Anything with PvP.
FIFA, NBA, Madden or any popular sports game, really. Just to start off, I don’t like sports games in general, but that’s on me. The part I don’t understand is the level of hype for each new iteration when for the last decade it’s been the same game with the same engine, same effects, slightly different roster and sometimes even missing features. Like, what are people excited for exactly? More of the same?
I can’t speak for the other games, but as a former player, FIFA did change a lot each year, usually its changes to physics, game speed, skill moves, mini games, and ofc graphics. Not $60 worth of game changes, but I’d argue it’s similar with things like call of duty. Best value was always to skip every other year.
Also gambling. Doesn’t get talked about enough but FIFA YouTubers are more or less payed by EA to shill packs and get people (usually teens) addicted to opening them. I probably bought $200 a year on packs from 2016-2020, usually money I didnt have too. Mostly why I stopped buying the games. (Stopped playing CounterStrike for the same reason)
These days, I just casually play mods of older games and get football manager every other game.
Also gambling.
I can’t believe I completely forgot about the gambling aspect, good call. The trailer for NBA 2k20 was especially disgusting in this regard.
I had an aggressive gambling problem as a teen. 2016 would have been my worst because I was still gambling on counter strike skin sites. I’d save up every dollar mom would give me to run to the store or whatever (I’d lie and say things were more expensive than they were), throw it onto prepaid visas and just waste it.
I can’t even begin to describe the amount that I spent.
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you’re doing better now.
Mobile games that have a cooldown timer when you play too much. Oh you don’t want me to play your game anymore? Cool. Uninstalled.
I do get those, but not that I think they’re good. You have to understand the design philosophy is not to make a good game. It’s to make a game that’s addicting and wallet draining.
The timer does two things. It makes you plan your time around it, always coming back as timers end (often with notifications when they finish). It also creates an obstacle they can sell you the solution to. Its pretty antithetical to good game design, but it’s profitable game design.
Elder Scrolls and Fallout. This style of game is just super hard to get into. I get super bored after a few hours
Which have you played? There are multiple eras for them. I’d say Morrowind is easier to enjoy personally, but you have to be OK with reading. The later you go the more brain dead they become.
Tried Oblivion, Skyrim, FA3, and FA New Vegas.
Morrowind looks like an objectively good game but, I suspect once again I’d fail to enjoy/finish it
CoD i reamber being a kid and playing it tried it again now and its the same game
FNAF. Just a cheap jump scare game popularised by shitty youtubers. I literally don’t understand how it got so big other than children being easily amused.
Fight me.
I only find the theory/lore for the first few games to be kinda interesting and even then, it felt shallow and later on just felt like it was jumping a shark.
FNAF is so overrated, it’s not even funny.
I dont care too much about the games but the lore is fun
I think you mean the back stories and personalities of the different animatronics? I don’t know anything about the lore.
So in the earlier game there was a lot of sub plot. If you’re familiar with the game theorists they did go a bit overboard about it but they dove deep looking into the clues of said sub plot and it was just good listening material. I dont play the games, I like to watch playthroughs and then video essays about its lore
No, I am Spartacus!
Call of Duty. I had fun for the first few and Modern Warfare, but then it just kept going.
Same! I could just never get into it even though I enjoy first person shooters
I really liked World at War but that was the last one where it felt like they had an actual story to tell.
Final Fantasy.
Music is good, but the story seems drawn out and repetitive, and a little too “edgy”, mainly with Cloud’s story.
Edgy was the style at the time. That might be a case of needing to adjust expectations to the time it was created in.
Final fantasy 7 came out 2 years before the matrix movie for example. Edgy was huge.
Final fantasy 8 starts out similarly, but turns into a much better romance story with all the same zaniness.
Final fantasy 9 is a more classical fantasy from that era. After final fantasy 9 it gets more modern, but that one at least loses the edge that you didn’t like in seven.
Try the old ones. I played III in 2016 and still felt it was a great game.
Not a series but I tried playing Witcher 3 because of the meme about how much redditors loved it. I played for about 10 hours and got bored and never bothered playing again. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad game but I didn’t understand the hype. Also, despite playing it years late with a decent graphics card, I had regular issues with frames. That is not a performant game.
I will say Witcher 3 kind of forced AA/AAA games to up the quality of their writing. It still stands up as some of the best writing in games, but maybe a little less obviously so after a decade of other competent game stories.
What’s really exceptional is how pretty much every sidequest is also very well written, with believable characters and compelling situations. Many games, again especially before W3, might have pretty good main plots, but the sidequests would just be endless dross with maybe one or two standouts.
As for performance, you probably enabled some silly options. Both Witcher 2 and 3 pushed the envelope in crazy ways for PC graphics; there’s an ultra setting on W2 that was still bringing GPUs to their knees a decade later as well. The game still looks great if you turn it down a little.
Its one of those games that felt cheap at full price back when it launched, i can’t say that for 99.9% of the stuff coming out nowadays.
You mean you didn’t spend a month playing gwent?
It’s a 2015 game that is straight up relevant to this day, also maybe there was something wrong with your settings because it ran flawlessly for me on a rx6600 and its a game made for nvidia.
Dark souls and the like. It just feels tedious and boring. Monster Hunter is the same for me
Are you too skilled for Dark Souls, sir? The process of killing enemies and being afraid of dying thus losing 20 minutes of progress is the game itself.
Nah definitely not too skilled, I just got burnt out on ds2 and blood borne. Felt like the same thing over and over again in a new pretty area.
CoD and Battlefield. There is so much war in the modern world and all it creates is sorrow. Not sure why i’d want to re-enact that.
GTA. I’m a SciFi and fantasy guy so it just doesn’t do anything for me.
What about Cyberpunk?
Never played it.
Have you tried No Man’s Sky? I’ve just recently picked it up and its got me absolutely hooked.
I hate NMS. I got gaslit into playing it again after people clamoring for years that they “fixed the game”. Big surprise, it’s still the same miles wide but micrometer-deep puddle that is was on launch.
Everything aspect of the game is clunky and frustrating and unsatisfying. Exploration is literally the only reason to play the game and even that manages to be stale and minimally exciting, which is truly impressive given the numbers on display. Within 45 seconds of landing on most planets you’ve seen everything there is to see on them, and the exceptions usually just mean another chore.
Sure, you can build a base, you can build up a fleet of ships, you can play with your friends… But to what end? All the ships handle the same, they just have more space or slightly better numbers. Combat is hilariously boring, and the ostensible goal of reaching the center of the universe becomes old far before you get even close. The story that exists is very “I’m 14 and this is sci-fi”, and they stretch it so hard that each crumb you’re given just feels insulting.
I’ve actually taken to it the same way I do Minecraft. I expect I’ll run out of game to do eventually as everyone keeps saying there isn’t any depth, but I’ve spent the last few days smuggling gravatino orbs off sentinal planets and building a hookah lounge in the portside barracks of my ship. I just wish I could type logs up ingame like I journal in Minecraft.
NMS came out on macOS around the same time I got my M2 Air. Being a huge 65daysofstatic fan, I played it for a bit when it first came out, but I didn’t have my own PC, so it was on my wife’s, meaning I couldn’t play that much.
Anyway, I was stoked to finally be able to play it on my own computer and put hours and hours into it. But the thing I could never really shake is just how lonely it feels. I get that that’s part of the point, but after a while it begins to feel really quite oppressive.
Honestly I think the loneliness is what really got me into it. Recently I’ve lost touch with my usual gaming group due to scheduling conflicts and it makes it hard to play a multiplayer game knowing what could have been. Nms feels like it gets that and the whole story basically centers around that feeling. It’s kind of cathartic.
I’ve tried to get into it periodically. I like aspects of it, but it’s also very bland in some ways I find. Like there are infinite cool planets to discover, but the resources are more or less the same on each and across the whole thing. There’s so much to see, but so little meat on the bones I guess?
I need a bit more pulling me forward than what that game gives you I think. The phrase “wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle” has been my experience with it unfortunately. I know a lot of people like it these days, though.
Would building your own medium size space ship that you can cook food in while autopilot takes you to the next planet help? Because that’s the current update.
Is there much depth to that? I’ve found in the past they keep adding new systems, and each new one has exactly the same issue of being another thing that’s not super deep. And by deep I mean full of surprises and things to learn, not you can technically do it for a long time.
It’s mostly aesthetic as far as I’ve seen, though it basically removes the need for houses and you don’t have to go to the Anomaly to start missions.
Yet unmentioned: Halo. I remember being introduced to the first one and being completely unimpressed. It just wasn’t that much technically better than the competition, and the world as far as I could see was super boring.
You were probably a PC player. Halo was designed for the console experience, which is why (on top of massive marketing) it did so well. It really dragged shooter design into the mud for years, arguably we’ve never recovered.
I’ve always liked that in Halo games you survive long enough to react, unlike in most FPS games where it’s basically whoever sees the other first wins.
Halos multiplayer was revolutionary. I’m not defending it though. I never liked it either but you have to admit it was a game changer.
What was revolutionary about it? It was just a mid arena shooter.
For the average person, it was the first experience with a multiplayer shooter. Yeah, there were many available on PC for much longer, but most people had no contact with them. Halo was the one to bring the internet to mainstream gaming.
Other than that, yeah, it didn’t change that much. It did revolutionize controller shooter controls though, more than any game since Goldeneye probably. Gameplay is just standard arena shooter though —maybe a little (or a lot if you’re looking at the likes of Quake) slower to accommodate controllers.
Literally everything about it was revolutionary. One of the first games to have primary/secondary weapons. One of the first games to have vehicles and special weapons in an “open world” map. Regenerative shields.
A lot of games had these elements but no one had all of them in an online multiplayer game for console. Console gaming was still growing and Halo set a standard for literally every fps shooter after it.
Yeah the “for console” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Having never owned an Xbox, I never really played any Halo besides when I had a go with my brothers. But I have to say, the co-op multiplayer on Halo 2 (I think it was) was incredible.
Going into a room, he’d go left, I’d go right, and together we’d clear it out before moving to the next. It was great.
Pokemon. Behind the pleasant facade of the game series, there is a reality: people kidnap animals in the forest, lock them in pokeballs, and force them to fight in arenas, at least until they are damaged. I didn’t understand this game series when I was younger and I still don’t. Do people really like playing this game?
I can understand that people find it repetitive but spare us the virtue signaling. It’s just a game it’s not that deep.
Its not virtue signaling, people just expect better products? Why can’t pokemon pull a zelda-esque quality game instead of the same recycled stuff?
The gameplay loop was really really fresh stuff back when it released for the first time, i stopped playing after the emerald generation because it never built up on what it had. To this day its the same damn game with barely better art style. Even their recent attempts to go 3D feel like N64 quality which is just a no-no for me. If a product is shitty, i won’t buy it even if it’s X brand.
I enjoyed Pokemon Red and Pokemon Snap. I’m vegan and don’t associate playing Pokemon with animal cruelty as the video game is fictitious.
I got the first Pokemon game (Pokemon Red) when I was 14 years old. I never watched the anime. Back then the game was revolutionary, I’d never played anything like it. The aspect of collecting all Pokemon, gaining experience to level up, evolving to make new Pokemon, choosing and organising my squad, it really played into my young brain chemistry. I finished it multiple times. I got a game boy link cable to trade Pokemon with my friends and battle them at school. Thats exactly who the game is made for.
I also played and finished Pokemon Silver, and Crystal. But after that I stopped playing them. Too similar, too repetitive, too many different Pokemon to know and remember, mechanics got too complicated.
By the way, surprisingly, cartoons are also fictional, but for some reason, child abuse in cartoons is 18+ marked or prohibited. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ratings among different media are indeed strangely incoherent.
Well, I have nothing against the players. It’s just that it’s really hard for me to play this series.
The bad guys in Black and White were Pokemon rights activists and your heroic allies were watching them speak being like “everyone knows Pokemon love being captured and made to fight each other, these guys are a bunch of nutjobs!”
Then later it turns out the Pokemon rights thing was just a cover for something nefarious because nobody could actually believe what these people are claiming to.
Ah, as one person on YouTube dubbed it, the debate and switch
I’ve heard the original manga in Japan was super hardcore. Like full-on dismemberment, pokemon would actually die instead of faint, and pokemon would regularly attack humans.
To be honest, I would probably play a game with such a plot with more pleasure than a game where all Pokemon look like puppies.
I tried one of the old parts, it’s incredibly repetitive and boring.
Collecting monsters and fighting them is fun, but Pokemon, to me, is just not the best game for that.
I somewhat understand the game, although i never was into it. But if you look at the newer games, they are just shitty looking cash grabs. But pokemon fans are insane and they would buy anything. I watched one or two movies with my nephews and god damn, they are super shitty. Don’t get me started on pokemon cards…
I hope the movies are not the same as the cartoons of the 90s. I once watched a couple of episodes where Ash sends Pikachu to fight in the arena and then cries when Pikachu gets hit hard. I just wanted to ask, “buddy, you literally sent Pokemon into the damn arena where he was supposed to FIGHT, what were you hoping for?” But in general, I understand you now. In fact, the plot is not important at all. People just collect Pokemon like things, like Magic the gathering cards. Now I’m not sure if this is as insensitive or logical as possible.
AFAIK the first movie’s plot is exactly that; the cast of the anime realising how cruel Pokémon fights are, but they conveniently forget about it at the end.
Final fantasy and everything Hideo Kojima. I don’t get it.
Having just finished the first Death Stranding, I agree with you re: Kojima.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is great; I ended up enjoying the delivery aspect more and more as it went on. But man, the story is…tough. The broad strokes of it are interesting, but I feel like the inertia of it got lost in the attempt to make it a multiple-hour open world.
As a whole, the game is undeniably an incredible piece of work. While you’re immersed in it it’s wonderful. But when you stop to think about it for even a few seconds, it flakes away.
And, like I said, while you’re playing, you’re really into it, you get to the end game, you ‘defeat’ the final boss. Then there’s the best part of 90 minutes worth of exposition to explain the parts of the story that weren’t explained DURING THE STORY. Never before have I played a game that had to put so much effort into explaining itself.
But somehow it all works. The experience of playing it is excellent. Or maybe Kojima just has his own reality distortion field.
I haven’t played a FF game in years, but grew up playing them. At least up through FF10, the stories were compelling. The turn based game play is slow, and I get not enjoying that, but I liked the writing the most.
