Games

Wizardry 8

They just beat the ever-loving fuck out of you with random encounters to the point that it was painful to play... and yet... I kept going

I am a huge fan of the Blackbox era of Need For Speed games and when I tried Undercover, I knew it had a reputation but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt as Carbon is often overlooked because of Most Wanted but it's actually my favourite in the series (and its short af campaign is a famous sticking point for Carbon's detractors)

When I launched the game, I couldn't stop noticing how... off everything looked. The graphics were ugly. I knew from playing ProStreet that this engine could look absolutely stunning and going to this was just... baffling. Then I did some of the races and I was constantly experiencing issues. The handling was very poor, the camera angles were really bad and most of the races just felt meh.

I wanted to drop it then but I decided to power through a week with it, playing on and off. I actually really liked the ambient police chatter and the arrest cutscenes (Some of them are shockingly brutal, police brutality much?) but the racing felt bland, the police chases felt even blander and the world overall just didn't interest me. The story didn't pull me in but then again, who really plays NFS For the story anyways.

This was one of the first instances of me disliking a game so it left me really confused and puzzled. This was a series I loved and then I came across this entry that just felt like it was completely alien to the series it belonged to. It was so, so, so weird.

Cities Skylines 2. I've got thousands of hours in the SimCity franchise. Over 500 hours in the original Cities Skylines. CS2 is a fucking mess of a game. It actually ran pretty decently on my PC when it first came out but you could tell it was an incomplete mess right away. The simulation was non-existent. The game looked like dog shit. The only way to get it to run decently was to turn everything down to low and medium. Somehow I squeaked out 75 hours in that first 3 month release window. For a working adult with responsibilities, that's a lot of time for me now. I install it occasionally and see if it's any better. It's not. I did this last week and it actually runs worse on the same PC than it did at launch which is counter to what most people are experiencing.

Mods through the Paradox launcher is a necessary evil for the game to function. I can barely get it to run stable without mods, I don't think tricking out the game is gonna help the situation. It's such a sad case of a game killing a whole genre. Especially when it's my genre. I love city building games and no game has hurt more than Sim City 2013. I didn't even play SC2013. I watched my favorite franchise die and made probably the smartest decision of my gaming life by saying fuck no to that mess. Fucking Cities Skylines 2 is right there with it, but I made the opposite choice. I gave it a chance and it stings all the time.

What's even worse is how such a staple of my childhood has turned into an almost impossible task to recreate. I'll never understand how gaming went from being able to produce 4 generational city building titles in ~10 years to not being able to get one to function at the same level at all in 20. You can count CS1 sure, but even that game was missing something compared to SC4. CS1 is not even close to the same level of SC4. Even now when the game is hard to run on modern hardware.

What's even more killer is we see other examples of Maxis era staples getting second life in new franchises all the time. Planet Zoo 1 and 2. Transport Fever for Transport Tycoon. Planet Coaster taking it's place next to Roller Coaster Tycoon. Hell even the Jurassic World Evolution series fills a gap from the old Jurassic Park Genesis game. But the modern city building attempts are all backwards attempts.

They all focus on the wrong thing. Agents. They all want to be able to simulate every living being and everything they do. It never works. It's why the newest Citystate is such an intriguing project. They're not doing every individual agent. And the dev finally decided to focus on modernizing the engine to work with fully 3d spaces. There's a couple contenders out there that are a year or two away. Citystate, Metro 1998 even though that's more of a throwback. City Masterplan. If just one of these games hit, we're back in business. Until then I've watched my favorite genre die twice. Hopefully the third time is the charm in terms of longevity.

This isn't a "lot" of time, but I spent 19 ish hours to complete Under the Island. I don't want to be harsh on an Indie game, but the game let me down so badly. I wanted a Zelda-like and this had some really interesting ideas. It was just that everything between the ideas was terrible. The plot was predictable and boring. Characters weren't. The mini games were some of the worst I have ever seen. Navigation was obnoxious and often relied on the top down perspective hiding the REQUIRED path with little to no indication that you could walk "through" an obstacle. I could go on.

Why did I play it through? I just kept hoping that everything would live up to the interesting ideas. It did not.

Overwatch, because: Overwatch 2. Now they're back to the original Overwatch format, and I just can't even.

Hades - I haven't seen anyone list this one yet. It was the first roguelike/roguelite I ever played and it taught me that I don't like roguelikes/roguelites. It tried to like it, but it's just not for me. Luckily, son boy loves it so it's not a total waste.

I always dislike The Witcher 3. As many times as I tried to like it as many reviews as I read that it was amazing. Dear God the controls sucked and I hated that game. No matter how many times I try it.

Hunt Showdown.

Oxygen not included.

Factorio spoiled me on resource calculation. ONI fudges it to a noticable level.

Every single mobile game.

Clicker Heroes. I left a negative review at 1200 hours played and it took me over 200 hours more to stop playing and finally uninstall the game.

Probably MtG: Arena

I have a pod I usually play the physical card game with, but sometimes when we can't get together that week I'll boot up the online version and play some casual games

I've spent ~100 hours in it and I've decided I really don't like it, and all for a single reason: the matchmaking

It is abysmal. I started up the game, made a shitty deck with the free stuff they give you, and go on a 15 game win streak. Over the course of my playtime I'll be upgrading my deck, when suddenly out if nowhere I'm facing the sweatiest assholes with the most juiced decks that will waste your time if it means a 1% increase in win rate

After a week of this I realise that even the casual format has a deck ranking system - the more powerful cards in it, the harder the opponents you'll face

Now, I'm all for this, if your deck was given a visual rank so you'd know the opponents you'd face before you spent resources to make it, but being faced with the problem of being unable to upgrade your deck, else you might be put in the same pool as those who'd played the game all their lives, is somewhat demotivating

Of course, going on 15 game win streaks where the opponent barely does anything isn't fun either

I only played like 30 hours, but I hated every minute of Mina The Hollower.

Satisfactory. It's a slog to play even after 2 hours. I would have dropped it in 10 minutes were it not for the overwhelmingly positive reviews.