Games which you never played for long...

The Game Room
1

By ‘long’ here, let’s fix it on less than 25% of its intended content or less than a total of 10 hours on it.

I have made a number of such purchases (much to my infinite regrets). Here’s my list and why:

God of War: Toss the disc aside after the xth time of falling off ledges. In the first stage. Good grief, am I glad to hear that those stupid sequences are gone in GoW 2.

Prototype: I played it for one day. Interesting game, but I really much prefer if they move me from stage to stage instead of having me to run. It gets old after a while.

Fallout 3: It turns out to be a FPS with RPG trappings. I was really into it for two or three days, using mods to change the gameplay experience when I realise that it is at its core at a FPS. But for some reasons I love Mass Effect. No idea why.
I have many, many more, but don’t let me bore you. What games have you left to gather dust on the mantelpiece just after playing it for a short while?

2

Blue Dragon. I love the gameplay on that game. It’s the same kind of RPG I played so much when I was younger. The problem is that it was so damned obnoxious and the voice acting was so bad, it drove me away.

That disappoints me.

3

I liked the character building system but you didn’t miss anything for dropping it. I think it was the most generic jRPG I’ve ever played.

There must be thousands of games where I’ve played less than 25% of it’s content. In arm’s reach (and not counting purchases from the past two weeks where I’m still sampling them) there’s Sins of a Solar Empire which I had been told was RTS for people who did not like RTS (I still didn’t like it), X Beyond the Frontier which it just didn’t hook me, Perfect Dark Zero which was buggy as hell (I fell out of the world geometry just walking around multiple times) with poorly designed missions, and Grand Theft Auto 4 where I found the controls annoying and the map effectively unreadable on my hdtv.

4

I spent maybe a half-hour, surely not even an hour, on Morrowind. I got the worst motion sickness trying to play the game if I spent more than 10 minutes on it. I went back to it a few times hoping it was something that would go away for me. Nope.

5

Dawn of War 2 (sucks), Bioshock (sucks), Beyond Good and Evil (crashes), UT3 (no players), I-Fluid (sucks), Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (forgot I had it), Far Cry (sucks), Company of Heroes (expansion made it suck).

Fortunately, most of these I got for <$15 during Steam sales.

6

It sucks too. :slight_smile:

7

Puzzle quest. I realized I absolutely can’t stand bejeweled and that’s basically all it is.

Master of Orion 3: I loved MoO2 so I bought MoO3 the day it came out. Let’s just say it’s not as much fun and leave it there.

Do MMOs count? If so, Aion Online. I got a copy for free from a friend and played for a week before I uninstalled it. If you love hardcore grinds, getting ganked by a group of people twice your level, and competing with legions of bots (who I would not be surprised to learn outnumber real players) this game is for you!

8

Myst. I spent about an hour on it, didn’t really get anywhere, and realized that so far the frustration level had outweighed the fun level by about a 10:1 ratio. Gave it away to a friend.

9

It was Baldur’s Gate 2 for quite a while. I got it when it first came out. I did eventually go back and play it, as well as the first game, this year. I believe it was a confrontation with a pack of mages inside a house that I just couldn’t beat that deterred me. It didn’t help my tactics was charge and smash.

10

Mario Galaxy
Destroy All Humans
Bioshock
Planescape: Torment
Starfox Adventures
FF Crystal Chronicles
Metroid Prime 1, 3, & Hunters (haven’t tried 2)
Turok
Half Life 1 & 2 (Motion sickness. These and Turok for the n64 are the only games I’ve played to give me motion sickness. I’m not sure why/what they have in common that other FPS games don’t)
Silent Hill
Resident Evil
Breath of Fire 1, 4, 5 (2 and 3 are good)
Megaman X 5, 6, 7 (1-4 are good)
FF Dirge of Cerebus (none of my mice work on it and I aint playing it with the gamepad)
Little Big Planet
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Children & Heroes of Mana
New Super Mario Bros.
Final Fantasy XII and XII Revenant Wings
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1 & 2

I’m sure I could go on forever but those are the ones on my mind/desk. Unless otherwise stated the reasons I didn’t play them more were that they were either terrible, boring, or just significantly worse than other games in their respective series/franchises.

11

Diablo: clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick. clickclick.

Halo: The enemies are cute little cowardly creatures. WTF?

12

E.T. for the Atari 2600 (way old game, I know).

Fortunately I didn’t actually own this turd, but when I played it at a friend’s house I could never get past the screen where he falls into the hole.

Good God, did that game ever suck.

13

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. I loved the premise (Sherlock Holmes vs a Cthuhlu cult), but I just can’t do those adventure games. GO look at stuff, search for clues, find the right stuff to bring back and analyze, then solve the puzzle. And even if you know the right answer, unless you type it in the window in the same wording they want, you’re stuck. I was playing for a while just following a walkthrough guide, then set it aside and never went back.

Left 4 Dead: Versus mode. I’m sorry, but I’ve tried playing all the infected characters, but the learning curve to play infected is high, and you can only play against other people, who boot you in an instant if you’re not playing as an expert. Got tired of getting thrown off all the time, so I just do the campaigns.

14

GTA4 - I played it for 30 minutes and sold it back. Too different from the previous games.
The Simpsons Game - I probably played it for 30 minutes too. Nothing wrong with it, but I was too big into Rock Band at the time.
Red Steel - Sucked
Trauma Center - Started off fun, then lost interest.
MotoGP 06 - Got it for free and it was still too expensive.

15

Duke Nukem 3D (PC) - Gift from dad, IIRC. Played it for like 5 minutes before being completely fed up with having to remember like 30 button commands and removing it.

Nascar Racing 3, or something (PC) - Bought it cheap. Played it for a bit, never could get the car pointed straight, all kinds of hardware problems. 30 minutes game time at most.

Blood And Magic (PC) - Not sure where this came from. Contained pretty much every beef I’ve ever had and ever will have about realtime war strategy. Struggled horribly through the “Aelric The Avenger” scenario, got to the final battle, game crashed. That was enough of that.

Gradius II (PSX import) - Bought for $55, sold back for half that a week later. This was my “$200 for a game? Okay, fine.” period, when I was young and (really, really, really) foolish. Here’s how it went: Took game home. Started playing. 1st level: Hard, hard, hard. 2nd level: Impossible. 3rd level: Impossibly impossible. 4th level: Torturously impossibly impossible on an impossibly hard, hard, impossible, painful murderous, impossible scale of murderous impossibility. I actually complained to the store owner about how ridiculous it was (to date the only time I have ever done this).

WWF Attitude (DC) - Rental. The game that convinced me forever and ever that moving away from button mashing was the worst thing that ever happened to video game wrestling Slogged through about an hour of torturous butt kickings before returning it two days early.

Jet Grind Radio (DC) - Bargain basement pickup. I tried, but this is one of those games where it’s way too easy to fall off of things, not to mention one of those games where it’s incredibly easy to get lost. And OOTG where you have to make constant progress or it gets erased. And OOTG where there’s a small but definite chance of getting motion sickness. And OOTG where it’s really hard to find things. Two hours max game time. (I still have this, BTW.)

Burnout (PS2) - Game 1: BZZZT! Time’s up! Games 2-about 25: See Game 1. Went to Codebreaker site, begged for time code, no tice. Nice knowin’ ya!

New International Track and Field (DS) - About $18 used, later sold it back. I had hopes for this, but slapping buttons, or, worse, sliding like a lunatic, just wasn’t worth it. (Not to mention the incredibly adept CPU opponents.)

The Chase: Felix Meets Felicity (DS) - Rental. Awkward control to the 99th power, waaaay too easy to die, constant crippling time pressure. I’d be surprised if I found out I spent 15 minutes on this.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2 (PS3) - Rental. Constantly thrown into swarms of foes, didn’t even know what I had to do some of the time, and trying to finish missions with low health was nerve-wracking. The dealbreaker, however, was the hulking “weak point” enemies that would smash me to bits in 4 seconds because I couldn’t get at that damn weak point. To date the only PS3 game I have 0% trophies on. Awful, awful game.

Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires (PS3) - Rental. Enemies and requirements jacked up to a ridiculous degree. Played it with 4 different characters and always gave up about 5 battles in because the requirements were just too frustrating. As Xiahou Dun, ran into an unstoppable monster about 8 battles in and gave up then and there.

BlazBlue (PS3) - Rental. The most apathetic I’ve been about a fighting game in my life. The problem is that it’s black and white: either you’re a fan of extraordinarily complicated, layered fighting games or you aren’t. Put it maybe 30 minutes on this, most of it on the Litchi Faye-Ling Arcade Mode run.

Facebreaker (PS3) - Rental. Ugh. Y’know, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing is plenty pointless; the difference is that I can actually BEAT THE COMPUTER on that. Did 90 minutes or so of vs matches, got pounded into the mat in my first CPU battle, and called it a day.

16

I never really got into Bioshock. I don’t know why, because I loved System Shock. I played till I got stuck in a spot and couldn’t be bothered to figure my way out.

17

Too Human - I’d heard extremely mixed impressions on it but thought it might be a decent Diablo clone. When I saw it for $10, I decided to give it a shot. Couldn’t stand the right analog stick gameplay and the death animation sent me into cursing fits every time it happened. I think I put 5 hours into it before giving up.

Star Wars Galaxies - Back when I was younger and more foolish, I paid $5 or so for the privilege of beta testing SWG. I logged in twice and hated it. On one hand, I paid to beta test a game. On the other, I only spent $5 finding out that I didn’t like the game instead of $40 or $50.

18

If DN3D was too many keyboard commands, don’t play Operation Flashpoint 2. I think I mapped about ever key on the keyboard. Or Ghost Recon. Or UT 2004. Or a bunch of other RTS, FPS, and strategy games.
I’m curious, what sort of games do you like?

19

Any of the Madden games. I’m just not into it. Back when the controls were much simpler it was an OK game, but now it’s absurdly complicated.

20

Black and White - it sounded SO cool. But where exactly was I supposed to be having fun?