I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls recently, and I’ve um… been talking about it fairly frequently! What I’ve realised is there is a stark divide. You either ‘get’ Dark Souls or you hate it. What games do you feel like you don’t ‘get’?
Like, I never really feel like I ‘get’ racing games. I’m talking about sims like Gran Turismo and Forza. I’ve never been able to fully invest in a game like that.
The new breed of PC games like DOTA and League of Legends. I don’t know if that’s something I completely understand either, but I think that might be my own fault for not giving them a chance.
What about you guys and girls — what are the games you feel like you don’t get?
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168 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: Games You Don’t ‘Get’”
Zelda.
Although that may be because I played Alundra first and all Zelda games have yet to match it.
While Alundra is a great game, a couple of the zelda games smash it out of the park, OOT and Links awakening just 2.
Oh, look, another Link’s Awakening evangelist! I used to get so much crap for claiming that the GameBoy Zelda was better than its SNES big brother 🙂
It’s the best one!
Link To The Past is the best Zelda game.
LTTP established a good template that Link’s Awakening polished to a shine.
It gave you full control over your items (the shield is actually useful, perhaps too useful, and you can swap away from it to combine multiple items for hidden effects), humorous writing, memorable characters, and an actual plot.
I really love the way that Link is kind of the Bad Guy in LA. The Nightmares are actually trying to protect the island and its inhabitants by keeping the Wind Fish asleep. Link slowly and systematically weakens them before finally destroying their entire world, all for his own gain.
It’s one of my favourite games of all time 🙂
MAJORA
Ah, Link’s Awakening. I very much enjoyed that game – it did feel a lot like Link To The Past 2, and Link To The Past is still one of my all-time faves. Hardly anyone seems to have played it though!
It’s also the last Zelda I played, since I defected from Nintendo to Sony after that generation of consoles and I didn’t own a handheld console after the original Gameboy (until getting a PSP which I ended up hardly ever using thanks to the rise of smartphones).
True story: my Gameboy got stolen from our house when I was 13 or whatever along with a few game cartridges stored next to it. One of those stolen games was Link’s Awakening, but when we got the insurance we never replaced that so I didn’t get to play it again, luckily I’d already beaten it once!
Gaming with a mouse and keyboard.
EDIT: In terms of games…I’m yet to find any enjoyment in playing MMORPG’s.
Amen Brother – on both counts
A mouse and keyboard were designed to do work – a controller was designed for games
Also terrible – touchscreen gaming.
Agreed. Howeber,one of the games I’m playing most often at the moment is called Table Top Racing. It’s on Android/iOS and is a cross between Micro Machines and Mario Kart (kind of.) The touch controls are so simple and it just works. Really fun and worth checking out. For me, it was the biggest ‘wow’ moment in mobile gaming I’ve experienced.
Sounds like your only a console gamer. The amount of games that play better with a controller is very slim to what plays better with a KB / Mouse combo.
If you are only a console gamer, then you are literally ONLY playing games designed for a controller, so your only seeing one side of the story.
Yeah, I have trouble believing that people find a gamepad more intuitive and easier to control when playing an RTS or point-and-click adventure game. And there’s a reason that console gamers aren’t allowed to play with PC gamers in FPSes – PC gamers DESTROY console gamers with the precision of the mouse and keyboard for aiming. Console gamers don’t realize how ham-fisted and clunky their aim-assisted shooting is until they’ve been headshot from hell-to-breakfast by the average mouse-user.
Remember in the mid 90’s (Quake era) when playing with a mouse became a thing for FPS. Poor keyboarders didn’t stand a chance and all of a sudden people were having to relearn how to play if they wanted to be competitive.
Hell, I remember that mouselook was available on Build Engine games like Duke3D, but actually trying to DO that was a recipe for vertigo. Quake was the first FPS to actually give us realistic enough 3D that we didn’t pass out trying to mouse-look. And yeah… Keyboarders got destroyed and had to learn. Fast. It was a big adjustment, being ground-breaking territory… Man. The things you take for granted, these days. Kids who weren’t around for actual innovations, not just what publishers put as ‘bullet-points on the back of the box’ innovations.
Indeed. Playing Sniper Elite V2 tonight for example, I got my 360 wired controller for my pc, decided to see how it went with the game instead of mouse and keyboard.
Christ it was horrible. A sniper game calls for the fine aiming skill that ONLY comes from a mouse. I used to believe that a controller in skilled hands could match a mouse/kb combo but its purely wishful thinking. It never will.
Play a fps with a decent mouse and keyboard for 2 hours you will change your mind. For third person games a completely agree with you though.
No I won’t. 🙂
I played one for six hours last night and still think it’s awful and want to get a controller instead.
Yep. The mouse was handy, but a typewriter is not a good game controller.
That’s your mistake, right there. Try a keyboard. They’re much more effective than typewriters, especially when they’re actually connected to the computer you’re using.
qwerty was designed specifically for typewriters, right?
I also took your advice and hooked up my Casio keyboard to my PC. I think that was actually worse.
That’s why gamers use WASD instead of QWERTY. 🙂
Some third person games I’d rather play with a controller, e.g. Batman Arkham Asylum. TPS games like Saints Row? Please give me the tools of the master race.
Hmm … troll?
Really, different controllers work for different genres. Fighting games, platformers, RPGs/JRPGs … controller all the way. Shoot-em-ups too (i.e. your traditional vertical or horizontal scrollers). Driving and flight sims too are better with a controller compared to a mouse/kb (though a proper joystick/wheel beats both options).
OTOH, RTSes (especially twitchy ones) and most MMOs would simply not work on a controller. There’s simply too many commands you need to be able to access quickly than can be covered by the 8-10 buttons on a controller, and the ability to select both points AND quickly drag to select outlined areas of the screen is vital.
FPS are a mixed bag. FPS games can work well with a controller IF the game is made for it (i.e. has some ‘forgiveness’ in how precisely you aim or has some form of auto-aiming), but it’ll never approach the speed and pixel-perfect precision of a mouse for aiming (a mouse allows you to do anything from the finest adjustments to instant 180-degree turns, since it has a greater range of sensitivity than is possible with a thumb stick with maybe a 1 cm range of movement).
ARPGs are a mixed bag too – a mouse is better for most, but if the game is designed for a controller, it can work with a controller too (see the console version of D3, which has a redesigned control scheme and different monster layouts/density to account for the limitations of what you can do with the thumb sticks cf. a mouse).
Most recently, titanfall, halo is another and any sport games. I’d rather go outside and play the sport. I know they are good for others though.
I’ll give titanfall another go once its released.
I’ll show you how to enjoy Halo!
Nintendo games. Any of them.
Seriously? No trolling? Wow.
see im not a fan of mario…. but i love many nintendo games…. in all seriousness…. whats not to love?
Most are fun, look great have fantastic gameplay.
Im honestly curious.
You monster!
Same here, I can see they’re clearly well made and all the ones I’ve played have been fun for a few minutes but I lost interest in them very quickly
Apart from Rogue Squadron but that was a special case. Also really only playable on PC where you didn’t have to suffer that mess of a controller they made for the n64
You take that back, the N64 controller is one of my favourite controllers of all time, after XBox and Gamecube.
But it was designed for aliens with 3 hands. How are you meant to get to the buttons if your hand is firmly gripped around a separate part of the controller?
Its really simple, put your left hand on the dpad your right hand on the bit with the buttons and then simply put your left hand on the thumb stick.
That’s the best description of the n64 controller I’ve read.
Classic!
I’m double jointed in my thumbs the n64 controller is a breeze.
It was a piece of crap. The buttons were awful the stick was really rough and stupidly placed, the only way I can think it’d be useful is if you were supposed to hold the controller with the side handles and use the stick with your genitals. Now that I think of that configuration, it would have made the rumble pack a more attractive addon…
MOBA’s… never understood why people like them, from what i understand you click around in circles for 10 minutes while a tower does all the damage then you gank a player when he has no health….. then you click around in circles again till the next gank… i dont see the fun in that at all.
And RTS games like starcraft, i get they are massive but i could never put in the time to learn the micromanagement needed to be any good.
This, never could get into DOTA/LoL. I understand that there’s a lot of skill involved but I can’t see the fun in it.
MOBA’s are all about clutch play. Thats what got me hooked. There a lot of ways in DOTA to be skilfull in the way you take down the other team. Or that one time that you killed 3 enemy heroes while surviing on 1hp. It’s all about ganking.. and not just waiting at your tower. Of course it makes it more enjoyable when you have a friend to play with as it’s easier to coordinate hero skills together to do massive damage.
It’s kind of a shame that micro is the route RTSes went. That’s not strategy, it’s tactics. They should be called RTT games.
I bought Skyrim and Battlefield 3 at the same time and hated them. I gave them so much time to grow on me but it just didn’t happen.
MMOs – just never appealed. slow progress = lots of grinding = paying more monthly subscriptions. (for those games that still have subs, at least) I feel I can spend my gaming time more productively & it feels a bit exploitative of the player.
Multiplayer-only shooters like Titanfall, and to a lesser degree, CoD (coz who plays it only for the SP campaign?). especially ones that make it hard to find & play with your mates. I don’t like random people & the few times I’ve actually gone in & played with randoms, the whole vibe of the thing is really off-putting.
Driving simulators. Not racing games – car games that describe themselves as driving sims. it sounds super wanky.
I agree with everything that this apparently highly intelligent and probably good-looking person has said (in this post, anyway…)
I am so sorry to tell you this, but you’re gonna be very disappointed on both counts.
As far as driving sims go, I’ve only played Forza 2. I don’t know how hardcore of a sim it is considered, but it gets pretty in depth and they advertise it as a racing sim.
There was a certain challenge where I really fell in love with it. It was one where you had to beat 2 higher class cars around one big circuit. The first couple times, I raced them and they were just so much faster than I. No matter how perfectly I drove they were way ahead. Then I dove into the mechanics, selecting harder tyres, adjusting spoilers, using more rigid suspension, swapping gearboxes. They give you some great explanations of what each thing does, so it wasn’t overwhelming. After 5 or 6 attempts I beat them. I’m no rev head but damn that was satisfying. I haven’t picked up any racing sims since, I don’t think there have been huge developments that have grabbed me, but I will likely get another one this gen.
don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge anyone liking them, I just don’t ‘get’ them.
eg: Gran Turismo Prologue. the way it has a focus on following the ideal driving lines, getting the speed right etc. & it doesn’t feel ‘racy’ more just…. driving because that’s what you like.
I mean I can totally understand the appeal that the fantasy of driving a multi-million dollar car around picturesque European tracks has for some people. its like the wet dream of any car enthusiast.
but yeah, I’m no car enthusiast. hell, I don’t even have a licence. so its all a bit lost on me.
Edit: having said that though, I do have a soft spot for some racing games. Especially the Burnout series & that new “Next Car Game” thing. OTT crashes are the best thing about car games..
Yeah that’s fair enough. I just thought I’d share why I like them, despite not really being in to cars. I guess there are strategy elements that can be really well done.
Bioshock. The first one especially. Everybody loved it, I liked the setting and Rapture and story and everything but the game itself I just couldn’t enjoy.
I can agree with you there. They are beautiful games, but I just can’t enjoy them no matter how much time I put in. I have the latest one through PS+ and while it’s a beautiful game to look at, it hasn’t sucked me in.
…the fact that I received my PS4 on Monday isn’t helping hehe
Same boat, although I really didn’t enjoy much about the first Bioshock. I’m a much bigger fan of an open world type feel, and Bioshock was just so dark, enclosed, I just didn’t enjoy it. Tried to play Infinite as well, but it didn’t click, so I gave up
You speak the truth brother! I completed it, but I found the whole “switching between plasmids and guns, then switching between the different ammo types” really detracted from the gameplay and was unnecessary.
Journey, might be the fact that for some reason I never seem to encounter anyone, ever. I’ve put about 3 hours into it and gave up cause I got bored and never saw another soul.
Edit: I was really excited to play it too, such a dissapointment
That’s bizarre. I’ve finished the game about a dozen times and I don’t think I’ve been alone after reaching the scarf bridge (the first place you can encounter someone).
Animal Crossing.
I really tried to get into New Leaf. I really did. But it just felt so much like one of those Facebook games and I couldn’t figure out exactly why I was playing. So I ended up writing a bunch of threatening letters to all the townsfolk, made a bunch of penis hats and called it quits.
I played ACNL for about five weeks to and from work. I think I basically got to a point where I was just grinding to keep buying house upgrades and realised there was no point to it whatsoever. There was nothing to actually accomplish. It didn’t matter one bit whether I had a fully upgraded house or a crapshack, unless I wanted to fill it with furniture to earn a high score to compete with other people with giant houses and I very much did not want to do that.
LOL I didn’t even bother with new leaf. I played the DS one years ago and hated it even though I’m a nintendo fanboy. Animal Crossing is defs on my list. Cheers!
To be honest, I don’t think most people obsessed with Animal Crossing can entirely explain it. It just seems to inexplicably hit that sweet spot with certain people.
I was so addicted to Animal Crossing WW. It’s just something that you need to do everyday even though the gameplay is REALLY mundane. One day you’ll just be like “I’ve had enough”.
This. Absolutely. I put over 50 hours into my game, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why that was. When I was in the throes of it, I described it as ‘gaming crack’, and I’m more than relieved to be free of it now.
MMOs. I feel like if I’m going to invest 300 hours into an RPG character I want to be the bigshot, not one of 4 million other tools running around doing the same quests, and the idea of grouping for raids etc sounds good in theiry but dealing with other people in a virtual space would frustrate the hell out of me. Plus, I dislike grinding, and MMOs in general feel like too much of a time commitment. I just don’t see how people do it.
Being single helps. A lot.
Its the sunk time fallacy.
I’ve spent so much time getting my character good, I don’t want to stop now or all that time will be wasted.
So they keep playing.
Crusader Kings II. It seems like an amazing game but I cannot be bothered learning how it works. That and the tutorial was no help.
do what I did install the early AGOT mod and play that untill you get the hang of the interface. The early mods strip out alot of the features(researching tech etc) and are a bit easier to manage as the world is smaller.
The tutorial is awful, but I love it in spite of that.
If you ever want to try again, I recommend the videos on youtube by quill18
Or the videos by Arumba. He must have several hundred hours of them by now.
I’ll give them a crack. Again I’m sure it’s an amazing game it’s just that initial hurdle that stops me.
I’ll get back into it when i clear my backlog of games. Yeah firs world problems.
Here we go. I’m going to say something sacrilegious.
Pokemon.
It was just…no. I thought I wanted it. I thought I would love it. I get the urge to try it again, but I’ve ended up just not getting into it. I don’t even know why. It’s an RPG, you have to go hunting to pick up new monsters and yet…it didn’t click.
I cant play the new ones. The faint animation of one of the pokemon made me feel ultra guilty, so I decided to just leave it.
How dare you
I never even wanted it. All my friends had it on gameboy and stuff but it NEVER appealed to me. Ever.
MMO’s – I’d much rather play a single player RPG then collect 10 flowers for 300 hours to get to level 30, and Tower Defense games – never got the appeal of building towers whilst a seemingly never ending bunch of enemies attempt to march past, its just not fun for me.
Also pokemon, I just really dislike the universe and don’t get the appeal…
I felt the same way about tower defense games until I played Plants Vs. Zombies, that game is so addictive.
Yeah, I did play that and did kinda like it but I still don’t really ‘get it’. Just not my type of genre I guess 🙂
MOBA’s. I did enjoy SMITE a little bit but the amount of items is just too much and I can’t be bothered learning them while getting abused by some idiot.
MMO’s mainly, like others have mentioned I just don’t see the appeal of paying a monthly subscription just to be able to play, and all that grinding.
Turn based RPG’s are another, I just want to attack, but instead I’m forced to stand there and wait my turn, it frustrates the hell out of me.
I also couldn’t get into Minecraft or Skyrim, but I haven’t put a hell of a lot of time into either of them, so I may give them another go in the future.
Battlefield and COD*. Also MMORGPs…
*I enjoyed COD4
MOBAs escape me. I understand the appeal, but I just can’t play them. I suck at them, and the communities are generally elitist jerkoffs with no interest in helping others.
Bioshock escapes me – Rapture was a pretty great creation, gorgeous to look at – but the games themselves are the most generic, uninspired first person shooters I’ve ever forced myself through.
So Bioshock 1 and 2 were pretty to look at, but crap to play, but Infinite was just plain drudgery across the board.
Animal Crossing lost me – I played for about two days until I realised I’d just accepted a second job that wasn’t even paying me. It’s a responsibility simulator – I get the whole ‘no real goal, joy of playing a game with no pressure’ thing but it’s largely BS. That game places SO much responsibility and generally anti-fun things, it’s insane.
Then again, each to their own. I love MMO’s, some people hate them. I love zombie survival/sandbox games, some people hate them. Different strokes and all.
I get MOBAs. They seem like they’d be a lot of fun. But the community is just so damned terrible. And all the starting level matches for absolute beginners are full of high level players with snuff accounts abusing beginners for not knowing how to play. In beginner matches. Da Fuq.
Definitely. I think there’s also a measure of performance anxiety that also accompanies RTS titles. Some people are so hardcore you just feel like a world class putz for getting your ass handed to you over and over again. Probably just need to persist and play with people who want to teach you/aren’t jerkoffs.
I don’t even know what MOBA stands for. I know what DOTA and LoL are, though and I get the appeal but yeah, barrier of entry insane (same reason that after enjoying games like Doom 2 and Quake when I was young I don’t even try picking up a multiplayer FPS anymore; no real interest in taking on people who have been playing them for years while slinging every ignorant slur in the book).
Let’s see…
Pokemon: Never really understood the craze about it. Loved the cards, hate the games.
Halo: Really enjoyed playing Halo 3, bought Halo 4 last year and just can’t do it.
The Witcher: The whole control system is confusing and ruins the game by having to pause it all the time.
Final Fantasy (all of them): Never really got into it, or any JRPG for that matter. The combat system doesn’t appeal to me, and the whole premise of the game just frustrates me.
Dragon Age: Same as above.
MOBAs: I don’t like any MOBA, at all. Gave DOTA a try, hated it. Too complicated to learn and everyone calls you a noob while you try to learn. Same goes for LoL.
RTSs: Used to play a bit of Age Of Empires, but I find that now they’re too slow when playing single player and almost impossible multi-player.
Brink: Just. No.
Any Splinter Cell game: see above
I think that just about covers it.
So you only like sport/racing and some FPS’s?
I don’t know if your comment was an attack or just an observation, so I don’t really know how else to reply. I am currently doing a diploma of game design, so I don’t really have much time to play many games these days (along with having a kid). I guess I’m an eclectic gamer. I really love some games and really hate others, doesn’t matter what genre it is. I like a game for having good design, good gameplay, and good story. I will always have a love for RPGs like Fallout and Skyrim.
Defining what games you like is really difficult, as there is so much about many different games I love, but player progression is a really important part to me, which is why I don’t like games where you don’t really get to build a character from the ground up. I guess I should probably give a few of the games I’ve mentioned above a better shot, as I’ve only played most of them for a few hours at most. Generally, if a game doesn’t grip me within the first 2 hours, I lose interest.
The only game which I pushed through to get really absorbed by which had a boring start was Mass Effect. I LOVE that game.
Not an attack! Seems like you just narrowed your choices down to almost only those three options, which I respect. I like SOME Fp’s and hate others, I love some RPG’s and hate others. It really boils down to mechanics, voice acting, graphics etc. So I wouldn’t say I like one genre or another, as there are great and terrible games in all genres.
I can relate to that “gripping” statement. I just attempted to play Thief. I gave it a generous two hours, could not get into it AT ALL. SO BORING. But that being said, I loved Dishonored.
Yeah I’m the same man. I like games based on their individual characteristics, not because they belong to a certain genre. I like the look of Heroes Of The Storm, and that’s a MOBA.
Any and all sports games, including car racing games. I know that it’s because i don’t like sports in real life, and I primarily game for escapism.
Yep, totally the same here.
So you don’t have fun hopping into a racing game and not actually racing? Just doing silly things that you can’t do IRL?
That would keep me entertained for about 20 mins, so would trying to get my entire team sent off, or injure all the opposing team’s players. I could find some enjoyment using the game, but it wouldn’t be as the game was designed, and I still wouldn’t ‘get’ the game.
I once tried playing Blood-Bowl, thinking that with elves, orks, etc. it would be a parody of what I disliked about sports games.
No, apparently you still needed a working knowledge of the sports it was imitating to get what was going on.
I don’t get how in Spider-Man games he can attach his web to thin air
So you don’t have an issue with him actually slinging webs just that they don’t attach to anything sometimes…???
I think some of the later Spiderman games latch the webs onto buildings.
In Spiderman 2 you could only attach to buildings which was cool.
I played Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions and it was just lazy how it was implemented as a sort of double-jump
GTA, I just don’t get the appeal
Pokemon – never got into the games. Watched an episode of the cartoon and was very confused. It just seems like a blatant “spend money collecting all this shit” without giving anything substantially entertaining in return but I admit I haven’t looked into it enough and it sells by the billions so there must be something worthwhile in there.
First person shooters – specifically Halo and CoD / Battlefield. For first person games I need a specific theme to hook me in. Either scary / supernatural (FEAR, The Darkness) or fantasy like Elder Scrolls. Alien and War shooters have never really interested me.
I don’t get most turn-based video games. It’s not the turn-based-ness of them that bothers me, really, it’s the way that they all seem to rely on randomness.
I don’t think that randomness has any place in video games, at least not when it comes to determining the outcome of a player’s actions. It’s fine for setting up a scenario, but not for arbitrarily deciding that a player’s shot has missed and the enemy’s shot has been a critical hit that killed the player in one go. That’s not strategic or challenging, it’s just frustrating. The player had no control over the outcome of their actions.
It’s even worse when the developers go the extra step and design systems to prevent “save scumming”. The players aren’t cheating, devs, they’re working around your bad game design.
The preceding post has been my opinion, and I’m extremely happy for you to have your own and continue loving the crap out of XCOM 🙂
Things like Civ are really good though.
I should probably confess, to my eternal shame, that I’ve never played any of the Civ games. I don’t know how or if they implement randomness.
If you’re bringing it up just because it’s turn based, then you make a fair point. I shouldn’t have said “turn based games”, because my rant really has nothing to do with having to take turns. Randomness just tends to be a feature of turn based titles, and the games that rely on it strike me as being good despite their randomness, not as a result.
Yeah, I don’t like random games, or worse, games with stats which makes no sense (like 1 point will be the difference between a 1-hit KO or not – I’m using Deer Hunter 2014 as my example here).
Civ games don’t seem random to me. The world is randomly generated, but then it becomes how well you can survive in that environment. Defense stats etc are given by terrain, so that’s not random, and I think (but I’m not sure) that all units of the same type have the same stats.
Final Fantasy (tried had no idea gave up), Cod and Battlefield (although i think if i had the time when they first came out i would have gotten into them),
I want to play it again but I just know it’ll suck so many hours out of my life that I’m not sure if I want that kind of commitment.
The button mashers like Street Fighter etc. Needs more story.
Metal Gear Solid. All of them. How is that trial-and-error gameplay fun?
MMOs. Tried WoW in High School, so I could play it with some friends. They got to level cap within a month… I got to ~25 in that time and gave up. Tried again when I got to uni, mainly to stay in contact with friends… got to ~37 and just couldn’t take it any more. The grind, the fetch quests… the lack of any consistent context to anything I was being asked to do. I kept trying with GW2, Path of Exile, Neverwinter… nothing clicked beyond about level 20. Will be trying again with ESO, though – the beta last week was awesome, and the game has the advantage of a huge amount of familiar lore.
“Score-attack” games, in general – With the exception of rhythm games, anything where the goal is to get a better score or a faster time by replaying the same level over and over. Not sure if it’s because these games tend to have less context, or because they have either no clear or constant end goal – leaderboards shift, so it’s like moving the goal posts, and setting a specific score to aim for seems far too arbitrary.
MOBAs and Arena-style RTS. I’ll happily spend 30+ hours in a game of Civ or Anno, but Starcraft is too directly competitive for me to enjoy.
There are others (multiplayer shooters, for example), but those are the main ones.
The game I seem to have a vastly different opinion of compared to the rest of the world is Alan Wake.
One of the most repetitive game I’ve ever played, the only difference in enemies being how much light you have to shine on and/or bullets you hit them with before they die. Even the driving sections ended up being the same thing, shine a light, run over, repeat.
Pointless collectibles. The story wasn’t half as clever as it thought it was.
I bought the American Nightmare DLC at the same time and have no desire to ever play it.
I struggled to complete Alan Wake simply due to the repetitiveness. How many fucking Taken are there!? American Nightmare was a lot shorter, but there are only 3 locations and you “get sent back in time” twice to redo them.
I don’t get why people like Bioshock (any of the trilogy). It has some interesting ideas storywise but the gameplay never really struck me as revolutionary or new. It’s a shame really because if it weren’t for the shooty parts, I’d probably get it.
I also don’t really understand the appeal of MMFPS games like Battlefield or COD. Maybe it’s because I generally dislike FPS games, though there are exceptions, especially in terms of co-op and single player games. MMFPS games though just aren’t fun to play repeatedly unless I’m playing causally with friends at a LAN party or something.
I’ve just finished Infinite and I have to say the game it most reminds me of (putting aside the excellent story) is Bulletstorm!
Mario Bros. I loved it as a kid but just cant understand how its still considered a good game when its basically the same game re-released 150 times.
Other games catch heaps of shit for same game different year but Mario is basically same game different decade. I just don’t get the continued attraction to it.
Anything Nintendo or JRPG’s. Had a little bit of fun with smash brothers against friends, but that’s it really.
Adversarial multiplayer
MMOs without a story (which might as well have been written “MMOs that aren’t SWTOR”)
JRPGs
Tower Defence
One button shitfests like flappy bird
I’m tempted to add minecraft but I could never play it long enough to get a good impression because the motion made me feel sick
Tower defence is the best genre there is!
I’m tempted to come over and slap you for saying that but the path to get to you would be long, winding and complicated, I couldn’t use even the most basic tactics to overcome your obvious traps and I’d probably die of boredom along the way…
\o/
TD wins!
Not really, the alternative is to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
/o\
Lets see your precious towers defend you against that!
Go go Cybran Boomerang!
http://supcom2.wikia.com/wiki/Boomerang_Nuke_Redirector
I don’t get pokemon.
I seriously don’t. And I don’t understand why grown men my age are obsessed by it, either.
^ This. I was in the age group where pokemon was all the rage but I still didn’t get it when I watched it.
Not game related… but I have the same feelings about My Little Pony. I commented on here a while ago about how I don’t understand how grown men can watch it, I was told to watch it myself, I did and still don’t understand.
Each to their own I guess.
I suppose it must have well realised characters or something – I figure I already have one 8 year old girl in my house so I certainly don’t need to join their ranks!
Bloody rhythm games like Guitar Hero etc. I guess I don’t have the coordination for them. Sports games too, except for car racing sims like Gran Turismo and Forza, I love cars so I really like these sims.
Also never really been keen on this resurgence in point ‘n’ click adventure games. Loved them as a kid but just don’t have any patience for them now.
Halo – I skipped 1 and 2 as I had a PS2, picked up a 360 at launch and when Halo 3 came out I was so excited to get involved…. played it for about 45 mins then returned it just didn’t get it.
MMO’s and JRPG don’t get the appeal for these genres at all. Im sure there are many more but mental block atm. Halo is the one that stands out to me the most…
Part of the problem is that by Halo3 , everyone was already doing what was once grounbreaking back in Halo1, so when you come to a series late, you think ‘what is the big deal, it’s just like everything else’, because by then, it is.
You are probably spot on there.
Pokemon Games– I don’t understand why they are so popular
MMO’s– tried a few, just can’t seem to get into them
JRPG’s– I hate the random battles, the turn-based combat, and over convoluted stories BUT I decided to give Persona4 Golden a go on my Vita, Love the Hell out of it! just recently finished it and starting again to get all the social links maxed 😀 There is something about P4 that makes it different from othe JRPG’s (thinking of trying to get Persona3 and giving it a go too)
I think one of P4 (& P3)’s strongest points is how likable the characters are. My fav JRPGs of all time all have great & memorable characters (Chrono Trigger, Shadow Hearts Covenant, P3 & P4). If the gameplay is good too then chances are it’ll be an outstanding game.
Yea I think that is a large part of why I have enjoyed it so much 😀 and each of them has deep (and realistic) life stories and issues which really made me want to keep going as well. In fact, the only thing I didn’t like about P4 was that it ended hahaha now I am going to grab the P4 arena game just to extend the story 😀 😀
For me its LoL, no idea why I love dota but could never get into LoL have loads of friends who play it religiously but I just cant get into it.
any other game though I usually enjoy
40 hours into dark souls and I’m still floundering about in eh territory. I can kind of understand why some people play it, it is challenging … although most of the challenge comes from a complete lack of direction and poor design. I still say that playing that game in offline mode without outside help would be damn near impossible.
Other than that the assassins creed games
I’d suggest watching Zero Punctuation’s ‘review’ of Dark Souls. Yahtzee is bang on the money with my experience of it – both the bad and the good and the difficulty getting into it. I like to think that if I DIDN’T have friends persistently evangelizing it, the Zero Punctuation review might’ve helped me ‘get’ it better/faster/whatever.
Sonic games. I’ve tried them a few times, but I still don’t get it. It’s a struggle to not play them like a Mario game, focusing on exploring rather than just running, but still… don’t get it.
Also I seem to not really get Playstation games. Checking out some of the “best of” ones that people always rave about, and I just… nah.
What do you mean by “Playstation Games”?
I’m assuming you mean games that are exclusive to the Playstation platform.
Surely there has to be one out of all the exclusive games the Playstation (1 through 4) has had over the years, that you like.
What about
Jak & Daxter
Ratchet & Clank
God Of War
MediEvil
Uncharted
Heavy Rain
Killzone
Puppeteer
Journey
Flower
The list goes on.
There’s an absolute plethora of Playstation exclusive games that are just fantastic.
Yeah, exactly. Half of those have no appeal to me at all, while the other half I’ve tried and just didn’t get it.
In general, whenever I stand and look at the shop shelves for PS3 and 360 games and just see next to nothing of interest at all. Like I said to someone else the other day though, I get all confused when people look at a Nintendo library and say there’s nothing there they’re interested in, but I go and do the exact same thing here 😛
PlayStation games just seem to have a particular style to them in general though. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but there’s something about them that “feels” PlayStation. And it doesn’t quite gel with me for whatever reason.
Is this not the finest fanboy drivel one has ever read?
Nah. If I were a fanboy I would hiss and spit whenever someone tried to bring a PlayStation controller near me and just yell “NO THIS IS CRAP” without even playing anything.
I give them a shot, there’s some good multiplatform games out there, but most of them don’t seem to click with me.
So what *do* you like??
Zero Divide.
Given that Playstation games cover every possible genre, are you sure you’re on the right site?
What games DO you like?
I never said it had anything to do with genres. Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation, Xbox. They all have a different feel to the games they tend to attract to their platforms. I prefer the things I find on Nintendo, and the ones on PlayStation tend to not quite grab me in the same way.
On the topic of ‘Playstation Games’ I dare anyone to play the incredible Banjo- Tooie then go and play Jak & Daxter and see if still think those Jak games were any good.
The PS2’s awful library of 3D platformers are the reason nobody makes 3D platformers any more!
Halo. It just feels like another generic shooter. I can’t see the appeal personally.
Yep. I played 1 & 2 for very brief periods on my original XBox, then shelved them. Tripe.
Can’t believe no one has mentioned tower defense games. I can’t be the only one.
There were at least two, one on each page 😛
THEY ARE THE BEST GAMES, YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE.
Feel bad about yourself and examine you life to see what has led you to this terrible, terrible point.
Shit… I thought I was being a pretentious prick when I labelled myself as a gaming polymath on twitter but wow some of these responses amaze me to no end. I don’t have such a game… Closest thing would be probably be point and clicks, but I love Ace Attorney and Layton so… yeah. At best I’m indifferent to platformers but generally, give me a game, give me a couple of hours at it and I will pretty much develop a considerable skill set and knowledge in said game… >_>
You may develop skills and knowledge, but do you come to understand the actual appeal of them?
Bioshock, Flappy Bird, COD, Assassins Creed, sports games and Titanfall.
(SERIOUSLY getting sick of Titanfall posts..)
PC games and console games. I never really got mobile or tablet games either.
LOL what? What’s left Game & Watch??
Open world/sandbox games like Skyrim.
I struggle to understand how anyone really gives a f%$# that game X provides you with Y hours of gameplay when that gameplay is made up of the same repeated fetch/kill quests (handed out by characters who are completely irrelevant to the overall storyline) that take place in the same rehashed dungeons populated by the same bloody enemies that perhaps change skins every now and again. I was sucked in by the reviews, the amount of things to do and the claims of choice/freedom made in relation to games like Oblivion and Skyrim and regrettably bought the damn games. But I have to wonder what the point of this freedom is when it is all meaningless illusion, and insignificant to the actual storyline. It certainly doesn’t help when the gameplay for these types of games is often slow, clunky and repetitive either.
I don’t hate all games that are open world, sandbox affairs. But the moment they sacrifice a compelling, driving storyline and/or fun, varied gameplay, for the sake of more things to waste time on, is the moment I lose all interest.
Diablo series. I just never saw the point of them and found them interminably boring and repetitive. Everyone else *loved* them though, so I’d keep coming back and trying it, but it just never clicked for me.
Yeah, there are other popular games I’ve hated but at least see the appeal (e.g. Oblivion, Demon’s Souls) but the Diablo clickfest is just…
Bonus points for saying it never clicked for you.
The Last of Us
(Waits for the hate)
I really do not get the mass obsession and praise over this game. I was super hyped for it and then i played it and do not get it. The story was just a bunch of cliches from what I could see, the shooting mechanic has been done far better in previous Naughty Dog games, the UI layout was horrible at points, and the games mechanics and story/environment were completely at odds with each other which consistently frustrated me. I appreciate what they tried to do and the work they put in, but I do not get why everyone raves about such a flawed game.
Anything that is Free to Play, but Pay to Win where the advantage in opening your wallet (on a regular basis as the developer wants you to) is beyond ridiculous to the point where people who don’t pay cannot even compete.
I get that mobile gaming is popular and I even indulge in it myself since I don’t get much time for lengthy gaming sessions any more but seriously why would anyone play a game where you have to pay to win?
Just where is the satisfaction in knowing that you won because you opened your wallet and not because you have the skills required to set you apart from other players?
The Gamecube controller. I heard hype about it at the time, both from media and friends, but when I finally tried it I was completely dumbfounded. N64 and Wii controllers were great, but this thing? It came from Mars.
Minecraft.
I get the creation part, but surely there must be better programs to “Create Stuff” with
and as a game, it just does not seem that exciting or fun.
Yeah, just don’t get it!
Turn-based games for me, JRPG’s (all of them) and games like X-Com. I actually really enjoyed the old X-Com Apocalypse back in the day, so thought I would get into the new ones, but just didnt enjoy them. I think I have grown out of turn-based games and would rather real time action nower days.
Also retro-looking indie games, I just dont get bitmap art, or whatever u call it. Much rather high def graphics, even cool looking HD cartoons over those games like Fez and Starbound.
Life. No matter what I do, I keep levelling up. Currently I’m at 36, I keep hearing that by the end of this year, I’ll be at 37. Apparently the level cap for each individual player is completely random…
The new patch, Teacher 1.0 is incoming, should be here in 3 years or so for me…
I DO hear the endgame is a real bitch though, a total once off.
League of Legends- I never seem to be able to find joy in playing this game but i do rather enjoy a similar game called Smite.Maybe i need to give it a little more time.