Giving up on a game

What does it take for you to give up on a game, particularly one that you've invested quite a bit of time in? Is there any point at which you just have to admit that it's just not worth it any more?

I ask because I just gave up at the very end of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door after dozens of hours invested in it. Initial infatuation with the great art direction and enjoyable combat and exploration eventually gave way to boredom from gameplay and dialogue that had became numbingly repetitive by the end.

mild spoilers wrote:

[color=white]Gritting my teeth, I made it past some irritating platforming segments to reach the last boss. Unfortunately, before you get to the final fight, there's a lengthy cutscene that forces you to hit the A button at certain points (meaning you can't even walk away and do something else while it plays out), followed by a long fight which you're forced to lose to continue the story, then an even longer interaction-required cutscene, then a fight that's dramatically harder than any of the ones that preceded it with cheap death opportunities galore. To get to that final fight again, I'd have to repeat every bit of it.[/color]

After one more attempt, I had absolutely no desire to ever see the game again, so Goozex ahoy. I could eventually win it after a few more tries, but why bother?

Anyone have similar experiences with a game?

Two games spring to mind:

Dark Reign - The last battle, you're dropped into a small corner of the map, with more-or-less limitless resources, and you have to destroy two fully developed armies that area already fighting between each other. The closest I've come is to destroy one, but I'm left too weak to defeat the other. I believe this game is still lurking in one of my CD cases, but I haven't loaded it up in years.

Asheron's Call - The thing that finally broke me of this MMO was a weapons upgrade that I should have been happy about. I spent 6 months gathering the resources to have 7 imbued bows. To imbue a bow, you had to grind for either the bow, or something to trade for a good bow. Then, you had to either grind for the trade material, or grind for enough stuff to trade for it (this, of course, all being in a player developed barter system, so no two people valued things the same). Then, you had to pray that you came out on the better end of a 33% maximum chance of success, or you lost all the materials involved, including the bow.

Two weeks after I imbued the last one (had a bow for each type of damage imbue - Bludgeon, Slashing, Piercing, Fire, Frost, Acid, Lightning), they introduced an entire new set of bows that blew mine away. I just snapped, and canceled my account.

I've done it before. I refuse to force myself through a game I no longer have the will to play. The exact reason is random. I've stopped because of boring gameplay, horrible storylines, crappy characters...

Recently... I sold Contact and Children of Mana near the end because they were too boring to continue playing. Actually, my favorite example is Final Fantasy X. I played the game all the way through and got to the point right before the final battle and never fought. I just didn't have the desire to complete it. I wanted them all to die so badly that I just left them there for Sin to devour them all. F*ck 'em. I sold the game a while afterward.

I don't think I've ever gotten stuck somewhere and gave up completely (besides my younger years when I couldn't get past anything). If I liked the game enough, I'll continue or go back to it in a few years (done it too). If I hate the game, I would've stopped way before that point anyway.

I stopped Paper Mario 2 at the exact same point. The thought of sitting through those cutscenes again outweighed my interest in how the story ended.

Huh, lots of games. When they even remotely start to feel like "work", that's when I say "Oh, screw this."

The latest victim was Jade Empire.

Psychonauts (yeah, I suck) - The Milkman Conspiracy level where the den mother is throwing exploding cookie boxes at you in the dark. The fun drained outta me at this level.

GTA San Andreas - I just got bored with it.

Morrowind. I just... stopped caring. Perhaps I just ran out of coffee. Perhaps I had to get a job. Perhaps my notebooks of who needed what from where was getting too full.

I can't remember all the games that have made me so mad I just quit, and walk away. The most recent one that I do recall was Prince of Persia: sands of time, well I think it was sands of time. I'm not a fan of having to redo a whole level because of one missed jump.

Final Fantasy IX - A lot of people hated this game but I vehemently loved it until they drudged up the cliched "fight the 4 elemental bosses a second time" crap. After vainly trying to get past the 2nd boss for a week, I gladly traded it in.

Beyond Good & Evil - The hovercraft racing missions killed this one for me. Great game but forced twitch racing just isn't my thing.

PC Gaming - Does an entire gaming platform count for this thread? After getting my 360, I decided that I was done upgrading my PC hardware for gaming. I just can't afford to keep up with new CPUs, GPUs and DX10 requirements now that I have a family to take care of. A $500 console upgrade every four or so years is much more justifiable than the constant drain that PC gaming is. Add in that I can cheaply rent games for the 360 instead of spending $50 every time something new & shiny comes out on the PC and its just a better deal for my current lifestyle. Although I will admit I miss the Thursday nights riding shotgun in a bullet-ridden SwampAir helo, seconds away from exploding.

LockAndLoad wrote:

Beyond Good & Evil - The hovercraft racing missions killed this one for me. Great game but forced twitch racing just isn't my thing.

Really? You had trouble with those? I hate racing games/mini-games myself, and I have no trouble with the hovercraft whatsits on BG&E. Meh, tweet chezone, I guess.

Personally, I've never "given up" on games, but there's been times I get some caught up in trying to find all the secrets and crap that I never get around to finishing the game - for instance, FFVIII, FFIX, FFX*, Wild Arms 4, among others.

*I hate dodging lightning, SquEnix, never do that again.

I've far to many games that I've put the controller down and walked away from. One of the nice side effects of this is when I do actually finish a game I get an overwhelming sense of accomplishment from it.

Paper Mario: I quit at the last boss too. One of my biggest, if not the biggest, pet peeve I have in video games is non-skippable cut scenes before a boss fight. That alone makes me want to quit a game right then and there.

FFX: I didn't even make it halfway through the game. I hit some zombie form of someone I'd already beaten that killed me in about 2 minutes and I just walked away. That was about 3 years ago and I've never played the game since. Come to think of it, I've had that happen with every Final Fantasy. I get to a point where I have to spend a week leveling up just to beat a boss and I can't be arsed to do it.

Viewtiful Joe: Another big pet peeve is fighting every single minor boss that I've already fought, only to get to the last boss and not have a chance to recharge my health. Such utter bullsh*t and I've never understood the point of this particular tactic.

Any castlevania game: At some point I've always said to myself "why am I doing this again?" or "why do I have to look at gamefaqs for every single boss battle?" and then I just put it down and never play it again.

Elebits: Again with the last boss battle. Because it's so new I don't wanna spoil anything, but needless to say I have no desire to try to beat that game any time soon.

Resident Evil 3(?): I'm sorry, but I dumped that sucker into a vat of magma. There is no frackin' way it's alive. Oh, and to not give me any health to collect between the magma and it showing up again? Cheap and uncool.

Wow, I was getting pretty worked up just reliving some of those memories! Maybe I need to take breaks from gaming a wee bit more

I'm currently retro-playing Syndicate: American Revolt. The level designs are ridiculous and seem specifically designed to frustrate the player and highlight the existing flaws in the engine: namely, really bad pathfinding and poor AI. You will be swarmed by dozens of maxed-out enemy agents with all the same advanced equipment that you have and your only strategy is to pray that this time your agents will remember to shoot at hostile targets before they fire their gauss guns.

Syndicate was pretty easy. American Revolt when too far in the opposite extreme. Still, I'm stubborn, so it'll be a few more days of ineffective flailing before I admit defeat.

LockAndLoad wrote:
Beyond Good & Evil - The hovercraft racing missions killed this one for me. Great game but forced twitch racing just isn't my thing.
Really? You had trouble with those? I hate racing games/mini-games myself, and I have no trouble with the hovercraft whatsits on BG&E. Meh, tweet chezone, I guess.

It wasn't really that I was having trouble with them. I kept trying & trying until I got the course sequence correct and that's what ruined it. I just had no interest in playing the game when I was faced with the prospect of having to do another race to advance the game further.

There's also games that I didn't really give up on so much as lost interest in or forgot about, which is not normal for me. I tend to finish everything I start. Unless it sucks or it's long and doesn't hold keep my attention. I never finished Tron or BG&E because I started playing other games and never went back.

Giving up is almost my default state. It's easier to just count the games that were good enough all the way through to keep me going.

After I slogged through one of the Xbox versions of Far Cry I vowed to always listen to the little voice who says "this sucks and it's not going to get better, step away now."

I would have given up on a lot of JRPGs as a kid if I didn't have my OCD little brother to do all the leveling for me while I slept.

Trachalio wrote:

FFX: I didn't even make it halfway through the game. I hit some zombie form of someone I'd already beaten that killed me in about 2 minutes and I just walked away.

Are you talking about the battle with Evrae Altana? That boss is easy, all you have to do is pop a couple Phoenix Downs on him and he's down for the count. Seriously, they do over 8k damage to him, and he only has 16k hit points. When I fought him, he didnt even have a chance to use a single attack.

LockAndLoad wrote:
LockAndLoad wrote:
Beyond Good & Evil - The hovercraft racing missions killed this one for me. Great game but forced twitch racing just isn't my thing.
Really? You had trouble with those? I hate racing games/mini-games myself, and I have no trouble with the hovercraft whatsits on BG&E. Meh, tweet chezone, I guess.

It wasn't really that I was having trouble with them. I kept trying & trying until I got the course sequence correct and that's what ruined it. I just had no interest in playing the game when I was faced with the prospect of having to do another race to advance the game further.

The hovercraft races aren't required to finish the game. You do have to enter one to get to the Slaughterhouse, but you don't even need to compete, you just need to find the entrance to the Slaughterhouse on the course.

Glad to see that other Goodjers had the same problem with that last Paper Mario boss. The design for the rest of the game is mostly quite good, so what happened there?

Brizahd wrote:

I can't remember all the games that have made me so mad I just quit, and walk away. The most recent one that I do recall was Prince of Persia: sands of time, well I think it was sands of time. I'm not a fan of having to redo a whole level because of one missed jump.

I gave up on Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for the same reason. I was about 2/3 of the way in and ran into a section that takes at least 10 minutes to get through, with narrow catwalks and plenty of enemies ensuring cheap deaths, little ability to rewind time, and low health at the end. After numerous attempts, I finally got through that mess only to have a giant enemy crash through a wall and demolish me in one swipe. No thanks.

Most Final Fantasy games. 2 and 3 come to particular mind, I get to a certain spot, get busy with Other Stuff, come back and don't want to continue because I've forgotten what the hell I was doing.

Jet Grind Radio. Given I haven't turned on my Dreamcast in 8 months..
Shenmue I was loving until my goddamn discs were damaged. Siiiiigh.

Zelda. I currently own 4 Zelda games. I have completed NONE of them. Ever. I think I completed the Gameboy one.

Morrowind. Got bored. Oblivion held on much tighter, until I completed the main storyline.

Most games seem to get boring enough that I don't want to play anymore pretty quickly. Almost like I'd rather play something simple and short, than spend hours and hours only to forget what I was doing and why.

Bunch of Quitters

LockAndLoad wrote:
Beyond Good & Evil - The hovercraft racing missions killed this one for me. Great game but forced twitch racing just isn't my thing.

Seriously? Wow, I'm gonna brag that I got them all in the first try. The part where I almost quit was when you have to let a torpedo follow you and at the last second move out of the way to clear a barrier. That wasn't so great. But I think that game was pretty good and overall not very hard.

LockAndLoad wrote:

It wasn't really that I was having trouble with them. I kept trying & trying until I got the course sequence correct and that's what ruined it. I just had no interest in playing the game when I was faced with the prospect of having to do another race to advance the game further.

It is news to me that it was possible to not finish those races in 1st. The only one I had to re-do was the one where you actually leave the course to go to your next destination.

I usually finish games. The ones that I don't - hello, Lost Planet - are usually on thin ice with me early on.

I gave up on Half-Life 2 three times, only because I kept trying to play it on a computer not really equipped to run it (it ran fine to start with, when there's nobody shooting, but later on the lack of power would catch up with me). I finally have a good gaming PC and I just re-started and finished it in a few days.

Final Fantasy X. I like the turn-based fighting and the story is interesting, but it just drags on and on. I got bored of never feeling like I was going somewhere.

PsychoNauts. Awesome game. And then came the Meat Circus. That was bad.

Ace Attorney: Justice For All. I guess I'm just not a logical enough thinker. You can only watch your client go to jail so many times.

Mimble wrote:

Ace Attorney: Justice For All. I guess I'm just not a logical enough thinker. You can only watch your client get butt-raped by guys named Sally Two-Fingers so many times.

Teehee.

I abandon games left and right... usually my interest just fades, and a new game beckons.

The one situation I remember is playing GRANDIA 2 on the Dreamcast. I got all the way through the entire game, until RIGHT before the last boss you have to wander through some dumb-ass teleporting dungeon. I refused to use a FAQ just to figure out how to get through the dunegon, so I just quit.

Never cared enough to go back. I always felt I had gotten "close enough."

I almost never finish games. I have never felt a real need to finish a game because of I've invested time into it or anything like that. As soon as a game stops being fully engaging, challanging, or interesting to me I drop it. There is always a new and shiny game out there that will thrill me more than the one I'm currently bored with.

The last game I finished was New Super Mario Bros and before that it was Kirby: Canvas Curse. Notice that these games were easy and short enough that the novelty didn't wear off until you could finish them. In the past ten years I haven't finished a FPS, RTS, or RPG because they are usually too long to keep my interest.

"Tactical" games. Silent Storm, Rebelstar, FFTA...they all take so long and I suck at them so badly that it's really not worth it. Dunno how I managed to finish Fire Emblem on DS.

Ditto for Morrowind and Oblivion. Just got bored with Morrowind and Oblivion felt like more of the same.

Oh, and the first X-Men Legends. The last boss f*cked me up and I couldn't be bothered to level up.

I think I just gave up on Puzzle Quest; the fights just take too freaking long. And there's not enough variety in your gameplay choices; you're pretty locked into a path and fighting strategy once you choose it, so if you've made a mistake you have to start over. When you run into a creature that your strategy has trouble with, you just don't have many options other than repeating over and over, hoping luck goes your way. That really isn't much fun. You can learn powers, but they're so expensive mana-wise that it's unusual to be able to actually use them.

Maybe I'll pick it back up, but I don't think so. Too much luck, not enough flexibility.

FF12 turned me off because of all the bullsh*t grinding. I hate hate hate the mechanic of 'kill pointless stuff and waste time because we didn't have enough real content for you'. I PARTICULARLY dislike the mechanic of 'if you kill the exact same monster fifty times in a row you get better drops'. They are rewarding tedium by design, and that pisses me off enough that I am not going to buy any more Final Fantasy games.

I've finished both Beyond Good and Evil and Paper Mario, and I honestly don't remember either of the problems you folks are describing. Heh, now that I think about it, all that I remember from Paper Mario was that A) it was good, B) the arena fights were fun, and C) the train station level was cool.

Oh, I dropped Metroid Prime 2 because it was looking very very long and tedious. You have to do the usual Get All The Pieces Of The Big Item, but there were lots of pieces and they were scattered all over the place. Suddenly, it was work, not fun, and I just stopped playing.

*Legion* wrote:

I usually finish games. The ones that I don't - hello, Lost Planet - are usually on thin ice with me early on.

I gave up on Half-Life 2 three times, only because I kept trying to play it on a computer not really equipped to run it (it ran fine to start with, when there's nobody shooting, but later on the lack of power would catch up with me). I finally have a good gaming PC and I just re-started and finished it in a few days.

Oh I forgot about Half-Life 2! I got it as a bonus with an ati card, and my computer also wasn't up to spechs. I got as far as the crane tower where you have to pick up your buggy with a magnet. An awesome game, but I had a hard drive crash on me and lost my game save. I just didn't want to do all the levels over again...

Malor wrote:

Heh, now that I think about it, all that I remember from Paper Mario was that A) it was good, B) the arena fights were fun, and C) the train station level was cool.

Same here, I have no clue what everyone else is complaining about. I mean, the only complaint you have is about something at the very end of the game? Come on.

Malor wrote:

FF12 turned me off because of all the bullsh*t grinding.

Oh, I dropped Metroid Prime 2 because it was looking very very long and tedious.

Replace FF12 with FFX and Metroid Prime 2 with the first game, and I'm the same.

This is an excellent thread. I think we all agree that the second a game begins to feel like work, that's when we throw it away.

I think most of our childhood games would not even get a second glance today.