Gaming Confession

I confess, I rarely ever finish any game, the last games I remember finishing were Final Fantasy X, Fable, and Halo. Yeah, it's been that long.

I stopped playing Bioshock as soon as I got to the first "twist" and will probably never play it again.

Fallout 3 lost me before I even got out of the starting complex.

I played Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for about 5 minutes and haven't played it up since.

The demo of Batman: Arkham Asylum was enough to satisfy me.

Final Fantasy XII fell along the way for some reason I can't even remember, perhaps it was the "War and Peace" length strategy guide.

Ohh yeah, I need a strategy guide for everything.

I like to play Supreme Commander by myself with a 20 minute no rush option, and then restart as soon as I hit 20 minutes, it allows me to see how efficiently I can build without ever having to deal with enemies.

I routinely purchase games on Steam and then spend the time to convince my partner to let me buy it. Fortunately I'm very persuasive because there have only been a few times he adamantly refused and I've had to face the consequences.

I confess that I love having 100 people on my XBL friends list, but I rarely invite anyone into a game.
These kinds of things roar through my head whenever I look at my list:
"What if I need to attend to my wife/kids/pets? These guys are gonna think I'm a douche for inviting them in, then leaving them hanging while I'm afk."
"Oooh, 5 people are in the same game but they're in the middle of a match, I don't want to bother them."

It's weird because in real life I interact with friends and strangers with ease, but I have a really hard time online (much like Elysium's article from a few days ago.)

Two Confessions:

I’m throwing in on the “I lost interest in Bioshock” confession.

The vita chambers made me feel like an invincible wrench-god and not using them made the game entirely too tedious. It went from one of my most anticipated games to utterly forgettable. I have pretty much zero interest in Bioshock 2.

And hey, speaking of tedious:

Gears of War:

Don’t get me wrong, I like it well enough. I just don’t understand how people beat up on other games for “bullet sponges” enemies and somehow GoW gets a free pass. I’d rather see more enemies that go down with less hits than this “fewer/tougher” option. (I do like the game though and will buy GoW3)

I hate the Halo games. I tried to play Halo 1 and 2 on the Xbox and I just find the art direction boring, the shooting doesn't feel good and the story doesn't get me at all.

I pretty much only read about videogames, I don't play so much. But I love watching reviews and stuff.

TF2 excepted of course

I don't "get" most Japanese games: Mario, Zelda, Metal Gear Solid, JRPGs. The kind of gameplay purity that many other people find and enjoy in them finds no purchase in me at all. I didn't really play them very much when growing up, since I had a Spectrum instead. (I also didn't go to arcades, which probably doesn't help). And even at that time, the sort of games my friends had on their NES or Megadrive consoles seemed thin in comparison to the better games on the Speccy. They're just not my thing at all.

Budo wrote:

I have never played a Mario or Zelda game

Neither have I, nor any Metroid games. What can I say? I missed out on the entire NES era.

  • I like games that encourage exploration (Zelda, Metroid, etc.), but I haven't found a modern open-world game yet that I've enjoyed. In general, I think open-world games are about making the fun for yourself, and I'd much rather have a guided experience.
  • I only enjoy scavenger hunts in games if there is a direct, tangible, in-game reward for doing so. I simply don't understand the people who hunted down every flag in Assassin's Creed, or every piece of intel in Call of Duty 4, for a piddling Achievement. It seems like such a waste of time.
  • First-person shooter games were more fun when they were designed like Doom: with no attention whatsoever paid to realism or sense. The pursuit of realism, particularly since the release of Half-Life, has weakened the genre significantly as each element of realism introduces something that will only serve to break immersion (e.g., chain-link fences that your space marine can't climb). Along similar lines, the monster closets in Doom 3 were great.
  • Games can be art, but most art-games are looking in the wrong direction.
  • Mass Effect was garbage, and whenever I see someone talking about playing through it a second, third, or fourth time, I make a mental note to pay less attention whenever they recommend a game.

kuddles, if you're feeling up to it, I'd love to know what you disliked about Call of Duty 4, either here or via private message.

Gravey wrote:

I don't like BioWare games. I stalled halfway through Mass Effect on account of its linear missions, shallow cliche story, unimaginative world and aliens, unsatisfying combat, and terrible UI. Jade Empire was a decent ARPG, but its world was small and constrained, and the story predictable. I couldn't get into KOTOR at all, but maybe that was just the Star Wars angle.

I just don't get the appeal. Dialogue trees and all that are nice, but every one of these games seems to want to reinvent the morality system—Light and Dark, Open Palm and Closed Fist, Paragon and Renegade—but each is just a fiction-specific spin on Saint and Asshole, every damn game.

Wow, I thought I was alone on an island with my feelings about BioWare games, though my reasons for disliking them are different then yours.

I just don't like their 'action-rpg' mold. It falls in this odd middle ground where it loses what are some of the better elements of each genre and doesn't really gain anything appreciable in return. None of your 'joystick-jockey' skills really matter much at all, as they do in typical action games, and you are not allowed the same level of player and party movement, control, and strategy that you get in more traditional turn-based RPGs. It's more like you're playing some odd 3rd person RTS, where the gameplay consists of your attempts to herd the characters into doing what you want them to do.

For all the talk about how these games give a great sense of agency to the player and allow them to develop the world, they do a good job of taking away from the player the amount of character control one would get in either a pure action or an old school RPG. What does the middle ground they are in now gain them? I guess more mainstream acceptance of RPG-like games, I suppose.

Zero Karzima wrote:

Gears of War:

Don’t get me wrong, I like it well enough. I just don’t understand how people beat up on other games for “bullet sponges” enemies and somehow GoW gets a free pass. I’d rather see more enemies that go down with less hits than this “fewer/tougher” option. (I do like the game though and will buy GoW3)

Not really defending it, just pointing out that most complaints about bullet spong enemies seem to come from games where the enemies are human. Big chunky armored aliens absorbing more bullets is a little easier to take.

Silly as it is I know that's the difference maker for me when it comes to that.

-I think ID software games suck. I appreciate what they've done for gaming as an industry but as a player of those games, I think they suck.

-I once changed plans for a Friday night date which I can say with complete assuredness would have ended with sex in order to attend a raid in EverQuest. I actually turned down some 'tang for a game.

-Whenever I'm in Gamestop and see some other customer looking at a game, I size him up and always come to the conclusion that I could totally kick his ass at that game. Also, the amount of how much I can kick someones ass is tied to what store I happen to be in. I could kick the gaming ass of someone in Target much easier than someone in Toys R Us who would be much easier than someone in Gamestop. There's a hierarchy.

-I love Unreal Tournament but want to set CliffyB on fire. To this day I refuse to give him any credit whatsoever for one of my top 3 games of all-time.

-At the age of 14, I masturbated furiously to the newly released Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking For Love (In Several Wrong Places). More than once. Leisure Suit Larry was my "Birds & Bees" instructor and I graduated with the understanding that as a man, I should go to any lengths for some strange.

-I can't play stealthy games. Well, I can but just not how I'm supposed to. Thief, Splinter Cell, etc. I play in a run&gun style and kill everyone I can unless the mission requires otherwise. Mercy is for sissies.

FSeven wrote:

At the age of 14, I masturbated furiously to the newly released Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking For Love (In Several Wrong Places). More than once.

Holy toledo. I think you "win" this confession thread.

FSeven wrote:

-At the age of 14, I masturbated furiously to the newly released Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking For Love (In Several Wrong Places). More than once. Leisure Suit Larry was my "Birds & Bees" instructor and I graduated with the understanding that as a man, I should go to any lengths for some strange.

I played through one of the Leisure Suit Larry games with my dad when I was too young to really understand what was going on in the game. We had just wrapped up a King's Quest game and a Space Quest game, so this, to me, was just another adventure game.

In retrospect, the whole thing creeps me the f*ck out.

FSeven wrote:

-I love Unreal Tournament but want to set CliffyB on fire. To this day I refuse to give him any credit whatsoever for one of my top 3 games of all-time.

Confession: I'm a fan of CliffyB. I played the ancient Epic Megagames titles that he designed back in the day when I was a young kid. In the days of UT he used to write blog posts about level design and analyze/critique user-made maps, and found his analysis of game flow and mechanics to be some of the most insightful stuff written by a developer that I've ever read. The fact that he is a fan of Dane Cook is pretty hard not to hold against him personally though.

Chalk up another CliffyB fan here. He seems like a dude I could hang out and have a beer with and not feel stupid every time I opened my mouth. I like him precisely because he isn't another Warren Spector, Will Wright, or John Carmack.

Those of you who haven't played Deus Ex are just dead to me. Seriously.

My confession is that I love the concept of the CRPG.. and buy most if not all of them (not JRPG's though bleh) but rarely have patience to play any of them even halfway through. Dragon Age being probably the first real CRPG I finished in AGES. Shiny and new are just way to distracting to me.

I loathe JRPGs. Passionately. It's boring level-grinding, fighting the same enemies over and over with slight variations, and it's painful drudgery. All the long cutscenes featuring androgynous, big-eyed, funny-haired freaks don't help. I took a flyer on Blue Dragon back when I still used Gamefly, and it was fun for about 30 minutes before I realized it was just going to be more of the same for the next 35 hours. I can't even vaguely begin to understand the appeal of the Final Fantasy series.

I rented Resident Evil 5, played it for less than an hour, and took it back. That's the single worst control scheme I've ever encountered in any game. It was horrible.

Jumping sucks. I don't want to have to time things for the perfect jump every second and a half, but thanks. Platformers are a terrible genre and should have died back around the time of Sonic 2.

Related to the above, I'm generally annoyed by Nintendo games in general.

I love RPGs, but never finish them. I can't count the number of hours I've spent playing RPGs, but I could probably count the number of RPGs I've actually finished on one hand. Oblivion? I finished it. Morrowind? Damn, it got old. I quit. I never finished Fallout 3.

These days, if I get stuck at all, I look for a guide online. I have no patience anymore. When I was a kid, I'd try and try until I got through a tough area. Now, I just look for the shortcut.

Switchbreak wrote:
FSeven wrote:

-I love Unreal Tournament but want to set CliffyB on fire. To this day I refuse to give him any credit whatsoever for one of my top 3 games of all-time.

Confession: I'm a fan of CliffyB. I played the ancient Epic Megagames titles that he designed back in the day when I was a young kid. In the days of UT he used to write blog posts about level design and analyze/critique user-made maps, and found his analysis of game flow and mechanics to be some of the most insightful stuff written by a developer that I've ever read. The fact that he is a fan of Dane Cook is pretty hard not to hold against him personally though.

Didn't know that about Dane Cook. Now I have another reason to hate him!

I guess my beef with him is mostly that he screwed up the UT franchise so much. I mean, in keeping with my belief that he had nothing to do with the success of UT, hypothetically speaking, let's say he did. He creates this amazing game with the most intense physics and combat system to date and he fails miserably to try to recreate it despite the uproar from the community stating how much UT2003 didn't feel like the precedent UT had set. Then he tries to listen to the community and recreate it in UT2004 and fails even worse. It's almost like he stumbled onto the magical formula for UT and had no idea how he did it because he most certainly couldn't recreate it. To me that translates not into brilliance but into buffoonery.

It's kind of like Tribes. An inadvertent design of the original was the ability to ski. A few whiners that couldn't do it forced Dynamix to tweak it, thus breaking it and driving away the community en masse. They realize they screwed up and make T2 but it just didn't capture the magic of the first one.

Dynamix and CliffyB are the gaming equivalent to Columbus who didn't so much "discover" America as accidentally bump into it while trying to find a new way to the West Indies.

I think UT2003's biggest problem was that it was overly focused on their new engine, and UT2004 was seen widely as a mea culpa and something of a return to form for the series.

adam.greenbrier wrote:
  • I like games that encourage exploration (Zelda, Metroid, etc.), but I haven't found a modern open-world game yet that I've enjoyed. In general, I think open-world games are about making the fun for yourself, and I'd much rather have a guided experience.
  • I only enjoy scavenger hunts in games if there is a direct, tangible, in-game reward for doing so. I simply don't understand the people who hunted down every flag in Assassin's Creed, or every piece of intel in Call of Duty 4, for a piddling Achievement. It seems like such a waste of time.
  • First-person shooter games were more fun when they were designed like Doom: with no attention whatsoever paid to realism or sense. The pursuit of realism, particularly since the release of Half-Life, has weakened the genre significantly as each element of realism introduces something that will only serve to break immersion (e.g., chain-link fences that your space marine can't climb). Along similar lines, the monster closets in Doom 3 were great.
  • Games can be art, but most art-games are looking in the wrong direction.
  • Mass Effect was garbage, and whenever I see someone talking about playing through it a second, third, or fourth time, I make a mental note to pay less attention whenever they recommend a game.

kuddles, if you're feeling up to it, I'd love to know what you disliked about Call of Duty 4, either here or via private message.

I agree with all of this (despite never doing more than watch my roommate play Mass Effect) except the FPS comment. To me, the Half-Life games almost always added just the right amount of realism while Call of Duty and Co. were way overboard.

Also I have to confess that when my former roommate walked in the door with Bioshock in his hand, I was playing Gears of War and I turned it off as soon as he mentioned Bioshock. Bioshock was the only game on the 360 I ever finished and now I own it on the PC. I never bothered with Gears of War again.

Switchbreak wrote:

I think UT2003's biggest problem was that it was overly focused on their new engine

And that's precisely when it was made obvious to the world that Epic became a game-engine creator first and a game designer a very distant second.

Thin_J wrote:

Not really defending it, just pointing out that most complaints about bullet spong enemies seem to come from games where the enemies are human. Big chunky armored aliens absorbing more bullets is a little easier to take.

Silly as it is I know that's the difference maker for me when it comes to that.

I suppose... those are pretty big guns though. It's still annoying to have to frequently reload while killing one bad guy.

I too have quite a few games that I just didn't find very enjoyable, despite popular opinion being that I should love them. My gaming confession, however, is that I'm a self-proclaimed PC gamer, and I am finding myself less and less interested in PC games. As much as it bothers (*pains* being too strong of a word) me to say so, I'm getting more and more of my gaming solely from consoles. I just can't keep up with the hardware specs for PC games anymore. My disposable income isn't quite so disposable now that I have to think about, for example, buying a washer machine for the wife instead of a new gaming rig. It's more than just dissing out the cash for a new PC though. Part of me just doesn't want to be bothered with patches, conflicts and outdated components anymore. I know both the pros and cons of PC gaming, but I'm caring less about the pros. Buying older games I don't have is a solution. But who doesn't want to latest eye-candy? So that's it, that's my confession. I'm sure there is a PC versus Console Gaming thread somewhere that this post would be better suited in. Sorry about that.

n10sity wrote:

I too have quite a few games that I just didn't find very enjoyable, despite popular opinion being that I should love them. My gaming confession, however, is that I'm a self-proclaimed PC gamer, and I am finding myself less and less interested in PC games. As much as it bothers (*pains* being too strong of a word) me to say so, I'm getting more and more of my gaming solely from consoles. I just can't keep up with the hardware specs for PC games anymore. My disposable income isn't quite so disposable now that I have to think about, for example, buying a washer machine for the wife instead of a new gaming rig. It's more than just dissing out the cash for a new PC though. Part of me just doesn't want to be bothered with patches, conflicts and outdated components anymore. I know both the pros and cons of PC gaming, but I'm caring less about the pros. Buying older games I don't have is a solution. But who doesn't want to latest eye-candy? So that's it, that's my confession. I'm sure there is a PC versus Console Gaming thread somewhere that this post would be better suited in. Sorry about that.

I think a lot of us can probably agree with that. PC gaming, despite what die-harders like to claim, is really pricey.

Plus, it seems like the few PC exclusive titles tend to be RTS, Diablo-esque, or MMOs. I have very little interest in those types of games, so I keep a mildly decent laptop that I use for PopCap games and simple PC titles. I've basically lost interest in the platform outside of indie games.

Odd that you feel PC gaming is too expensive. I have an unused Xbox 360 and Wii because the PC has spoiled me. I calculated on Steam that with package deals and sales I am spending an average of $6-7 on each PC Game, and they are great games. On the console side that much money will get me a used XBox (original) game. If I actually want to get this generation's games, even used, I have to shell out 20-30 dollars. Bayonetta, the latest Ninja Gaiden, Dead Rising, etc, etc, I'd love to play them, but when $4 can give me the same amount of play time on the computer...

I've never ever understood the draw of a SEGA console.

That jerk in EQ1 and World of Warcraft who snatched up anything in the bazaar/auction house that's low-priced and resold it for 2x - 100x more, ensuring that you'll rarely get a good deal? It's-a me, Mario!

I don't even do anything with the money I make in MMORPGs - just hoard it. It's like some kind of weird game-within-a-game.

Yonder wrote:

Odd that you feel PC gaming is too expensive. I have an unused Xbox 360 and Wii because the PC has spoiled me. I calculated on Steam that with package deals and sales I am spending an average of $6-7 on each PC Game, and they are great games. On the console side that much money will get me a used XBox (original) game. If I actually want to get this generation's games, even used, I have to shell out 20-30 dollars. Bayonetta, the latest Ninja Gaiden, Dead Rising, etc, etc, I'd love to play them, but when $4 can give me the same amount of play time on the computer...

I often buy games used and often a year or so after release. Plus I use Goozex and other game trading options. With some smart spending, you can really drive down console game costs. Besides, all my real-life friends own consoles and Macs, so a gaming PC would be relatively worthless to me.

Not trying to turn this into a console versus PC debate. Both have their strengths, but I pretty much hate what PCs excel at these days. (Except for Cryostasis... not gonna lie, that game looks pretty awesome.)

KillerTomato wrote:

I don't even do anything with the money I make in MMORPGs - just hoard it. It's like some kind of weird game-within-a-game.

Most people I know (at least, most people until I found GWJ) who play MMOs play it for the economy. It's one of the few aspects of the game that has a score.