Ever given up on a game for technical or usability reasons?

[Mr Light]

Oh I played the entire Zelda Phantom Hourglass game all the way through to the final boss fight. I tried it about 10 times and could never hit him, so I put the game away in disgust and never saw the ending.

 

[Skywalker]

I had to temporarily shelve Empire: Total War. Not because the game's buggy or anything, but it just runs way too slowly on my computer. So I need to get some more RAM (I only just found out my PC can hold up to 4GB ) and then a new video card, but my vid card is still pretty decent so the RAM definitely takes precedence.

 

[Twilight]

Frontlines: Fuel of War

The game is effectively broken. Multiplayer could have been fun, but then I wouldn't know, because it was almost bloody impossible to join a game.

Here's a typical experience with the game:

Click XBox Live Match
Wait 1 minute for it to search for games
Join an open game
Wait 2 minutes to join it
Read error message saying game is not joinable
Get thrown back to the main menu

Repeat 20x


It got marginally better after a patch, but the game is still useless and broken. I traded it in.


After almost an hour with the infamous Star Destroyer boss battle in The Force Unleashed I almost gave up as well. That boss battle is utterly broken.

 

[LutherSloan]

Star Trek new worlds jumps to mind, the game was a 3d RTS and on release it would crash constantly no matter what you did, the game was dumped into the wild and never patched, it was at best a beta build.

And to add icing to the cake there was no save game during the missions, and like most RTS games can you imagine playing a level for a good few hours only to have it crash on you just before your victory and then you had to do it all over again.

That game was broken from the minute it came out. I remember trying and not playing for very long. The no save feature was just brutal.

 

[Mr Light]

I also finally gave up on GTA4 about halfway through the game. I got so damn sick of failing missions over and over no matter how many cheats I used, particularly the car chase ones. Christ. How about some checkpoints.

 

[Timby]

I got so damn sick of failing missions over and over no matter how many cheats I used

I think that's a sign that you just suck at the game.

 

[Holdfast]

BOTF. The slowdown that occurred as you went on made it unplayable after a point

There was a patch for that.

It never fixed it completely. Fortunately computers fairly quickly advanced sufficiently in speed that it was no longer a problem. Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) the game is more unstable on newer computers with OS's it was never designed for, with somewhat more frequent random drops to desktop. Still, the speed problem is no longer an issue and autosave works fine.

I remember Anachronox (unpatched) had a game-breaking bug near the end. That was fucking annoying and ruined a wonderful game for me. I never had the patience to replay the patched version in full, so I never completed the game without cheating. Shame, because it was a great game aside from that bug.

 

[eastman23]

None in recent memory, but there was one that my mom and I tried to play when I was about 10 or so. It was called Torin's Passage and there was a bug about five minutes in that made it impossible to progress pass that point. Damned annoying because it looked like a good game.

 

[SiorX]

It took me almost eight years to work up the energy to fianlly finish Grim Fandango because of how difficult it was to get Manny to look or walk in the right direction.

Fantastic game, shite interface.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Star Trek new worlds jumps to mind, the game was a 3d RTS and on release it would crash constantly no matter what you did, the game was dumped into the wild and never patched, it was at best a beta build.

And to add icing to the cake there was no save game during the missions, and like most RTS games can you imagine playing a level for a good few hours only to have it crash on you just before your victory and then you had to do it all over again.

That's pretty much the only one that I can think of

Star Trek: Dominion Wars was Trek game that was buggy as hell.

Although I can't say that's why I stopped playing it. I think I just got bored with it and realized Starfleet Command is a much better game.

 

[FPAlpha]

Several games.. i'm afraid far too many to care to remember.

I've started to make it a habit only to buy a game after it had its first few patches and runs halfway stable.. i violated this rule with Dawn of War 2 and was promptly punished for it by an insane installation process, update process and the realization (after about 3-4 hours of installing) that it didn't work on my PC.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

Another game that comes to mind was Tomb raider Angle of darkness, this game was a complete mess right out of the box, plenty of random crashes to desktop, game not starting errors, sound freezes and graphical glitches up the wazoo.

 

[TheArsenal]

Empire Total War, currently. Seemed like a top game at first, but was full of game breaking bugs and crash points which couldn't be played past once restarted. I haven't touched it since March. However, that game has a massive patch coming out Monday, so I'll give it another spin.

I played a sandbox game called SimCity Societies. Nice ideas, but this game was pitiful - crashed like no one's business. They tried patching it once or twice, and as far as I know, abandon it.

 

[LutherSloan]

I forgot Splinter Cell: Double Agent for PC. A really good game, there is a point during a daytime mission in Africa where the game basically dies, and it is literally impossible to get beyond a certain area. At least on PC this game had its share of bugs. I'm not sure why, because I never had any trouble with the other three games in that series. Sadly I'll never be able to finish it, because UbiSoft hasn't released a new patch in 3 years, and almost certainly never will.

 

[Rii]

New entry: Battlefield Heroes.

Oh well, back to TF2.

 

[Immolatus]

star trek dominion wars, never could get it to work right and I really enjoyed the little bit I did play

 

[Alidar Jarok]

There was a patch for the game. I can't promise it fixed the problems because I think I only played it once after patching, but it might help

 

[MyCylon]

It took me almost eight years to work up the energy to fianlly finish Grim Fandango because of how difficult it was to get Manny to look or walk in the right direction.

Fantastic game, shite interface.

I couldn't come up with a game I could mention here. But you just reminded me of one. I'd never managed to get around to trying "Grim Fandango" when it came around and finally got hold of it not too long ago.

I started to playing and simply hated the controls. I found them to be very, very unintuitive. As a consequence, I barely even started playing the game and don't plan on trying it again.

 

[Brikar99]

I had a problem with "Half-Life 2" where after I got to the part where you lose all your weapons and only have that gravity gun or whatever, the game would crash any time those energy balls hit anything.

I almost gave up, but it worked fine after I updated the drivers on my videocard.

 

[Teelie]

A few games I've given up on the unplayability of the controls or technical issues. The only one that comes distinctly to mind with an absolutely unusable control scheme was Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex for the PS2. Glad I only paid $10 (new) for it. The controls are set up so poorly and complex (a nod to the name I guess) that I didn't bother trying to get past the first level after an hour or so of fumbling with them.