Hello everyone. When I read the article on Waypoint about Rage 2 possibly being leaked on Walmart Canada, it reminded me that I have 68 hours played on my Steam account for Rage. I bought the game a few years after it had come out on a steam sale. Doom 2 was the first game I have any memory of playing and it was the game that got me deep into video games. Ever since then I have had a huge interest in anything to do with id Software, which is why I got Rage. I didn’t think that it looked like a good game at the time of release, but I wanted to play it because it was an id Software game. I was wondering if there are any games you have played for any reason besides thinking you might enjoy playing it.
I normally end up doing this for things like Nier: Automata a game I really disliked to start but game to loathe with a passion but finished anyways because everyone else loved that game for reasons I have read about but may as well all be written in Latin for all the understanding I can gleam from it
And a few times I’ve slogged through a games ending when I wasn’t really enjoying it anymore but I can’t recall any examples
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I’m a sucker for continuity and lore, so if a sequel in some series comes out that entices me, I’ll try to play through the preceding games in order to ‘catch up’. The original Witcher game and Resident Evil 5 come to mind as games that just flat out sucked ass to play, that I told myself I needed to play. I ended up dropping both and, wouldn’t you know it, I haven’t played their sequels!
I think Borderlands 2 is a very bad game. My biggest issues with it are the level layouts resulting in lots of backtracking and the very slow opening area (which you’ll need to do twice to reach the level cap per character so I hope you don’t want to play as all 4 character classes). Add the internet humour and memes which most people criticize the game for on top of that and it’s just not a good experience which I for some reason played for 100 hours.
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There’s quite a few I played through as a kid that I hated but because that’s all I had I was determined to finish them.
In particular:
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Seek and Destroy
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A handful of games based on movies/tv shows
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Army Men: Green Rogue
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Shadow the Hedgehog
Thankfully kids these days don’t have to worry about tie in media games as much as you did during the PS2.
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I am sort of in the same boat right now with Nier Automata. I just finished the first playthrough and I’m hoping that the game’s story is going to start to wow me like it did everyone else. Do the 2nd and 3rd add a lot story wise because while I don’t hate the game I don’t find the game’s combat or RPG mechanics that great.
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They do add a lot but it’s of a sad dude being manipulated by women so it’s more A LOT than a lot
Also that whole game is just a bad version of Undertale go play that instead
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Oh no. I still kind of want to finish it just so I dont feel guilty about freeing the hard drive space on my PS4.
Wait, is that the meta-narrative everyone is talking about? Are we as players the real robots?
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So much this. NieR: Automata was my yearly “why are people so excited about this” game for 2017. It followed the 2015-6 wave of meta games and did only some of the things they did, but worse.
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Modern Warfare 3 comes to mind even though I only played it for the campaign. At that point god knows who at Infinity Ward was still involved with the series and that was actually the game that made me quit COD for three or four years before I got back on board with Advanced Warfare, which I greatly enjoyed.
I recently got into Call of Duty: WWII, which has been bad but not for the reasons I thought (And it’s not necessarily problematic, but the things that make Call of Duty: WWII’s campaign bad are something I’m trying to write about because it’s honestly kinda interesting)
I still played about 10 or 12 hours post-game Arkham Knight a few weeks after release, even though I had already checked out of the game about halfway through and their handling of the challenge rooms were incredibly poor.
Watch_Dogs is another one I still explored post-game despite vehemently disliking everything about that game. I like driving around in big cities and chilling out, I guess.
I’m like 30 hours into Xcom 2 right now and I think it’s a much worse game than the first one, but am just too deep into a campaign to stop now. That game’s insistence on putting arbitrary timers on both the combat missions and the actual meta layer make it stressful and frustrating in the least fun way, and it’s a real shame.
I was also so desperate to like Pyre that I played around a third of it despite how little I was enjoying the experience, just because I hoped it would at some point resonate with me like Transistor did. No luck.
Witcher 2 is the only recent one that comes to mind. I decided to play the first two games in the series before I started the 3rd one, because I knew I’d feel a nagging sense of missing something in W3 if I didn’t. And also I apparently have no respect for my own free time. I did not expect to like the first game more! I mostly think the story in 2 is better, and it was very pretty in a bloom-lighting-covered 2012 kind of way, but otherwise was pretty miserable to actually play. At least Witcher 1 was janky in sort of an interesting and unique way. Witcher 2 is just a godawful action game with a pretty decent rpg story bolted on. I ended up having to play it on the easiest settings because the combat was so unresponsive, clumsy, and arbitrarily unfair that I couldn’t get past even basic fights without dying dozens of times because Geralt just wouldn’t dodge in time and had a back made of tissue paper.
Witcher 1 has a lot of awkward writing, extremely tedious fetch quests, and some really laughably moronic sexism but it also had so many strange and interesting ideas about how to twist wrpg mechanics and storytelling into a simulation of one very specific fantasy job class. Witcher 2 was bigger and fancier but it was also far more conventional in its presentation and design and all the awful interfaces discourage you from engaging with the returning sim elements. I’m glad I played it because Witcher 3 is hugely enriched by already having spent so much time with Geralt
Plus importing my saves meant Witcher 3 Geralt still has, as a mark of shame, his dumbass tattoo of a topless woman gotten when drunkenly partying in Witcher 2, which is hilarious to me.
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Alan Wake. I hated Alan Wake. I found almost nothing redeeming about its story, characters, or gameplay. I had heard so much of it, and it was easy enough that I figured I had to see it through just to see how the shit show ended, and the answer is either “not well” or “not at all” depending on how charitable I’m feeling at the moment.
Weirdly, American Nightmare was a huge improvement. It actually shows that Alan Wake’s gameplay when polished and balanced can be incredibly satisfying. The writing was still garbage, and it pulled the most insulting explanation for everything out of a hat, but the horde/arena mode was legitimately fun.
I tried to finish Borderlands 2 many times but I could not continue playing it. It is fascinating to me how different Borderlands and Borderlands 2 are in everything except for the shooting part and the art style.
I played Small Soldiers Globotech Design Lab on my parents’ computer because I like Small Soldiers and wanted to create cool toys in that universe.
Currently, I’m playing through GTA IV, and I’m really not enjoying it that much. I don’t know what magic lead to the developers behind this and GTA V to make Red Dead Redemption, but I really want another game like that.
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Red Dead was developed by Rockstar San Diego, who also developed Midnight Club and going waaaaay back, Midtown Madness.
I suspect Dan Hauser’s writing credit on that game mostly symbolic (both for publicity’s sake, that way you can actually say it’s from the Makers of GTA, and the Housers seem like they like their names on big things). I only say this because I actually find the tone of RDR tolerable, and the plot is driven by characters I can actually stand rather than by the shitheads of GTA 5. Totally speculation, of course. Dan Houser could have written every single thing in that game for all I know, but man it’s just so not GTA that it would surprise me.
Overwatch. I hate Overwatch. I keep playing it and I don’t know why when it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anything out of it. There are some cute characters and I enjoy playing a role as part of a team. It’s satisfying playing a healer and being part of the reason your team comes out on top during a fight, but those moments feel rare. Most of the time I’m stuck with toxic teammates that make even winning feel bad, so I’m honestly at a loss as to why I keep coming back to this game.
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I’ve had that issue. Why not stay off comms, though? That greatly increased my enjoyment of the game.
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Wait Rockstar shuttered their San Diego office? I’m not sure how reliable Wikipedia is but it says they’re still operating. Still(post withdrawn by author, your post lead me to wonder how much credit R*SD / Angel Studios deserves for GTA’s open world driving. I remember really loving Midtown Madness because of how you had a lot of freedom with driving.
