Are you good or bad at games?

[oustropique]

I'm playing Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex and the original Crash Team Racing in my evenings and I'm terrible at both. CTR's challenges to collect so many crystals in a minute or so (I'm presuming the plural - not that far in yet) and some of the standard courses are proving annoying. Cortex and Crash in general I'm just bad at - end up falling down a lot of holes after misjudging a jump and the enemies or nitro boxes get me all the time. You need reaction times that I just don't have. Maybe they're not for me.

My recent playthrough of Neversong, an adventure platformer, took me four, possibly five hours when the walkthroughs are under three. That was mostly because of the puzzles.

On the other hand, my brief time with Fortnite (I only really wanted to watch Christopher Nolan's The Prestige in it) led to me getting top ten nearly every game and top three a few times. It's multiplatform crossplay so I assumed it was all kids and idiots on phones, and only every now and then did someone wipe me out really prematurely. The last game I played was one of those times, admittedly, and I haven't played in a couple of days.

I think I need more patience and perseverance - Crash as a franchise appears especially difficult to me. I'm 4% of the way through Wrath of Cortex and it's wound me up. Can't see myself finishing it and might just watch a longplay.

Am I broken?

[wooders1978]

I'm very good at football games imo - playing on hardest or 2nd hardest level usually - recently switched from fifa to pes - also thrash online on most occasions when I can be arsed

I'm crap at "soulsie" games, largely due to a lack of patience though

FPS - fine/good

[ImmaculateClump]

I'm alright. I've got good staying power which makes up for my myriad failings. Always happy to hop straight back on the horsey.

I consider myself a lanky dwarf when it comes to shmups. The skill ceiling is waaaay high so I'm nowhere near even average when it comes to the bigger boys but I can hold my own amongst the flannel tier shit munchers.
Got plenty of 1cc's under my belt and won a few high score competitions, dontcha know.

Quite good at first person shooters and twin stick shooters and platformers and things like that.

Not too good at puzzle games or RTS or 4X or anything toooo nerdy like that. I'm a bit thick and I've got a lazy brain so I like to switch off during my me-time, I like playing games where you don't really use the thinking part and just use the automatic lizardy bit mostly.

I do like roguelikes and turn based stuff but I like it where you're just baby sitting the one guy, I don't like it where you have like 5 of them and you have to level them all up and wipe their arses and one of them doesn't really like fish fingers so you've got to put a pizza in as well but it has to be cooked at a different temperature and needs to be in longer. Balls to that, life's too short, just pick a favourite and put the others up for adoption.

[Dewt]

Really good at rhythm games, platform games, schmups. Pretty good at strategy games. It makes game development a little harder, completely strips the ability to judge difficulty.

I am terrible at FPS games. To me they're just mazes, and my brain doesn't care enough about corners.

[Inspector Norse]

Yes I am good or bad at games. I'm a pretty casual gamer at best, only tend to have an hour a day if that and it's something I do just to switch off from real life rather than any more serious hobby.

I tend to go for open-worldy story things but I did decide a while ago I should give Dark Souls a go and picked up the remastered trilogy.

First try I got to Firelink Shrine then ran into the skeletons, couldn't figure out how to get past them as they kept coming back to life, eventually sacked it off as too hard and not my thing.

Went back a year later, found the steps up to the zombies, slowly ground past them, but got pretty stuck in Undead Burg and sacked it off as too hard and not my thing. I was frustrated by needing to grind and repeat bits if I died a long way from a bonfire.

Left it a while longer then came back and figured it out a bit. Got through Undead Burg and Parish, beat the bosses without too much trouble, then met the Titanite Demon and 400 deaths later sacked it off as too hard and not my thing.

Six months later again, I somehow got past him as he got stuck on some scenery and his big swings were all over my head, and I could pick him off easily. That done, I got into the game properly and have slowly but surely progressed through it over the last few months. I wouldn't say I was good at the game - I still lose much more often than not when some fucker invades me - but I've figured out a lot of stuff (and, I'm not ashamed to say, looked up a bunch more stuff, because seriously some of it is just completely random), missed a lot more (like the guy I accidentally attacked when I was trying to get him out of a barrel, who then fought back, so I killed him, only for it to turn out he is the only character who sells some pretty damn useful stuff), struggled for ages with some bosses (the Four bloody Kings), surprised myself with others (Sanctuary Guardian went down on about my second try solo), got help and not been ashamed to with a handful, found ways to completely rinse others (big 'ard Gravelord Nito had no answers to my swiftly dispatching his skeleton minions then just backing away around the stalagmites in the middle of his cave and filling him with arrows as he plodded after), and now with a week to my "going away to the country" finishing-the-bloody-thing deadline, I just have Kalameet (who is optional anyway) and the final final final boss to contend with.

I feel I've come a long way from those tentative beginnings - I laugh at the idea of panicking at a death far from a bonfire - and am quite pleased with my achievement even if I realise I haven't discovered a lot of the game's secrets and even if I will need a lengthy break before getting started on number 2.

As for online gaming, I used to be pretty good at FIFA but they have fiddled the gameplay over the last few years so the Ultimate Team mode is full of pubescent shits who've blown their parents' bank accounts on filling their teams with 99-rated Ronaldinhos and just spam PRESSURE all the time, and I can't really hack it any more.

I was good at the early CoD/MW games; not in a dominating masterblaster way but in a good-team-player sneaky, flanking, smart-use-of-environment way. I've not played any of the more recent ones - is the latest remaster of the original closer in spirit to the early ones? Might be worth a go if so - but I struggled with Battlefield 1, which I found required more genuine weapons mastery and the like.

I haven't played Fortnite but my old CoD tactics have helped me do OK at other battle royale things I've tried, though ultimately I don't have the skills to actually win anything.

I completed Untitled Goose Game and only had to look up one thing.

[ImmaculateClump]

It makes game development a little harder

Ooh, have you made anything I might have played?

You playing any shmups at the minute? ZeroRanger just got a patch that added an arrange mode called "white vanilla" which I've been enjoying, it's lovely and fast.
The main campaign had a lot of dead air and this fixes it. The final boss is a pain in the arse, you have a time limit and you have to use your melee weapon and keep whacking it while all sorts of nasties shoot hands at you. Gonna get it next time I play though, I can feel it.

Danbo mentioned on twitter that there's gonna be a Blue Revolver related announcement on friday but it's not Double Action so not to get too excited.

[Dewt]

Ooh, have you made anything I might have played?

Probably not! Low-level semi-independent (but not the COOL kind of independent) mostly Flash games stuff 8+ years ago.

[ImmaculateClump]

Me and my nephew were all over those free browser flash game sites around that time, so you never know!

I know what you mean about fps games being like 3d mazes, though they're more like one long corridor nowadays.
I get lost dead easy, no sense of direction. I prefer those arena games more where you're just moving on to the next big room full of monsters.
All action all the time, just boiled down to the combat rather than effing around backtracking and finding keys and stuff.

[ASFTSN]

Bad, but persistent. Never learn from mistakes, just keep headbutting that brickwall.

[magval]

I think I'm actually quite good at them. I haven't played any of the famously hard modern games, but I've done a couple things that I know were difficult (finished Uncharted 1 on Crushing difficulty, completed the VR missions in Metal Gear Solid 2 including that fucking 'hit disappearing targets with hand grenades' one, and got a couple of the top scores on the hardest difficulty on Goldeneye).

I think with me it's that I rarely play them any more (although that's changed a little in lockdown), but I've watched Francis Higgins streaming on Youtube a fair few times and marvelled at how little intuition he has playing games. He's someone I'd say is 'bad' at games. That, for me, is the difference. Having an inkling of knowing what to do next.

I'd be no good at competitive games though. And I never finished Crash 1 on the original Playstation.

[AsparagusTrevor]

I'm pretty good at the kind of games I play, shooters, puzzle games, fighting games - admittedly less good than I used to be when I was younger. I never play online though.

I don't mind difficulty in games as long as it's fair, earned and logical. I'll keep at them indefinitely as long as I see a light at the end of the tunnel and the fun doesn't drop too much. I found myself dying multiple times recently playing The Last of Us Part 2 but it never felt cheap. I always felt if I just do something a bit better or a bit different I would get through it, and I improved a bit every time. Conversely, I gave up on Hotline Miami 2's Dead Ahead level after my deaths must've gotten into triple figures and the fun had dwindled long ago, replaced with anger at the cheap game design.

My wife bought the Spyro Reignigted Trilogy as she remembered enjoying them back on the PS1, but not being a gamer as such she kept getting stuck on the more fiddly parts so I'd end up helping. Now those are cheap, unfairly-designed games with fake difficultly (and in the case of the third, buggy to the point of being broken). For example check out this part from the first game. There is no way anyone is finding this area without following a guide or watching a video. It is so unintuitive - I mean at one point you do the opposite to what has been established throughout the game except for this one part. These are the perfect example of what I hate in games, the product of unfair design. There is a stage on Spyro 3 that I gave up on totally after realising it was completely broken in this remaster (confirmed by many other players online). Just felt the need to shoe-horn in a Spyro rant, sorry.

[madhair60]

The Treetops superjumps are brilliant and not unfair design in the slightest, just lateral thinking.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I think I might be getting worse at them. We got a Raspberry Pi for retro gaming recently and games that I breezed through as a kid seem rock hard now. People do say that emulation isn't the same as playing on the real console, but I'm not convinced that has anything to do with it - I played a fair bit of emulated SNES stuff on my PC a few years back and didn't have a problem with it.

This whole blinking post-Dark Souls fad for overly difficult games certainly doesn't help. "Git gud"? Get fucked!

[AsparagusTrevor]

The Treetops superjumps are brilliant and not unfair design in the slightest, just lateral thinking.

It's the exact opposite of lateral. Not lateral.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Longitudinal thinking.

[madhair60]

It's the exact opposite of lateral. Not lateral.

No it isn't. This is weird. I'm sorry you couldn't figure it out. I did it when I was 11.

I will agree with you about the sequels though. They are shit and always were.

[AsparagusTrevor]

You might've done it at 11, you might've figured it out, but that doesn't mean it's fair and it's definitely not intuitive. Let's break it down - You run the wrong way along a path with arrows, you jump off arbitrary points on the sides of paths with no clues, you do a U-turn in midair and at no point is there any indication that these things are doable. Plus failure in most of these steps results in falling to your death. Not to mention the timing and skill of each of these steps is pretty high. There are plenty of comments on the walkthrough video from people who also thought it wasn't a very fairly designed section of the game.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Average tbh. Play most games on the default difficulty, sometimes piss it, sometimes struggle through.

Last two single player games I played were:

1) Jedi Fallen Order, which I think I played on Jedi Master, whichever one is in the middle after you take out the 'Storyline' difficulty. Died quite a bit, but I persevered.

2) Streets of Rage 4. Played through on Normal. Again, died a fair bit, particularly on the boss of the Old Pier level, the Dojo in the Chinatown level and the final boss.

Online, I'm decent at racing games and at some shooters. Terrible at others.

[Sheffield Wednesday]

S++ Rank on Ikaruga stage one.

You tell me...

You tell me...

Only took two years.

[Kryton]

I'm not an achievement hunter, but I'm fairly decent at what I play. Getting much better at Stellaris. Stuck in Platinum league in Rocket League, can get silent assassin on a lot of levels in Hitman, I used to have a really good Disci priest in World of Warcraft and I was a right bastard in Eve online.

I think I'm okay at the games I put the effort in. Figuring out the mechanics and exploits is more my thing rather than anything too competitive. I'd probably suck at Stellaris multiplayer as I like pausing and thinking about things in grand strategy games.

[popcorn]

I can complete any game on max difficulty.

[popcorn]

You might've done it at 11, you might've figured it out, but that doesn't mean it's fair and it's definitely not intuitive.

Yes.

[mobias]

Pretty average gamer here. I usually have to crank down the difficult levels, especially as I've got older. With most games that I like and form a connection with I just enjoy being immersed in them. The story and world and whatever else. The gaming challenge is enjoyable but I hate if it becomes frustrating. I prefer open world games because you're not constantly funnelled along from one challenge to another. I'm quite happy just potter about at my own pace.

I've really come to enjoy simulator games in the last few years. What I've come to like there is that the immersion is really such a big part of it. Its all about the attention to crazy small details.

I tend to go for open-worldy story things but I did decide a while ago I should give Dark Souls a go and picked up the remastered trilogy.

First try I got to Firelink Shrine then ran into the skeletons, couldn't figure out how to get past them as they kept coming back to life, eventually sacked it off as too hard and not my thing.

I had the same experience with Bloodborne. Those games really aren't for the faint hearted. The technical gameplay is everything. If you don't know that then you won't last long with any of them.

[madhair60]

You might've done it at 11, you might've figured it out, but that doesn't mean it's fair and it's definitely not intuitive. Let's break it down - You run the wrong way along a path with arrows, you jump off arbitrary points on the sides of paths with no clues, you do a U-turn in midair and at no point is there any indication that these things are doable. Plus failure in most of these steps results in falling to your death. Not to mention the timing and skill of each of these steps is pretty high. There are plenty of comments on the walkthrough video from people who also thought it wasn't a very fairly designed section of the game.

I'm afraid I don't agree. I think making you run the wrong way up a ramp is actually a smart little bit of design, the sort of thing I'd go "hmm, I wonder if that's... hmmmmmm". I like stuff like that.

[druss]

I can reliably parry in Dark Souls. Pissed through Witcher 3 on Death March. Completed Ghouls 'n' Ghosts.

Used to be decent at shooters in the 90s and early 2000s but can't PVP at any game to save my life anymore. Get too anxious.

[Blue Jam]

I am rubbish at driving games. I wonder if it's partly because I can't drive.

Gave up on GTA V after a couple of missions. I preferred RDR2 and getting about the map on horseback.

[Inspector Norse]

I had the same experience with Bloodborne. Those games really aren't for the faint hearted. The technical gameplay is everything. If you don't know that then you won't last long with any of them.

I found that once I got into Dark Souls it seemed less "challenging"; there was a point somewhere at which the style and mechanics clicked and I realised I had found my playstyle, so even though it was still bloody hard, I felt more confident about getting through it and less worried about having to repeat bits or lose souls and humanity. Any issues I might have had about "not doing it the right way" or something were easy to get past and my feeling that I might just not be very good at it was finally laid to rest by soloing the final boss in only three or four attempts (put on a load of fireproof gear, danced around the stalagmites, poked him with my sword whenever I felt I had a window).

[Barry Admin]

Not as good as I want to be, but that keeps me trying. I'd give up if I was amazing. My favourite thing is learning and working out all the systems, and how best to use and exploit them.

Because of my attention problems, my favourite games tend to be twitch shooters.  I can only really slow down enough to enjoy slower paced narrative driven games on the rare occasions I can get hold of weed.

The very high skill ceiling of Apex keeps me coming back, and thankfully they add enough new stuff to reignite my interest when I start to get bored. I constantly work on my movement and aiming, and on developing my game sense and positioning. That helps me keep up, even as I get older and my reflexes slow down.

[mobias]

How good or bad I am at a game does depend somewhat on how into it I am. I was pretty chuffed with myself when I got to the end of my first playthrough of Witcher 3 when it came out. Sword and sorcery RPG's with lots of boss battles aren't usually my thing, i gave up early on Skyrim, but I got so into the story, characters and world of Witcher 3 that I felt I just had to keep on playing it and that in turn forced me to become good at it. Stuff like Bloodborne and the Souls games aren't about story or characters or even necessarily the world, they're all about the gameplay. They're quite old school, which is a big part of the appeal I guess.

[Spiteface]

I think I'm okay at fighting games. Until I go online and the matchmaking bit pairs me up with someone ranked way above me that JUST HAS TO GET ALL THEIR SHIT IN.

No matter how hard you practice, there will always be someone with far more spare time than you.