Gaming

Need for Speed Unbound.

The stakes are just too high and the limit on time and funds you can safely earn just makes it feel stressful when it should be fun.

I can get the appeal of the risk/reward but it crosses the line from exciting and tense to anxiety inducing for me.

On top of that the game was kind of unstable on release and if you crashed it counted as losing the race and your wager etc and you cannot load an earlier save or anything, if that was the case the whole game would actually be decent apart from the lack of event variety.

EA's F1 completely ruined due to shit AI ramming and acting completely unrealistically

Most of the games of my childhood - they exclusively came from the <$5 bin 🙃 at least we had a PlayStation 2 but Crazy Frog Racer 2, Frogger: The Great Quest, Zathura, Animal Soccer World, and Street Vert Dirt are noteworthy “highlights”.

I tried playing Blasphemous recently and had to drop it in a couple hours. I might've stuck with it had I tried it when I was younger but I've discovered that nowadays I don't have the patience to play games that require you to beat your head against a brick wall until it breaks. So many frustrating enemy placements and insta-kill spikes, the movement is slow, the combat is unsatisfying, I just didn't feel like I had much incentive to continue playing (minus the art style which is absolutely gorgeous).

Games usually have to grab me pretty quickly, or I just drop them, so I don't play a lot of unfun games for a long time.

Some exceptions were Final Fantasy 13, and to some extent the most of the Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).

Final Fantasy 13 I just tried a bunch of times, put in a combined 40h over the course of like three attempts, I don't know why, but it was just mediocre at best. During the final one last year, I made it about halfway through, and actually got turned off from gaming altogether for a few months. The story sucked, as well as the characters. I thought the combat could be interesting, even with the auto-battles, since you'd have to decide what "stance" your characters were in, but it was just lame for the most part.

The Trails series is a bit different. I actually liked the gameplay (turn-based JRPG combat is fun), but the story and especially the villains are just complete garbage. Two years ago, before Cold Steel 4 came out on PC, I sat down and played through all the games in like two months. While Trails in the Sky is trash, I was actually surprised to really, really like Zero and (to a little bit lesser extent) Azure. Those gave me hope, but Trails of Cold Steel just goes back to being terrible. I might still go back and play Cold Steel 4 and whatever other games continue or maybe finally finish the story, just because I've invested too much time at this point.

I rented Sim Earth for SNES and it didn’t come with instructions. I had no idea what to do, and it was confusing and frustrating.

This is a hard question to answer, because the really unfun ones either get dropped so fast I forget I ever played them unless someone jogs my memory by naming them directly, or I'm willing to just shrug and say "this is probably great to some people, but it's not a genre I like." I guess for this category, I would point to The Witness. I heard so many recommendations for it, but aside from the occasional "oh, neat" when I saw how a puzzle was placed in the world instead of on a board, I couldn't tolerate it for nearly as long as it wanted me to keep doing the thing.

The game I memorably should have enjoyed - that I had the highest hopes for (and the biggest subsequent disappointment for) was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

At first, I loved the deeply disturbed main character and grim Norse fantasy world being crafted around me, but the combat felt so disjointed from the story (on purpose) that it felt like there was one guy on the dev team who liked combat who everyone was afraid to piss off, so they had to make concessions and put one token immersion-wrecking battle in every so often. And it's mad that Senua has two entire character traits - "psychotic" and "warrior" - and one of them managed to feel immersion breaking.

Then the ending destroyed the bits of the game I DID like and made me feel like a tool for ever having bought into the grim fantasy world to begin with. That shit is everyone's most hated ending trope, and I walked away from the game feeling like I'd wasted my time.

At least it was short.

Story of Seasons AWL, it was nostalgic but the fact I couldn't go to Mineral Town/ The City was a bit disappointing and broke the nostalgia.

As far as being overhyped beyond belief: Celeste. As far as playing an entire game to the end just to finish it: A Way Out