I'm a chronic 'parallel gamer', I have lots of games and separate campaigns of the same game installed at the same time, but as you can imagine it can get overwhelming, takes up a lot of disk space and some campaigns are left starting at me without me making progress for up to half a year, so I decided to do some culling.

These games I did all put a stop to, maybe to come back to at a later date, maybe not at all:

Ace Combat Assault Horizon

A New Beginning - Final Cut
I like the theme but as in most adventure games, I feel like the game drags on too much, I get tired from puzzle after puzzle.

Bioshock Remastered

Divine Divinity

Dragon Age 2
the only Dragon Age games I like are Origins and it's expansion Awakenings

Drakensang
will certainly come back to this one at a later time, I like the amount of detail and the feeling it could take palce in a real world - shops sell items that are useful to the common folk, not just overpowered adventure gear

Fuel

Raiden III

Risk

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
I don't like that this installment of XCOM isn't turn-based, so you can't take time thinking about your next move, you can slow down the gunfights, but they don't stop till you give a command

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Final Cut
i like Van Helsing I and II a lot and decided to start all over in the Final Cut with 3 separate characters, but playing the game all over for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th time wasn't as fun as the first, also because I liked the old class system better than the one of Van Helsing III and The Final Cut, mostly because there's no swapping weapon sets in the new system. The bounty hunter is stuck to ranged, can't switch to melee and I couldn't continue my Hunter of Van Helsing II to Van Helsing II because of the different class system.


The Witcher
Geralt of Riva is a very popular character apparently, but I fail to feel connected to him, he's too 'tough' and mysterious for my liking, doesn't show the passion and vulnerability I like to see in a main character.

Saints Row IV.

I really wanted to like this game, but when I never actually felt like playing it, I eventually had to admit to myself that I just don't think it's a good game. While it certainly isn't all bad, and I can see how some people would enjoy it, the gameplay is just too radically different from 2 and 3. Pity. I did enjoy the rosy 50's america parody in the beginning though.

Seems I have, at least for now, quit both Cookie Clicker (again) and Oblivion. I may get back to them (especially since I may want to restart Cookie Clicker with the recent anniversary update).

Also, "quit" Dust: An Elysian Tail; I didn't get a Battle Master's Pendant on my Normal file (despite reaching level 60 killing endgame enemies), I didn't get 4 stars on the trials, and I didn't play on Casual or Tough difficulty this time (I did years ago), but I think I've played enough. (Keep in mind, I *did* beat the game on Hardcore, which is harder than Tough (and also counts for the relevant achievement.) Speaking of achievements, there is one particular achievement, one that requires doing something rather disgusting, that I just can't bring myself to do. (Hint: It involves poison ivy.)

<span class="bold">Maze Lord</span> (Android)

What a pity. This is an excellent puzzle game with simple rules and small levels, that nonetheless allow for some hard and well-thought-out puzzles. Most of the time the real challenge lies in solving the puzzle in the least possible amount of steps. As you progress through the levels the game slowly introduces new concepts and mechanics, and mixes them with old ones in order to create new types of challenges.

So, why did I quit it if it was so good? Because of the damn secret passages. They make their appearance a little after the halfway mark, and they are totally unfair and different to any other element in the game. They are completely indistinguishable from regular walls so the only way to find them is through trial and error, and subsequent memorization. Combine that with the fact that levels are randomly rotated every time you restart them, and the annoyance and frustration levels quickly become unbearable when you've finally figured out how to beat a puzzle but fail to nail it because you didn't remember the exact location of the frigging passage. What a pity indeed.

I played the Android version of the game, but it's also available for Windows on Steam (if anyone's interested in it despite my warnings).

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos

This game is a first-person dungeon crawler.

There are a lot of good things about this game:
- UI is very intuitive and easy to use
- super-easy to jump into and get started
- graphics are great
- automap
- grid-based movement
- difficulty level is adjustable at any time
- story doesn’t overwhelm gameplay, but gives you a goal

However, there is one negative, and it was enough to make me quit:
-real-time combat :(

I hate trying to simultaneously manage my party members’ attacks, spells, inventory, and movement all in real-time while enemies are also attacking me (sometimes from multiple sides). Many people may love it, but unfortunately I don’t. I was enjoying everything else about the game so much that I was forcing myself to continue on, thinking that I’d get used to it or that it’s worth putting up with because the rest of the game is so good. But no, after playing for many hours I’m sad to report that I just couldn’t do it, it utterly ruined the rest of the game for me. If only the combat were turn-based it would have been perfect.

If you enjoy real-time combat I’d *definitely* recommend the game (although I didn’t finish it, I assume that it continues on in a similar manner), I mean everything else about the game was great. It just wasn’t for me though.

Dagon Age - Origins GotY

I managed to play it longer with mage character. Playing melee chara was terrible (mindnumbingly boring) idea since mages here are meh beside skinny witch, forgot name. Nice to find stash to store junk but I got to look up for it in guide.
Story is typical biowarian "prepare for incoming great evil!" but served decently, not overly dark but sometimes baffling and hilarious, I think Larian do this better tbh.
Checked walkthrough and though it would be too timeconsuming I rather spend it on something else, maybe even quit games for some time...

Commandos 3

Considering some of the reviews this game has, I was expecting it to be a disappointing but fun nonetheless. Disappointing, yes, fun, not by a long shot.

The frequent time limits created a major problem. You no longer had time to observe enemy movements and plan your moves accordingly, one of the key components that made C1 and C2 excellent games. As the time limits were tight and the controls were fiddly, most of the game ended up being an exercise in trial and error. The spy's disguise was considerably less useful as there were to may enemies around who could see though them. Enemy snipers..........ugh..........they see you in prone position, you're dead. Others complained about how short the game was but I never finished it.

Pretty obvious why C3 was bundled with C2. I'm sure most people would just buy C2 and leave C3 on the shelf to rot. C3 is not just disappointing, it's downright BAD!!!

Ys Chronicles+ (aka Ancient Ys Vanished: Omen)

I hadn't played any of the Ys games before and decided to give the first one a try. It's an action game with cutesy anime graphics, RPG elements and simple, weird, but original "bump into monsters" fighting mechanic. All of that would have been fine by me, if it wasn't for the problematic combination of the following design decisions:

1. The game relies heavily on its RPG elements. A single character level can make a huge difference between very hard to almost impossible and trivially easy. This difference has a much bigger impact than player skills.

2. The game is rather linear and gated. If you find you don't have the right level yet to beat a boss, there's hardly anything to do but grinding by repeating the same content you've seen already.

3. The balance is really off. You will find you don't have the right level yet to beat a boss - repeatedly, even if you follow the path the game has laid out for you. It's like the grinding, tedious backtracking and repetition was put there by design. Also, there is no steady progress. It switches between being very slow and insanely fast. And then you suddenly reach the level cap halfway through the game. The same applies for money and equipment. In the beginning it takes quite a while to collect the money necessary for the weakest but expensive equipment (which is a requirement for advancing the plot, btw), but shortly after you're so rich that you can skip buying the mid-range stuff and already get the best gear, which will still leave you with more money than you can possibly spend.

Which means I'm fully maxed out when battling the third boss, halfway through the game; but he's still a great pain in the ass, a high damage-dealing sponge that you can only hurt within a tiny timeframe, provided you're close enough to him then, so the combat goes on forever and mostly consists of running and waiting, hoping for the right opportunities to strike without getting hurt too much. And now I don't even have the option to improve my damage output or armor anymore by leveling or getting better equipment. I have rings for higher damage output, or halving the damage taken, or healing, or slowing the enemy, but none of these work in boss battles, and regular enemies are nothing but a minor nuisance now that I don't have anything to gain from fighting them anymore, it's best to just run past them, which makes my cool equipment pointless. The story so far was serviceable, but not nearly interesting enough to put up with this tedious and frustrating gameplay. So I think I'm going to stop here.

If it's the boss I'm thinking of, that particular boss is poorly designed; I consider it an example of bad game design. If you are able to get past this boss before it drives you all batty, the rest of the game isn't as frustrating; if not, you can go on to Ys 2. Also, I note that Ys 1 is the only Ys I've played where you reach the level cap mid-way through.

(The boss you're talking about does return in Ys Origin, but they fortunately made the boss much more reasonable; it doesn't stay in bat form as long, it seems to be easier to damage it, and there are some twists to make the fight more interesting.)

Yeah, but the previous bosses weren't that much fun either, and I don't really see the point of continuing if regular opponents become trivial, there is no character progress anymore and all I can look forward to are those tedious boss battles. Maybe if the game also had clever puzzles and a very exciting story, but so far there were no real puzzles to speak of and the story was standard fare. IMO, the whole game is poorly designed, from what I've seen.

Do demos count ?

I was interested in Binary Domain, so I downloaded the demo on Steam. When you move your mouse slowly in game it moves fast, when you move fast then it moves slow in the game. Tried changing the mouse settings in the game, tried changing the settings in my mouse configuration program, nothing helped. It's unplayable with a mouse, and even though I have a controller, I am simply very bad at aiming with it and it's not fun when I struggle to hit anything. I can not believe how could someone program something like this and sell it, and then not even bother to release a patch to fix it. There are many people complaining about it and searching for a fix. I just can not believe it, why even bother porting it to PC ? It's not rocket science to make proper mouse support.

You quit before the really enraging bits in Binary Domain.
There is quick time events that are bound to non-standard keyboard keys like semiquote, pipe, dash, etc in the PC version.
Rebinding keys does not update the quicktime event prompts.
Extreme frustration ensues.

Anyway, I just quit playing Moonpod's 2007 game Mr Robot. The game is a combination skewed perspective 3d-platformer + Final Fantasy 3 style RPG. The storyline is interesting, the RPG part is interesting with different team roles/weapons/spells, unfortunately the game balance is 70% platforming, 30% RPG. Timed platforming puzzles, rooms of tiny 1 platform wide jumps, forced perspective based jump puzzles, forced perspective timed jumps, etc...

Stuck on a really annoying roomwide interconnected moving floor strip maze that requires perfection, and that's it.
I am done, there's just too much annoying platforming jump puzzles for me to handle anymore.

Star Wars Rogue Squadron III- Rebel Strike (Wii)

A Gamecube exclusive, played on a Wii since my new monitor only has digital inputs. But the Wii works with a nifty little Wii HDMI converter from China "five dolla for you very cheap". So the Wii is back up and running like a champion.
Which is more than can be said about this game, it is utter shite. I thought I'd never find a game as bad as the old Rebel Assault games from the 90's...and it took another Star Wars game to take the worst game ever throne. Good graphics for the time. But everything else sucks. Worst controls ever, which is deliberate to make the game hard or else it would only last an hour. I forced myself to play about half the game before ejecting the disc and throwing it across the room.

The game got wonderful reviews. But you can sell anything if you put a Star Wars label on it.

Saints Row 2 mainly because the controls were wonky. I couldn't find a way to get it to full controller or full keyboard.

No One Lives Forever Nostalgia strikes again. Yes, overall it is a great game however..... that is somewhat diminished by the insta-fail stealth missions and horrible controls for diving sections.

Drakensang: The River of Time The final boss fight is a two part fight that starts with the apprentice and ends with the evil mage. Between the two its a 14 round boss fight. It wasn't that its hard but that it's boring. Despite that the series has potential and would probably do better with a different developer.

Fallout 3 The best parts are in the DLC. For most of the buildings in the area the only difference is the layout of the building and things you fight. If you get too good or evil you get targeted by one of the groups. I wiped out their base, killed everyone, found no clue as to who hired them, and the attacks kept coming. I got really annoying.

One of the things I really like about Fallout 1 and 2 was how it tells you what happens at each area you visited because of your actions. I was looking forward to finding out what happens at tenpenny towers and other places but the ending for fallout 3 doesn't give you any clue at all.