game is Morrowind, I keep coming back to that ***** but I cannot break into it. Even with 50+ mods enhancing it, I just cannot get past the first half and hour. But I am still trying!!!

 

[Mausthemighty]

Gears of War and Bioshock. I have both games installed on my pc right now, but every time I start them, I stop after five minutes to play more Skyrim, Arkham City or Mass Effect 3. They just don't do it for me. I find Gears of War a generic cover based shooter with too many machos in it, and Bioshock is too damn slow. Which is weird because I play 'slow' RPG's all the time...

 

[JasonKaotic]

I'm just going to be lazy and go with my most recent one, Final Fantasy II. I've heard some of the story about the Emperor and stuff already (no big spoilers or anything) and to me the story sounds really interesting, but the gameplay is just... wow. To say frustrating would be a horrifying understatement. The encounter rate is ridiculous, there's far too much EXP grinding needed, dungeons are too damn long (and they take the piss - I got at least an hour into a mine I have to reach the end of as part of the story, only to find a chest that happened to have a monster inside that I had no chance at all of killing. And the last chance I'd had to save was just outside the mine. At least an hour before. I'd say about an hour and a half before. Thanks FFII.) and argh. But seriously, a medium-length path that would take you about 10 seconds to walk across will take you at least 10 minutes because of the damn encounter rate, and the chance of successfully fleeing from combat is staggeringly low. Plus the battle theme on the Origins version is really annoying to hear over and over again which makes it that much worse.
Despite all this I'm probably going to play it again soon. Brain, you disappoint me.
Although I'll grant it that for such an old game it has a pretty sweet conversation system. They should've used it in later games.

 

[shadyh8er]

LittleBigPlanet.

I can understand why people like it, and the idea of creating levels is awesome...but that main campaign just KICKED MY ASS!

 

[Unia]

I tried SO HARD to get into Dwarf Fortress. I love building colonies and watching them grow and expand. But the interface is so god damn horrible and confusing that 4 hours later I still had no clue what was going on.

I feel your pain. I had heard stories, I had seen joke charts of the soul-crushing learning curve. Yet I was not prepared to get almost immediately stuck by losing track of my dwarfs. As in, where they were. Then I started wandering if in-game time was even passing. After 30 minutes of bumbling through menus and vast ASCII fields I had found no answers. If a game is harder to get into than a long-winded textbook of metaphysical philosophy, something is amiss.