Video Games you hate... but still play... fairly frequently.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I have a video game I seethingly dislike, but can't help but still play. It's Heroes of Newerth. It's a team-based player-verses-player hyphan-verses-proper-use-of-punctuation RTSy RPG game. Unfortunatly it has a problem with its mechanics where if something goes wrong, the game can shift significantly out of your favour. i.e. Intoxicated player/Player not playing to their best. Player being awful. Bad hero line up. As people take this game very seriously, it can cause some horrific elitist aggression. Or, aggresive e-dong waving around by tormenting the enemy team. Brings out the worst in people.
You may play to the best of your ability and still lose because of someone on your team. The overwhelming sense of disappointment is unpleasant, particular when you question the health of the human mentality. Even worse is when you play with friends and they let you down


Yet I still play it. Not sure why. Is it optimism that perhaps next game won't be so bad? When you do win it feels hollow because you spend 1 hour on the game or it ends 'before it's time'.

Do any of you play any video games that you hate yet feel compelled to play?

(my HoN name is Sherwood if you fancy boosting me *cough* ooh hai phlaem!)

[Darkobra]

Final Fantasy 13 for a while. I hate leaving games unfinished.

Morrowind I'm on the fence with. It all looks so bland, I'm having to read loads of tiny writing instead of hearing the story dictated to me like in Oblivion, the combat just seems quite choppy and I've got quite the few teething issues with it.

However, it's just hooked me in with a large selection of weaponry that I'd like to try. Maybe I'll get further into it and find out I do quite enjoy it. But right now it's just as off-putting as the first 4 times I tried to play it.

[empath]

Psychonauts.

Skim back through the years for my multiple tirades over that game.

...but I still have a copy, just waiting to be installed again, so I can beat my head against that implacable brick wall. Again...

[Psycat Aurora]

Recently, Donkey Kong Country Returns. That game was incredibly annoying in a lot of parts, but I refused to let it defeat me. Then I got a better game and now it's sitting on my shelf.

[semysane]

Oblivion. I can't stand that game's bland characters with their bland faces and bland voices, but every now and then I'll spend two weeks playing it for hours at a time, dammit.

[the_lone_bard]

League of Legends.
The community is just so terribad sometimes. i understand why so many people get banned for foul language cause sometimes i just wanna snap and spend the remaining 5 minutes till we can surrender isnulting someone for being so bad. (I don't, i'm not a dick... well not that big a dick.)

Starcraft 2.
I loved sc1 so much! And starcraft 2 is that on crack, i love playing with all the new things they put in, but a part of me dies everytime i play yet another game that is over in less than 10 minutes. Also the custom map community is dead here in aus, and bnet 2.0 is the reason i won't play it except at a lan cafe with friends or something. i just plain won't support that decision.

Magic The Gathering.
I have a deck, and it works really well. and is really fun to play with.
And then half a dozen of my friends decide they wanna play as well, and bring out their turn 3 win decks. Whether it be fnm or just a casual game they still play them. Decks with 4 obliterators in them... or 4 koths and 4 chandras... I can't afford that! I went to 2 drafts a sealed and split a booster box with a mate and got NO rares that i want except for a sorin that i pulled in a draft... nobody wants to trade for my rares cause everyone has a playset of them already since prettymuch everyone has brought multiple boxes of each set in standard. and singles are too expensive when you consider the decks i'm coming up against need expensive cards to counter them...

[Evil Jim]

Desert Bus.

You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Every once in awhile I boot it up on my GP2X Wiz thinking it's going to be HI-larious but it's still just Desert Bus, same as it always was. Ugh.

I don't know if this counts but there is another game in a reverse situation. I've been buying Asylum Packs (aka. new card releases) for the Fantasy Flight Game, Call of Cthulhu. I love Lovecraft & his mythos & the game is really neat but I have absolutely NO ONE to play it with. Nobody I know around here is interested in the game or likes the Cthulhu Mythos enough to bother learning to play, yet I still pay $15 for the new card pack release each month. *sigh*

[Geoff_B]

i've tried to play baldur's gate a few times because it has an epic story. So I install it and boot it up. No its still the same boring game. Leave it for another few months. Not helped by the fact it refuses to play properly on my laptop.

[Drinnik]

Get the mod that runs BG1 in BG2's engine, it makes the first game prettier. And don't start as a Mage... sodding AD&D 2nd Ed.

For me, it's probably World of Warcraft. When I'm WoWing it with friends, it's a blast. On my. own, I hate it, yet every so often, I'll renew my account, just to play...

[Deedles]

WoW is the only game that I can think of, and even in that case I don't hate it. I've just been playing it for too long, I'm bored of it.

[Geoff_B]

my main problem with trying to get back into games i've recently given up on, and this is more true of rpgs, is the huge tutorial level you have to play through every single time. Biggest offender? Fallout 2. Every time I decide to try playing it again i'm faced with the temple of trials and i'm like 'nah'

[auberginequeen]

Games with modern Bioware dialogue trees.

Argh argh argh argh argh argh.

Mass Effect 1 & 2, you weren't very good at all. If I wanted to talk to people I'd go to a party. At least then I could get drunk and not feel quite so alone. There was definitely a point at which I stopped giving a fuck and just skipped through all the dialogue. I know I was probably "playing it wrong" but for God's sakes.

Same thing with DAO. Enough! Enough with your infernal speaking! Less talking, more stabbing people in the face! I was tempted to go around choosing all the "evil" options because it'd piss people off and then I could stab them in the face.

But then ... every now and again I remember how pretty the games were and how much fun it was shooting/facestabbing people when I got the chance. I'm still in love with the little part at the beginning of ME2 where you step out into the vaccuum on the Normandy and stare up at whatever you were circling and all you could hear was your own breathing.

And so I am drawn to them again, like a moth to the cruel, cruel flame.

[Elomin Sha]

Desert Bus and Command & Conquer: Generals I don't know why but Generals (mainly Zero Hour) has something I like about it. I don't know what.

[WBAGNR]

C&C: Generals is a brilliant game to have a nostalgia-fest on. Zero Hour just makes it all the better.

[Elomin Sha]

Generals wasn't a C&C game but when ZH came out, then it was. FMVs are a C&C must.

[General Michi]

This might earn me a fair amount of hate but mine would be the origional Deus Ex. It has a good story and very intersting game play and exploration but the charaters just came off quite bland and every time I find a new way to complete an objective it feels more like the game is laughing at me for only finding out about it now.
But every so often I remind myself about how I love exploration in games and the rewards that come with so I boot it back up and stay entertained for a few hours until the games laughs at me again

[Lisra]

i've tried to play baldur's gate a few times because it has an epic story. So I install it and boot it up. No its still the same boring game. Leave it for another few months. Not helped by the fact it refuses to play properly on my laptop.

Sir, I have to ask you to step outside.

[Drinnik]

To be fair, Baldur's Gate is dull until Cloakwood, if you only do the main quest line.

[Darkobra]

I got over my Morrowind teething problems for the most part. I am always fucking LOST! but the game itself is quite fun.

[Mowinckel]

fallout 2

I can see so many things in it I would love but I did not play it while it was new
And I just can't play it... the combat is too slow and the graphics are so ugly (not the aesthetics thou)
I play it from time to time and I WANT to love it but just cant...

[JackSlack]

LA Noire.

So much to admire, but in the end the vagueness of the interrogation system drives me batty. In contrast to her Royal Aubergine above, I found myself begging for a Bioware style conversation tree, with a bit more give and take in interrogation.

As an edited in later aside, I do really like the game a lot more in Black & White. Thanks Graham, for pointing that out in the podcast! It feels such more like a noir film once you're in black and white.

[madrak_the_red]

Games with modern Bioware dialogue trees.

Argh argh argh argh argh argh.

Mass Effect 1 & 2, you weren't very good at all. If I wanted to talk to people I'd go to a party. At least then I could get drunk and not feel quite so alone. There was definitely a point at which I stopped giving a fuck and just skipped through all the dialogue. I know I was probably "playing it wrong" but for God's sakes.

Same thing with DAO. Enough! Enough with your infernal speaking! Less talking, more stabbing people in the face! I was tempted to go around choosing all the "evil" options because it'd piss people off and then I could stab them in the face.

But then ... every now and again I remember how pretty the games were and how much fun it was shooting/facestabbing people when I got the chance. I'm still in love with the little part at the beginning of ME2 where you step out into the vaccuum on the Normandy and stare up at whatever you were circling and all you could hear was your own breathing.

And so I am drawn to them again, like a moth to the cruel, cruel flame.

But...but...that was the point! And the combat in DA:O sucked arse!

Oh, there's one, DA:O. I hate the combat, but I still wanna play it for the story

[sdhonda]

You would think that a game that sends me into a expletive throwing rage half the time would not be an addictive game.

SC2 disagrees.

[nonjabiru]

WoW. I like the game but I seem to burn out on it rather fast now. Three months into the last expansion and I got tired, quit for a month, and then started playing for a week, got bored and cancelled. Three months clean now and I'm feeling like I need to play again. I put part of the blame on not feeling like going into my backlog of games to play.

I just know if I go back I'll have fun for perhaps two weeks, and then get bored of doing nothing but dailies and PUGing heroics.

[Mister Fiend]

Two Worlds.