I wouldn't necessarily say unfun, but "not for me". Stardew Valley. I went in ready to relax and farm, but oh God, time moves quickly! And I only have limited energy per day. That wombo combo when I was starting out just stressed me out and I didn't get into it immediately.
I know there are mods for it or that it's a good game even with the time, but out of all possible farming type games there were plenty more my speed than Stardew.
The first days are indeed really short. You have to upgrade your tools and your player to have days long enough to explore. It is still a limiting factor for big explorations. You have to pack your stuff. I can understand that it can be unfun.
I wasn’t interested in it at all but then my partner (who has played it a ton) and I started a co-op game. Stardew is way easier and plain more fun if you’re playing it with someone else.
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 an invisible wall broken down bus. It was so egregious I got annoyed and went outside.
MLB: The Show. I used to really enjoy these games because they felt like a sports game that actually cared about making a very realistic simulation while still keeping it fun. Now everything is about Diamond Dynasty, the fantasy baseball mode. All the other modes only reward you by giving you packs and giving you a gentle shove into Diamond Dynasty. One of my favorite modes was “March to October” where you play select innings in select games over the course of a whole season. Each game’s outcome determines your team’s general ability over the season. The better you do, the better you win rate and the higher chance of making it into the post season. Your rewards? Card packs. SMH.
Ghostrunner. The levels were fun and had big Hotline Miami vibes but the boss fights were far too difficult and just utterly boring. Yeah, I really liked wall running in circles for minutes on end because the floor was lava. That was great.
Atomic Heart. Bought it on a whim while high. I liked the bioshock influence and the level design is really cool. It just suffers from being a “survival horror” without the survival or the horror, so most of the gameplay involves you scrounging around for bullets and then dealing ultra light blows to enemies because you ran out of your 3 bullets. Pretty much none of the combat was fun and the stealth was a relentless ultra punishing slog. As a lover of stealth games, please if you’re considering making a stealth game do not take any notes from this game. It did it all wrong.
Dying Light 2. I loved the first game but this game just sorta felt overwhelming in a way? I really don’t know how else to put it. I like open world games but developers just need to calm the fuck down. I don’t need 10 map markers.
The Quarry. I get that it’s supposed to be a rip on teen slasher movies but that still didn’t make it very fun to me. I loved Until Dawn and played it probably 5 times so I was super hyped for this but just really let down. I hated the way the game ended and I hated pretty much every second that I played it.
The Hunter: Call of the Wild. It was just boring. I guess that’s what hunting is like in real life, but so is truck driving and I like truck simulator games…
In recent memory the two that have stood out to me are Risk of Rain 2 and Halo 4. I thought some 3rd-person action in the former would be fun but I found the core loop and overall shooting boring after a couple run attempts so I guess it just didn’t click for me.
Now Halo 4… I think gameplay in that title is an exercise in tedium. Add on (what is in my opinion as:) poor AI, a bit too much melodrama, dumb retcons, “do X three times!” a bit much and I got a campaign that felt like a chore and haven’t touched it since I left off at the level with the Mammoth. The Prometheans are a pain to fight and I felt funneled into making do with Forerunner weapons to take ranged potshots at Watchers above all other targets and then rushing to kill the one Knight I was targeting before it regenerates, also above all other targets. Yuck. (Update: Coming back here since it occurred to me that I could sum it up as: my ability to make mid-combat decisions and play in the sandbox was kneecapped by poor enemy and maaaybe level design respectively.)
I tried playing Blasphemous recently and had to drop it in a couple hours. I might’ve stuck with it had I tried it when I was younger but I’ve discovered that nowadays I don’t have the patience to play games that require you to beat your head against a brick wall until it breaks. So many frustrating enemy placements and insta-kill spikes, the movement is slow, the combat is unsatisfying, I just didn’t feel like I had much incentive to continue playing (minus the art style which is absolutely gorgeous).
I felt this with Elden ring. Once I got past the starting area, it just felt like everywhere I went I’d find enemies that kill me in 1-2 hits if I made one wrong or mistimed move. I wish I had the skill or patience to get through it, but I just found it too time consuming to try those tough enemies again and again. Definitely may just be a skill issue on my part, so I don’t necessarily want to dissuade others from giving it a shot.
That’s the point of the game. It’s definitely not an easy game, but it is the easiest game of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring series. And it’s okay if that’s not for you! It requires a different approach than your usual hack-and-slash game, and that’s certainly not for everyone.
I don’t know I had relatively little problem with Dark Souls 1 and 2, so I don’t get the people saying it’s the easiest game in the series. Something about the combat just didn’t mesh with me. No big deal though.
I began playing it after so much praise from all over the place and it just uses predatory tactics to hook the gamer. I only had fun with the game for maybe a day or so but overall clocked in many more hours of hate-playing. The only good thing is that the developer (who's background is developing gambling games) does not use those tactics for microtransactions.
Once I deleted the game, I was never even tempted to go back.
Really? I guess you could consider the game’s visual flair to be predatory that way but I always felt that stuff was a joke because it doesn’t have microtransactions
Predatory usually implies that you’re being lured in to buy something, but the game has no microtransactions. At its worst the mobile version (which is free) has the option to watch an ad to get 1 revive per run. Don’t watch the ad? The game is the same as the console/PC version.
I think the lights, sounds, slaughtering massive hordes of enemies with overwhelming damage, and constant dopamine rush from them could certainly be predatory in nature if they were used to bait you into buying microtransactions, but that’s not the case here. I see where they’re coming from, but I can’t necessarily agree.
What’s the difference between predatory tactics to hook people into a game, and “normal” gameplay, whatever that is? If neither cost any money or have microtransactions in any way?
Is Diablo 2 using predatory mechanics? Is Counter Strike? Is Factorio?
Games are artificial constructs. If you deconstruct them entirely, unless they got some story to tell as the center point of the game, their mechanics and goals are entirely artificial and constructed to get you to keep playing, be engaged, and have fun, whatever that means and implies.
Because, well, in the end, games do not have a grand purpose. Their purpose is entertainment(or be art, but not all games have that goal). And so if vampire survivors keep you engaged and enjoy the game… Is that really that much different to other games? Another example to this are idle/incremental games, as a pure distillation of what games are. Are they predatory? Is there really much difference from the very core of other, more “proper”, games?
A game can offer an experience that leaves the player feeling satisfied or at least content with how they spent their time. There is a large space of possible interactive experiences that extend far beyond the simple dichotomy of fun vs educational or productive.
A game can certainly be considered predatory if it exploits psychological vulnerabilities to hook someone on engaging gameplay that gives the player very little in return in terms of fulfillment or mental recovery. Whether or not it takes the opportunity to swindle the player on top of that is a matter of degree in severity. Wasting a player’s time (or worse, induce stress or other harmful mental states for no good reason) is not a particularly nice thing to do.
Sure, he worked in the sector, but that’s because he couldn’t find better jobs. What you’re implying here is really unfair, especially considering there aren’t even any microtransactions in the game. As far as I know, he just made a game that he felt was fun.
I found spelunky to be a game not fitting for me at all. I really wanted to like it, but I found myself to be unmotivated when I kept losing and didn’t feel like making more skillwise progress. I might just suck, but I just don’t feel like playing that punishing roguelikes.
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
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.
We had a few cartridges for our Colecovision that I could never figure out how to get to do anything very game-like. I don’t really remember the names of the bad ones. I’d be hard pressed to remember the names of the good ones other than like Donkey Kong. They were pretty hit or miss in general and the controller was really weird, but it made a memorable introduction to gaming and a great starting point to watch it all grow from.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played was the Dragonlance game for NES. There are other equally bad games that are even bad in largely the same way, but I’m a big Dragonlance fan and when I finally got a copy of this I was very excited for about 5 minutes. It’s just bad. I have vague memories of throwing Tass into a hole a bunch of times and like maybe a little bit after that, but it was a mess. Maybe if I’d been able to get past the controls I’d have found a gem in there somewhere, but it just wasn’t there. I feel like if a pizza company can knock out a class A platformer, TSR should have been able to manage.
It’s odd, because D&D crpgs have usually been innovative for their time, using the D&D rules and hitting the ball out of the park. The Dragonlance game didn’t come that long before the Black Sun game they made, and I’m pretty sure they had been making similar crpgs previously. I feel like I remember playing another early one on our 8088. But they decided to make some half assed platformer instead. Huh?
But Dragonlance always seems to get shafted on adaptations. I remember Tracy Hickman talking on Palace in the late 90s about making a live action Dragonlance movie with Aaron Eisenberg as Tasslehoff, but it seemed to just evaporate and instead we got that kinda weird but cool to see very stylized cartoon. I do like that it looked like the book covers, but it was a long way from what we’d initially expected to see.
Some day Dragonlance will get some real love. Maybe Baldur’s Gate 3 will help.
When you get to the area with the bazillion spitting statues that respawn when you do, it became very clear that Fromsoft was out of ideas for making the game both interesting AND challenging.
Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I’m not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.
For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.
The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.
Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.
Same here re: Ubisoft cookie cutter open worlds. I LOVED the first ~40 hours of Immortals and thought I was approaching the end until I realized I was less than halfway at the rate I was progressing. I have no idea how length estimates like the ones on How Long to Beat are accurate for this game; usually they’re pretty spot on for my “complete what I find fun and interesting and not much else” play style. I gave up on the game after briefly skimming FAQs to see what I had left.
That’s all the FromSoft games to be fair. I’m forcing myself to finish Dark Souls one for the first time right now and straight up? I fucking hate this game.
Curious why you're forcing yourself to finish a game you don't like. I usually drop at this point, because I play games for fun. Are you a completionist who'll get some satisfaction when it's all done, or someone who has to write a gaming review? I realize my tone seems judgmental but I'm really just curious and am not sure how to better word my post to come off as less judgmental.
Sort of the completionist thing, it’s just one of those games people rant and rave about, so I want to have the experience. I also rode every roller coaster in a very popular amusement park just so I could say I have done it and will never again. I’m a crazy person.
As soon as I saw it’s locked at 30fps, it immediately killed any amount of interest I had in playing it. All the power to people who can stomach action games at what feels like a slide-deck input response.
This game has been the bane of my existence. I love the atmosphere, story, and design of Bloodborne. I cannot get myself to enjoy the game. I want to like it so badly because everything other than the mechanics are extremely my-interests, but FUCK do I not like the gameplay.
Destiny 2. I played THE HELL out of Destiny 1, then 2 rolls around and it was like they forgot everything that people liked about 1.
You couldn’t access the story missions from the map, and you couldn’t replay them on demand, you could only play them off a playlist. There was a weekly heroic story mission that gave a powerful engram reward, then they removed the reward and people stopped playing even that. Eventually they removed the story missions entirely “because nobody was playing them”. Big brain move there!
In Destiny 1, each series of missions on a planet ended with a higher level “strike”. So you’d pick the missions off the map based on your light level, then level up to hit the strike, then move on to the missions on the next planet.
In D2, not only could you not see the missions, or what level you were supposed to be, the strikes weren’t present on the map at all, you could only play them on a play list and the play list was randomized. It was also bugged, often delivering the same strike over and over and others not at all, leaving gaps in the storyline and player experience.
They did patch things, like being able to play strikes on demand, then about 1/2 way through the life cycle Bungie decided to just delete 1/2 of the content in the game. New players would come in, have no access to the original story missions, no idea what was going on, and no idea how to proceed without watching a bunch of youtube videos showing the content removed from the game.
For existing players, they decided that people had spent too much time, in some cases hundreds of hours, curating their perfect weapon and armor sets. Rather than create better gear to replace what people loved, they artificially capped old gear to sunset it and force people to “upgrade” to crappier gear that replaced it. They intentionally didn’t make better gear because they were afraid of “power creep” and legitimately “explained” that they no longer knew how to design the game around the old gear. Funny, they didn’t have that problem when it was the ONLY gear.
Maybe it’s better now? I dunno, the way Bungie totally disrespected the time I spent playing and money I spent on expansions, they’ll never get another dime from me.
I played a little bit of Destiny 1. It was fun but I just wasn’t into MMO any more, but it was still fun to dick around solo and maybe group every once in a while. But I got 2 and instantly nothing made any sense and nothing was any fun. I doubt I clocked even 10 hours on the game before putting it down forever.
Good call on this one. I forgot I even played it until your description.
My biggest issue is I just can’t keep up with the monetary demands of that game. Every time I finally had the excess money for an expansion they come out with two more.
Most of the games of my childhood - they exclusively came from the <$5 bin 🙃 at least we had a PlayStation 2 but Crazy Frog Racer 2, Frogger: The Great Quest, Zathura, Animal Soccer World, and Street Vert Dirt are noteworthy “highlights”.
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.
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