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Games you've given honest tries for and just don't find fun

12h 55m ago by piefed.social/u/Ryoae in games

I've just uninstalled and removed Balatro after yet a near, very close 8/8 ante finish. I have been failing and failing, I've only ever seen and gotten to 8/8 ante twice, this being the second time. Every other run has been just insulting me to where no strategy has ever worked, I feel like a lot of it is RNG and pre-determined outcomes based on seeded runs.

And I hate that way of playing. It always feels like I'm getting smacked down by a troll bully who I can never overcome. They'd kick me down every failed run I'd have, then they give me a false sense of security the further I get. "Awwww, getting tired of being owned? Here, let me help you by giving you a few seemingly lucky breaks. SMACK Oh! OWNED YOU AGAIN! FUCK YOU! LOLLOLOL! I BANGED YOUR MOTHER, GIT GUD, NOOB!1"

I just don't understand why these kinds of games are around, even when I have a good idea who it is for.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I don't find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That's just dumb design.

In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you "Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village." Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.

Witcher 3.

I've started it 4 times and I never make it past 6 hours in, it's just painfully slow and feels like a chore to my brain.

Yeah, same for me. I never understood the hype…

It was sort of like the Bethesda formula except that every quest was actually interesting and well-written. Plus there's the part where taking down tougher monsters on harder difficulties requires appropriate prep, which made those fights more interesting.

I'm similar. I did manage better after installing a bunch of mods. Lots were to mitigate/nullify systems I didn't want to interact with.

Mods to make equipment scale with level, autoloot, remove inventory weight, remove durability, and I'm sure I'm missing some.

It's still a slow game with floaty combat, and not my favorite, but I was able to see at least some of what others rave about.

I played that game for about 30 minutes. I got to one of the first areas, picked up some "fetch quests" where I had to kill some type of creature and return their pelts for a prize and some exp or whatever and I was like "Oh... A mid 2000's MMO with no other players. No thanks!"

I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of "snap to grid". Not sure how else to explain it.

For me it was specifically the Blood and Wine DLC. I was really engrossed in the story and when it concluded, I lost my motivation to keep playing.

I found nearly all of Disco Elysium's characters so unlikable, (especially?) including the player character, that I could not enjoy it at all. I think I like the systems in it, and I'm happy when an RPG exposes its dice rolls; the voice performances were all very good; I just couldn't stand it after 5 hours of trying.

You're definitely not supposed to like Harry as a person. He is at best insane and at worst a racist, mysognistic, alcohic drug abusing piece of human garbage. It is also very easy to be put off by even the good people because Harry has already wronged most of them and they have already had enough of his shit by the time you take control.

I get that. But I consume a lot of crime fiction. The Wire, Guy Ritchie movies, etc. These stories are full of terrible people, but they don't make me feel like I'm trudging through a story with a bunch of assholes.

I don't know, maybe it's just because I relate to him but I do kind of like Harry. Yes, he's not a regular "good person", but he's also much more complex than just a "bad guy". He's flawed, tragic and ultimately incredibly human. I think he's a fantastic character, just like most characters in Disco Elysium.

I don't think I necessarily like Harry, but I sure as fuck empathize with him. Playing him as someone seeking redemption or trying to put his life back together (and SO OFTEN failing) was incredibly meaningful. You put it very well.

Balatro should just be renamed to Flush, every single time I win it's because I use the "discard until you have a flush" strategy, and augment that with Jupiter, wild cards, steel cards, and jokers that give bonuses for flushes or single suits.

Flushes are satisfying when they work but you can definitely finish runs with pair or two pair decks

The pair will get you there. I know it sound crazy, but hear me out.

I plateaued at purple ante with flushes and two pairs, and had a eureka moment with pairs after some rng gave me a ton of mercury cards. My strategy to get through gold was to run nothing but pairs and try to get as many hands in as possible. You focus on getting some scalable jokers; my best were green joker and supernova. Then you get selective and find a good joker or combination of jokers to get at least x3 mult. At the same time take card packs, spectral, death tarot or whatever else can get more blue seal. I was able to beat gold stake with nothing but green joker and stencil, and I'm pretty sure I suck at the game.

Dyson Sphere Project. It's exactly the type of game I'd love, and I've tried to get into it 3 or 4 times, but it loses me after the first 4 hours or so.

For me it's Don't Starve. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Early in the game I have to collect rocks and sticks and gold (IIRC) to make a "science machine" (WTF is that?) as a requisite for further crafting. And I found out the hard way that my character has to put flowers on their head to avoid dying from insanity. What were the devs smoking?

A friend and I tried playing Don't Starve Together. We kept dying before progressing very far.

I love survival crafting games but Don't Starve is a bit too punishing for me. I gave it 20 hours of attempts before giving up.

Things can fall apart so fast and so easily and like you said, they just throw you to the wolves to figure it out or die

But it's not a matter of "figuring it out" if there's no logic to the items. I'm supposed to just combine random shit and hope something good happens? Seems pretty disrespectful of my time.

I could never get into Don’t Starve but Don’t Starve Together is a blast with friends and mods. The game’s old and developed enough at this point that I wouldn’t try to figure anything out on your own. Just look it up. You’re not gonna miss out on the “discovery”. The game is crushingly hard already.

If a wiki is genuinely required, then IMO that's a sign the game probably isn't designed well.

Don't starve is pretty hardcore if you don't know what you're doing. I love the game, and i absolutely suck at it. Every now and then you get lucky and the game seems pretty easy. Other times you starve and need food, but you're also insane and can't eat rabbits, and then it's winter and you die.

So... just like I said, doesn't make any goddamn sense.

God of War 2018

I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.

  • The game is littered with "puzzles". The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to "solve" it. They just waste your time.

  • Stats don't matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about "showcasing" my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.

  • The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.

  • Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your "cinematic angles" mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.

  • There are so many "cutscenes" that have you walk at a snails pace. If your "gameplay" can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn't immersive.

  • You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.

  • Probably some more things, but it's been a few years.

The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that's what I did your second entry.

Outer Wilds. I just couldn't get into it, kept playing first hour over a few times, couldn't progress, gave up. I know it's very highly recommended and I'll probably give it another try someday - but I'll have to force myself, it just didn't grab me.

Same. I wanted to explore cuz the environments were cool, but I can't handle games where progress gets reset on a timer. Makes everything feel rushed. Kills the exploration for me.

You're approaching the game from the wrong angle. Progression doesn't reset because there's no mechanical progression. The only way to make progress is to uncover more of the story so you know where you should be looking in the next loop, or how to get around an obstacle. It's a metroidvania of information.

It's one of the games where you have to stick with it for a bit before the story really grips you.

I spent several days there, but didn't find story or characters engaging. Aesthetics and visual design didn't touch me as well. And knda same feeling I get from Blue Prince. The game feels very cool on intellectual level, but there's not enough emotional engagement

Red Dead Redemption 2. The cutscenes are too long and boring.

And some of them are unskippable.

So. Much. Exposition...

I gave up after accidentally doing things too many times. The hotkeys felt like an ever shifting mess and I got tired of constantly reloading after pressing the wrong one. It was a bummer because I loved the setting and overall feel of the game, just ran out of patience after so many times not knowing how to do the thing I wanted to do and half the time ending up doing something unintentionally violent.

Elite Dangerous has a zillion hotkeys as well but that feels more like gameplay and learning to operate a complicated ship. Accidentally wasting a heat sink with a wrong keypress is different from accidentally starting a fistfight with a random person when I meant to wave and say howdy partner

Eeeh, the length of the cutscenes wasn't really what put me off but rather the fact that I didn't care about most of the people in them. I fact, I never got invested in any of the characters.

Their world building and dedication to creating complex systems are fantastic but Rockstar Games makes their characters so repulsive that I don't enjoy being around them, much less advance whatever agenda they have. Same with GTA V (and presumably VI as well).

Doom Eternal.

I like the original trilogy, adored Doom 2016, and I even thought Doom 3 was a decent game in its own right. So a direct sequel to Doom Eternal where Heaven gets involved and everybody says is bigger and better? Sign me the fuck up!

I bought the game and all the DLC. I played through to the end and beat the final boss, and I did not enjoy one second of it (I only finished because I can be a stubborn fool).

Things got off to a bad start when I had to sign into my Slayers Club account before the game would show me the main menu. Then when I was playing, it paused every few seconds to tell me that it couldn't connect to the server, which utterly kills the vaunted flow of combat.

And the combat. Ugh. Doom 2016 is excellently balanced, providing 10 fun weapons for different situations which let people find their own playstyles, and prioritising ammo drops when the player is low on ammo and health drops when low on health. Eternal fans claim that there is no reason to use anything other than the super shotgun, and I have no doubt that strategy worked for them, but I used all the weapons, and I don't think I used the super shotgun very much at all.

Eternal officially gives you nine weapons, but each of them has three different fire modes (except the super shotgun, which just has two fire modes and also a meathook), so there are really 26 guns plus two different grenades. And every single fucking enemy has a hardcoded weakness to two, maybe three attacks, and are barely hurt by anything else. These aren't weaknesses to individual weapons, but to specific weapons in specific modes, and some of those modes have to be unlocked by meeting specific conditions. Every single demon hits like a dump truck and moves like a motorbike, so by the time you have selected the specific weapon that will do more than a papercut, you have a completely different demon in your face. And the guns in this Doom game hold fuck all ammo even when fully upgraded. And getting upgrades often requires playing suboptimally.

Speaking of ammo, the chainsaw has been downgraded from powerful emergency weapon to tool for obtaining ammo. You can find the odd ammo pickup in levels, but 90% of the time, the only way to get more ammo is to chainsaw a weak demon (demons don't drop ammo otherwise). Because you can barely carry enough ammo to kill one heavy demon, I spent the 90% of the arena battles running around, desperately dodging attacks as I waited for the chainsaw to refill so I could get some ammo to shoot at the big demons. And the arena battles don't use waves; as soon as you kill a big demon, another one teleports in to replace it, so there is no respite until you get near the end. This did not make me feel like a berserker-packing man and a half. I felt like a weak, terrified wimp, desperately trying to survive. Fighting hordes of demons isn't epicly badass, it's a long, tiring slog, and at the end of every arena, I didn't feel empowered, I felt exhausted and relieved it was finally over.

To make an analogy, Doom 2016 is like an Italian pasta dish: a small number of high-quality, carefully-chosen ingredients that work well together. Doom Eternal is like making a sandwich of rashers, sausages, fried eggs, strawberry ice cream, venison, raspberries, spaghetti, and chocolate cake. All those things are great on their own, but the sandwich is just too much, and the flavours and textures all clash with each other.

I feel the same about Eternal. In 2016, once I got the upgrade that gave me infinite ammo while at full health and armor, I had some of the best fun in the game, using the railgun like a maniac

I didn't finish Eternal, I think I stopped before the cathedral where you'd kill the 2nd evil archbishop or whatever. Combat was annoying and the parkour more so

Rainworld. I've started it twice now and quit a half-hour in both times. I love a good side scroller/Metroidvania, but this one has one mechanic I can't abide: a time limit. You have to rush from shelter to shelter because the world periodically floods and annihilates everything out in the open. I just want to explore at my own pace game, thank you.

No Mans Sky. I think my biggest turn off is the interface - its so unintuitive and slow, I just can't seem deal with it. I try it once every big update but that part of it doesn't seem to improve. I haven't tried it in a while.

The UI and every interaction is unnecessarily slow and that really builds up stress, not to mention the many times your aim is pretty fucking clearly centered on a vegetable or box or whatever, but the interact will target a nearby NPC because fuck you.

Learning alien words is one of the worst chores of NMS

I keep going back to it to try it again and again because I recognize the potential is great, but every time I get in there it's the same feeling of being in a weird technicolor circus, a universe that has a weird scale and no real sense of vastness because the systems are cramped together cartoon solar systems and there's no real feeling of consequence, no feeling of "going too far, I need to come back later when I'm stronger" or conversely no feeling of "I need to get to that place over there" and it seems the only real challenge is some dangerous robots and animals so you leave that place and go get your fuel somewhere else.

I think it would have connected a lot better if it was less easy to get around, less teleporters to identical space stations, less fast-travel and less ships flying in the sky, less aliens hopping all over the place on planets, less stuff everywhere. Maybe more of a survival feeling where you really do have to climb down in caves to search for a part to get your life support going, even basic, tired old hunger/thirst type mechanics would have really spiced up the experience and would have made finally being able to fly and explore feel awesome.

Also, the crafting isn't fun, they lean into a lot of weird space minerals and space chemicals and such that you have no intuitive idea what you need to keep. To say nothing of how boggling the inventory/upgrade system can be, I don't know why they reinvented the inventory/skill/upgrade system so much.

Rainworld. It just doesn't feel fun to play.

EDIT:

Also any roguelike that isn't Dead Cells. I keep telling myself I like them but the permadeath mechanic is beyond frustrating. Not sure why I've stuck with Dead Cells, maybe it's because you still meaningfully progress between runs.

Dead Cells is a roguelite, due to the permanent upgrades that persist accross runs. A roguelike doesn't have this type of progress. If you like Dead Cells, check out their new game, Windblown!

Same with Roguelikes. To try to tune up their playtime, they always seem to ramp up the difficulty curve to hell and back. I'm okay with games that eventually get hard as you adjust to mechanics, but so many of them just frontload giant walls of difficulty and insisting you need to "find the right abusive build".

I've had the Roguelike tag blocked on Steam, only picked up a few that were able to market themselves past that aspect.

Same. The game is impressive and I respect it, but it's better when someone else is playing it and not me.

Its fanbase is small but very passionate judging by the content I see on YouTube. Lots of fan theories and lore videos and even fan animations. I forget where I first heard about the game, but it was a video about games that were badly reviewed initially but went on to gain some sort of following. The premise of trying to survive in a world that wasn't made with you in mind really resonates with me, but I can't get into it. The platforming is clunky and the visuals are hard for me to parse.

Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 both bored me to sleep. I didn't find anything in their worlds to care about, and the meta-game of endlessly memorizing monsters' attack patterns just doesn't hold my interest for more than a few minutes. I guess soulslike games are not my cup of tea.

I had this with dark souls 2, even though I enjoyed dark souls 1(remastered)

witcher 3. I just don't like the mechanics and the character.

Skyrim.

I tried it for 25ish hours with around 30 mods, mostly QoL stuff with a few other tweaks thrown in. I don't like 1st person melee combat (and the 3rd person camera sucks), so I went magic. I had a magic overhaul mod, but the best spell I found was just double fireball. Every time I tried other spells, I would think "this kinda works, I guess, or I could just kill them with double fireball." Combat got pretty boring, since every engagement boiled down to double fireball until out of mana, then use bow and arrow until everything was dead.

Side note: I evidently was bitten by a vampire at some point and didn't realize I had turned into one myself until several hours later when I received the message that my vampire powers had been fully realized. I was confused as to why guards kept asking me if I was sick and commenting on how I looked so pale.

When I first played Skyrim it was the "complete" edition with all the DLC. The game starts fun enough, I complete the intro, wander around a bit and find an interesting quest that takes me to a big city.

Immediately two vampires attack me. I know now this is the start of a plot hook for one of the DLCs, but it was so confusing. Suddenly I was forced to do a whole vampire side plot because every time I ignored it more vampires showed up.

I hope DLCs have improved since then because it was a terrible introduction to the game.

Nope. Dlcs being forced unto the player without reason or timing is pretty much the norm.

Gran Turismo 7 was the worst offender I've had in a long time. It was very pretty and very well put together but it just wasnt fun.

But a few years later and a YT rabbit hole or two and I decided to give it a go on a very basic simrig setup and... yep, theres the fun.

Oddly enough I found GT7 far far too hand-holdy. There is absolutely no way to pick the wrong vehicle for a race.

The non PP limited races are a joke, IMO those should have the payout linked to the PP of the car. You take a 450 into a 550 race, double payout. Take a 650 in, half payout. Also maybe dont call it PP because it makes talking about it sound like a dick joke.

IMO if you turn the difficulty up to hard and turn all the drivers aids off its plenty challenging for people new to sim racing, I see how veterans might find it a bit simple.

If I recall correctly, I turned off all the driving assist aside anti-lock brakes and still breezed through... simply because they don't let you buy the wrong car for a race. It felt like the game lost an entire aspect to it. The restaurant menu or whatever system it was only let you buy exactly the cars it took to win the next race, with everything else locked.

Back in one of the previous GTs (4?) I accidentally bought a Prius as a starting vehicle. It was, in theory, everything you'd need for a beginner car... but yikes was it bad. And I quickly learned about sunk cost fallacy trying to upgrade it. I made a similar grievous error in GT2 buying a Daihatsu Mira as my beginning car during a second run. I was targeting the K Cup and didn't think beyond those requirements. So I was stuck with something like 78hp going into the Clubman Cup, which didn't work at all.

Another mistake was buying a Chevy Nova (or maybe Camaro?) in GT6 for the legacy races, only to find out the heavy weight and rear-wheel drive made it impossibly difficult to turn without losing traction and having the tires kicking out from underneath. It was even too heavy to compete in a basic FR race. There was no fixing it. My driving style was too aggressive and I had to choose another vehicle.

All of those errors were learning moments that I brought forward in choosing my future cars. Learning what was in my budget, what upgrades I targeted first, and adapting when I got it wrong... all of that seemed gone in GT7. I don't even remember money being a consideration.

It's possible that I could have unlocked more of the "game" when I finished those tutorial-esque menus, but I had rather boot up the older games and just jump into a Sunday Cup with a fresh Silvia Q.

I had fun in the online races, especially in VR.

Sonic Mania. For a game where you're supposed to go fast, it's terribly frustrating when you slug through each level because you don't know them well enough to fly through them. I feel like this game is more about memorizing maps and less about having quick reactions.

Yeah I feel this way about Sonic in general. You get punished for going fast in a game that markets itself on going fast.

Dark Souls 3…it is a bit hard to jump in after its slower predecessor, for some reason unknown, I just like the legacy combat system better, can’t find the rhythm in the new one…

You're not the only one, I love each other sooulsborne but 3 has this weird frenzy about it that I don't really fuck with.

Cyberpunk 2077.

I don't care much for the story and it gets too much into the way of me trying to enjoy the world.

Also I despise that Silverhand guy.

Ugh, yeah silverhand is painfully annoying. I absolutely dislike the trinkets in this game. Collect garbage simulator. I also often heard how the city felt truly alive. I never really got that feeling. Yeah it's nice looking at all, but there are always the same 4 people at the same place talking nonsense to each other.

I bounced off of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I didn't really even get into the gameplay because the narration in the intro just wouldn't shut up. You'd click an option, the caption would pop up, and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer. I'd have the caption read by the time the narrator started to speak, and the narrator talked the way old people fuck. I went "I don't have the patience for this right now, I'll come back to it later" I chose the Exit option from the menu, and the narrator started delivering a multi-line "everyone gets a break but you'll come back" dialog, which I ALT+F4'd out of the software and uninstalled it on the spot. Dim Bulb Games is one of many studios on my black list.

Yeah, I couldn't put my finger on it but I think you're right. Real shame because it seemed like the game was going to be right up my alley in terms of its subject matter. But it's just not an enjoyable experience.

I discovered it through its soundtrack. I was listening to West of Loathing's soundtrack on Youtube, which was partially or entirely done by the same artist who did WTWTLW's, so I got recommended some videos, looked up what it was, decided to give it a try, and...maybe if someone implements it for Apple II or some other machine that physically cannot support voice acting so we can dispense with the pretentiousness.

I mean, voice acting in and of itself is not a bad thing. Return of the Obra Dinn had just the right amount, for instance.

Granted, Obra Dinn's pacing problem wasn't about dialog. It was...You find a corpse, click, a musical sting plays, you get a few seconds of audio play, and then you see in glorious monochrome dithering the aftermath, and then you're stuck there for the exact amount of time that some music plays. If you immediately learned something, you can't do anything about it. If you learn a piece of information that puts something you saw earlier in a new context and you want to go back and look at it, you can't do anything about it. If you're not done looking when the music is over, you'll clunkily have to come back in here. And woe betide you if there's another corpse in that scene and you end up doing like five of them in a row.

and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer.

🤣🤣

Get ready, this one’s sure to ruffle some feathers:

  • BioShock
  • Oblivion
  • Any hero shooter
  • R.E.P.O.
  • Most overhaul mods for Halo games

Edit: typo

I fully agree with most of your list, except Bioshock. I love Bioshock and think it's a work of art.

Halo overhaul mods are definitely not my vibe, even back on the original PC port. They change too much about the game where they're just making a new game with Halo assets. My only exception to that is InfernoPlus's Cursed Halo which are just fun as hell.

No real opinion on most of these, but I'd like to ask when you played Oblivion? I maintain that its one of my favorite games that absolutely does not hold up

I was introduced to it around 2010 and I thought it looked mid. I then finally tried it in 2012 and it played exactly how I expected it to, which, in my opinion was not very well at all. I like Morrowind and Skyrim, though.

Doom 2016. Idk why it's not my vibe. Eternal is much more accessible I guess is the word I would use to describe my experience. It's difficult for me to care about Mars but Earth? It's pretty badass fighting there because you know logically the humans don't deserve what the demons have done to them.

My experience is the opposite. I found Doom Eternal too platformy. Super Mario Galaxy from hell. 2016 wasn't masterpiece, but it was fun enough for a playthrough.

I prefer 2016 over Eternal. Better story. Better levels. Better atmosphere. The gunplay and arena battles in Eternal were great and would get my adrenaline pumping, but it felt like the game was basically made for those battles and didn't have any other substance.

For me, it's Elden Ring. I wanted to love the game so bad but it didn't recapture the magic of Dark Souls 1 for me. I never get past the early areas of the game because I just get bored.

Elden Ring just doesn't make the experimenter part of my brain feel good. I want to try out everything and do everything and constantly adjust to the enemies. But, in ER you are much better off focusing on one thing and getting really good at it. The game is about mechanical skill and pattern recognition, not solving the enemy like a puzzle. So, I just get bored doing the same repetitive attacks and learning when to dodge the enemies. Maybe you get to do a little bit of fun planning by picking the right element or buffs but that's about it.

I was actually really sad about it, but I came to realize that I just want to play games that are very mathy and allow me to test out lots of builds and strategies. I've actually taken an interest in JRPGs as a result and I'm enjoying it so far.

Oh man, I totally agree with this. Plus they reuse mini bosses a bunch of times. The open world is a slog. I played 80 hours trying to explore the whole map and beat almost all of the bosses and got so burnt out I haven't picked it up since. Meanwhile I've played DS:R probably 10+ times since.

Magic The Gathering player?

I actually couldn't afford to play it really.

The only format I could really play was Pauper and I had some fun with it for a bit at my LGS. Then I just gave up because I wasn't making any friends at the LGS and I didn't want to keep spending money on it. I guess proxies exist, but I don't have anyone to play with 😢.

I actually really wish I could afford it, I play games like Slay the Spire to get the deck building fix without spending a ton of money.

MtG draft scratched this itch for me for a few years. With a little gaming of the system on Magic Arena, it's definitely possible to play for free or near-free once you get good enough at it, but I was already a veteran Magic player by the time Arena came out, and there are few things with a higher learning curve than draft.

You might like JRPGs with job systems. Metaphor: ReFantazio is a recent one. Final Fantasy Tactics and Bravely Default are a couple of my favorites in this vein.

Guilty Gear -STRIVE-

Played it and played it. There was just so much loading time. Loading to get to the main menu, loading between matches. I never even bothered going online. I beat it with all the characters. Then beat it again with a few without losing a round.

No joy. Sold it and got the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection instead.

Diablo, or Diablo 2, don't remember. Didn't really "get it". It seemed that you just walked around to the next foe, clicked a lot, picked random loot, and repeated endlessly, with nothing much happening. Maybe I missed something...

Nah that was about it. Fun to play on flights. I still play once in a while while a movie is on that isn't that good.

Original Fortnite was garbage lol. Dunno how much its changed since, but I found it to be the worst f2p battle royale game at the time.

The projectile physics were cruddy, the weapons sucked, the building mechanics seemed like an abusable/spammable gimmick more than a proper feature, there weren't any vehicles, the rewards were non existent, the graphics looked pretty lame, the emotes had nothing compared to TF2 taunts.

I had more way more fun on some random Chinese mobile pubg knockoff with touchscreen controls.

Maybe its just me, but I feel like Fortnite just got lucky by being the first on the PC/console space that was free, so it exploded in popularity. Otherwise there were a ton of much better alternatives.

Witcher 3

The combat isnt very good compared to… souls games.

Red dead redemption. Just got really repetitive for me.

Half life and HL2

It wasn't all that fun to me, and gave me motion sickness. It didn't get into either of them

Lol, I feel you with Balatro. Played on and off for the past year and reached a 6/8 at most. It's fine for a quick short run every now and then but i do not get the obsession with it.

For me one is Ghost of Tsushima. Must've started it like five times before finally deciding I just don't dig katana fights.

Another is Baldur's Gate 3. I rally want to like it and it does look like a properly polished game, but man I hate the DnD dice roll mechanic with a passion.

I really, really tried to like Ancestors: The Humankind Oddysee.

Playing as an ape, swinging from trees, eating fruits and mating. It was a lot of fun.

But there are mandatory mechanics that drag it down. You have to discover everything to progress, and you have to bring your kids and tribe along manually. The cost of failing in combat is too high. You can grind for two hours to learn your area, and then lose your best ape and 2 kids to a panther with one second of quicktime events that you haven't trained for.

Building fortifications is very laborious and I couldn't find a good reason for it.

Training the clan to build weapons eluded me.

The exploration was amazing though, and if it was less grindy, more forgiving in combat (especially with more opportunities to practice, I mean, why not allow apes to initiate play fighting with each other where you could master the quicktime bullshit without such high risk) and a more independent tribe behaviour where they advance without having to be led manually, it could be a great game.

Minecraft and others like it. I want something to work towards. Because in games where you can do anything and make your own fun, is too much after my days.

The Outer Wilds - I get recommended this over and over, I know it's a huge hit, a cult classic, and beloved to many people. I finally got it and gave it a real solid attempt, several times so far. I understand the gameplay loop I guess, the repeating, the weird ship flying. I mean, I appreciate it and love that people are experimenting with new ways to make games that break old molds. I really like the atmosphere and maybe if I were a lot younger it would feel fresh and interesting.

But I never really started having fun, never really connected with the characters or the world, I never got hooked. Everything felt like a janky obstacle instead of progression and reward.

Maybe I'll try it again sometime, but maybe it's possible some games just don't rub me right.

Also, ITT: lots of people arguing with other people why their feelings are wrong.

Final Fantasy IX. I was a religious FF player before IX, and loved VIII so much despite all its flaws, because it really went for it with new ideas and atmosphere and the draw junction system which was hackable and broken but really interesting. In many ways the most Final Fantasy of Final Fantasy, despite the widespread hate.

But the devs got so conservative for IX, might as well have been playing Dragon Quest. And the load times and frequency and lack of variety for random encounters was just insurmountably tedious.

Most open world games I can't seem to get past a few hours. I've started RDR 2 about 4 times now, Watch Dogs/Assassins Creed games probably more than that and even stuff like Forza Horizon (I love FH1 though) is part of that too.

Hunt: Showdown

The teams just hide around the objective and wait for the timer to countdown. Anyone that goes in first to kill the monster just gets picked off by the camping teams. Then as the timer approaches zero the remaining camping teams just all have to engage in what's essentially team deathmatch. It's the same every round. It's super boring.

I really wanted to like Last Epoch, played for probably 30 hours or so, just didn't feel like it was worth it to continue