Hello Hive Gaming!
Frequent lurker here.
This is my entry into HGC's #worstgamingexperience compeition, which runs out tomorrow. I always discover these late, lol.
Anyway, you can find the competition page HERE
I rarely post in HGC because I think my gaming content is terrible. When I do it's largely Hive related gaming content, which I consider that fairly safe and easy to write about... however the last competition you guys ran really got me wanting to contribute more.
I really enjoyed reading people's entries I can't pass up the opportunity to join in this one.
I never thought I'd ever write a video game articles, I'm more of a story-teller. I've run D&D and various other table-top roleplaying campaigns for years, but hey - it's always good to branch out and try something new.
Thankfully this wonderful challenge is within my wheelhouse as it were.
So, worst gaming experiences? There's just so many to choose from.
Where to begin?
Now that I think about it, the further back in time I go the worse the experiences get.
So I suppose I'll stat with what's recent and work my way back.
Eve Online
Have you guys ever picked up a really old t.v show half way through even though you have no idea what's going on?
Imagine dropping headfirst into Stargate Episode 1 Season 8 with zero knowledge and try to keep up.
You'd be like. "Uhhuh, okay, there's Genghis Khan, a dude in a batman costume, an extra from Wrath of Khan and Karen, and it looks like they're all waiting for the manager."
Spoiler alert: the manager never came.
With Eve it was almost the same thing.
There's so much content I have no idea where to begin, but it's okay because I had my brother to help me. Oh wait no I don't, he had to leave.
My brother was a secret Eve addict for years until he finally admitted his biological dependency on mining virtual asteroids.
What a coincidence, I thought. I too have an addiction mining virtual currency. It just so happens the currency I mine is accepted for cash.
So I figured I'd give it a go, what's the harm?
So far so good. 4 factions?
Comically modular character creation?
Oh neat, you can be a corporate faction? Cool, I hope one of their quest chains involves writing schedules, getting yelled at by customers, and challenging charge-backs from cheap-ass clients.
Nothing makes my sci-fi more enjoyable than true-to-live fuckwits making your life difficult.
SO I made a character. Did all the bibbidy barbidy boopidy what-not and made myself the best looking avatar the game has ever seen.
Pfft get the message out of the way! I want to admire my character!
-HITS NO-
Screen goes blank.
Uh oh
It stays blank.
A Loading icon appears.
Dear god I've skipped the tutorial!
I was starting Eve off in season 8 episode 1. Okay that is making less sense the more I think about it.
Basically I felt like a total fish-out-of-water.
My first hour of playing the game was a total fever dream.
As I pointlessly navigated the menus and tried to fly around I became disoriented and irritable. After pissing off the people in the chat, (I guess I was too noob for them) I finally discovered how to find missions, and an hour of clicking and flying into the void of space, I finally discovered how to ACCEPT MISSIONS.
Hell yes! Finally I was making progress, finally about to do something in this 20 something year old game. (I asssume)
Actually - When was this game released?
Oh, 2003. Jesus that's old.
Anyway, I got my first mission. It was to go defeat some pirates floating by some wreckage or something.
I flew through space for 2 HOURS 'running' to the quest point.
This is my face the moment I realized I had been looking at menus and learning the interface for 2 hours, and I wasn't even at the quest zone yet.
Seriously about to quit the game right there. It was Space Flight Simulator: the non-game.
Already several hours in I finally arrived to my first mission.
Alright! Let's fight some pirates. Shouldn't be too hard? I mean, I practically clocked Star Trek: Online, this shouldn't be too different?
Yeah didn't get a shot off.
I got MAULED, my ship exploded and I re-spawned in some weird pod thing soaring through space yet again.
Alright. Enough screwing around.
At that point I quit the game. That was four days ago.
Will I ever try again? My nightmares say no, but my masochism says yes.
So probably.
Although I sabotaged myself, these hours I've had with Eve will haunt me for the rest of my days.
PUBG 
I was one of the unfortunate souls who bought this game the day it dropped.
Never again. NEVER AGAIN.
This game made Swiss Cheese look solid enough to use in construction.
It was an absolute mess.
We had it all.
- Disappearing character models? Check.
- Disappearing weapons, vehicles? Check.
Source
Textures not loading in? Check.
Being able to see, shoot and drive through objects that haven't loaded in yet? Check.
That last one almost got me banned a bunch of times.
Hey, guy, it's not my fault that the game didn't load and I can see you laying on the ground behind a building, a rock and a tree. I'm sorry that I get a free head-shot on you. Someone did the same thing to me the previous round - so it is what it is.
Seriously though these made the game almost unplayable, especially when you're with a team.
One of the worst gaming experiences I remember was how frustrated everyone got, and how quickly we went from being massively excited to incredibly disappointed.
It took over an hour for us all to launch with loaded textures. Time after time one of us would load in without walls, or guns, or both. Sometimes we would just play a round with a totally handicapped player because we just didn't want to keep launching over and over again - we wanted to play.
Admittedly it was pretty funny being chewed out by some dead players over the mic, funny and bad at the same time.
There was another bug where if you were in a building and someone somewhere was driving a car, their model would appear on the upper floor of the building and you could just shoot them, and somewhere far off on the map they'll just randomly die.
Oh I forgot to mention, I had the worst computer so I was always the one experiencing these problems. IT made my friends so angry and I felt partly responsible.
Yeah, that was PUBG.
Constantly letting my friends down, combined with the utter crap-show that was happening made PUBG's launch one of the worst gaming experiences of my life.
Made with a canva.com pro account
The further back we go the memories combine into categories.
Probably the biggest and most soul crushing are the dozens of corrupted saves I've had throughout my life. I think we can all relate to this in some way.
You've been playing your favorite RPG on a console with a .... memory card... and you're about a hundred hours in. You've progressed really far, collected so much equipment and completed so many side quests. You're a completionist, so this is par-for-the-course for someone like you. Great, you think. I've had a great gaming session today, time to shut it off and pick it up tomorrow.
Only to wake up and find the file corrupted and all that effort wasted.
I can think of a few times where it was so bad that it actually stopped me from playing the game all-together, and I've not touched them since.
Here's a list of the games I've abandoned because of corrupted saves:
Front Mission 3
I was definitely on the Main + Extras type of play-through.
This game has to be one of the best JRPG's I've ever played even though I've not finished it and probably never will.
I remember I was about 80+ hours into this title. I take my time, but dang... one day, one day the memory card reaper came to visit, and a pound-of-flesh did he claim.
So much excitement and enjoyment and achievement all swallowed in one single bite.
I remember being so invested in the story and the characters, but I couldn't tell you a single thing about it nowadays. This was a long, long time ago.
Final Fantasy IX
This game was incredibly fun, super imaginative and fairly original in terms of its lore and aesthetic. I can't express how much I appreciated this game when I first played it.
Compared to the laborious and melodramatic Final Fantasy XIII this game felt like a breath of fresh air that knew not to take itself too seriously. I loved the dynamics between the characters, I loved the romance sub-plots and Steiner was probably my favorite character.
Anyways, if you've played Final Fantasy IX to any extent then you'll probably recognize this guy.
That's Ozma. If you're into fully completing Final Fantasy games then there's no way you haven't heard of this particularly annoying boss.
What makes Ozma difficult? Well almost everything.
1 - It incredibly hard to find.
2 - It's attack rate is stupidly high.
3 - It has multiple party-wipe attacks that'll just ruin your day.
4 - It heals itself constantly.
This is an excerpt from a finalfantasy.fandom
Ozma will not waste a turn using an elemental attack that will be absorbed by all party members (nullifying the element still makes Ozma use it), or use status attacks if all targets are immune to it. Thus being immune to Ozma's other attacks increases the likelihood it will use Meteor.
Ozma has a unique battle script; when Ozma's ATB bar is filling up—i.e. when it is not in the middle of casting an ability—any command the party targets at Ozma will fill its ATB bar up, and Ozma will execute its turn before the player's commands.
That's Ozma. It'll ruin your whole damn week, no, it'll ruin two weeks at least. I can't tell you how insanely happy my brother and I were when he finally beat it.
Yes, in this gaming experience I didn't even play the game, I was just watching it.
Here's a video of someone beating Ozma in like 5 minutes, 😂 oh that almost makes me cry
That actually hurt to watch after recalling all of this
Anyway,
So he defeats Ozma after several attempts and several hours and I'm right there behind him. The bloody thing explodes to our complete disbelief.
I kid you not, my brother saved the game the moment he could - and it CORRUPTED AS IT WAS SAVING. The bloody thing broke just after we beat it, and he had to start the entire game AGAIN.
WHICH HE DID. HE PLAYED THE WHOLE GAME AGAIN.
I felt cheated and I didn't even put in the effort, I just watched.
To be fair we were fairly poor, so we were using some cheap memory cards that we got in a big pack. They corrupted frequently, so it's not really the game's fault - more so our forced reliance on faulty hardware.
Regardless I abandoned that dumpster fire.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
I don't think I'll ever touch this game again.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved what I played of it. I've played the first 8 or so hours of it about a dozen times, and it's been great. I've been multiple races and explored a fair amount of it, and it's an amazing game.
IT has a feel and a quality to it that the others have lacked, well maybe except for Oblivion.
There's something about the water in Morrowind that's just beautiful.
I think their source material was taken with a really nice camera in a really, really nice setting. I think they used GIF images for the water in Morrowind, that might be why it looks so good.
Anyways, the first bunch of times that I lost my saved game wasn't the game's fault. My brother went through a very intense 'format the hard-drive regularly' phase, to guarantee optimal performance.
IT also guaranteed that I'd lose all of my progress every time. I remember getting to the end of the Fighter's guild and the Legion quests, and I absolutely loved them. I remember the blight beginning its creep over the isle, but damn... I just lost my progress too many times.
MY half orcs are all gone, as are my dark elves and Kajiits, I hardly played human characters - which is fairly out of character for me.
The last time I played this was about 13 years ago. I found my old copy and fired it up on my old Sempron, and it corrupted shortly after. I think it was after the first mine quest, so not really far at all.
When that happened I knew my relationship with Morrowind was over, and we'd never talk again.
Honorable Mention
Fallout: New Vegas
I'll include this game in the corrupted saves category though it occupies a weak position. I played this game only three times, and as I transitioned into the Mojave desert on my way to Vegas - each time - the game corrupted.
Apparently this was a very common problem at the launch of New Vegas.
Three times, and no more.
I thoroughly loved Fallout 3, in fact it reignited my love for the entire series so much I had to play the originals again. Every aspect of Fallout 3 was perfect, in my opinion. Even its faults, counter-intuitively.
New Vegas was everything Fallout 3 was but MORE. It had more of a story and Noir. You had to micro-manage more things and it felt more like a post-apocalyptic survival game than Fallout 3.
Anyway, I seriously doubt I'll ever play it again. My memories of this game are meeting the two warring factions and being super intrigued by them.
I mean, look at this.
It's beautiful, and I lived in California. In fact I lived in the deserts this game was set in, the Sonora and the Mojave - I've been to both, and lived in one.
Anyway, my last memory of this will forever be staring at the corrupted file screen for about 5 minutes, slowly sighing, and putting the controller down.
Never again would I put that game into my console.
The Christmas I got: Time Crisis
This was simultaneously the best and worst day of my childhood.
One thing you gotta' understand is that as a child I didn't really have access to many games. We were not very well off and it's only due to some truly kind donations from friends, family, and my late father's military friends that were were even able to get a Playstation.
To be fair we were able to get a Playstation some months before Christmas due to the RAAF sending us money.
The first games we ever bought were:
These changed my little 9 year old life.
However my mind was truly blown when I opened my Christmas presents on December 25th 2007 and saw THIS
My poor unworthy eyes had never beheld something so beautiful.
It was more than everything. It was heavy, it was big, it had buttons, and I could shoot at the T.V with it.
My little life was complete. I inserted the disc in slow-motion, savoring and enjoying every second of the greatest moment of my tiny life.
I put it in.
Turn it on.
I have the greatest time I had ever had in my 9 years of existence.
I was truly in heaven, then I saw the GAME OVER screen.
"Alright Simon, turn it off it's time to go."
Oh shit. I completely forgot that we were leaving for FOUR WEEKS up to Queensland to stay with the Grand Parents.
I played it once, fought for my life for a second go - but failed. I fought like I was going to die, without a doubt I ruined Christmas for a lot of people.
You know what though? I wasn't alone. See my brother is only 14 months older than me, so guess who else was throwing the tantrum of their lives?
We were 2 inconsolable balls of despair as we grabbed out packs and got in the car. WE cried and complained the whole way. For kids we really punished them for doing that to us, I actually feel pretty bad about it.
It hurt to touch something so beautiful and then have it torn away like that. I know that sounds dramatic, but I was 9 - life was dramatic then.
Anyway the weeks we spent up there were pretty great overall. The first few days were absolute torture because of Time Crisis and the fact that we couldn't play it. Also, they had a freaking Playstation! WE could have just BROUGHT the bloody game with us and played it there, but no.
We actually played hardly any video games over that time. I learned to fish, I swam more than I ever had before. I went on long bush walks where I saw Koalas and I remember collecting volcanic rocks that washed up along the beach. They lived up at a place called 'Victoria Point'.
I guess our grand parents wanted to separate our growing dependency on video games. Probably for the best, and I guess I do appreciate it now, but I didn't at the time. By the time we went home I had completely forgotten about Time Crisis.
I only remembered it again when I was on the plane - and guess what? Then I became that excited kid that moves around too much and makes too much noise.
