I’ll start. pokemon. doesn’t matter if the game’s old or new I just can’t get into how it plays. idk the gameplay just gets old to me pretty quickly, palworld is an upgrade in every way tbh
Same with Pokémon. I’m not a big fan of most turn based games, but that franchise especially never spoke to me.
I have a friend who buys every new Pokémon game they bring out. Same him playing one a while back, and I was like, that’s it? They can get super big now? That’s the new thing? To me it’s like FIFA, same game different characters.
Metroid*
Tried Minecraft multiple times. Can’t stand the game. Weird part is that I absolutely love both Terraria and Vintage Story.
I found a huge surface vein of olivine in a peridotite cliff face earlier while searching for bauxite, only to realize that I was about 50 blocks to the east of the Resonance Archives entrance, which my world put in a damn near inaccessible valley between K2 and Everest.
If I can find some bauxite I have a ton of iron to make some steel and between that and my huge harvest of flax and honey, I will have honey sulfur poltices, and the eidolon should be a cakewalk.
Animal crossing.
And back when this was a thing, Candy Crush.
Pokemon. Never played one, never will. Hot take is it’s a gateway into IRL hunting which is honestly just very cruel. Do not approve.
hot take
You weren’t kidding
that is a swealtering take if I’ve ever seen one
Same with me. Can’t get into Pokémon. Love the show though. Same with zelda…super boring.
A friend tried to get me into Half-Life multiple times and I just cannot get into it.
It’s a fast-paced FPS game, which means I’m likely to get dizzy after some time but something about the ambience makes it worse than usual. I can play Skyrim for up to 1.5 hours at a time, Minecraft or Fortnite for 45-60 minutes, but I’d be lucky to play 20 minutes of Half-Life without my head pounding.
Plus, it’s a linear, story-based game, and I’m more into games based more on mechanics and progression (like Pokémon, Factorio, Cities Skylines, Civ, Balatro, and incremental games) than story. And at least for as long as I’ve tried to play it, there isn’t even much of a story.
Have you tried Portal? I ask because it’s half life but worse, for you, it sounds like.
You might like Dyson Sphere Program, and Vintage Story, given the list you named. They’re both early access and cheap.
Fallout. I like the premise and I’ll watch other people play it, but I just cannot get into the mechanics of that franchise. Something about VATS is just not enjoyable to me.
Walking simulator…no fun for me
Try the first one. Before Bethesda got a hold of it.
All of them.
About 10 years ago, I was playing BioShock. It was fun, but I kept losing interest. Which was weird, because it was pretty much a game that was made for me - a pretty deep plot, a cool adventurous aesthetic, exploring and discovering different places on the map. I realized I was getting distracted thinking about all the other things I wanted to do - hanging out with my friends, figuring out how to talk to girls, studying so I could get good grades and a good job, learning all about things that interested me, going backpacking and rock climbing - and so I finished the game out of habit, and then set down the controller and didn’t pick it back up for a while.
My last game was Red Dead Redemption, which I blasted through in a marathon play-through while spending a month crashing my sister’s couch between semesters. My sleep schedule got all fucked, I ate like shit, and I felt like shit. Once I got to the end of the game, I packed up my XBox and put it in a box box. The next semester I sold it to get money to buy climbing gear.
Now I just do the Wordle.
At least you chose a fantastic game to go out on. RDR2 is like one of the most amazing games ever produced! I still go back to it when I run out of stuff to play despite beating the ever living hell out of it.
I cannot do balders gate 3, or any rpg of that style. I suspect it’s to do with trying to roleplay a character while simultaneously viewing them in that top-down third person perspective. I can do X-COM, strategy, I can do roleplay in third person, but that particular combination just kills it for me. It’s bizarre.
God of War. I played 1,2, and 3 and they were all pretty much the same. I think a lot of the hype was from marketing and edge lords who were thrilled to have so much blood and some low-poly tits on the PS2. Once you get past the spectacle, the combat is a slog of mashing the Square button until the game decides to stop spawning HP sponges for you to hit. The puzzles are tedious and annoying. The platforming they try to force in just doesn’t work with the physics and controls. The music is bland and generic “epic symphony” stuff that may as well just be from a stock music library, with no Greek influence at all. The story is a generic and modern story with a thin vineer of Greek mythology. Kratos is less of a character and more of a reason to move the game along to the various locations. I know it’s not a completely fair comparison, but Hades used Greek instruments to create greek-influenced and interesting music that I still find myself humming and drumming to years later. Hades also did a way better job of using actual Greek mythology to create a narrative that would actually fit in that cannon.
I remember playing Knack 1&2 and thinking “wow, this is like if the old God of War games were fun”. Knack is far from perfect of course, but is largely a similar series that cares more about being fun than being mature.
I’m playing through the 2018 God of War now. Completely different, and honestly a few hours in I’m still not sure why they chose to make this a God of War game staring Kratos instead of just making it a fresh IP. Maybe more lore reasons will be revealed, but so far it seems it was just to capitalize on the brand for marketing reasons. The music is still not a strength, but it’s better. The environments are better. The combat is still pretty boring with way too many boring enemies with way too much health, but it’s better. This is the first game where I’m starting to get tired of the same UI and over-the-shoulder perspective that other Sony games have used lately (Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Horizon, Spiderman). GoW, like most of those games, has an unnecessarily complicated itemization and leveling system that just bogs the game down, and feels almost inspired by MMO’s or gacha mobile games.
It does a great job of characterization, with plenty of small, subtle, beautifully written moments that grant insight into personalities. The boy is annoying, but I can see that’s the point so I mostly don’t mind. It’s really annoying how the game won’t shut up- there’s always someone saying something, and if you even just stop moving for a second someone pipes up to remind you of what you should be doing. It doesn’t have space to breath. The puzzles are better than the prior games- they are an acceptable tool for pacing but aren’t great by themselves. The story seems a lot better, with much more attention given to original Norse mythology.
With Uncharted I could push last the mediocre puzzles and bullet sponge enemies because the cutscenes were really good and the stories were fun. For Ratchet and Clank I can ignore how the humor has gotten worse and more juvenile over time because it’s still fun to platform, dodge, cycle through weapons, and kill tons of enemies. For Horizon Zero Dawn… Actually I don’t have many complaints, that was a solid title. For GoW (2018) there’s just nothing pulling me back to it.
Yeah, stick with GoW. It’s one of my favourite games of last gen just for the story telling.
Post game there’s some vicious challenges that took all my ability just to beat them on normal.
Souls games.
I really want to like them too, but they seemingly aren’t compatible with how I play games. I need to be able to put a game down for a couple of weeks and not feel like I’m back at square one because the specific muscle memory for that game has gone.
Just kinda kills the fun when the game is effectively telling me to get good, when I don’t actually have the amount of free time IRL necessary to do that.
Try Jedi Fallen Order. It’s got a lot of the ingredients, but a lot shallower learning curve.
I feel similar. After having tons of people tell me for years I need to get into them, I finally played Bloodborne, which multiple people have told me is their favorite.
I pushed through it on my own first. I actually didn’t die quite as much as I expected, though I definitely had to spend time watching YouTube videos and reading 3 different fan-made wiki’s to figure everything out. I managed to finish it, but I didn’t think it was worth it and would not have finished it if not for wanting to be able to talk about it with my friends.
Then I did another playthrough with a friend doing co-op. When it worked (ugh) it was a way better experience. Partly because of my previous experience - I had a better feel for how to build my character, I remembered most of the environments and enemy placement, and still had that muscle memory from my first run. Partly because it’s better as a cooperative experience. Having an ally makes the world feel less desolate. Having another player to take aggro so you can heal is huge- some bosses almost feel like they were designed for multiplayer. And it’s fun just cracking jokes and hanging out, making fun of how ridiculous some of the stuff is.
I still don’t have the love for it that other people do though. I agree 100% on the aesthetic: everything in Bloodborne is just dark and wet and looks the same. FromSoft makes a LOT of game design decisions that are different from most other developers in terms of what they prioritize. Which is fine, but there are aspects of design where they clearly cut corners and the fanbae seems to laud it as a desirable artistic choice. I shouldn’t need to spend hours watching YouTube and researching fan sites to learn how to play the game, and I would argue I shouldn’t have to do that to appreciate the story. They simply do not respect my time.
The multiplayer barely works. It’s restricted to bosses and the areas leading up to them, and costs Insight (a valuable and kind-of finite resource) to use. Simply connecting is a tedious pain. You can only play either completely online or offline, so if you want to play with a friend you have to accept your whole world cluttered with annoying and distracting messages from random players and the specters where other players died. And that also opens you up to having hostile players gank you. Like… Why can’t my friend and I just pair up and play through the whole game together without inviting the rest of the internet too? Why does it cost Insight? Why are the caps for stats never communicated to the player? Why does the Hunter’s Axe do primarily Blunt damage while the KirkHAMMER does almost no Blunt damage, and for that matter why aren’t the damage types explained anywhere? I’m still not sure why some gems increase Attack, others increase Physical Attack, and others increase Blunt or Thrust, plus there are hidden damage types.
The game feels like it was designed to really get good on your second playthrough and beyond. Especially NG+, although even starting a fresh file again is much better than the first playthrough. Kinda reminds me of how some MMO fans like to say “it gets good after the first 100 hours”. For most developers, the player onboarding experience is one of the most important parts to be developed, but FromSoft basically skills over that and outsources it to their community of hardcore fans.
Yeah. Heard so much about Elden Ring, and watched the kids play it, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
After about 45 minutes of wandering aimlessly and nearly as many deaths, I decided I wasn’t having a good time.
I finally had the Get Good moment where everything clicks recently, its very real. Now im on Nightreign like its crack.
Level your Vigor, people. Farm that little village with the soldiers and get a few levels into your health bar. And boom! Now you don’t die bc you missed a dodge. There’s good starting gear there too.
Once you “get it”, suddenly Elden Ring becomes like the coolest DnD game ever from an old-school perspective. Honestly, its not much different from Zelda - if you can play that, you can play Elden Ring i think.
That has been my experience with it too. It’s probably more fun with good gear, but i just see hours on the couch in my future that I don’t want to spend.
Same for me!
Just about any multiplayer game. I generally don’t like playing with randos (why would I want to listen to a 12 yo squeal in my ear that they fucked my mother in a pitch only dogs can hear?), and most of my friends don’t play games I’m interested in.
Name any sports title ( NHL, NFL, NBA, MBA, etcetera )that isn’t a zany, over the top SuperTuxKart or Cartoon Network Racing style kart racer and I’m out.
Same goes for any PVP shooter games such as Call of Duty, TF2 Counter Strike, etcetera. Anymore I really find no interest in them because I don’t feel like breaking things over some 6 month old who can squad wipe me, all while getting their diaper changed and slinging slurs my way.
Mega Man, no matter how much time I put into trying to grasp the controls and mechanics, it just never clicks.
