X-Com. I kid, I kid.
Basically, anything by Peter Moleyneux. I tried to love Black & White but gave up on it. Ditto Dungeon Keeper. Ditto Fable. Always feel the promises are so much better than the games.
Oh… and that Star Wars civ-like game (Rebellion, I believe). Definitely wanted to like it… Gave it every chance… hated it by the end
Definitely World of Warcraft. I mean 50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong, right? Somehow though I just find the game un-fun, and I enjoy a bunch of other MMO’s.
Is everyone basing their picks on games that everyone else loved so they think they should also? Or are you saying ‘I love RTS games so I should have loved Homeworld, and didn’t’?
I want to love Europa Universalis II because it looks like a deep, complex strategy game and it sits right in the middle of my favourite time period for games. But it’s so bloody opaque. I always end up kicking it to the curb after a few hundred years of trying to decode what effect lowering this slider has had, or raising that one.
If they end up porting the third one to OS X I’ll have another kick at the can(n’t), but I’m not infused with optimism.
The same goes for Dominions III. This one should be an even better fit for me because it offers tactical combat that is resolved while you watch, just like Combat Mission, but bloody hell it’s an ugly game. Playing it just doesn’t bring me any joy.
Viva Piñata. It looks fun, great graphics, everyone raves about it… but its an Animal Crossing/Sims game, and after the initial rush of “wow new game”, it wears off, the game sits on a shelf for the next ten years, and what then?
Splinter Cells. Good graphics, nice stealth system, but i can’t ever get into them. My idea of stealth is Rogue Trooper. There if you want to save bullets.
Wow for me. I jumped in, played a lot, then realized I just wasn’t getting into it the way it seems so many do. I should have been addicted - what’s WRONG with me!?! LOL! Seriously, I was hoping for deeper play, I suppose, rather than what just feels like a continuous pursuit of leveling for the sake of leveling. I have felt more emotionally immersed in some Nethack characters than my WoW rogue.
CoH. Man, I wanted to love this one. WWII, as a PC gamer of about 25+ years I can see and appreciate what a great game design it is. I guess I should just stop trying to enjoy RTS games.
Jeff, did you ever feel like you should be playing WoW, to get your money’s worth out of the monthly fee? That’s how it was with me, and after a while i realised, what’s the point of being miserable, levelling endlessly just to make the most out of £8 a month, when i could quit and play something else.
The wost game for me, for wanting to love, is Diablo 2. I loved the first to death, but the sequel just wouldn’t click for me. I still played it a lot. But it never felt quite as awesome as the first game.
So there is this really hot girl you always wanted to go out with, and to your delight she finally says “yes I’ll go out with you” and, to your surprise, she is very much into lets got to the room right now and have sex! and you are thinking how lucky you are.
And there she is, naked and beautiful, really beautiful, and you want to feel great, yet for some reason you are just going thru the motions, cause when you stop for a second and think about it, she really isn’t all that smart, and really doesn’t have a lot of stuff to talk about, nor has that great a sense of humor, and, really, she isn’t really even good in bed.
That was Diablo II for me.
Loved the first one. Wanted to love NoII, could not. I even forgot all about it 'till now. Curse you, Mr. Carlos.
The Builder’s Hand strikes thee down at my call!
Same here. Along the same lines I’d put Sacrifice as another RTS that just didn’t click with me. Friggin beautiful graphics for it’s time but damn I couldn’t even force myself through the first chapter or whatever it was.
Pirates! mostly because of the dancing.
Do you have EUII patched all the way? It helps a ton, since that game is messy as hell.
I guess I don’t follow how it could be confusing because I’ve been a hardcore player since the first one, but I do know that the patches help.
I’m totally with you on this one. I loved Diablo (in fact, it’s fair to say that I LUUUUUURVED it), but Diablo 2 did nothing for me. I never even finished it. I think part of it may be that I admired Diablo for its simplicity; there was the town, and there was the dungeon, and that was the game. The character advancement was simple, the quests were simple, and the story was so simple that you could probably sum it up in one or two sentences. It was sort of like Nethack with Blizzard productions values. Then in Diablo 2, it was like they decided “Well, time to make a real game out of this,” and went and added a bunch of complexity that pretty much smothered everything I liked about the original. And I hated the outdoor areas, which were really just dungeons with outdoor graphics and walls spaced so far apart that you had to keep the minimap open all the time just to keep track of where the hell you were. They were utterly unfun to explore. Diablo excels as a dungeon crawl, and Diablo 1 stuck to that exclusively, in its wisdom.
I know we shouldn’t razz each other about our choices here, but I can’t imagine how anyone could not love Thief. It’s like my #1 favorite game ever. I will say, however, that I was never able to get into Splinter Cell. I kept wanting it to be Thief, and not the rigidly linear series of hoops with sneaking that it actually was.
I wanted to love Gun, but it was ugly, and then it was OVER, and then I was kind of pissed.
Red Faction. After Freespace 1 and 2 I was a drooling Volition-can-do-no-wrong fanboy. I was fully expecting something that outdid Half-Life, with GeoMod as the cherry on top.
Instead we got a lame, in places downright laughable, console FPS that didn’t use GeoMod as anything more than a gimmick.
Fortunately, I can say I quite enjoyed Homeworld. Took me a second crack at it after years away to finish it, but wow I can’t believe that gameplay hasn’t had more influence. While everyone else is doing another Star Wars take on a space game (which I also enjoy), here’s the one attempt at 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Coincidentally, I just fired up Homeworld 2 today, and am enjoying seeing what changes they made. Mostly for the better so far, except the cartoony HUD is out of place.
Thief 2 is reeeeeeally the definitive Thief experience. I mean, I loved the first one at the time, but Part Deux took everything that was right and good about the first and dumped all the shitty parts. By shitty parts I mean the Burricks and the zombies, mostly.
I may have to give it another go, like I usually do with films (although I still can’t stand The Shining). It just really didn’t grab me, much like Splinter Cell. I don’t mind sneaking in games but I do want the option for some really good fights if things go wrong and Thief just didn’t have that.
John: If you were intrigued by the plot or setting of the Thief 1 and 2, but really couldn’t get past the gameplay, I suggest you download Radvideo Tools (or any software that can play BIK files), and watch the movies directly from one of the subdirectories. Good stuff in there, though you’ll obviously miss out on in-game developments and the whole thieving experience. But it’s better than nothing!
Chibi-Robo. I love the art direction and the basic idea of the game but found the gameplay tedious as hell.
Some of the monster levels were great (I’m thinking particularly of the Halls of Echoing Repose in the Bonehoard, which was wonderfully eerie, and the Cathedral mission, which was easily one of the best missions in the game). The only problem was one of balance. The horror missions made for a great change of pace–there were just a few too many of them. Thief Gold bumped up the number of “regular” missions in the game (and added that awesome, awesome opera house mission), and really made for a much more balanced mix.
I don’t mind sneaking in games but I do want the option for some really good fights if things go wrong and Thief just didn’t have that.
Yeah, that’s definitely not the focus of the game (and on the higher difficulty levels, killing is outright forbidden).
I may do that, thanks! I liked the premise and the idea but just could not get into the gameplay. I enjoyed the sneaking around and stealing to an extent but wanted to mix it up with guards when I got caught.
The zombies were about where I gave up.