I'll second this. My issue with the entire series is that they're smashing a ton of mechanics together (driving, fighting, shooting, etc) and everything is just functional but not great. Any time I was shooting I just wished I was playing a shooter. Any driving you did just made me wish it was a racing game.

Nothing was done well enough to make me want to keep playing. I think I put a couple hours into 4 and then 5 and lost interest.

I used to like Monopoly, before its many problems became evident to me. I notice that even in the official excessively mythologizing biography of supposed-creator Charles Darrow, it notes that Parker Brothers didn't believe the game would sell well, and it had to be proven to them from the sales of 5,000 units of the game through department store Wanamakers.

The reasons Monopoly is popular are several, most of them pretty dumb. At this point Monopoly is a part of the culture and lots of people buy it because they don't know there are many much-better games out there. Hasbro merchandises the hell out of it, there's over 4,000 themed versions of Monopoly now. It pushes a pleasing narrative that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become successful (ignoring that all but one of the players will go bankrupt during the game).

What positive attributes does Monopoly have? Well it's ultimately a game about trade, what causes someone to win at Monopoly, in ideal situations, isn't how they move but what trades they make. In nearly every game of Monopoly I've ever played few people ever traded, causing games to run long and winners ultimately decided by whoever managed to make a natural color group, but in principle it's an interesting idea. And it's open-ended, as that mythologizing document I mentioned notes at the time of its origin you couldn't get a game published unless it adhered to certain dogmatic rules, one of which being that it had to have a clear ending. Open-endedness is interesting in a board game, even if, as in Monopoly's case, it can make a game excessively long.

I sometimes muse about how Monopoly could be improved. I think it'd be interesting to make the trading less ad-hoc and random. Maybe only allow trades at certain times, so players would have to think more about when to make them or else lose the chance, and make trades more formalized, maybe with a randomized element? Maybe fewer properties, reduce all color groups to two, make railroads and utilities a bigger part of the game. Maybe an explicit mechanism by which a player can resign from the game. Definitely make bankrupting a player less of a windfall for the person causing it. Definitely increase the costs of owning lots of properties. Definitely set an end point rather than just meander on until all players lose. Maybe add additional reasons to play than just winning; at their best board games tell these little stories about how the game progresses. Maybe have awards for players who circle the board the most times, who spend the least time in Jail, etc. Maybe one or more of these could be a "bar goal," by which I mean, if the players agree ahead of time the players might have to buy the player who wins/gets a specific award a drink or some other minor forfeit.

That's because Monopoly (well, the game Monoopoly ripped off from) was designed to be bad (like Undertale's genocide route). It wanted to show how shitty the stock market is

Everything in game is obscenely expensive, and once rockstar discovered they can charge idiots for Shark Cards, the game got patched and the quick-money smaller activities got neutered, basically requiring people to swipe credit cards.

i own all 3d GTA, the og's - I've never played online, it's just not appealing to do it 😅

Large amount of players, high skill expression, impossible to master, cool lore, one of the biggest e-sports scenes, hundreds of characters to play, and it can run on most hardware.

That being said, terrible game, wouldnt recommend.

It's boring and people spit on you the whole time you play. Maybe it's the spitting? Some people love that.

Monopoly is the absolute worst. Almost everyone I know grew up with a copy of it in their house, and almost every family made changes to the rules because it's such a terrible game. Yet somehow it's a "classic."

Im sure Rockstar is popular because its popular. The turning circles on every game have been ass.

It was acceptable up to Vice City because 3D and physics was fairly new and pretty much every game had its foibles, but at this point its just frustrating.

I don't have enough fingers and toes and penises to count the number of times I've tried to talk to someone on rdr2, and shot them instead.

I can chime in that for many people like myself there's a catharsis from playing them. They're an allegory for life and the struggles in it.

I am not lying when I say that Dark Souls changed my outlook on games as a lifelong gamer.

It's not without its flaws but there's something about a game that doesn't hand you everything you need to succeed and does not get easier when you fail.

"Git Gud" is literally the mantra many of us assume because like life you need to learn to persevere or give up but the game gives you just enough to persevere. There's a strong parallel with battling depression that this game just gets and gets it pretty much bang on.

It's less a game, and more a work of art.

Did u play it on a console with a controller ? I played it back around release like that and didn't enjoy the combat. The story did keep me playing and when it came out on PC i found playing using mouse and keyboard controls completely changed the experience for me to being actually decent. just me maybe tho

I really enjoy both games, but I agree the gameplay in 1 is god awful. 2 is very similar but they expand on some of the mechanics to make it more engaging. The story of those games do all the heavy lifting, without that no one would have looked twice at them.