Aaaaah, such a long list of console games.🙁 Maybe I just suck (bad eye/hand coordination does not help). 😄

OTOH, with some games that others found quite hard I managed to finish them in one go.

Somehow Duke Nukem series and Unreal, i really like them, but have not get far, only few levels. But all Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Hlf-Life, Far Cry and Serious Sam series games i have finished.

Monkey Island, The Dig ja Sam n Max also comes in mind, love them, but have really never progressed. But thats because i do not play those kind of games.

Warcraft 1 and Dune 2 .... if they had full modern mouse control, they would be absolutely lovely games.

There's several updated versions of Dune 2 to choose from. Afaik they add C&C style controls, network play, skirmish mode etc.!

Sam & Max Hit the Road - I love Sam & Max. I love the comics, I love the short-lived cartoon series, and I love what I've seen of the game, but every time I take a stab at playing it, I decide I need to really sit down and spend a crapton of time giving it a "proper" playthrough (explore everything, do everything) - so have never made it past the first couple areas. I also have the Telltale episodes but have barely even started them because I want to play the original game first.

I should just watch a speedrun sometime.

Jet Set Radio

it's all fun and games until you have to spray the entire city in 999 seconds and your biggest foe are the controls.

xjas wrote:

Sam & Max Hit the Road - I love Sam & Max. I love the comics, I love the short-lived cartoon series, and I love what I've seen of the game, but every time I take a stab at playing it, I decide I need to really sit down and spend a crapton of time giving it a "proper" playthrough (explore everything, do everything) - so have never made it past the first couple areas. I also have the Telltale episodes but have barely even started them because I want to play the original game first.

I should just watch a speedrun sometime.

Btw.. There also was a Sam&Max cartoon, you know ? - I've seen some VHS cassettes of it on eBay once.
So I think it must be from the mid-90s or so (predating Telltale). Haven't watched any episode of it myself so far, however. 🙁

Jo22 wrote:

Btw.. There also was a Sam&Max cartoon, you know ? - I've seen some VHS cassettes of it on eBay once.
So I think it must be from the mid-90s or so (predating Telltale). Haven't watched any episode of it myself so far, however. 🙁

I want to say the cartoons were from the mid-'90s? I definitely saw them before Telltale were around. I used to rent them from a VHS rental place back when those still existed. I have the DVD box set (all of three discs of it) which seems to have been released by Telltale as a promo in the mid-2000s, but the cartoons themselves are much earlier.

Come to think of it, I might have gotten the DVD set with the Telltale episodes. I can't remember where I picked it up anymore.

Honestly, Sam's voice from the cartoon is the canonical Sam voice for me. The actor totally nailed it. The whole series is on Youtube if you want to check it out (and now I'm not getting anything else done this afternoon, thanks for that. 😜 )

Future Wars as dumb as that sounds,

I always enjoyed the game because it was one of the more complex games that would run on my floppy only 512kb Tandy 1000rlx when it was still new.

I borrowed Monkey Island once but I actually had Future Wars

I found it hard to get affordable games that would run until years later when my folks got our first multimedia 486

xjas wrote:

Sam & Max Hit the Road - I love Sam & Max. I love the comics, I love the short-lived cartoon series, and I love what I've seen of the game, but every time I take a stab at playing it, I decide I need to really sit down and spend a crapton of time giving it a "proper" playthrough (explore everything, do everything) - so have never made it past the first couple areas. I also have the Telltale episodes but have barely even started them because I want to play the original game first.

I should just watch a speedrun sometime.

Reminds me of the first and only time I played Toonstruck. Christopher Lloyd does a great job in it, the animation is very good, etc. I think I played it sometime in 2016 for about an hour, set it aside for later, and never touched it again. Need to fix that sometime, and do the same for a number of other games.

Half Life, I always ran into Headcrabs, go figure, maybe one day I'll beat it finally 😦 Not until at least I manage to deal with these pesky headcrabs 😠

My title for this thread is "Games you really wanted to enjoy, but just couldn't get into". 😀 Because if I'm really enjoying a game, I'm making progress. If I'm not making progress, it's because I'm not motivated enough, which means the game doesn't have the hold on me I'd hoped.

Duke Nukem 3D every episode but 1
Quake I every episode but 1
Blood
Shadow Warrior
pretty much every Sierra and Lucas Arts graphic adventure
Thief: The Dark Project
Deus Ex
Planescape Torment
Dungeon Keeper
X-Wing / Tie Fighter

clueless1 wrote:

pretty much every Sierra and Lucas Arts graphic adventure
X-Wing / Tie Fighter

Interesting. I loved all of these. What do you find difficult to enjoy about them?

gdjacobs wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

pretty much every Sierra and Lucas Arts graphic adventure
X-Wing / Tie Fighter

Interesting. I loved all of these. What do you find difficult to enjoy about them?

With graphic adventures, I inevitably get frustrated by puzzles that turn into pixel hunts or don't make logical sense. And I feel disconnected from the characters because I'm clicking once, then watching them walk. With RPGs and FPS games, there's more direct control, so I feel more immersed. And again, the puzzles. When they're intuitive and just make sense, they are rewarding. But it seems more often than not, you have to get lucky by taking a bunch of random clicks and illogical leaps.

With X-Wing and Tie Fighter, there was too much emphasis on realism and not enough on story. I could not feel connected with the plot because there were too many keyboard shortcuts to remember. I spent most of my missions having to look up (in the moment, which ends up doing you in) what key to press in specific situations, which ended up disconnecting me from the story.

In both cases, I like the idea of the games, but the execution doesn't work for me: frustration>entertainment. And I'm a sucker for good reviews and highly rated games, so I still bought these games when they came out, knowing I'd probably play them 1/10th through then give up.

thepirategamerboy12 wrote:

xjas wrote:

Sam & Max Hit the Road - I love Sam & Max. I love the comics, I love the short-lived cartoon series, and I love what I've seen of the game, but every time I take a stab at playing it, I decide I need to really sit down and spend a crapton of time giving it a "proper" playthrough (explore everything, do everything) - so have never made it past the first couple areas. I also have the Telltale episodes but have barely even started them because I want to play the original game first.

I should just watch a speedrun sometime.

Reminds me of the first and only time I played Toonstruck. Christopher Lloyd does a great job in it, the animation is very good, etc. I think I played it sometime in 2016 for about an hour, set it aside for later, and never touched it again. Need to fix that sometime, and do the same for a number of other games.

Oh yes, Toonstruck! A magnificent piece of works, indeed. Also, the translators did wonders in keeping the puns intact.
My sister and me loved to play it together in the 2000s, when I saw it a the public city library.
- At the time, they still had a corner with old donated PC games. Including Monkey Island, Wing Commaner series and so on.
In parts, even with the complete box sometimes. Playing Toonstruck was very demanding, though.
At the time, we played it on my brand new Athlon Mobile based laptop with integrated DX8.0 graphics.
DOSBox was at v0.6x, so we had to use the lowest quality and many frameskips.
My DOS PCs at the time weren't even able to play Toonstruck at full quality.
I seriously considered building a DOS-only Pentium II PC with ~400MHz, just to get Toonstruck running smoothly in best quality. 🤣

clueless1 wrote:

Planescape Torment

I think the plot develops very slowly in the beginning, but once I got through approximately 1/4 of the game, I was absolutely captivated. In the end I loved Planescape: Torment so much, I even entertained the idea of getting a tattoo with the Symbol of Torment.

clueless1 wrote:

With graphic adventures, I inevitably get frustrated by puzzles that turn into pixel hunts or don't make logical sense. And I feel disconnected from the characters because I'm clicking once, then watching them walk. With RPGs and FPS games, there's more direct control, so I feel more immersed. And again, the puzzles. When they're intuitive and just make sense, they are rewarding. But it seems more often than not, you have to get lucky by taking a bunch of random clicks and illogical leaps.

Puzzle solving isn't as important for me, so I don't usually feel bad about keeping the hint book close by. I'll give it a good stab, but I won't beat my head up about it. I find I enjoy the story telling a lot more that way.

clueless1 wrote:

With X-Wing and Tie Fighter, there was too much emphasis on realism and not enough on story. I could not feel connected with the plot because there were too many keyboard shortcuts to remember. I spent most of my missions having to look up (in the moment, which ends up doing you in) what key to press in specific situations, which ended up disconnecting me from the story.

Yeah, it's definitely a flight sim game. How does it compare for you with, say, WC?

gdjacobs wrote:

Yeah, it's definitely a flight sim game. How does it compare for you with, say, WC?

WC series is one of my all time favorites. Easy to get into with fewer controls than X-Wing, but still simmy enough to not feel like an arcade game. Heavy on the story, which sucks you in right off the bat. Difficulty is not too bad, though it gets really challenging the last set of missions. The add-ons were way too hard though. Secret Operations 1 and 2 were so tough I gave up about 2-3 missions in.

I'm guessing you're not a fan of Falcon 3.0?

gdjacobs wrote:

I'm guessing you're not a fan of Falcon 3.0?

I had it, and it was fun for a few days figuring out how to take off, navigate and land, but it wasn't something that held my interest for long.