Gaming

Final Fantasy 15. I've never been a fan of the modern (post FF7) games but fell for the hype around 15, purchased it, played it, actually finished it constantly wondering when the game would suck me in, and was left wondering what all that hype was about. The game had literally nothing I wanted in a JRPG as I found the story bog standard and the combat and traversal piss poor. That game officially made me give up on Final Fantasy since the only recent-ish game I've liked is FF Tactics. Make a sequel to that and I'll reconsider.

Its very rare that I actually finish a game that's just plain miserable but I got a nomination since it was also (thankfully) short: Photographs

Photographs is an indie puzzle/narrative game, where you solve dilemmas through a different set of mechanics in 5 different narratives. So far so good, that's somewhat interesting. It falls apart completely, however, on the absurdity of its attempts to be tragic. Every story in Photographs has to be a tragedy - which in itself is already a negative point. You start each of these vignettes already expecting how it'll all go wrong, which by the third or fourth time is already stale. You're just waiting for what will be the inevitable Bad Thing™ that will randomly happen to these people.

But its biggest failure is that those tragedies just don't hit. I'll spoil some of those so be wary if you're still interested in that. In one of those, a swimmer is caught in a doping scandal, which ends with her being scorned, kicked out of the competition scene, and homeless. In another, a newspaper editor decides to only publish bad and infuriating news to get more readers, and ends up being bombed by one of his former employers, after publishing a paper that says people deserved to get fired. The quickness in which things go south and the intensity is absurd, to the point of almost being comical. Worse of all, it also fails in one critical point (one which even big names fall for) which is not building up its characters. You rarely get an idea of who you're dealing with before tragedy occurs. You'll often only have a general understanding - old man lonely, athelete stressed, editor scared of bankruptcy - before the inevitable happens, and by that point you're on the rollercoaster watching a castle fall down, but it was more like a makeshift, straw castle that you never really cared about.

And at the end, you get one final "tragedy" where you as the player will decide one of these stories to rewind and have a chance at a happy ending. Its a distressing attempt at emotional manipulation where the multiple characters will beg you for their lives and futures, but once again...you have no investment in any of these. They're all 1 dimensional cardboard cuts, all struck by baffling circumstances. You might as well pick at random - for my part I did the one story that angered me the least, the lonely alchemist - but at the end its just one more alternate future for empty characters.

Its by far one of the games I've hated playing the most, and a massive stepdown from a developer that made some kickass mobile games before (You Must Build A Boat is still a must have)

Now I kinda want to make a thread for highly rated AAA games that disappointed you...

I found spelunky to be a game not fitting for me at all. I really wanted to like it, but I found myself to be unmotivated when I kept losing and didn't feel like making more skillwise progress. I might just suck, but I just don't feel like playing that punishing roguelikes.

Stardew valley - it sells itself as a harvest moon inspired farming Sim but as someone who grew up playing a lot of harvest moon, I really can't help but be super disappointed in it. Harvest moon games have a complex and more importantly moving relationship system - you start to go after one marriage candidate, the others will pair themselves up and have kids alongside you. People move in and out and you need to really get to know people in order to progress the game and unlock things. Stardew valley? Super flat in comparison. All the candidates you don't marry feel super flat once you lock yourself out of them. There's not much locked behind friendship so there's less reason to get out there and really work on befriending everyone.

Also fucking combat - it's a supposedly nice and peaceful farming Sim, yet combat is an unavoidable part of the game. I didn't sign up for combat! It's not fun it's just annoying.

Fallout 4

The changes they made to the game mechanics ripped a lot of the roleplaying out of the experience. I kept hoping to find a lot of what I loved about Fallout 3 and New Vegas in it, and never did.

It's not even necessarily a bad game, but the aspects of the games that I found fun were either heavily reduced or removed completely, leaving behind an open world shooter with a bad story.

The binding of Isaac. You just do the same thing the whole game. You shoot stuff, and gather stupid RNG items. That's it, such a boring game

Satisfactory.

Totally my fault, it's not a bad game it just wasn't remotely what I was looking for when I bought it.

I got it expecting "factorio in 3d", however in reality it was more like Subnautica or Fallout 4 if the base building in those games was the main part of the game.

By the time I had finished loading the first phase of the space elevator I had came to terms with this.

As it turns out, the game that scratched that itch was heavily modded Space Engineers.

Before I say this I do admit I am in the wrong, and that an overwhelming majority of people love this game, and I understand that on an objective level it was both ground breaking and excellent.

I cannot, for the life of me, enjoy breath of the wild due to weapons breaking. I played maybe 5 hours? I got excited when I found a cool sword, and then proceeded to never use it because I was afraid to "waste" it. (and repeat that with new weapons, to save which I have to go find some little seed people to have more inventory slots?)

I understand that they want me to try new things, but for me, for some reason, it just wasn't fun. I want to be excited when I find new loot, not anxious. Maybe it's because I grew up with Diablo-like games, where accumulating loot was the fun part, but I can't seem to enjoy it when the game takes toys away from me.

Idlegames, though I kind of dont want to count those as games in the first place. What make them anathema to fun to me is that they are designed for you to waste your time on them. They dont teach you anything either, maybe some prioritization if you really get into them.

Any multiplayer game. They sacrifice a deep and interesting storyline for the sake of pointless grinding and slaughtering.

SimCity 2013 or whatever the full online one was.

It was bugs and lies all the way to the bottom of it.

Minesweeper. Because I found it ugly and boring and it still managed to put me on edge.

We had a few cartridges for our Colecovision that I could never figure out how to get to do anything very game-like. I don't really remember the names of the bad ones. I'd be hard pressed to remember the names of the good ones other than like Donkey Kong. They were pretty hit or miss in general and the controller was really weird, but it made a memorable introduction to gaming and a great starting point to watch it all grow from.

I think the worst game I've ever played was the Dragonlance game for NES. There are other equally bad games that are even bad in largely the same way, but I'm a big Dragonlance fan and when I finally got a copy of this I was very excited for about 5 minutes. It's just bad. I have vague memories of throwing Tass into a hole a bunch of times and like maybe a little bit after that, but it was a mess. Maybe if I'd been able to get past the controls I'd have found a gem in there somewhere, but it just wasn't there. I feel like if a pizza company can knock out a class A platformer, TSR should have been able to manage.

It's odd, because D&D crpgs have usually been innovative for their time, using the D&D rules and hitting the ball out of the park. The Dragonlance game didn't come that long before the Black Sun game they made, and I'm pretty sure they had been making similar crpgs previously. I feel like I remember playing another early one on our 8088. But they decided to make some half assed platformer instead. Huh?

But Dragonlance always seems to get shafted on adaptations. I remember Tracy Hickman talking on Palace in the late 90s about making a live action Dragonlance movie with Aaron Eisenberg as Tasslehoff, but it seemed to just evaporate and instead we got that kinda weird but cool to see very stylized cartoon. I do like that it looked like the book covers, but it was a long way from what we'd initially expected to see.

Some day Dragonlance will get some real love. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 will help.

Triangle Strategy. It's basically a visual novel with 5 minutes of combat every hour or so.