as i’ve played more games i’ve begun to get a better understanding of what i can intellectually appreciate–i.e., play for a little bit, say ‘this is good’, eventually drop and never pick back up–vs what i really enjoy, aka ‘wow this is dope wait why is the sun coming up what time is it’
in category B, ‘page turner’ sorts of games, i have these sorts of things:
modernish FPS campaigns – my first ‘real’ experience with fps was at age 13 when i played halo at some local rec center’s video game night… i wouldn’t shut up about the game for the next 2-3 weeks, it immediately hit some kind of primordial joy center in my brain. a good fps will pretty much always find me finishing it. halos, half lifes, new wolfenstein. once i get around to playing them, probably new doom, alien isolation
TRPGs light on the difficulty. recently, chroma squad found me plowing through the game for four nights or so nonstop, i couldn’t really come up with an explanation for why the game gripped me so much, but something about lite-strategy gameplay to keep the mind active while fun little cutscenes push the story along. too much difficulty and i tend to find it more of a drag i think
bite size sui generis indie games. i don’t have a better name for this, but blendo games are very very high up in my ‘do i want to keep playing this game’ scale. same with something like space funeral, which was so freaking cool (it’s almost passe to call it weird). just something that’s super out of the ordinary and doesn’t give itself time to falter
charming puzzle games with a story. recently, puzzle agent; previously, vvvvvv, machinarium. puzzles keep the mind active, the ‘charm’ keeps my interest in each subsequent scene. i felt machinarium and puzzle agent 2 tended to drag at the end, so maybe this appeal is limited for me.
open world games with good traveling and waypoints all over. these aren’t really actively enjoyable in the ‘grinning because this gameplay is so damn good’ sort of way but they do trigger a kind of completion fetishist feeling of accomplishment in my brain. thinking like assassin’s creed, prototype. not 3d fallout because the traveling in those sux. i enjoy these sorts of games more than i should given my taste in other games. they incentivize dicking around with sidequests and ignoring the story which i am a fan of.
knowing what u like probably helps to save time and money and have more fun in the long run. what do u like
I have spent far too much time completing (save for random repeating side quests) Bethesda lawnmower sims instead of finishing other, better games. I am a garbage person.
I finish games with discrete levels. I’m far less likely to finish a game that has an open world. I’m also less likely to finish a game if it has an economy or character stats. Most of the games I’ve finished in the past year have been shooter campaigns or adventure games with the exception of the Witness. I haven’t finished MGSV, Bloodborne, or the Witcher 3. The last lawnmower game I finished was Saints Row IV, but you can play that like Mass Effect 2 if you like.
for some reason this seems to have been the year where i stopped actually bothering with finishing stuff and just knowing when i’m satisfied enough to quit
i’m a big fan of clearing 10 hour-ish platformers and turn based puzzle games/roguelikes apparently though
Whether I finish a game seems entirely random and has little to do with my appreciation of its quality. Mostly these days I think it has something to do with whether I can make decent progress without working consciously to improve my skill. If I hit a wall of effort that’s usually it for me, no matter how much I otherwise like the game (Titan Souls and Bloodborne are good examples)
This to a degree, but I am getting pickier as I get older. STGs I’ll knock away at until I can 1cc them, as well as anything arcade-era/-like. Platformers usually get finished unless they are particularly tiresome. Racing games are what I’m probably most reliable with - just recently blew through Ridge Racer V, and I play Codemasters’ stuff almost religiously.
I am unbelievably guilty of dying five or six hours into an RPG and completely losing motivation - this is why it took me a decade to finish FFVII, and why I have yet to finish any other FF aside from XIII. I managed to power through that for Etrian 1, so I guess secretly prefer dungeon crawlies? Action RPGs usually hold me until the end, if the gameplay is interesting.
I have spent too much time thinking about this, but maybe don’t have much to say. I like beating games, not ‘completing them’ as there is NO game I’ve seen that avoids having at least one BS acheevo for if they have acheevos.
But I like beating more ‘tight’ games overall. I feel like my tastes are fairly broad if a shade off the mainstream. I think we tend to beat the games we like. I like sandbox, action, platforming, random stuff, fps, and on and on. The kinds of games I’m more likely to start and not finish an RPG though as they tend to feel like time sinks and can be easy to put away in favor for something else.
I probably played over a hundred, but these are the games I “finished” this year (as in seen the credits roll):
We Love Golf
Import Tuner Challenge
Undead Syndrome
Kaiten Patissier
Yukkuri no Meikyuu
Ogre’s Phantasm Sword Quest
Grand Knights History
Street Supremacy
That’s a Camelot sports game, a Genki Racing Project game, an indie 3D Metroid, an 8bit puzzle platformer, an action dungeon crawler, an indie fantasy EDF, a JRPG boardgame, and another Genki Racing Project game. Huh. Can’t really see a pattern yet. All of these are Japanese games though. I think I’m a weeaboo.
I also mostly beat linear FPS games, but I beat most things that are under 10 hours. It just happens that most of what I am interested in that group is linear FPS games.
I give open world games 30-40 hours usually, and if that doesn’t do it then I don’t beat it.
I think if I have to manage more than about a half a dozen party members in an RPG it fatigues me greatly and leads me to start losing interest/will to play (I’m thinking about Pokemon here, though I do realize if I made better party-building choices earlier on I’d avoid a lot of these problems).
goofy plot with just enough weirdly affecting emotional content to make me mildly engaged, i haven’t really gotten into any straight narrative games more than five minutes long in years so it’s mostly just to have something to focus on to help recontextualise the boring parts of gameplay
distinct little modular themed levels rather than metroidvanias or open worlds
feeling like your choices don’t really matter, like you’re just bouncing around inside a series of rooms or whatever and there won’t be a cartoon character to yell at you if you push a different cartoon character off a ledge. inscrutable moral attitudes in general.
not too long, focused, no sidequests, good pacing in general which is maybe most important thing.
i don’t complete that many and definitely not that many out of things i have to actually focus on so i got very specific. >1hr games i can remember finishing in last 3 years: kero blaster, no one lives forever, astro boy omega factor, darkwing duck on savescums, wind waker which flunks all of these except the first one.
I tried to keep a list of games I’d played and completed this year, updated infrequently. Here’s what I remember finishing:
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Asemblance
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night DISTRAINT
Grand Theft Auto V
Grim Fandango
Pachinko Man
Silent Hill: Homecoming
Soul Reaver
Soul Reaver 2
Super Mario 3D World
Spaceplan
Yoshi’s Wooly World
So…I have no idea what kind of games I will actually play to completion. I can usually tell by reading about it, and I can definitely tell within the first 20 minutes of playing a game, but it’s not consistently any one thing.
Undertale was the only game i finished in 2016 (back in january). every few months after that i loaded my save file and walked around talking to NPCs and watched the ending again.
there were probably like ten games i played around an hour of, and very few got much more than that