Games piss me off (and you can too!)

[monkey_05_06]

When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to be Ron Gilbert. I didn't know that, because I was a stupid kid. But I wanted to make The Secret of Monkey Island™. I don't feel that qualification is necessary for wanting to make what is undisputably the best game ever created.

When I was a teenager I discovered (via The Legend of Monkey Island, the best Monkey Island fan site ever created) a site called Fangames.co.uk, where people would submit games they had created. Many of the members were relatively close to my age. By extension I eventually landed with the Adventure Game Studio community.

Given that I have made a name for myself within that community as a programmer (which is a joke seeing as I'm really a novice in real-world languages), people are often surprised to find that I hate playing video games.

Which is funny because I don't. But if you name any video game there's a 99% chance that I haven't played it for any real duration, nevermind completing the storyline. I bought The Walking Dead, of which I have only heard great things, and I've never downloaded any of the setup files.

So, the point of it all is, when I do play games, they piss me off. The graphics piss me off. The puzzles piss me off. The controls piss me off. The stories piss me off. The action sequences piss me off. The enemy spawn rates piss me off. The cheat codes piss me off. I generally can't play any game without finding something about it that pisses me off. Do you?

[Alcoremortis]

Sometimes, yeah. When I was a kid, I could play the same game for hours and hours, my favorite being Age of Empires II. I could play it every weekend all day and never get tired of it. Half the time I wouldn't even be playing the game, I would be using the level creator to design levels of my own or just make simulations of what would happen if you put a hundred War Elephants up against fifty monks. When I couldn't beat part of a level, I would move to a different campaign or do a random map or something. It's like nothing about that game could possibly irritate me or prevent me from playing, short of the disk breaking or my computer crashing.

Now? I can barely play three hours of a game before I reach a point where something annoys me and I have to leave it for the day. It took me eight months to get back to Witcher 2 and finally finish it because every time I was about to start, I could only think about the sidequest that I'd missed out on in the beginning sequence. A sidequest, by the way, that has no ramifications on the rest of the game but is kinda funny.

Instead, I find myself drawn more to the tabletop RPGs, like DnD, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, and Legend of the Five Rings because they can be whatever I want them to be. Seriously, I spend far more time prepping for games that may never happen than I spend playing computer games. That and writing, where I have even fewer restrictions.

I think it's a sign of growing up. Sad, but true. I was hoping to delay it longer.

[Chyron8472]

Originally Posted by Alcoremortis

I think it's a sign of growing up. Sad, but true. I was hoping to delay it longer.

I think you're right. My inability to get into various game I own must be because I'm getting older.

That being said, pick a Zelda game, and I will gladly play it even now, regardless of how many times I've beaten it.

[Alcoremortis]

Of course, having said all that, I find that I can easily get into short indie games with retro graphics. I don't even remember how many hours I've poured into Dungeons of Dredmor, but it just never gets old. And Gemini Rue? Yes. All the yes.

I guess it's because the games are so short there isn't time to find anything wrong with them. Or if I find something that I don't like, it's a fairly painless process to start over (like with Dungeons of Dredmor).

[VeronicanPlay]

Games can piss me off relatively easy, even multiplayer games. I never play PvP because people beat me up even as that is what they are meant to. If someone helps with my kill in GW2 even thought they can't steal my loot or my experience. The bosses in some particular games keeps trashing me and I scream at the monitor. Some puzzle I can't find the solution to, or some thing I just can't figure out how to do. I can get so angry, at one time I literately threw a Play Station controller in my sisters face because I was pissed.

There are more times that I can count my Boyfriend have told me to shut up when I talk to him over Skype as I scream down the microphone. My mother telling me to calm down and stop hitting the table.

Over 100 games are now stashed in my backlog due to various reasons, one of them is that I am sure something in there is going to get me really grumpy, and also because I am busy being angry with the games I am playing at the moment.

[thestalkinghead]

Originally Posted by Alcoremortis

Of course, having said all that, I find that I can easily get into short indie games with retro graphics. I don't even remember how many hours I've poured into Dungeons of Dredmor, but it just never gets old. And Gemini Rue? Yes. All the yes.

I guess it's because the games are so short there isn't time to find anything wrong with them. Or if I find something that I don't like, it's a fairly painless process to start over (like with Dungeons of Dredmor).

that's weird i sort of have almost the opposite feeling, that i cant really get into games that don't reward me for invested time (like with Dungeons of Dredmor) i like games that remember what i have done and keep it on record (not MMO's though because they are really just 10 hour games padded out to last 10 months) that is kind of the reason i like games with unlocks and stats because everything you do adds to the total, not just starting from scratch every time.

i every so often get into browser games because they are persistent, my biggest problem with them though is that after a few days everything starts to be padded out so you cant accomplish anything in the short term.

my perfect game at the moment would be a game that i can play for an hour or two and do lots of little things with it, but you can also set up things that will take days to do, it sort of sound like i am describing farmville, but even though i think farmville is to basic i think the general idea of farmville is good (persistent world with both long term and short term goals) i think that is what is appealing about minecraft, as in short term goals of mining for supplies and exploring but also long term goals of building a castle (or whatever) my only problem with minecraft is that the mining and resource gathering feels like work, i would rather command minions to do things like dungeon keeper.

basically i want a game that is a combination of short term and long term goals with some kind of persistent world (with the option to pause that world if needed) like Virtual Villagers or Fish/Plant tycoon but with more to do in the short term

[DAISHI]

Mankind isn't mankind without something to bitch about.

[Secret Fawful]

I find unless a game is really special.....I just kind of lose interest after a while. A recent game that I consider very special that I could stick with hour after hour without getting bored is Chrono Trigger. It's really everything everyone has ever said it is.

I too wish I could have been Ron Gilbert and made Monkey Island, and A Night At Camp Ravenwood came out of that desire, but it's weird you say that....because within the past year I began to realize I had a voice of my own to bring to games that is way more interesting to me than just aping Gilbert's style. ALSO, even though Secret is one of my favorite games of all time, replaying it after gaining some design experience has brought me a new perspective on it. A perspective that meant it pissed me off.

Secret has some small instances of puzzle ideas I hate. They're funny....oh...the first two or so times you have to play them. But for replays? They're excruciating. Actually, it's ONE MAIN one I'm talking about. The ship buying dialog. Mostly because I'm never sure exactly how it works, so I can have to go through it ten times before I get Stan to sell me the damn ship, and I don't enjoy listening to those "accessories" over and over. Secret is damn near perfect, though. It's the best instance I can think of of every puzzle being a new, inventive piece of design by itself. I've come to realize with adventure games that an inventive puzzle is worth ten million tough ones. Its just fun to take the navigator's head and use it to navigate Hell, or to go through insult swordfighting again, or to do a tiny thing like step on a board to make a bird fly away and let you get a piece of meat. Every puzzle in Secret is inventive, and it set a bar for many adventure games since, especially in terms of the three trial puzzle "system". Even Schafer and Gilbert still find themselves wanting to revert to this style. (I'm sobbing inside right now that I met the guys and didn't even discuss design but just slobbered and goo goo eyed at them what an idiot I am). This irritates me with a lot of adventure games. I really enjoyed Broken Sword 3 recently because it was at least different in a lot of ways, and I love that series as a good example of being "cinematic" like Telltale wants to be and disguising quick time events. The Broken Sword series has a lot of quick time events. But also by different puzzle wise, I mean The Sleeping Dragon was just a lot of block pushing puzzles. Some of them in retrospect were pretty bad too. CLIMB ON LIMO TO REACH ROOF. There's two limos. You can only climb on one. WHY.

Another game that has recently pissed me off is KOTOR. You know this, but I'll go back into it. The dialogue is hilarious....but it's also ridiculously STUPID in the opening. I know, I know, I need to get to HK 47 and the TWIST. I don't know what the twist is, I just know there's a twist. But the dialogue is still TERRIBLE. AWFUL. Wookies don't brush their teeth....thanks for letting me know Bioware. The battle system is atrocious. I hate MMORPG lite systems like this. Hell, I like MMO fighting more than the fighting in this shit. I'm basically just sitting back and watching my NPCs fight. I don't want to watch them fight, I want to pick up a lightsaber and feel the impact of my blade hitting flesh when I mash buttons. Super Star Wars is still the superior Star Wars game. Don't get me started on the Saturday Morning cartoon villains. At the very least, the world is well built and they keep it from seeming too.....empty. Sometimes it can feel empty, though.

Then there was Final Fantasy VI. I got a ways....I was having fun....then I'm supposed to use a new fighting system called Blitz, I think. SCREW THAT NOISE. It's unusable! I can't press the button at the right time no matter what the HELL I DO. I dropped that shit right there. No matter what I do, I can't get it to register. I have an official copy on Wiiware too!

And Grey Matter. It didn't piss me off, but it's just one of many games I need to return to. Skyward Sword, Planescape Torment, Majora's Mask, Zelda I and II and Link's Awakening and Minish Cap. Majora's Mask is hands down my favorite Zelda, and I STILL CAN'T BEAT IT BECAUSE I've played it over and over and I'm played out on it, like Monkey Island 2.

I hated Penny Arcade Episode III because of that damn static map screen. What a piece of shit. Let me WALK WHERE I WANT. I HATE MARIO 3 style map screens! I didn't like that in Paper Mario: Sticker Star either!

I loved Sticker Star, though. People need to quit complaining about what pussies they are and just man up and beat it.

[WarpSpeed]

I've never gotten into multi-player games much, unless they're short or silly. (I liked the old BBS game L.O.R.D. for a while, just because it was silly enough.) The concept that you can attack another player (a real human being) and deprive them of something they worked hard for doesn't sound like fun to me.

I'm also fairly tolerant of other potentially annoying games. I write computer software myself, so I can see things from the game developer perspective and understand how it all came to pass. However, when something is just sloppy, with glaring spelling/grammar problems, or requires some very restrictive hardware choices to run/progress correctly, well, yeah, I'll get mad at it.

[Johro]

The market is too saturated for me to get angry anymore. Once my dislike meter reaches a certain point, I just turn it off and pick something else. The one exception is that if it's just a single instance within a game. Then, yeah, I can get rather worked up.

[monkey_05_06]

WarpSpeed, I'll just mention in passing that you should check out the Oceanspirit Dennis series - in particular my own contribution to it would infuriate the hell out of anyone (even I can't stand it, but that's why I made it).

Fawful, I've just noticed that you've quoted me in your signature. I appreciate the credit, you know how much of an egotistical prick I am. You may not ever be able to get into KotOR. The battle system is definitely not one of my favorites, but I'll probably buy it again anyway (my copy was stolen), and I just (relatively) recently bought the second one.

Minecraft was mentioned, and that's a game that does piss me off. I hate the way everything looks in that game, and I actually feel terribly claustrophobic playing it. I do however enjoy playing Terraria, though I spend most of my time trying to circumnavigate the game's defense systems.

MMOFPS generally tend to piss me off just simply because I'm terrible at them, but I give up on playing them before I actually increase in skill, so it's a cyclic problem. I do enjoy picking up a game like Halo and bludgeoning my way through the Legendary campaign. I have even quoted myself as saying, "Anyone can be good at games, but it takes a real man to be terrible at them and bash his way through anyway."

Just the other day I tried loading up the tragically terrible game "Darkstone", which I know for a fact to be a wonderful game. I wasn't able to play for more than about 20 minutes though because the awkward camera controls, distracting map overlay (covering the whole screen when turned on in a dungeon), and generally horrible design of it. Game characters should not be required to worry about things like eating (or in the case of "Dark Cloud", drinking). And somebody explain to me why the hell I paid 15k gold to upgrade my weapon before I realized that it was losing max durability points with each "upgrade".

I got the PS3 Jak and Daxter collection for Christmas, and I've always loved the first game (which is the only one I've beat), so I recently played it through again. As much as I love it, I think it is by far the worst auto camera I've seen. You can move the camera (sometimes), but there's often cases where I've died just simply because the camera. Jak 2 deviates so far from its precursor as to make me wonder why they assigned the same title to it. Really all they wanted to do was make a "for teens" version of GTA. They made no improvements to the camera. The guns are awkward to use, and the hoverboard is just infuriating.

All in all, I think Alcoremortis may be right... As I've gotten older my tolerance for bad design has greatly diminished. I think that's why I now aspire to make terrible games, so I can piss everyone else off as much as I have been.

[thestalkinghead]

maybe you should make games you would wan't to play, you never know, it may be good

[Vainamoinen]

Originally Posted by monkey_05_06

The battle system is definitely not one of my favorites, but I'll probably buy it again anyway (my copy was stolen), and I just (relatively) recently bought the second one.

I SOLD MY COPY!! Talk about stupid. If hope this goes on gog.com one day, I really want it back.