17 Games I Tapped Out On Midway Through (Updated for 2022)

 

For me to not finish a game that I've put time into, something drastic has to occur. Sometimes a game simply doesn't gel with me. Sometimes it gels fine, yet I find it too difficult to get to the end. This list will cover games that I simply reached the end of my patience with, one way or another, and had to stop playing. Some of them I enjoyed up until around the point where things went bad. The games on this list are by no means bad games (well, some of them are), but simply games that at some point I found myself disliking so much that I just gave up. I'll discuss the why and how of each one, looking at where they went wrong. 2022 Update: Some of these have now been beaten, so I'll get into the how/why. New additions are in bold.

Almost Made The List: Super Princess Peach. I finished this game, which disqualifies it, but it would have been very high on the list if I hadn't. The game itself is decent; the problem is that it doesn't let you into the final level unless you've found all of the collectibles. I'm all for platform games having collectibles, and secret levels that you need to find collectibles to unlock. That said, never ever EVER lock the final level of the story behind a 100% collectible wall. It's one thing to have a reasonable collectible requirement for the final level, ala most of the modern Mario games, but it's another to require you to 100% the game before you can play the finale.

Considering no other levels up to that point had any such requirements, it really came out of nowhere and completely stalled out the momentum of the game. I wasn't expecting it and felt kinda cheated, since I had no intention of 100%ing the game up to that point. I imagine very few players actually reached that point with full collectibles, and finding an inaccessible final stage at the end is like running into a wall. I very nearly stopped the game at that point, but for some reason I decided to go ahead and get the rest of the collectibles and finish the thing. It didn't take as long as I thought it would, and the final boss was fun, so I'm glad I did it. But yeah, that endgame wall was not cool and prevented the game from ending at the perfect time.

Now for the actual list. They're ranked more or less in order of how disappointing I found them, from least to most. Usually the ones I got further with ended up being the more disappointing, due primarily to sunk cost fallacy.

#17 - Geometry Wars 3 (PS4) - A very cool game with an interesting premise. I heard enough good things about it to pony up for it. In short, it's a hyper-evolved version of Asteroids from back in the day, where you have foes converging from all sides. Only problem is, I'm not that good at it, and it's a very difficult game. So I couldn't get too far, and sunken cost fallacy set in since it was a digital buy. So I kept at it, but eventually I had to tap out. Didn't make it that far, either. The learning curve is STEEP on this one.

#16 - Lumines: Supernova (PS3) -This is a fun and fast-paced PSN puzzle game. Most of it being on this list is because I tried to play it during a difficult breakup, and something about the game just made my mood worse. I couldn't get that far with it either. I tried to play Fallout 3 during that same time and it didn't work out, but luckily I revisited that later and discovered that it was really good. Lumines, on the other hand, I never revisited. Still, nothing against the game, but it gets a spot on the list.

#15 - Alien 3 (SNES) - Here's a game that should have been fantastic, but ended up being mediocre. Nowadays games like this don't hold up at all anymore even as retro museum pieces, not with SNES competition like Super Metroid. While there's a great deal of potential for Alien 3 to be a blast to play, it gets ruined by the confusing area structure and objectives. During the short time I played, I spent nearly all of my time lost. Right from the get-go I had no idea where I was supposed to go at any given moment, with hallway after hallway that looked identical. Being forced to explore wouldn't be such a big deal, but the enemies instantly respawn the second you so much as look away from them, making travel very tedious.

Factor in limited ammo and the fact that enemies don't drop any health or ammo...well, you're basically screwed without extensive maps/notes/patience, and I gave up fast. There are pretty decent odds that I'll give it another shot eventually. Or at least I'd like to, but I'm sure I'd quickly remember why I gave up on it. Shame because it's got such good source material (mostly derived from Aliens, funnily enough).

#14 - Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (Many systems) - Time for the first controversial pick of this list. The first Mortal Kombat was practically a religious experience. I was in like 5th grade when it dropped, and all of us kids pretty much thought it was the greatest thing to ever happen. What adults didn't get at the time was that we weren't excited about it because it had blood in it, we were excited about it because the world it created was awesome and the cast of characters was super-compelling. We all wanted to be badass like Liu Kang or Sub-Zero. Later Mortal Kombat II came along and improved on everything that made the first game great. We had more characters, a stronger villain in Shao Khan, and the battle spilling over into the Outworld. Even the penultimate boss, Kintaro, was essentially a bigger and badder version of the first game's Goro.

Later, Mortal Kombat III came out and it was clear the bloom was off the rose a bit. It changed the gameplay too much for my liking, and the general roster/world seemed like a step sideways or even back from MKII. Looking at the penultimate boss, Motaro, even that guy wasn't up to the cool-level of the bosses in the first two games. Long story short, I wasn't that interested in UMKIII when it came out. It featured a huge roster with a bunch of new characters, but the roster was too big for its own good. It seemed like nearly all of the newbies were palette-swapped ninjas. Add in considerably higher difficulty than the previous games, and I just couldn't get through this one. That said, it's the only game on this list that I might try again eventually. It's like a thirty-minute game if I can get the hang of winning.

2022 Update: I'm now definitely planning on tackling this one in the near future along with a bunch of other fighters.

#13 - Far Cry 2 (PS3, XBox 360, PC) - When I was trying to get into the Far Cry series, I should have just started with Far Cry 3. That's when the series really took off in popularity, and it's also when the games got a lot more user-friendly. Instead, I tried playing Far Cry 2 first out of some weird sense of needing to "catch up". It...is not user-friendly at all. It's probably a solid game if you can get into it, and has a fairly realistic jungle environment that looks great for the PS3 era.

The problem for me was the "realistic" part. Everything about this game goes for realism, to a fault. I like realistic characters and relatable stories, but I'm not so crazy about realistic gameplay. There's no fast travel here, no hints, no checkpoints, no map markers, and no clue what to do half the time. You're hoofing it everywhere, with nothing telling you where exactly to hoof it to. You can't even look at the map while driving! This game is very rough around the edges, and despite my best efforts I just couldn't seem to enjoy it in the least. I gave up after a couple hours of stumbling around in the jungle. I can see hardcore purists being into this, at least. The good news is that when I moved on to Far Cry 3 I had a blast.

#12 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) - I tried this game a bunch of times as a kid and never could get very far. It was also one of the first NES games I played, as a friend had it. Back then, we weren't experienced enough to realize how terrible this game really is. We were just happy to be playing something Ninja Turtles related. Trying to play through this now, I was pretty shocked at some of the design choices here. The game just isn't well done, and the water level is the stuff of nightmares. How hard was it to make a simple Turtles beat 'em up? Apparently, pretty hard, because they didn't start doing that until the second game. This game is dreck, and the people who made it were ROBBING KIDS.

2022 UPDATE: I finished this one. See the post HERE.

#11 - Cadence of Hyrule (Switch) - This has Zelda-themed visuals, but it isn't a Zelda game so much as a rhythm-based game with a Zelda skin. You don't even play as Link, you play as...this girl cosplaying as Link, from the looks of things. Why not just play as Zelda then? In any case, I'm sure this game is a good time for people who get into it. I would have liked it if it played like a Zelda game the majority of the time, then went to a rhythm-based setup for boss fights or something.

Instead, even the basic act of movement requires tapping along with a constant rhythm minigame, and it quickly becomes even more tedious than the motion-control stylus-based movement in the two Zelda games on the DS. And on that note, Spirit Tracks narrowly avoided this list because I still plan to finish that game, by hook or by crook, despite the wildly annoying stylus controls.

#10 - Patapon (PSP) - Another rhythm game that I decided to add alongside the previous one. This game was all the rage when it first came out and spawned a bunch of sequels. I was so interested in the concept of Patapon that it was one of the 4 games I got immediately when I got a PSP. (The other 3? Mega Man Powered-Up, Maverick Hunter X, and Crisis Core).

Unfortunately, once I got down to playing it, it just didn't work out for me. The difficulty is high and the learning curve is steep, so I spent most of my time watching my Patapon army get annihilated while I pressed buttons that always seemed to be "too late" regardless of how spot-on I thought they were. Eventually I just tapped out on this one. It's a popular game, so I just didn't get it, I guess.

#9 - RPG Maker 2 (PS2) -When the first RPG Maker came out for Playstation in 2000, I stayed up for three straight days working on creating an RPG. It was basically a dream come true to have that much creative power, and I haven't stayed up that long again for any game since. Unfortunately, it was a very limited program without keyboard functionality, which really limited the scope of what I could create on it. Losing a lot of data due to a wonky save system didn't help either, and eventually I put that game on the shelf after creating a short, bare-bones RPG.

Fast forward to 2004 and RPG Maker 2 released for the Playstation 2. I was stoked about this and put a couple days aside to work on creating something with it as soon as it was out. It had keyboard support (finally), superior graphics, and weather effects like rain; basically everything I wanted out of the first game and didn't get. Unfortunately, once the game arrived, I discovered the horror that was the character models. Every character archetype was a short, superdeformed cartoon character that resembled a Funko POP. That's right, all of them. There was no changing the core character model, and you could do everything in your power to make them look like badasses, but they'd still be short bobbleheaded toddlers with heads as big as their bodies.

Good luck making any game that looks remotely serious. What a colossal disappointment. The sad thing is, the original RPG Maker, while lacking those above-mentioned things that I really wanted, at least had tons of really nice character sprites that looked like the full spectrum of RPG classes and badass archetypes. Not sure who the ad wizards are who decided to change that up for the second game. And that isn't even getting into the waaaaay more complicated scripting system in this game, which takes all kinds of programming stuff that the first RPG Maker made simple and deconstructs it into a complicated mess. Suffice to say, things that the first game was fine giving you templates on, the second game made everything DIY with only vague instructions. Something as basic as generating a thunderstorm for a particular outdoor area was a tedious endeavor.

I created about 20 minutes of gameplay, total, then shelved the game without finishing anything. I didn't even play through the included finished game that ran on the game's engine to see what it was capable of. I just wanted to get as far away from those character models as possible, and never looked at the game again. Never tried any RPG Maker after that, for that matter, because I'd just moved on by then. The crazy part is that the PC got several really good RPG Makers in this timeframe (RPG Maker 2000 and RPG Maker 2003) that didn't have any of the issues that plagued their console counterparts. They weren't exactly marketed well, and I didn't know they existed until I'd already soured on the console ones and had moved on.

#8 - Terminator 2 (NES) - Nearly all of the old games based on Terminator (see link) are awful, awful crap. If I had to pick one that I really despised, though, it'd be this one. I barely got past the first level, only to almost immediately die on the auto-scrolling second level because they put a wall right in front of where you start. A wall that immediately crushes you. Yep. Along with a host of other baffling design decisions, this game was barely playable, and I tapped out fast. Sad thing is, I almost definitely would have bought this game if I had owned an NES as a kid, because Terminator 2 is one of the greatest movies ever. It's still great to watch even today as an adult, and when I was 8 or 9 we were insanely hyped for it. It's horrible that people who had an NES and wanted to play as Arnold got to be treated to THIS game. Once again, YOU ARE ROBBING KIDS.

#7 - Ultima: Warriors of Destiny (NES) - The NES ports of Ultima III, IV, and V are a mixed-bag to say the least. While the original computer games were great for their time and a lot of fun for RPG fans, the console ports of the series have been spotty. Exodus (III) for the NES is a brutal, difficult game that looks like a lot more stress than I want to deal with, but I can definitely see hardcore people having a lot of fun with it. Quest of the Avatar (IV) is a marked improvement in every area, up there with the Dragon Quest games of the era in enjoyability. Aside from the confusing portal mechanics, it's a great game and one I want to return to later.

.....and then we have the port of the fifth game, Warriors of Destiny. It's like they forgot everything they learned when making the NES port of the fourth game, because as far as I can tell this one is nearly unplayable. It looks and handles horribly, with a weird diagonal view of characters/NPCs and a way-too-small portion of the screen dedicated to actually showing you the gameplay. This game isn't just bad, it makes me feel ill to even attempt it. While Exodus made me tap out with some regret, Warriors of Destiny made me tap out and run for the hills.

Funny thing is, the PC version of this game is regarded as one of, if not the BEST game in the Ultima series, with an epic storyline where the once-beloved Avatar is hunted as a criminal by the corrupt government now in control of Britannia. The NES version could have been even better than the NES version of Quest of the Avatar. Instead they made this mess that looks, sounds, and handles terribly. Oh well.

#6 - Drakengard 3 (PS3) - Pure shit. I mean, look at the main character; she looks like she's covered in shit half the time. Maybe that's why the framerate and responsiveness are so abysmally bad during boss fights. This game is lowest common denominator nonsense, with the most un-likeable cast I've ever seen in anything. No exaggeration. I can't tell if the heroes are horrible people or just very poorly-written, but I think it's the latter. That'd be alright if the game were fun, but it isn't. The large open-arena army brawls of the first two games are replaced with corridors and scripted events. With no real reason to play this off-putting mess, I tapped quickly.

#5 - Gravity Rush Remastered (PS4) - I LOVE the idea of the Gravity Rush games. Just free-floating (while still needing to follow the rules of gravity somewhat, as you have limited power) is a fun time. The gameplay is interesting, the main character is a hottie, and there's a magical cat flying around with you. What could go wrong? Well, around halfway through the game, there's this awful section where you have to fall down a massive tunnel in a limited amount of time. I think there might have been a boss fight during this, as well. It was WAY harder than anything before it in the game, and after beating my head against that one section for several hours, I was done. It's a shame because I liked the game and wanted to see where it went. Gravity Rush 2 seems a bit better balanced, so I'll give that a go instead.

#4 - Recore (Xbox One) - Another one I really liked and wanted to finish, but gave up on forever instead. Made by Keiji Inafune and the Metroid Prime team, this game has an interesting setting, a cool protagonist, and a fun gameplay loop that feels a bit like a truly next-gen Mega Man X game. So where does it go wrong? Again, around halfway through. After you defeat all of the primary areas/bosses, the game sends you on a scavenger hunt to collect cores...with no gorram clue where any of them are, or which ones you've already gotten. I ended up retracing my steps and using a walkthrough to hunt for cores, some of which it turned out I'd already gotten. The momentum just ground to a total halt. Considering that this lengthy core-hunt is followed immediately by the final boss fights, I could have done without what was clearly a whole lot of padding. Tapped out when I simply couldn't find a core in an area where I knew I hadn't gotten it yet, and eventually I just couldn't be arsed anymore.

#3 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2, XBox, PC) - I think this might be the only time I've ever deleted my save files for a game just to ensure that I didn't waste any more time on it. See image at the top of the post. This game managed to alienate me so much that I had to make sure that my future self wouldn't go back to it like a battered spouse going "I CAN'T LEAVE! I LOOOVE HIMMMM!"

Back in 2013 I played GTA: Vice City and enjoyed it a lot. Way back in the early 2000's I played GTA3 and while it's no Vice City, I enjoyed that one too. After I finished Vice City I had big expectations going into San Andreas, given how popular it is. It's a fun sandbox, for sure, and great if you have no other games to play because of all the time-consuming sim elements like working out and...eating.

Problem is, once I actually got going with this game, I started having problems with it very early. The missions weren't fun, a lot of the characters you meet later on are as un-likeable as possible (seriously, they give Drakengard 3 competition for being just insufferable people), and a lot of the game design elements here are baffling. The game is unnecessarily bloated, with tons of mandatory missions that probably should have been optional sidequests. Like anything where you have to fly. It takes ages to get through, and those ages aren't fun. The lack of checkpoints on the missions adds to the frustration, while repeatedly having to drive to mission locations (some drives can be up to ten minutes long) makes this an incredibly tedious experience.

I played about a third of the game, but nothing about it was exciting or appealing, so I shelved it for a long time. Two years later, I resumed it, deciding that I'd finish the game once and for all so I could move on to GTA4 and GTA5. That was a waste of time. I got through most of the remaining game, stopping at around the 80% mark when I reached a flight mission that was damn near impossible. The flight controls in this game are so bad that I could barely get the plane to do anything I wanted it to do. It was like playing Superman 64. Hell, I even had to fly through rings! THAT wasn't happening when I couldn't even seem to move in a straight line.

So...yep. As unenjoyable as the game was, I stuck with it, but a lategame flight mission did me in. It's awful the way it forces a completely new game mechanic (flight) on you very late in the game, after you've spent the whole game using ground-based controls/vehicles. It's even more awful that it forces you to use the worst-handling plane for that mission. About two-thirds of the times I tried the mission, my plane would just refuse to gain any altitude to begin with. The third of the time where it would comply with my vague controller-based suggestions, it'd usually gain too much speed and end up spinning out of control.

After spending about three hours trying to fly through more than one or two rings in a go (you have to fly through about ten), I gave up. Nothing I did seemed to make a difference, and my success/failure seemed almost random. If I went too easy on the controls, the plane would peter out and lose all momentum. If I went to hard on the controls, the plane would spin out. If I went medium on the controls, one of the above two things would happen. My plane also seemed to just go into a nosedive randomly whenever I'd start to do well, and no amount of research let me come up with a good solution. The mission just sucks, and you need a lot of luck to get past it. Well, no thanks. I deleted the save from my PS2 and never looked back, something unprecedented for me.

The game just isn't good, regardless of the flight mission. It never was good, unless you've got tons and tons of time to put into it and nothing better to play. It's got plenty of content, but there's nothing fun about the design. I would have finished it anyway if they hadn't thrown in a lategame roadblock that uses terrible flight controls that you never use anywhere else. Looking it up online, tons of other people couldn't get past the flight stage either, so it isn't just me.

San Andreas certainly has an expansive world and a fair amount of fun to be had, but when you get down to the brass tacks of mission design, it's atrocious and shittily-designed. As much as I wanted to "catch up" with this series, I just couldn't get through this one. On the bright side, while it too has a lot of problems, I've enjoyed GTA4 a lot more from what I've played of it (10% or so). The characters are much more interesting/likeable, the setting is more compact and MUCH more interesting, and the mission designs are fairer. The vehicle controls could be better, but I think I'll be able to get through that one and V without much issue.

2022 UPDATE: Somehow, against all odds, I gave this one final shot not too long ago...and actually finished the game, finally. How, you ask? By using copious amounts of cheat codes to quickly get through all of the stuff I'd already finished multiple times over in the past. By the time I got to the flight stage, I punched in a code that increased my flying skill to max, and voila, no more random crashes and spin-outs. After that I just had the final town to do, and steamrolled through it with infinite ammo codes and jet packs. I just obliterated this game, and it felt good to finally get the upper hand on it.

#2 - Assassin's Creed Chronicles (Playstation 4) - This was originally a trio of games on the PS Vita, now ported to the PS4 as a collection. You've got China, Russia, and India as the settings of the games. Completely unexplored locales in the rest of the series, so this had a TON of potential to really expand the world and show us what the Assassin Order was like in other places outside Europe and the Middle-East. All they had to do was make these regular Assassin's Creed games. Nobody expected them to be full-size visual tour-de-forces like the console ACs, but I'm sure the Vita could have easily handled some 5-6 hour 3D AC side-games. Instead, they inexplicably went the 2D route for these games, and gave them controls that can best be described as "Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero".

It was such a disappointment to fire these up and get absolutely nowhere with them, especially considering the Russia setting in particular has an incredible visual art-style to it. It's very difficult to fight enemies head-on, stealth and assassination are super hard in 2D without being able to freely move around the environment, the controls are stiff, clunky, and slow, and there's just nothing fun in these games. Nothing. Zilch. What a massive disappointment. I quickly gave up on them, but a couple years later I rebought it to give it another try, thinking maybe I just wasn't patient enough. On the retry I discovered it was even WORSE than I remembered. AC completionists, you may be tempted to pick this up to "finish the series" but prepare to be disappointed. I'd say stick to the 3D ACs.

#1 - Superman 64 (N64) - I'd rather play anything else on this list over Superman 64, and there was absolutely no way I'd be able to stomach it long enough to get to the end of the game. My problems with San Andreas' worse missions (like short timers, lack of hints, and flying through rings) are the entire core of this game. What do rings have to do with Superman? Imagine being a Superman fan in the late 90's, getting this game home after paying $60, and finding out what garbage it actually is.

I tried to play this to do a post. I fully intended on covering the whole game, but I just couldn't do it. It isn't even "so bad it's good" like Bebe's Kids. It's completely unplayable, and the barren wasteland of an environment isn't even something you can look at and make fun of. There is NO redeeming value to be had here. While GTA: SA saves the horrible flight missions for late in the game, this one makes you go through lots of them right from the get-go. At least the flight controls are marginally better here than in San Andreas, but that's like being the least-smelly litter box.

2022 Note: I actually covered this game in a post HERE. It was written in 2015, so excuse the Kevin Spacey praise. Not gonna see me praising many Hollywood celebrities now. Also some of the images are broken links because I wasn't uploading everything myself yet. Luckily it's only a couple of them.

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