I’ve just uninstalled and removed Balatro after yet a near, very close 8/8 ante finish. I have been failing and failing, I’ve only ever seen and gotten to 8/8 ante twice, this being the second time. Every other run has been just insulting me to where no strategy has ever worked, I feel like a lot of it is RNG and pre-determined outcomes based on seeded runs.
And I hate that way of playing. It always feels like I’m getting smacked down by a troll bully who I can never overcome. They’d kick me down every failed run I’d have, then they give me a false sense of security the further I get. “Awwww, getting tired of being owned? Here, let me help you by giving you a few seemingly lucky breaks. SMACK Oh! OWNED YOU AGAIN! FUCK YOU! LOLLOLOL! I BANGED YOUR MOTHER, GIT GUD, NOOB!1”
I just don’t understand why these kinds of games are around, even when I have a good idea who it is for.
Resident Evil after OG RE:2 and Code Veronica. Maybe they set the bar too high for me. Nemesis was frustrating as hell and stressed me out. Plus, the mystery was gone, they just beat you over the head with the storytelling leaving nothing to the imagination. Cautious exploration and wonder turned into a frantic, aggravating hide and seek with a yelling OP monster.
Nearly any game where your weapon breaks. Some handle it well, but most don’t. Feels like crappy, low effort, artificial difficulty to me.
Mortal Kombat. It was interesting at first with the break from sprites but coming from SF:2 and SNK fighters the controls seemed incredibly awkward and the lack of frames for animations felt off.
Oblivion Remaster: I loved Skyrim, but this game felt not as fun as Skyrim to me. Not sure what it was. Maybe it’s just nostalgia for Skyrim and I don’t have the patience for those kinds of games anymore.
Hollow Knight: The platforming always felt clunky and the constantly having to Google shit to figure out where I’m supposed to go next without spending 4 hours backtracking turned me off. I much prefer the Ori games to Hollow Knight.
Dude I was gonna say balatro too. That game is fucking hard as hell.
I played it for a few days and man, it felt so unfair each time.
Slay the spire felt much more fair. When I failed then, it felt like it was my fault more often than not. In Balatro though, nah man. Shits rigged lol.
For Balatro, depending on the difficulty … some draws are just unwinnable. You just gotta try again. You will pick up patterns or ways of winning eventually. But if it’s not for you, there’s no need to push yourself.
What’s funny is that I just can’t seem to beat Slay the Spire. I should try getting back into it 😂
Haha that is funny, I loved slay the spire. On lower ascensions, I would do pretty well, but after ascension 8, I struggled hard. I think the best I got was 12 or something on all the characters. Past that in couldn’t win most runs.
Balatro felt much more punishing for some reason I guess. Slay the spire has more strategy and skill based mechanics which i think made it more fun or at least, had mechanics that I could more easily enjoy/understand. In Balatros defense, I didn’t unlock everything so maybe thats why i didn’t enjoy it as much.
Arc Raiders - bought into the hype and it’s just looting part of battle royale without the actual gun parts.
Baldurs Gate 3.
I’ve tried starting it up like 3 or 4 times but I just find the combat to be too slow and difficult. I constantly get my ass handed to me and I just wasn’t enjoying the progression. The most recent time I was save scumming but even that wasn’t helping me progress quickly enough Tried bumping it down to easy but even that didn’t help. In general I just didn’t have the patience for it.
I liked the story and the visuals. It’s just the combat mechanics were what turned me off.
Dishonored. I was excited because of the reviews, but couldn’t vibe with it. I found it ugly, thought the world was uninteresting, and the forced stealth mechanics are frustrating and unfun to me.
Monster hunter. You need to hit the monsters like 1000x and they don’t even have a health bar. Its like using a mixer: boring and takes long.
LoZ: The wind waker. I thought it would be like that one world in Paper Mario: TOK where you get a fast ship, but instead you get an extremely slow nutshell.
This problem was addressed in the remaster of wind waker
Yes 100% when it comes to monster hunter. I have no love for that game, the only time it was the least bit exciting was when we avoiding the objective and fought a monster that was way too strong for us.
Oh yeah if I had to pick one game it would be that onr as well. I like Monster Hunters world but not thr gameplay. I’ll stick with the Stories spin offs.
There have been a lot of highly praised games that I simply couldn’t get on with. The most recent is Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I’ve picked the thing up three times now and I just find it incredibly boring.
I enjoyed Kingdom Come: Deliverence but I couldn’t get past the lock picking part of one of the early quests. I’ll probably circle back to it at some point
Funny, I have it three tries because I couldn’t get it out of my head. It stuck in the third try and now I’m on KCD2.
I have tried to play Hollow Knight multiple times and I just can’t get into it. I find the art style clashes with the gameplay, it’s difficult for me to tell what is and isn’t a platform to stand on, what will and won’t hurt me. I also just don’t think the Souls-like system really works for me in a side scroller, I had the same issue with Salt and Sanctuary, it just wasn’t how I want to play one of those games.
I also was not a fan of Hollow Knight. My biggest problem was the constant backtracking and not knowing where to go to progress the story. And the platforming always felt…wrong. It felt like your character would go between having and not having lead tied to their shoes. It didn’t feel fluid.
If you want a great platformer in a similar vein to Hollow Knight that has a beautiful art style, snappy controls, and punchy gameplay, check out Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
Nier: Automata. The gameplay mechanics were great. The plugin chips for your skills is what I have been wanting in a game since the Megaman Battle Network series. The gameplay mechanics were great as well! They way you were able to use weapons for light and heavy attacks. It was great.
I could NOT get into that story. I beat the the story and discovered that the game continues. Turns out I have play through the story 5 times to get the full understanding of the story.
Hard pass.
I gave up about halfway through the third play through. I like the aesthetic, the music, and I’m kind of interested in the story. I just find the combat boring. Just button-mashing. Funnily enough, this was just a couple of weeks ago, hadn’t played it before.
FYI (with slight spoilers):
spoiler
not sure where you got the 5 times, but it’s very incorrect: you play through the first part of the story twice, once with 2B, the second time with 9S with a couple of additional scenes. The second half of the game is made of entierly new events that happen after the first part.
Hey thanks for pointing that out. I was reading the endings page from fandom. I was under the impression that I had to run through the same events 5 times.
I didn’t have it to run through a second time. Maybe I’ll re-visit it down the line.
I too was a bit disappointed when I first played it and reached ending A, thinking that was all there was. I continued months later to try the different mechanics and realised that they are not endings, but more or less just chapters/acts.
It’s honestly a really weird decision to present the game like this, especially since route A is the least interesting one (IMO).
Glad I stopped on the first run then. Sounds like I would have done the same thing
I genuinely want to like Dandara: trials of fear edition, a lovely looking game, with the art feeling mildly inspired by Celeste (one of my absolute favourite things ever), but with a lot of originality, it is its own thing, undeniably. The pixel art is impressive, colourful and detailed, it really is (and i played some truly bad looking games so trust me), and it makes me to see more the game.
Speaking of the bosses, they look increddible - lovecraftian, beautiful in a disturbing way (augustus is just a purple floating head but he still pulls that look fine) - and they feel weirdly alive. The music is on the same level as the presentation of the game, which is to say, really good.
But damn is it hard. After the second boss (Belia, the living heart) this thing goes from being difficult to whatever the citadel of reason is (and the other sub-layer of the map) is. The bosses themselves are big bullet sponges, and the main attack has no improvement whatsoever, what you start the game with is what you end up with, an attack with a range just about enough to hit things, but not most of them. Special attacks are long range and powerful, but they take energy, and it will eventually be refillable by few charges (that you find in chests), but still not enough to be perpetually usable.
The map is a maze, of size and scopes that can be unusual for a game of this size. And the game uses a souls-like system. You need to get back to your death to retrieve the currency (salt, the same thing that apparently powers the creation of the world). This is almost fine in the beginning, but with so few bonfires and so many rooms, it’s bound to be annoying. Not to mention, sometimes the old soul of dandara (the main character, inspired by a real life figure) gets stuck in unrecoverable position, you can say goodbye to your salt.
And, the amount of backtracking will only grow…
As for the difficulty, the difficulty becomes progressively higher(and ridicoulusly so) by the end. The movement of the character is really odd, only jumping from a salt platform to another, despite the fast movement the attack takes about 2 seconds to charge, really slow and penalising. Trying over and over again is only as fun as it gets.
Not to mention, the DLC introduces new special (and extra hard) areas, that are accessible with portals that are not marked as such. While exploring, i got stuck in one of these (clock tower) because, after so much wondering, i thought it would be a way to the next room. Well, it wasn’t. Apparently the DLC areas are prisons that are not escapable, in fact getting stuck in one of these is practically game over. If only somebody marked that portal… The portal was the end of my run. I have only so much time to play games. The story itself is very vague, most characters talking by riddles, and the general theme (freedom from authoritarian powers) gets lost in the vague atmosphere of the game.
I’d still say that it’s an interesting game, but damn you don’t have to make it hyper-challenging.
The cheat mode has few accessibility options and cheats, these help but in the end the circular maze-like design of the game still overstays its welcome. But you should try it yourself to have any idea…
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. As a die hard Zelda fan, I was beyond hyped for this one. Probably my biggest letdown in all of gaming.
- No real story to follow
- No cast of interesting characters outside of optional collectible flashbacks
- Repetitive, lifeless gameplay. No real dungeons or temples, every “mini dungeon” that does exist is the same copy pasted theme.
- No score of memorable unique music, just the MiNiMaLiSm of some understated occasional piano.
- Atrocious lack of enemy variety.
- a focus on exploration that rewards you with precious little given that any weapons your find will just break, and there are no unique combat or traversal items to unlock.
Came back to my save a couple times to push through, but the entire game is just the same 4 activities copy pasted 300 times with no variation or progression that makes your 50th hour unique from your first. It’s like. Soulless kowtow to Ubisoft game design in a once beautiful and innovative game series. Makes me mad just thinking about it lol.
Did we play the same game? BotW was the first Zelda game that I actually enjoyed!
As a die hard Zelda fan
I guess this is it, it’s quite a different game to all the others, and people like different things.
I will offer counters to all your points though:
- The story is “Ganon’s doing bad, stop him”, same as most of the others
- What about all the NPCs in all the towns?
- There are 120 shrines, 4 temples, and a big final zone, how’s that no dungeons?
- The music was great
- Aren’t there enough different enemies to fill up that huge photo album?
- The exploration was the most fun! Finding all the shines and secret seeds was great (clearly collectathons are my thing and not yours!), and the weapons breaking didn’t really seem like an issue after a while.
Did we play the same game? BotW was the first Zelda game that I actually enjoyed!
Well that sorta says it all. You don’t like Zelda games lol. Botw isn’t much of a Zelda game so it stands to reason you’d like it.
The story is “Ganon’s doing bad, stop him”, same as most of the others
So that’s just it, all the others aren’t like that. The fact that BOTW is, is just lazy. It sorta Flanderized itself.
What about all the NPCs in all the towns?
What about them?
There are 120 shrines, 4 temples, and a big final zone, how’s that no dungeons?
Because none of those things are dungeons. Not in any substantial way we’ve come to expect from a Zelda game at least. There are 120 separate and yet identical puzzle rooms with no unique characteristics between them, and 4 boss fights that sort of act like 1/4 of a Zelda dungeon that all share a single theme. There isn’t really a single dungeon or temple in BOTW.
The music was great
It was serviceable ambiance, not all that unique or memorable. It did its job but not nearly the level the series is known for.
Aren’t there enough different enemies to fill up that huge photo album?
Idk but BOTW had 15-30 base species types accounting for unique bosses but not every single sub variant. Ocarina of Time from 1998 has over 70. And there was more regional diversity compared to BOTW which is very same across the whole map overall.
The exploration was the most fun! Finding all the shines and secret seeds was great (clearly collectathons are my thing and not yours!)
Exploration in older Zelda titles had more rewarding, unique items and treasures to find when exploring, and the way you would explore would change as the game progressed and you unlocked more gadgets. BOTW is as you said just a collection of the same handful of incremental upgrade items copy-pasted hundreds of times. And it never evolves because the game is designed specifically so that the gameplay does not evolve over the course of a playthrough. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a collectathon but BOTW used it in place of more substantial exploration rewards, and is the exact thing everyone would dog on if the game was published by Ubisoft and not Nintendo.
Botw is a fine game, it just doesn’t do anything to scratch the Zelda game itch. It’s just a different game.
You don’t like Zelda games lol. Botw isn’t much of a Zelda game so it stands to reason you’d like it.
Haha maybe it’s as simple as that!
The recent Link’s Awakening remake was pretty well received, reckon they’ll keep making both classic and botw-style Zelda games in the way games like castlevania do?
Well the problem is it seems they’ve given up on the classic Zelda formula. Botw sorta ate it and spit out the bones, which is why I dislike the game so much. It’s a pod person that replaced Zelda and is living in its place, instead of just being its own thing.
Meanwhile you have another legacy game series like Resident Evil that in the same span of time seems to have figured out how to evolve the formula twice now into something new without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree with you, it’s a decent open world game but a pretty mediocre Zelda game. I had hoped TOTK might improve upon the direction they chose to take the series, but it kinda doubles down on all the weaker points of BOTW (uninspired “dungeons”, more one-time use resources, etc.).
I think my biggest gripe with TOTK and Echoes of Wisdom is that you can solve 90% of the “puzzles” with one or two techniques. There isn’t a lot of critical thinking needed when you can use things like the rocket to just skip most of the puzzle and similarly I think I solved a majority of the puzzles in Echoes of Time using the bed echo.
I feel this. I’m a huge Zelda fan. It’s my favorite game series. BotW was just ok. Then I played Elden Ring and realized that the vast emptiness of the open world didn’t have to be so unrewarding. Now BotW is mediocre, and I didn’t bother with the sequel.
Why the fuck does the Master Sword degrade? Garbage concept. Genuinely terrible.
I totally agree with the exception of the music. I know what you mean because there is minimal music in the “open world” parts of the game, but the actual songs made for the actually interesting places are bangers.
I mean ultimately it’s a matter of personal opinion, but there’s a reason so many legacy Zelda songs are so beloved and memorable, and have been sampled and remixed to death over decades and nobody really talks about or remembers any particular themes from BOTW.
Like I don’t remember music from BOTW being bad, I just don’t remember it at all
I hate Battle Royale shooters, all of them.
There is nothing I find more unpleasant than inventory management under pressure. I don’t even have time to look at what I just picked up and figure out what it does before people are shooting at me. I say just pick a lane, you can be a competitive shooter, but skip the loot. Or go maximum inventory management, like borderlands or stalker, but not in a competitive multiplayer game.
Terraria. I’ve tried 3 different times now and I just can’t get into it
I tried so hard with Terraria back in the day but never could get into it. I suppose it was partly because I approached it thinking “2D Minecraft” which it is not
The beginning of that game is quite slow, but it does pick up, and it has a lot more to offer than I thought when I first picked it up. It can also feel a bit inscrutable as there’s little to no direction offered to the player. Personally, I make liberal use of the wiki to counteract that. I’m betting there’s spoiler-sensitive guides out there, too.
I’ve always wanted to learn to play rts online like starcraft or aoe2 but I just get beyond stressed out
You should try the arcade games, some really creative ones in there. Or try the scenarios in beyond all reason, it’s more of a puzzle than a stressful game since it’s vs ai.
I have no issue with RTS…it was the genre I grew up with. Facing hard bots doesnt really stress me. Something about facing another human does lol
Which is weird because I’ve been 6000 mmr on dota before, ive been top 5 worldwide banshee kills worldwide in halo reach, etc, so I don’t know where this anxiety stems from
