What's the Pettiest Thing that made you dislike a game?

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

snip

Yeah. I can't even picture in my mind how it would had been to not being able to play with my Game Boy during recess for fear of being mocked (let alone bullied or beaten). It's messed up!

I grew up in a time when 'Geek' culture was not only wrong, it was okay to bully them. I played Magic in grade school and the bullies would steal and tear up my cards, and the teachers were fine with it because it was just a card game.
In Junior high I was caught reading a chaos marine codex in the library during free time and they sent me to the headmaster and a priest because they thought it was a satanist text, despite having painted models in it.
God forbid if anyone learned if you played dungeons and dragons - I have relatives who still think its cult stuff.

So when someone like Felicia Day or Will Wheaton gets praised at Cons and events and get all this celeb hype, all I can think is the people praising them are the same assholes who beat up 'nerds' in the 90s as kids, but now that its hip and profitable to like games, hey we were all always into it too!

Its nothing against Day personally, i'm sure she's a nice enough person. I just hate the happy, bubbly gamer-girl "Hey guys, playing video games is cool now!"
It was always cool, and if these 30 years olds had been honest with themselves 20 years ago, maybe 10 year old me wouldn't have gotten a blackeye for bringing the Ocarina of Time Nintendo manual to school.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

snip

Yeah. I can't even picture in my mind how it would had been to not being able to play with my Game Boy during recess for fear of being mocked (let alone bullied or beaten). It's messed up!

... You had your game boy out during recess and it wasn't stolen from you?! Someone stole my 3DS out of my bag when I went to a Community college for a Auto Cad Certificate!

I grew up in a time when 'Geek' culture was not only wrong, it was okay to bully them. I played Magic in grade school and the bullies would steal and tear up my cards, and the teachers were fine with it because it was just a card game.
In Junior high I was caught reading a chaos marine codex in the library during free time and they sent me to the headmaster and a priest because they thought it was a satanist text, despite having painted models in it.
God forbid if anyone learned if you played dungeons and dragons - I have relatives who still think its cult stuff.

So when someone like Felicia Day or Will Wheaton gets praised at Cons and events and get all this celeb hype, all I can think is the people praising them are the same assholes who beat up 'nerds' in the 90s as kids, but now that its hip and profitable to like games, hey we were all always into it too!

Its nothing against Day personally, i'm sure she's a nice enough person. I just hate the happy, bubbly gamer-girl "Hey guys, playing video games is cool now!"
It was always cool, and if these 30 years olds had been honest with themselves 20 years ago, maybe 10 year old me wouldn't have gotten a blackeye for bringing the Ocarina of Time Nintendo manual to school.

Like, I wanted to clip parts of this, but I couldn't. This is all relevant to how I grew up. If you saw that youtube vid of the 1980's, imagine what it was to be a little kid running around then with a Nintendo T-shirt of Link. Or talking about the games I got for my birthday and christmas.

Not only did no one else have the games, but they thought I was bragging because their families couldn't afford it. And then I became the 'rich' kid. And we were NOT rich. But Upper Middle Class back when that was a thing.

Everyone else only had the playground and basketball to keep themselves interested. And you had to know someone with a ball to play with. I didn't care for basketball. Or sports, really. I liked games. I wanted to play checkers more. Or Chess as my dad taught me. That didn't go over well.

So while everyone was bonded by playing hoops, I just had the... I want to say 'eight' other geeky friends in my complex circle. We couldn't ride bikes because Parkchester back then had a lot of elderly people, so they actually got together and made it illegal to ride a bike due to some old people being hit. Literally, if the cops saw you once, it was a 50 dollar fine. twice, 100 and your bike was taken away (tinted my view of cops real early and I STILL don't know how to ride a bike).

The only thing that saved me from a lot of beatings is that my dad likes horror movies, so we could see horror movies. I could tell them things that I saw on cable (which again, a lot of them didn't have) like all the Nightmare on Elm Streets, Hellraisers, and Halloweens. Oddly enough, that got me the reputation of fearless because there wasn't a horror movie I didn't see.

... and yes, I moved before I could use that reputation to my advantage. Life is a stone cold ***** that doesn't want to see you get ahead.

But the Most Important part of what SilentPony said was this:

I grew up in a time when 'Geek' culture was not only wrong, it was okay to bully them.

I was born in 1980. I still have memories of Teachers encouraging beatings to make 'deviant' kids stop what they were doing and to conform to what was popular and/or acceptable. I remember Teachers advising to stop liking what you like if you didn't want to get beat up. Try to play a sport. Make friends with the bullies on their terms. And if that didn't work, take a martial art class and beat them the hell up.

That, and Channel 5 playing the Kung Fu Movies every Saturday Afternoon is what actually got me into Martial Arts.

 

[CaitSeith]

snip

I don't know what to say. Maybe it was because I was attending to a private school. Maybe it was because I didn't live in the USA; and some things considered nerdy in America were a little more mainstream there (thanks specially to free-to-air channels broadcasting dubbed anime, and local markets selling cheap Famicom knock-off consoles with adapters to play NES games). Still, I see really unfair that many people were harassed by their peers and their teachers back when they were just kids because of their tastes and hobbies. Even if I almost never got bullied, I don't sympathize with bullies.

EDIT: Oh, yeah! I took preventive measures to never let my Game Boy out of my sight (like keeping it inside of my jacket, instead of my backpack).

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Any time Felicia Day is in a video game, I immediately ignore/dislike her character. Its not her voice, that's fine. Its her IRL persona of the 'Geek girl' who can only talk about Fallout or Star Wars.

For 40 years any dude who only wanted to talk 'nerd' culture was considered immature, a man-baby, bunch of other things. But suddenly an attractive woman does it and she's a Living Saint?! Plus I find the whole act to be just that, an act. Not that she's not a real fan, but she's deliberately hamming it up for attention and nerd cred. And that makes me feel manipulated, and that in turn makes me annoyed.

Ok, this is a sidebar story.

Being a geek back in the day was bad, but being a black geek in the Bronx was almost literally life and death. You show weakness, and they will pounce on you.

Back then, my brother (who is older than me) hid it better. He said he was buying those comics for me. He wasn't, but I definitely read all of his comics growing up. Did he know? That's another topic. But I know how to place things back perfectly for some reason.

He collected Wonder Woman because he liked how she looked. I just liked the comics. And it was not a fun time going to the comic shop buying my own comics with Wonder Woman being in the pile. I took a page from my brother and lied, saying it was for my sister. The New Mutants (then eventually X-Force), X-Men, and sometimes Alpha Flight were my comics.

Fast forward to when they had the Women-only Wonder Woman screenings. And having a female friend telling me that it's perfectly ok that happened. I could have easily gotten beaten up for being a fan of Wonder Woman, but I was. I paid money to be apart of that world when it was actually dangerous for me. And then I'm being told by people who actually know nothing but the Mythos that it's ok that me as a lifelong fan was excluded because I happen to be a dude?

Anyway, more to your point, I never got why people were so into Day as it was. I knew she had a web series, I tried to watch it and all I did was Cringe.

Now that you mentioned it, I do have an issue seeing a new character in video games or whatever geek media and realizing "Oh, this is what the female Cosplayers are all going to dress like next year..."

It sounds like you guys grew up in sucky places. Video games were one of those things that seemed to interest pretty much all the guys when I was in school, even middle school, which was a bullshit place. Really the only time I can ever remember being made fun of for anything regarding it was when one of my friends decided that KKnD sounded like kkk and started mocking it after I told him about the game.

Either-way you guys might want to be careful of gate-keeping nerdom, I don't think its intentional but both of you sound a bit like you're trying to say that she didn't have to earn her nerd cred the way you too did so shes not worthy. Again, I don't think either of you are making that statement, but it sounds like you might be inadvertently saying that.

Oh no, im not saying she has to earn nerd credit the violent ways, I'm saying I'm completely unimpressed with her 'I'm a Nerd, isn't that cool now?!' persona.
It always feels like the subtext is that now its okay to be a nerd. Now that cute white girls like it, Society will approve of it. As if we were wrong to be nerds before she and others like her came froward to give us their stamp of approval.

 

[Hawki]

Thank God, when 4 came out, the true ending of that game and the plot of 5 hinted/implied that they were ending that sub-plot.

Wait, you could understand what the hell was going on in DoA 4?

I played through all the characters' stories (using the broadest definition of the word) and even I only got the barest of hints and implications.

 

[Hawki]

Anyway, the question...this is hard to answer, because I can't really think of any one single thing that made me dislike a game. I mean, there's plenty of stuff I might dislike, but I'd like to think those aren't petty reasons, and even if they were, it's not a case of "I dislike this thing, ergo I dislike the game."

The closest things I can think of are:

-Gears of War: Judgement

So, in the game, you can take on extra difficulty settings, like, decreased vision, or no regenerating health. The in-universe explanation is that these factors were sealed by the COG. However, why? Why cover up reports that stated that Kilo Squad was so tired they couldn't regenerate health, or, visibility was low at this point in time? I can understand some, like a Hammer of Dawn strike going off-course, but the in-universe explanation makes no sense for what's otherwise a gimmick.

-Half-Life 2: Episode 1

So, I'm not a Half-Life fan, but of all the things that I dislike about Ep. 1, one of them is at the end. Towards the end, when you're in the train yard, helping refugees escape, you see a group of Combine soldiers coming towards you. As City 17 is on the verge of being destroyed, my first thought was "hey, maybe they're trying to escape with us. Maybe the game will try and introduce moral complexity of people who turned their back on humanity, but now want to join the Resistance. I mean, up till a few hours ago, there was no reason to suggest that humanity had any hope against the Combine. Maybe this is going to lead to something interesting...

...or not, as they just start firing, and I'm forced to kill them. Yay...

-Mass Effect: Andromeda

The kett. Just the entire way they're handled. I'm calling this petty because the game's under no obligation to treat them and the angara in a given way, and you could say that I'm setting a double standard for the lack of moral ambiguity in ME1. But you know how I feel about the kett on the "currently playing" thread, and, yeah. I still think the game's narrative shot itself in the foot here.

-Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

This is the closest example that meets the criteria. Now, I really dislike this game, even if there's far worse STH games in the series. That I dislike it this much because of its story/lore is arguably weird, because I've let other games get away with worse, but that this was from BioWare after ME1, coupled with Ken Penders being a douche, made it all the worst. But what got me to stop playing after all these frustrations was towards the end where you see two gizoids show up. Yep, turns out Emerl wasn't the only gizoid, and they're just off the assembly line. Because that totally doesn't undercut the plot of Sonic Battle at all (sarcasm). At this point I gave up, because I couldn't take the constant barrage of nonsense anymore. More fool me, because turns out I was actually quite close to the end.

-World of Warcraft

I'll always have some dislike for this game, because no matter its quality/lack of it, its mere existence is part of the reason why we'll almost certainly never get a Warcraft IV.

 

[Lufia Erim]

The Entire Dragon quest series.I absolutely hate the artstyle. All the characters look like Dragonball characters and it's jarring. I know the Art director is the guy who made Dragonball but holy hell, there's like zero variation. It's like he learned one skill and has been coasting through on that alone.

I realise it's petty,and pretty much no one has that same gripe, but i cannot for the life of me play those games. I bougt DQ11 ( on sale for PS4) finished it, and vowed never to touch another one until the artstyle changes.

 

[BrawlMan]

Thank God, when 4 came out, the true ending of that game and the plot of 5 hinted/implied that they were ending that sub-plot.

Wait, you could understand what the hell was going on in DoA 4?

I played through all the characters' stories (using the broadest definition of the word) and even I only got the barest of hints and implications.

I found it easy to follow back in 2008. 5 & 6 (from what I heard) more or less resolve the Kasumi/Ayane feud and the whole my entire clan is trying to kill me for breaking some arbitrary rule. It's a plot line that mainly went nowhere since DOA2. But not as obnoxious as the Mishima feud in Tekken.

 

[Dalisclock]

Dragon Age 1. I dropped it after learning Morrigan is the only offensive mage in the game. I hated her attitude and her commenting on my every decision in a snarky way.

https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comicsandcosplay/comics/stolen-pixels/6864-Stolen-Pixels-149-Approval-Ratings

Says it all, really. Kreia in KOTOR 2 was much the same way, but Morrigan was far more obnoxious about it.

 

[Kyrian007]

As someone who has spent 20 years with a gaming chair that has built in speakers and a big subwoofer... audio is important to me. But I admit it can easily be seen as petty. So when my roommate picked up Borderlands 2 I was massively disappointed. I was used to Perfect Dark and the satisfying roar of the DY357 Magnum, the deep metallic throng of Maian weapons... even the satisfying wet thwack of a bolt or knife hitting its mark. Borderlands 1 had pretty decently satisfying sounds, with the exception of pistols that just made a sickly dull phut phut wheeze. So when even the revolvers made apologetic polite muffled coughs in BL 2 I was seriously disappointed.

 

[Casual Shinji]

It sounds like you guys grew up in sucky places. Video games were one of those things that seemed to interest pretty much all the guys when I was in school, even middle school, which was a bullshit place. Really the only time I can ever remember being made fun of for anything regarding it was when one of my friends decided that KKnD sounded like kkk and started mocking it after I told him about the game.

I never experienced any issues with it either. I used to talk Tekken, Tomb Raider, and Spyro with friends all the time, and the worst we got was the occasional scoff from some kids we didn't know anyway. I did get bullied, but it was never for liking/talking videogames. But then the whole social system in schools from my country is likely different from American schools. There's zero emphasis on sports here for example, other than just keeping kids in a healthy condition. I don't know how big that is in America, but it's certainly bigger there than it is over here.

 

[Yoshi178]

when i disliked TLOU 2 because they lied when they said the first one was the last of them but it wasn't. :3

 

[Hawki]

Since others have commented on it, I will admit that there was no stigma against being a nerd during my school years. Everyone was engulfed in the Pokemon craze (similar to how kids are wrapped up in Minecraft and Fortnite today), but even before and after that, it was common to discuss videogames and other stuff without any issues (Warhammer was a thing as well). The only stuff I remember that came close to that was Magic: The Gathering (I never played, but I didn't mock people for doing so) and I was teased for reading Sonic comics, but that was more because of the character rather than the act of reading comics in of itself. Honestly, the only stigma for those things at the time came from adults.

 

[SckizoBoy]

Sleeping Dogs... 'cos the main character doesn't speak Cantonese at any point. It's a good game and I had fun (for the most part, the PC controls can be frustrating at times), but the prevalence of Honglish had me check something and sigh with faint disappointment that the MC was voiced by a Korean-American.

 

[Dalisclock]

when i disliked TLOU 2 because they lied when they said the first one was the last of them but it wasn't. :3

That joke wasn't funny the first time and it's less funny every time you repeat it.

 

[Squilookle]

As someone who has spent 20 years with a gaming chair that has built in speakers and a big subwoofer... audio is important to me. But I admit it can easily be seen as petty. So when my roommate picked up Borderlands 2 I was massively disappointed. I was used to Perfect Dark and the satisfying roar of the DY357 Magnum, the deep metallic throng of Maian weapons... even the satisfying wet thwack of a bolt or knife hitting its mark. Borderlands 1 had pretty decently satisfying sounds, with the exception of pistols that just made a sickly dull phut phut wheeze. So when even the revolvers made apologetic polite muffled coughs in BL 2 I was seriously disappointed.

I know exactly what you mean. If you have access to it- you should really give Black (2005) a try. You won't be disappointed in the weapon sound department, that's for sure.

On a semi-related note I just got my hands on Goldeneye X- probably the best Perfect Dark Mod I've ever seen:

 

[Dalisclock]

Final Fantasy X, mostly due to Titus being an obnoxious, whiney shit with giant daddy issues. I realize that's supposed to be his character for the first part of the game, but it doesn't make him any less annoying.

As I said in another thread, it's much like Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. I realize he's supposed to be a whiney, annoying teenager, but I still have a overwhelming urge to punch him in the mouth just to get him to shut up for 5 minutes.

The game itself, otherwise, isn't bad, even if I would have liked the world to be fleshed out a little more.

 

[Xprimentyl]

I bought my Sega Genesis because of the Sonic series, but I didn?t like Sonic CD for the simple fact that, after the [then] incredible intro video (below, still makes me smile) the game wasn?t much different than the previous 16-bit titles. Mind you, it was perfectly serviceable as a 2D Sonic game, but in my 13-year-old mind, ?this is Sonic CD!! We?re working with 32 bits, baby! Wow me!? And it didn?t really. I don?t know what I expected; had that game been on a cartridge, I would have loved it, but because it came on a CD, meh.

 

[votemarvel]

when i disliked TLOU 2 because they lied when they said the first one was the last of them but it wasn't. :3

That joke wasn't funny the first time and it's less funny every time you repeat it.

Perhaps he's suing the makers of the Neverending Story because it actually finished.

My pick would probably be Alan Wake. For a title that was supposed to be filled with tension it sure did telegraph everything, even going to the lengths of panning the camera around to show you exactly where all the enemies were coming from.

 

[BrawlMan]

I bought my Sega Genesis because of the Sonic series, but I didn?t like Sonic CD for the simple fact that, after the [then] incredible intro video (below, still makes me smile) the game wasn?t much different than the previous 16-bit titles. Mind you, it was perfectly serviceable as a 2D Sonic game, but in my 13-year-old mind, ?this is Sonic CD!! We?re working with 32 bits, baby! Wow me!? And it didn?t really. I don?t know what I expected; had that game been on a cartridge, I would have loved it, but because it came on a CD, meh.

What sold Sonic CD is the time traveling and soundtrack (mainly the Japanese/EU version, but I like the US version too). Otherwise, it's Sonic 1.5 with more exploration and less emphasis on speed. Sonic CD was one of those games that got way too much praise or over glorification from certain fans.

when i disliked TLOU 2 because they lied when they said the first one was the last of them but it wasn't. :3

That joke wasn't funny the first time and it's less funny every time you repeat it.

Perhaps he's suing the makers of the Neverending Story because it actually finished.

My pick would probably be Alan Wake. For a title that was supposed to be filled with tension it sure did telegraph everything, even going to the lengths of panning the camera around to show you exactly where all the enemies were coming from.

While Alan Wake was not scary, it did have some tense moments and a jump scare that got me. When you think about it, Alan Wake was kinda of Remedy's take on the RE4 formula, just with darkness possessed people instead of parasites. All the more ironic, because of Shadows of the Damned came out two years later and is a 3rd person shooter with a light vs. darkness theme too. One thing Shadows had over Alan was enemy variety and some legit scarier moments by comparison.