Tanukitsune

Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

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Just an update on ME, things were going fine but the performance error came up again all of a sudden. It appears to be random in triggering. So... Fuck. I really want to play this game. I'm into it. The writing behind all the characters is many levels above other video games. There's something to love and something to hate about all of them (Ashley is a necessity to my team being a combat expert, but goddamn it her racism is awful) (also because she goes "technically it's not racism!" NO FUCK YOU ASHLEY JUST SHOOT THINGS).

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I entirely agree with griddelol. I (against the odds) really enjoyed the main plot of 1. The exploration and the maturing of humanity as well as the hinting at a wider world. Then 2 established that they weren't at all interested in those ideas, they just wanted cool characters in a badass space fight. 2 doesn't do anything interesting with a *good* set up. There's a lot of conflict/potential for conflict but in the end all you do is shoot a bunch of stuff and then it says "Look forward to ME3!". (this is aside from the characters' stories)

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Just an update on ME, things were going fine but the performance error came up again all of a sudden. It appears to be random in triggering. So... Fuck. I really want to play this game. I'm into it. The writing behind all the characters is many levels above other video games. There's something to love and something to hate about all of them (Ashley is a necessity to my team being a combat expert, but goddamn it her racism is awful) (also because she goes "technically it's not racism!" NO FUCK YOU ASHLEY JUST SHOOT THINGS).

 

I don't remember her racist stuff. What happens? I hope it's a case of not having played ME for 10 years, rather than me being completely deaf to racist comments as a 16 year old.

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(Ashley is a necessity to my team being a combat expert, but goddamn it her racism is awful) (also because she goes "technically it's not racism!" NO FUCK YOU ASHLEY JUST SHOOT THINGS).

 

I am bothered that everyone calls Ashley racist, because she's really not. Shamus Young wrote up a good article on it. There's one or two remarks people misinterpret (she's not mad at the Council, she just doesn't trust them to protect human interests which is shown to be correct, she doesn't want non-military personnel poking around the top-secret stealth ship which is entirely reasonable), and as he put it:

 

The problem here is coding. When an author wants to do some quick shorthand for “this character is a racist”, they often reveal it with comments like this. It’s kind of like parents yelling at their kids. In real life, it’s an ordinary thing that happens all the time. In a movie, a parent yelling at their kid is universal screenwriter shorthand for “this person is a horrible parent”. We’re used to picking up on these cues and extrapolating. If a parent yells at their kid in the first five minutes of a movie, we assume we’re being shown the world in its default state. “This parent is ALWAYS yelling at their kids.” I think some people get caught on Ashley’s dialog the same way. “Oh, she’s ALWAYS ranting about aliens.”

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I'm going to be smart, and quit Fallout: New Vegas while I still like it.  I can feel myself getting increasingly frustrated with it (with the same things that I get frustrated with all games built in Bethesda's engine/formula).  The writing is generally better than Fallout 3, but mechanically the game isn't particularly engaging and it feels like it's increasingly just about running from point to point putting marks in checkboxes, rather than exploration, discovery, role playing or combat. 

 

I think the Bethesday style game holds up for me for about 20-30 hours, and then just collapses on itself very quickly.  I did a good job of quitting Skyrim, but I played Fallout 3 so long that I ended up hating that game with a passion. 

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I'm on the verge of quitting Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls. Like I said in the Vita thread, I love the previous titles, but the gameplay in this one is soooo clunky! The story is interesting, and there are some cool mechanics but the third person shooting (yes shooting rather than murder solving) is a giant pain in the ass! In the normal gameplay, it's OK and even quite fun, but the setpieces require more and more precision, and they are infuriating! I am on Chapter 4 (probably out of 6), so I can only imagine them getting worse. Also, there's some particularly grim schoolgirl objectification in Chapter 3... it's understandable when done by other school kids, but then adults are made complicit, and the expects you to get a kick out of it too.  Ugh! 

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I quit... Alundra... I just don't think it aged well, the dungeons aren't just satisfying, the combat isn't satisfying, nor the bosses. It's just a Zelda clone for the PSOne, and frankly I'd just play a Zelda game or another Zeld a clone. 

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Man. Alundra is one of those games I have genuine nostalgia for, having only ever seen it in a magazine. It was in one of my issues of Official Playstation Mag that I would constantly thumb through and dream of being able to afford anything.

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Man. Alundra is one of those games I have genuine nostalgia for, having only ever seen it in a magazine. It was in one of my issues of Official Playstation Mag that I would constantly thumb through and dream of being able to afford anything.

 

There's a whole flock of console games from 1998 - 2003 that are permanently burned into my imagination because I would re-read issues of EGM a hundred times and had to extrapolate the gameplay experience from 3 tiny screenshots. Like WILD 9! I bet Wild 9 is so awesome!

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When I figured out how to work a PS1 emulator, I spent months in dozens of second-hand media and thrift stores searching for a Wild 9 disc.

 

I had to settle for Shadowman, which was way less playable than I had imagined it would be when I was 14. Classic "I am so lost, I have no idea what to do" level 1 quit on that one.

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I wonder if I still have Wild 9 in a box somewhere.

 

I'm sure I'd think it's terrible today...

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Man. Alundra is one of those games I have genuine nostalgia for, having only ever seen it in a magazine. It was in one of my issues of Official Playstation Mag that I would constantly thumb through and dream of being able to afford anything.

 

 

There's a whole flock of console games from 1998 - 2003 that are permanently burned into my imagination because I would re-read issues of EGM a hundred times and had to extrapolate the gameplay experience from 3 tiny screenshots. Like WILD 9! I bet Wild 9 is so awesome!

 

This is me too, from both Nintendo Power and EGM. There's a ton of SNES-era games that I have nostalgia for, despite never owning a SNES. Likewise for a lot of Playstation and PS2 stuff.

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I have a lot of fondness for Alundra because of how oppressive it feels, and how cleverly it disguises its structure. It's a fairly happy looking game about the residents of a small village being killed off one by one by their own nightmares.

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I think I'm quitting Divinity Original Sin. To paraphrase someone's description of the game: "There are two main complaints about Divinity: 'The game is too hard' and 'The game is too easy'. You spend half your time figuring out how to break the game, and the other half figuring out how to make it interesting again." I managed to make it interesting for a while, but my characters seem to grow in power faster than the enemies and I think the game has settled into its final resting place of "broken".

 

I played with the following restrictions: No crafting/upgrading, two person party, no Glass Cannon. I settled on each of my characters being identical Rogue-Mage hybrids: A focus on backstabbing for damage and enough INT to do self-buffs, summons, and crowd control. It was interesting and challenging at first, but now that I'm level 15, I no longer need to do all the crazy crowd control just to survive, so every fight is the same and I don't feel particularly threatened. Apply self buffs (haste and damage boost), summon spiders to act as meat-shields, run around backstabbing everything, resummon meatshields if they die. I think I've gotten too good at positioning summons so that they draw aggro away from my main characters, plus summons are kind of fundamentally broken when you're higher level and have so much AP that they don't cost you most of your turn to use.

 

I don't have it in me to reset and try a new build (I'm certain that any ranged character would fall into the degenerate strategy of "use your mobility advantage to back up and shoot while they spend all their time running after you", warrior is just rogue with worse DPS, and I doubt "rogue without 'no summons' rule" is viable) so I guess I quit. The experience was brilliant at levels ~1-8, it's a shame things got easier further in.

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I think I'm quitting Divinity Original Sin. To paraphrase someone's description of the game: "There are two main complaints about Divinity: 'The game is too hard' and 'The game is too easy'. You spend half your time figuring out how to break the game, and the other half figuring out how to make it interesting again." I managed to make it interesting for a while, but my characters seem to grow in power faster than the enemies and I think the game has settled into its final resting place of "broken".
 
I played with the following restrictions: No crafting/upgrading, two person party, no Glass Cannon. I settled on each of my characters being identical Rogue-Mage hybrids: A focus on backstabbing for damage and enough INT to do self-buffs, summons, and crowd control. It was interesting and challenging at first, but now that I'm level 15, I no longer need to do all the crazy crowd control just to survive, so every fight is the same and I don't feel particularly threatened. Apply self buffs (haste and damage boost), summon spiders to act as meat-shields, run around backstabbing everything, resummon meatshields if they die. I think I've gotten too good at positioning summons so that they draw aggro away from my main characters, plus summons are kind of fundamentally broken when you're higher level and have so much AP that they don't cost you most of your turn to use.
 
I don't have it in me to reset and try a new build (I'm certain that any ranged character would fall into the degenerate strategy of "use your mobility advantage to back up and shoot while they spend all their time running after you", warrior is just rogue with worse DPS, and I doubt "rogue without 'no summons' rule" is viable) so I guess I quit. The experience was brilliant at levels ~1-8, it's a shame things got easier further in.

As I said before when I quit this game right before the end, I think it's a terrible move to have absolutely no gating of progress until suddenly right at the end. My first 60 hours or so with the game were great, the last 20 hours were terrible. 

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I'm pretty close to quitting FEZ, after noticing that I'd never played it since picking it up in some indie bundle along the way more than a year ago. I've given it about 3 hours of my time, and, while I can see that there's obviously lots of deep content (those "hidden" doors with puzzles that look like they need something I've not unlocked yet, the obviously coded writing in some sections, and just the generally huge space of the game in general), the core platforming is already starting to bore me.

It's not even that the core mechanic isn't interesting - I think I've seen every possible spin on it now (you rotate level, you rotate item on level relative to other items, you rotate item to rotate level but can't otherwise rotate level, you stand on platforms with rotate level when you're on them, you rotate things in level to wind them up screws) along with every possible sideeffect (line up things with different perspectives to make them connect/not connect from this particular orthographic projection, check "behind" things to find hidden stuff, follow winding paths around level (Nebulus-style)), but, honestly, the actual core experience of interacting with stuff isn't that engaging - Gomez seems to be a little "floaty" when platforming, which makes things vexing when making the odd precise jump, and in general just doesn't feel "good" to control.

Also, the "world map" is next to useless - while it shows you which levels connect to which, it doesn't show you how they do so, which, given how many doors I've been through right now, implies a lot of tedious backtracking and notemaking/checking in order to revisit different areas. Since I'm already dreading having to backtrack a lot because that would mean doing more of the tedious platforming in areas I've already seen before, I think this is a good sign that I should quit while I'm ahead.

 

In general then: I like everything about the game except the experience of actually platforming in it, which is a pretty big problem since it wants me to do so much of that.

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I'm pretty close to quitting FEZ, after noticing that I'd never played it since picking it up in some indie bundle along the way more than a year ago.

 

This was my Fear of Fez from when I played the Xbox demo—I just didn't like the jumping!

 

I bought it years ago in a bundle, too!  I told myself I would play it when the Steam Controller came out.

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You just reminded me I never got back to Fez so I cheated and looked up the 64 cubes ending. Eh, s'okay.

 

The 32 cubes ending is one of my favourite game endings ever. So, if you're 100% not playing any more totally go look that up. No context required.

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I'm thinking of quitting the Arc the Lad Trilogy, it's funny how I willing did nearly everything in Arc 1, and was willing to do everything in Arc 2, but... The game is really feeling "sloggy" now.

 

It's funny how close I am to the ending I am, but I just stopped caring, the game keeps sending me to destroy some dumb evil towers, only to derail me with a time travel story which is utterly boring.

 

As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that the plot keeps throwing new bad guys and disasters, but no character development, although I'm pretty sure that the two lines a male and female character had will be enough for them to be madly in love by the end...

 

Frankly I think Arc the Lad II is a bit of a mess, they introduce monster capturing, but never give you a reason to use monsters again once you have a full human team and it feels like half the items I collect are for the monsters because they are never worth using for the main cast.

 

Nothing I find in chests seems useful and the items in shops seem worthless and the more I write, the more I wonder how on Earth did I play this much? A part of me wants to continue because I'm probably close to the finish, but... I just can't.

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I had to quit Randal's Monday because I just couldn't stomach it anymore.

 

Imagine an adventure game with Family Guy's sense of humor, only worse. The game is nothing but pop-culture references that are subtle is a bazooka. I jokingly say every adventure has it's "Obligatory Monkey Island Reference", but everything is a reference, I'm not joking when I say I don't think they go more than a few lines without some dumb pop-culture references.

 

If that wasn't bad enough, the protagonist is the most unlikable person ever. I'm O.K. with him embracing the kleptomania every adventure character has, but he just has no empathy.

 

I don't why I continued after this specific scene where he antagonizes a cop with the "I thought we had something special" talk, something that was already awful in the movies from the 80's who did this scene.

 

I did quit when he did nothing but joke in front on the mangled corpse of his best friend.

 

And of course, this game come from my country. And people wonder why I don't stomach any media from here, it's pretty much like what I just described.

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I mean that game is just as ugly as Family Guy too. I like how they copy pasted all of the character faces.

 

Kind of annoyed Daedalic published it honestly.

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