Speculate about why a certain game doesn't 'click' for you.

[Demondaze]

Assassin's Creed the First.

I find it too formulaic and repetitive; and certain things in the game just anger and frustrate me. "Ahoy, fellow guard, look, here comes a man galloping on his horse in the wilderness. He travels at such speed, surely he MUST be up to no good. Let us attack him."

Very little in the gameplay felt natural... it was like a lot of not-terribly-fun elements tacked together flowing very poorly from one to the other. Ride horse (but not too quickly or the guards will have at you!), get mission, mess up, have guards irritate the hell out of you while you fumble about looking for a convenient gaggle of similarly dressed monks to blend in with, return to mission, clear mission, repeat. And despite the huge environments, there was no real freedom to do anything with that scale.

I haven't played the sequel, but I hear its a vast improvement. I'm just not sure I want to risk the potential boredom of trying it.

 

[GrinningManiac]

Napoleon Total War

You'd think after the trainwreck of Empire (following all the undeserved hype it got pre-release), NTW would be insanely good because they nailed all the concepts they wanted in ETW, right?

But it was stale, so very stale. Every time I played a campaign, I knew exactly how it would pan out. France would take all of Austria, whereupon Russia would step in but be pushed back, then Britain would take Spain and start taking bits of south France, then France would end up not owning any parts of France but would move east until it hit the dead-end at the end of Russia and Britain eventually swamped it, the end.

I went back to ETW and grabbed a massive mod by Darth. The mod was doubly impressive, because not only did it make ETW the insanely brilliant game it was meant to be, it also did this despite the developers having slowly made their games mod-unfriendly in recent times

But yeah, to me, ETW was an arist who did a big painting of a flower in a new style. People liked the intention, but the guy hadn't done it right. So he 're-releases' the flower, but instead he does it really small and blandly.

 

[The Random One]

I don't need to speculate, I know exactly why I disliked some of the later classics.

GTAIV had horrible, horrible, horrible gameplay and stepped away from the zaniness that made the earlier games in the series appealing. If GTA wasn't the behemoth it is it would have gotten major flack for the whole 'hold A to run, tap A to run fast' thing. Those stick thingies you see on controllers can tell how far they're pushed, you know.

Half-Life 2 just has plain bad game design. And the back of the box tells you it's 'puzzle-based' gameplay so when you're stuck you think you're SOLVING TEH PUZZLE when you're just STUCK IN A POORLY DESIGNED LEVEL WHERE THE EXITS ARE UNCLEAR. I think HL2 is the latest game in which that has happened to me, and the only one made in a year beginning with 2. And the live cutscenes are cool exactly once and then you can't skip them.

Resident Evil 5 shouldn't have an option to play alone. Or at least if you did should get rid of your braindead partnah.

And, of course, I don't like Urban Dead [http://www.urbandead.com/] because it has reached the balance between Achievers and Killers predicted by Bartle [http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm] and I, being an Explorer, don't fit in.