Think what you want .

I hate when sagas like mass effect change so deep from one game to another. Lately, I'm starting to hate bioware and EA after what they did to Mass Effect and Dragon Age...

Sorry to necro this, but I had a thought on the subject as I was browsing Abandonia:

I think it's impossible for me to "hate" a game anymore. Chances are that if I don't like something now, I'll just shut it down and move on to whatever's next on my backlog or my wishlist. That's one nice thing about being an adult: if you want another game, you just go buy one.

When I was a kid, however, things were much different (and I'm sure this was the same for pretty much anyone else as a kid here). I got one game, once in a great while; whenever my parents had extra money and felt I was deserving of something new (or allowance had been saved, which took months). When you are only getting about two new games a year, you start to hold the experience near and dear to your heart, because the only ways out are to play demos, play something else you've had, or just not play at all. Your choice of game becomes more important to you, and it really sucks when you know that you've blown it with your choice.

This happened to me with Nightmare Creatures. "What a neat concept for a game," I mused, "you get two people to play as and it's an alt-history take on the great fire of London!" I can still remember being left wondering why I ever thought it would be so good. The game controls like that shitty Spawn game on PS1, the combat is as janky and stilted as the first Virtua Fighter (only simpler, somehow), and nothing changes throughout the whole game. On top of that, they toss in a mechanic where adrenaline must be kept up by killing (a finite amount of) enemies, lest your health start to drain once it depletes. There are very few enemy types, the items are all pretty much insta-kill (or close to it) weapons with no depth or strategy to their use. What's more, the game was well-liked by critics at the time, and even now I see people on forums look upon it with admiration.

I remember that hopeless, sinking realization I came to in the second level, when I knew that for the next half-year, I was stuck with this shit-excuse for a game. I despise Nightmare Creatures.

Sims 1
Final Fantasy VII
Quake

Super Mario 64: I consider the 2d Marios to be far better games.

Zelda OOT: Same as before, I consider the NES, SNES and Gameboy Zelda games to be far better.

Final Fantasy 7: FF 4 5 and 6 far outdo this game. I feel its only popular because it was in 3d and abused the CD format to make excessive cut scenes.

Morrowind. I played it on my uncle's computer a long time ago, I think maybe a year or two after it came out, and I didn't like it. Years after that, I figured that I'd just been to young to appreciate it, after all, everybody loved it, right?

Worst $10 I ever spent. Worst game I ever spent money on. There was nothing good about it. I still feel bad for giving it to a friend.

The Sims. - Too tamagochical, and i don't like the philosophy that underlies its mechanism (buy a bigger tv set and you'll succeed at life and making friends).

Baldur's gate. - The fights bore me, and most of what I played was just about cleaning maps of wandering monsters. The portraits and the (french) voices were also irritating me, trying too hard to look and sound all epic.

Indiana jones and the fate of Atltantis. - Hated the plot, hated the universal puzzle devices that were the magical beans, and didn't feel anything was much indanajoneseque in it. The plot and concepts did fit the dig way better.

Diablo series. - See it as a bland repetitive generic hack and slash, aimed at absolute nerds who love playing with spreadsheets (it was introduced to me by a fan who was very much into world ladders and stats maximisation). I had played Gauntlet enough already.

MMORPGS. - No.

Alpha protocol. - A decent action game, but sold to me as a RPG. Didn't feel like it. Just saw it as a shooting/sneaking game with branching missions.

Doom. - Historically, almost prevented me to play fps at all.

Most platformers (mario, etc). - Unless there's really a weird gimmick (Braid's timeline,Flood's stick-on-wall, etc), I just don't enjoy platformers. Prince of persia was an exception, but I hardly relate it to that genre (like Anoter World or Flashback). Rick Dangerous and Newzealand story were weird but genuine exceptions.

Also I'm still struggling to like -as I feel is my duty to- Alpha Centaury. But for now, I still can't 'get' it, feel its logic, etc. I love the later civilization/colonization games. Maybe alpha centaury's interface is too old for me. I don't know. But I'll keep trying, until something clicks.

Legend of Grimrock --- played it through once with a friend (well, watched half of it being played) and loved it. Bought it myself and bailed on it after an hour. Hated it with a passion. I think the fun of playing with a friend was most of the reason I initially liked it :)

Divine Divinity - Hate the gloominess of the game. Will give it another shot eventually but, so far, not my cup of tea.

Limbo - Absolutely detested it. Made it through to the end but thought it was one of the worst games I'd ever played. Dark, depressing and annoying.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP - Thought it was pretentious garbage, with very poor gameplay.

The Blackwell Bundle - Really enjoyed the first one, didn't particularly care for the other three at all. The writing is dull and the characters are just not interesting.

EDID: Will also add Fahrenheit (The Indigo Prophecy) although a lot of other people hated it too - probably the worst game I've attempted to play all year. Controls are abysmal and the QTA sequences are stupid, simply stupid. Just over an hour was enough for me, then I started watching the Let's Play videos. Gave up on those too. Just don't like the game.

Skyrim, The Dragon Age series and every Mass Effect game after the original are games I do not like.

In Skyrim I always felt like I was a short jog away from civilization. Despite the large map, It doesn't really feel as big or as full of 'stuff' as Morrowind or even Oblivion. The plot somehow feels less epic than Oblivion, despite the fact that there is a civil war going on while dragons are swarming out to devour everything. Demonic armies pouring out of Oblivion gates always seemed a more immediate threat than random dragon raids, even if they were less of an actual immediate threat to the player. The destruction of Kvatch and later the attack on the Imperial City made the plot of the game seem to have a far greater impact on the world. I also felt that many of the game changes were gimmicks and/or poorly thought out. Dual wielding and dragon shouts seemed to me to be a desperate attempt to make the player feel more 'badass' to appeal to 'that crowd', but felt shoehorned into the game, in my opinion and came alongside the removal and baffling omission of several things that I expected to see in the game. The new leveling system seems blatantly designed to be familiar to Fallout 3 fans, which seems like something of an insult as it would have been trivially easy to 'streamline' the leveling system by applying attribute bonuses as skills were leveled up instead of when reaching 10 primary skill level ups, and continuing to use Oblivion's perk system. Instead, they threw the baby out with the bathwater and sidelined everything except the perks. The game is by no means *bad*, but I can't help but feel irritated that the developers felt they had to slap 'elder scrolls' onto the game, because they would have been just as well served by making a new IP considering the tiny few things it has in common with the older games. Despite the supposed intention of being closer to Morrowind, the game feels farther away from it than Oblivion.

As for Dragon Age, It never seemed very unique in its setting or plot. While Bioware can always write good characters and character interactions, it really seemed to me that they were phoning it in in Dragon Age with the highly derivitive plot, setting, and characters. Some aspects were lifted wholesale from the works of others, such as Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings (the movies) etc while the rest seems to be a callback to the old Forgotten Realms D&D games that Bioware already made (better) the first time around. Everything in Dragon Age has been executed better and with more originality somewhere else, to say nothing of the sequel, which took everything in a completely different direction in terms of art, tone, gameplay and content and lore. Honestly I would be more upset about this, if only I hadn't been as disappointed with the first as I had been.

While Mass Effect may have suffered from some of the same problems as Dragon Age in terms of extensively borrowing from other works such as Babylon 5, Farscape, etc etc. I felt that they managed to cement the elements together into a setting that genuinely seemed to stand on its own (as long as you didn't squint too hard) The alien races were diverse enough to be interesting, the enemy was menacing while being mysterious enough to hold my interest, and I loved exploring the galaxy, touching down on rocky, barren planets and exploring in my bouncy apc. The technology was sleek and high tech yet the feeling remained that the galaxy was a huge, unexplored place filled with great unknowns, such as Thorians, Geth, Rachnai and Reapers. When I started up ME2 I immediately noticed the shift in focus, more swearing, fanservice, bulkier less futuristic looking guns, environments, etc and instead of the sleek geth, we got the 'generic alien badguy' collectors. The Mako was gone, as was in depth planetary exploration. The player had less control over customization of equipment, and a number of plot elements were introduced with little explanation or purpose. The Normandy is destroyed, but is rebuilt anyways with the same crew. Shepard is killed, but then brought back as a cyborg, something that has little effect except to make renegade players look like Sith, and the player is shoehorned into working with Cerberus where literally any other organization would have made more sense. It was obvious by the time I wrapped up the tutorial area that Bioware was going down a drastically different path with the series than the first game, creating a game that was 'darker, more 'mature' and with greater focus on gunplay, sex appeal, and so many of those other traits that are all too popular in so many games these days. It was obvious that they were chasing a different market than me with the second game, and while I can accept that, it doesn't mean that I particularly enjoy being dropped like a hot potato in so a developer can go chase a different crowd mid-franchise, and honestly that makes me somewhat resentful.


I'm a bit starved for good modern rpgs at the moment, considering my dislike for the modern Bethesda and Bioware games, luckily I have acquired a good amount of older rpgs from GoG to play which I am very happy with. I am currently greatly enjoying the Geneforge series, so while I might be a disappointed with the previously mentioned games, all is well.

Any MMO (particularly WoW), any MOBA (HoN, LoL etc..) and frankly any competetive versus game especially the FPS genre (Quake, Unreal, TF2, CS etc..).

Haha, I don't post much, but this really caught my eye, and the Minecraft servers are down (DRM-free my eye) so I have to do something right now.

If I thought about it, I could probably create a huge list of games. I guess I have really strange taste in games. But the big one for me recently was Alan Wake. I don't remember exactly how far I got into it, but the moment it was released on Gog I jumped on it. It was the most repetitive and uninteresting gameplay I could imagine. Everybody said the story was amazing, but it just seemed like recycled Hollywood trash to me.

Maybe I'd think better of it if I got further, but there was one point where I was on some kind of bridge and it kept throwing a bunch of stuff at me, and I got pretty frustrated. I finally decided that it wasn't worth the frustration.

I actually dislike any game that thrives on frustration. I'm quick to quit playing a game if it's frustrating, and I'd much rather a game be too easy than too hard. I know almost everybody runs to the "You just hate it 'cause you suck at it" thing, but the truth is I don't go to video games for accomplishment. If I want accomplishment, I'll do something in real life. I play games to relax. And if a game's too hard, if it's more aggravating than it is fun, then I just don't think it's worth playing. That's why I couldn't stand Mario Kart Wii and those constant stupid spiky shells.

Update: Also, Oddworld, Abe's Odyssey. Or however it's spelled; I don't think it's like Homer's Odyssey. I played that for twenty minutes and couldn't stand it. If I remember right, it was hard to control, something like if I tapped the right key Abe would take too long of a step to the right or something. But it's been too long for me to remember specifically; I just remember I couldn't stand it for more than the short time that I played it.

Second update: I'm going to resist the urge to do this over and over, but someone mentioned Morrowind, and I heartily agree. I don't understand the appeal of Morrowind at all. I loved Oblivion so I went back to play Morrowind, but the number one thing that ruined Morrowind (it really could have been good if it weren't for this one thing) is the fact that absolutely everything you do has a chance of succeeding, and I never could find a mod to correct that idiotic design. You swing a sword, and it's more likely to not "hit" than to hit. You cast a spell, and you fail casting the spell. It's the most tedious game I've ever played in my entire life. Morrowind wasn't worth playing without cheating, so I pretty much had God mode on all the time, and then it still wasn't fun.

I recently tried the abes odysee and exoddus. The last time i played them was in demos back on the ps1. Playing them today, i would say that the graphics/sound are still fantastic, but the gameplay is unresponsive and frustrating trial and error gameplay.

Deus Ex. Third and second ones are vastly superior, in that order, first is loved because online lists and forum users tell people to.

Call of Duty (x,y,z,...): I wouldn't call it hate, but the series offers nothing in terms of multiplayer that Day of Defeat and Counterstrike didn't offer years ago. I guess it's the console crowd responsible for it's over achievement.

Metal Gear Solid 2,3,...Boring TV shows consisting of long periods of radio-based dialogue with minute instances of mundane, linear, and scripted stealth gameplay in between.

Metroid Other M: Overpriced glorified Ninja Gaiden mod. 2D Metroid please!

Little Big Planet: The gamelay in this title is so basic and unengaging that the title could almost be called a non-game, or a post-game.

Killing Floor: Such a dreadful Left 4 Dead clone. Terrible, terrible graphics, constant DLC packages, and a chugging engine.

World of Warcraft: Competitive chatroom for men. Pass.

Bioshock: I don't exactly hate it, but I found it rather basic, clunky, and uninteresting.

Dota 2
Counter-Strike Source
Call of Duty (I like the SP of COD1,2 and 4,but that's all)