You’ve mentioned the ones I’d recommend to people who want to get into deckbuilders, so maybe it’s not the genre for you. I can’t get into “point engine” or “point salad” games like Agricola (blasphemy, I know), Le Havre, or Terra Mystica. They feel like playing Excel spreadsheets.
You have to accept that you will be punished in CKII, and that it’s not your fault. If you’re a little guy, the big guys will steamroll you when they have the opportunity. If you’re the big guy, you have the joy of managing a large empire. (Regent, why won’t you let me grant viceroyalties? My subjects hate me for having too many vassals. It’s for the good of the kingdom, you ass. Also, how did you, one of three Jain in my realm, become regent over all the Buddhists? When I’m 16, you’re going to be sorry.)
If you’re not a glutton for punishment and willing to load and reload to understand why you were screwed and how it was a 20 year timebomb that did your house in , these are not the games for you. I’m generally good at avoiding massive timebombs like that now, but I still have some very rough eras. (Seriously, fuck my regent.)
ARK: Survival Evolved. My son is playing the heck out of this game, and I’d like to get high enough level that I could play with him, but it’s just… survival. You spawn in on a desert island, buck nekkid, and it’s a super-high res Minecraft with dinosaurs. You run around picking up rocks and sticks and banging them together to make axes and spears, and make clothes and boxes and shelter and then you make up a huge pile of drug darts and tame dinosaurs.
That’s it. Survive, build some stuff, tame dinosaurs. Gotta get 'em all… no quests, no plots, no way to “win.”
I don’t care about that. It’s just very non-intuitive in its controls, the tutorial is pretty terrible and the general advice on it is to watch a day’s worth of videos to learn how to play. I just don’t want to invest that sort of time into a video game before it starts being entertaining.
That’s pretty much the Paradox strategy game trademark and I respect that that’s the way they roll. I just ain’t got time for that.
Bioshock. I adore the aesthetic, and the story looks like it’d be right up my alley. But every time I try to play I get queasy from all the bobbing around. I don’t think first-person shooters and I get along.
That’s a whole new genre of “survival” games from the last couple years and it’s a pretty niche audience, I think. The concept is great in my opinion but the game play requires you to get into a team/clan/tribe and punishes you for not playing regularly since it’s a persistent game world and your stuff will be raided in your absence. On the other hand, if you play on a private server where your stuff is safe and you’re not immediately killed by a guy with a bazooka who wants to steal your underwear, the game quickly becomes trivial since the environmental hazards flatten out once you hit a certain level of tech.
I’m trying Savage Lands which supposedly has a somewhat better single player game than most of them but haven’t gotten into it much yet. Interestingly, all the survival games I can think of are still in Early Access on Steam, sort of an admission that none of them quite nailed down how to turn the concept into an all around balanced experience.
I generally would like to love games like KSP and Hearts of Iron III, but the level of detail kind of drives me nuts. I mean, I don’t really want to do orbital mechanics calculations for a game, you know? Something between say… HoI3 and Civ5 would be ideal for me. Not so abstract as the Civ games, but not so relentlessly detailed as HoI3 either.
Beyond that, I really do wish I could get past the hideous aesthetics of the games like League of Legends. All that Japanese-looking stuff with the huge swords, stupid outfits and dumb hair just grates on me, especially with the swirling colors and flashy bits. It’s like they made the games to appeal to dorks who like anime, not the general public.
All of the Zelda games bore the piss out of me, and when they are not doing that, frustrate the heck out of me. It’s sad, too, cause I feel like I would really like them. They are right up my alley. But I just get annoyed.
I also loved Batman Arkham Asylum but then they made City and it was too open ended. The Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series don’t give me this problem but apparently when confronted by a huge city full of tons of quests, what I spend all of my time doing is beating the crap out of thugs. I was never able to finish it and I don’t think I will ever buy the later games.
I really, really want to like the Mass Effect series, because from watching my kids play, it really seems like a spiritual heir to B5. But I’ve played the first one for about two hours and it’s only reinforced my loathing for cut scenes. I want to play, not watch a movie and then go down a corridor to watch another one.
Even Borderlands TPS has gone cut-sceney, with the viewpoint character having extended dialogue. I find it disturbing to hear “myself” talking.
Heh, Paradox in one :). Same here. These games (EU, CK etc…) seem like they could be fascinating, but even though they’re far from the most grognardy thing out there they’re still waaaay over my personal grognard threshold. And I played the first Combat Mission.
I don’t recall ME being all that high in cut scenes.
Now Metal Gear: Solid series. That one’s just ridiculous. The first one, while a bit heavy on them, at least kept them to at most a couple minutes.
But each game got increasingly longer and longer with the cut scenes. By the 4th one, they had some 20-minute long cut scenes. (It’s possible the 3rd one might have had fewer and shorter cut scenes than the 2nd. I don’t recall them being quite as bad. But the 4th one was just awful.)
Maybe he’s counting the dialogue options as cut scenes? I can see that if you want to just play a game you might not want to go to each little sentence that’s offered
This, plus the actual cut scenes. Which may not be bad on any modern scale but my experience with Max Payne II so scarred me with the “watch a cut scene until you’re half asleep, die one second after it ends” model that I dislike even the short character-intro ones unless they’re truly awesome/funny.
I had to look up the term… I’ve run into a few sequences where there are unique actions or specific actions that have to take place within the context, but not enough to bother me.
I tend to avoid “console” games as well, where it’s all about mashing the hell out of some small subset of available controls. I love everything about the new Batman games except that they’re console-ers, and all that fabulous action is A-B-UP-DOWN-A crap. I much prefer a complex keyboard mapping, preferably customizable.
But then, I am so far off on the widdle tails of the gamer bell curves it hardly matters.
I hate that too, I’m here to play a game not watch a movie. And almost invariably the cutscene me can do cooler stuff than in-game me can. To me the best cutscenes are short ones where you stay in the character point of view and perhaps the camera pans to show the action going on. Like the Half-Life intro subway ride, that has long been cited as one of the coolest gaming moments.
As far as games I want to like:
Crusader Kings 2
Homeworld
Galactic Civilizations
Europa Universalis
Bioshock (even though I like the art deco style the gameplay just didn’t appeal to me)
Diablo (click click click click click click click click)
Mass Effect (Just wasn’t interesting at all to me)
