I played this Gameboy advance game as a kid where you adopted a puppy and cared for it and all that and then after a certain amount of time your parents in-game made you get rid of it.

I’ve never felt so fucking betrayed in all my days. I was so mad that I threw the game cartridge out of the car window and my parents weren’t even mad because the ending to the game was so fucked lmao

FFXVI

I saw the trailer years ago and seemed good, so I wanted to give it a try. I of course looked for online reviews and game journalists were praising it so I bought it.

It’s horrible. The only reason I played a lot of hours is because there’s an endless stream of cinematics.

The strong point is supposed to be the story. But the story is so fucking stupid. The lore and world building is good, but the story is shit.

I don’t know how game journalists are even allowed to exist.

EDIT: mistakenly wrote XIV instead of XVI

Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Too many cheaters and the skins just ruin the game. I still play 1.6 and Source sometimes. CS2 I don’t even bother, because my pc is potato.

Red Dead 2 for me.

I constantly get everything wrong. Never understand the quests or what I’m supposed to do, always making the wrong decisions. Constantly having to retry.

It felt like it was designed by aliens that just read a few books on life on earth and cowboys and made an open world game.

“Hurry you have to do this one thing RIGHT NOW” means you can do that thing whenever you want. Hell. You can even take and 8 year old on a fishing trip but I get tricked into losing sleep on a workday because of appearant lies… I never knew when I was in a quest or not.

BG3 I straight up refunded because it reminded me why I hated D&D. I just end up save scumming and hating melee combat against ranged targets. I walk 2 steps towards the enemy the enemy also walks two steps and throws a dagger in my face. Repeat. To be fair I hated XCOM for the same reason. I loved Fallout 1 and 2 though.

Subnautica: Below Zero.

Subnautica is one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. My understanding is there was enough of a shakeup of crew behind the scenes during BZ’s development that it effected the final product, and it’s evident that they didn’t know what about the first game was so good.

Every single area in the game is a twisty turny confusingly self-similar maze of corridors. The twisty bridges, the sea monkey dens, the icebergs, the glacier, the lilypad caves, the crystal caverns, the wreck, the game is a bunch of mazes. The story doesn’t make sense, the characters kinda suck…I’ve played it through 3 or 4 times, and that’s probably it. I’ve played through Subnautica dozens.

Rocket League and Rust have each taken thousands and thousands of hours.

I fell in love with RL the very first weekend and bought all the DLC as it came out because I wanted to support an indie developer. I was rewarded by having the thing I loved sold to a corporation who systematically used my love against me until I could no longer tolerate it.

Rust of course decided that I wasn’t worth having as a customer anymore and cut me off along with every other Linux user.

Almost every MMORPG. They start off fun and then the fun becomes grind - tedious quests, upkeep, travel time, hp recovery, crafting, rare spawns, penalties & debuffs for death.

My first experience of all this was Everquest. I quit because Verant screwed up a series of expansion launches leading to crashes and downtime and I questioned why I was playing this thing and realised it hadn’t been fun for a long time. But pretty much every MMO is the same.

Solitaire. I found out later that the deck only had 51 cards.

I know I am late to the party here but the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trilogy just didn’t work for me. I played the first game and suddenly my guard was up. Some of the combat is cool, and of course the graphics are better. But every story change from the original was worse, all of the new characters were boring and clearly shoe horned in, and the general game seemed to lack direction despite having solid rails to coast on.

Still, I finished Remake and bought Rebirth and just couldn’t. In the first town all the flaws of the remake trilogy were on display. Uninstalled, sold the game, and have zero plans to buy Revolutions (is that the last one?)

I do not see SE capturing the spirit of FF again, which is such a loss.

Rogue Legagy. after a while it suddenly occurred to me that if my characters were slowly getting more powerful as a result of how long i played the game, the game wasn’t challenging me to beat it, it was challenging me to invest my time until i’d customized the experience to be easy enough for me. so i switched back to playing more traditional roguelikes and roguelikelikes (which is what we called roguelites at the time) where you reset to 0 each play

Blue Prince. After reaching room 46 and realising that the game was just getting started, I immediately gave up. This is probably the game that respects the player’s time the least that I ever played.

It has amazing lore and overall feeling but is ruined by the RNG. It’s somewhat bearable in the first part but becomes extremely annoying when you know what to do but can’t because of unlucky draws or not enough steps left.

Warframe. 3500 hours in about 5 years.

I watched it develop from just a fun little “be a magic space murderhobo” into a game with some actual story behind it (and some kinda cool cinematic story missions… that went a bit off the rails when they made time canonically non linear)

The unfortunate part for me was the reputation gating and crafting materials grind. Every new update brought another new material and another new hub world with another dozen or so NPC’s to increase your popularity with by running the same missions ad nauseam, just to get another weapon you were going to level up for the Mastery Rank exp and never use again.

I started in the days before Mastery Rank 30 was anywhere near possible, after hitting L1 (30+1) and realising there was no appreciable difference to gameplay I completely lost any reason to play.

I had hopes that there would be something big once you hit the original “max rank”, even if there was intent for the devs to continue adding more after that. I had thought there would be some change in the way the game played, like they would reduce the crafting times from 4 days (a new warframe requires 4 blueprints, a head, systems and torso, all 12h crafts, then a 24 hour craft to stitch them all together, all 4 steps requiring blueprints and materials which are RNG drops from different specific enemies on specific map types/planets/hub world areas gated behind reputation)

The GRIND was unreal. They had to roll back their crafting quantities on Railjack after each individual component, of which there were 6, took 1 million credits and 4 sets of 4 figues worth of materials. I nolifed that game hard enough at the time that I spent an entire week (including wait times for the crafting itself) just to build a ship that was advertised as a ‘dropship for you and your mates to use both in space and as air support on the open world areas’ but that became a “use in very specific missions and one big gamewide event that’s never coming back”

Don’t even get me started on trying to earn platinum (RMT currency to instantly complete a blueprint that’s crafting or buy a new cosmetic/weapon/frame without the crafting steps)

Saying all that, it was a good way to spend time during covid.

There’s also the very valid situation of a game you previously liked becoming noticeably worse after some update or addon, which might cause a previous recommendation and engagement to flip.

Dark Souls 3. I have 160 hours in Dark Souls 3, and I hated probably 90% of it. Its just such a boring slog, it’s when Fromsoft imo jumped the shark with what i call, “flailing boss syndrome.” So many bosses and enemies in DS3 just flail wildly with such little telegraph or strategy other than, roll away, and mash roll. Dodging should be a strategic maneuver that lets you avoid damage and change your position, but it really hasn’t been that since Dark Souls 2.

DS3 is what started the whole dodge slop thing thats so prevalent in modern souls likes. Ironically, Bloodborne, which also has flailing boss syndrome, is one of my favorite games of all time, but the game is a lot more deliberate in its design around those kinds of bosses… minus a few.

I think DS3 is too Action, not enough RPG for me as a Souls game. Bloodborne is unique enough to be a separate category for me, and Elden Ring’s weapon ashes really add a lot more flavor and gameplay, along with letting you really diversify your build more. Plus I think the bosses in Elden Ring are more readable, and block is actually something you can feasibly do. (Though I do think they need to decrease the dead angle that can hit you when blocking.)

I just despise Dark Souls 3 so much, all everyone talks about are the late game bosses, but dont mention the slog of areas you need to get through to get to any of the good bosses.

But is DS3 a bad game? probably not, its probably a me problem. DS2 set my expectations up in the sense that DS2 was completely different gameplay wise to DS1, where as DS3 felt like a more generic sequel to DS1 rather than expanding and making the game feel different or unique. DS3 was just DS1 but super fast and that’s really it. I guess i just wanted something different.

Flashback and Ultima VIII

Both games were inspired works of art with unbelievably frustrating mechanics, often involving jumping onto moving platforms. I think I actually broke a keyboard playing Flashback. And yet I kept playing.

Back then, if you had a game, you finished it, even if it made you cry. Because you didn’t have anything else.