It definitely is one of the best PS2 games. I enjoyed 2 a lot, though I never finished it.

The graphics on 3 were great, but all the blood and gore got to be a drag, smashing someone’s face to a pulp in a QTE isn’t an acceptable replacement for fun gameplay.

I think I already posted my God of War story here before, but here’s a brief summary:

After reading walkthroughs, taking 15-20 tries to defeat the “protect your wife” level, and another 15-20 tries at Ares and failing, I took the disc out, broke it in half and threw it away, then watched the end of the game on YouTube.  One of the only games that made me that angry with it.

@AuroraBoreanaz:disqus I have a similar story about Dead Space. I couldn’t muster up the skill or patience to make it through that damn asteroid-blasting segment so I gave up and watched the rest of the game via YouTube walkthrough videos. This is excessively lame, I know, but it was a situation where I was really into the game and wanted to see how things played out. 

Other games that I didn’t/couldn’t finish:

God of War 2 – I lost interest after making my way down a ramp hacking through horde after horde of monsters. I did not watch the rest on YouTube

Killzone 2 – I couldn’t kill Radec. I thought the game was fair-but-tough up until this last fight. I watched the ending and realized it was relatively disappointing. As such, I felt justified in not having expended the time and energy.

In all cases, I did not break my discs.

My general rule is that if it takes more than a dozen tries to do it, it’s not worth doing. (Psychonauts’ Meat Circus is an exception of course.) That’s why I’ve never completed Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

@AuroraBoreanaz:disqus I think what makes the final battle so ridiculous is that it occurs just after bloody Hades, which is eye-stabbingly hard for entirely different reasons. So you’re already kind of enraged. What makes it even worse is that there’s no particular indication that your actions change anything about Ares’ actions – he will literally never use his unblockable attack if he hasn’t blocked you first, so you can just follow him around with your guard up while he slashes at you, wait for him to finish, and then weak-weak-strong-strong-QTE him to death. On the other hand, if you do one too many attacks, he blocks you, and then about 50% of the time will follow it up with his frigging fireball-stabby-stab-stabby attack, which is unblockable and takes away about 20% of the health bar in one shot. Once you’ve figured this out, it’s just a matter of patience and a tiny bit of luck. But (and I think this is a serious flaw in the level) I have no idea how I could possibly have figured this out without walkthroughs – and even then I had to combine information from three different ones to figure out exactly what was up.

Also I wanted to note that I’m kind of stubborn, so I would guess I made around 100 attempts to get all the chests in Hades – and ended up giving up. I got all of them numerous times, but couldn’t do that and make it back to a save point before falling off the veiny-knifey things. As it was, I ended up about 4000 orbs short of getting everything maxed out, which I’m sure would have given me a trophy or some nonsense.

Ah well. I think I’ll take a pause before starting on another long game – maybe go back to working through the co-op Portal II and occasionally doing Unreal III multiplayer to get my violence on. (If anyone has that on PS3, feel free to send me a friend request – same name as here.)

  @Everyone:disqus  in this thread:

It’s been a long time since I’ve played the original God of War, but I believe the trick to the Ares battle was the sword matched the moves of one of the sword weapons you acquired earlier in the game. The shitty part was that your original weapons are pretty awesome so you never really have an incentive to work/practice with the other sword in the game, so being FORCED to use a similar weapon in the final battle becomes a pain in the ass.

The thing with the Ares fight/sword is that, unlike the other weapons, where you could mash buttons and pretty much execute any combo, the sword required specific timing of pressing buttons, so you could actually execute a full combo successfully without it being blocked by Ares. And even as a pretty avid gamer myself, the shit was hard, and I actually spent about… 30 or 40 attempts at Ares practicing getting the timing right, since I hardly used the similar weapon during the actual game.

Re Dead Space: I didn’t have any trouble with the asteroids (mouse aiming helps), but the bit that made me quit was the bit where (SPOILERS) you have to go back through the medical bay with the serum thing, and the unkillable necro is still there, along with other nasties, and this time it’s depressurised so you’ve got to do it before your air runs out. I’m very fumble fingered with games under that kind of time pressure, so kept running out of air, or getting killed. On one occasion, I managed to make it out with about five seconds to spare, only to be completely disoriented about what button I had to press and die.