Your worst game experiences and flops? - Instant Kingdom

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Your worst game experiences and flops?

Anne 12 years ago

I'll start with my personal game-related trauma:

It was my birthday (14th, I believe). My brothers had kindly helped my parents in choosing a special present for me. When I opened the package, out came a brand new computer game. Highly praised, they said.

Well, the game was Doom II. And yes, I know it was liked by many, but most definitely not me. Not my cup of tea, rather the opposite. But you might have guessed that my brothers were surprisingly keen on playing their sister's birthday game. Clever fellows, weren't they.

Ps. I've also spent lots of fun moments playing games with my brothers, but I always preferred games like Heroes of Might and Magic III&IV, the Civilization games, and the Monkey Island series.

Have you got any stories along these lines? Maybe you've spent months saving up for a pricey game, and then hated every minute of the actual gaming experience?

Kario 12 years ago

So, we should post horrible things that have happened to us while playing a game?

I died on the first Mario enemy, you know, that first Goomba?
Edited 12 years ago

MageKing17 12 years ago

Anne said:
Well, the game was Doom II. And yes, I know it was liked by many, but most definitely not me. Not my cup of tea, rather the opposite.

I've never been a huge fan of the Doom series myself.

Anne said:
But you might have guessed that my brothers were surprisingly keen on playing their sister's birthday game. Clever fellows, weren't they.

No, they were jerks, and I hope you punched them. Preferably in the face, and repeatedly. ;P

Anne said:
Ps. I've also spent lots of fun moments playing games with my brothers, but I always preferred games like Heroes of Might and Magic III&IV, the Civilization games, and the Monkey Island series.

I've never played any of the Might and Magic series (including Heroes of Might and Magic), but I've always been a fan of 4X games like the Civilization series (and the Space Empires series), and the Monkey Island series is the greatest example of point-and-click adventure gaming. Have you played the Special Edition versions of the two first games? The ones in HD with full voice-acting that nonetheless allow you to push a button to instantly go back to the classic graphics? Totally awesome.

Anne said:
Have you got any stories along these lines? Maybe you've spent months saving up for a pricey game, and then hated every minute of the actual gaming experience?

Ah, yes. Somebody recommended I get Battlecruiser Millenium: Gold Edition. I played it for a grand total of... half an hour, I think, before I declared it a piece of utter shit and never touched it again. Worst waste of money I ever spent.

Anonymous1157 12 years ago

I don't think I've ever had a particularly BAD gaming experience. Well, except when my graphics card died, but that's not a problem with the video game. How 'bout the fact that my mom sold all of our NES games because she bought them to resell them in the first place? If she had made THAT clear, I might never have touched the box (And we wouldn't have ended up with, like, 8 different consoles in the house either, but that's besides the point).

Pete 12 years ago

MageKing17 said:
Anne said:
But you might have guessed that my brothers were surprisingly keen on playing their sister's birthday game. Clever fellows, weren't they.
No, they were jerks, and I hope you punched them. Preferably in the face, and repeatedly. ;P

Being a jerk and being clever is not mutually exclusive, you know.

Anyway- Hunted, the Demons forge. Coop. At several points in the game, you have this clearly evil cauldron of superpowers lying around. So at one point, I decided to use it, you know, just to see what its like. Turns out (according to youtube), if you do it, even just once, the game ending turns into "and then they were mindless slaves forever". Yeah, okay, you warned me (sort of), but still! Geeze! Never did finish that campaign because of that...

ville 12 years ago

Pete said:
Anyway- Hunted, the Demons forge. Coop. At several points in the game, you have this clearly evil cauldron of superpowers lying around. So at one point, I decided to use it, you know, just to see what its like. Turns out (according to youtube), if you do it, even just once, the game ending turns into "and then they were mindless slaves forever". Yeah, okay, you warned me (sort of), but still! Geeze! Never did finish that campaign because of that...

That's sadistic! Which reminds me, I'd love to add a sort of what happened afterwards sequence to Driftmoon...

My worst experience was a game called The Flintstones on the original NES. I saved money for weeks to get it, and then it was too difficult for me. Ah, the era of instant death by jumping into bottomless pits. I never got past the first two or three levels without cheats. A lot of NES games were like that, you could only finish them by practicing for months.

I think I've been burned by some sequels as well. Star Control 3 comes to mind, which was sad considering Star Control 2 is the best game of all time. And of course any Ultima after 7, though I forced myself to play them because I was such a big fan of Ultima 7.

Oh yeah, now I remember the worst one. XCom 2. My strategy was to take it slow, build up my forces and only take on missions I know I can handle. I played for weeks like that, until I was sure I could take on the most badass enemies. Turns out the number of alien bases had been increasing exponentially all the while I played my safe routine, so when I decided it was my turn to attack the enemies, there were about 500 alien bases now left to eradicate. I tried and I tried for many days, but the aliens now attacked my base every 2 minutes and still increased exponentially.

reaver894 12 years ago

I pre ordered Dragon Age 2.

What more need be said....

MageKing17 12 years ago

reaver894 said:
I pre ordered Dragon Age 2.

What more need be said....

Why that was a bad thing, I guess.

reaver894 12 years ago

MageKing17 said:
reaver894 said:
I pre ordered Dragon Age 2.

What more need be said....
Why that was a bad thing, I guess.

Cause its dreadfully bad,

MageKing17 12 years ago

reaver894 said:
MageKing17 said:
Why that was a bad thing, I guess.
Cause its dreadfully bad,

...And what, exactly, was bad? You are not telling a very interesting story. Details, details! As an example, and to avoid being horrendously off-topic, let me tell another story:

I was browsing through the shelves of Half-Price Books (a not-uncommon store chain over here that sells not just books, but other things too, like video games), when I spotted the back of a game box that looked fairly interesting. Flipping it over, I was astonished to see the title was "Star Control 3", when the original Star Control was a game I had played religiously throughout my childhood. I was so ecstatic that I bought it immediately, and ran home to install it. After installing and running it, I was met with a gimmicky, buggy game that was nonetheless entertaining enough that I didn't feel like I wasted my money. Then, some years later, I discovered The Ur-Quan Masters. After realizing that the only funny dialogue in Star Control 3 was stolen from Star Control 2 (and that Star Control 2 had much better, less buggy gameplay), I was outraged, incensed that Star Control 3 had dared to make me so much as think of liking it. It's still sitting in its case, untouched, to this very day.

ville 12 years ago

The problem with Star Control 3 was that it had no soul. You could see the developers didn't care for the game - they weren't the same people who made the prequel. A game's got to have soul...

Ardjun (guest) 12 years ago

Somebody told me that Arcanum was like fallout. So i bought the game and the whole atmosphere of the game nearly killed me. To me the combination of steam punk combined with magic was absurd. Add a strange game design to that, dry dialogs and lots of other stuff and this game is the worst delusion of my life.
I forced myself to play it but even then i had to shut it down because i didn't like it at all.

ville 12 years ago

To me Arcanum was one of the better RPG's of that time. It took a while to get started in the game though, and a certain liking to steampunk. I imagine the dialogues were written druly on purpose, to keep the atmosphere more victorian. But I still loved it after I got into it, even if the ending didn't match up to the rest of the game.

Death Knight 12 years ago

World of Warcraft. After playing diablo 2 to extinction (finally did ubers), the only thing i havent done, i gave wow a try. The game seemed cool, however the controls are so insanely hard to use. I find that if a game has bad controls (anything resembling wsad) or anything other than mouse movement, i wont be able to play. You could give me a game such as the new game Avernum-Escape From the Pit, add horrible controls to it, and as good as the game is, i wont play it. I find that user-friendly such as driftmoon and magebane 2 are good examples of good controls.

I would even say that while baldurs gate 2 is a bit tricky to play, at least the controls are good and you can pause in combat.

Death Knight 12 years ago

I actually beat arcanum and while the dialog is crap, what you can do with classes is crazy. I made a thief type class and took a fine steel dagger up to the last boss. With master melee/backstab and prowling, nothing could stop my thief. Backstab didnt seem as good as i thought. You can only use it on the lesser/mid enemies, i couldnt use it on the last boss, which sucked.

Narvius 12 years ago

I actually find WSAD controls to be more comfortable, due to the more natural distance between both hands when simultaneously using keyboard and mouse. Plus the standard argument of having more keys nearby. Since I spent a lot of time playing Clonk in the past (I think it's still the game I spent the most time on, ever), I'm even used to ZXCS+ADQWE controls (which I use with GBA emulators; SZXC for movement, A for... A, D for B, QE as LR, W as Start, V as Select).

That said, a game has to try really hard to piss me off with the controls. I mean, I play roguelikes. A lot. More often, it's the camera that does it for me.

I tried WoW. Apparently, I'm mostly immune to game addiction (except the, y'know, not doing much else part), because it bored me after level... dunno, 20-25? When the quests* stopped and the grinding started.

* AKA Grinding with Walls of Text thrown in.
Edited 12 years ago

ChuckV 12 years ago

Personally, I greatly enjoyed Arcanum. I found that the greatest thing about it was how you could handle most situations in a great variety of ways; did you know that you can actually convince the final boss to surrender? And I agree with Death Knight that the class flexibility was great (And yeah, thieves kicked ass in that game).
As for the dialogues, they were indeed very dry and serious, probably, as Ville suggested, to match the Victorian style, but still the dialogues were very detailed with a lot of possibilities and I liked that.

Now I have to find a game I didn't like...

Venom31 12 years ago

But IMHO, you don't have to - you can generally like some game, however it sometimes brings you ...

Like that one, Sacrifice. I can still remember the frustration of ending up in nearly unbeatable missions, while having taken other path it's piece of cake! Didn't even finish the game because of that - I guess there are as much as 1-2 ways to do it easily, and having little to no chances for the majority of choices T_T.
Edited 12 years ago

Amarth 12 years ago

I played Sacrifice multiplayer for a while with some friends, that was fun. Except, of course, that they were better at it than me. As happens with most games, I notice.

I blame it on being trained on 16-bit games and thus not understanding the finesses of the newer generations of games.

ville 12 years ago

Amarth said:
I blame it on being trained on 16-bit games and thus not understanding the finesses of the newer generations of games.

You're spot on! Zelda 1 and 2 on the 8-bit Nintendo (NES) made me lousy at modern games!

Death Knight 12 years ago

You know what was a horrible and almost frightening experience i had-Any of the Eschalon series from Basilisk Software. I gotta say, everything about the game was oldschool and cool, however when you cant make a game easily accessible with extremely poor and slow moving times and sluggishness through the game-you just lost my support. Dont get me wrong, a great concept for a game, but if an almost brand new computer cant run a game which graphics arent the most demanding, something is wrong with that picture.

Its such a shame because the game was fun from what ive played of it, but if it takes me 3 hours to finish a small quest, what am i supposed to do?

Anonymous1157 12 years ago

Death Knight said:
Its such a shame because the game was fun from what ive played of it, but if it takes me 3 hours to finish a small quest, what am i supposed to do?

You're supposed to do a 72-hour marathon! Just kidding, couldn't resist.
Edited 12 years ago

ville 12 years ago

I've always loved the depth in both Eschalon and Jeff's Spiderweb games, but I'm always stumbled by the complexity of the user interface. Actually I can never finish the demos for either series until giving up in frustration. Somehow I don't remember game interfaces from the nineties or even eighties being that complex. Or maybe I've been dumbed down by the simple interfaces in modern (80's NES) games again.

Death Knight 12 years ago

Well that goes without saying. I barely managed to beat geneforge 1 (the 1st and so far only game i beat by them). Im finishing avadon up right now and its much simpler to get through boss battles. The problem with jeff's games is that they are meant to be understood and if you dont understand what you should be doing, you are going to get screwed in the later fights. You have to have a preconceived notion of what will work. I think it was one of the moderators on there told me that the people that get the right to beta test, are insane powergamers that can power through areas on the highest difficulty that normal people cant even begin to understand. I would never have the patience to beta test as id lose my patience.

ville 12 years ago

That would be it then. I consider myself an ex hardcore gamer, I used to play Baldur's Gate 2 without any of the companions, beating all the dragons. But I'd much rather spend (most of) my free time with my wife&kids than with dragons these days, so I'm liking short games more and more...

Edited 12 years ago

Death Knight 12 years ago

I cant agree with you more, I soloed bg1 and bg2 and it was fun moreso for 2. I do agree on smaller games though, nowadays its better to be average in length. Unless the game is pure awesomeness.

Narvius 12 years ago

On a semi-related note, I find it amusing (though not surprising), that nerds often turn out to be pretty neat fathers.

Death Knight 12 years ago

I can agree on that, but not entirely. Im a nerd and i doubt ill get married (at least not in this lifetime). I find that most nerds live the solo life until they meet someone. When they meet someone that is very much like them, they are complete and then games take the back seat as family takes priority. You could look at people like jeff from spiderweb software. I once asked jeff why he makes the games now compared to later. Jeff replied-"I make these games because they allow me to take care of my little girl and support my wife and family". If the games dont sell, my family doesnt survive." I found that kind of cool that he flat out stated that, it gave me more respect for the indies.

ville 12 years ago

I too never though I'd find anyone until I suddenly met Anne. Sure took a lot of courage to ask her out, but I'm glad I did.

I've always loved Jeff's dedication to his fans. He knows his fans love just that kind of game he makes, and he relentlessly does what he's best at. And he doesn't fail to produce a great game after the other, of course he can't fail, otherwise the kids will starve... I don't know if I could keep it up making similar games for decades - I need a lot more variety in the games I'm making to keep me satisfied. Which is why working on Driftmoon and my day job (working with educational games for 6-8 year olds) go well together.
Edited 12 years ago

jgprof 12 years ago

I've had two bad experiences.

The first, Achron. I got so excited the first time I read about it -- it's a brilliant concept, the kind of thing that could have you completely rethinking all the strategies you thought you knew for that type of game. It was developed much like Driftmoon (funded by pre-orders which gave you access to an alpha build) so I threw down some cash and installed. I played it for about 2 hours and...just couldn't quite get my head around it. The first few levels were fine but after a while I got stuck and couldn't figure out how to make progress. I haven't played it since. I still think it's a great concept and I definitely intend to go back to it (I paid for it, after all!), but somehow I just never feel drawn back...somehow I just don't care enough about it.

The second is Fallout 1. A friend of mine is always going on about the Fallout series, and because of this I was intrigued. I usually do my research before buying games (I don't buy that many) so I read all the reviews and tried to decide between Fallout 1 and 2.

The general concensus is that both are amazing.

Eventually I took the plunge and put my $5 towards Fallout 1. I played for perhaps 8 hours over a few days then stopped, and haven't loaded it since. I'm not entirely sure why. Partly I think it's (again) that I don't care about the story or any of the characters, but I think that the main thing spoiling the fun is the interface. When I'm playing a game the last thing I want to spend my time on is click-click-clicking my way through a clunky interface and needlessly walking around from one part of the map to another just to advance a mission (and occasionally being killed on the way). Because it has such a good reputation I intend to go back to Fallout too, but as with Achron I'm not really looking forward to it

Venom31 12 years ago

I might've been as disappointed in F1 as you, jgprof. It's not, simply because I've been warned: it's more like a F2 beta or even alpha. So, one walkthrough is pretty much enough - you get all, or almost all, and there just isn't much more to see or to do. One quest per town... One-time game, IMHO. Unlike F2, F3...
Edited 12 years ago

NeoGangster 12 years ago

many of my friends recommended Oblivion to me, so I tried it and damn got I pissed at the whole world leveling with you thingy...

the worst game experience I ever had happened at a LAN, a few friends wanted to play Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle-earth (1 or 2 I'm not sure), so we played it. The enemy Legolas made me rage at that game, he was faster than any unit I had, he had more range than any unit I had... I was like WTF is wrong with this game

Death Knight 12 years ago

I CANT play any game made by bethesda. Morrowind, oblivion, skyrim, they all have the same problem-the world levels with you and the leveling system is crappy. Why would you have a chance against a guard that is level 50 when you are level 15. You cant even get close to his level as he levels up faster than you do. Fallout 3 wasnt very good either imo. I did hear that new vegas was awesome though. Probably because bethesda didnt make it.

MageKing17 12 years ago

Death Knight said:
I CANT play any game made by bethesda. Morrowind, oblivion, skyrim, they all have the same problem-the world levels with you and the leveling system is crappy.

You never actually played Morrowind or Skyrim, did you?

Death Knight 12 years ago

Actually i got to level 25 with a nord in morrowind. The main quest had no clue as to where it is. Fast travel might have helped. I fought enemies outside the outdoors countless times for about a week. Eventually killing the same enemy gets boring. I stopped playing as my nord with his battleaxe could kill most enemies in 1 to 2 shots. This game might have been decent with a fast travel but still as i said before-the game's leveling system is no fun. Im a powergamer when it comes to that stuff. My nord had 100 strength, 100 endurance and 80 agility because i found a way to level fast. The problem with that, is that i couldnt have fun because if i didnt do the powergame leveling that i did, i wouldnt be able to kill anything as the enemies would get stronger than me.

Oblivion was eh, alright but still the leveling system is no fun. Got to lvl 23 with dark elf assassin type character. Lvl 15 with gladiator type character that uses his fists. It was more fun with gladiator character as fists were fun. Again, like i said i dont like the fact that enemies level up with me and because of that i have to powerlvl my way through the game only to get half way and think-this is boring.

I have not played skyrim but knowing bethesda, they havent changed this major flaw. Not worth my time.

Still i will say this though. Had morrowind had a fast travel feature like oblivion, i would have liked that one the most. Morrowind had one thing that was really cool for the rogues of the game. You didnt always hit when you attacked which was kind of oldschool. Oblivion's always hitting kind of threw off the rogues as they used to be more accurate whereas warriors were less accurate and more forceful. That was kind of cool in a way. I would play morrowind but without a fast travel feature like oblivion, i probably would lose interest fast. Maybe someone might make a mod or something for that.
Edited 12 years ago

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