Intentionally hard games. I get that people like a challenge, but play games to relax.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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I think it's similar to people who like horror, it's a way to experience stress or challenge while being perfectly safe and in control.
They just feel too much like they're trying to be be a blockbuster for for guys that don't want to be made fun of for liking games rather than games. I know that that probably isn't the case, but they just seem too normal to me.
I personally think the moniker of grizzled white guy action game should be reserved to thinks like Haze or similar things but it's not far off. I think it's embarassing for video games as an art that these games regularly top every which list about best games. They're functionally competent, even good, action / western / zombie movies with bouts of tetris in between. There's a reason Hitman did not work at all as a movie and TLOU works perfectly fine as a netflix series
Out of curiosity why Haze specifically?
Could've been Wolfenstein (2009) for all it's worth, allthough that has decidedly more colour.
Just the first one that came to my mind as the mid 2000s white bald stubbly guy with brown and piss filter on it that just has nothing else going for it. Red Faction Guerilla ticks all the boxes but at least that has an impressive physics going, even if it doesn't manage to prop up the rest of the game. FEAR 2 rides the coattails the first ones before they really nosedived it with 3. But Haze? What's the saving grace for Haze?
EDIT: I'd say Uncharted, RDR and TLOU are regularly called blockbuster games (positive) but I think they should be called blockbuster games (negative)
I don't respect people who like GTA infact anyone that does I think less of you.
My one is roguelikes. Like so many fun looking roguelikes (not binding of Isaac you suck on a fundamental level) but I just can't ever find the time to play any or really understand how I'm supposed to play them. If they have meta progression it's not so bad but if they don't it just feels like a genre built around wasting my time through rng. If they have suspend and resume like Returnal then I find them infinitely more enjoyable because I can't stand a game dictating to me how long I play it for. Risk of rain is brilliant though but that's because I can be satisfied it has an "ending" without it actually being the end goal which is simply survive as long as possible. If story is locked behind getting to level 3 billion then I'm pissed but if it's just a self made goal of unlock characters and get as far as I want then it's brilliant.
The other is basically any Nintendo game. Largely because I grew up with sega and Sony but I did still have a Gameboy colour advance and DS at the time I just dislike almost every Nintendo title bar metroid. The only thing that doesn't follow the rule is Yoshi's Island which is the best platformer ever made and nothing will ever reach the same heights because everyone thinks mario is good.
Oh yeah fighting games. No I'm not going to spend half my life "training" to play a single game I'd rather do anything else including eat my own hands off. Only good fighting game is Hellish Qaurt because my brother can't beat me at it. Get rekt guilty gear peasant.
(oldschool)RuneScape, I find the planning out of grinding fascinating but have no desire to commit hours to it myself.
I've never met a deck builder game I've liked.
And I've never made it further than like Day 2 of Disco Elysium. It's just so so dense and I need to be in a novel-reading mood to enjoy it properly, and those are far between so I end up forgetting what I did in between runs and restarting.
Same on Disco Elysium. Also it makes me sad
It is a very sad game. It also wouldn't work if it wasn't sad.
The sadness is why people care about Harry.
The sadness is why people care about Revachol.
If Revachol wasn't so bleak, La Revacholiere would just be self indulgence, Cindy the skull writing a hopeful message in fuel oil wouldn't matter, the communists telling you "In the dark times, should the stars also go out" wouldn't hit.
And it wouldn't be so fucking funny for Harry to do the finger guns, try to do a matrix dive, and immediately hit a woman in a wheelchair.
The sadness is why people care about Revachol.
It making me sad isnt a bad thing, just a reason I never finish it
I'd read a disco Elysium book, but I can't get far in the game.
I really tried to like mobas. I put in like 500 hours on Dota 2 and I dunno how many into league, but I don't feel like I ever had fun with them at any point. Really wanted to be into them because I had friends who played them and they have such broad appeal that it seems like an easy way to connect with people.
I'd add dark souls as well, but I really don't understand the appeal.
Mobas aren't about having fun they're about making other people mad, the people who have played League for thousands of hours probably hate it the most.
Played dota 1, heroes of newerth, and dota 2 for hundreds of hours each, minimum.
You are absolutely correct and every time i get the urge to play a moba again it's luckily immediately quashed before i install it
Dwarf fortress is one of the coolest concepts I've ever seen, and I cannot get into it.
Battle Royales, I've played a few since that's what friends want to play but I'd never play one of my own volition. It doesn't help that I'm just not good at them & I feel like dead weight on a team of 3
Take apex legends, it's a solid game with really smooth movement/gunplay but it's so damn stressful to keep track of everything that's going on. I much prefer single player RPGs like New Vegas, Shadowrun Returns, Baldur's Gate, etc but obviously they aren't exactly social games
Dark Souls, I play games to have fun but I can understand other people may have different reasons
I understand the appeal of Hades but tbqh I like the broadly similar game "curse of the dead gods" way better.
I like hades, but I will not be completing the same game 30 times with self imposed difficulty sliders.
I couldn't enjoy GTA (it really fell off after 2), the Witcher games, or Disco Elysium (I ain't reading all that)
Fighting games and rts games. I wanna already know how to play them cause they seem fun as hell once you have the hang. I cannot get the hang.
Sorta kinda the soulsborn stuff... a lot of people like em for different reasons and I dont. Whether or not I understand and respect kinda depends. I think most controversially. I dont mind the gameplay, I dont like the aesthetic or storytelling. Make a castlevania game in thst style and id be right there. I just dont like grimdsrk fantasy that I have to work out why I give a shit about what improving in the first place over the course of doing it cause for most of the ds1 which is the one I played in had no idea why I should give a shit about any of this generic dark fantasy crap. I know if you dig deep enough to make a 6 hour podcast then there is stuff but nothing maxe me feel compelled to look into it. Also as a gameplay tjing that is a me thing, im good at hard 2d games and bad at hard 3d games or at least like 2d difficulty more and am less easy to give up. There are a variety of reasons mostly availability of information on the screen that makes 2d feel more fun to be challenged in. I wish I liked them, people that like em sre having lots of fun. But I really dont get it.
Fighting games and rts games. I wanna already know how to play them cause they seem fun as hell once you have the hang. I cannot get the hang.
Old RTS have great single-player modes. I'd start with Warcraft 3 and Red Alert 2 and work backwards in their respective series. They pretty much all (even back the original C&C and Warcraft) have super easy starting missions, and steadily get harder. A lot of the time that's gonna be too hard for a newbie by like the fourth mission, which is why I recommend hopping between games when it happens instead of plowing ahead. But after a loop of a few you'll find that you've gotten better at all of them.
If you want to get into competitive, I don't know. I think AOE2 still has a big enough community to match noobs against noobs (but it's Microsoft so I dunno, I won't touch it). A lot of other games have been whittled down to just people who already know it though.
I don't know anything about fighting games.
I dont want to get into them. I just respect em. I dont play video games much anymore in general.
trying to be be a blockbuster
The more games try to be movies the more I'm adverse to playing them. I really don't like the Sony stable of modern games. When everything became over the shoulder and mostly open world (the detritus of the 7th gen) Ever chasing realism most of the games look so similar in the environments, it's become rather stale.
Minecraft
Would be one pick that I find too unstructured to enjoy and I don't really engage in any multiplayer.
name any popular JRPG. I just never really could. i probably didnt get past disc 2 of FF7, and i played FFX a decent bit but pretty sure i didnt beat that.
also, pretty much any Zelda not called Wind Waker.
I'm here with JRPGs and I've only recently reflected that I think it comes down to presentation. Their plots usually touch on much deeper philosophical ideas and have so many interesting mythological/religious and historical references, like Xenosaga. Under most circumstances, I would eat that right up and beg for more.
But I find the presentation of most JRPGs, especially older ones beloved ones from the PSX/PS2 era to be very boring. Even in many newer JRPGs trying to mimic that older style, NPCs just stand still in one spot waiting for you to talk to them for whatever fluff dialogue they have. Characters are very often melodramatic. A lot of the cool stuff happens in cutscenes instead of being initiated by you through any sort of choice because ultimately the story is being told to you, not trying to make you feel part of it like many Western RPGs have done. There's usually a lot of mandatory filler content between the big acts, whereas other RPGs will put that as optional side content and you can rush from one exciting story plot point to the next. This really kills the pacing. I don't think they justify their ridiculous length because so much of it is this kind of uninteresting padding.
I have played and enjoyed a few of them, like FFX International, but every time I try to go back and play anything else, I give up partway through because it just doesn't hold my interest.
Disc 1 is by far the best part of FFVII anyway. The game opens with you playing as a gang of ecoterrorists who blow up a power plant and literally nothing they do later in the game can live up to it.
Fighting games. Zero interest in memorizing combos and using them with millisecond precision.
Slay the Spire and Balatro were two games that people I know have gotten really into but I could never get through. It's something about any type of card game that doesn't jive with my brain.
Also slay the spire's art direction didn't do it for me, and that's basically a necessity in roguelike games.
I never finished Half Life because there were too many "where the fuck do I go/do moments" which might be a skill issue but whatever.
Fallout 2 had that god awful tutorial section that made me quit and I found the story to be a repeat of the first game anyway. Never played the Bethesda fallouts because I already played Skyrim.
Haven't got into any RTS games for a similar reason to card games.
TBH I enjoy most video games by watching people play them since I can't find the time nowadays. Very much born and raised on let's plays.
I wish I didn't suck shit at deck builders. I played Slay the Spire for a couple hundred hours and finished one run by the skin of my teeth
I never finished Half Life because there were too many "where the fuck do I go/do moments" which might be a skill issue but whatever.
the original? That still has a lot of remnants of doom / quake / wolfenstein find the keycard or press E on this one thing in it honestly
Pretty much any big AAA game franchise for me. I have friends play them and I just don't get it? Like they look pretty, but they all feel so samey, all got this same kind of third person perspective and it never really feels all that different from each other, whether you're an assassin dude or a cowboy dude or a vampire hunting dude, they all feel so...artificial? Like token RPG elements and vague "exploration" to collect doodads to get 100%, everything feels very scripted and kind of soulless sometimes.
Any game that I'm bad at. It can be well designed and smooth to play, but if I'm bad at it I'm not going to enjoy it. It sucks being bad at something, especially a leisure activity you paid money for
A lot of what you mentioned. I actually got pretty pissed at Last of Us even before I knew the guy was a zionist back when it first came out because it was so hyped and was being sold as something else entirely by the end of it. Though that tech doesn't fit what you are saying. The others are like that.
Honestly, the big one for me is most Metal Gear Solid. I liked 3 pretty well. But I HATED 2, 4 was okay. and I'm sorry I cannot get over how they treated Quiet. (was typing way to much for the spirit of this because of that before I deleted it). I see that the gameplay is interesting and stuff, but I just can't get over how they treat women in those games at this point. I was barely hanging on in the early ones cause at least a lot of the misogyny you had to go looking for it. I can say the same for most Kojima games tbh. Death Stranding looks interesting mechanically but...well it goes back to the grizzled white guy action. (Though I did like Witcher 3, more Blood and Wine, though. 1 and 2 are....something in the same vein as this one, though. 3 is a little better with it, but it does some "men writing women" type stuff.)
Ocarina of Time. Another one that kind of got over hyped for me. It's the curse of being one video game gen behind the older millennials, I stg. Cause when I played it, I understood it and got why it was important for other Zelda games, but holy hell it was not the transcendent experience that I was promised.
Most platformers in general, I can't get into. Which is normally fine cause I like games with story and most platformers didn't have that much...at one point. Thank god for mods or I would never of gotten through Hollow Knight or Silk Song. Holy hell, those games are brutal.
Death Stranding looks interesting mechanically but...well it goes back to the grizzled white guy action.
I'm interested in this because it's so far off of my own thoughts
Lastly are what I'll call "grizzled white guy action games" Uncharted, Red Dead, The Last of Us. They just feel too much like they're trying to be be a blockbuster for for guys that don't want to be made fun of for liking games rather than games.
The 7th generation was such a time and it's only become worse. You should disrespect "grizzled white guy action games" more tbh.
For me it's probably the Super Mario games, which on one hand probably seems like obvious contrarian bait and on the other hand Nintendo is the Disney of video games. I think it's the way they control, I dunno what the problem is but I've slammed my head into mario games my entire life and it just never clicks.
also gta was never good :>
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XCOM, Souls-like games and especially fighting games, I feel like a slow old man if I ever play one.
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