Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun?
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
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.
Got into super breeding. Maxed out damage and health and got a lot into speed on my rexes. Its very rewardimg being able to 1 or 2 shot a 150 rex. Takes like a month+ to get anywhere with it. That rex with those stats took like a year of breeding
The thing is Ark isn’t a dino game, it’s a scifi survival/exploration game. You start from nothing and work towards conquering the island and discovering it’s secrets.
I really hope you like it. To me it is best played with friends on a private server, or a server with good rules and active admins.
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.
When you get to the area with the bazillion spitting statues that respawn when you do, it became very clear that Fromsoft was out of ideas for making the game both interesting AND challenging.
Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I’m not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.
For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.
The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.
Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.
Same here re: Ubisoft cookie cutter open worlds. I LOVED the first ~40 hours of Immortals and thought I was approaching the end until I realized I was less than halfway at the rate I was progressing. I have no idea how length estimates like the ones on How Long to Beat are accurate for this game; usually they’re pretty spot on for my “complete what I find fun and interesting and not much else” play style. I gave up on the game after briefly skimming FAQs to see what I had left.
I feel this way about basically any Souls game. I’ve tried several of them thinking I would get the hype after playing for a while, but I still am kind of mystified by the mentality of those who really enjoy those games. I never get that sense of reward and accomplishment people describe for finally defeating a difficult boss, just sort of mild irritation.
That’s all the FromSoft games to be fair. I’m forcing myself to finish Dark Souls one for the first time right now and straight up? I fucking hate this game.
Curious why you're forcing yourself to finish a game you don't like. I usually drop at this point, because I play games for fun. Are you a completionist who'll get some satisfaction when it's all done, or someone who has to write a gaming review? I realize my tone seems judgmental but I'm really just curious and am not sure how to better word my post to come off as less judgmental.
Sort of the completionist thing, it’s just one of those games people rant and rave about, so I want to have the experience. I also rode every roller coaster in a very popular amusement park just so I could say I have done it and will never again. I’m a crazy person.
As soon as I saw it’s locked at 30fps, it immediately killed any amount of interest I had in playing it. All the power to people who can stomach action games at what feels like a slide-deck input response.
This game has been the bane of my existence. I love the atmosphere, story, and design of Bloodborne. I cannot get myself to enjoy the game. I want to like it so badly because everything other than the mechanics are extremely my-interests, but FUCK do I not like the gameplay.
Destiny 2. I played THE HELL out of Destiny 1, then 2 rolls around and it was like they forgot everything that people liked about 1.
You couldn’t access the story missions from the map, and you couldn’t replay them on demand, you could only play them off a playlist. There was a weekly heroic story mission that gave a powerful engram reward, then they removed the reward and people stopped playing even that. Eventually they removed the story missions entirely “because nobody was playing them”. Big brain move there!
In Destiny 1, each series of missions on a planet ended with a higher level “strike”. So you’d pick the missions off the map based on your light level, then level up to hit the strike, then move on to the missions on the next planet.
In D2, not only could you not see the missions, or what level you were supposed to be, the strikes weren’t present on the map at all, you could only play them on a play list and the play list was randomized. It was also bugged, often delivering the same strike over and over and others not at all, leaving gaps in the storyline and player experience.
They did patch things, like being able to play strikes on demand, then about 1/2 way through the life cycle Bungie decided to just delete 1/2 of the content in the game. New players would come in, have no access to the original story missions, no idea what was going on, and no idea how to proceed without watching a bunch of youtube videos showing the content removed from the game.
For existing players, they decided that people had spent too much time, in some cases hundreds of hours, curating their perfect weapon and armor sets. Rather than create better gear to replace what people loved, they artificially capped old gear to sunset it and force people to “upgrade” to crappier gear that replaced it. They intentionally didn’t make better gear because they were afraid of “power creep” and legitimately “explained” that they no longer knew how to design the game around the old gear. Funny, they didn’t have that problem when it was the ONLY gear.
Maybe it’s better now? I dunno, the way Bungie totally disrespected the time I spent playing and money I spent on expansions, they’ll never get another dime from me.
I played a little bit of Destiny 1. It was fun but I just wasn’t into MMO any more, but it was still fun to dick around solo and maybe group every once in a while. But I got 2 and instantly nothing made any sense and nothing was any fun. I doubt I clocked even 10 hours on the game before putting it down forever.
Good call on this one. I forgot I even played it until your description.
My biggest issue is I just can’t keep up with the monetary demands of that game. Every time I finally had the excess money for an expansion they come out with two more.
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 didn’t play the remake because of the name changes. I still have my Gamecube copy and the PS2 special edition, so will probably go back to those next time nostalgia bites.
Agreed. Given how many people are sucked in by dark patterns, I'm very pleased there's a contingent who is actively turned off by them, who refuses to reward that kind of design. I'll let it go in a game that seems otherwise quality, but it does count against you in the "are you an actual game or just freemium/predatory bullshit" assessment.
Street Fighter 1 is an interesting case of an historically extremely important game, that just wasn’t very good. Which in turn explains why it was largely forgotten and completely overshadowed by its sequel. While it invented most of the conventions for the fighting game genre, it implemented them all in a really clunky way. Special moves can’t be triggered with any kind of reliability, jumps don’t even follow a smooth arc but just jerk around and the thing is a button masher, due to originally not having the six-button layout of the sequel, but two huge buttons that would register how hard you pushed them. It’s barely even a functioning game by modern standards, yet it is the birthplace of a franchise that lasts to this day. It’s fascinating seeing all the elements from later fighting game on display in such a rough shape.
This is so true. I bought the anniversary collection years ago. When I went to play SF1 I was flabbergasted. It’s legitimately terrible. Even by standards back then. Though, as someone who is a bit obsessed currently, I am so glad they kept up with it.
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.
It could be argued that other video games are also designed for us to waste time on. It’s just that the method of wasting time is different. In one you make numbers go up, in another you kill enemies (which might just be to make numbers go up: referring to grinding in RPGs) or try to make the car go fast in the right direction.
I personally enjoy idle games, but I understand that others might not like just clicking some buttons that will make the numbers go up faster.
Now, it’s kind of the point. But I don’t know if it was my mouse or what but I found the controls to be too poorly implemented with how difficult of a game it already is. Sometimes, the hammer would basically glitch out or would apply way more pressure relative to my movements and fling me back down to the button. It served as an element of frustration that I think goes against the design goals. I’ve seen speed runs that make me think it could have been my hardware, but I’ll never know. Actually, remembering, I think I switched to a different mouse eventually that was better but still not great.
I also just didn’t really ever buy into the premise. I know it’s an ode to B games, but the piling of random assets is not what I would consider good design even if they serve the purpose of what the game is going for. There are plenty of difficult video games that are about perseverance but still put in the effort in level design, mechanics, controls, etc.
Tbh, I found it an interesting enough experiment with failed execution. I don’t understand people who hold it up as one of the better “art” games in the medium.
It’s certainly funny but it is not a fun game. It plays itself. Literally. That’s the point. It was something you ran along side with your mIRC client to show your uptime in a fun way.
I don’t find any of those kinds of games fun. From Cookie Clicker to most mobile games, “idle games” are just the most unfun, un-game-like games ever made.
That’s the thing: progress quest isn’t an idle game. It’s a parody of modern games that was made long before idle games were a thing. It wasn’t fun just like a joke isn’t an interesting story.
I would say it was the grandaddy of idle games. It was made as a joke, but actual games have followed its model seriously. And it sucks. It parodies JRPGs, many of which had an auto-battle option. But that was still just an option, and they typically had stories and other fun things about them.
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