The Sims and The Sims 2, with expansion packs. These games have a spot on my computer because my daughter loves them, but every time I fired them up, I said, “OK, what now?”
All of the recent Zelda games, going back to Ocarina of Time. I LOVED the first 4 games, and OOT just changed the feel too much. Hanging around a village just wasn’t fun or interesting, and then they did the SAME thing with Twilight Princess…which I actually forced myself to play, seeing how I spent $60 on it. I got as far as the water palace and didn’t enjoy any of it…some of the dungeons were fun, but were way too fucking long. The Gamecube Zelda sucked too…after I got spotted by the spotlight for the 12th time, resulting in my having to replay that dungeon over again for the 12th time, I quit and never looked back.
I don’t understand at all why the newer Zelda games get so much praise.
All of the recent Zelda games, going back to Ocarina of Time. I LOVED the first 4 games, and OOT just changed the feel too much. Hanging around a village just wasn’t fun or interesting, and then they did the SAME thing with Twilight Princess…which I actually forced myself to play, seeing how I spent $60 on it. I got as far as the water palace and didn’t enjoy any of it…some of the dungeons were fun, but were way too fucking long, and I hated the entire wolf mode. The Gamecube Zelda sucked too…after I got spotted by the spotlight for the 12th time, resulting in my having to replay that dungeon over again for the 12th time, I quit and never looked back.
I don’t understand at all why the newer Zelda games get so much praise.
Really? I loved MGS 2 - which is why I bought MGS - SnakeEater. Which is what I came in here to complain about.
When I first got the game I loved it. I put in about about 10hrs the first weekend I had it. Then, I didn’t get a chance to play again until the next weekend. All the food I had stocked up? Rotten! What a bunch of crap! I can see if the time was based on game time - but not real time.
I just couldn’t get into it again. I tried restocking my food supplies, but I can’t devote much (if any) time to games during the week. So even if I get everything restocked, it’ll be worthless next time I play.
Metroid Prime. I love the 2D Metroid games, but the transition to 3D just left me cold. I do enjoy the multiplayer in Metroid Prime Hunters though.
The God of War series. The graphics are great, and I can appreciate why people like it, but it’s just not my thing.
Cubsfan, Final Fantasy XII does eventually open up, a lot. Once you get past the initial part of the game and gain access to the whole world, you can spend hours and hours just exploring and doing sidequests if you want to. I’d estimate that 50-60% of the game’s content is outside of the main story.
Rome:Total War.
Either I always screw up, or the end game is just not for me. Every game I try as one of the Roman powers ends up the same. Things go well until I have about 20 territories. Then it becomes a quagmire of adjusting things to keep cities out of revolt. Slowly I gain more territory until I hit the magical number around 30. Then the other Roman cities declare war and the game hits a brick wall as Hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of boats converge on the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian sea. Each turn starts to hours as boats fight boats fight boats. I spend 4 minutes instructing my towns to make more boats, an hour to move my boats, then watch for another hour as the AI attacts my boats. with the occasional swap of a city or two. It’s such a drag of micromangement and goddamn boat watching. I lose interest and just stop playing.
Myst and Universallis 2 . Universallis I will give another chance. I never found the key .
Completely agree.
Xenosaga. I couldn’t stand the cutscenes, the fighting system, the characters… Actually, I can’t think of a thing I liked about the game. I feel bad, though, because a good friend gave it to me as a birthday present.
Final Fantasy IX. I really like the series as a whole, but I just lost interest partway through the game. I guess I just didn’t like any of the characters.
Age of Wonders (all editions). I really really really tried to get into this series, and it has some good ideas, but something’s lacking. It is kind of a Master of Magic wannabee, but both the magic system and skill system are amorphous and non-hierarchal; you can easily get a killer spell or skill without having to choose prerequisites first. There’s other issues too but ultimately the game failed to drag me into its universe despite the fact that fantasy strategy games always get my attention (been playing the various iterations of Heroes of Might and Magic 10 years running now).
With the Civilization series, it’s more a case of burnout. Yeah with Civ IV + expansions there’s tons of new content, but it’s still Civ, with barbarians, the boring combat system, and annoying AI factions with their idiotic demands and inability to pull off a good stab without telegraphing it.
Crysis I don’t understand the love for this game. The AI sucks the vehicle control sucks (the mandatory jet section nearly made me quit in anger) and as the game progressed I had to steadily turn down the graphics quality just to have anything else than a slideshow (my computer isn’t cutting edge anymore but it’s still respectable) Yet I still played through it feeling little flashes of what it could have been bogged down by poor programming.
Oh and whatever happened to “you can rip a tree out of the ground punch a car into the sky and leap from building to building” that all the previews spoke of? Maybe I’m just stupid and missed something but I don’t think my strength mode ever enabled anything like that.
Similarly blasphemous, I tried but never caught the hook for Planescape: Torment. It is hailed as the greatest plot, story, characters, blah blah blah but I found it to be tedious and unengaging.
I loved the Baldur’s Gate series though, and still replay them occasionally, so I know that I should be a raving Planescape fanboy, but I would honestly rather go fold socks than play it. 
Cooler-than-thou emo characters have always annoyed me though, and this game drips with shuffling shrugging emo angst, so that may be a factor.
Yeah, the Zelda Wii game. I can’t even remember the name of it…bought it when I bought the Wii over a year ago (joking with the salesperson that Wii owners were **required ** to buy it). I guess, if you like that kind of thing, the game was fine.
I guess I found out I really didn’t like that kind of thing.
FF Tactics.
Black & White
All of the Zelda games.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.
Second this one. It’s my favorite game series, and even in the lesser entries, I can find some element of the game that I really enjoy. Even VIII, fundamentally flawed though it is, was a fascinating and surprising game in many ways.
But IX… I can’t think of a single thing about the characters or the setting that appealed to me, and the gameplay was completely rote. It’s not even an interesting failure.
Morrowwind: A friend gave it to me, and I really tried to like it. The character creation process seemed interesting, and my friend told me about taking over the Thieves guild and enjoyed it alot, but I found the combat to be brutal, and the controls awkward. I gave it a go three different times, each time picking it up after I’d ignored it for a long time, but I just couldn’t get into the flow of it like I’d have wished.
Everyone says how awesome it is, but I can barely get past the first fights, and it takes so long to even get to one. Very easy to wander off, and get killed by some random foe.
Eve Online: I played this for about a month. Tried two characters, one was a Minmitar projectile weapons guy, the other was a big time miner. While the combat seemed interesting, the economic system was impressive, EVE for me was one of those games with interesting mechanics but no ambience or flavor in it to keep me going. Staring at stars and warp points and asteroids all the time wore me out quickly. “Autopilot Engaged”, and that voice didn’t help.
Fable. The idea of the game was intriguing, but the actual gameplay was…well, dull. And it was really hard to get used to the controls.
Dwarf Fortress. I downloaded it based on incredibly positive, nay orgasmic, reviews here on the SDMB, but just couldn’t get into it. The graphic interface never became intuitive for me, so I felt like Cypher, peering at the Matrix’s code on his green CRTs, trying to distinguish the blondes from the brunettes from the redheads. It was too tedious.
I hate to break it to you, you have two heads.
Any game that sacrifices the single player mode for online play. There are still many of us that can not get a good enough connections to play online. I like FPS but there needs to be a good single player mode. Specifically Gears of War. I liked it but single player was way too short.
I like RPGs and I like the Final Fantasy games. But I have never finished one. It always seems that I get to a point in the game where I need to be about twice as powerful as I am to go forward. And it seems like it is too late to get more powerful. And I’ve already put 40 hours into the game and I don’t want to start over. And to get everything I need I would have to buy the guide. And fucking Sephiroth keeps dropping a fucking planet on my head and wiping out my entire party and there is nothing I can do about it.