I don't really know how to put this, it might sound strange... but there are some games which I can't bring myself to play. When I try it, it's like my mind gets sick and weary. Sometimes, if I even think of playing them or just watch a gameplay video, I feel kind of queasy...

Examples would be:
- Survival/Sandbox games llike Minecraft, Terraria, Don't Starve. Which is strange because when it was released, I loved playing Don't Starve but now I can't anymore.
- Isometric (a)RPGs like Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Fallout 1,2, Torchlight
- "Funny" adventure games like Sam&Max, Edna&Harvey, Deponia, even Night of the Rabbit
- every platformer 2D or 3D from Spelunky to Psychonauts
- every MMO

Games which I absolutely had no problem with, because I played them during the last months and it was awesome:
- "serious" Adventure games like all Blackwell games, Resonance, Gemini Rue, Wolf among us...
- Sci-Fi games like Nexus: Jupiter Incident, AI War, FTL
- 3rd person RPGs, like Fallout 3/New Vegas, Elder Scrolls >3, Gothic 1,2,3.
- Beat'em'up games (multiplayer) like Street Fighter 4, BlazBlue, Super Smash Bros, Little Fighter 2

Yeah, I don't really get it and I'm curious if someone experiences the same or something similar.

In some cases, one part of the game makes me not want to play the game at all.

Two examples:

Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Every time I think about this game, I remember the game's 2 frustrating mandatory stealth sections, which I find to be a deal breaker.

Chrono Trigger. An otherwise well-designed game, except that there is one part where, in order to continue, you have to mash a button repeatedly.

In both cases, removing those sequences would greatly improve the games in question.

On another note, I find that I can't get into Baldur's Gate 2 because of the real-time with pause combat system, the large amount of interrupting dialogue, and having too many things working on timers. I do, however, enjoy experimenting with the game's mechanics (more so than actually playing through the game).

From the top of my head: Alpha Centaury and Falcon 4.

2hardcore4me, seriously. I love deep and complicated games but I just can't understand the very basics of them.

Wait a minute, Edna & Harvey counts as "funny"??? Just by looking at the screenshots, I think they are psychopaths ! (Of course, I might be wrong but the general style conveys that impression to me!)

Anyways, I don't have an "allergy" to some kinds of games per se, but I just can't bring myself to play "time-consuming" games when I'm not on holidays (aka games where I have to try multiple times to get a stage right, or time-consuming RPGs) even though I'd love to, because I'm afraid I might become addicted and spend so much time on these that they would negatively affect my real-life. I also don't like horror games or games with creepy elements in general, because I'm not very fond of this genre (but I thus don't buy these, while I buy time-consuming games, despite the fact I won't play them any time soon...)

At any rate, you're not that weird, as I've seen some other guys in the forum not wanting to play/not liking certain genres (one for medical reasons, the other I have no clue...) so I guess you can be relieved with that fact....

Dark Souls - everything about it is so bad it makes me feel physically sick.

GTA4 - Brought at release, after hours on the phone to R* got it to work for around 10 minutes (and then another 1-2 hours to re-install the system to get rid of their crap DRM). Several years later I played a cracked version, wish I hadn't bothered as its was pretty damn poor, and hour later it was removed permanently.

Anything Steam (or Origin or similar) only, I have no interest in that business model and will not support it or anything to do with it ever, including publishers who insist on using it exclusively.

Are you using the default values for autopause?

The combat in Infinity-engine games, including BG2, became much more pleasant to me when I turned off party AI (I rather decide myself what exactly each party member does in combat) and added some more autopause options (ie, when it will pause automatically). At least things like:

- pause when you detect an enemy (so that you can instantly prepare for a fight)

- pause when you detect a trap (so that you can disarm or avoid the trap and not accidentally step on it)

- pause when an enemy dies (so that you can select a new enemy to attack for that party member)

- pause when your weapon becomes unusable (usually this means a party member has run out of arrows, bolts or darts, so you want to pause to give him/her more of them, or change to a melee weapon or spellcasting)

- pause when a party member is critically injured (so that you can start healing them and possibly move to safety behind others)

- pause when a party member dies (probably you want to load an earlier savegame at that point?)

I think those were the ones I enabled. Then the combat was nice and easy to comprehend what was happening, and react to it. If you want even more pausing, you could possibly enable also "pause after each turn", but that was too much pausing to my liking, because quite often I didn't want to change anything at the end of each turn.

Naturally you can always pause the combat also with the spacebar, but I don't recall really needing it anymore with the above settings.

Overall, I even started liking the autopause combat system more than pretty much any other combat system. I usually prefer turn-based combat in RPGs, but the autopause combat flows better, and pauses only when something interesting happens.

I think this is my answer too. Civilization-series, Master of Orion/Magic, UFO: Enemy Unknown, manager sims etc. kind of games usually overwhelm me somehow. I feel like they should be the kind of games I'd like, but I have hard time to get in for some reason. I like normal RTS games more, as they feel more constructed and I usually know what I am supposed to do in them in order to proceed.

Rise of Nations is an odd case though. At first I though it is an Age of Empires kind of game, but it has some kind of Civilization kind of metagame on top of it all where you have to care about negotiations, decide where to attack etc.


As for serious flight sims... I used to love flight sims (and other military vehicle sims), back when they were somewhat simplistic (except some Microprose sims maybe). Games like Red Baron, F/A-18 interceptor, the original Gunship, Gunboat etc., just what I wanted.

Then I bought Falcon 3.0c, and tried to play it. I read the manual, tried to learn it... but I never could really get into it. I felt overwhelmed by the controls alone, and frankly I didn't find the user interface intuitive, how to look around you in the cockpit etc. It was all kinda clunky, I felt I was fighting with the controls constantly even though I had a good flightstick... in fact I think I even bought a HOTAS system for the game, but I still had to occasionally touch the keyboard and use the mouse during combat I think, so it wasn't really a full HOTAS experience (knowing what the acronym stands for, after all).

After that I concentrated only to WWI and WWII era flight combat sims (because they have less controls and more 1-2-1 dogfighting), space combat games (Wing Commander and Freespace series etc.), Descent series, Strike Commander etc. I haven't even dared to try Falcon 4.0, its predecessor already scared me away from modern flight combat sims.

I can't play any first person shooters, games where the camera resides in the small of your characters back, or games where you have to drive a car. I have to reduce the mouse movement speed in a lot of third person games, but at least I can play them.

I wanted to be able to play Max Payne - no such luck. I was ill 10 minutes in.

I guess the new Mad Max game is going to be a no go for me and I have a friend who's raving about it..........

p.s. I'm fine driving a car in real life - thank goodness :p

Alternatively, and as I prefer nowadays, play solo. Much more fun.

The problem is that, with auto-pause features enabled, the game becomes irregularly jerky. When you are in combat, the game keeps pausing at arbitrary intervals, which makes the pacing feel disjointed. In a game like Wizardry, by contrast, there is a nice rhythm where the game nicely alternates between command entry and command execution phases.

Also, this doesn't solve the other issues with the game, like constant dialogue that interrupts the flow of the game.

One particularly annoying thing in the game is one part that consisted of an unskipable cutscene followed by a part where the game arbitrarily didn't let me save followed by a battle that I lost. The result was having to watch the unskipable cutscene *again*.

Another annoyance is not being able to rest outside in town. There is no good gameplay reason for that restriction; if the game lets me rest in hostile areas, I should be able to rest in friendly areas as well.

On the other hand, and I discovered this when using bards, turning off the AI *did* improve my enjoyment of the game. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that I am still forced to rely on the game's pathfinding instead of being able to control my characters manually.

One other thing that is annoying: inventory management. It's especially bad when the game doesn't let me trade between characters because they are "too far away", and when characters who die drop all their equipment. Little annoyances like that (including those included for the sake of "realism") add up and make the game less fun to play. (In the case of dead characters dropping equipment, it makes me want to reload when someone dies even if resurrection is readily available.)

Yep. But honestly I'm not sure that it's the game itself that is complicated or that I'm too used to "modern" controls and interface the makes AC allmost unplayable to me.

One more game: AI Wars. Only played the demo but this game makes AC look basic like the original C&C.

3D platformer genre.
I have problems with depth perception so find it difficult to judge the Z plane in games.

I prefer party RPGs where I can experiment with different kinds of characters at the same time. Unfortunately not all of them, but at least some kind of mix of warriors/thieves/spellcasters/whatever.

That's what annoys me with e.g. Diablo 2 (a game where you control only one character), or Nox for that matter. I'd like to play it with several different classes to see what they can do and how they develop... but that would mean having to restart the game from the scratch for each different class, and replaying all those boring levels all over again (even if they are partly randomly generated in Diablo 2). You could say that is replay value, but some kind of forced replay value. I wouldn't replay all the levels because I want to, but because I'd have to in order to experience something I missed on the first run.

Some single-member RPGs still work if they let you practice and develop any skills you wish, so you can experiment with all abilities if you want. I recall e.g. Ultima Underworld being such a game, there I didn't consider it as a problem that I was restricted only to one player character.

The Elder Scrolls series (except Arena) are like that.

Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back are fun to solo as your one character can develop in all 4 classes. (The game is designed for a party of 4, but soloing it is actually quite manageable.)

Dwarf Fortress.