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Post by BakFu on Oct 25, 2019 15:48:22 GMT
You ever start playing a game and think “why am I wasting my time with this crap, it’s brutal!” Because maybe the controls were a little dodgy, or maybe the tutorial is taking forever, or the difficulty made the game feel completely inaccessible (and you’re too stubborn and/or masochistic to read a walk through) or the whole endeavour just feels like a waste of time? I’ve had many of these experiences and almost missed out on great games because of them, have any of you had similar experiences?
Skyrim: a friend raved for months about Skyrim (as did the whole internet), then, knowing what a cheap bastard I am, bought it for me for Christmas. I started playing and thought “this is cool, the game is pretty!”. After an hour or two picking flowers and mushrooms in beautiful mountain pastures with my creepy, ghoulish looking dark elf, I though “what the f$&k am I doing, this is such a waste of time!”. I was going to turn the game off and see if I could trade it in for something not in the botanical foraging simulator vein when I noticed a cave. I was able to finish off a few wolves and merc a party of barbarian guys having a bbq around their fire without them seeing me, and I was hooked for over a year straight, and I still think about the game and want to get it when it goes on sale all of these years later!
Forza Horizon: played the original on the 360, had a Jones for something like project Gotham or another fun, arcade style racer that could scratch the speed bug itch for me. Forza Horizon was dirt cheap and had great reviews, so I tried it and was really digging it despite the douchy “hey, we’re a bunch of crazy young people living our crazy lives in this underground race festival” theme. The first game is great, but a bit more linear that the following titles, so I ended up getting stuck on a rally style race featuring vintage mini coopers. I could not for the life of me win this race, and therefore could not advance to the next tier. I tried dozens of times, could shave time off, but NEVER win. I was ready to quit, then I did the unthinkable, I dropped the difficulty. I felt like a chump, but it worked, and I cranked the difficulty back up and LOVED the rest of the game (the final full map race is my favourite of the series! Crazy speed that required a near perfect race through traffic and residential areas, great shit!). That experience sucked me into the rest of the series, so I’m glad I pushed through!
Dark Souls: do I need to explain this? This is a humbling experience until you accept that you will not have your hand held and that dying is a necessary part of the game. DS is not for everyone, but if you want an Olympic gold medal feeling of achievement, beat some bosses or just survive the bleak, lonely, and deadly environments of Lordran.
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Post by IamAres on Oct 26, 2019 0:45:51 GMT
I had a somewhat similar experience with Oblivion. I got the 360 late, and Oblivion was this game I'd always heard of, and it was pretty cheap to buy by that point. Picked it up, played around with the beginning part a little, realized you could make your own class, and started kind of micro-fucking around with it, trying to make different guys from like different fantasy universes and stuff, eventually got bored of that and never got around to the actual game. Part of the issue was probably how literally the entire world opens up at once, and you may not have a strong idea of what you want to do.
Little while after, in 2008, Fallout 3 had just come out, and it was actually a thread on the old FPC where somebody said "sell me on this game; what's the big deal with it." I got it, loved it, played the shit out of it. It certainly helped that its "Liam Neeson is your dad and you have to explore this destroyed world to find him again" plot was a stronger initial narrative than Oblivion had had.
So after doing literally everything you could do in FO3, I gave Oblivion another shot, knowing it was in some ways the same game in a different setting. This time, I just did what I'd done in Fallout - made an avatar loosely based on myself and just role played the game, following where its situations led. Once I got invested in playing my character and living in that world, I was hooked. I played all the way through it, I bought Skyrim at midnight (and took the day off to play it), and am waiting semi-patiently for Elder Scrolls 6.
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Post by OrochiGeese on Oct 26, 2019 6:02:15 GMT
I really like this topic and think I have a relevant game to add to the collection 😉
There was this time in 2001 when I convinced a friend to buy me a little known Japanese game that I had been reading about in magazines for years. I take it home and have absolutely no concept of what is going on. The gameplay was weird as shit and none of the moves were connecting. I stopped playing after 30 minutes.
A year later No Mercy got "DA GLITCH" for the 5th time and I took out that Japanese game I put away.
Next thing I know, I've been a Fire Pro fan for 17 years 😁
FPD was the "BLOW -> SUCK -> OMG -> AWESOME -> CIGARETTE" game for me.
The first time I played it I just could not wrap my head around anything. The striking just seemed broken to me. The grapple timing was too hard. And the fact the game was in Japanese certainly wasn't making things easier. Had No Mercy not once again SELF-CRITICALLED! taking all my remaining patience, I never would have fished FPD out from under my Dreamcast "mistake" pile games again only to have my life changed.
I've never been more happy to have been completely wrong on my first impression.
I will note though that I was completely blown away by the cool entrances and huge roster the first time I played it. Everything after that was all downhill until I gave it another chance. And when I did fish it out a year later, I jumped onto GameFAQS to assist me in figuring out what to do. So not only did finally appreciate Fire Pro, but I immediately loved the community for helping me understand what was going on 😎
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2019 7:42:18 GMT
I've had similar experiences with the Fire Pro series myself.
My first run-in with it was after seeing some animations people had done based on the SNES games, though I didn't know they were based on a game at first. I just was impressed by the effort in the animation and thought the choice of perspective was interesting.
Then I found the origin. As it happens, the first one I ever tried was X Premium. I thought the gameplay was weird but the massive amount of save space (compared to AKI's N64 offerings) was cool and it was oddly fun to watch from time to time so I held on to the ROM, even if I only & touched it once in a while.
Despite that, it still left an impression on me because it made me want Returns when the NA version was announced. And yet, even though it was the main thing I wanted for Christmas that year, it still took me at least another year for it to really click.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2019 12:44:51 GMT
Natsume Pro Wrestling.
Discovered it on emulator. I was only used to the WWF mash button style with Royal Rumble and Raw from years earlier. Thought it sucked.
After I discovered Fire Pro returns and learned about timing, Natsume made sense, even bought it for the Wii virtual console and played it for years until I got a SNES emulator on my smartphone then got SFPW Premium X and AJPW
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Post by El Marsh on Oct 26, 2019 16:46:06 GMT
Metal Gear Solid 3 was like that for me. I'd virtually breezed through the first two MGS games (enjoying the complete, nonsensical ride) but when I first started MGS3, I wasn't really feeling it. I liked the setting, I liked the story setup BUT it was that damn jungle mission that I later learned to be the PROLOGUE that just soured me on it. I hated the camouflage system and didn't quite invest in the animal trapping minigame. I went back and forth through the various submaps for hours and just couldn't make good progress. I decided to just put it down and cut my losses. A couple of years later I picked it up again on a whim. And it just *clicked* Not only did I overcome that annoyance that had soured me on it but I grew to enjoy the game so much that to this day, it's my favorite in the MGS franchise.
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Post by Nth on Oct 28, 2019 8:45:20 GMT
Definitely Fire Pro for me. When I bought Fire Pro G, like most people completely new to the series, I found it endlessly frustrating. Trying to learn the game with only Japanese text to guide me became too much for me. For the longest time I would just sim matches between WCW and WWF wrestlers. It wasn't until I found the Fighting Road translation on gamefaqs and I finally decided I wanted to at least try the story mode everyone was talking about. Thankfully the dojo at the beginning of the mode took me through the controls of the game and I hadn't enjoyed wrestling gameplay as much since the AKI series faded from existence.
JRPG's and turn-based strategy games. Amazingly these would end up becoming favorite genres for me, but initially I absolutely hated them. I was all about platformers, fighting games and anything where the action was constant.
I watched my brother play the original Final Fantasy on NES and thought it looked boring as hell. Turn-based combat with these lame stumpy little sprites doing half assed animations. Random battle, random battle, read text, random battle... it seemed so anti-climactic.
It wasn't until Nintendo Power started up and offered a free game for a year subscription. Unfortunately the game was Dragon Warrior. I remember looking at the back of the box in video game rental stores and thinking it looked so boring.
So a friend of mine ended up getting the year long subscription to Nintendo Power and the free game. I ended up going over to his house and we played it for about an hour. I absolutely loved it. I got totally addicted to it in one play session. I went home and convinced my parents to get me a year subscription to Nintendo Power as an early birthday present that same day. Got my own copy of Dragon Warrior and played it compulsively. Soon at school other people were getting Nintendo Power subscriptions and RPG's started to become really popular.
Strategy games were also in the same realm as RPG's for me. Graphics were often simple and minimal and gameplay mechanics seemed really complicated. I think it was actually strategy board games that turned me around. I remember when I learned to play RISK loving it. Then I started getting more strategy type board games like Battle Masters. If a game had a theme I was into I found I could totally get into it. Now strategy and RPG games encompass a huge part of my gaming library.
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Post by pyrodean on Nov 1, 2019 21:48:03 GMT
I had a similar experience when I first tried playing Returns. I raged quit due to the menu navigation lol.
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Post by hungerlow on Apr 16, 2020 14:27:21 GMT
Minecraft
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2020 2:01:24 GMT
Now that I think about it, this could describe how I was with Dance Dance Revolution. In 2000 I would sometimes search random words of interest in Napster, and listening to Rage Against the Machine and punk rock was turning me into a junior radical. So, I searched "revolution" and, alongside Pantera and The Beatles, were a ton of results for something called Dance Dance Revolution. I didn't download any of them at the time but it still made a blip on my radar. Some time later that year (maybe?), I found a DDR machine at my local arcade. I want to say it was either 3rd or 4th mix because I remember it had a CD-based interface rather than the songwheel introduced in 5th mix. So, out of curiosity I tried it. I had NO idea about any of the songs or artists so I picked some song by Taka because it made me think of TAKA Michinoku. And then I failed partway through the stage because trying to watch the screen and my feet was too hard to coordinate. I didn't give it another thought after that. Then some time during winter 02/03 I heard this song at a friend's house, which made me interested in trying it again. This time I was hooked even though I still wasn't very good at first. From there it turned into something of a minor obsession while I was in college. Interest finally started to fizzle around 2007 but I still get back into Stepmania from time to time and have a ton of nostalgic favorite songs. |
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Post by Gamer707b on Aug 6, 2020 5:18:38 GMT
I can name many games, but one that stands out was Castlevavania SOTN. This was when the PS1 was riding high on 3d. So , when I first played SOTN, I thought it was a bland, old fashioned style 2d game. Sold my copy. Maybe 6 or 7 years later, I picked up the greatest hits version and this time I truly appreciated it. I took my time exploring the map fully. I did all the secrets and flipped the castle upside down and essentially got an extra game out of it. Needless to say, I ended up loving the game. Now, its one of my all time favorites.
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Post by Shadow Master on Feb 15, 2022 9:06:07 GMT
My first forays into the world of Fire Pro-Wrestling happened when I was searching for new Wrestling titles to try out many, many years ago.
Since the SNES was my favourite video game console, the first game that I acquired was Super Fire Pro-Wrestling III Easy Type. I found a charm to the
simpler graphics, added voice clips and massive roster of Wrestlers.
With no idea whatsoever of how Fire Pro's grapple system worked, I attempted to play Final Bout like a traditional American button masher. Big mistake.
Thinking the game was too hard for me, I put Final Bout aside and continued looking around for more Wrestling games to try.
It wasn't long until I stumbled across more articles citing Fire Pro-Wrestling as the greatest game series ever created. In one piece, the reviewer brought
up another Fire Pro title. Coined "one of the greatest Wrestling games of all time", the game in question was Super Fire Pro-Wrestling X Premium. A game that
inspired foreign game magazines to begin taking notice of the Fire Pro series. A game that one reviewer said was more than worth importing for $200 back in the
day. A game with over 116 Wrestlers and the ability to create 80 more.
Well, hot damn, I thought. I had to try it.
Again, I had no idea how the grapple system worked and couldn't figure out how to escape from submission holds. It was brutally embarrassing. But, even after I
gave up for a second time ...something kept pulling me back in. Maybe it was the hype. Perhaps the constant praise and accolades. So, I decided to sit through
a guide to figure out how to escape submission holds, came to understand the grapple system and the rest is history.
I'll never forget the first time I was able to pull off a MED grapple. My character of choice to start with was Road Warrior Hawk. It was so satisfying; that, after
so many trials and errors, something finally clicked.
Getting the hold of X Premium allowed me to go back and better appreciate the rest of the Fire Pro series. Today, all of the Super Nintendo Fire Pro entries hold special
places in my heart and many years of nostalgia to boot.
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Post by SonnyBone on Apr 29, 2022 9:07:07 GMT
WITCHER 3
it was in a piss poor state at launch (shocker!) and I got rid of it before even completing a single main quest. It was the first game I ever played where the right analog stick input was literally broken. It did stair steps instead of smooth rotation. They eventually patched that out, along with tons of other shit, and I gave it another shot (thank you GameFly) and I eventually got all the DLC and loved it.
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Post by unimportantguy on May 4, 2022 0:39:20 GMT
WITCHER 3 it was in a piss poor state at launch (shocker!) and I got rid of it before even completing a single main quest. It was the first game I ever played where the right analog stick input was literally broken. It did stair steps instead of smooth rotation. They eventually patched that out, along with tons of other shit, and I gave it another shot (thank you GameFly) and I eventually got all the DLC and loved it. This is every CDPR game ever. |
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