There’s a significant level of frustration which comes from having high expectations based upon some reasonable level of certainty, and then having them dashed.
My experiences with various titles over the years has gone from the highest “This is SO much better than I thought it would be, why didn’t I buy this before” to the lowest “OUT… OUT foul platter, begone from mine sight!”
At these extremes the emotion is actually pretty easy to manage, it’s during the in-between times that the real problems arise. Those games where you think “It’s going to get better, I just need to get ‘in’ to it a bit more” or you have those “Maybe I’m just not in the right mood for this right now” moments or even “I must be doing something wrong.. this doesn’t seem right to me”.
These levels of self doubt are the very worst elements of a BAD game. And I want to make a distinction here… there are games which are bad and there are BAD games. The former are sometimes fun in their badness, they fall into the ‘So bad it’s good’ category of experiences. The latter are pure evil. They are the games which promise so much and only just fail to deliver on almost, but not quite, every single level. It’s that failing which makes the experience such a bad one – I’ll provide an analogy! You are going for a train and you wake 1/2 hour late; because you know your morning routine you know that you are never going to make it, so you relax, find out the next train time and practice all of the excuses you are going to use. It’s not a great situation but the stress level is, over all, reasonably low.
Now, you wake only 10 minutes late… you believe that if you rush you’ll be able to make it; so you do rushed wash, rushed breakfast coffee, rushed journey to the station and you arrive just in time to watch the train pull away from you. THIS is what a BAD game does, it strings you along giving you hope that you’ll find enjoyment and then leaves you standing, all stressed out, wondering what the hell you wasted your time on. BAH!
My current BAD game has become a vehicle (no pun intended) for Gamerscore. With no real emotional investment I’m going to wring another couple of hundred points out of it – no names here, you can check out the achievements if you fancy a guess – last word “Pro”! – and then I’ll cast it aside ready to be deposited into the next batch of ‘stuff I’m donating for a good cause’ or maybe I’ll just trade it in and hope that its replacement is more toothsome.
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