Games You Want To Love But Can't

[Blackcompany]

Skyrim (Surprise.) I so badly wanted to love this game, to have a immersive open world. But somehow...the magic just isn't there, this time. Maybe I've just left these "emergent gameplay" games behind. I like to think not, but perhaps it is so.

STALKER. I so badly wanted to love this. Maybe its just the age of the thing. I tried. I really did.

Crysis. I loved this game - until the aliens show up. Before that point it was one of the best shooters I had ever played (just played it recently, the first time ever.) Amazing game. Then...well, you know, the aliens. Went downhill fast. Easily worth the $4.99 on Amazon nonetheless.

[Rii]

Braid - Too pretentious. The guy who made it probably wears berets and turtlenecks.

I take it you missed his fawning profile in The Atlantic?

[ColdSpiral]

Guild Wars 2. Everything about it looks brilliant. I'm part of their target audience for this revamp; the WoW school of MMOs just doesn't appeal to me, and I'm interested to see how GW2 works out. But at the same time, one of the reasons I never got far into the genre is that here in country-town Australia the internet is both absurdly expensive and absolutely terrible.
As it is, after attempting the public betas of Tribes: Ascend, Path of Exile, Firefall, and Diablo 3, I'm not convinced I'm even going to be able to comfortably play Diablo 3 singleplayer unless I'm home alone - as soon as my partner starts scrolling through her infinite tumblr feed of Avengers gifs, my latency spikes from its awkward base of 250ms up into the 800s and the game becomes infuriatingly unplayable, even with Blizzard's vaunted client-side combat.
I can't imagine how my frail connection would cope with a fully-fledged MMO.

[Berzee]

her infinite tumblr feed of Avengers gifs

I feel sympathy at your plight, but that's hilarious.

[soldant]

I take it you missed his fawning profile in The Atlantic?

God, I read the first page and was violently ill. I think I hate this guy worse than Tale of Tales now, and they've been at the top of my hate list for a while now.

[Gentleman Jim Stacey]

When Blow told me, during a typically metaphysical conversation in a park near his Berkeley office, that his windfall was “absurd,” he didn’t mean it in the whimsical “Can you believe my luck?” sense; he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.” For the world’s most existentially obsessed game developer, coming into seven figures just provided another opportunity to ponder the nature of meaning in the universe.

[Juan Carlo]

I'm going to say E.Y.E. In fact, I can't think of a game more fitting to this thread than EYE.

I really loved it for like the tutorial mission--it had a neat look, tons of stats, good atmosphere. But then you go on your first real mission and realize the stats are meaningless, the worlds are empty, and the game pretty much sucks.

[Rii]

God, I read the first page and was violently ill. I think I hate this guy worse than Tale of Tales now, and they've been at the top of my hate list for a while now.

Yeah, I have a pretty high tolerance level for pretension but that piece blew right past it. I'm not sure how fair it is to blame Blow, though, when it seems like the author is practically tonguing his butthole. Maybe he is as bad as he comes across in the piece, maybe not.

Here's a send-up of the piece, barely distinguishable as such:

Blow beats a path to his ‘kitchen’ – in reality a ragged crater carved into the stone floor. Recumbent inside are coals still aglow from last night’s traditional hangi. “I prefer stone to most materials,” Blow explains. “It stands the test of time. Wood? Too weak. Titanium? Too artificial…”

[MrN]

Minecraft: It just feels like virtual Lego, and I'd just assume use real Lego. Terraria bores me even further. Just cannot get into these games where I wander around building stuff.

[Althea]

God, I read the first page and was violently ill. I think I hate this guy worse than Tale of Tales now, and they've been at the top of my hate list for a while now.

Why'd you hate Tale of Tales?

[Casimir Effect]

Braid - Too pretentious. The guy who made it probably wears berets and turtlenecks

Actually he's constructed entirely from them.

[Hypernetic]

God, I read the first page and was violently ill. I think I hate this guy worse than Tale of Tales now, and they've been at the top of my hate list for a while now.

I like the part where they talk about how he doesn't care about money and thinks money is fictional..... and then spent 150 grand on a car because he is rich.

WAT!

[Juan Carlo]

Yeah, I have a pretty high tolerance level for pretension but that piece blew right past it. I'm not sure how fair it is to blame Blow, though, when it seems like the author is practically tonguing his butthole. Maybe he is as bad as he comes across in the piece, maybe not.

Here's a send-up of the piece, barely distinguishable as such:

That is douchey, but braid is a really, really, good game. So I'll forgive the developer for being a bit of a douche. Lots of artists are pretentious douche bags, which is irrelevant to what they produce, I think.

It's one of the rare games that actually uses gameplay as a language unto itself (i.e. to express philosophical concepts and such--or maybe "embody" is more accurate than "express"). Which has always been something I've wished more games would do (another example would be that game that attempts to embody the way a relationship works via abstract shapes in motion--can't recall the name off hand). It seems especially suited to expressing more dynamic philosophical/theoretical concepts which can be said to have a certain "motion" to them (what, for example, would Freud's idea of id, ego, super-ego look like when expressed in terms of gameplay mechanics? I think it could be done).

But now I sound like a pretentious douche bag!

[Jockie]

I enjoyed the Atlantic article! The author gets more from Blow and 'gets' him as a person, probably because they are both massively pretensious. That said, his next game sounds like a fucked up combination of Myst and Dear Esther and will probably be awful.

[Ernesto]

Dwarf Fortress. Actually I just like the world creation algorithm.
First layers of rocks, soil, sand,... then simulate how the terrain would change under the influence of climate and weather, then simulate how civilizations would change their environment and how it would look today and so on. I don't know how this thing works, but I sure would love to program one myself. Just for the fun of it.
I'm looking forward to a Dwarf Fortress - Minecraft mix.

[ShowMeTheMonkey]

ArmA II - I like it but I can't get into it. The scope of the missions is overwhelming and the multiplayer is aimless to me. The modern setting doesn't help. The series would be cool if it went back to the Cold War. I want to play as Russia, not generic bad guys with Russian hand-me-downs.

I might not speak for every ArmA player on RPS, but I think the majority. Don't play single player. No one does! Play multi player and you can be whoever you want. If fact the majority of the missions we play we are either Russian or Takistani (Taliban essentially).

Just have a look at the forums here on RPS and see what times we play. We have a few new people who say that they hated ArmA before they played MP. Me probably being one of them!

[redspielened]

I enjoyed the Atlantic article! The author gets more from Blow and 'gets' him as a person, probably because they are both massively pretensious.

I do think the author gets Blow more, and so do I, but unfortunately they're called 'pretentious' because they deviate from the bland, tired phrases people expect in articles of the sort. It's very silly and shows the intellectual level of the commentators when they label other people 'pretentious' simply because they deviate from the discourse they're accustomed to and have more than a few stock phrases they use to communicate. Instead of trying to put themselves in the other person's shoes and see how he sees, and why, they simply are like the idiot who rejects any criticism about himself and simply carries on about his business thinking he's phenomenal and the earth's bellybutton. Simply label the other <something> and ignore any possible threat to your current way of thinking or seeing the world, that way nothing will ever go wrong and you don't have to suffer the possibility of thinking too hard about anything! It just seems very hard for people to try and be understanding of other people while recognizing they are not very alike in their own modes of being. Just like you should be able to appreciate Picasso while not necessarily being a fan of his art; of course, this is true today but not because people appreciate Picasso's art, but because they appreciate Picasso's authority as an artist.

There's just too little thinking done and too much talking. Everyone wants to write their opinion, give their opinion, share their opinion without actually thinking about their opinion. I mean, who has time for that anyway? But you know, if RPS is like a barrel of wine, we have to remember that no matter how exquisite the wine may be, it still has dregs at the bottom of the barrel.

[Hypernetic]

I do think the author gets Blow more, and so do I, but unfortunately they're called 'pretentious' because they deviate from the bland, tired phrases people expect in articles of the sort. It's very silly and shows the intellectual level of the commentators when they label other people 'pretentious' simply because they deviate from the discourse they're accustomed to and have more than a few stock phrases they use to communicate. Instead of trying to put themselves in the other person's shoes and see how he sees, and why, they simply are like the idiot who rejects any criticism about himself and simply carries on about his business thinking he's phenomenal and the earth's bellybutton. Simply label the other <something> and ignore any possible threat to your current way of thinking or seeing the world, that way nothing will ever go wrong and you don't have to suffer the possibility of thinking too hard about anything! It just seems very hard for people to try and be understanding of other people while recognizing they are not very alike in their own modes of being. Just like you should be able to appreciate Picasso while not necessarily being a fan of his art; of course, this is true today but not because people appreciate Picasso's art, but because they appreciate Picasso's authority as an artist.

There's just too little thinking done and too much talking. Everyone wants to write their opinion, give their opinion, share their opinion without actually thinking about their opinion. I mean, who has time for that anyway? But you know, if RPS is like a barrel of wine, we have to remember that no matter how exquisite the wine may be, it still has dregs at the bottom of the barrel.

Speaking of pretentious..

[Keep]

Here's a send-up of the piece

I enjoyed that more than I should've.

(another example would be that game that attempts to embody the way a relationship works via abstract shapes in motion--can't recall the name off hand).

This it?

I do think the author gets Blow more, and so do I, but unfortunately they're called 'pretentious' because they deviate from the bland, tired phrases people expect in articles of the sort. It's very silly and shows the intellectual level of the commentators when they label other people 'pretentious' simply because they deviate from the discourse they're accustomed to and have more than a few stock phrases they use to communicate. Instead of trying to put themselves in the other person's shoes and see how he sees, and why, they simply are like the idiot who rejects any criticism about himself and simply carries on about his business thinking he's phenomenal and the earth's bellybutton. Simply label the other <something> and ignore any possible threat to your current way of thinking or seeing the world, that way nothing will ever go wrong and you don't have to suffer the possibility of thinking too hard about anything! It just seems very hard for people to try and be understanding of other people while recognizing they are not very alike in their own modes of being. Just like you should be able to appreciate Picasso while not necessarily being a fan of his art; of course, this is true today but not because people appreciate Picasso's art, but because they appreciate Picasso's authority as an artist.

There's just too little thinking done and too much talking. Everyone wants to write their opinion, give their opinion, share their opinion without actually thinking about their opinion. I mean, who has time for that anyway? But you know, if RPS is like a barrel of wine, we have to remember that no matter how exquisite the wine may be, it still has dregs at the bottom of the barrel.

Wrong words for wrong crowd dude.

[Nalano]

I do think the author gets Blow more, and so do I, but unfortunately they're called 'pretentious' because they deviate from the bland, tired phrases people expect in articles of the sort. It's very silly and shows the intellectual level of the commentators when they label other people 'pretentious' simply because they deviate from the discourse they're accustomed to and have more than a few stock phrases they use to communicate. Instead of trying to put themselves in the other person's shoes and see how he sees, and why, they simply are like the idiot who rejects any criticism about himself and simply carries on about his business thinking he's phenomenal and the earth's bellybutton. Simply label the other <something> and ignore any possible threat to your current way of thinking or seeing the world, that way nothing will ever go wrong and you don't have to suffer the possibility of thinking too hard about anything! It just seems very hard for people to try and be understanding of other people while recognizing they are not very alike in their own modes of being. Just like you should be able to appreciate Picasso while not necessarily being a fan of his art; of course, this is true today but not because people appreciate Picasso's art, but because they appreciate Picasso's authority as an artist.

There's just too little thinking done and too much talking. Everyone wants to write their opinion, give their opinion, share their opinion without actually thinking about their opinion. I mean, who has time for that anyway? But you know, if RPS is like a barrel of wine, we have to remember that no matter how exquisite the wine may be, it still has dregs at the bottom of the barrel.