[Oddey]

I've played a lot of games I found extremely tedious and irritating to play, game I personally found impossible to enjoy. A quick list of titles I can think of right now: Beowulf, Wii Carnival Games, Men of War, Rust and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.

Beowulf, I lost patience with almost immediately. The game begins with one of the most tedious quick-time events ever: the button pressing is highly imprecise and starts over after one single mistake. And for what? Just so Beowulf can chant a bit and get his men to row a bit faster. I did eventually finish it, only to find that these were a core part of gameplay: moving stones requires this event, singing in halls requires this, almost everything that isn't combat requires it. At last though, I got to a fighting section. And this was somehow even worse. Almost instantly, your weapon breaks and you need to get a new one from conveniently placed sword stashes, which breaks nearly as quickly. Which wouldn't be nearly as big a problem if you didn't have to watch the ass of 12 other NPCs to make sure they didn't die. After that, I stopped playing because a game where you mostly do quicktime events truncated with miserable combat that mainly consists of switching weapons just didn't seem worth it.

Wii Carnival Games just mocks you for its questionable controls and feels just as cheap as real carnival games do. Not a great experience.

Men of War has some phenomenally bad voice-acting. This is largely due to it coming from a small Ukrainian company, which is sort of forgivable. But the game itself isn't even that good. It runs pretty badly on most computers, control of units is fairly erratic, most armored vehicles cannot be trusted to do anything useful without manual control. The physics engine is especially frustrating, with tanks being able to push over trees but finding small rocks completely impassable. Balance isn't great either, with a clear upper hand going to the Russians, who sweep the field with their better tanks and better elite infantry. One might think standard infantry and artillery would be their foils, but artillery is so hamstringed by absurdly short range that it hardly makes any difference and standard infantry is only marginally cheaper so you may as well not bother. This was a game I put a surprisingly large amount of time into, thinking I could master it and then trying mods that allegedly fixed the game. It became quite clear to me that the game was beyond fixing though, so I haven't played it in nearly a decade now.

Rust, when I played it, was slow, boring, buggy and just unfun. I turned it off after just a short while.

Warrior Within is one of the biggest disappointments I've ever been through in all of gaming. Yes, even more so than Munch's Oddysee.

When I first played Munch's Oddysee, I was still fairly blank on what to expect in a 3D game. My previous experiences had given me small environments of precision platforming. Munch's Oddysee felt open and free by comparison and at the time, the humor was good enough for me.

Warrior Within, however, I didn't play until recently. I had just returned to Sands of Time, its predecessor, and played it through from start to finish and enjoyed it immensely, finding it one of the best gaming experiences I'd ever gone through, with the story meshing well with gameplay and the story itself being surprisingly strong, even with such a deceptively simple setup. Then I put in Warrior Within, already hesitant at the cover art.

I was almost instantly disappointed when I saw the loading screen was blooding dripping down a strange symbol. And then the menu opened with metal blaring. Not really what I was hoping for. Part of what I liked so much about Sands of Time was its tone and setting: mature, dealing with personal growth in a very real manner, but light, able to do it with a few smiles along the way, in the form of witty banter. Warrior Within lacks this from the very word go.

Then I saw Shahdee and I probably should have just stopped playing then and there. I didn't enjoy a tutorial that I had to replay 30 times just to beat which coincidentally also taught me almost nothing. But I did play through it and found the game continued in more or less the same vein of angst-filled metal and edgy bullshit. So I stopped.

Warrior Within is exceptionally disappointing because it clearly runs on more or less the same engine as Sands of Time, but rather than exploit this to make the game better, they made the game worse. It's as though someone bought you a lovely car, then said they can make it better and just tore the body apart, took all the seats out, replaced them with bigger engines and then painted it all black with red lines of blood. It may be faster and it may be more exciting, but it's stupid, uncomfortable and definitely not the better game. Warrior Within, for me, is such a disappointing followup that had I played it in isolation, I might have enjoyed it, but knowing that it's the sequel to Sands of Time, I simply cannot find it in me to give it another chance to prove its worth.

Those are the games I particularly dislike. There are some others and there's definitely games that are less functional and arguably worse from design and technical viewpoints, but these are ones that I personally can't stand.