Younger users of Lemmy: Did you ever love a game that you just really sucked at?

NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 102 points –

So I was watching a few youtubes and remembered how the vast majority (of like the ten) nes games me and my sister had were hard as all hell. I loved to play Little Nemo and Street Fighter 2010 but I am pretty sure I never made it past the third level of either. Let alone infamously hard games like The Lion King.

Which got me thinking. Basically every game for the past 20 years has been designed around instant gratification and being accessible. We outright had to make a new concept "hard but fair" to account for games like Dark Souls that are designed to be difficult but beatable as opposed to putting you in a death spiral if you hesitate too long on a hard jump (hello Ninja Gaiden).

So do the younger folk even have a concept of a "favorite game" where you likely never experienced more than fifteen minutes worth of content?

103

Do I need to explain any further?

That’s why I only play aram, urf and 5v5 lmao

Ah, I went to play Pokémon Unite instead (even tho Nintendo and their Switch & Mobile only approach)... Bluestacks is an option but not a particularly good one...

And then there's Tencent - but you encounter Tencent kinda everywhere right now so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

So the thing about these linds of games is that you theoretically can master any Champion/Pokémon, but there are some that you just intuitively understand. Keep trying different characters until you find one you gel with in Standard/non-Ranked matches, then get a feel for how to improve your runes/items by playing Ranked and studying your shortcomings. It’s how I found out that I love to play walls and use items that optimize walls for damage. (Iceborn Gauntlet, Sunfire, Demonic Embrace type stuff for LoL and Rocky Helmet/Shell Bell/Drain Crown for Unite.)

literally all fighting games. started with smash, loved to sf4, then dbfz. sucked hard but still f opening fgc content to this day - planning to buy sf6 when i get the chance/time

KSP. Never managed to even land on the Mün without a fast and violent end to the crew, but I loved building spaceships.

The best thing I managed to do was to achieve an orbit around Kerbin.

I'm pretty sure I saw a YouTube video where some actual rocket scientist said that KSP was amazingly realistic, so you having achieved anything at all seems incredible to me! I just know I spent a few hours with that game and never got anything to not explode. Some things would launch but oscillate out of control and explode eventually.

Oh no, my rockets oscillated like crazy. I just strapped more boosters and struts and hoped it got out of the atmosphere before it got Kraken'd.

I could do manned missions to Mun and Minmus, but I don't think in my hundreds of hours of play I ever set Kerbal feet on another planet. I did launch some probes though.

Shoot same! I swear to God it was like the controls were broken on every rocket I ever made. No matter how symmetrical it was I felt like I was always fighting the controls.

Did, and still do enjoy fast-paced shooters from time to time but I absolutely suck at it. Sometimes you just need to do something exciting without putting too much thought into it and not having a care about whether you win or lose, what your K/D is or whatever. I just find it a nice way to unwind from time to time.

I brute forced my way through learning starcraft, it took literal years to get out of the bronze league, probably my most played game of all time. Can't wait for immortal gates of pyre.

After years of dominating everyone at my high school in LAN parties, we finally got the Internet at my house and I played my first few online games.

I got my shit wrecked 10x in a row. Haven't played SC online since lol

Yea StarCraft 2 was this game for me. I first saw some beta gameplay from TotalBiscuit and just got hooked into it and I was so ridiculously bad. I still play every year around Christmas for some reason

Sort of relevant, I had a friend who was really into super smash brothers (brawl, I think). Talked a lot about the competitive scene, different moves and tactics etc. He didn't have a Wii or Switch though, we were all pretty broke.

Anyway, some money came buy and he was able to grab a Switch and SSB finally. Super keen.

And then he just kinda sucked at. It was pretty sad, he almost immediately stopped being excited about it and the Switch, which he had bought new, was barely used a couple of months later. I was kinda worried about him because he wasn't mentally in a good place before that and talking about SSB seemed like an outlet for him (none of us in the mutual group played or cared about the game).

This was a while ago, he's doing much better now

Smash Brothers is one of those games where you think you're good casually but it has such high skill cielings that even other casual players can curb stomp you. It depends so heavily on what sort of games you played growing up. (Assuming you don't out in effort to practice I mean.) I (used to) be able to reliably win against my wife because she never played anything growing up, but my friends that played a lot of fighting games growing up easily beat me.

I feel like I had this experience repeatedly in RTSes. I don't think I quite had the same dive as my friend did, but still

Dunno if I'd consider myself "younger" anymore (who am i kidding, i ain't THAT old lol), but...

If we count really old games: the OG castlevania's. Didn't grow up during that era, but thanks to handmedowns, i got to play pre Symphany Vania when i was super young. Love them, wish i was better at them tho. The collections are sitting in my steam library, and maybe some day, I'll beat at least one of the classics.

For something more recent(?) tho, i love me some Touhou. fangames, offically made games by Zun, fan games in the style of Zun, ya name it....but MAN do i suck at the actual bullethell Touhou games. i can make it past two or 3 stages, but then the boss destroys me and I'm like "I CAN choose continue, nothing but pride is stopping me...but also, if i can't manage this far without continuing, how bad is the rest gonna be??" and wuss out lol

I am a young user of lemmy ( I am in high school ), And, I really suck in games, but I love the blinding of isaac: repentance,I didnt played as many games as that, but I think it is the hardest game I've played, and my favorite.

Keep and it, in a few years you can be like me. An old guy who loves Issac, but still sucks at it!

yeah, it is fun to try and retry, and I love the fact that every game you play are different in some ways. I began to watch "Learning of isaac" from Shisheyu , it is very fun and usefull. Btw do you think people can be interested by a AMA I'm a high school student ( in France)

edit: I wrote "I'm a high school", but I'm a human.

Yeah, the variety is amazing. That is the best part by far!

I absolutely sucked at games as a kid, Most of my absolute favourite games I played all day for months on end as a kid I still never finished... even on the easiest setting.

Wasn't until my 20s I started going back to a lot of these games and finally completing them 100% on hardest mode. It's quite a feeling :)

oh yes, a bunch.

Sekiro wasn't as hard for any of my friends then if was for me, that game practically made me not hesitate, even just a little.

Then there's ULTRAKILL that game aant you to do everything from muscle memory or it's straight up going to kill you, Have not perfected the final challenge, but the game is extreamly fun.

And to give you another example, let's sag the Keli games. Oxygen NotnIncluded and Don't Starve (Together), these two can be the two hardest games I've ever played. Easly clocking in more then double the playtime then the previous two, and yet I've never beaten neither of them. In Oxygen I managed to get to the "mid game", as the community calls it, ONCE, on m most recent. In Don't Starve all my notable achievements are because I have friends that play way better than me and we played co-op.

These games are easly in my top 10, making me work for the reward is much more fun. Played Legue and Fortnite 1k hours in both. I hate them for making me addicted and stealing my life. Oh, also you asked for younger gamers, I'm 17.

Well now I just want to watch young people try to beat the unbeatable games of my yout'.

Prince of Persia, Mega Man X, Ghosts & Goblins, Ecco the Dolphin (my favorite, but I screamed so much at Ecco dying one pixel away from air). Zork without a walkthru. Solve all the puzzles yourself or by talking to friends also playing it blind.

And you paid $60 ($200 in today's bullshit money) for this, you can't get another for 3 months.

God damn, I think Super Ghouls and Ghosts gave me PTSD. I literally spent an entire summer where that was the only game I played. The absolute freefall of my happiness when I went from thinking I was going to finally get a chance to beat the final boss to the princess telling me I had to play the game all over again but with a shitty bracelet as a weapon was damned near heartbreaking.

I got pretty far in Sands of Time, but never actually finished it. The first miniboss of Warrior Within can eat my entire ass, though.

i like ddr alot, but i suck ass at it

still a fan

DDR?

Noita. People say the final boss is the tutorial boss 💀

I get out of the first area maybe 50% of the time? I rarely get beyond the second area. Still love the game, but it's really difficult for me.

Terraria. Spent so much time in it. Tons of fun. I liked a lot of it. But I compared to other friends and realized I was terrible and barely even saw much of the game cause I didn't get very far.

I have a couple hundred hours in Terraria, am still terrible. Usually get carried by my buddy I play with. Though, to be fair, he has close to a thousand hours, so maybe there's still hope! Lol

I am not young but I can’t beat Souls games. I adore the world design of Dark Souls, Bloodbourne and Elden Ring but I just can’t motivate myself to suffer through them. I know they are beatable, there are many safepoints, but I don’t have fun doing that. Still, I wish these games had a difficulty slider for anyone who just wants to enjoy the story. But that will freak out the gamer bros who think that will somehow ruin their precious game.

And it’s not like I never play anything on hard mode. Games like Sniper Elite work best in „Authentic“ mode for me. In puzzle games I always turn off any assistance if possible. But simply increasing the health bar of bosses is not my understanding of fun.

Never thought about it like that. The Adventures of Willie Beamish taught me a lot about the nature of an uncaring universe... And now I don't think it's possible for someone to be frustrated in that same vexating way anymore as the solution is only ever a google away.

Age of Empires 2. Love the game, but I'm terrible at it... I can barely beat the medium AI. I was defeated in pretty much every online match.

I always felt like the way you need to be playing AoE to be competitively good defeated the purpose of the game for me. It ends up become a rush of min maxing, as opposed to what I loved about the game which was building and designing empires and armies.

At some point you will drop down to your level online, but itll take a few losses to push through. It is such a lovely game though, but just a bit too stressful for me.

For me, Dwarf Fortress. I have never gotten far in that game. It's fascinated me since I was 13, and I still suck at it.

Pretty much all of them, especially fighting games. I liked SF4 but absolutely sucked at trying any more complex combos.

Depends on how young you mean exactly, but there's a niche space warfare simulator (simulator in the sense that it only uses currently or very close to existing technology, models the behavior of every major component on a ship, and the developer has stated that it intentionally isn't made to be balanced as their motive for making it was partially to see what kind of strategies might become dominant in a space war rather than create a balanced game, obviously a true simulator of a space war would be difficult considering one hasn't happened yet) called "Children of a Dead Earth" that I really like the concept of, and really want to enjoy, but have never been able to properly get into, because I've never managed to design ship components that are particularly efficient or effective compared to premade examples, and my experience in games like Kerbal space program havent given me a good enough understanding of the game's more realistic orbital mechanics to figure out how to maneuver my fleets properly. It feels like a game that one needs to be a bigger space nerd than I am to properly enjoy, but that same effort at realism is why I find it so appealing in the first place.

Have you tried Space Engineers or Empyrion? They're open world survival crafting games that let you explore entire planets and build your own space stations and ships and such.

Space engineers yes, though not empyrion. I do like the game, but I have found it not quite as fun as a voxel vehicle building game as games that let you also design your own components or subassemblies, such as From the Depths, and not quite as fun as a space game as Kerbal Space Program, as least in my opinion.

If that's the case, then you may want to check out Starbase. It's basically on life support at this point (being an MMO), but the ship building is pretty wild. You can build your ships from absolute scratch, choosing the specific size of the plates and able to cut them to fit exactly, choosing where to place your bolts and struts for maximized stability and ship strength. You can even build the engines from different individual parts, and there's an entire coding system so you can write your own code for autopilot, automatic landing, and all kinds of other things.

I recommend you go visit the Dwarf Fortress forums.

I'm not very good at Diablo 4, I mainly picked it up thinking it would have a sort of MMO thing and expected something not too different to a grindy time waster.
I mainly play other genres, and the last Diablo game I played was D2, when I was a teenager (mid-30s now), which I didn't even get far into.

I just started Act 6, which I believe is the last, most recently. Where I skip cut scenes in other games I'm really enjoying the story of this, and so I'm finding myself watching them all the way through. The voice acting is great and I've never actually felt properly bored.

I'm not bad, but not what I see as the average player of this sort of thing (so not very good either), yet I enjoy it a fair bit! Veeeery dark story, and the cut scenes are incredibly gory sometimes. I think that's really cool from an artistic standpoint, I kind of get why people like deep horror films so much: there's just so much cool stuff artists can do with dark themes, and the artists in Diablo 4 really go ham with this! Lilith has like a freakin' head of horn clusters, like they said "fuck two horns, just keep adding them!" But they made her character REALLY cool looking by doing so. I love it.

I haven't played it, but I remember watching the opening cinematic where Lilith gets summoned. I love her aesthetic as a demon queen, with the skin wings and all.

Oh same. That intro is what drew me in. Reminds me of when I used to sketch all sorts of demonic beings for fun. But not just the appearance, for me the entire cut scene elements impressed me. From the design to the voice acting and general demeanor of the characters. The emotional depth within each role is rather well accomplished, I would say.

I'm a younger user of lemmy in the sense that I've only been a Fediverse user for less than a year. 😇

Starcraft (1 and 2). I suck. Suck in the "had trouble finishing the campaign on Normal, couldn't get out of Bronze league" sense of suck.

But I love it. It's my favourite video game, though these days I only watch it rather than play it, for reasons of see above.

Slay the spire I must have 400hrs+ of game time on multiple platform. Yet I still suck ass!!

Does it count I loved Quake 3 back in the day? Wasn't good at all at it but still I think it's one of the greatest games ever made and I loved playing it, especially Rocket Arena.

Binding of Isaac! I must have watched at least 2000h of Northernlion playing it and have complete knowledge of everything about that game. But I do suck at it and have played maybe like 10h in total just cause I don't have the hand-eye coordination for it haha

It really just depends on the genre. Platformers usually have one set difficulty. As does games like Castle Crashers. A few rogue likes offer difficulty settings but they typically range from very difficult to impossible without options for easy.

That said games like the lion king were interesting because their difficulty is typically so high because designers back then were designing for the arcade, even with home release only games. It's a mindset the industry was in.

Road Rash on the PS1, absolutely loved it but could barely win a race on it 😂 yeeting other riders off their motorbikes was too much fun.

Also thought the video cutscenes and menus looked kinda cool back then, especially compared to the simple ones in fighting games (tekken, versus etc). Actually thinking about it now, the music on Tekken's character select screen really made you feel like you were in an arcade

There's a spiritual successor to Road Rash which is Road Redemption, I can recommend it. I found it to be a bit easier to control.

The fucking lion king. Aladdin was hard af too. But roger rabbit? I couldn’t beat that bouncing around mother fucker and I don’t know if I ever did. And fuck kid Icarus. Another one I never beat. But the answer to the question is Turok for 64

Escape from tarkov. I am intrigued by the concept of the game, but each time I played I was outmatched in gear and skill.

Overwatch. I've played since 2018 and I still haven't climbed out of Bronze. I love the story and character lore a ton though!

I used to be gold and platinum but I think the ranking system is broken because I'm as good as I ever was and am consistently bronze -__-

If this is happening to both of you it just might be the decreasing player base. If the people that are still playing leans towards those who are very good or very experienced it might just be that you are the same but there are less players worse than you still playing

This is a very good point for some reason I'd not considered

I'm not that young anymore but I put more hours into Planetside 2 than is even reasonable for how fucking bad I am at it.

Fortnite lol, but now I’d never wanna touch it again.

I def sucked at Quake Champions at first but now I think it’s the best shooter around

I love "Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos". I even run its official fansite.

To this day, I have never finished the game because it's hard. I mostly play it like a sandbox space pirate simulator. :D

Tried for months but couldn't beat Rayman 2. Fuck you, razor beard.

For me it was Rainbow Six Siege.

Absolutely fell in love with the gun play (leaning in that game is my favorite mechanic in any game), destructible environments, operator gadget interactions, and repelling.

However, I was trash at the game because of slow reflexes due to bad eyesight, and poor aim. Relied on the gadgets while my team got the kills.

How do you define young?

I'm definitely too old but I loved Tarkov before cheaters ruined it.

I know some early-20's folks who grew up on DayZ.

Both games very hard to not suck at.

I don't qualify as a "younger user of Lemmy" but I love games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. I suck at all of them, except for Killer Instinct but I'm only kinda good with Combo.

I feel like the answer is yes, but I can't remember what if any game it was. Its just the feeling is familiar.

I could never beat Pokémon Blue because I chose the grass starter.

I won't stand for this Bulbasaur slander

Right?! Type advantage against the first 2 gyms, mid game has a couple of surprise difficulty spikes, but late game Venusaur is a front end status workhorse and tank. Choosing Bulbasaur is playing on Easy lol.

IIRC the original design intent was that the starter choice was intended as a form of difficulty selection for the player. It's not super well-signalled, but Oak kinda says when you're choosing that Bulbasaur is easy, Squirtle is medium, and Charmander is hard. Their respective difficulties reflect their match ups to the first two gyms and also to most of the fights in the early game.

I beat that game at 10 years old with only my starter. Like I knew in concept you should train other Pokemon but I just had a level 86 Blastoise by the end of the game.

I wasn't expecting to call myself young but I guess I never did experience any games that were just brutal though I did get into gaming a bit later in life. The earliest game I played was Warcraft 3 and the main campaign was easy enough, some custom maps were harder but nothing really hard so 20 years ago games weren't really harder. The hardest thing in any game I have experienced in about 20 years of gaming was Midir with a magic build in dark souls 3 which I never did beat.

Karate Champ. I probably spent hundreds of dollars on that game and never got past the third match, and don't have the slightest clue what would make a round kick score a full point or a half point... You could come up with strats that usually worked, but nothing ever worked reliably... Mortal Kombat you could come up with strats that would 100% get you double flawless, but it's grandpappy would toss all manner of randomness at your ass and fuck you up pretty reliably :)

Whoooaa talking about the NES for me it was always "Castlevania" and "legends of Zelda II", gawd damn they were so difficult when I was a child.

Tbf you didn't say video game :p so basketball was another, used to think I was so Kool playing it. But dayumn did I suck at it.

Current day would probably be call of duty, I always think I'm gonna slay, then I get killed an call it bullshit >!but I know it's not bullshit, it was me!<

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Young? How young? Because I'm older than most video game consoles...