To me right now is the first Red Dead Redemption. Finally I’m able to play it, I’ve wait for over a decade. No spoilers, zero youtube gameplay videos, zero questions about the game to my friends. It gotta be me, and the game, it happened, and I think it sucks.
Maybe you thinking in “well, you shouldn’t play the second first”. I did not. My first Red Dead game was Red Dead Revolver, I was able to play it a few years ago when I could buy a PS2, but I couldn’t get a PS3 nor a Xbox 360 to play RDR1. It grinded my gears because we got the prequel in PC. When RDR1 came to PC it was so freaking expensive, yet today, I think it is expensive. I was able to buy the game some weeks ago while there was a Steam Sale, and well, I regreat it now.
I don’t like its exploration, its missions, its characters, its world, its secondary missions. its wanted system, and nothing but less important: has a lot of bugs.
That’s my experience in a few words.
What’s the game that you wanted to play but it was a total mess?
I wanted to play Cuphead because I really liked the concept and the aesthetic. I got it not knowing its reputation for being hard as absolute fuck. Played it for several days with increasing frustration, started watching walkthroughs, those didn’t help, still tried to stubbornly stick with it, and eventually got to the point where my heart just wasn’t in it anymore.
Yeah, I loved the concept, hated the gameplay. There’s a TV show that’s way better than playing the game.
Any pokemon game after gen 2.
I started in 1999 with red. It was a childhood-defining experience. I spent all summer with my nose in that game boy. Keep in mind I had to use a loupe mounted in a glasses frame and had to hold the screen an inch from my eye, so the ergonomics weren’t ideal, but the experience was compelling enough for me to bear through it. Then I got gold in the summer of 2001, I think, and was blown away. It was an upgrade in every way. I personally think the series peaked with gen 2. To be absolutely clear I am not a “gen-wunner” or whatever the word is. I just think the combination of the game itself and the zeitgeist it created for those first few years came together to make something unrepeatable.
Gold and Silver came out while Pokemon was still everywhere, but by the time gen 3 released, the craze had ebbed. Yes it was still popular but it was no longer in everyone’s mouth. I was also in the latter half of high school, and most of my friends were no longer into it. I bought the game, so it’s not like I thought I was too old, but it just didn’t feel the same. They removed the day-night cycle and the calendar functionality. It felt like a downgrade.
I’ve tried several times since to rekindle that feeling I got in 1999. The closest was with Pokemon Go in 2016. For a few weeks it felt like the late 90s again, with everyone and their dog talking about Pokemon. I actually beat Pokemon Let’s Go, but I think the nostalgia is what kept me going. Tried with the first Legends game and just couldn’t stay interested. Ditto with Brilliant Diamond.
There has to be a word for not wanting something but wanting to want it. That’s how I feel. (Of course the nice thing about being a conlanger is I can make the word myself 😁)
spoiler
sdC CBa serial verb construction consisting of the verbs
sdC(to pine for/yearn for/be nostalgic for) andCB(to want). Perhaps “to miss wanting” is a close translation.sdC CB qGr qGrbfrp 0 sdC-0 CB-0 qGr-0 qGrbfr-p [1sg] yearn-A want-A play-A video_game-3D I miss wanting to play that video game. 1sg = 1st person singular (0 means it's dropped) -A = authoritative verbal mood (-0 means a null morpheme that isn't pronounced) -3D = 3rd person distal noun suffix ('that video game')deleted by creator
I had some fun playing slightly newer titles with an action replay to cut down on the grind and it really helped.
Any after gen 5 for me. Gen 5 is actually my favourite
I feel this one deep.
The word you are looking for isn’t “wish”? Like “I wish that happen again”. My first experience with a Pokémon game was with Pokémon Red Fire in a GBA, back in 2006 or 2007. That game itself obfuscate the third gen games. Ruby and Saphire aren’t bad games, but something definitively felts off.
I think you just grew up. People seem to forget that these are games for children. Nostalgia can only take you so far.
Pokemon is games for babies
Funny for me it was RDR2. I still think I probably would have liked it if I stuck with it, but 20 minutes in I was told that I would have to regularly clean my gun and hunt to feed my camp etc. and it just felt like doing a bunch of chores and I noped straight out.
Gun cleaning, hunting, feeding camp, doing chores, etc are all optional in that game. You can just do missions to get to the end of the game with no problem.
Thats where I stopped. I played the prologue and was having a blast, then you get to the first camp and it shows you all the stuff youre expected to do and it just looked like hassle.
I couldn’t agree more. RDR2 has this aura of “you can do so many things, in any order, all the exploration, etc” and to me it feels like no one stopped to ask “are any of the things fun?”
Silksong it’s a great game but way too hard for me. :(
Biggest reason I can’t generally recommend my favorite game of the last decade. Shit’s tuffer than elden ring
I just finished it today and it truly is a grind. I’m a middling gamer at best, but that series has held my attention in a way few have in over 15 years. Persevere and it’s worth it, but you’ll absolutely throw down your controller in frustration more than once. Reminds me of the old Mario games for difficulty at times. Happy struggles!
i literally gave up on the last boss after 100%ing the rest of the game. just a brutal experience and there’s no carrot left to make me grind it out for a couple hours.
Skulls and bones. Sailing in black flag is probably my favorite gaming experience ever. Ubisoft announced a sailing game right after. All they had to do was add some upgrade paths so people could set up their ships for different playstyles. Like 10 years later, the game finally came out. It’s the only game I’ve ever refunded. Everything about it was terrible.
I have a friend who defines his gaming existence by black flag. He’s bought it, multiple times on multiple consoles out of sheer love for the game.
Skull and bones came out, I expected that to define the next 6 months of my life. Not a peep. Mentioned it and he just shrugs and goes: they had something good, and ubisofted it (this is after they’ve lost all consumer goodwill). I can’t help but agree
Control. stuck in an office with dull attack options. I played about half way through then looked up my progress and walked away. Way too dull for me. Friends were raving about it.
I think the ray tracing drew a lot of people in. It certainly did me. I think it also rides on its reputation as a big-budget spiritual adaptation of the SCP Foundation.
Like my experience with most remedy games by this point. Cool concept, interesting world, so many things I SHOULD love…but the combat got so damn repetitive and unfun. Same enemy types over and over again. Killed all enjoyment for me. At least I finished it.
God, that game was so damn boring.
Usually I get hooked immediately but Control lost me I think in around 2 hours.
The story didn’t do it any service either. I kept finding notes but never understood a damn thing in them even though I read them carefully.
Starfield. I tried it on a more recent update and it was just boring. There was no point to exploring because outposts were useless and space combat was trivial. Just an overall boring game
Starfield only reinforced my aversion to pre-ordering.
I had about $100 set aside to pre-order the deluxe edition of Starfield when orders went available, but around that same time, a similarly priced, new limited-time premium cosmetic pack was announced for Warframe, and they did one of those things where “and it’s out RIGHT NOW!” (we typically know at least a couple months in advance before something drops), so I, without hesitation, redirected those funds to the Warframe item and did not order Starfield.
Still one of the best decisions I’ve made. Starfield, even had it delivered on all its promises, was just not the game I was looking for. I pledged for a Star Citizen ship two months later.
spoiler
Those last couple sentences are like a short horror story.
I am so glad for game pass (at least before the price hike).
I tried Starfield and found it just so contrived and boring. To being made to touch and gather the weird space magic stuff in the asteroid to just suddenly being given a space ship to the inane combat and awful environments.
And this is someone coming from over 5,000 hours in F04 (and 2000 across Fallout titles, and God knows how much across Morrowwind, Skyrim, Oblivion etc). I am very much used to Bethesda jank.
But jeebus, Starfield is as compelling as wet toast. I read the synopsis of the game and was utterly relieved to have missed wasting countless hours in what has to be one of the worst written and developed games of the past 10 years.
That said it is clear Starfield was a huge pump and dump scheme by Zenimax to sell Bethesda to MS under the idea Starfield was gonna be the next Elder Scroll/fallout block buster. (not to mention populating stories about giving Sony an exclusive on Starfield to make MS jealous)
Little did they know they were buying pure Todd co
kepium that had been cut with a shit tone of sweet’n lowI played it out of morbid curiosity after everyone started talking how bad it was. I went in like “It can’t be THAT bad, can it?” - and indeed, it can. I’m still amazed that menus are fucking .swf files (Adobe Flash for those too young to recognize it)
It’s one of the least credible scifi settings I’ve ever seen. Also, despite the whole “multiverse” the main story tries to paint, it’s much closer to a time loop, given how nothing changes and effectively none of your actions are acknowledged by anyone. City NPCs won’t even react to your
dragon shoutsForce usetotally unique space magic, unless it hits them, then it’s just like being shot. Even Oblivion guards would tell you to holster your weapons, Starfield guards won’t even grunt if you shoot around like a maniac (but hit nobody)
An old one: SPORE.
Cool creature editor. Lacked all the depth that was promised in the presentations. Instead of being a cohesive game through the ages, it’s like 5 bare-bones shallow games glued together.
I loved spore as a kid, but I do agree that when I tried it again and an adult I was disappointed by the shallowness that I just hadn’t noticed as a kid
surprised you feel that way, I was 13 and played it 3 years after it came out with no expectations and really enjoyed it. I wasn’t part of the hype around it before release so I assumed a lot of other people in my position would feel the same way. I think the different “minigames” led me on a path to discover games later on like civilization, cities skylines, no man’s sky, etc
Yeah… See… I already played games like Sim City 2000, Age of Empires 2 and 3, Homeworld 1 and 2, Dungeon Siege, and space sims like Vega Strike and Freelancer.
So I understood what deep systems looked like, and also detailed character stat development. What they promised was something that sounded like a system heavy game, and my expectation (even as a young teenager back then) was that evolution was a creative spin on RPG stat development.
What we instead got was the most barebones element from each of the games I mentioned. There basically weren’t any systems, and the few that existed were entirely self-contained and could easily be completely ignored without any major loss.
Agreed.
Spore was horrendously disappointing after what I’d read about it.
I bought into the hype and pre-ordered it, and then regretted it.
I’d been given the impression by previews you’d get to play it as a singular session or experience, which I guess they never could have pulled off, but finding it to be segmented as it was was disappointing.
And then the way it portrayed “evolution” seemed deeply flawed to me. Choices you made had almost no consequences - rather than gradually going down different paths and committing to things playing out in different ways, you could just completely change your mind or go back on things, your choices didn’t really matter.
The only good part of spore is the first part of the game, going from single cell to multi cellular.
I found the rest of the game convoluted, and this despite playing it to the end. And replaying it many times over
That said my brain can’t believe it only came out in 2008. I could have sworn it was a 90s game.
Ho boy! Don’t buy RDR2 in that case. Worst (and last) full price game I’ve bought. Goddamn disappointing
Right know for me is Baldur’s Gates, it really don’t scratch my hitch. I have to play it in baby difficulty because I’m no tactician and I’m not a min maxer playing DnD so this game is really not for me
Don’t worry about the difficulty level and just play for the story.
If that isn’t for you, then definitely throw in the towel. I am truly biased though as I have played D&D for a good deal of my life.
F5 and F8 for quicksave and quickload. As my son tells me: “Don’t tell me how to play my $60 game.”
Mods and cheats all day long.
GTA V.
I liked all the previous ones, but this was just more of the same on a bigger generic map and a more convulted and stereotypical story. Online never worked for me either. Too buggy.
Vice City and San Andreas were the best of the series.
Map size/design is just more important than size. Same problem in Just Cause.
I didn’t hate V, but nothing has touched San Andreas’ magic for me.
I had to mention both, because I like them for different reasons.
Initially I didn’t even like Vice City, because it was just an epigon of GTA3 with more lens flare, but the story and not least the music won me over. I know it’s a blatant mockery of Scarface, but that’s what makes it so great and funny.
San Andreas is probably the masterpiece of them all. Maybe it got a little too serious in comparison to previous games, but it managed to portrait a great feeling of freedom and doing whatever in-between the main missions.
GTA V is more like: Follow the arrow through this generic oversized map.
San Andreas just felt like it captured the 90s perfectly. I could almost lump it in as a 90s memory.
World of Warcraft.
I didnt get to play it when it came out because I was still in school and couldnt afford the subscription. I was a huge Warcraft fan when I was younger. Eventually I forgot about it, until about 10 years later when I found a post online talking about WoW and I learned that they had a 14 day free trial. I immediately downloaded the game and made an account.
I uninstalled the game two days later. It wasn’t even remotely close to the Warcraft that I grew up with. And sure part of that is on me. I had made the expectations that it was going to be like Runeacape but in the Warcraft universe. A top down, point and click, open world version of Warcraft 3.
The fetch quests was what really killed it for me though.
I started it way too late. Spent the first few hours having to solo while getting spammed with duel requests, like seriously every second a flag came down. I accepted a couple and got wrecked immediately while they spammed lolololoolol noooooooobbbbbbbbbb stomped rek lol doing the dance emote.
By the time I got to the “real game” and its time to party up to do dungeon runs, nobody would let me join their group because I didnt have full epic perfect-spec’d gear. Which i cant get without doing the dungeon. Which i cant do because I dont have the gear.
Just uninstalled it. Didnt even make it past the free trial. I’m still baffled, because a game like that lives or dies based on its player count, and the players make it as hostile and inaccessible as possible for new players.
MMO is a one and done genre. You never match the original high.
Gonna disagree with you on that one my friend. FPS and BR on the other hand. You played one you’ve played them all.
I couldn’t afford subscriptions either, which is why 99% of my WoW playtime is in private servers, most of which are now long dead. I think my account in Firestorm might still exist, I first played there when it had Warlords of Draenor, then gave it another go during BfA. I should check it again someday.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 kind of fits the bill for me here. I wanted to play it from the moment I learned about it. I had zero experience with 1, or any other dragon quest games. My biggest issue, and im still quite angry about it, is that the game I wanted to play, and the game the trailers promised actually does exist. Its all functional. The only way to play it though is the campaign, and its so frustratingly hand-holding and text-heavy it actually hurt to play.
“we need to build the BRONZE ROOM. So we’ll need some BRONZE. Theres some BRONZE in the cave nearby.” [Camera pans over to where the bronze is.] “Okay! We’ll go and get the BRONZE!” “I think 3 pieces OF BRONZE should do it.”
Head over towards the cave.
Hey! We’re near the BRONZE cave! Isn’t this where they said we could get the BRONZE that we need to complete the BRONZE ROOM? Let’s get the BRONZE!
Head towards the bronze.
Hey! It’s the BRONZE that we need to make the BRONZE ROOM! Lets mine some quick so we can make the BRONZE ROOM! You can do this! Let’s go!
Mine the bronze
[BRONZE acquired!]
Hey! Thats it! We just mined the first piece of BRONZE that we need! Didn’t the quest-giver say we needed 3 pieces? What are we waiting for? Lets mine 2 MORE!
Mine 2 more
Thats it! Weve got all the BRONZE that we need to make the BRONZE ROOM! lets Head back to the base as quickly as we can to make the BRONZE ROOM.
Head back to the base, get talked to by the quest giver for a solid minute about the importance of the bronze room. Then the concept of the silver room comes up. You think 'that was a really really really long-winded tutorial, but they’ll leave me alone to do the silver and gold now that I know what to do. No. Go back to the top of that list but replace BRONZE with SILVER. Then gold. Then do it again and again and again until the credits roll and you realise the game never actually happens and you just wasted a bunch of your life and you’ll never ever get it back and they could have made an excellent game, and they actually did, they just wouldn’t let you play it.
Im still pretty bitter about that whole experience.
Never played this game but I’m aware the same devs are involved with Pokopia in some way. Makes me worried.
It’s like they saw Minecraft’s complete and utter lack of direction and decided to overcorrect.
Yeah this game is definitely better if you’re totally burned out/ depressed, cause then the handholding is kind of nice. Plus the main island is kind of sandboxy to create your real home/ base since you basically have very little autonomy in the main quests, and you don’t get that in the first one. I feel like my whole life is so many decisions and I’m too tired to actually do hobbies or game, but I can do a cute game like builders with no brain, just mindless fun.
I feel the same way that it’s like if Minecraft came with a Lego manual and all you’re doing is following it.
Do you like Lego? Do you like following a kit, or do you want to build how you want without instructions?
I never wanted to play any specific games but I did avoid playing Dave the Diver for months thinking it was boring. I could bet money that I would hate it. Gave it a try one day out of boredom and could not sleep until I finish it a week later. 70 hours. (yes I have a full time job)
fucking great game
Any MMO, I’ll pick it up and give it an honest try for a month or so. And I feel like I’m just grinding away for days for a couple hours of fun a week.
It’s so damn boring, all of it.
1000% agree. My friends badgered me into WoW back during the Burning Crusade era. Gods that shit was boring AF. And beyond being boring to play it was even more boring to look at. I don’t require top graphics in a game. But the oversimplified flat colors and design of everything was just so damn boring. Like at one point (last night I played actually) I was in an area and it was just like looking at a series of flat gradients next to each other. A brown gradient next to a blue gradient that faded into a white gradient. Fucking snoozefest. And there was zero exploration in the game. Don’t understand why there were big open areas when you have no point in exploring off the established beeline path. Fuck WoW.
I’ve played other MMOs since then. Some are better than others. ESO was fun for a bit but mostly because I like TES and really wanted to see Black Marsh, once I finished that area it wasn’t as fun. And once they dropped the skyrim expansion I quit. I’m not going back to skyrim. Spent enough time with the main game. FF14 was fun till it wanted me to get into groups. Dungeons sucked because I wanted to watch the stories and explore the dungeon but the randos all bitch about it and are annoying. Not to mention them losing their shit if you don’t attack exactly as they want so their minmax order of operations is just so. Lost Ark was actually pretty enjoyable too until I caught up to the current content. Then it became grindy and boring. I don’t mind some grind. But MMO grind is usually untenable for me.
Sorry, bitched about MMOs more than I intended. I mostly only play them to be with friends. But every one of them ends in the same disappointment for me. Not to mention the weird ass fucks I seem to find. I try to be nice but that seems to pull in even weirder ones.
I actually had a fantastic time with ESO in the early game, because everything was new and fun and magical.
1k+ hours in I started feeling like that.
I would say you’ve played enough if it took you 1k hours to feel like “it’s boring now”
True… But I still would love to feel excited about the game again, and jump back into that “good” feeling. It’s a fun world!
Those are rookie numbers. The player base for some of these games feel you’re just out of the tutorial by 10k.
- CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077:
the trailer showed V riding a crowded monorail train. I bought the game in promotion with Google Stadia. There was no monorail in the game. Or rather, you could look at it, and you could find some stations, but they were teleport points; - Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds:
it was marketed as a role-play game, but your possible choices were either bad or good, with no in-between, and they did not influence your story at all. It’s just a shooter game, the SciFi setting is secondary and forgettable; - Blackbird Interactive’s Homeworld 3:
too far from what I loved in Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm. For some reason the developers believed they had to introduce physical people with mental issues in a game about faceless ships blowing up each other. Nevertheless, the story is bland. I would like to pretend that this game did not ever exist.
A game that I’ve been waiting years to play for years is Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds.
I have only heard praise about it. I can’t find the courage to finally play it and end up disappointed.Outer Wilds (not Worlds) is incredible, I doubt you’ll regret playing it.
Well, you might. Some people do bounce off; usually due to not knowing where to go next, or what to do next. But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want your hand holding and are okay to persevere a little, you’ll probably have a good time.
No other game for me has ever matched the feeling of exploration and discovery, and that is only possible because the game gives you a long leash.
Funny! Outer Wilds was exactly the OP question for me.
Utterly frustrating realistic space controls, unguided exploration that leads to reentering the same planet for the 8th time and still not finding anything new, annoyingly specific timing-based puzzles…
Tap for spoiler
And a nihilistic “friends we made along the way” ending that doesn’t solve the initial problem. Fuck that.
I’ve had games in my wishlist now that I see “It’s like Outer Wilds!” and I start to think twice about them.
I too came in here thinking about outer wilds.
The controls are less realistic than you think, because they attempted to have the ship correct itself but it constantly fought me. I program spacecraft for a living, I know how the orbital mechanics and movement in 3D space works, and they made it super frustrating it made me rage quit the game for years. I only finished it because a close friend wanted me to experience the story.
For me, the story >!was the games weakest point. Putting together the history and the question of “what happened” was cool, but the dialogue was insufferable, I hated reading the story walls and having to string together the order things were said. Then to finally put everything together, get a half baked story about being marooned on effectively a desert island and it ends with a shrug and “yup, everyone died, you too”… Man fuck that.!<
Different experience for everyone I suppose :)
I found the space controls and conservation of momentum to be such a fun aspect. I loved getting consistently good at it, and feeling like a competent rocket pilot when I nailed fancy manoeuvres.
Silksong on the other hand, I had to give up because it was way too hard for me!
Uptick for the awesome nickname.
Thanks mate, it’s my wish to live up to that name.
Now, though, read my comment too!Haven’t played any of the RDR series. I have RDR2 but it won’t work in my Linux box.
A game I had high hopes for was Witcher 3, simply based on internet hype. Somehow it doesn’t work for me. Maybe I was expecting a better Skyrim. The main character is too opinionated. The immersion is not there for me.
Just pull the trigger and do it so you can know. Don’t rush it. Take your time enjoying the puzzle and piecing together the mystery. There is no rush, a couple moments require good timing but you’ll know what to do when they come up. It’s not everyone’s thing, but if it is your thing, you’ll wish to forget everything so you can play it anew.🙂
- CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077:
