Regarding games I like on paper: I am always simply pleased that they exist, no matter what. There is no game that I like on paper for which I have no positive feelings. This isn't because these games always have something about their gameplay, graphics, or story that I like, it's just that I'm super positive about games that appeal to me. Dead Island was an absolutely broken trainwreck, and yet I fought the characters-going-into-T-pose hard-crashes in order to complete that game in co-op with a friend. Mercenaries 2 was a thin shadow of it's predecessor, but I kept trying to play more of it in spite of its enormous technical failings. Titan Souls has probably the most unnecessarily large and empty overworld of any game I've ever played, and I ultimately only quit because I just couldn't find another boss in its vast barren landscape after hours of searching. Alpha Protocol actually ended up switching all of my goddamn controller face buttons around towards the middle of the game (on PS3, mind you), but I couldn't get enough of its Obsidian je ne sais quoi.

All these games I inexplicably look back on with some fondness. Dead Island wasn't the open-ended RPG I hoped it would be. Mercenaries 2 didn't give me the silly Saints Row 2 of military games experience I dreamed of. Titan Souls didn't distill the scale and finesse of Dark Souls the way I expected it to. Alpha Protocol's combat wasn't the, in retrospect, MGSV-style combat I imagined. Ultimately, imagination is the key here: there are some games I want to like because I imaginedhow much I'd like them when I played them, but rather than experiencing them and deciding I didn't like them at all, I choose to remember them as better experiences than they were simply because I imagined they would be better experiences.

The unifying factor here is all these games had some weird character to them that I was intrigued and excited by. Dead Island was an FPS melee zombie RPG, Mercs 2 was a tropical destructive playground (two years prior to Just Cause 2), Titan Souls was a frickin 2D Dark Souls, Alpha Protocol was a spy RPG! These are all cool, unique, funky ideas, and in the end I'm glad that they exist in any form at all. The only way to ensure that I don't care about a game is if it just doesn't have any character.

I'll like just about any game with character. At least a little bit.

Both of my game examples have already been discussed in this thread, but the late Persona games and Fallout 4 are both amazing games that I've played to some degree of completion and have fond memories of. But I can't say I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay of any of them. I think that reflects much more on something yet-unidentified changing in my tastes, but it seems weird nonetheless.

@tinaun: The dadgames idea is really interesting, because as I move slowly into that target demographic, you're right that I increasingly identify with those player characters. And I can't remember ever playing an LGBT character (aside from the occasional RPG party member) whose identity as such had any bearing on the story. Only blank-slate characters who had the option of romancing whoever. Hopefully there'll be a breakout success that bucks that trend.

@kcin: You just made me hope that Obsidian recruits the MGS5 devs to build the spy-action game of my dreams!

InFamous. Every one of them. Especially First Light. Prototype is just straight-up poor, but InFamous feels well-crafted. But playing the game? It just isn't fun. I can't make sense of why.

A game that, on paper should totally been up my alley but didn't click for me was Remember Me. I don't really have a rational explanation for it but something felt "amateurish" about it. Visuals and style were great but there was a little "je ne sais quoi" that made it look off to me. The combat was interesting on paper but wasn't actually any fun to me.

Also, I agree with you on Overwatch. The characters are all so god damn charming. I had a blast with the beta this weekend.

@jordanxjordan: I have been reading a weekly blog about the Mass Effect series these past six months. It's written from the perspective of a writer who likes Mass Effect 1 a lot and does not like the sequels.There's more to it, but it basically comes down to the difference between slow, details-focused worldbuilding compared to immediate character drama. The first game is a lot of the former, and that's the reason I thought it was super boring for the first 80% of that game while he enjoyed it. That might be your reason? I recommend the blog, anyway. I think Bioware games are alright to play, but that's nothing compared to the entertainment value of complaining talking about them. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792

When Fallout 4 came out, I decided to replay Fallout 2 since I wanted to give it another chance since I haven't played it in years and remembered that I didn't like it compared to the first one (which is one of my favorite RPGs). I've more or less given up on beating it since it dawned on me that the game is way less forgiving than it's predecessor in terms of combat, and the pacing of the game in general feels slower. I really wanted to give FO2 a fair shake since it seems like people who know and love the original games prefer 2 over 1, but I just can't get myself to feel the same way.

Undertale. I like a lot about it. Just not playing it.

Everything about Dragon's Dogma should make it my favorite game of all time. But whenever I touch it, it just doesn't click for me. I have absolutely no clue why. Of course, it's been a hot minute since I last touched it. Maybe I'll give it another go soon.

I appreciate the reply, and I did finish the campaign. It wasn't very long, after all. It's been a few years now, so apparently there was more variety than I recall. I looked up a forum post I made on the game after finishing it, and it mentions that you fight Chaos at some point, but 2012 me didn't like fighting them a whole lore more than the Orks.

I had also apparently mentally edited out that the final boss fight is a QTE, so there's that going against it too.

@redhotchilimist: I'll definitely check it out! It's always rad to read an opposing view.

Alien: Isolation

I recently listened to Vince Staples album as well and asked myself the same exact thing. I gotta stop doing things like that. No more sleep!

Great article, Austin!

While there have been many games I got way too hyped for pre-release that I turned myself off of them none sticks out more than Diablo 3. I've bought that game three time-- PC, Xbox One & PS4--and yet each time that I think this is a new start and promise myself I'll endure through the beginning to max level a character I just cannot get further than about six hours in. I played a lot of the Diablo series as a kid. Diablo 2 dropped when I was 13 as I was just seriously getting into games and this shaped my entire future with games. I adore loot driven games with the opportunity of multiple playthroughs and a whole heap of content to experience I was well and truly hooked (And, in a similar way, why I got hooked on JRPGs)

Diablo 3 feels like a refinement of those original games. It's sharper, more coherent and looks fantastic and yet I felt boredom from the get go. Perhaps it was timing? My daughter is now 18 months old so time to truly dive deep into games is limited to late nights and the odd weekend she stays with family. The same old argument of time vs. money switching as you go from a youngster to an adult has always been in the back of my mind but I make time for Destiny with my three 300 light characters; I play SW:TOR as and when I can and still, Diablo haunts me enough that I actually continually convince myself I'll go back at some point!

@apothaeos: As someone who was always scared to jump into any Souls games, Bloodborne felt like a really good leaping off point to me. I wonder if that may have been their thought process? Something along the lines of "New hardware so let's remove some of the more arcane elements to introduce new people to the style of games we make." That could just be me projecting onto the game makers, though.

@austin_walker you're a pretty big fan of the Souls games, correct?

I'm not saying every shooter needs to do this--Team Fortress 2 leans so far in the other direction as to be charming--but it really helps to make me care about the world.

Can someone help me understand this sentence? I'm sure it's grammatically correct, but it left me a bit confused (especially the "as to be charming" part.

I definitely don't like Ocarina of Time and it is a very good game, I just can't stand it. I'm not really sure why, it just never grabbed me I suppose. And I never got into Skyrim, despite how much everybody in the entire world seemed to like it.

That Vince Staples album is one of the best of the year for sure.

Mark of the Ninja did me wrong.

I really enjoyed stealth-based games for a long time but after a while I got sick of the trial and error. I thought to myself "Man, I'm super good at this, this game's just being cheap. Just let me know what I'm doing wrong so I can prove that I'm actually doing nothing wrong".

Enter endless GOTY nominee Mark of the Ninja, the game so binary that if you actually did do something wrong... well, I assume you didn't cause it was Kirby's Epic Yarn/10 on the difficulty scale.

When it comes to Overwatch, I feel, @austin_walker needs to look at it differently

This game is less about "How well can I play with Genji?" and more about "What are the team make up's and how can I counter them, are they aggressive or defensive?". Once you learn the counters, you can play fairly dominatly.

After my weekend with I learned the game is a lot more about counters and picking the right team. When the enemy had Bastions/Tjorn/Symmetras I just switched to Winston who disrupts all of that and dominated the field and the game. I SUCK with Winston, people classify him as a Tank but he doesn't really tank as much as he disrupts certain charcters.

Sure, knowning how to play a certain charcter is important, but I believe this game's skill cap isn't about twitch. It's about strategy. It's far easier to understand the plays and match up's in football than actually be on the field playing football, it's something hard to master but easy to understand basics.

A game where my mind is far more powerful than a 19 year old micro master is something i'm very excited for.

@trionix11: Oh, I ALSO mean that I won't be able to keep up with that strategy. Like I said, by the end of the three days I played, players were rolling out combos and counters. In the same way that I don't have the time to stay well skilled at a competitive game right now, I also don't have the time to keep up with meta. Just ask my dusty collection of Netrunner cards.

@tmthomsen: I was saying that unlike Overwatch, Team Fortress 2 doesn't develop a deep lore to set its action in, and in fact it's spent years using that fact to comedic effect.

I have smashed my face into the Souls series and its weird Appalachian family tree enough times to disqualify me from doing diving headbutts in the ring.

I get it, they're incredibly solid, tight experiences with majestically built worlds, but I'm not good at them one iota. And I can't commit myself to very granular levels of improvement in a game like that, a game where I'm solely fighting myself to improve, as opposed to a game with a larger ecosystem in which I can use /other people/ to learn as much as I can learn from myself.

@austin_walker you should call your question thing....Question of the week!

Another solid question from the "Austin Asks" segment.

A game I should love on paper but actually can't say that I enjoy/like? Xenoblade Chronicles/Final Fantasy XII..

Before I get roasted over an open fire, I've seen game footage and tried to play them both, and I think the stories are very well written, but I just cannot get over the MMO-like combat. I'm an avid player of FFXIV, and I enjoy the hell out of it. But when it comes to single player JRPG experiences, I want turn-based combat, not real time, auto-attack mediocrity. It feels less and less like a game because all I'm doing is managing cooldowns.

I have a very old school background when it comes to JRPGs. I MUCH prefer the gameplay style of Final Fantasies like IV, V, VI, IX, X, and hell, even X-2 (Though not the story or the way the game is laid out. Just the way battles work, please and thank you.) to the button masher combat of Kingdom Hearts and The Last Story or the snoozefests of FFXII or Xenoblade Chronicles.

I'm going to give X a go since it seems more in line with Phantasy Star Online than it does with the previous game, and thank the heavens that the 3DS Dragon Quest remakes are coming west. I'm going to have all of the JRPGs to play and none of the time to play them.

Great article Austin, looking forward to the next one. (Also, #AnyoneButRoman)

The Overwatch section read almost exactly like Patrick would've written it: Looking for and giving meaning to things that just don't need it. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's always fun to see people see some grand picture that's never there. It happens all the time with movies, why not video games too?

I might get hate for this, but mine is Wind Waker. I've tried so many times to play through that game, and I do like it and I know it's good but for some reason I can't quite put together, I've never been able to get into it enough to get very far.

GALAK-Z is my 'I should love this but I don't' game. I love the 'stylistically poorly Americanized 80s anime' aesthetic they're going for a la Robotech, I love roguelike game mechanics, I love dumb awesome spaceships that turn into giant robots and all that jazz. I really like anything that lets me shoot a billion missiles en masse at all kinds of curved angles.

But I'm SO BAD at playing it.

There's something about the fast-paced nature of the gameplay combined with the tactical finesse required in positioning yourself to shoot the enemies, not get shot by the enemies and not plow yourself into lava constantly that, when controlled with Newtonian physics and inertia based movement, is utterly impenetrable to me. Everything about the game on paper is stuff I should love, and I really want to enjoy the game because it seems like the sort of thing I could sink hours into, but I can't for the life of me get past the 'tutorial' stages. With the season-based checkpoint system this means need to replay the early tutorial levels from scratch when I inevitably die to driving into a wall of lava and have to restart from the beginning of the tutorial season, and it sucks.

I thoroughly dislike Tomb Raider 2013 and I can't tell you why. Everything about it should be my thing but I found the entire experience flat and lifeless.

I actually just had a similar conversation with a friend of mine.

Instead of a specific game, honestly, I have an issue with Bethesda RPG's in general. I know that a lot of people love them for a myriad of reasons and as a writer and aspiring developer myself, I greatly appreciate fully developed worlds that have stories to tell within them (two great examples of this would be the BioShock and Mass Effect series), but I feel that most of Bethesda's games are too developed, if possible.

I know, I'm one of those people, but I get so overwhelmed with games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 that once I'm done with the tutorial, I have no clue what to do or where to go. I'm a very story-centric gamer and when it comes to those types of games, I feel like I could complete the main plot and still miss out on so much content, which I understand is the greater point of Bethesda RPG's but as someone who rarely plays the same game twice (unless it is a multiplayer focused title like a MOBA or Hearthstone) I don't really get the point of sticking around in the same world when there are so many other games out there with much more interesting stories to tell.

To counter my own argument, I understand the value proposition that Bethesda titles offer to people who play games on a budget and as a college student, that is something I need to take into a much higher consideration than I do right now, I just have horrible self-control.

Going back to Mass Effect, I believe that trilogy incorporates all aspects of their world into a fully developed narrative that that shows the player what the universe has to offer all in the main plot, without leaving anything out. It felt massive yet incredibly tight at the same time, regardless of all the controversy that surrounds the ending.

Austin I love your Articles, mainly because it often seems like you've stolen my brain. What draws me to Overwatch is that it's a setting that was clearly crafted with love and care, and I'm very sad we might not be able to learn more about that very interesting world, because it's all going to be about the fast paced, multiplayer matches. Not that those don't look completely fun, but I'd love to see more of it.

As for the game that I should love, but just didn't? Darksider's II. Like there's nothing particularly wrong with that game. But for some reason, and reasons I've never really been able to explain, it just never sucked me in the way the first Darksider's did, despite being so much bigger in scope, something just always felt like it was missing and I could never figure out what it was.

@austin_walker I feel you. This game is going to have an interesting meta (I don't know what else I could replace the word "interesting" with, lol). Well, if you get the itch to play I think playing support is always fun. Mercy and Lucio were pretty dope and didn't require much skill to be decent with.

Dishonored for me, could never get into it for some reason despite trying it like 4 times. Maybe Ill give it another go before 2 but every time I try that game I just don't like the way the game feels for some reason. I'm also not someone who hates stealth games and has the patience for them. I wonder if I need to get further in.

Most recently, I would say Ni No Kuni. I completely adore Studio Ghibli (just bought that stupid expensive Miyazaki boxset, can't wait to get in it), and I sort of sometimes like JRPGs. But man, I just thought it was so boring and archaically designed (but so pretty). I was going to say The Witcher 3, but the other day I decided to play another hour of it (I'm only ten hours in but stopped playing it in the summer) and I think I'm starting to like it. I really don't like the characters or world, and I especially dislike the combat, but something about the individual mission storytelling and dialogue keeps me intrigued.

The most recent game I just didn't like that I should have was Fallout 3. Something about looking like a twitch game, but really rolling the dice behind the scenes (something I really like in my turn-based RPGs) just felt icky.

Bonus- the gaming system that seemed tailor-made for me (but I totally hated) was the DS. I was a huge GBA fan, but the form factor of the DS just didn't work for me. My family has had 5 systems total from the DS family, and it wasn't until my kids got their 2DSs that I finally felt comfortable gaming on it (which, duh... it's a supergigantic GBA with an added touchscreen).

Speaking of not making audiences happy, Brendan Keogh's "Videogames Without Players" and Mattie Brice's "Kill The Player" both think about what games might look like without our focus on the player's pleasure--and what that focus has lead to in design and aesthetics

(Aw crap, the site ate the comment I spent like 20 minutes drafting, so here's a shorter vers)

I've been making weird indie games for years, some of them got featured on some major sites like Kotaku and RPS. I've been following the "Don't worry about amusing the player" rule for a while.

Usually the games I make don't have conventional visuals or any sort of challenge. They'll also look really *weird*.

I've also made obtuse games before, one of them was where you had to steal a mech, but you couldn't read the buttons because you were a dog, and you had to start the mech using a really complicated startup sequence that was relayed via text messages. It was basically "Keep Talking and nobody explodes" but for one player, and with mechs. And it was really cool but nobody could figure it out.

I like being obtuse with the game content, but generally if I make something I want the player to see it, and if you make getting there hard then they'll quit. It's a weird push-pull of being hard enought to be a challenge, but something they get on the first try.

But generally, I don't worry about whether the player is having a "good" time. I try to make what I'd want to see in a video game, and that typically resonates well.

I like this, Austin. I like you.

Can you think of a game that you don't like despite being able to recognize that its parts are totally solid? Or, said differently: What's a game that you don't like even though on paper you should totally love it?

I was never able to make myself finish Metro 2033. I played it at a time in my life where I loved dark, moody atmospheres and first person shooters, it should have been right up my alley, but I just didn't want to play it as I was playing it. Strangely enough, I finished Metro Last Light in two or three days and thought it was pretty good.

Fallout 4, although I don't really know if I want to put that on here. That game is a well-made Bethesda game and I think they did a lot of interesting things with the formula, and I've always loved that formula, but I think there are some pretty glaring flaws with Fallout 4 other than the usual Bethesda problems. It feels like there's "less" in Fallout 4. The world feels smaller, my character is predefined so I feel like there's less room to believably create a goody two-shoes or a total asshole and everything in between, and the pacing just feels totally off. Instead of being funneled straight to Megaton or something, you're basically just given a settlement and you're left kinda directionless for a little while. Still, those problems aren't exactly what's turning me off. I'd just really rather be doing something else when playing Fallout 4.

I can think of a lot of other games that I've just never been able to get into, but not ones that I would say I particularly disliked. Baldur's Gate 2, Legend of Grimrock 2, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night are all games I should have loved as soon as I really started playing them but for some reason or another, I never found myself obsessed with them.

But I'm weird and picky. I never know what I want until something comes along and hits all the right notes at all the right times.

@gaspower: Thats one tournament though, Blizzard balance tends to be a series of "well now this gets to be the strongest". Like how they completely fucked the WoW balance for pvp so you were one of 3 different combinations of classes or you didnt stand a chance past a certain point.

Ha, yeah. As the short final portion of an already short campaign, it's definitely easy to forget. Especially as the introduction of a new enemy type doesn't change up the combat much. Man, that final QTE...

For me, it's the card game Hanabi. It's got a brilliant design. Each player holds their cards face out so everyone but them knows what their hand is. You can spend resources to give others information about what they're holding, or get resources by discarding (hopefully) unneeded cards. Players work cooperatively to build stacks of cards in the same color in order.

The problem is it's just so stressful.

Perfecting a game of Hanabi is a difficult affair, and seems heavily dependent on luck of the draw. I've never managed to do it, and I've played some pretty tight games. There's not a lot of room for error. There's also not enough resources to know everything in everyone's hand, and inevitably you're going to be forced to discard blind. That's a tense moment, because you might be discarding something that's required for a perfect score without knowing it.

The tough part is trying to keep not only what you know in your head, but what everyone else knows. Do you spend valuable resources to let someone know they're holding a card? Depends on if you remember whether someone already told them. You can only give them partial information (i.e. only color or only number) so are they going to catch your meaning?

Trying to keep all this up, making difficult choices and trying to keep the state of the game in my head, is just too much for me. It isn't much fun. On the flip side, I know people who are able to let go and treat it like a party game, and they have a blast. I just don't have the midset for it.

Answer: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I loved the first PC Deus Ex game, having played it multiple times, and enjoyed the sequel that made it to consoles (not great, but definitely playable). With Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I just couldn't get into it and the only reason I could come up with is the art style. Something about the look of that game, and especially the main character, put me off in a big way.

Rogue Legacy is a game that I was really skeptical of, even while it was receiving endless reoccurring praise when it came out. I finally bought it on sale on steam and didn't enjoy it at all. It felt like it hit the perfect combo of feeling like I needed to grind and procedural design and action that seemed at odds with each other.

I have a great distaste for requiring grinding in real-time action games. It always feels like a bad trade off so that a game can have more replayability in exchange for less tight encounter design. It's turned me off in stuff like Darksiders 2 and Ys Origins, and it did the same thing in Rogue Legacy, except the grind is also tied to dying which is a intrinsically negative feeling thing. I always felt like getting better meant dying a lot, rather than feeling like each death was a chance to improve. After my first few hours, I extrapolated out the rest of the experience and decided to avoid it.

The encounter and level design also felt at odds with the character. You have this early Castlevania style character, with a slow swing and constrained movement, but it felt like every enemy would fly at you through the ground without much chance to eliminate them. On top of that, your ability to block was tied to an MP meter allowing only a couple blocks until you ran out. I guess you're supposed to rely on the dashes more, but the skill chests I managed to get on my early runs weren't dashes! Even when I did finish a room, it didn't feel like I was beating a proper challenge and experiencing a ramp up towards an end point, it just felt like one of many interchangeable rooms.

I know a lot of people love it, so I'm not trying to say it's bad. I even know that it's a game that you can master on a completely skill based level without engaging in the leveling stuff. I just had an experience that really turned me off from wanting to continue to invest time into getting better at it.

The game that always comes to mind is definitely Far Cry 2. I know you like that game and I want to love it too 'cause it's a ton of fun but damn is a pain in the ass.

I only really liked Metal Gear Solid on PSX. Yet, I disliked where MGS 2 went with it story and all the other ones have been equally disappointing. I think Phantom Pain started to swing back into something I COULD like, but honestly I just don't like Kojima's sense of sexist mischief - It is not funny or amusing to me.

I can appropriate the game play MGS brings, but honestly the stories, characters and Kojima's playful/unfunny perverseness is more than a little annoying to me.

Nice post Austin. That Times New Viking track is dope. You might like this Chastity Belt song "Joke".

So, for me, the game would be Elite Dangerous. I normally love space combat and customize-able ships and upgrade paths. But with that game something about the way activities payed off bothered me. Everything either seemed like a low stakes grind or super high-risk high-reward. The low stakes stuff was a bore and I'd end up losing my ship constantly in the high risk stuff.

@austin_walker: Summertime '06 is an awesome album, one of the best of the year in hip-hop. You should also check out Czarface if you haven't, they are a rap group led by Inspectah Deck and their theme is old timey superhero stuff. Their new album is great.

Any Elder Scrolls game. While I dislike post-apocalypse settings like Fallout, I love fantasy settings, and Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim all take place in a fantasy world. I also am a big fan of RPGs, and all the gameplay systems of Morrowind greatly appealed to me when I first read about them. I cannot get invested in any of those games however, and I think its due to the open-endedness of the worlds, and that I am a solitary person exploring that open-ended world that causes me to lose interest.

On paper I should love everything about the Total War Series. Its historical. It looks great. It has a deep strategic layer and an exciting, rewarding tactical layer. I just kind ever finish a campaign in those games. It feels like I get to the point where each turn takes 10+ minutes to complete and I just can't push myself to keep going.