Checkers. You start with only one piece type and they go to the trouble to make all those squares and you only use half of 'em.

Pretty much any competitive online game. It's not that I don't like competing. I just feel bad for the others if I win and I feel bad for losing if I lose

Battle Royale and extraction shooters

Uncharted. Dislike might be a strong word. But I don't particularly like them.

The story is serviceable. Fine if you gameplay is great.

The fighting mechanics are serviceable. Fine if the story is great.

The climbing and puzzle mechanics are annoying. It constantly feels like you're not doing what the game wants you to do, even if it should work.

The characters/character interactions are the highlight of the game. But it's not enough to make the game great.

Zelda breath of the wild - it's one of the worst Zelda games I've ever played and I've played so many. There were so many bad decisions made with this game from weapons breaking to getting rid of traditional dungeons. It's a great open world game but a terrible Zelda game.

The Horizon series by Guerilla Games - These games are good for the most part, however they suffer from long stretches of boring open world where you have to fight robot dinosaurs with underpowered weapons. The whole point of the combat is to find weaknesses with the enemies and exploit/attack those weaknesses, but the game never at any point explicitly explains that concept or focuses on that concept. It expects you to just understand what to do. Not to mention the absolutely stupid grinding for mats to make new weapons and armor. Melee combat is terrible, the story for the most part is pretty good but man does it take forever to pick up, it overstays it's welcome. They are technical powerhouses but just so grindy and boring.

First person games

I think Portal is the only one I'm fine with, probably because there's not as much action. First person puts me on edge and not in a way that I really appreciate. I also really like to be able to see the character in general.

To that end I also don't really like horror games, but I don't think that's as divisive an opinion.

Unless Pokemon counts, I don't think I have ever enjoyed a JRPG. I have zero idea what people see in these except weebs getting horny over anime girls.

Final Fantasy VII, honestly. And it's not like I haven't tried to like it but it's just not that good to me. I'm a long time FF fan and I have played all but XI, but VII misses me. The music is bomb, for sure, and I love a few of the characters.

It's also talked about SO much by so many in the gaming community and I'm really just tired of hearing about it. I wish Square gave this level of love and attention to some of their other FF titles.

Souls games, cod and most other FPS games namely the multiplayer, god of war, RDR2

Bloodborne.

Don’t get me wrong, the game has fantastic mechanics and great art direction.

HOWEVER. The game relied too much on its lack of hand-holding in order to be enticing but it came out just raw fuckin frustrating. You know what’s cool? Finding new areas by exploration and not by being told it’s where you’re supposed to go. You know what’s not cool? Being handed a list of names of places with no idea of what is in each of them and being expected to know where to go. I got really frustrated with a boss and quit for a few weeks. I come back, kill the boss, and learn that there’s no new door out of the boss arena. I open the fast travel list to find a long list of names of places I had been to but had no fucking idea which one I was supposed to explore next. That is the absolute worst design choice I have seen in a universally loved game. Fuck Bloodborne.

Yes, I will absolutely buy it when they decide to remaster it for PC.

I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.

The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.

Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn't do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.

I'm gonna get a lot of flak for this...

I really don't like Sekiro. Like, at all.

I played the inspiration for years (Tenchu) and loved that so much, but Sekiro just feels hollow in comparison. I know it's not a stealth game, nor is it trying to be, but I can't help but feel like the cliffs and stuff are just "cheap" ways of making the game more difficult. Idk, maybe I'm just not ninja enough lol...

Speaking of stealth, Dishonored. I REALLY wanted to love this game. It's just not open enough for my taste. There's only usually one main walkway to the objective (I say walkway, but there are of course roofs and stuff you can teleport to - I'm just saying, I wish you could get on the actual roofs of buildings Assassin's Creed style or explore the city open-world style). Cool story, cool theme, but the gameplay falls through for me. I felt the same way about MGS4.

Also Red Dead Redemption was meh for me. Could have been better, could have been worse. Undead Nightmare was great though.

I realize this is an overgeneralization I'm making.

every game made since the ps2 was officially retired. I don't hate them because they're hard and I'm just not getting the handle of gameplay. I hate them for specific reasons:

1. the reliance on online modes. games used to be a singular affair between the player and the game. since 2008 online modes have become increasingly necessary to a requirement. with online modes comes a need for a server dedicated to that game. so what happens when the company shuts that server down? you're sol. and piggybacking on that
2. games are released buggy out of the box. before a game wasn't published until it was done. now it's released on a target date and patches get released along the way. so if you happen to be in a position where you have the physical media but no internet you could have a broken game and not be able to do anything about it. I just think about that situation with the tony hawk game where the manus didn't ship the game on the disc and players had to download the entire game as an "update". and what's going to happen when that server shuts down?
3. games are moving to downloads instead of on physical media. I'm a full believer in you buy a game you own it. some game publisher just said recently that players shouldn't own their games anymore. gaming is going to move to a streaming model where you own a service (console/platform) and games will move on and off it when a licensing deal expires. sorry I don't want any part of that.
4. games made that don't require you to be online to have any kind of gameplay are becoming rare. I'm the game player that plays the game just to play the game and doesn't want to play against another human player online. my competitive juices don't flow that way. I'm perfectly fine playing against the game's ai.

tldr the internet killed gaming for me.

The last of us was a boring shooter with unlikable characters who continually did things i wouldn't do so i couldn't invest myself in their story. The gameplay didn't save it.

As a huge SoulsBorne fan, Elden Ring.

I was really excited for "open world dark souls", but I feel like this turned out to be a bad combination. The difficulty is all over the place, so you fight enemies that are really strong (which is fine), but then other areas become completely trivial as a result.

And with how many bosses they put into the game, the quality of each individual fight suffered immensely imo. I think the bosses in previous games were just a lot better designed (on average, there are of course stinkers in Souls games and good ones in Elden Ring).

There's also a ton of gank bosses, which is just lazy. You could use the summons, of course, and it almost feels like a lot of the difficulty was designed around players having that extra strength, but at the same time, the enemy AI and movesets are designed around fighting a single person, so it breaks the combat.

All around, it was just a huge disappointment for me personally, and I uninstalled it right after I beat it, whereas I have hundreds of hours in DS3.

All the recent PlayStation Studios games.

GTA games are the epitome of shallowness, for me. The story is always so vague and not interesting, you never get attached to characters. Gameplay is a boring loop, but its strength has always been being some sort of theme park. But it's 2024 and "hop onto a game just to go fast on car and shoot a couple of civilians"

Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Like Pokémon, nintendo developers know fans will buy new games regardless of how much new content there is to it. There is no legitimate reason for the game to be so close mechanically to its Gamecube entry, and I find it an insult to long time fans.

Breathe of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are at the top of that list for me. The "old" style Zelda games are objectively better in terms of pacing and exploration. And I absolutely hate the weapon durability system in the better ones. I've read their reasoning behind it, but they're wrong. It sucks and makes the game more about hoarding the good weapons and avoiding combat whenever possible, which is boring as shit.

Hard agree on the Zelda example.

Survival elements without base building?

Combat that feels closer to Dark Souls than Zelda? Odd.

I'll add in a genre rather than a game: Battle Royal games.

We used to play a variety of games. Halo, warcraft, Smite, League of Legends... Now I have no gaming friends left as they refuse to play anything other than Apex Legends or the latest greatest Call of Duty.

I played Call of Duty Black Ops III and I don‘t understand how anyone can enjoy that multiplayer, it‘s such an overloaded piece of crap lol

Campaign and Zombies was fun af though.

Also, any sad dad game. I don‘t wanna be sad when I play videogames.

Souls games.

tHe PoInT oF tHe GaMe Is ThE sTrUgGlE

So turn the difficulty up.

Almost anything first person. It makes me incredibly nauseous, which is really unfortunate because there are some really neat games that use the mechanic. I recently sold my copy of Echo Night since I couldn't play for more than around ten minutes at a time. I also couldn't complete the tutorial in Half-Life because it made me so nauseous that I had to spend almost the entire day in bed. Weirdly I'm perfectly fine with Metroid Prime.

The 2 that you mentioned and God of War 2018.

I honestly don't get what people love so much about that game, the combat is simple and kinda sloppy, boss and enemy variety is non-existent and traversal is a joke.

I get that the story is good but it's not so good that I can look past everything else, it even has a few big issues like the amount of times the game throws a dumb obstacle in your way to justify some fetch quest like the black mist.

ditto rdr2 - its less a video game than it is a graphic novel read by a semi-literate slow talker

the entire dark souls series is also ruined by clunky controls. give me a Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Skyrim, etc . . . fps controls pls.

X4 fails because of its controls too. Imagine making a flight sim where you can't invert the Y axis, or an FPS where the shift key can't be bound to sprint.

Kingdom Hearts. I like action RPGs but KH is too weird and I don't dig the whole Disney crossover thing at all.

Dragon Quest XI - I am a huge fan of the 8-bit and 16-bit DQ games. But I just couldn't get into DQ11.The atrocious music probably didn't help.

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.

Burnout Paradise - this game is unplayable. You have to either look at the mini-map the entire time, or memorize the map.