[Sanek]

Do you ever play the game and have wonderful time doing it, but for one reason or another, you never touch it again after finishing it?
I have a huge number of PC games that I played during my childhood (which is early 2000s), but never played it after finishing it, save for the games with a multiplayer options or the games with editors being included.

So here's the list:

Half-Life series - save for some standalone free mods on steam
Left 4 Dead
Prey (2006)
Unreal
Quake 3
Heretic 2
FireStarter
Painkiller
Outlaws
Max Payne 1-2
Mortal Kombat 4
The Incredible Machine
Neighbours from Hell
The Pink Panther: Passport to Peril
Tigger's Honey Hunt
3D Caveman Rocks
Disney's Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers
101 Dalmatians: Escape From DeVil Manor
Disney's Aladdin in Nasira's Revenge - don't remember if I ever finished this one...
Age of Empires 2 - I was a huge fan of this one, I played tons of user maps/scenarios and made dozens of works myself, but I stopped playing it a very long time ago...
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The Simpsons Hit & Run
GTA: San Andreas
Assassin's Creed
Fishing

There's more games on the list, but this is definitie ones I clearly remember playing during my childhood and have very fond memories of it, but I just don't have any impulse to play ever again. I must play some of these in the future, who knows (especially the Disney' games). But the fact is that I don't have any nostalgia for these games. Just because you played these games during your childhood doesn't automatically meant that it'll become the source of nostalgia for you. The same goes for every other media. I watched tons of good movies and played lots of good games over the last 20+ years, I'm NOT going to cherish every single one of them.

As for the more recent games that I played, the first games that comes to mind is Doom 2016 and Ion Fury (I'm sorry!). I enjoyed both of these, but I don't think that I'll ever play the full campaigns from start to finish.
So yeah, that's it. Excuse me for making it more like "games of your childhood that you don't play anymore". But what about you? Do you have games that you really like, but never touched it again after the credits? Share your list here.

[Ninety-Six]

Well having grown up fairly poor, I learned to enjoy replaying most of any games in my collection, and that habit never really broke as I got older.

That being said, there are still a few. We'll start with my steam library, admittedly most of which play loose with the idea behind this thread:

Microsoft Flight, albeit not willingly. Because I can't reinstall the damn game; they won't let me. Bastards.

Risk of Rain - I don't think I actually beat this one. I played it back when there was this really nasty bug where the terrain would just lose all collision. At one point I spawned and just died over and over until I game over'd. I guess it got better since? But I just haven't been able to bring myself up to trying again.

Continuing the theme so far: Waveform. Fun game until it crashed so hard that any time I tried to start it I would have to task kill steam itself. I don't think I need to explain why I haven't gone back.

You Have to Win the Game - I honestly completely forgot about this one until somewhat recently when I was looking over my steam library and realized I had no memory of this thing. Seeing the screenshots does ring a bell and I seem to remember enjoying it, but I never apparently felt the need to go back.


Now I still have my genesis games from way back when (not the genesis itself though; it died. So I guess technically all of them qualify, but I don't think that's in the spirit of the thread), and there are a few here too.

Tiny Toons Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure - I remember playing this game a lot as a kid. It took me a few years to finally knuckle down and complete it. I remember that itself took a few weeks of my life, where I'd play for a little bit after school, get walled by something, and then play something else for the rest of the day. Rinse and repeat. And then once I beat it I for some reason lost all interest.I don't actually know if this would still be considered a good game or not, but it was made by Konami back when they still had a reputation so it couldn't have been terrible.

Castlevania Bloodlines: An excellent game with an A+ soundtrack but for whatever reason once I finished it one cold winter's midnight I never bothered to play it again.

Earthworm Jim 2 - this one confuses me since I've played the first one front to back several times. Just not its sequel.



In my gamecube library, there's only about one I can think of. And it's only by technicality. Megaman 7, via the Anniversary Collection. I actually really like Megaman 7, (and the rest of the series, but 4 is my favorite), but I've only played it to completion once. Anyone who has also played it to completion may probably understand why I don't really intend on facing that final boss again.

[Morpheus Kitami]

Its a real struggle to think of such games because my problem is either some kind of glitch or distraction. I either play them to finish multiple times or never manage to finish it the first time.

Shin Megami Tensei, the original...although I just got the Sega CD version...Good game, except for the grinding...and the end...Actually, I never finished this, that grinding at the end.
Killing Time, great game, underrated FPS. Its got the theme of a '20s detective drama, except with gangsters, clowns and Ancient Egyptian magic. Well, I know why I'm not playing it not, but before this year it wasn't in my mind.
La Noire, although the dialog system is probably why I haven't returned.
Silent Hill, I think at one point I was holding off until I purchased a physical copy, but prices have shot up.
Sanitarium, also one I've been holding off until I get a physical copy. Since its an adventure game, its only natural that a long time passes between playthroughs.
Realms of the Haunting, another one I wanted to play on a proper copy. Even found one, but for a new copy, it sure was water damaged...

I'm sure there's plenty on consoles that i don't remember, but I generally haven't been playing on those for quite some time now. Like Tony Hawk's Underground I semi-recently gave another shot, but never reached the end. Nor have I played any Resident Evil game for a good while now.

[High Treason]

There are only two that I can think of, both of which have a bit of a strange history and I don't know the name of the first one, or else I would play it again.
In the 2000s, a friend of mine gave me a burned CD (among several others) and said it had this game on it that was banned or something and wasn't going to come out in stores. I don't think this is the case, but it's possible it never did get a full release as the game did have watermarks displaying some guy's name and a number in the corner at all times.
When you started the game, a cutscene played of a man at the pub with his girlfriend, he went to order some drinks and she went outside with her friend, who had been talking to this random guy. This random guy's friends were waiting outside, where they grabbed the girls, shoved them into a car and drove off.
The protagonist guy came back from ordering drinks, realized she was missing, heard about the men outside and you had to track them down. The game ran mostly in first person, but had the occasional third person part and was mechanically weird, because it behaved a lot like an adventure game, some puzzles even used a full screen image with a cursor. Eventually you talked to enough people, got enough stuff and had three different places and people you could go to in order to get your girl back, but only one of them was right. My friend said things like this were randomized every time you began a new game. The correct one in my play through was this abandoned house behind the pub where everything started, accessible only through a small alley way. It was raining heavily (the effect looked like shit, some textures were also scribbled over and dialog was missing, one of the lines even had the voice actors laughing about misreading something) where you reached the house and confronted the guy, finding out he was someone you'd been to school with years ago.
You had the option to kill him either with an illegally acquired gun, or with any other weapon you had, though you could pay him off or end up being killed too. Eventually you got your girl back and returned to the pub like nothing had happened in the final cutscene. It sure was a strange game, even the characters weren't the usual sorts, you were playing as a fairly average guy in his 40s who was a kitchen fitter or something, or was it tiles he did? Can't remember. Had to give the disc back, so never got to play it again, never saw it on store shelves and would love to know what it was called in case I could find it again.

I can't even remember the name of the developer, only that it was some nonsensical mouthful like 'Greater Album Paloma Arts' and not necessarily in that order, which searches for turn up nothing. No logo as such, just words with a kind of white square outline around them and something red, think it was a pigeon or something which, come to think of it, there were an abundance of in the game itself that seemed to serve no purpose.



The other game is Zelda: A Link to the Past. I'd assumed for years that the game sucked balls and the walkthroughs were all wrong, because they didn't always match up with what I was seeing, the game was also broken.
I hated the game enough to try streaming it, where I learned that my copy is broken for some reason, it seems to be a bootleg and the theory is that it was a bootleg of the US version, which causes issues on my UK console as well as some odd changes the pirates made - some tiles appear to be broken, some text was replaced, the fountain has a 'Certain Death' that doesn't seem to be in the original game and the error room refers to 'Chris Houligan' and the game does weird things. Its a shame my original save was lost as the game was in a busted state, I was in the ice palace with starting items and it was extremely crash prone. It turns out my copy is un-winnable without using exploits.
Here, have a random breakage;
https://youtu.be/HFuDKqVN0jU?t=3161
There are many more across the streams I did of this game, but it probably isn't worth your time to sift through them, I just wanted to demonstrate the kind of nonsense I was dealing with for all those years and was never sure if they weren't by design, given RPGs tendencies towards being cheap and not being my thing.

What sucks is that I actually think I turned out to be quite good at the game, started trampling it from around the halfway point on even in areas I'd never seen before, maybe because of how shit it was playing so far with starting items over so many years and dealing with what I perceived to be cheap, unfair bosses like that and screen bugs like those when I leave the palace. What's weird is in the end, I had to use a different cart to finish the game, but then went back to my own cart to beat it using an exploit. No music played, as if the game knew it was over and the grudge was finally settled. I won't play it again on either a working cart or my broken one, because I don't think it would be anywhere near as fun as it was kicking down such a long standing hurdle.
Now that I know my copy was broken, I do think it's a good game, really good, and that's saying something because I generally despise Japanese RPGs. I do take pride in knowing I beat the game on a broken copy though, or as near as was possible.

[Morpheus Kitami]

High Treason, you've got me intrigued. I don't know what it is right off, but given a few more details, I think I can figure out what that game is...assuming it was released in another country. If it was completely unreleased, I don't think I've got anything. My usual source for unreleased games turned up nothing that sounded like that. What year was it, roughly? What other games the guy gave you might help with that. And, very important, what kind of graphics did this game have? Pre-rendered, FMV, cartoony (LSL7 or otherwise), pixel art, Gabriel Knight 3, Vampire Bloodlines, Limbo of the Lost?

[High Treason]

This would have been around 2004-2005, the only other games he gave me that I can remember, were car games of the time that were already out, Midnight Club or some such that my crappy machine couldn't run.
Graphics in the unknown game were fairly typical polygon graphics of the time, if not a little dated. The best way I can describe it is like PS1 graphics, but more advanced, no polygon wobble and more detail, but most of the textures were quite low resolution. They were very monochromatic in feel; deep blacks, bright whites and everything else in the middle was largely gray. The puzzle screens with the cursor were rare, but they were quite oldskool, looked like hand drawn pictures with CG over the top, like some of the older adventure games, these tended to be more colorful, as were the icons - I don't remember any HUD, but there was an inventory of some sort that appeared over the scene if you held a button down, it was quite basic and everything appeared on a single row, almost like the Build games if the weapons were also in the inventory. I don't recall any dynamic lighting at all, shading was rather flat, so I doubt there was any baked lighting either aside from maybe a handful of textures that I can't remember.

Couldn't even begin to guess what engine it ran on, it wouldn't be IDTech as none of my systems could ever run those, it could have been an older Unreal engine but the renderer was quite buggy, a lot of depth sorting issues and smoke effects that looked like random pixels sometimes, but like discolored textures in others, as white smoke took on a greenish hue, something I've seen in many other games.
The rain effect I mentioned did three things that I recall; have these thin white streaks around the player, almost looking like they were simply mapped to the faces of several cylinders around you and scrolling downwards rapidly, put dancing white squiggles on the floor textures at laughably low frame rates, presumably an animated texture, and also display random circular textures on the screen as though the rain had hit the camera, but they really did just look like gray circular lines.

By contrast, the models were quite well animated. I think the guy you played as had a bright red t-shirt on for most of the game, though I faintly remember it being white at some point. The red one resembled a Manchester United shirt, and the game was definitely set somewhere in the North of England, but this soccer team is popular around the entire country and it could just as easily be Liverpool or something, which the voice actors sounded vaguely like they were from in what few lines they had. I don't follow soccer so the shirt could be anything, and the voice actors could have just been the devs or whoever was cheapest on the day, I'd find it hard to believe any of those lines were meant to be the final take, but it would suggest a British dev team as nothing I can recall suggests a localization from another language.

To which end, there weren't many lines yet, like you'd get subtitles in rather large letters, and a few of the lines would have grainy voice clips for things like "Ah. OK." or "Get off me!" but not much else, there were actually more lines towards the end of the game than anywhere else. A lot of things also lacked sound. I distinctly remember it being quite jarring in places, in particular going from a wooden floor to a steel walkway between buildings, where the floor had no footstep sounds but the walkway did and they were extremely loud. Not much music either, a very simple synth bass bouncing up and down an octave in certain cutscenes and not much else, some weird descending piano and another weird piano stab, can't remember any more.

Controls were what you'd expect, used the cursor keys but you could turn and perform actions with the mouse if you wanted to. Movement was slow, combat was quite clunky and your hits would often miss entirely, though enemy AI wasn't really all there and did little beyond run around aimlessly.


That's about all I can remember. To be honest, the whole thing had a strong 'student project' vibe about it and I'd not be surprised if they simply never finished it. It wasn't actually good for being a really great game, it was good more because it was different and kinda absurd, as if the devs were just having fun with it and somehow that bled through to the player, as happens with some things. To this day I have only ever met one other person who remembers it, though I'm not clear on where he got it from and he didn't think he had the disc any more either. Unfortunately I lost touch with both him and my friend who loaned me it a long time ago. Notably I used to get through a lot of PC gaming related magazines back then and never once saw this game mentioned in them, so it definitely wasn't widely publicized. Sticking with my 'student project' notion, for all I know that name and number wasn't the tester they'd sent it to, but the creator's name (if only I could remember it) and phone number, and he just gave out a few discs as a demo, only for some idiot to make a copy and start handing it around. It wouldn't be the only time I'd gotten my hands on such a thing unintentionally, though it was unusually close to completion for such a thing.



More on topic, I'm not sure I'll ever play Rule of Rose again, but that's more because my PS2 is busted and I can't be bothered to fix it. With a little more polishing time, that game could surely have been a masterpiece.

[DNSKILL5]

X-Squad on PS2. That's the only game I know for sure I'll avoid to ever play again, but for me to list others I would think since I still have (at least if things keep going how they've been going for me) a lot of life left to live, and my taste could change in the future, but I'll never want to play X-Squad again.

[Morpheus Kitami]

I did some looking around, and I am 95% certain I have not found the game, and I think with relative certainty I won't find the game if its not any of these. But I can reconstruct certain events I do believe.
Firstly, it was not officially banned. It is not any of those. The only games banned in the UK were mostly overturned later, or obscure Japanese games that are very distinctly Japanese. It might be banned in a technical sense, as in someone was suing someone else and the game couldn't come out because of that.
Secondly, I believe it was made in Wintermute. I don't know this for a fact, but given what you've said, it seems quite likely. Another student project was made at the same time in that engine, although it was 2D and not any kind of 3D. I believe its Wintermute because of the nature of everything you've described. The inventory and up-close system seems similar to what I've seen. The graphical issues are probably more owing to the game's beta nature. Wintermute can be thought of as being like Adventure Game Studio, but in 3D. I found a list of games made in the engine, only The Dead City sounds anything like the game your describing:
http://res.dead-code...php/games:start
Now, I have one more game to suggest, this:
http://www.abandonso...Imprisoned_gods
I can't remember why I suggested it, because it only partially looks like the game you were describing and doesn't seem to match the plot much.
I do have one more thing to ask you, is the graphical style somewhat similar to this:
https://www.mobygame...meShotId,83087/
Probably won't help me, but I'll have a base to draw upon in the future.
Thirdly, I feel relatively confident that it isn't some kind of foreign game translated into English. None of the ones sounded anything like what you dsecribed.
So, in summary, if its not any of those, its likely it was a closed beta that got leaked. You weren't have supposed to see that, the game never got released. The student probably went to a school in your area, hence why you and your friends found it, but it seems to have disappeared. Barring some freak upload of it to the Internet Archive (hey, it happens) the only other possible lead would be to check local colleges that might have anything related to multimedia and see if they keep records of old student projects, either on their main site or on the Internet Archive. From there, you could find the authors and ask if they still have it. I doubt the project itself would be there. If not, hey, you might know the name now. However, this reminds me of the whole banned aspect. It might not be that the project itself was banned per say, but that the college didn't like the contents of the project. Which would make a lot of sense, and explain why it barely exists. Its more interesting than the author just getting pissed off at people sharing his work.

[High Treason]

Indeed, I think it's lost to history, at least for now. Given the accents, I think it had traveled quite some way (from the Northwest, I am in the Northeast), but it wouldn't be unusual for someone to go to a university many miles away from where they lived - I lost many friends to this myself - which only makes it harder to figure out, because it could have been in either direction; A local student going to a far away university and bringing the disc home, or a student from a distant town studying closer to this one. Unfortunately local educational establishments are pretty bad at keeping records, and I can tell you first hand that if you upset them, they effectively disappear you and your work at the first opportunity, so if they didn't like his game, it is likely they'd have gone out of their way to scrub it out of their archives. If it wasn't part of his course, he'd likely be punished for bringing it in anyway.

Those pages are at least interesting, but nothing there looks anything like the game I played. This thing was far more grungy and low-res, think of the New York level in Driver on the PS1 when it's dull or rainy, it was like that but with more of the details modeled. Building entrances and such were actually there, for example, and things were way less flat in general. Things tended to look dirty and run-down, though that was always going to be the case with a northern English city setting. Character models were more on par with early PS2 games. Those full screen puzzles almost looked like something you'd see in Myst or Atlantis, though. I think the bad guy had set it all up to get revenge for something that had happened years ago, like he was the random guy talking to your girlfriend's friend, only to get close to her and kidnap her or whatever.


I'd laugh if ten years from now, it turns out the creator is some big shot at some major studio and he randomly posts something like 'oh look, I found this crappy project I made years ago and it got me hired' on the internet. Makes you wonder how many games like this exist that nobody knows about.


The ban thing probably means nothing, it used to be quite common for this rumor to go around, even for common games like GTA - people would literally go to the store, buy the game and then talk about how the game was so 'realistic' or 'violent' that it was banned. People are idiots like that. Either that, or you're right and it was 'banned on campus' with someone in the middle misunderstanding. Overall I still think it's lost to history and probably won't resurface, but one can hope.

[Morpheus Kitami]

Interesting, it sounds like if this wasn't some thing the university had on its website in some way there's no way of finding anything on this short of the actual game. I guess the voice actors might be another bit, but it might just be his friends, which would lead into another dead end.
Now I didn't see the first-person bit, which actually throws most of my idea into the trash, because I've never seen a Wintermute game that has traditional shooter's first-person view. This is basically an adventure game right? Not an action game? Or FPS? Because I haven't been looking for an action game very much. Even one of those dreaded immersion sims maybe? RPG?
As to how many games like this must exist...thousands, probably. Its even amazing how many professional games by major studios end up screwed. I'm sure there's very few developers alive who haven't given up on a game in a state like that.
I give more credence than its worth to the banning thing because its Britain, your government banned a bunch of crappy horror movies because they had spooky titles. Someone with less power might try as hard as they can to ban some game for some silly reason.

[Sanek]

Mind you that it's only about the games that you used to enjoy back in the day....
I have more games than I can add to my list...I cleary remember playing game called Echelon and I still have a CD for RTS called Submarine Titans, but I don't remember whether I enjoyed these games or not.
I do remember Wing Commander, but I only remember my friend playing it instead of me, I enjoyed watching it. I actualy run it by myself a few years ago and found it totally unplayable. Still have some fond memories of this game, with it's briefings, barracks, intense fights and such.

Anyway, back on topic. There's another bunch of games from my childhood that I do remember playing is Living Books series, it's is a series of interactive storybooks. I had 4 games from the series - Just Grandma and Me, Little Monster at School, Harry and the Haunted House and The Tortoise and the Hare. I had such a blast playing through The Tortoise and the Hare, then launching Jazz Jackrabbit (which I still replay every couple of years so it's not on the list).


And one last game is Fisher-Price Great Adventures Pirate Ship. It's one of "activity centers" that Disney and other studios used to make back in the day. I had a russian version which is fully translated and I still have a CD, but won't able to load it even on my older WinXP machine, not to mention Win10.

[Micky C]

Hey I remember Grandma and Me! Man that was a long time ago.

Games which immediately come to my mind for this include the original Prey and the Max Payne games as others have said. There’s also half life 2 and it’s episodes (not the original, I couldn’t get into that) and the portal games. Deus Ex, plus DE:HR and DE:MK, Dishonoured are others.

As for RTS games, I played each of the Starcraft 2 games once. I’ve played Tiberian Sun multiple times though.

[jkas789]

I got two: Torchlight 1 & 2

Like in paper I love this games. Lot's of content, lots of excel spreadsheet resistances to juggle, tons of ok writing/lore. Pets that you can send to town to sell your shit.

However when I get down to it, I reinstall Diablo 2 &/or 3 and play those instead. Even Grim Dawn and Titan Quest I only went as far as finishing the expansions.


I have realized I'm the trash that has been enabling Blizzard for so long.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Prototype. Best open world "superhero" game ever. Just never felt like going back to it once I finished it and never played the 2nd one, but it's so deliciously violent.

[jkas789]

I though about another three. The Witcher games. 1 was jank but ok I guess, 2 was great and 3 was peak. However I pretty much shelved them after beating them once, never to go back.

Like seriously, there is no reason to play those games again, multiple endings be damned.

[Danukem]

jkas789, on 09 April 2021 - 11:37 PM, said:

I got two: Torchlight 1 & 2

Like in paper I love this games. Lot's of content, lots of excel spreadsheet resistances to juggle, tons of ok writing/lore. Pets that you can send to town to sell your shit.

However when I get down to it, I reinstall Diablo 2 &/or 3 and play those instead. Even Grim Dawn and Titan Quest I only went as far as finishing the expansions.


I have realized I'm the trash that has been enabling Blizzard for so long.

Maybe your timing was off. I played and beat those Torchlight games when they were released. Torchlight and Torchlight 2 were essentially Diablo 2 with quality of life and various other improvements. Diablo 3 came out at around the same time as Torchlight 2, but Diablo 3 was shit at that time. So those Torchlight games were a way for Diablo 2 fans to get more of what they wanted when there weren't other great options.

[jkas789]

Hmm maybe? Now a days Diablo 3 has gotten way better than at release, to the point that it is a very different game than it was initially.

Maybe Torchlight never resonated with me that much. Not in the way Diablo 2 (with plugy installed) did.

For anyone who hasn't played them, don't get me wrong. They are excellent ARPG. In some respects they are better than Diablo 2 (+plugy) and Diablo 3.

Maybe it is just me and my dumb ass I guess.

[Aristotle Gumball]

I can't get into something that looks like a PG version of the original Diablo and Diablo 2 graphically. Why's everything got to have these bright happy colors? Part of the reason I liked D2 was it's art style. Both Torchlight and D3 have this WoW-like aesthetic.

[William Beavis]

Zelda: Wind Waker

[Player Lin]

I like Diablo but I never played Torchlight series, even I had the idea to try them.

Why? Simple : I have no interest on both games' classes. Well, I only played Diablo 2 and 3, never the first one, and I didn't played Diablo 3 until its expansion near released, which the new class in the expansion was something I had interest.

I feel sad but I don't want forced myself to play something I have no interest.