Nipah

I said this elsewhere, but essentially it looks like a “Turn your brain off” movie which kind of hits the notes that Borderlands is known for while also having a bit of a fun house mirror / “We’ve got [game] at home” feeling to it.

Overall though, it feels… forced. From the limited bits you can hear, I don’t think Jack Black really works for Claptrap (no reason to not just keep the original VA outside of “Jack Black is so in right now” or some shit); the dialog feels overly filtered, if that makes any sense… Like too many people edited it so that it achieved maximum ‘for the lolz’ (not that the first two games (the ones I actually have experience with) were the peak of writing, mind you); and I don’t have any feelings one way or the other for Kevin Hart, but for this role I think he was also a bad casting choice (but what do I know, I’ve only seen a quick trailer… maybe he nails it).

Action looks decent enough, and I do appreciate that (at least from the looks of things) they’re pushing Cate’s character as the lead.

Assassin’s Creed Origins the gameplay started getting repetitive very quickly. Even though I liked the ancient Egyptian settings and the beautiful graphics, I couldn’t follow the nonsensical plot.

Man, that was the only one of the newer style that I liked… Bayek was pretty cool, and it felt ‘fresh’… it doesn’t hurt that it ticked off two of my preferences: exploration and combat (say what you will about hiding in knee high grass, I love me some stealth). Some of the bits did rub me the wrong way, like no 1-hit kills, but I liked the weapon choices and combat options enough that I had a good time overall.

That being said, I can’t for the life of me remember anything about the story of the game so… I guess I just turned that part of my brain off after a while.

The more recent ones went too far in terms of world size, so it went from “I wonder what’s over that hill?” to “I’ll never complete filling in this map so why even bother?”… which sucks, because Kassandra was pretty cool too (not sure how the viking character was done because I didn’t even bother with that game after bouncing off Odyssey).

Shit, I forgot about GTA games in my reply…

I’m with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.

Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden… but in a game like GTA? Yawn.

For games that are in genres that I’d actually play:

Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just… underwhelmed. I didn’t really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.

I’ve since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me… but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don’t really get it because I can’t get over the hump.

The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don’t like the combat, honestly. I’ve tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn’t manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn’t having fun.

Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is ‘going backwards is hard’ in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn’t get the English PSP port… that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn’t resonate with me as much as the other ones did… Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn’t hit the same.

Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn’t do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or ‘walking sims’ or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don’t tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.