My Worst Weekend of Gaming Ever

B

beetlegum

CAGiversary!
As an older adult, weekends are pretty much the only time where I can make good progress in games. This weekend has been one wall of frustration after another. After hours of gaming, I've made zero progress, cursed a lot, and finally walked away.


Game 1 - X-men Origins Wolverine - I feel like I've been playing this game for months. I'm so sick of it. I just want to beat it, and never see it again. The game has been 80% frustration, 20% fun for me. It took me an entire weekend to get past this jungle part where you have to do a double jump and it must be timed perfectly. If you fail, you have to go all the way back and push blocks and crap. Now Im at the winter base, and it's another freaking jumping part. I don't know if I have the will to go on.

Game 2 - God of War Acension - I'm so close to beating it, but these jerkoff developers designed to create the most insane hard GOW boss fight ever. I've tried 40 times, and can't get past it. You have to fight 3 waves of medusas with no checkpoints, no health, and then they throw in a 3rd wave with so many enemies that I can't even see where Kratos is at on the screen sometimes. It feels impossible even with all my weapons and powers fully upgraded.

Game 3 - Halo Anniversay - I've been trying forever to beat this game. I now hate Halo because a lot of the levels all look the same, making it basically a confusing maze to progress. I just spent an hour finally making some good progress, got frustrated and quit. I forgot that you have to click on save and quit. ARgh. I lost all my progress and gotta work through the damn maze again.

Anyone else ever have gaming days like this? It makes me wonder why I put myself through this torture sometimes. Games are suppose to be fun. I do like a good challenge, but I loathe having to repeat sections and do the same thing over and over again.
 
[quote name='beetlegum']As an older adult, weekends are pretty much the only time where I can make good progress in games. This weekend has been one wall of frustration after another. After hours of gaming, I've made zero progress, cursed a lot, and finally walked away.


Game 1 - X-men Origins Wolverine - I feel like I've been playing this game for months. I'm so sick of it. I just want to beat it, and never see it again. The game has been 80% frustration, 20% fun for me. It took me an entire weekend to get past this jungle part where you have to do a double jump and it must be timed perfectly. If you fail, you have to go all the way back and push blocks and crap. Now Im at the winter base, and it's another freaking jumping part. I don't know if I have the will to go on.

Game 2 - God of War Acension - I'm so close to beating it, but these jerkoff developers designed to create the most insane hard GOW boss fight ever. I've tried 40 times, and can't get past it. You have to fight 3 waves of medusas with no checkpoints, no health, and then they throw in a 3rd wave with so many enemies that I can't even see where Kratos is at on the screen sometimes. It feels impossible even with all my weapons and powers fully upgraded.

Game 3 - Halo Anniversay - I've been trying forever to beat this game. I now hate Halo because a lot of the levels all look the same, making it basically a confusing maze to progress. I just spent an hour finally making some good progress, got frustrated and quit. I forgot that you have to click on save and quit. ARgh. I lost all my progress and gotta work through the damn maze again.

Anyone else ever have gaming days like this? It makes me wonder why I put myself through this torture sometimes. Games are suppose to be fun. I do like a good challenge, but I loathe having to repeat sections and do the same thing over and over again.[/QUOTE]

This will be me in a couple of months when I start working.

For Wolverine, it sounds like you should have quit long time ago. For GoW Ascension, I think that's the part everyone had trouble with. They patched it to make it easier... not sure if you updated your game or not, but that might change things for the better if you didn't. As for Halo, I remember thinking how such a great game could have some of the shittiest levels ever back in the day... guess they never bothered to update it.
 
Change up the difficulty. Make it easier on yourself. As we get get older, we just don't have the same amount of time to throw to games as we did when we were living in our parent's basement.

Further, I think Achievements do a pretty good job of playing a psychological trick on you, trying to keep you playing the game in new, different, and oftentimes more difficult ways. You just have to overcome that meaningless number and be able to see through it. Play the game how you want to play it, and if you're not having fun with it, then get rid of it.

Our life on this spinning rock is finite. Don't waste it raging over a bunch of ones and zeroes.
 
fuck Halo, fuck GoW, fuck Wolverine. Play fun games!

That Wolverine game was a turd.

Yeah I have had those days, a lot of times, I do switch to something else and have some fun.
 
Welcome to how I feel most of the time I play a game. I really can't help it if I can't physically move my fingers fast enough for the developer. I really hate jumps in games, they should be super easy, because really, I have tried over 100 times to do certain jumps and could not make them even after that, you mean to tell me you can't make something like a simple jump easy enough so the average player can get past it?

Of all games I am having trouble with skylanders spyro, there are sections where your skylander will die instantly, when you remove him from the portal and put another one on it will die before you get a chance to move the thumbstick to move it out of the way of whatever is killing it. Yes I know it's a ploy to get you to buy more characters so you can finish levels without having to start over but in a situation like this it wouldn't matter how many skylanders you had as they would just die one after another. This is also supposed to be a kids game, but like most Mario games for example this is definitely not a kids game based on difficulty, this a game with an adult difficulty disguised with colorful graphics and a toy based system. This game does not have selectable difficulty levels either.

I have played a bit of giants and it seems much better though I can't say if I will run into a situation where my skylanders will die one after another it does have selectable difficulty which really should have been in the first game.
 
[quote name='Swift900']Change up the difficulty. Make it easier on yourself. As we get get older, we just don't have the same amount of time to throw to games as we did when we were living in our parent's basement.

Further, I think Achievements do a pretty good job of playing a psychological trick on you, trying to keep you playing the game in new, different, and oftentimes more difficult ways. You just have to overcome that meaningless number and be able to see through it. Play the game how you want to play it, and if you're not having fun with it, then get rid of it.

Our life on this spinning rock is finite. Don't waste it raging over a bunch of ones and zeroes.[/QUOTE]

This.

I don't have the time or patience for hard games. So I avoid them and have no qualms turning down difficulty etc. as the point fr me is to just relax and have fun. I don't play games to challenge myself or get a sense of accomplishment. I get more than enough of that from my career, running and other avenues.

Games are just like TV, movies, books etc. for me--hobbies to veg out and get away from it all for a couple hours.

So I avoid hard games, turn down the difficulty if need be, pay no attention to achievements/trophies and have no qualms ditching a game I'm not enjoying.
 
I know how you feel, I almost threw my WiiU controller on the Final boss of Kirby's Adventure last weekend. I'm not sure if it's the Virtual Console or how it was on the NES but the slow down that goes on in those later levels can kill you.
 
I used to feel this way when I played FFXI (the MMORPG) back in my last couple years of college. After working a 30-40 hour work week, then school / homework, I could finally carve a 4-6 hour session in on the weekends.

Sometimes things worked great and I made plenty of progress, then there were other times I feel like I wasted that time completely (moreso than usual) when I couldn't find anyone to party with. After those nights I always told myself I'm done with it, but I'd always give it another go next weekend...

Now I pad my collection with games where I can save often, and have a good instant gratification factor, so even an hour of play-time will have significant progress / enjoyment (which is about as much time I can get with a wife and two kids).
 
I stick to turn based RPG's, but I do want to play some action stuff too, so it is frustrating. But most turn based RPG's require little or no reflexes and you can save often, plus you can do other stuff while playing, and if you have to put it down fast, you can just close the 3DS or for a console it will be on a text screen or something and you can easily just put down the controller and pick it up later. JRPG's are also good if you only have 30 min to play as you can usually save anywhere, also if your kids or the wife is calling again read the above. I find pokemon to be the perfect game for this type of play. Another person with kids mentioned persona 4 golden on the vita, he played it while his baby slept on his shoulder!
 
I mix it up. I have easier mindless games and then games that are hard. I play whichever I am in the mood for.

Simple games like Catan (board game), the Maw, Skyrim, etc can make a bad day good.

Then other games like Dark Souls etc can make a good day bad or any day awesome if you beat their hyper difficult nature.

Quite simply, don't get caught up on games you don't think are fun. There's way too many cheap good games out there that you should waste your time on bad games or games that frustrate you. I know its hard at times, but Put your completionist ego in check and drop Wolverine or any other game that you don't find fun.

Yes Halo was an extremely fun game, but does get confusing as they reused a ton of graphics and also backtrack quite a bit. If you don't play through large chunks at a time I could see it being annoying.
 
Ditto to everyone else that said "turn down the difficulty". There's definitely no shame in it - I play games to enjoy myself, not be frustrated. I finally finished Farcry 3 this past weekend after chipping away at it since Nov. I did NOT enjoy that game as much as most people did, but I was determined to finish it. Even on easy, I found a lot of it to be really frustrating.
 
[quote name='argyle']Ditto to everyone else that said "turn down the difficulty". There's definitely no shame in it - I play games to enjoy myself, not be frustrated. I finally finished Farcry 3 this past weekend after chipping away at it since Nov. I did NOT enjoy that game as much as most people did, but I was determined to finish it. Even on easy, I found a lot of it to be really frustrating.[/QUOTE]
I wholeheartedly agree, i tend to set games on easy at default now. I noticed as i got older, especially with the limited amount of time have for gaming. I tend to get easily frustrated at game, compare to when i was younger , say in my teenage years. I just do not like to having toreplay the same sequence/ stage over, and over again for numerous of times, because I kept dying. It just felt really redundant to me.
 
Take a break and play something you actually want to play then go back to those games. It'll make it a whole lot easier.
 
[quote name='Swift900']Change up the difficulty. Make it easier on yourself. As we get get older, we just don't have the same amount of time to throw to games as we did when we were living in our parent's basement.

Further, I think Achievements do a pretty good job of playing a psychological trick on you, trying to keep you playing the game in new, different, and oftentimes more difficult ways. You just have to overcome that meaningless number and be able to see through it. Play the game how you want to play it, and if you're not having fun with it, then get rid of it.

Our life on this spinning rock is finite. Don't waste it raging over a bunch of ones and zeroes.[/QUOTE]

This. I have a feeling on this site that "older" gamer could mean early 30s, but I'm in my early 40s and while I still love games find I have much less patience for them. Playing the same level over and over and over is more frustrating at this age than it ever was before, and it doesn't help that I'm pretty sure my gamer skill set is definitely on a steady decline. Changing the difficulty is one answer, but I still feel a stihma when playing a game on "Easy", which I know is stupid. At the same time, playing the same level over and over takes away even that false feeling of accomplishment, making it even more obvious you are wasting your precious free time. I have recently simply stopped playing a game when it reaches a point where I can't get past a certain level after giving it a decent period of time. I had to quit the latest CoD game when I quickly found I had neither the patience nor desire to get past the "strategy" section where you have to control the multiple units to defend a facility.

I think my ultimate message to kids out there is "don't get old".
 
Very much true. Doing something over and over is very frustrating now that my hobby time is much more limited than when I'm younger. Thus I don't have a lot of patience for that as it just feels like a wasted hour or whatever if I'm just trying the same boss, or section of a level, over and over and not making any progress toward beating the game.

I do still feel some of that stigma/shame when dropping difficulty in certain games. Something like WRPGS I don't care as the combat sucks anyway, and I don't have patience for grinding, and I'm playing for the story, questing and exploring rather than the combat anyway.

FPS games I hate to drop difficulty on though, but I can usually get through them on normal without too much trouble. Action games (God of War) I feel bad dropping difficulty, but don't have the patience for them otherwise--I largely just avoid that genre though.
 
Yes, just change the difficulty and when you finish a hard part, put it back up. Or just keep it down so you do not experience more frustration.

If you game enough, I think you develop more tolerance and do not get angry so easily. But, you can also just go to a different game you have more fun with and come back to it later.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
bread's done
Back
Top