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Giving games you don't like a fair shake
Henroid
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Anyone who knows me enough here probably knows that I think Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance is shit. And if you didn't know, you're probably disappointed in me. The first (and only) time I had played this game was when my older brother got it, and I tried it for a couple battles and was sorely disappointed in it.
For whatever reason, I decided to give the game a fair shake and just got it. I'm going to try and play through the game and beat it, start to finish, to give it a fair shake instead of what I did the first time (which was barely scratch the surface of gameplay).
That's what inspired me to make this thread. I'm sure lots of other people here have played a game for 10 minutes, only to drop it and declare it shit for whatever reason. I figured it'd be worth trying to get other people on board with this. I realize it sounds like a sort of shitty idea to force yourself to play a game you know you don't like, but let's see if first impressions with games can be wrong.
You guys are welcome to call each other out on things too (it wouldn't be any fun at all to NOT do that) (get some peer pressure up in this bitch). I'm sure there are plenty of folks here notorious for not liking Popular Game A or B, so on.
I don't want to totally formalize this with rules or anything (let alone I don't know if this will catch on). If anyone does decide to follow my lead, all you really have to do is drop updates (spoiler tagged just in case) about where you are, what you've done, and if your impression of the game has changed at all.
Edit - It only took me a couple of days to realize FFT:A is still bullshit.
Edit - Because I need to work on being more kind, I'm changing up the title yet again and being a bit better about the wording.
For whatever reason, I decided to give the game a fair shake and just got it. I'm going to try and play through the game and beat it, start to finish, to give it a fair shake instead of what I did the first time (which was barely scratch the surface of gameplay).
That's what inspired me to make this thread. I'm sure lots of other people here have played a game for 10 minutes, only to drop it and declare it shit for whatever reason. I figured it'd be worth trying to get other people on board with this. I realize it sounds like a sort of shitty idea to force yourself to play a game you know you don't like, but let's see if first impressions with games can be wrong.
You guys are welcome to call each other out on things too (it wouldn't be any fun at all to NOT do that) (get some peer pressure up in this bitch). I'm sure there are plenty of folks here notorious for not liking Popular Game A or B, so on.
I don't want to totally formalize this with rules or anything (let alone I don't know if this will catch on). If anyone does decide to follow my lead, all you really have to do is drop updates (spoiler tagged just in case) about where you are, what you've done, and if your impression of the game has changed at all.
Edit - It only took me a couple of days to realize FFT:A is still bullshit.
Edit - Because I need to work on being more kind, I'm changing up the title yet again and being a bit better about the wording.
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Still not gonna play any Killzone though.
Earthbound I still refuse to play because every time I try I am just bored to death with it.
I'm sure there are other examples as I'll often write things off too early and only after significant peer pressure do I try again.
I also became less closed minded and saw there are other great games to play on the Xbox besides Halo.
So I got someone new in my team (this didn't even happen years ago when I played the first time). I'm like okay groovy. He has nothing equipped, he's like a beastmaster dude. I go to the shop and I'm about to buy some random things when I realize... how do I know what I can equip him with? Select didn't work. It brought up an item description. Press A.
What kind of item. Press A.
Press select to see the classes that can use it. I pressed A and then select, and had to go through all that shit again. I press select when it says to, an what comes up? Icons with class abbreviations. Thank goodness it is sorted out by races then classes.
This is a lot of work to go through to equip someone though. This UI is fighting me.
There aren't many games that I make a quick judgement on and then drop, though. I am usually pretty good about making absolutely sure I dislike something.
The third, I made it through the intros and such only to get killed by an alligator. That's when I shut it off.
The fourth, I made it through the intros again, finally got control of Snake, then crawled under a truck and it triggered another insanely long cut scene. Off it went.
I would've loved a fucking try menu in the first one! A2 can wait. If I end up still hating this game, I won't be playing A2 period.
I was really enjoying this one up until the point when it makes you do the second install, followed by a 90 minute cutscene. That's when I fall asleep.
I don't know. Hate would be a strong word, but I thoroughly disliked FFTA, and enjoyed A2.
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Advance is trash. Don't let anyone talk you into thinking differently.
A2 is tolerable.
Yeah, I'm going to sell my SNES Chrono Trigger because I cannot get into it for the life of me. And for those that think I didn't play enough, I got to the part where
Also, I had been forcing myself to play it with long breaks from it. The longest break was two years, so yeah.
Probably the only game I've ever done a complete turnaround on is Myst. I really didn't "get it" the first time I played. I had never been exposed to a pure text or graphic adventure before. My cousins randomly decided to grab it off my shelf and give it a whirl one day, and after some time of collective head-scratching and perseverance, we really started to get into it.
Majora's Mask was one game that I felt indifferent to at its release but actually came to appreciate it a lot more later. I never outright disliked it, but the whole idea of reusing all of the Hyrule NPCs as alternate universe characters just struck me as some colossal display of laziness, as if Nintendo was too uncreative to actually develop new assets and let this world stand on its own.
But the Hero of Time retreads since then have made me appreciate a Zelda game devoid of Ganon and Zelda's influence.
Yeah, I was told that when I did it, but it was too late.
Thanks for getting my back Sheep.
When I get through (or at least experience enough of) FFTA, I'll ask you guys to sell me on A2 maybe. I'm sure you could give me specifics now but they don't mean too much yet since I'm still doing the first set of missions from the pub.
Now days I absolutely can not play those old school FPS grid based dungeon crawls.
As a kid I played the hell out of Shining in the Dark/The Holy Ark, Phantasy Star, Bard's Tale, etc.
I just can't do it now days. I do not want to buy graphing paper.
Actually, this reminded me. I did a similar turnaround for Riven, which I played before Myst. I got it as a gift and tried it out a couple times, but it was so dense that it was hard to get into. I finally had to basically set aside some blocks of time and really immerse myself in it before I really got anywhere.
I've played most of the DC/PS1/PS2 games, mainly cause my roommate and my best friend both loved them.
I cannot fucking stand those games. I only played them cause I was getting bitched at and they were there, and I only finished them cause I had these 2 idiots who had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the game.
I've gone back and tried to play it four or five times now. I get to the castle and I just give up. I mildly enjoy everything before it, but once I get there, I just can't take the controls or the camera anymore and have to give up.
Everyone likes it so much it always makes me feel like I should too. But I don't. And I don't think I ever will. I hope this thread doesn't make me try again.
I followed the development closely, bought into the hype... and played the demo and realized I was not going to like the game.
Not a big deal, really. But then my brother bought me it for Christmas (on Steam). So I played it. And I played it some more. And I kept waiting for the game to start. Worked my way to Fontaine's Fisheries (or whatever) where they took all my weapons; beat that segment and thought "ok, so I can write that all off to the tutorial level". And then the next level was more of the same. And then after the Big Twist (which, in retrospect, I almost stumbled upon during the intro sequence - just didn't follow a train of thought far enough) I, again, thought, now, now the game is going to open up and let me play it. Instead I traded one tyrant for another. By rights, the game should have ended there. The entire premise of the game falls apart in the third act.
I graduated from the Doom School of Gameplay many years ago. Wandering through a level shooting things that move, trying to find hidden switches - and then, at the end, there's a button I press to tell the game that the level is over. Can that be said of every FPS? I suppose. But in HL, it's not quite so blatantly obvious.
Yes, I imagine you can go backwards, but without a reason to, the functionality is pointless. You can achieve everything that's on a level while you're there the first time. There are no locked doors you need a higher card access for, no.. well, no reason to backtrack.
Yes, it was pretty. Yes, it was competent. Yes, I imagine it was fun for a great many people. Just not for me. When you have enemies that can climb the walls due to their modification; where's my ability to do that? When you have a story built on the premise of actual genetic manipulation; why translate that as simple magic attack spells? The game truly lost me when I realized I could swap lightning out for fire. There were no choices, no 'if you get this power, you can never have this one', which (at the least) would help with replayability.
As I said in another thread, I never upgraded myself. I used the default number of tonics and spell slots and whatnot throughout the game. The final boss (even on hard) was a joke; perhaps more so because I was playing C&C Renegade earlier that day and couldn't help but make a comparison to Raveshaw.
This got way too long. TL;DR. Bioshock was not my cup of tea and I wouldn't have played it except it was a gift.
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So now that I have free time, I'm going back to play it and I'm impressed at how much stuff there is in terms of story content and whatnot.
Also, the game gave me head and stomach aches. Not sure why, even after I turned off motion blur and film grain.
Oh yeah, I had a similar experience. A friend kept trying to get me to play RE4 because of "how awesome it is" so I borrowed the Wii version and I can't say I liked it too much. I played until the end and couldn't bother to do the extra missions.
It doesn't really matter; it's not like it suddenly adds a whole new layer of depth to the action. Honestly, if you've made it that far into the game without really enjoying it, you've given the game a more than fair evaluation.
I'd say Fallout 3 qualifies for me. I made it to
I really want to like these games, but I'm bewildered be all the stuff you can do and all of the party options. I'm not much of power gamer and I can't decide what I want to do with my party.
On top of all that, I have a large number of RPGs that I've yet to finish and I get distracted fairly easily.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
It's gonna take some seriously cajoling to make me go back to that shit guys
Advance is a gift from the gods of gaming. No loads, nice compact battles with interesting shifting laws, different bonus items depending on map placement, no shitty rehashed Ogre plot, no random encounters of rape chocobos only.
No loads? That's a dumb thing to point out, considering the games are on different formats. If both of them were on discs and FFT had slower loads, yeah, I would concede that as a point. You may as well say NES games are better than PS games because of the lack of load times.
I don't consider the laws "interesting," I consider them to be a contrived excuse at making a game interesting and difficult. It only succeeded in being annoying so far.
The map placement thing, maybe you're right. It depends on if there's a right way to place things on the map and a wrong way, or if you miss out on getting the better items in the game because you didn't know what to do from the start. FF games in general pull that bullshit and I'm afraid I'm going to run into it.
No bullshit chocobos I can agree on at least.
Yes, before you call me a hypocrite for posting in here I have completed both FFT and War of the Lions. So I did give the game more than a fair shake and found I didn't like it.
Henroid will probably end up the same way with the better Tactics game. It is to be expected, not everyone can handle greatness in the face of so many bland boring games.
Mass Effect was this backwards for me. I loved it on the first attempt, aside from the awful repetitive sidequest design, but I had to put it down halfway complete for various reasons. Every time I've come back to it, I can't get myself to give a crap. I can't remember why I liked it at all.
Morrowind - I borrowed a copy for a bit and couldn't get past the awful control bugs (mostly related to jumping/landing) or bring up any interest in the game whatsoever. Much, much later, I saw a battle chest like deal of the game plus both expansions, picked it up on a whim, discovered that the control bugs were almost completely gone in the new versions since, and it's now by far my favorite western RPG and the one I've put by far the most time into.
Halo 2 was terrible. I fucking hate that game. I've tried playing through it 2 or 3 times, but my disdain grows with every attempt. I can't bring myself to finish it, which is funny, 'cause it's the shortest one.
Ultimately, I have no idea why I wanted to try out Halo 3, but my perseverance paid off. I really loved it - they finally got the formula right, and elevated the overall design to a very consistent level of quality.