How many and which bad games did you play this year?
The only one that really sticks out is Starfield. Most other games I played I knew what I was getting into. For some reason Starfield surprised me, probably because it was on Gamepass (so effectively free) and because I trusted Bethesda. Oh well.
Considering the number of great games this year, that’s not too bad.
Agreed and Starfield wasn’t even that bad. I just don’t have any time to play a mediocre game when BG3 is sitting right there.
Maybe it’s just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me. They’ve been leaning on the creation engine for too long, to the point that so many of the features, not the least of which being the goddamn shouts, are all carbon copies of one another, the base building is literally just a fucking resource sink, the gunplay sucks and the enemies are all bullet sponges unless you dip into late game planets and filch a late game gun, the jobs are 90% basic bitch fetch quests, and the core gameplay loop of “go place --> grab shit --> sell shit” has not evolved since Morrowind.
I stop playing games when they start feeling like a second job, and for me that point in Starfield was about three hours in when I was trying to complete survey data for the homesteading program and I was wandering around this deserted planet, looking for samples of flora and fauna, and I scoot back from my desk as I realize, for 20 minutes, I have done absolutely nothing meaningful or engaging. The closest I’ve come is, I’ve pointed a scanner at a bunch of procedurally generated animals hoping they don’t land a hit on me because they’re too spongy for me to kill, so I can fill a meter, so that when I’m done filling meters I can go back to BDG and tell him this place is suitable for people to live. That’s not fun. It barely qualifies as gameplay, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
Maybe it’s just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me.
It is not you. Standards for the genre have been raised since at least 2015, and Bethesda has not kept up, for all the reasons you stated.
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I loved every other Diablo and went hard on 4. Then one day I just put the controller down and never picked it back up. I might play more later, but I’m so tired of games that are just nakedly obvious about being nothing but a grind and a job. I wasted so much money getting PSPlus for just this game. All told I spent about $150 on this and the only thing of value I got was a few hours playing with some old friends who also stopped playing and made me realize I wasn’t getting anything else out of it.
I’ve played a hell of a lot of BG3 and it feels completely the opposite. There is so much content that motivates me to do it for roleplay reasons. It doesn’t feel nearly as grindy. Some of the dialogs are a bit much to slog through after seeing them a few too many times, but they were all great the first time through, and it motivates me to try different options to get different dialog. But everyone knows BG3 is good.
Guess I’ll round out my list.
I really enjoyed Jedi: Outcast. Like BG3, the story is as good as the action, but there’s really only one storyline and if I recall you can get pretty much everything on a single playthrough so there aren’t really even mechanical decisions to make other than how to approach a combat.
Horizon: Forbidden West was pretty fun. I put it down for other games and haven’t gotten back to it but I will. Seems to share a lot with Jedi. Similar gameplay, similar linear storyline. It feels like mechanical choices are more meaningful and maybe you can’t do everything on a single playthrough but again I haven’t finished it.
Hogwarts Legacy: my wife wanted this because Harry Potter, but then it made her motion sick. So I felt obligated to play it to get our money’s worth and I didn’t make it very far at all before putting it down. Maybe there is more there further into the game but it didn’t grab me enough to find out.
Jedi outcast, as in the original from like 20 years ago?
Or Jedi survivor that came out last year?
Survivor. I can’t ever keep any of them straight. Jedi: Foo the Last.
Either way, both were good
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100h is not a stinker game playtime but I see what you mean :))
I gave into peer pressure earlier this year and tried League.
God that shit was boring.
Every other game Riot releases outside of League is better than League.
Mageseeker is my top choice by them this year.
Starfield was pretty much it for me.
I wanted to like it, but there is just nothing to like about it aside from the gun design and the spaceship builder.
It’s weird that as I continue to want to play more of it, I’m annoyed by just about every design decision they made along the way. I want to get into the gun design thing even, but the perk tree system puts a roadblock in my way.
The skill tree stuff makes me feel like Bethesda finally listened to all those players who bitched about it being too easy to become “overpowered” and blamed it on how easy it was to level up and not the poor balancing with how level scaling works. So now, all the actually good, fun and useful shit is all the way at the top (or rather the bottom) of the tree, with a bunch of “milestones” you have to hit in addition to simply being the right level and/or having the previous skills in the tree.
I don’t even think it’s that. Lots of RPGs have had “do X more to level up X”, including old Bethesda games, but it’s riddled with problems, which is why most games don’t do it anymore. As for level scaling, at least they finally got rid of that, but the way they guide you through the galaxy in line with your level involves basically being equally far along in each faction quest line at the same time instead of having low level factions and high level factions.
I can’t actually think of anything off the top of my head. After I stopped buying AAA titles from the obvious scummy companies, pretty much everything has been at least as good as expected.
I have PlayStation Plus. Most of what I play are stinkers.
If you’re talking video (not board) games, I think most the games I played were kind of a mix of good and bad. I mean they usually start out pretty well but then end up being repetitive and boring. If I ever have to play another farm sim where I’m required to craft things in some convoluted way that makes no sense, I’ll chuck my game system out the nearest window. Why does “Stardew Valley” get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all? OK yes I play mostly casual games, but the real “gems” are few and far between. Still waiting for another good sim that isn’t more work than it is fun.
OK yes I play mostly casual games…
You say that like it’s something to be ashamed of. “Casual” is an underrated genre, because sometimes, it’s nice to just take your time and enjoy the experience. Life has enough complexities that escaping to a world of simplicity and calm can be truly rewarding.
Well to be truthful, it feels like people DO put casual gaming in sort of a “not really serious” category. And that’s somewhat true; I don’t like overly complicated games that have tons of drop down menus you can’t even read onscreen (tiny fonts). I’ve always been more into puzzle or even sim games because there is no platforming usually (I SUCK SO MUCH AT PLATFORMING!). I love casual games because they usually are easy going, I can play for 20 minutes or an hour, it’s up to me.
Oh, for sure. But so what if it’s “not really serious?” Isn’t that kind of the point of the Casual genre? Play the games you like; don’t listen to a bunch of tryhard, self-important gatekeepers.
That’s a good point. I mean, why should games not be as unserious as possible? That’s one thing that always kind of bothered me about video game evolution. At first, it was this little square dot you swatted with a white “paddle”; my family bought that system and I was about eighteen.
I’ve been a video game addict since and probably have owned every system at one time. But I really hoped to see it grow in the direction of fun but other the top sim games and casual but engrossing puzzle games, not so much in the direction of let’s go shoot people and kill as many other sim-humans as we can.
Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that! I mean, I have a special love for the God of War games, but to me those are so crazy with mythological creatures and stuff that it really appeals to me more than, say, GTA type games.
The beauty of it is gaming is all of those things! There’s something for everyone, even down to revisiting old formats (see Moonring).
That’s so true! It’s kind crazy to me how many new games are in the jagged style of old arcade games (pixelated). I think the old and new all have a place in gaming, but – I can’t keep up with all the new consoles. I mean, I really don’t want to have to get a PS5. But - i don’t want to be left in the pixelated dust of yesteryear either!!
Why does “Stardew Valley” get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all?
I think it’s because Stardew has a lot of RPG elements. Developing relationships with the townspeople (romantic and friendship), figuring out the lore, etc. Lots of games that try to replicate Stardew do the farming / labor stuff and call it quits. I know there are probably some people that go into that game only doing farming, but most people I’ve met who are fans of it like the lore stuff.
That’s one thing Stardew does right. But also, it gets the “labor mechanics” right; there aren’t a ton of drop down menus to navigate through, your tools are right there on the bottom tab. And also, amazingly - and astonishingly - it GIVES you the basic farm tools you need right off the bat! You can start a farm without much explanation and zero aggravation. If you need upgrades, you just pay for them and yes, there’s some material gathering to make buildings, but someone else does the actual construction. To me that’s great because then I can go fight blobs in the mines or fish or visit the other residents.
If you don’t want gaming to feel like work, maybe stop playing labor simulators. Like, isn’t the point of those games to make you feel like your working whatever job they’re “simulating”?
Clearly there are some games that do it better.
Oh sure go and be all logical about it. :/ You’re right though, and I do try to stay away from labor simulators (which is a better name for them than gaming simulators, since there’s not much fun in them if you ask me). Even Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing get very tedious doing the same chores every day all day long - maybe it’s just my adult ADHD acting up.
this is such a mood. i’m still waiting for the next stardew valley.
Me too! And why after all this time, isn’t there a Stardew 2? I know he’s busy with Haunted Chocolatier, which makes me salivate for many reasons - but I dunno if I’ll ever live long enough to see it come out for realsies.
Why does “Stardew Valley” get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all?
I am not an expert on SDV, but my wife plays basically every HM-like out there, and her take is that Barone focused so heavily on the ‘economy’ balance in SDV that all of the activities feel like they’re worth doing, so it doesn’t become “only farming”, or “only adventuring”, etc, like many others do. Even just picking up wild plants feels worth it when you drop them in the sale bin in the evening.
I think that’s true and one reason I like SDV so much. There isn’t a lot of time spent on material gathering, and you don’t have to craft your own tools or make your own buildings. I think those things COULD be fun if they weren’t so complicated in so many sim games - I could not make heads or tails out of the crafting mechanics in “My Time at Portia,” for example. I think if you’re goingg to task the gamer with those things, they should be very easy to do, because most people don’t want to waste time on mundane chores and drawn out searches for rare materials or who knows what the game requires (in many cases I simply have no idea what the game is wanting from me!).
I think MTaP and to a lesser extent MTaS both really carried over a lot of the complexity from Planet Explorers, Pathea’s first game they released internationally. It’s a survival crafting game, with a LOT of complexity (e.g. manual, voxel-based weapon and vehicle designs). I don’t think it worked well in combination with other systems like farming being very underdeveloped (in MTaP especially).
What is MTaP and MTaS? *(sorry for my ignorance). Are they available on Switch? Or just PC? Just curious.
My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock (sequel). They’re both on Switch.
Oh OK - sheesh, I shoulda known that. I’ve seen My Time at Sandrock and it’s available on Switch, but I’m afraid to check it out because I hated MTaP so much.
Yeah, if you didn’t enjoy MTaP I wouldn’t recommend it. :)
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Intraveneous. Game got a lot of love and as a huge stealth fan I was really into the idea. Got it and hated every second of it. It’s tedious and punishing even by stealth game standards and the story wasn’t great either. Mechanics were poorly explained and it felt like the keymapping was made by a person who had never played a keyboard game before. ugh. I was really disappointed too because it was marketed as a stealth game that didn’t punish you for failing stealth which is true but the issue is that it’s so damn easy to fail stealth that you might as well just go in guns blazing anyway. It wasn’t like MGSV where both options make sense depending on the circumstance. It was more like “stealth is nigh impossible so we made guns-blazing a fail safe for people who aren’t nuts at this game”
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Atomic Heart. Yes I bought this game and I am ashamed of it. No it wasn’t for the robot porn. I thought it looked like an interesting Bioshock / Wolfenstein mashup and both of those are my favorites. Game was just… slow. Combat, stealth, everything felt like you were moving through syrup. The character’s english voice acting is also horrifically cringe. Like, just awful in every sense. Made me hate the MC more than the villains.
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Dying Light 2. I loved the first so I was seriously disappointed by this. Main issue was really with the movement. Gave me motion sickness dozens of times with how the camera is set up, and I was expecting something like Mirror’s Edge (Catalyst) but it felt just awfully floaty. The game also did… fuck all… in terms of explaining what you… do? so I just was super confused. Uninstalled after like 10 hours in frustration.
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Ghostrunner. Played this in December of 2022 but I wanted to add it in as a hot take. Overall great but the boss fights are pretty terribly designed after the first one and pretty much ruined the game for me. Plus there’s useless parkour sections that added nothing. Surprisingly little time spent being a ninja badass for a cyberpunk ninja badass game.
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Hard for me to call any game a “stinker” because I am simply not into a lot of very popular games.
Not “bad” but disappointing: No Man’s Sky. There’s a lot to be liked here but as someone who has played Elite Dangerous everything is just so incredibly dumbed down.
Fighting is trivially easy, just hold S, shoot and grab a snack while doing it.
There’s absolutely no consequences for anything. It doesn’t matter how much fuel I have because I can just find new fuel anywhere or teleport somewhere completely different. Doesn’t matter where I log out because the game will just throw me to the same system as my coop partner anyway.
Doesn’t matter if the authorities want me, just fly into a station and all is forgotten. Got contraband? Just tell them to get lost and fly away casually. No bounty on my head, no nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, Elite is definitely way too hardcore for casual play but at the same time the only thing No Man’s Sky has done is make me want to play Elite again.
I wanted to like “No Man’s Sky,” when it was finally available on the Switch (my PS4 had just died when it came out) I was elated to play it. After a couple hours of playing, I wanted those two hours of my life back. An ugly game with very little color, and absolutely no direction as to what you’re supposed to be doing, I wasted those two hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I absolutely hated it - the only game I ever asked for a refund on.
I’ve often described NMS as Minecraft in Space. The “story”, such as it is, is completely pointless and superfluous. You just fly around, mine minerals, build stuff, and that’s about it. And it wears thin really quickly.
I played a lot of great games this year, but also many that didn’t click with me.
There’s a huge spikes of games that I played this year, because I decided to start tackling my backlog by streaming them, these include games I’ve bought on sale, and those that are on PS+ Extre.
Can't finish because of difficulty spikes
- Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown:
- Dropped it after that mission where you need to protect a car, while manouvering between buildings in a city, as expected I kept crashing into buildings
- Shantae: Risky’s Revenge
- It was fun at first, but then there’s some precisioin platforming part, which I just wasn’t in the mood for
- Super Mario 64
- There’s a level where you’re first introduced to flying mechanic
Dropped it because of technical issues
- Assassin’s Creed Origins
- The game crashed within the tutorial area
- Call of the Sea
- I got motion sickness
- Kena: Bridge of Spirits
- Again, I got motion sickness, supposed to be an okay game.
- Tardy
- Weirdly because the game has lots of reading, but the fonts are way too small for me
- The Ascent
- Too much clutter on scene when you reached the first city / settlement. The first section feels okay, but again, some items / objects are just way too small for my failing eyes
Dropped it because it's not clicking
- Gnosia
- It was supposed to be fun at first, but then the rolls I got was not advancing the storyline
- Grime
- This feels like the moment I dislike souls-like metroidvania. It might be when I realized that I’ve picked the wrong upgrade path, and there’s limited resources for upgrading your character
- Gungrave G.O.R.E
- This is not a good game
- Horizon Forbidden West
- The combat feels worse than the first one. There’s so many more things to do that has way too many writings that I barely care enough. I’d rather have smaller number of sidequests with good writing, than a large number of them where everyone has so many stories to tell. This feels like it’s becoming a ‘forever game’, which might be good, but the combat is just not satisfying at all.
- Mafia: Definitive Edition
- Dropped after the racing section, was not feeling it.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda
- Dropped while in the first area. Something about the movement not clicking.
- MediEvil (Remake)
- Dropped after the 3rd or 4th area.
- Moon: Remix RPG Adventure
- This is supposed to be great, but I just got tired of the slow pace
- NEO: The World Ends with You
- I talked about this before, the game keeps on interrupting you. Walk to a new area, fluff dialogues, walk to another area, more inconsequential fluff dialogues. This seems to be a (bad) trend among JRPGs or anime style game.
- Oxenfree
- Character dialogues just don’t gel with me. Also there’s a time limit when choosing replies.
- Root Double: Before Crime * After Days - Xtend Edition
- The slice of life part is atrociously slow, most of them are inconsequential ‘look at me, i’m a cute anime girl’
- Sea of Stars
- The combat is way too slow, and requires you to do timed button presses. Also for the part I was in, the story feels generic.
- Shadow of the Beast
- JUst not good
- Star Ocean: The Divine Force
- Arrived at port town, overtly anime character came in, dropped the game. THe combat was fun, but the character / story are not clicking
- Tchia
- This is supposed to be good, but I burned myself out for trying to collect everything available before advancing the story
- The Adventure of Little Ralph
- Feels kinda repetitive
- The Wonderful 101: Remastered
- I don’t think this game works well without touch screen
- TUNIC
- Sadly another indie trend that I dislike, difficult combat encounters that don’t feel satisfying. It’s supposed to be a very good game.
- Unpacking
- Played it on PS5, I dropped it after rotating object for quite a number of times. I think this game is probably better suited for mouse and keyboard
- Vernal Edge
- I wanted to like it, but the combat is not fun. You have a dedicated ‘Pulse’ button to heal, which throws your sword at the enemy, and you need to press attack + direction to launch an attack that could heal you, which is already a roundabout way of healing (the mechanic is not fun). Then you have enemies that need to be stunned by X number of charge attacks, and the game throws you into small combat area with 4 - 5 enemies that doesn’t get knocked back without 3-4 charge attacks.
Finished it, but it's kinda not good
- Root Film
- Root Letter was okay (but arguably ruined with the updated version with multiple endings), Root Film is just plain boring, especially the ending. The story was enticing at first, but nope, it became bad by the end of the game.
- Shenmue II
- Shenmue.
- The 3rd Birthday
- I like the combat, considering that it was on PSP.
- Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown:
I personally really disliked the latest Far cry. Graphics where nice, story was ok-ish but the outlandish aspects of the gameplay (supremo’s… pets…) made it a snoozefest without any challenge. Setting the enemies to bulletsponge made it even more unbearable. I’ll be waiting for the bargain bin for the next installment.
How is it compared to 3 - 5? 3 - 5 are some of my faves and I was looking forward to 6 but I heard similar things from other people. If it’s a similar game experience then I might consider giving it a try.
I enjoyed 3 to 5, probably 3 and 5 more than 4. I did not enjoy 6 at all.
I don’t think I played any truly bad games, but I do have a list of games that I bounced off of for one reason or another. Maybe I ran out of steam to play them, maybe life got in the way and I couldn’t come back to it, or I just didn’t want to “git gud” with the limited time I have. I basically deemed them not worth my time when I did manage to sink a ton of hours into Spider-Man, Cyberpunk, and Talos Principle.
So that abandoned graveyard consists of…
- Tunic - I hit a wall at one of the bosses and just couldn’t progress. Ran out of juice unfortunately.
- Mr. Sun’s Hatbox - Such a weird quirky game. Didn’t get close to beating it but I got enough out of it and called it quits.
- Hunt: Showdown - This one was a bummer. It’s been on my “need to try” list. I tried it, solo, and died right away. I could tell it was one of those games that needed a time investment to make it work and I just don’t have it in me.
- Cult of the Lamb - Something about the roguelike aspect of it didn’t mesh with me, which is weird because I feel like that’s really become a genre I like.
- Overwatch 2 - I played poorly as Lifeweaver, was griefed in chat, and quit :)
To jump in on Hunt Showdown, the initial learning curve of the game does require a little time to get used to compared to other shooters. However the biggest call out I would have is to not try playing the game solo. Hunt is very much a game that is made or broken by the company you keep while you play it and it takes a very special kind of player (a masochist) to enjoy playing it solo. Either way, definitely understandable to bounce off it, it’s a great game but not for everyone.
Totally could see that being the case. I think it was a combination of seeing the difficulty curve and not having a consistent group to play with that probably did me in. I’m happy to lose and learn, but not maybe as much as it seemed like I would playing solo!
Given more time, definitely something I’d want to get into more.
Not many. The obligatory 50% of all mobile games that I played for 5 minutes and went “I hate this”, obviously. But PC games? Hmmm. Probably “Lost Ember”, I guess. What really puzzles me about this is I played “Spirit of the North” and was utterly in love with it, to the point that it’s in my top 5, and “Lost Ember” is very similar in many respects. I ought to have loved it, and I cannot put my finger on what I didn’t like about it. I just didn’t like it.
