A possibly-interesting one for me is the original Rome: Total War. I liked it, I played it a lot, but I never completed it. Several times (and I think with all three Roman factions, although I’m sketchy if I did it with the one that faces west and takes on Carthage) I quit shortly after I got the bid for power message, where you get the game’s permission to attack Rome. I just declared myself the winner and quit.
Never even finished the short campaign.
I did “normal” mode. I have shied away from slights, b/c I was under the impression that I would lose all three cards, not just one. Maybe I’ll implement them more. But, yeah, from everything I’ve read, this fight should be a breeze. For some reason, I’m stonewalled.
Every Real TIme Strategy ever (not really, but all the ones I’ve actually played). I really like them, or at least I did back in the day when I gave them a go, but it doesn’t take long before I’m at the “This is stupid!” threshold because nothing I’m doing seems to be keeping me in the game and viable. Which is why I say back in the day, I quit playing them a long time ago because I was obviously wasting my money.
The farthest I got with one was Army Men RTS on the PS2. I really enjoyed it, but the thing was a bit too fond of escort missions, so I gave up on it eventually. Because of an escort mission that was kicking my ass. Gah…escort missions…
I saw a couple Let’s Plays of Borderlands 2, and enjoyed the dialogue/writing so much I picked it up, even though I really, really suck at FPS games.
Got to Handsome Jack’s city (the name escapes me at the moment) and I just hit a skill-wall. And unfortunately, you can’t really out-level content there, as the level of the guns that drop are based on the storyline progression.
I’ve gone back and bought the character with the robot, which is supposed to be pretty e-z mode, but just haven’t gotten around to trying again.
I’m also not terribly good at RTS games, but picked up Rome 2 Total War in a Steam sale. I failed the first tutorial scenario. I didn’t think I was that bad at them. Maybe I’ll go back someday.
Monopoly. I’ve never seen a game officially end.
The latest one I abandoned, was probably the quickest I have ever done so. The new Crusader Kings. I loaded up , got ready to pick a country to start with, but then started to think about the huge learning curve in those games. I wanted to play, but realized I didn’t want to play quite bad enough to go through that whole trial-and-error process of figuring it out again, and just turned it off.
Working as intended.
Hahaha, I did too, because I didn’t realize the tutorial AI would actually be smart enough to exploit the fact that I left a town undefended. (Tutorial AIs are usually purposefully braindead).
I tend to abandon CK2 games, but for totally different reasons. Once you blob enough it’s stops being a lot of fun because you just steamroll everyone.
I’ll give up on a game if I get really stuck on one section of the main mission. It doesn’t happen too often in RPGs or FPSs, but it happens fairly frequently with RTS games (I’m not great at micromanaging).
Examples I can think of:
-Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal
-GTA San Andreas – I finished it all except for the final mission on several occasions, but I found the final bit where you have to chase the fire truck too frustrating.
-Ultima Underworld
-Dark Souls
-one of the Splinter Cell games (Pandora Tomorrow, maybe?)
I’m still playing a game of Risk that started in 1990.
If you’re interested in giving Borderlands 2 another shot, take a look at your Fast Travel map and see if you have the version of the game (might be Game of the Year…) that has Oasis on the map, way up at the top. If so, and you haven’t done those quests, go there and do that. Huge upgrades to your gear, especially if you finish the whole Treasure of the Sands quest line, and a couple levels. The game is kind of unforgiving about a couple levels difference; if you’re 27, some bad guys will freakin’ ignore you. Come back at 29, with the same gear, and you’ll mow them down.
Finally finished Dragon Age Origins yesterday. And it was just tedious. A difficult fight followed by a difficult fight, followed by a difficult fight…and so on until the final boss, which wasn’t the most difficult, in fact, but very tedious. Especially since the boss flees at some point while wawes of smallest monsters attack, making the fight even longer and more tedious.
So I finally got to see the epilogue, but only after many hours (ten? possibly more) of hard fights when there was no more story, no more surprise, no more character building, and so on.
I’m not even convinced that the majority of players enjoy this.
One item crossed on my list. Next Fallout New Vegas? Elder Scrolls Arena?
ワンダーと巨像 (Shadow of the Colossus, in English). I got stuck on the last boss and didn’t get around to finishing it for something like 3 years. Did it eventually, though.
Shadow of the Colossus was like that for me too, though I got stuck at an earlier point and had to basically make a grim, dogged effort to finish the game, hoping it would redeem the effort somehow. It didn’t. When the whole “narrative” of the game is “You know, this all seems like a really bad idea” it doesn’t exactly compel me to want to finish, you know?
Finally beat Riku on the 8th floor, thanks to your advice. Did a 1-2-2-2-1-2-2-1-2-2 opening set and spammed Ars Arcanum. You weren’t kidding. It also makes grinding so much easier, stunning the mobs and then opening with that / those slight(s) as my attack(s).
Now I’m at level 52, on the 10th floor, facing Maleficent. May need to alter my strategy a little, but I only fought her once because it was getting late. My goal was to have all three games of ReMix done by the time the KH2 ReMix comes out, but I have no idea how the 358/2 will go.
Basically I have an aversion to grinding in single-player games, which means that I tend to only give the really tough fights a few tries before I put the game aside, fully intending to revisit it later. Problem is, I rarely do, unless years have gone by. Red Dead Redemption is one of these, the various “Dawn of War” WH40k games, and several of the CoD/Battlefield games where I really bought them for the multiplayer gameplay anyway.
That, and on a lot of “campaign” games, I tend not to fight it out to the bitter end once it’s clear that the enemy has the upper hand, or that I have the upper hand. So in the Total War games, there’s usually a point when it’s fairly obvious that I’m going to win or lose, and I just don’t play past that point.
Occasionally I’ll get stuck due to poor saving or game glitches, and not finish because I just flat-out can’t figure out how not to get killed, or go so far back that I have to repeat a LOT of the game. For example, I quit Fallout: New Vegas because I’d played on and off all day one Saturday, and hadn’t formally saved it since the day before. I got stuck in one of the casinos where you have to surrender all your shit, and did something (broke into a room, I think) that pissed the guards off- so I was persona non grata, and had no armor or weapons except this rinky-dink pistol I got off a guy I beat down with unarmed melee. There’s no way I can find to get out of the predicament, and the alternative is to literally drop 6 hours of gameplay to go back to the last saved game, since the autosave is within the casino after I pissed them off.
Stalker: Call of Pripyat just can’t get started for me. I have about a hundred hours in Shadow of Chernobyl but the first time I started Pripyat I got distracted by some other game (I had just finished SoC so needed a change, really), then I started it and got blasted by the emissions and said “nuts to this”, a few other false starts and then a few days I ago I started yet again and got a few hours into it, getting new guns and getting situated when I read that the Complete mod (which I have installed) is broken with the official patch removing Gamespy and leads to constant crashing later in the game. So now I have to reinstall the game clean, find some graphic improvement mods and start over again.
I’m thinking by this point that I’ll either have it all done and be well into it by Monday or just never get started.
Have you tried using a stealthboy and stealing your stuff back from the casino? Also, unless you lost some of the really, really cool unique stuff, I wouldn’t consider that any real loss. Guns, armor, chems and stuff can all be readily replaced. You still have all your experience and perks, you know. Go beat down some raiders, take their stuff and through shoot n’ loot you should be able to replace everything you lost in short order.
Nitpick, but I think you’re misusing the word “grinding” here. There’s no “grinding” in Dawn of War (Well, there might be in DoW2, I haven’t played it.). Grinding is the act of repeating the same action over and over so your character’s stats/level/gear/whatever get better so you can proceed. Repeating the same level until you are good enough at the game to beat it is not grinding. It’s just you getting better at the game.
If you try to use “grinding” this way, old arcade games are the grindiest games imaginable, and that makes no sense.
I hate boss battles. They usually offer a ridiculously increased difficulty level to artificial increase game length. I tend to come across boss battles that are just so hard I just can’t beat them. Most recently that was when I went back to Metroid Prime 2 but hit this idiotic piece of game design:
The first stage was fine, but the second stage, shooting to stun and then grapple beam to behind so I could maybe shoot it. And having to fight for 5 minutes or so to get to where I could try it again? Fuck that.Also I played Final Fantasy 8 for about 80 hours. I got to the beginning of the fourth disc but found I was just getting slapped around. I had to then travel the map finding powerful magic in random situations to boost my powers. I just got bored. Really, really bored.