[Eric D.V.H.]

What's the most fun game you've played enthusiastically and then, uh… Never quite managed to polish off? It was (perhaps you're still trying to beat it) a really good game, but maybe it was too hard, maybe you hit a boring part that you didn't feel like playing through, maybe you got distracted by something else and never got back to playing it, maybe your system just exploded and you couldn't quite bear to play all the way back to where you left off at the time. In any case, it was a good buy, but you've never seen the closing credits.

For me:

• PiD - I kept using up my blue crystals and getting munched by shadow thingies, creepy.
  
• CYAC - I've beaten all the missions individually, but never quite managed to pull all the way through a tour of duty without getting shot down or running out of fuel behind enemy lines.
  
• SimCity, All of them - I realize these games aren't “winnable,” but my goal has always been to start on a bond and end up 100% debt-free. I HAVE gained a great deal of respect for Leon Panetta though .
  
• EFMI - Those stupid lying/truthful parrots, the diving game, NNGH! Like all of these games, it's totally hilarious, but some of the puzzles are so absurd (I beat my adventure game walkthrough addiction after ruining DoTT, and I've been clean ever since. *Twitch*.)
  
• StarCraft & WarCraft 1-3… Heck, RTSs in general - I admit it, I suck at RTSs. Maybe I should get a multibutton mouse, maybe I should use macros, maybe I need my brain split in half so I can multitask better, but I still love playing the things and keep buying them. I usually get about 2/3rds-nearly all the way through the campaign before I reach the level that Thou Shalt Not Pass. Oh, multiplayer? I give that a try with each game, just so I can get crushed under an army of SCVs or whatever within seconds of the game starting, lé sigh.
  
• A number of shareware games I never quite registered . I'm going to hell when I die.

What about everyone else? Oh, and roguelikes don't count.

Eric,

[Tacohead]

Baldur's Gate 2 and Fallout 2. I'm probably around 75% through both of them. Great games but LONG. I still plan to finish both.

-PN

[teflon]

Theres a number of games which Ive got and not even played for more than a couple of hours. They were more sort of "Ill play that when I get round to it", and all of them a few years old.

But since getting the PS3, Ive been making a concerted effort to finish everything I buy. But onto the list:
Final Fantasy 3 DS (got to where the world opens up, but it got boring... havent gone back because Id be lost in the plot).
Ratchet & Clank Future (The only PS3 game I havent completed, because I bought it iearly and its been forgotten, Ill go back soon though)
Beyond Good and Evil (got a few hours in over the summer, but then got the PS3 and totally distracted)
Psychonauts (ditto)
STALKER (ditto)
Advance Wars Days of Ruin (stuck on the last or penultimate mission, I forget)

thats pretty much it over the last year or so. Of course, theres plenty of other stuff which has fallen by the wayside and I should go back to... Even games Ive "finished" like LBP, Resistance 2 (for the co-op), Sins of a Solar Empire etc. etc.

too many games, too little time

[jackdawsson]

A few still unfinished but probably the best is "Vice City" on PS2. Joypads were never really my thing & the (for me, at least) over-sensitive analogue sticks on PS2's controller & the inevitable, mind-numbing repetition this causes, spoils an otherwise cracking game. Btw, those thinking "never really my thing" = being crap at console games, may have a point!

[Sneaky Snake]

Oblivion, great game but I just lost the spark required to play after about 20 hours of gameplay

I never really bought that many games up till this year. I used to just get one per year and play the heck out of it. I've done that with AoE II, Civ III, Halo UB, Battlefield 2, and COD4. However the times are changing. I'm currently going through MGS:4, Grand Tourismo 5, Mass Effect, Civilization IV w' Warlords, and Age of Empires III. MGS and Mass Effect get played the most but every one of those games will see at least an hour per week

-Snake

[Ichigo27]

Disgaea 3 on the playstation 3. I have been playing mostly the world at war so I haven't spent a lot of time on that game.

Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII, great PSP game, still didn't get around to beating it yet.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R, steam was acting teh lame so I haven't beat that game yet. Very hard.

Persona 3, I pretty much gave up on when I bought the 4th one.

[Tetsuya]

The Witcher. keep getting bogged down in Chapter 2 because im such a completionist.

[badger2d]

Most recently, Titan Quest. I had a pretty good time with it most of the way through, but then reached the final boss and discovered my character was simply incapable of killing him. No interest in starting over with a new one, or grinding up ten more levels in the hopes of being able to scratch him.

In the ancient past, the good games that I don't quite finish have tended to be Square RPGs. Final Fantasy 3, Final Fantasy X, and Chrono Trigger were all examples where I got nearly all the way through and then...just didn't pick it up again one day.

Civilization games get an honorary mention here. The only games I've ever finished have been a couple of cultural victories in Civ 4, which is really just too easy to do. But I've never, ever reached the top of the tech tree in a Civ game, despite starting many a game vowing that this time I'm in it for the space race.

[innuenstu]

Some of my favorite games were the baldur's gate series haven't finished them. Waiting till I have an intel or maybe a pc to play the first one again. I enjoyed that one much more but a very bad port over to apple. Recently installed Neverwinter Nights with intentions of completing that and maybe buying the expansions.

[Rev-O]

X³: The Reunion.
I really want to love the game, mostly because I've had a big empty hole in my heart after I finished Sundog: The Frozen Legacy over 20 years ago. I do like the game quite a bit, but I just can't get past the learning curve involved with the controls. I hate having to pause just to try and decipher what cryptic combination of keystrokes I've got to use to perform some fairly mundane action. I've started it soooooo many times, but something else comes along and woos me away. It's still on my dock. Just sitting there, reminding me that I really should give it another whirl someday.

[MILBOP DIPPLEBERRY]

Fallout 1 & 2 both. I almost got into Fallout 1 a while back and was planning on going right into Fallout 2 afterwards, but I just felt like it wasn't worth the trouble anymore right as I was about to find the water chip. I was pretty much just following a walkthrough because I didn't feel like figuring everything out.

Neverwinter Nights. I love this game. I know the expansion campaigns are better and aren't part of the main storyline, but I'm always fixated on finishing the main campaign first and my interest level starts plummeting as soon as I finish the first chapter. The outside environments are ugly as hell and limiting and I always get bored with my character. I almost got through the third chapter last summer, but just lost interest. This has been going on since the damn game came out in 2002.

And I never finished any Escape Velocity game even though they were my earliest influences and I still compare games to them today. The first two I didn't buy and always ended up getting raped by Cap'n Hector. I actually bought the third game when it came out but always lost interest.

[Ichigo27]

Tetsuya, on February 16th 2009, 04:36 PM, said:

The Witcher.

I stopped at chapter 2 as well.

[Malt-Pipefishes]

I got about 7 hours into Far Cry 2 before my pc crashed. The annoying part is that I'm one of the few people who claim to have actually enjoyed Far Cry 2.

Also, Okami. It was a great game, but after a while the story started to slip into jrpg territory and I just tuned out.

[Dark_Archon]

Another vote for The Witcher. If there was an OS X native version, I'd be much more likely to finish it. In fact, I think The Witcher is also the only game currently on my list of games I'd like to see ported to OS X.

[alldaveallen]

XIII-- I think I am honestly about two stages away from the end, or maybe 93% done. The checkpoint system in this game, which is in all other ways very fun, finally killed my interest.

Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn--nowhere near done, haven't played it in about a year and a half. Like Fallout 2 and other RPGs of this type, I don't think it should take you longer to read the manual than it does to play through the game.

The Campaign mode in "Domination."-- This is a fun game, but I find the basic deathmatch mode much more interesting than the campaign.

GooBall--got hung up maybe 80% of the way through, never got around to finishing it. This is really a great game, though.

I'm sorry to say there are a number of games in my possession that I haven't played enough to qualify them for this question, like Knights of the Old Republic, X3 Reunion*, Fable: TLC, Myth 2, Blitzkrieg... Sheesh. Maybe I better stop buying new games for a while.

*I had the same issue with this game as Rev-O; at one point I printed out the list of keyboard commands for this game and it was 3 pages of 16-point type, 1 line for each. I'm all for games having complex play, I just don't think the input should be the complex part.

[Janichsan]

I'll join Rev-O and alldaveallen regarding X3. Great game, lots of potential, but just too complicated. (I hope Elte 4 will finally come someday...)

Other games I haven't finished are Final Fantasy III DS (I got distracted at some point by another game and just couldn't get back into FF3 again – I'll probably start the game new someday), Neverwinter Nights (I got stuck in the original campaign pretty close to the ending – I finished both expansions, though) and StarCraft Broodwar (I just lost interest in the campaign somewhere in the middle).

[the Battle Cat]

alldaveallen, on February 16th 2009, 10:46 PM, said:

XIII-- I think I am honestly about two stages away from the end, or maybe 93% done. The checkpoint system in this game, which is in all other ways very fun, finally killed my interest.

Ditto. I wound up replaying huge amounts of the game over and over because the checkpoint system in the game was rubbish. I just reached the point where irritation overcame fun and I quit playing it.

[teflon]

I managed to finish XIII, but yes, the checkpoint system sucked. I remember one of the levels that was in the demo was near impossible for me to complete until I came back to it about a year later, then I got good at it and went through the actual game. It was a long time ago, but yeah, a few sticking points which had me repeating over and over...

[Tibur]

A better question for me would be "What is the best game you have finished?" And the answer to that question is BG2 (including Throne of Bhaal).

The list of great games that remain (for me) unfinished is long, and I'm sure the list below is not comprehensive.

No One Lives Forever
Planescape:Torment
Dungeon Siege
Fable
Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (I deliberately gave up on this one - the terrible quest tracking/journal really pissed me off, especially since the NPCs often had long, complicated and similar-sounding names. "Go find Xwereasd Fealthroasd." Trudge, trudge, trudge. Aha! Xwereasd Fealthroasd, I presume? No, I'm Xwereasd Fealthroasb, you idiot. Lather, rinse, repeat.)
Elder Scrolls: Obsidian (it seems like quest tracking and the journal is vastly improved in this game, but the size and the number of side quests is still overwhelming)
Grim Fandango (I stopped playing this after about a week because I only got to play it on a friend's PC while house-sitting for him.)
Deus Ex
Pathways into Darkness
Fallout 2
Starcraft
Neverwinter Nights 2

There were a number of RTSs that, by all rights, I should not have finished (because I suck at RTSs), but I used cheats to give myself unlimited gold or lumber or something.

[Rev-O]

Reaching back a bit to the Dreamcast, Resident Evil: Code Veronica was a tragic exercise for me. IIRC, I made it all the way to the bitter end, but found out I had squandered my magnum ammo prior to the final boss fight and it seems like you needed the magnum to kill the final boss. Didn't have a save that would help me out without replaying a ton of the game, so I traded it in. Really made me hate all Resident Evil games.