GregHowley.com

Having recently gotten stuck in Eternal Darkness, I started thinking about the games in which I've gotten stuck, why that might be, and whether it's the fault of developers or my own. So here follows a list of games I've never finished. Sometimes it was because I couldn't get past a certain point, other times I simply lost interest. These are mostly games I've never written about, having never beat them, so there will be some mini-reviewage going on here.

• Brothers in Arms: The Road to Hill 30 (PC) I actually don't remember much about why I quit Brothers in Arms. I think I just didn't like this style of First-Person shooter. Maybe I don't like the World War 2 shooters at all. I don't know - this is the only one I ever tried. Bottom line is that I wasn't enjoying it enough to keep playing. I think I probably got about five missions in.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS) I'm a huge fan of Castlevania games. Have been since Castlevania 3 on the NES, which is still my 2nd favorite, right after Symphony of the Night on the original Playstation, which was perfection. Dawn of Sorrow did some pretty interesting things with the stylus. Most notably, when you defeat a boss, you need to draw a mystical symbol, or seal on the screen to keep it dead. This generally involves quickly fumbling for the stylus, but isn't really that bad. The first seal is something simple - like a triangle - but they get progressively more difficult. The stylus is also used for breaking blocks once you get an item that lets you do so, and for rearranging rooms slide-puzzle style, which was a really nice touch. But at one point, I'd travesrsed the entire castle 2 or 3 times and found nothing new. So I checked an online walkthrough, a practice I've come to hate more and more each time I'm forced to do it. It said that there was a door that I had to open by using a specific spell. I ran around the entire area it said many times, using that spell, and never found where I was supposed to go. Completely stuck. I can't imagine how the game's developers expected people to figure out what to do here.
• Condemned: Criminal Origins (PC) This is a game I wrote about after I stopped playing. Granted, the combat was excellent, and having guys sneak up behind you was pretty frightening, but the game overall was a poor port or a less than great game. Annoying, and frustratingly difficult. That's why I quit this one.
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (PC) Call of Cthulhu started great. The story was good, although much of what made H.P. Lovecraft's writing great is that the imagery was all in your head, and actual graphics can't compare to what you imagine when reading his stories. The injury and sanity systems were great, but the greatness stopped there. The latter half of the game is an exercise in frustration. And at the end, I kept dying. I later learned that there was a bug in the PC version of the game which actually makes it so that it's impossible to complete the game. Nice.
• Diablo 2 (PC) This is one of three games on this list that I know people will call me crazy for quitting, and I quit even before the end of the first chapter. But I think a lot of the game's appeal was the ability to play it online with others, and as I've stated before, I hate MMOs. There was a boss who killed me, and after that I decided that the game wasn't fun enough to be worth my time.
• Dragonshard (PC) A RTS based on D&D? Sounds like a great idea? Right? Wrong. I hated this game. The way you built structures was lame, and you couldn't do much with them. This one I stopped playing simply because I didn't like it. At all.
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (GC) I actually really liked this game, and I'll likely write up a review at some point. I'll possibly even go back to it at some point. The insanity effects are the best part of the game by far. But the Ulyaoth Black Guardian at the end of chapter 9 kicked my ass. As soon as it started summoning zombies, I was completely unable to harm it.
• Far Cry (PC) Far Cry is actually a really good game. Possibly the second best FPS I've ever played, right after Half-Life 2. And it's the only game on this list that I've actually completed. So why is it on this list then? Because the final battle at the end of the game was so incredibly hard that I had to cheat. The only time I can think of that I've ever used a cheat code in a game. Anything is easy when you're invincible. And once I'd run through for about 30 seconds with invincibility on, the game was over. But damn this game was hard.
• Freedom Force (PC) After playing and enjoying Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, Brandon recommended that I try its predecessor. So I did. Not bad at all, until I hit the one level where that effeminate wimp El Diablo has to face off against an entire organized crime family singlehandedly. Difficult, but not impossible. But he's got a retarded fanboy following him around. And if the fanboy catches a stray bullet, you lose. That, my friends, is just about impossible.
• Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords (PC) I was really excited to learn that this game was being released sans DRM. I think that's a great idea, and I bought the game from a first-party vendor to support the game developers, rather than waiting and buying a used copy as I so often do. Sadly, I didn't like the game at all.
• Grim Fandango (PC) I know, I know. I'm liable to get my ass kicked for quitting this game - I know that everyone and their uncle loves it. I still have it, and I'll probably go back to it someday. I just couldn't figure out what to do at the point where you have to get Glottis to climb the marrow extractor. I now know what I was doing wrong. When he climbs up, I'd viewed that as a cutscene, and waited for it to play out. I didn't realize that I could move while he was up there. Too bad I'd already uninstalled by the time I figured it out.
• Katamari Damacy (PS2) This game was a lot of fun until I got to somewhere around the sixth level, at which point the time kept running out long before I could reach the goal. Perhaps the problem is that I never quite mastered that stick-wiggle zoom thingy.
• Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time (DS) From the start, I was fairly unimpressed with this game. It got good reviews, but I couldn't help but feel that it had been created for a much younger audience. So when near the end I finally beat what I assumed was the last boss, I ran through things, forgetting to save, assuming the game's ending was near. When Bowser popped up and killed me, I realized I'd have to go through all that again, and I couldn't bring myself to do it. So the game ended up on EBay.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (PC) This was the first (and currently only) Metal Gear game I've played. It was actually pretty good, and I enjoyed all the supremely odd moments. But a fight against three Metal Gears at what I assume was the 85% point of the game was just too hard for me. The PC version was a terrible port from the PS2, which I assume was a big part of the problem. The sword I'd just gotten was actually impossible to use with the USB joypad I had.
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (PC) The game frustrated the crap out of me. I played the PC version, and perhaps that was my mistake. The combat was the truly infuriating part. Of course, I tried playing the third game in the series on the PS2 and that was even worse. Wow - I'm getting stressed just thinking about these games. I'd better move on.
• Resident Evil: Code Veronica (PS2) I'm a huge fan of the Resident Evil series. Although Resident Evil 4 was amazing, Resident Evil 2 is still my favorite, due largely to the moments that scare you so hard you jump out of your chair. Storywise, Code Veronica should have been numbered as the third game in the series, and the game they released under the title "Resident Evil 3" should have been some weird side-title and been categorized with such lackluster titles as Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil Outbreak, and Resident Evil: Dead Aim, none of which I've really played. Unfortunately, Code Veronica was the type of game that tended to put you in situations where you simply couldn't progress without restarting the game. Once, after many hours of play, I had to restart from the beginning. When that happened a second time, I called it quits for good.
• Starcraft: Brood War (PC) Yes, I've never actually finished the last couple missions in Brood Wars. The Starcraft games are amazing, and I've replayed them 2-3 times, but those last couple missions are just so difficult that they cease to be fun. I probably could get past them if I dedicated my life to it, but why would I?
• Thief: The Dark Project (PC) I loved Deadly Shadows, which was the third game in the series, but I just couldn't stomach the first or second. Perhaps they were just too dated. After finishing the first mission, I put the game on a shelf.
• Temple of Elemental Evil (PC) So many things were done right in this game, but it was just so buggy, as I wrote previously in Temple of Elemental Evil - Why it was Great, why it Stunk. Shortly after writing that, I went back and reinstalled it with the Circle of Eight patches. They really fixed a number of things, although I never got to find out whether they'd fixed the bugs with the elemental nodes, since I was forced to skip them. Co8 added a bunch of really nice content, but amongst the added items was one which prevented me from reaching the nodes. I did get to the final boss in the game, a demigoddess with near-infinite hit points. And only through a bug in the game was I able to nearly beat her, although it took hours of tedious gameplay. But then I made the mistake of engaging in conversation when she was nearly dead, which allowed her to heal herself back to full hit points. That's when I quit that game.
• Trauma Center: Under the Knife (DS) This seemed like a really innovative and fun game, and honestly, it is. But I'd never dreamed it could be so maddeningly difficult. I barely made it past the first half-dozen missions before I got to a point where my patient had aneurisms popping in his heart far faster than I could tend to them. I put this one right alongside Far Cry, those being the most difficult games I've ever tried.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (PS2) This game had a feel very much like KotOR, albeit much darker, which is understandable given that it's a Vampire game. The dialog and plots were very well written, but much like Neverwinter Nights and KotOR, I hated the combat system. Sorry, Bioware. Still, that wasn't my problem. My problem was that probably about two thirds of the way through the game, I was told to go to the second floor of a restaurant. I spent what seemed like forever running around that place, inside and out. No staircase anywhere. No door I'd missed. There was no second floor. WTF??? And it wasn't a mission I could skip - it was central to the game's plot - not a side-quest.

So that's it. Twenty-one games. And fully two thirds of them have titles with colons. What's with that? Maybe I should rename this site GregHowley.com: Blog of Wonder.

But seriously, I'd never realized before I started writing this just how many games I've given up on throughout the years. And looking more closely at things, it seems that the most frequent thing that got me was game difficulty. Ten of the games I quit due to difficulty, five because they weren't worth it or weren't fun, four because I got stuck on a puzzle or didn't know where to go next, and two due to game bugs - and I'm counting Temple of Elemental Evil as a bug, since the game is so so buggy.