Games you sincerely wished you could enjoy, but just couldn't get into them

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rgrekejin

Senior Member
Mar 6, 2011
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Yes, several:

Bioshock: I honestly can't tell you what it is about this game I didn't like. I played it start to finish, and my reaction never rose above a bemused 'meh'. I mean, it looked good, the story was decent, and the it played well (although the animations for the plasmids all felt slightly cut-rate to me, but it wasn't that big a deal). Just... something about this game rubbed me the wrong way. It seems like a good game, and I have no real defense for my position that it's not other than that I simply did not enjoy playing it. I wish I could see what all the fuss is about.

Morrowind: My principle complain about Morrowind was that the controls always felt vaguely broken, especially with how the collision detection vs. damage was determined for melee weapons in the game. Oblivion, I though, handled it much better, making your skill with a given weapon indicative of how much damage you did rather than whether or not you hit. It's been a long time since I played Morrowind, so maybe my other gripes were more specific at the time, but it was just immensely frustrating, as I could tell, somewhere, beneath this veneer of bad control and uninspiring graphics, there is a pretty decent storyline, but I'll never find out what it is, because I can't get over the half-broken skill system. Years later I played Oblivion and loved it. Wish I could have gotten in to Morrowind, too, but I couldn't.

Dead Rising: This one is... more of a technical issue than anything else. I own a 360. I do not own an HDTV. Apparently, when played on a standard TV, the text notices on the bottom of the screen in Dead Rising are rendered in such a tiny, blurry, unreadable font that it is literally impossible for the game to communicate with me by non-verbal methods. This could be fixed if I could go out and get an HDTV... but I just don't have the money for that. So for not, this game will remain inaccessible to me, all because I can't... read... the in-game text! ...oh, and Frank West walks annoyingly slowly.
 

quinch

New member
May 26, 2010
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Hmm. Let's see.

Master of Orion 3. At first sight, I loved it. Cool-looking races, really well-done intro cinematic, detailed backstory, the ability to design my own ships, the whole hysperspace lane movement mode which is, let's be honest, pretty unique... and then I spent a few weeks futzing around with it before I realized, that... no. I wasn't playing it wrong.

Fallout 2: Good characters, improved gameplay, bigger world than the original... but the plot was a shitty copypaste of the first Fallout, and writing that was buried under an avalanche of contemporary pop culture references just made me feel I was playing a rousing game of "guess what movie the developers watched the night before".

Undying: Fucking. Scary. Except the dialogue... who wrote this disjointed crap? I can't help but think they hired whoever did the writing/translation from Final Fantasy 7. That the atmosphere got progressively shallower around the half-game mark didn't help the end result either.

System Shock 2: Just too damn hard. I don't mind a challenge, but there's a difference between "challenging" and "murderous".

Arkham Asylum: Too many distractions for collectables and extras hammered away any attempt to immerse myself into the gameplay and story. The increasing lack of stealth-based sequences as opposed to run-of-the-mill beatdowns gradually made slogging through it monotonous. The Ivy-overgrown Arkham part just sealed the deal.

Morrowind: The hassle involved in finding out just who has quests to give you instead of background information you've heard three bajillion times before made the game a chore rather than an adventure.

Grim Fandango: The controls. God DAMN it, the controls!

PoP: SoT and TWW: Constant harrassment and death at the hands of that one boss... haunting you, taunting you, always snickering as he hovers in midair, blinding you every chance he gets. And there is no catharsis... you never get to fight and kill the god-damn sadistic monster that manhandles the camera.
 

Denamic

New member
Aug 19, 2009
3,804
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Monster Hunter.
I SHOULD like it.
It's my type of OCD fodder.
But I just fail at getting into it.
 

righthead

New member
Sep 3, 2009
175
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Most of the Fable games, although the reason may have more to do with the fact that I'm either borrowing them, or playing them on an underspeced computer and nothing really to do with the actual gameplay.
 

Laurie Barnes

New member
May 19, 2010
326
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Mass Effect.
Mass Effect 2.
Dragonage: Origin.

Final Fantasy-Any of them really.

I will readily admit these were all awesome games. I just don't enjoy their style. I prefer games where you are more directly involved in combat, and where player skill is more important than having high stats or a better weapon.
 

dolgion

New member
Nov 20, 2010
264
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quinch said:
Hmm. Let's see.

Master of Orion 3. At first sight, I loved it. Cool-looking races, really well-done intro cinematic, detailed backstory, the ability to design my own ships, the whole hysperspace lane movement mode which is, let's be honest, pretty unique... and then I spent a few weeks futzing around with it before I realized, that... no. I wasn't playing it wrong.

Fallout 2: Good characters, improved gameplay, bigger world than the original... but the plot was a shitty copypaste of the first Fallout, and writing that was buried under an avalanche of contemporary pop culture references just made me feel I was playing a rousing game of "guess what movie the developers watched the night before".

Undying: Fucking. Scary. Except the dialogue... who wrote this disjointed crap? I can't help but think they hired whoever did the writing/translation from Final Fantasy 7. That the atmosphere got progressively shallower around the half-game mark didn't help the end result either.

System Shock 2: Just too damn hard. I don't mind a challenge, but there's a difference between "challenging" and "murderous".

Arkham Asylum: Too many distractions for collectables and extras hammered away any attempt to immerse myself into the gameplay and story. The increasing lack of stealth-based sequences as opposed to run-of-the-mill beatdowns gradually made slogging through it monotonous. The Ivy-overgrown Arkham part just sealed the deal.

Morrowind: The hassle involved in finding out just who has quests to give you instead of background information you've heard three bajillion times before made the game a chore rather than an adventure.

Grim Fandango: The controls. God DAMN it, the controls!

PoP: SoT and TWW: Constant harrassment and death at the hands of that one boss... haunting you, taunting you, always snickering as he hovers in midair, blinding you every chance he gets. And there is no catharsis... you never get to fight and kill the god-damn sadistic monster that manhandles the camera.

Please please please please I BEG of you please give Grim Fandango a real try. I had the same problem. I was like "WTF, a point-and-click adventure where you can't point and click?" and I would be running like a drunken dude around the environments. Just do you best and memorize the control scheme, be patient. You'll get used to it. And when that happens, you'll be able to actually notice the great characters in the game and their morbid humor.The puzzles are alright i guess, but the story and the events and all are just so unique and refreshingly grown-up compared to the usual crap out there. I totally fell in love with the game once I got used to the controls
 

DaGoomba

New member
Aug 2, 2010
25
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Final Fantasy X-2.

I am a huge fan of Final Fantasy X. (In my opinion, one of the BEST games for PS2) After beating the game, I decided to give Final Fantasy X-2 a try. BIGGEST MISTAKE EVER. In less that an hour, all the fun I had in FFX was reduced to the level of riding the town bicycle. I tried to like it, but I hated it. I hated my PS2 for running the game, I hated GameStop for selling it to me, I hated SquareEnix for ruining a good game, and I hated myself for playing it.
 

THAC0

New member
Aug 12, 2009
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Dragon Age. I should have liked it. I wanted to like it. I didn't like it.

I loved leveling up my dudes, i loved setting up their strategies.

I didn't enjoy anything beyond that.
 

quinch

New member
May 26, 2010
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dolgion said:
Please please please please I BEG of you please give Grim Fandango a real try.
I played it. I finished it. It is, by any standard save for gameplay, a masterpiece. I just couldn't enjoy it in the process, and it's unfortunately on my list of games to never play again because of it.
 

DJ_DEnM

My brother answers too!
Dec 22, 2010
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Fallout 3. I wanted to see what all my friends were talking about, I rented it and didnt see what was so great about it.
 

Hemlet

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Jul 31, 2009
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Mirrors Edge was a big one for me. I tried to like it. I tried really, really, REALLY hard to like it, but when all was said and done and I had played through the entirety of the game several times in a futile attempt to finally catch that "this game is awesome" moment...how do I put this? Oh yes: whenever I'm playing a game, and the person I'm controlling does something very stupid that I most certainly did NOT want them to do, I call that a "Faith moment". In short, the game was just too damn frustrating.

Bioshock 2. Again, I tried really goddamn hard to like this game, but the game somehow managed to be too hard and too easy at the same time. Too easy in that I would go through entire set piece fights without firing a shot or swinging my drill and neatly murder everything in sight. Too hard because I just always felt like I was just being absolutely barraged by splicers all the fucking time with no room to breath.
And then there came the time where I found out the Chameleon gene tonic could really only reliably be gotten in the last three levels of the game unless you grind it out of one specific area way earlier on. Then I found out that the Chameleon gene tonic is bugged and will simply not work for either one or all of the last three levels, depending on how the game felt at the moment.
 

Gaiseric

New member
Sep 21, 2008
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Oblivion
Fallout: New Vegas
Dragon Age
Gears of War
All good games in their own right. But there was just too many little issues or things that didn't feel right.
 

dolgion

New member
Nov 20, 2010
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quinch said:
dolgion said:
Please please please please I BEG of you please give Grim Fandango a real try.
I played it. I finished it. It is, by any standard save for gameplay, a masterpiece. I just couldn't enjoy it in the process, and it's unfortunately on my list of games to never play again because of it.
Well then, the only way to really enjoy it I think would be to play together with somebody who doesn't mind the controls that much. So you get to still think about the puzzle and experience the plot and characters without having to get frustrated by the controls.
 

quinch

New member
May 26, 2010
8
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dolgion said:
quinch said:
dolgion said:
Please please please please I BEG of you please give Grim Fandango a real try.
I played it. I finished it. It is, by any standard save for gameplay, a masterpiece. I just couldn't enjoy it in the process, and it's unfortunately on my list of games to never play again because of it.
Well then, the only way to really enjoy it I think would be to play together with somebody who doesn't mind the controls that much. So you get to still think about the puzzle and experience the plot and characters without having to get frustrated by the controls.
What, play? With... other people? Are you INSANE?!

Aaanyhow, maybe I'll look up a Let's Play of it one of these days.
 

dolgion

New member
Nov 20, 2010
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quinch said:
dolgion said:
quinch said:
dolgion said:
Please please please please I BEG of you please give Grim Fandango a real try.
I played it. I finished it. It is, by any standard save for gameplay, a masterpiece. I just couldn't enjoy it in the process, and it's unfortunately on my list of games to never play again because of it.
Well then, the only way to really enjoy it I think would be to play together with somebody who doesn't mind the controls that much. So you get to still think about the puzzle and experience the plot and characters without having to get frustrated by the controls.
What, play? With... other people? Are you INSANE?!

Aaanyhow, maybe I'll look up a Let's Play of it one of these days.
Sounds like a good idea. Anyway, it's really kinda sad for a game if it would be more enjoyable to watch a let's play than to actually play it LOL
 

Shadowtek

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Jul 30, 2008
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deus ex, just couldnt get into it.
Oblivion, Constant problems with bugginess and glitches completely ruined it.
Many others actually. I just cant get into some games.
 

captaincabbage

New member
Apr 8, 2010
3,149
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Mass Effect. I really, really tried to like it, but I just couldn't get invested in the gameworld or characters. the same happened with Dragon Age.
 

ScourgeOfHell

New member
Mar 5, 2011
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Im sure Mass D-efect is a wonderful game, but i just cant play it without puking at the way shepherd runs