Beating Games, Ending Games, Or Not

King of Posters
#21

Most games are way too long but I’m at the crotchety old man stage of my life so I find myself discovering games I missed rather than playing new releases. So when I do enjoy a game I make it a point to finish it. I’ve done all the stuff in RE2make.

Conversely with FFXII and Tactics Ogre I’m near the end with both of them and I think I started XII in 2015? Frankly I just don’t want the adventure to end! They’ve been there so long that they’re like little chapters of my life. Might also have to do with the lack of Matsuno titles. Like when Satoshi Kon died I liked Pefect Blue so much that I made a point to wait a long time before watching another one of this movies. And now I only have Paprika left and I don’t want to be out of Kon films to enjoy, because there won’t be any more.

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#22

I’m suspicious.

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#23

I chuckled, understandable. Turns out, when your down in the dumps because of no work, you can play mindlessly some pretty boring games. There was definitely a time in my life where I would play stuff that I didn’t like just so I could argue about them with friends. I am very glad that stage of my life is over. Man, how lonely was I?

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#24

So far this year the only game I even played was Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song and I didn’t get past the character selection screen. I just left it there for hours and listened to the music.

Keeping a guide open to play through a game (esp an egregiously padded one) is fun. Not boring

#25

i’ve been using a guide to collect all the keys in san francisco rush and it’s about as much fun as you can have while playing videogames tbh

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#26

I have never beaten Dark Souls, and I was having a fucking blast rocking DSRemaster.

I don’t think I’m learning anything, but man did it feel good to play. Then my TV broke. I uh. Yeah.

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#27

All y’all playing Sonic Adventure and not having an incredible time.

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#28

I have a backloggery page in part to keep track of what games I have, but also in part to remind me of how many I own and have not yet played or beaten. Because of this I probably finish 95% of the games I start and don’t drop within the first half hour or so. That’s probably not healthy! I also feel more satisfied this way and feel bad about certain games I started and never finished, so it is probably the best for me.

The one thing I have been trying to get better at is picking the right time to walk away. There is this horrible deal in gaming where they are putting the credits roll in along with a false ending for reasons I can’t quite fathom and I end up grinding through all sorts of bonus crap just to get to a real ending they hid behind all of it. I look at games like the Witness and MGS V where I went through so much stuff I didn’t enjoy just to try and see what they were really hiding, the result being me having rather mixed feelings towards things that at one point I was enjoying a good deal. Someone told me that Mario games now have as much stuff post-ending as before and I almost hate them on blind principle because of it. I may just adopt a “once the credits roll put the game down no matter what” rule.

#29

I stopped the witcher 3 an hour in because it seemed like it was just going to be sad and upsetting and knowing what the hell the battle system was felt like something I could put on a resume.

MGSV and Automata I am taking notice because those are two games I enjoyed the whole way through. I didn’t stop having a bad time with them. Same thing with BotW and Moddesy.

Hearing y’all didn’t like those I said to my screen “oh no you should definitely stop.”

On the flip you frequently hear about someone “getting” a Souls game after trying for years. And then they suddenly love it. That also makes me go hmm. There is a way to play those games that absolutely rewards and is maybe impossible to explain. Once you attune to it is yours and I am getting off the train.

#30

Also I am not even halfway through TIS-100 and I already had to toss away over 90 minutes of work on this most recent puzzle and I won’t be able to walk away until I consider this game beaten and send help.

3 Likes
#31

Isn’t that one of those games that’s supposed to be a Rubix Cube while listening to Led Zeppellin?

#32

def. not the silver bullet, but:

https://make-primary-monitor.software.informer.com/download/ look this weird .exe may be some kind of data mine bit coiner home phoner I can’t find it anywhere else I make no promises

but I use it on rig with 3(4) displays spread across a room and it has been a big help - the real bonus is putting a shortcut on your desktop and then you can assign a keyboard shortcut in the shortcut properties - it will swap primary to wherever your mouse is floating.

u made the right choice

#33

I hope not, I can’t stand Led Zeppelin…

It does look like this though:

tis-100-preview-program-1024x576.jpg1024×576 121 KB

So… yeah probably?

1 Like
#34

the curse awakened when we learned that a disproportionate amount of sales are driven by the minority that will obsessively play your game forever, telling their friends to play with them, and our actions to serve both them and the other 70% of the audience by splitting that baby right in half

1 Like
#35

I rarely finish games, but I’m trying to get a bit better about that. it’s not usually the game’s fault that I stop, because I’m pretty good by now about only playing games that I’m real sure I’ll like, but what happens is my current tastes swing wildly. so I’ll be all about playing RPGs for a while, and so I’ll play some RPGs, but then my interests will swing the other way much faster than my playing speed does, because I’m slow as hell with everything. I recently beat divinity original sin, which was a game I first started playing last june. before that, the last two games I beat were nier automata and dark souls 3. so I’m beating like one game a year, here. I’ve been playing baldur’s gate 2 for about two months now, and I’m maybe half way through it. that represents a mild success for me.

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#36

i sometimes play games i don’t like to completion or at least way longer than i should have when i’m not into them at all solely because they’re The Zeitgeist or whatever and it sucks

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#37

I do this too, but my relationship with it is less negative I think. Even if I don’t “enjoy” the thing per se, I like having a comprehensive personal experience with it to help form an opinion. I do the same thing with movies; sometimes I watch movies I know I won’t really like just so that I can articulate what exactly is wrong with them. And a lot of times I come out surprised that I liked a certain aspect of the thing, even if the whole on average was bad.

I suppose if it were more of a compulsion or affected my mood it might be a problem, but I try to frame it as a healthy curiosity. Like neggy, I find my tastes swing wildly with the weather or moods or whatever and sometimes I find good things this way that at first blush I didn’t think I would enjoy at all.

#38

When I see the credits roll, I consider it done.

I play fighting games by going through the arcade mode with every character to see their ending.

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#39

credit rolls definitely seem to give the best sense of completeness for me, or at least are the most satisfying point to put the game aside. There were some extra things I was thinking of doing in RDR2, but once the credits ended I was like “Yeah I think that’s enough for now”

Games like Skyrim on the other hand, completing the main quest feels no different than any random fetch quest, and so I typically just keep playing until like hour 70 when I artibrarily decide enough is enough. There’s no sense of closure to a story, just an empty feeling of leaving a meaningless list of chores unfinished

#40

Is it possible to make a game that ends in 5 minutes with the same sort of impact as a Final Fantasy? The struggle to complete a game lets you relate to the protagonist’s struggle, and by reducing the difficulty when given a choice you are reducing the game’s emotional impact.

I think a discussion of difficulty factors in here. I can’t count the number of games where I reach some boss who’s like “You did well making it this far!” and I’m thinking “no I just held down forward and the fire button.”

I consequently turned up the difficulty on Zone of the Enders 2 to the max, couldn’t get past the mobs in the first non-prologue level for an hour, and dropped the game.