What's a game you don't like that you can't stop playing?

Fortune-Street-Logo.jpg

I can't remember where I first heard of Fortune Street, but I was hooked immediately by the premise. It's a Monopoly-style board game where you buy up property, and try to dominate each section of the board by owning all the shops there. You even charge people if they land on your space, and can make the rent go up by pumping money into a property. The one real difference here is that stocks play a major role. If you buy a lot of stock in your district before investing money into it, your stock price will go through the roof. Alternatively, if you can buy stocks in a competitor's district before they invest, they have to decide between helping both of you or abandoning that district. Or, if one player has all their money tied up in stocks, you can buy out property from under them, tanking that district's stock price and ruining them. I'm a huge Mario Party fan and this basically sounded like a grown-up version of it, with some of the randomness reduced and more strategy involved.

It didn't exactly work out like I hoped. I could only find one friend who was willing to trade Mario- and Dragon Quest-themed stocks with me, so we decided to try the single-player mode. That began a nearly decade-long quest to conquer one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. The deck is stacked against the player hard in Fortune Street, to the point where I’m convinced that the AI flat out cheats. That may sound like sour grapes, but it’s hard not to think after you’ve seen Bianca make a boneheaded trade to Mario to hand him the win, or Bowser Jr. bumble through Dragonlord’s district, handing him thousands of dollars, while deftly sidestepping every trap you have set for him. When you’re in a race with the AI, suddenly you’ll be rolling all ones, while they’re rolling eights. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t experienced it, and I know there’s no point in a developer rigging the game against their players, but I’ll always be convinced that’s the truth.

But that only steeled us further. We were the underdog, virtuous warriors fighting to beat an unjust system. Like any cheater, we couldn’t let the game get away with what it was doing. It took a long time, and it was exhausting work, but it’s oddly one of the most satisfying notches in my gaming belt.

Games are weird like that. Due to their interactive nature, they challenge us directly in ways that other media can’t. If the insult is personal enough, you can get drawn into a ludicrous grudge with a children’s game. I’ve been thinking a lot about my Fortune Street experience lately, so I wanted to pose the question to the GBAtemp community: do you guys have any games like this? Ones that you know are bad, but for whatever reason, you just need to force yourself to beat anyway?
 

GoldenBullet

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It started to be Pokémon. I played the heck out of Pearl, Soul Silver, and Black. Starting with Omega Ruby, I started to only play it for nostalgia. I finished ruby but I never played past the third gym of sword and shield.

In general, I think the franchise is a bit dumb now but the new game looks kinda promising.
 

raxadian

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When I don't like a game I just stop, the only reason I may play a game I don't like is because of a self imposed challenge as in "I paid for this game, may as well at least beat it once since I don't really hate it". That's what happened to me with Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. I bought the game, found it inferior to the first game and only finished it years later.

Also if I really feel like I have to beat a really punishing game but I don't want to put the effort, I just cheat.That's another reason why I don't play MMO.

With Sonic and the secret rings, I just downloaded a save file with the game 100% complete. The boss fights and the story was okay, the rest of the game? All the forced stupid grinding? Nope.

Games are for fun, unless is your job, like a professional Beta Teaser or having to write a review or something, don't punish yourself with a bad game. You will hate everyone but worst of all you will hate yourself.
 

Thejax

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Destiny 2. It’s my most played game, that I continually support, but hate so much stuff about.

the gunplay and gameplay loop is fun, but tiring.
The focus on end game activities, that half of require communications, but there is not good way to communicate outside of the discord or any in game LFGs.
Loot that is a real grind, but trying out those new perk combos can be super fun.
Loot lockouts on a weekly basis for raids and dungeons. Meaning to get what you want you need to come back weekly, and dedicate time to it.

but I could go on and on.
 
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Wolfy

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CS:GO and Among Us for me( though don't play either as much as I used to ), I've gotten way better at CS:GO over the 300+ hours I spent playing it with friends, though I will never be amazing at it, just marginally good and get through it. The main draw for me was definitely Minigames servers and also Workshop maps, some of the Strike gamemode ones and Story based ones were amazing.

Among Us isn't a bad game to me, but playing it is sometimes too stressful and being imposter with certain groups isn't enjoyable due to having to argue.
 
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DS1

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First of all, this is a great write-up Fortune Street/Itadaki Street! Perfectly encapsulates the one-player experience. You are not wrong, the AI cheats, and it cheats HARD. I have an irrational hatred of Wario because of that game.

My big “hate it but beat it” game was the DS Glory of Hercules game. I played the JP version which was 3x slower than the version that was eventually released in the US. It was so bad, but somehow I became obsessed with finishing it.

Others would include Black Rock Shooter and 3rd Birthday for PSP. Terrible games, but somehow I still pushed through them, multiple times even.
 
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VartioArtel

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League of Legends.
Careful, don't want Riot Zed from the Security Team hunting you down to sic his Radical Law Ninjas on you for your criticism!


In all seriousness, I don't got anything like this atm, but the closest is Destiny 2 which I dipped out of a while back (tend to avoid stuff I dislike like the plague).
 
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DKB

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Overwatch and MapleStory. MapleStory however I think I'm finally done with it. Shit game, shit in the past and shit in present. Fucking like 15k hours+ on that game, man. Played comp in Overwatch today and 3.1k SR. Game sucks. Toxic as fuck and makes me become toxic really easily.
 
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qqq1

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Can't think of anything like that. If it's something I don't like I don't play it. Bad movies on the other hand I will usually stick out because I still want to know the story even though it sucks.
 
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