I really wouldn’t say this piece on Destructoid about why folk don’t finish games delves particularly deeply into the matter (and nor will this one), but it did spark a few idle thoughts across the deadend pathways in my brain.
Most people don’t finish games, even games they’re dead excited about. The reasons are manifold – Valve tweaked Episode 1’s zombie/lift sequence to be easier, for instance, when their creepy online monitoring system spotted that a ton of players were struggling with it and giving up there and then. I know at least half a dozen people who didn’t make it far past That Moment in Bioshock, praising its power but in the same breath claiming boredom with the game’s admittedly repetitious structure and combat.
I’m guilty of plenty of gaming orphans myself. I’ve never quite completed a GTA game, usually because the level of driving ability required gradually becomes too harsh for me to enjoy myself. It took me 18 months of fits-and-start playing to finish Deus Ex. I made it to Chernobyl itself in STALKER, right on the cusp of answers and endgame, then found my savegame rendered useless by a patch and haven’t found the time/energy to start over. I’m still dodging KOTOR 2 spoilers, because churning through the game’s fight/collect/upgrade mechanics so soon after KOTOR 1 just felt too dreary, despite my burning need to know the plot’s secrets.
Worse, I’ve started Baldur’s Gate II around a dozen times, but always hit a point where its end still seems impossibly far away and just give up. Then there’s the half-dozen Final Fantasies (hey, two of ‘em were on PC, so I can mention ‘em here) I couldn’t finish because they kept interrupting me with the hideous, arrogant cutscenes that their hideous, arrogant fans believe constitute good storytelling. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see some graphs on, and no doubt they’d show the faintly horrifying proof that the human animal behaves largely the same way even in experiences which feel so personal. On the other hand, it’d be reasurring to see that many people have given up in the places I did. At least it would mean it was the developer’s fault, and not my own.
There’s a thousand other games I’ve played for work assignments where I’ve had to fight on well past the point where my brain was begging me to stop, disgusted by the hackery and laziness of the storyline, or some ridiculously tough boss, or the agonising repetition of the shooting, or, as the Destructoid piece does mention, other games competing for my easily-distracted affections. The point of ennui is something a great many games don’t seem to be tested for, and it’s made me say some remarkably unpleasant things about their creators, who no doubt believed wholeheartedly that they’d made something fun from start to finish. Sorry, guys. You made pain, not pleasure.
Some do benefit from a thorough check for unintended misery – much has been written on both Valve and Bungie’s extensive focus group playtesting of their recent games, establishing the exact maths of what keeps people enjoying themselves, and not feeling frustrated or lost or overwhelmed. Then there’s Portal, which I’m furious has been consistently scored lower than HL2 Episode 2 and TF2 (standard criticism – “it’s short”) despite being the Orange Boxette that everyone’s now quoting from and making slightly unsettling fan art of. It’s such a complete entity in a way so few games are, with a defined start, middle and satisfying end, and its brevity completely suits it. It sets a scene, tells a story and says its goodbyes while you’re still on a high.
But both the playtesting and the episodic ultra-polish are investments few developers can afford to make. Valve’s main men were millionaires even before they started the company. Bungie could suck infinite milk from the Microsoftian teat. Almost every other developer lacks these resources, and risks a large part of their games’ audiences never seeing everything they worked so hard to create. One day though, I’m sure someone will nail the science of gaming boredom, and then we’ll have pleasures without end.
So, readers – what PC games you were enjoying have you stopped playing, and why? Let us know in comments (even you, Dave Lurk from Lurksville) and perhaps we can spot some trends.
And developers – any sense of the common causes of players giving up on your game?
The weird thing is for me, I’ve never given up on a game because it was rubbish – or at least I don’t think I have. I have not gone back to a game because it’s too rubbish for me to get enough motivation to finish it, but even these I usually tell myself that I’ll come back to it later. And then a reformat or hardware problem usually ends up preventing that eventually.
I mean, I even saw Path of Neo to it’s conclusion…
Now that you mention it: I believe I never managed to finish Full Throttle. I got stuck in what I imagine is the last scene in front of the truck. Adventure games were specially cruel for me. It’s a pitty they stopped making them when I was old enough to think.
I find that if I somehow manages to aquire a game when I’m not done completing another one I’ll completely abandon the former. It’s terrible. That being said, I’m actually OCD enough to have completely every single game I’ve ever owned baring, maybe, a dozen or so out of hundreds. I’m terribly frightened that I might consider dropping FFXII and STALKER because The Orange Box etc. are just around the corner. Also, STALKER is so buggy and tends to crash a wee bit too often for me to fully delve into. And FFXII have those really long, important cutscenes. Sometimes I wish that entire series were books or movies.
And I lost my KOTOR2 saves, and I really don’t want to do that damn first level again. Snore.
I love you internet! Youtube has the ending of Full Throttle.
I am a stubborn cuss and I used to complete every game that I bought. It’s only over the last couple of years that I’ve started to give up on games – mostly because I have such a hugh backlog of unplayed ones. I still don’t really give up on games I’ve enjoyed though – unless I’m waiting for them to be fan-patched (KotoR 2) or to see what mods come out (Oblivion).
The vast majority of games outstay their welcome though, to the point where I’m just slogging through with no pleasure just to get it done. It’s almost like chopping my way through a woodpile of games that I’ve bought over the last few years. Which is silly, I know. What’s more silly is that I’m likely to grin and bear it through games that have recieved univeral acclaim, even when I don’t get them at all. Metal Gear Solid 2 nearly killed me with hate, and I still struggled through to the end.
The worst case of grimace-and-complete it recently was Metroid Prime – a game with some excellent basic structure and design, but also NO POINT. No appreciable story. Retracing your steps is a big no-no. Something as tedious as scanning was a huge no-no too. And who can stomach those sorts of traditional boss battles anymore?
A game that I thought was a perfect little package was Beyond Good and Evil. It was relatively short and split into sections that sat well with a a medium length gaming session (an hour-ish). The difficulty was at a lovely, gentle pitch. The warmth and charm was evenly spread through the game. The whole experience was just so… pleasant. I can think of few games that managed to get that right.
To sustain itself beyond the 10-12 hour mark I need a good, intriguing story or at least the promise of some decent set-piece character interactions. Sadly these things are in short supply…
In my case, it’s not that I give up on games as much as that I have a tremendous backlog.
I gave up on the final boss of Clock Tower 3 (huge difficulty spike), and cheated past the final Meccaryn mission in Giants (a poor mission- I have no qualms about that)
Otherwise, I do intend to finish every game I’ve bought. Eventually. I have suspicions that Forbidden Siren may be beyond my skills.
@Turin Turambar
“If you have to use cheats and pass the last levels, the game was not for you.”
Yeah, well, realizing that “it wasn’t for me” isn’t going to give me my money back. As an aside, any game that you don’t like “isn’t for you”. That’s a tautology.
“And using cheats to finish the story? In a iD game?”
Make that “see the ending”. Since I’ve paid for the whole game, I might as well get to watch it all.
Generally, if I give up on a single player campaign it is for one of the following reasons:
1. Extreme repetitiveness (Settlers 2)
2. Particularly difficult section, especially when I don’t have a clue what to try next (ARMA in particular, but this kills lots of games for me)
3. Really boring story (many, many games).
Unlike some of the posters, the linear and scripted campaign in HL2 + Episodes doesn’t bother me, though I do hope Valve shakes things up a bit in EP3.
//Spoilers ahoy!//
Completed (just):
Get this: I finished HL1 after HL2, despite having started it ten times or so. And having bought it just around a year after release.
What’s with Doom 3? I just completed it a week ago (have it since release…) and I can’t believe how boring (ok, repetitive?) it was. Why oh why did PCG give it 90%? Were you able to play it in a dark, damp corner somewhere? I wasn’t.
Nix:
I played Far Cry with my dad. Most of the time we just played at the same time, but time to time he would get stuck and then I’d help him out. Somehow I was better at the places he couldn’t master. However, my patience ran out in “that big valley with the gazillion hulking mutants with rocket launchers. That was just insane.”. He continued though, and I still helped him occasionally…and then, just before the boss, we lost the play CD. I never got round to installing a no-cd patch either. Neither did I uninstall the game.
The fun part is that it’s my friend’s game and he doesn’t have a hunch anymore that I’ve got it (no, I didn’t steal it).
Mondo: Can’t get past the “falling walls” level. There’s a room with two walls, but I can’t seem to grasp the point.
//Here endeth spoilers//
The first Hitman: Too hard for me. The last one was really great, even though I couldn’t complete it without plenty of helpful walkthroughs.
B&W1. Repetitive (omg how extremely!) and buggy. Had potential. Next.
GT Legends (if you can complete a driving game…?). This was a shame. It had potential, but was spoiled by a few small(ish) things. 1) Why was I denied access to the better cars in the game? I never got round to trying the GT40 or Porsche 906. 2) I can’t change AI speed and driving realism separately? Where’s the logic in that? 3) The bloody DVD died on me. I kept it pretty well actually, it would appear it had a design fault of some kind.
IL-1, Lock On, Falcon 4: AF, X-Wing Alliance… I murdered my joystick with trying to squeeze 747’s though barns in FS9. Plus I’m lazy and don’t want that steep learning curve, although I know the prize would be sweet.
Real Life: Still installed, but I only play it once in a while.
Ok so – do I start episode 1&2 now, even though im in the middle of bioshock, and risk losing what was going on with bioshock, or do I try and finish bioshock first, even though that could take me up to 2 weeks?! OH GOD TOO MANY GAMES! Maybe this is why some games never get completed, another one comes out too soon
For the same reason Alec couldn’t finish Baldur’s Gate 2…
… I never finished Planescape: Torment. And it’s still TORMENTING ME!! :P
In response to Willem:
Few of my gaming experiences have been so hollow and defeating as Realising i wouldn’t be able to complete Psychonauts. I ended up sitting, fuming at my computer watching the ending on You-Tube. It was all the more bitter for the rest of the game being so delightfully easy.
I think for me as well, a sudden spike in difficulty will cause be to shut down a game and never return. This for me is the point in time when the game goes from being entertainment to work. For instance, Vagrant Story on the PS1 is one of my all time favorite console games, but I never finished it. Why? The final boss who you get to 10 minutes after the last save game point. I don’t like having to reload and try bosses over and over to begin with, but throw 10 minutes of gameplay and plot in front of it, and the game’s shutting down after the second attempt. This was true of FFXII now that I think of it. The first judge boss on the airship… 15 mins of running battle only to die at a boss. Not going to happen more than twice.
I have no problems with the brevity of Portal. I finished it with a smile on my face which hasn’t happened in a long time. It’s okay to be left wanting more and reviewers need to stop the “less than 20 hours to complete = -10 points” nonsense.
Also, Oddly Kotor 2 was a game i had no trouble finishing due to it’s excellent plot. The fighting was easy and post Kotor, unoriginal. But the plot was genuinely enthralling. i played, living from one cutscene to the next, exploring every angle and trying to extract every line of dialogue. That could easily be a criticism of the game, but when dialogue is that well written it doesn’t seem to be a criticism at all.
I’m not going to compile a list, but I’d like to make particular mention of Dungeon Siege. I mostly liked it, but on two separate occasions I’ve played through nearly the whole thing, before giving up within spitting distance of the end. Not because of a difficulty spike; more of a completely-not-caring spike. Maybe my attention span is just slightly too short.
I keep a list of games I *have* finished, because it represents maybe a tenth of my 400+ game collection. (And that collection figure leaves out freeware, shareware, demos, ROMs, rentals, Gametap, and so on.) That should give you some idea. I bounce from game to game multiple times in an average day.
Which means the shorter a game is, the more likely I am to actually complete it and get my money’s worth. Portal being the notable recent example of such. Most of the epically long games I’ve finished I did back when I was in grade school, junior high, or high school. Since I didn’t have the money to amass huge swarms of games and I had, especially early on, a very limited set of platforms to play on.
I tend to think that I rarely finish games but when I look at my collection I’ve finished nearly half of the games I can see from my desk. But there’s also plenty I’ve never finished. The reasons are usually that it gets too difficult, feels pointless or gets repetitive and boring.
Also in longer games the death-stroke tends to be when you go away from the game for a while and try to get into it again only to notice that you have no recollection on how to do certain things or sometimes no idea what to do.
From where I see I have finished:
Vampre Bloodlines, Commandos 2, Deus Ex, CivIII (enough scenarios from start to finish at least), Alpha Centauri (enough scenarios from start to finish at least), Baldur’s Gate, Worms Armageddon, Sid Meier’s Pirates, Arcanum, C&C, Chronicles of Riddick- Escape from Butcher Bay.
Unfinished that I see are:
Far Cry (I got to the helicopter and never reloaded the save), Commandos (Playing it after Commandos 2 was too much of a shift. And it was a bit too much harder), Jagged Alliance 2 (I’m still on that one. I play it now and again but I rarely do much progress), PlaneScape Torment (This one suffered from the play-leave-don’t-remember syndrome. I got fairly far but then I left it and couldn’t remember what I was doing anymore), Diablo 2 (At the last level it just got boring), Hammer&Sickle, Silent Storm (damn those mechawalker thingies. Ruined the endgame completely)
Looking at the collection I can see how most of the bought games I’ve finished so I think one of the biggest factors in not completing a game is actually (god forbid) because it was pirated. Somehow I personally just feel a lot more compelled to finish a game I’ve thrown out cash for than a game I didn’t pay anything for.
Not that I pirate obviously. I speak of freeware games (They tend to feel fun for a while but afterwards I just go back to the latest game I actually paid for).
I very seldom finish the games I buy. Even the ones I like, I tend only to play for 10-20 hours and if they’re longer than that I usually stop playing, and never look back.
Part of the problem is that I buy so many games. I almost always wait for games to drop in price, and then I buy them if they seem interesting. I suppose my reasoning is that if I have to buy five games to find one I really like, which I wouldn’t have bought if I had been more conservative, buying the other four was worth it. Also, there are no genres that I don’t like, so there’s always tons of games I’m interested in trying.
Unfortunately, this also leads to a situation where I think “hey, that looks different, I should give it a go” and buy a game, which I then for some reason or other never really feel like playing. I think my stack of unplayed games is approx. 1 meter tall right now, and there’s games I bought years ago there…
I probably abandon (or cheat my way through) more games than I finish. I love games, especially shooters, but my skillz ain’t that great, and after a while you get tired of bashing your head against a wall. It seems to be an article of faith among FPS designers that the game should abruptly become exponentially harder in the final quarter — you can just about set your watch by it. With Doom3, I was enjoying it just fine until I got to the Hell levels, and then I was completely overwhelmed. Ditto with Halo, ditto with Max Payne, ditto with dang near everything: 3/4 fun followed by 1/4 impossible. Same goes for Tomb Raider Anniversary, which also threw in impossible boss battles as a bonus.
Half Life 2 and Episode 1 didn’t have that problem — played smooth all the way through (haven’t played Ep 2 yet, hope the trend continues). I thought the self-adjusting difficulty in Sin:Episodes was brilliant — whenever I started dying repeatedly in the same spot, it would eventually start easing up on me, and I was able to finish. I’ve probably replayed that one a dozen times since it came out, shame the company got bought out.
Years ago, I bought Dino Crisis and started to play it on my wily PS1. The game (hugely underrated) had some of the best “Oh Shit” moments I’d seen in a video game. About a few days after getting a bunch of generators running and what-not, I lost the urge to play anymore. Chalk it up to a really screwed up difficulty curve midway through the game. That, and I felt like I got as much as I wanted from the game: I’d mowed down droves of dinosaurs, gotten attacked by a T-Rex, and endured some really bad instances of voice acting. At that point, the surprise was basically gone.
I’ve failed to finish many games over the years just because of this: weird difficulty curve and badly-timed climactic moments.
Well done Alec on post RPS’s most chatty article yet! :)
As for me, aside from games that seem to be designed to be repetitive and unfinishable (Settlers 2, as already mentioned — though this isn’t a distraction from the game), I usually just become too busy doing other things to finish them. Candidates for this are Settlers, Baulders Gate (all!), NVN, Dwarf Fortress. I try to finish all my games, I really do, but sometimes I just forget to. Ie: I was having a great time recently on Evil Genius, then this orange box thing came out, so I bought it, played HL1 for the first time and just forgot that I was most of the way through EG.
hmph.
I guess I’m the opposite to most. In general, I’m serial game completer – I tend to not buy a new game until I’ve scoured every inch of the game I’m currently playing, even if there’s something really new and sexy on the horizon (sorry, Metroid Prime: Corruption, Bioshock pushed you onto my ‘08 play list, what with the Orange Box and Super Mario Sunshine and all). Tends to leave me totally satisfied with my purchase and, once completed, with a long list of awesome games I still need to play.
I think it comes from my broke college student days, where I couldn’t afford more than a game or so a month, and thus wanted to get everything I could out of ‘em (Deus Ex kept me going for 6 weeks….bliss). That and I’m obsessive compulsive.
There are exceptions to that rule, of course. If a game is total crap, or just isn’t working for me, I’ll trade it and move on without much thought, and sometimes I’ll play through something twice because I loved it so much and want to see what level my skills are (Ninja Gaiden was one of those – I brutally man-beat that game the second time around).
The grand exception to the rule, though, is stuff on Gametap. For some reason, no matter how good a game is, it just doesn’t trigger the “obsessive game completion bloke” in me, and so they tend to sit abandoned two or three levels in. Strange…no idea why.
I’m trying to think back to games I owned, but never beat. I’m a compulsive ‘completionist,’ so I’ll push through almost any crap. That has been happening less and less of late, as I’m older, and have more things competing for my time. Here are some I can think of though:
-Prey: Prey decided that the ability to walk on the ceiling was the most fantastic idea in an FPS, ever, and seemed to focus entirely on that. I fought the same enemies a million times, watched ‘That Girl’ being pulled all about and everything. Just stopped caring.
-Thief Deadly Shadows: I loved the Thief series, so I figured this would be a no-brainer for me. Well, the real no-brainer was whoever the fuck decided that, since it was a PC/Console port, PC testing would be almost none. In particular, you cannot play the game with a USB keyboard. Fuck you, I am not buying an old keyboard just to play your game.
-Doom 3: Monster in the closet is one thing, but the exact same room hundreds of times is fucking retarded. I literally played it like this: Walk into room, throw grenade behind box, killing a zombie. Run into the centre of the room, turn around, run back to where I had come from, and killed whatever had spawned behind me. Then killed whatever was in the room. Walk into room, throw grenade behind box, killing a zombie. Run into the centre of the room, turn around, run back to where I had come from, and killed whatever had spawned behind me. Then killed whatever was in the room. I returned it two days after I bought it, the first game I’d ever returned out of disgust.
-Warhammer 40K Firewarrior: Probably the most buggy FPS I’ve ever played, which is saying something. You could go into the terrible level design, the awful A.I., the terrible weapons, but it all came down to this: The PC’s aim was broken. As in, useless. If you moved the mouse slowly, your cursor jumped. If you moved the mouse quickly, the cursor barely (occasionally didn’t move. I ended up playing it almost solely with the keyboard which was… infuriating. When my roommate tried it, he named it the (now infamous) shortcut Do Not Play Firewarrior (a pun on the original shortcut, “Play Firewarrior.”)
-Halo: Ok, I did actually finish it (on the PC), but it took me months. Halo has, and I stand by this, the worst level design of any FPS I’ve ever played. Not only did this game manage to butcher the backstory of Marathon, it managed to actually make me say aloud to my friend (who also attempted to get through) “Ok, am I backtracking? I’ve done this room at least 10 times.” Halo managed to combine bad A.I., the worst map design I’ve ever seen, a terrible story, and mediocre weapon design (what the fuck is that goddamn assault rifle supposed to be used for?)
I can’t think of any others (I’m sure there are more), but basically you can stop me from beating your game with terrible level design. I can play through almost anything, but that is one thing I just can’t get past.
Anyone else do this? When I hit a tough boss that would otherwise force me to quit, I defeat it in god mode to see what the trick is and the approximate amount of time required. Then, just before the final cutscene, I quickload to the beginning of the battle and finish it without cheats. Decouples the “figure out the hidden weakness of the boss” bit from the “stay alive while doing it” bit. Each challenge in its own is palatable while the combined frustration would be a game-breaker.
I’m also in the collect games as opposed to buy them camp. Latent objects of desire, indeed.
http://tleaves.com/?p=239
The list of games I have completed is much, much shorter than those I’ve given up on. I just don’t have the time to play a lot of games anymore, so if I get stuck, even for a bit I’ll tend to have moved on to the next game and never get around to going back. I also hate having to replay boss battles and stuff if I die, I figure if I’ve only got an hour to play I don’t want to play the same section 5 times and hate wandering around looking for pointless stuff (hello Zelda, love the dungeons, hate the rest). Adding to that, I find that even an average game of something like TF2 is more fun than the best single player FPSs these days.
Some games I have completed lately: Portal, HL2 (I ran through the last few levels in god mode with infinite ammo a few days ago so I could play Ep1 and then Ep2, I hadn’t touched it since a few weeks after launch), PoP:Sands of Time (hmm, having to go back now), um, Call of Duty 1…
I totally forgot the Call of Duty series. I brought a video I had made (with Fraps) of a hilarious auto-save I had. It was in Call of Duty 2. You get to a certain point where (and it’s real obvious it’s coming) a tank busts through a wall. So I hop on an AA gun, the game autosaves, and the tank busts through the wall, and shoots me. Dead. So I reload. Tank instantly kills me.
I’m sure as hell not playing through the whole level again, so I just tried to sell the game back to EB (they wouldn’t accept it, surprise), and I’ve never touched it since.
Another absolutely fantastic time I nearly never beat a game was Half-Life 1. I won’t give it away for anyone who hasn’t beat the game, but that certain weak area you have to find.. bugged. The boss was invulnerable. I kept thinking there was something else I had to do, so in frustration I look up the method online (after three days of straight trying), and find out I was doing it.. just my save was bugged.
Fun, eh?
There are a few games I never finished. Crimon Skies, for instance. I should go back to that. Rollercoaster Tycoon – well, there’s only so many times you can make a theme park with a lot of rollercoasters before it gets a bit samey, you know? The Movies – actually rubbish. Black and White – they stole my monkey and threw fireballs at me whenever I tried to do anything; if they don’t want me to play, who am I to argue? City of Villains – my highest level character still teeters in the high 40s, not yet maxed out. But my biggest shame is undoubtably NWN2, which I mostly stopped playing because something shinier came along. But also because I got to a bit which asked me to go somewhere and if possible could I not kill anyone please so sneak in, okay? And then it forced me to fight rather than sneak and I got confused and irritated and couldn’t be bothered going on. I ought to go back to that, too.
But most of the games I haven’t finished are ones I haven’t started. I have unopened copies of Planetside, Tribes 2 (both free with my PC), both Dungeon Keepers (on budget), X-Wing (TIE Fighter and XWA were better anyway), Op Fap, and Daikatana (I bought it for a laugh, but it wasn’t even that).
But I finish most of the games I buy, because they’re so super-awesome. How could I NOT finish Outcast? I’m the freaking Ulukai! For those haven’t the stamina to complete things like Baldur’s Gate or KOTOR, you’re rubbish and I hate you. Blah.
I’ve had plenty of games I have given up on, mostly because I just didn’t really get on with them and only picked them up because I heard they were good/didn’t have anything else to play.
On this topic I would be interested in finding out which games people finished more than once.
I think the only games I have completely finished more than once are Half Life 1, Diablo 1 (many times with the same character and different ones), KOTOR 1 and Monkey Island 2. I have also come close to a full second play through with BG2, System Shock 2 and Jagged Alliance 1/2.
Memorable games I did not finish include Doom 3, Quake 4, Warcraft 3 and NFSU but generally I try to complete my games before I move onto the next one.
I’m currently near to abandoning Viewtiful Joe, because however lovely the regular fighting is, the boss battles are just absurdly hard. I got through a couple with the aid of a spoiler site, but the shark is just horrendous. It also makes you watch the pre-boss cutscene repeatedly, which is a Gaming Crime.
Halo had far too much padding in the middle.
The GTA games are so long and open-ended and difficult that I’ll probably never finish them. Likewise I no longer have patience to play Zelda or FF games, but I can see why people love them as timesinks.
I’ve got a host of games that I’ve not finished and in all truth probably never will – I’m much better at buying them than playing them. I’ve finished a fair few FPSs in my time (from Catacomb 3D onwards!), even playing on long after I’d gotten bored (Prey). I completed KOTOR, as I was ill at the time and played straight through it in a week, but that was the first RPG I’d completed since Adventure on the Atari 2600.
It took me two and a half years of casual play to get to 70 in WoW, though that’s now turned into a semi addiction which has forced me to make use of my wife in order to see the endings of certain games in my collection. She loved Bioshock.
I really don’t get where all the “Psychonauts is bloody hard” people are coming from. I thought the game was very easy, and th only thing that required an extra effort from me was finding all the bonus items. Really, the meat circus was easy.
As for games I haven’t finished, I’m a bit of a completionist, so I have to think…
Homeworld. I’m not very good at RTSs and this was insanely hard.
Shogun’s campaing. Despite loving the game to bits, I felt the campaign just got repetitive, half way through.
Fallout Tactics. Not having hexes annoyed me.
Lionheart. After Barcelona, things went really down the crapper. And such a good setting too.
Special mention: NOLF2. I’ve only finished it once, unlike the first game, which I conservatively estimate to have finished a thousand times. I feel guilty for only having finished once a game that I love. And I so loved the mimes!
There are plenty of games that I’m just happy to leave unfinished (Farcry, Warcraft III, and C&C game etc) but others I feel compelled to go back to:
Stalker – i felt that the patch may help improve performance around indoor areas but didn’t have the energy to start again (although I’ve completely forgotten where I was in the game now so a restart is looking less like a bad thing)
Company of Heroes – this is a masterpiece, it deserves to be finished. Then, AND ONLY THEN, can I buy the expansion.
Bioshock – I’ve been giving this time when I have it. I’m not going to play it for just 30mins or so at a time, it’s much better to get lost in it for a few hours at a time I reckon.
HL2 Ep2 – I want to do it in one sitting, heh.
FEAR – i was a scaredy-pants.
But I finished Doom 3!!!
The reason I don’t finish games is generally because of repetition, and because it seems like the game doesn’t care about my progress. It all feels insignificant.
Portal solved both of these problems and so I eagerly finished it. I wasn’t just having fun with the game — the game was having fun with me.
Narrators are hardly ever used, but come to think of it, games could really benefit from them. They personify the game for you, tell you how you’re doing and what it means in context.
One I forgot to mention until I slept on it: ULTIMA VII: THE BLACK GATE. I’ve started it countless times, and it always ends with me saying something like this:
“What, you’re hungry AGAIN? Oh my GOD! Do I have to schedule bathroom breaks for you braindead half-wits too, or should I assume we’re all saving the world when covered in sticky layers of our own human waste?!
I’ll show you! rmdir /r C:\ULTIMA7″
I have struggled with this problem for a long time. Whether to buy a new game or force myself through whatever difficult stage I’m at in the current game. The thing I came to realize is that I own the games – they don’t own me. It’s their job to entertain me, and if I’m not having fun, and it’s starting to feel like work, it’s time to move on – at least for the moment.
I worked through a brutal game called Oni a couple years back. I hated the game after the difficulty curve spiked (especially around the time of the boss battle with the cyber-ninja dude) but I obsessively kept at it. I did finally beat it, after entering that zombie-like state of retrying the same level over and over. You’d think that would give me a sense of accomplishment, but looking back I just ask myself, “Why?” I mean, I could have been having a lot more fun playing something else. I don’t even remember the ending or the story – just the pain and frustration.
These long, expensive games are ruining our lives. I miss the early days of video games, where it was all about just having fun. We didn’t need to ‘finish’ Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, we just played them. PLAYED them. Video games aren’t books or movies! Stories enhance the experience the first time you play, but the gameplay keeps you coming back. Why do you think that casual gaming is making such a comeback? When I play Peggle, I don’t feel the need to “beat” it, I just enjoy myself.
I love RPG’s, but I think they were the first to invent “slog-through” gameplay. The best RPG’s in my mind are ones that are so tough, you feel accomplished when your character actually kills a monster. Perhaps toughness in RPG’s doesn’t frustrate me as much as with action games, because they’re really just about decision-making. When I’m saying “Attack, Attack, Attack, Cast Spell” over and over to my party, I’m bored out of my mind. But if I’m biting my nails every attack round, thinking my guys might die, I’m actually having fun. I’ve never beaten Bard’s Tale (the original), but I always come back to it. I doubt I’ll ever “finish” it, but turning your party from losers into contenders is so hard, and satisfying, that I always feel drawn back. Same goes for the roguelikes – no one enters thinking they’re going to actually win, it’s the experience that keeps you coming back. To use a cliche, “It’s the ride, not the destination”
“These long, expensive games are ruining our lives. I miss the early days of video games, where it was all about just having fun. We didn’t need to ‘finish’ Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, we just played them. PLAYED them.”
Amen brother. Amen!
Well after reading everyone’s post I’m surprised Quake 4 was not mentioned more frequently. Probably the more likely reason is that it just wasn’t that popular. I generally play games through the first time on the most difficult setting. I got through I would say almost all of Quake 4 like this with the exception of a few “This is annoyingly difficult” moments. But when you get to the last level so to speak this game just turns to crap. They have no ammo for any of your guns and then it’s enemy after enemy while you’re trapped in this room. I have no problem fighting a ton of enemies at once but give me some damn ammo to deal with it! So alas I used god mode and infinite ammo just to see how close I was. The boss seemed a little less annoying, but I just just finished it cheating and promptly uninstalled it. Still not as bad as Doom 3 though.
Love the Half-Life series though, they’re not overly difficult but still pretty fun.
For me, the ultimate kick in the balls was HL1’s Xen worlds. The first part of the game was like one huge innovative, exciting thrill. Then Xen arrived and murdered my enjoyment of the game. I never finished it.
As for Episode 1’s zombie lift sequence (and Episode 1 in general) am I the only one who thought Episode one in its entirety was dreadfully boring? I forced myself to finish it because I had nothing else to play and because “hey, it’s Valve, it’ll surely pick up”. The whole mechanic of shining the light on monsters would be great if Alyx could actually aim at stuff that was attacking you and gave you any idea of what her health levels were like (at one point I turned around for a moment to get some goodies, heard nothing and then was informed “Alyx died”). Plus those Zombines were lame; even an alt-fire double shotty blast wouldn’t take them out. When they had grenades, you were usually getting fondled by other zombies and couldn’t grav gun it away, plus they had too much health to kill before the grenades went off. This left you with the option of “run away”. Run away in pitch black, claustrophobic corridors littered with phys objects? Again, not fun.
Bumbling around in darkened claustrophobic environments while relying on an AI character to save you *really* isn’t my idea of fun. Oh and the infinite waves of ant lions made it oh so tedious, too. Yeah block the hives with your grav gun. Fun the first two times… but after that it just degenerates into “find hidden cars while getting bummed in the gob by a never ending stream of antlions while Alyx runs around and shoots the one that is nowhere near you and screams for help”. Did I mention I hate relying on CPU characters? I did? Good. The moment I had a squad with me in the original HL2, I would order them to their deaths (into rooms containing sentry placements) just so they wouldn’t get in my effing way.
“Good idea, Gordon! AIIIIIEEEEEEERGHGH!”
Granted, the AI in Episode 1 was amongst the best I’ve seen for a game buddy that had to react to various situations and not get in your way, but it still felt like a huge burden and a constraint on my fun. Who here actually had a blast playing through Episode 1? Be honest. Also please bear in mind that I really liked HL2 (the only criticisms I had of HL2 were the hovercraft and, in particular, road sections of the game were way too long and tedious) and the fact that the combine seemed to like dying in single file without offering too much in the way of organised resistance.
God I sound like a grumpy old fucker.
I didn’t have a huge issue with Alyx being in most of the game. I remember them patching that elevator sequence but I had gotten past it before they had. It was really annoying and the elevator seemed to take forever. I recently played through it again and it wasn’t even close to as difficult. I was slowly playing through Episode 1 again and found the final sequence where you take the groups of people to the train very tedious. There’s very minimal resistance and ends up being more of an annoyance than any real combat.