Most of us probably know of and regularly write to Austrobogulator's "Games Finished in 2013" thread, since it's nearing 50 pages in size as of writing this. However, lots of games get abandoned at the same time for a wide variety of reasons: people lose their interest in them, they are too difficult, too dull, and plain bad. Or they're just forgotten about. So how about a dark version of a Games Finished thread: what games have you decided to give up on this year?

I'm the kind of gamer who doesn't give up easily. The game has to be truly horrendous for me to abandon it, or simply too difficult that no matter how hard I try, I can never imagine myself beating the game.

Now, since we're halfway through August already, I might have given up on more games that I can remember, but here are my entries as of today (that I can recall).

Sometime in the spring: Unstoppable Gorg. Personally, I'm not that crazy about tower defense in general, although I did enjoy Plants vs. Zombies a lot. But this game was simply just too hard for me to beat. Every level was a struggle, and I usually ended up with my planets (which the aliens are trying to destroy) having only a fraction of health left when a level was completed. And finally I ended up facing a wall: my efforts just didn't cut it anymore. I just wasn't good enough in this game.

Today: The Bard's Tale (2004). This I decided to abandon for a completely different reason. Well, I guess not completely different, but I digress: For me, this game was just plain horrible in every imaginable way and I just couldn't bear to play it a minute longer after about three hours. The final turning point came in a certain boss battle: I didn't have the gear to beat him. That would've required a bow, but I didn't possess one, because the game never guided me to a shop. Now, the game doesn't have to hold your hand at all times, but if such a boss battle is about to become next, you'd think the game would make sure to make at least precautions and notify the player in some way so that I would at least have a chance to beat the boss. As it is, the boss keeps spawning an infinite number of enemies without any pauses, and if I approach him, he immediately teleports away. An archer I can summon can, in theory, damage the boss, but she insists on firing at the endless regular enemies and there's no way to order her to switch the target. Also, the game is simply mind numbingly boring (story- and combatwise), all the characters, especially The Bard, are extremely unlikable, the humor (yes, the game tries hard to be funny) fails miserably, the voice acting gets on my nerves constantly, and...well, everything's just either very bland or very bad. I had no choice but to give up. I can't take it anymore.

So, anyone else got stories to share? What games have you abandoned this year (or if there's too many to mention, then how about what games you've abandoned lately)?

Odd, I keep begging people for "Bard's Tale". :D

The only thing I've totally ditched so far is "Knights & Merchants". By 'totally ditched' I mean I SHAN'T be coming back to it. A lot of games I ditch I keep it in the back of my mind to give another try at some point in the future, not this one. It wouldn't be so bad if your fucking army didn't up and take a lunch break in the middle of an attack. Anyone who has ever played the game knows that this is exactly what happens.

I did remember seeing someone ask for it somewhere. Just didn't remember it was you. Although, I do remember already thinking then "man, if only you knew..."

I did check the GOG rating afterwards, and apparently other people do like it, with its 4½ star rating. Maybe you would too. But me...I hate it with a passion.

I haven't ditched anything yet... but was very close with SR3. Some missions are just annoying ... like the helicopter missions...

I feel that by focusing on the boss, you're unfairly glossing over how mind-numbingly terrible that entire level is. I haven't officially "abandoned" the game, but I have relegated it to the "sort of playing if I ever get around to it" bin.

Eschalon: Book One. It's a shame, because I was actually enjoying the game. I was quite a few hours in and came across a situation in which I could progress no further. I don't know that it was a bug, as no one else on the game's official forums had made reference to it. I asked for assistance in multiple venues and while folks tried to be helpful, nothing resolved the issue. I wasn't too hip on the idea of going back to my last save point seeing as there was no gaurantee I would get any farther on the restart and, frankly, another game quickly drew my attention. Again, a shame, because it's not a bad little game when it's working.

Eschalon book I.
Usually I finish 99% games started unless there's something really wrong.

What went wrong here?
Well for me this game has every outdated mechanic, UI or some other annoyance of yore without anythin that made oldies like this good.
After 15h the combat is still a mess, with a turn based system devoid of any strategy, the story is nonexistent and the exploration is a chore due to big empty maps and horrendous walking speed.
To continue would be pure torture.

I second Knights and Merchants. I couldn't get past the tutorial.

Some people like it, but damn how does one begin to figure out that interface?

Civilization V: Gods and Kings - I love Civ 5. It is my first and only Civ game, and have been playing it since it came out. I picked up this expansion during the Steam sale. I'm sure I would like it, but apparently my processor is not fast enough for it. The AI turn times got really long really quickly. I'm talking 10 seconds by turn number 50. I got to around turn 75 in my first game before quitting, and waiting until I can get a better rig.

PAYDAY: The Heist - I loved this game. I clocked 285 hours. A few weeks ago, one too many crappy players asked to do "Overdrill." I finally snapped and uninstalled it. (Overdrill is a new easter egg that requires no skill, and 40 minutes of doing nothing. It gives you enough cash to gain up to like 25 levels. I consider it cheating. Unfortunately, about 90% of all players want to do it all the time, and almost all games these days are overdrill games.)

TES V: Skyrim - Quit just a few days ago. After spending a bunch of time tweaking files and installing mods to fix very basic things (that still don't work right,) I finally just started playing. And I was bored out of my mind. Absolutely everything about the game is boring to me. I just can't get into it at all. I loved Morrowind, I loved both of the new Fallout games, and I even loved Oblivion. But Skyrim just bores the living piss out of me. So I quit rather than wasting any more time trying to like it.

I was about 33% through The Last of Us before giving up on it, I found it too hard to enjoy to come back to it.

Anachronox. I previously told myself my abandonment of the game was temporary, but after thinking about it, I don't think I'll ever play it again. It wasn't anywhere near fun enough to warrant my playing through it. The combat sucks. Seriously.

Freespace. I enjoyed it some extent (far more than I thought I would, actually), but in the end, flight games just aren't my thing (except for maybe Rogue Squadron, which, to date, is the only flight game I've ever completed). I may pick it up again in the future, but I've ditched it for now.

Silver. It's an okay game in terms of gameplay, unoriginal in terms of story, but it is gorgeous and the voice acting is great to listen to. Unfortunately, it just wasn't enough. There wasn't enough variety to the gameplay to keep me going.

That's all I can think of, at any rate.

* Far Cry 1
* Far Cry 2
* Puddle
* Waking Mars
* Just Cause 1
* Sword of the Stars: The Pit

I'll go over the details on why I dropped these below:

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Far Cry 1.
For the most part, I really enjoyed it on the big, wide-open levels where you had the freedom to tackle each scenario as you chose. But eventually the game introduced some zombie-pokeman-whatever monsters, which totally ruined it for me. At first they were alright because you could take them on in wide, open spaces, and there weren't that-that many of them to deal with. As time went on, though, you had to deal with more and more of them, and eventually I got to a really claustrophobic, temple-like level that had nothing but those things. Instant and unfair death was had over and over again.

I quit the game at that point, because my will to plow through the shitty monster/levels was not worth it, in order to get to the good levels.

Far Cry 2.
Quit about 4 hours in because I got really sick about having to worry about Malaria (it was a really dumb mechanic that had to be dealt with constantly in a really repetitive/rote manner), and the respawning enemy camps that you had to deal with over and over again.

Pid.
It was a really lovely game that had an incredibly charming and wonderous aesthetic... just seeing the characters and where the story went was a joy. But unfortunately, the game suffered from floaty/imprecise controls that made keeping-up with what the game demanded from you incredibly difficult. I put up with it because I liked the story/characters, but I eventually just reached my breaking-point with unfair-difficulty due to the controls.

Puddle.
It was quite enjoyable at first, and was a journey through many unique and interesting locales/mechanics. But later-on, the game starts to get tedious because it throws situations at you that you could never predict how to respond to, and as such, it becomes trial-and-error based.

It's not fun going through a particularly difficult level, only to get screwed over right at the end because the game magically expected you to know whether you should have been going fast or slow in order to make it past a certain section. The tutorial in the game recommends that you take it slow so you can figure-out how to approach sections of a level properly, but this advice doesn't really hold-up.

Basically, your repeated deaths in the later levels always feel like the game's fault, and it's frustrating redoing levels because of how slow/imprecise controlling the fluid can be (that, and the fluid's physics never feels quite right, making you relearn how you think fluid should flow).

The game was great fun while it lasted, but the tedium the game introduced later-on was enough to pretty much ruin the overall experience for me.


Waking Mars.
Again, mostly-enjoyable most of the way through, but it eventually became repetitive, making you do the same things over and over again. ie, you'd know how to do something, but doing it was boring. Tedium/repetition in a puzzle game is a big no-no.

Just Cause 1.
Its sequel, Just Cause 2, is a pretty great game, but the prequel... not so much. The game had a large, expansive world like its sequel, but there wasn't much to do in it. After just an hour in, it already got repetitive for me, and just dropped it. Not to mention, it was a gimped PC port of the Original Xbox/PS2 version, so it looked like crap and didn't have the visual-fidelity the Xbox 360 version did. I am glad I only spent $0.27 on it, due to a pricing error.

Sword of The Stars: The Pit.
While it is a roguelike, which is a hard genre to "drop", I have to say I consider it ditched because I stopped playing it after only putting 4 hours into it, with only a handful or attempts at it. The game is difficult, quite polished, and has some interesting mechanics (eg, the focus on gun-play), but the interactions were just too simple for me, and I'd find myself really bored because every encounter was basically dealt in the same way.

I also had a feeling that crafting in the game was an integral part to survival, which I didn't do much of, and is probably why I usually didn't get that-that far in most of my playthroughs. I really didn't want to play the game on Easy to get far enough to unlock them to make my Normal/Hard playthroughs remotely possible (which other people recommended).

Don't get me wrong, I love roguelikes, but the interactions in The Pit were just too simple for me. Granted that other roguelikes like Dungeons of Dredmor (which is considered "Babby's First Rogue-like/lite") might have been kind-of simple/easy -- and even repetitive if you played the game with the normal-sized floor setting -- but it was interesting because of the hugely-diverse set of abilities you could use in every playthrough, and because it was overflowing with really funny & clever loot to find. Just finding and reading the descriptions of loot was pretty much the driving force for me, and is why I somehow clocked 65 hours into it.

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That's about it, as far as games ditched in 2013 for me, I thunk.

I almost gave up on Unstoppable Gorg too, some parts really do get incredibly difficult.

I don't usually ditch games - most of the time I tell myself that I'll eventually come back to them later. Although, one that I've definitely ditched is Woodle Tree Adventures. I played the first level and found it to be very dull, there's also a lot of camera issues.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 it started off decent but ended up being shit basically

Risen 2 I liked the game but my save had a slight disappearance problem

Empire Total War another game I liked but it started crashing constantly and lagging bad so I just had enough and uninstalled it to install Napoleon

Stalker Clear Sky basically same reason as Empire but take away lag and replace it with crashing non stop

Blood 2 its pretty good but I got annoyed at the auto aim, non missing AI and decided to spend time with Blood 1 instead

Freespace 2.

I just don't get it. You point the dot at the thingie on the screen and push the button over and over while fiddling with all kinds of other buttons in order to do stupid things your futuristic space ship ought to be doing for you automatically.

I played for an hour or two, got bored, and quit.