Plus now they all have to have goddamn lens flare.
You can pick up a sniper rifle and run around, get shot, fall down hills, do barrel rolls, and then just pull the thing up to your shoulder and fire off a round with pinpoint accuracy regardless of distance.
The most annoying one for me is that in multiplayer, even on hardcore mode, your guys seem indestructible and/or spawn way too fast.
Without a serious penalty for playing like a knucklehead, the games are inherently unbalanced. Things like machine guns that are THE weapons to have in real infantry combat are somehow reduced to some big heavy gun that fires too slow, isn’t accurate enough, and is hard to control. Conversely, relatively useless stuff like pistols and submachine guns somehow become effective in situations outside of close quarters battle.
Ya gotta admit, in Fallout 3 or New Vegas, it becomes a serious tactical consideration.
I don’t know how many epic deaths I’ve had in those games because I take cover in a firefight behind a car… “Wait. Does this car still have its engine?”
Nuclear BOOM
“Yeah. It did” (as my corpse attains escape velocity) 
You’re in a corridor, and an enemy heavy is charging you. You open up with your shotgun. BOOM! Direct hit to the middle of his chest. He doesn’t slow down at all. BOOM! Another shot to center mass, but he shrugs it off. One last chance: BOOM! Third shot, same place, but this is the kill shot, so now he goes flying backwards like you just launched him out of a catapult.
Apparently, in video games, mass is a function of how many hit points you have left.
Well, they’re ablative…
This was one of the best things about the original Goldeneye: when you shot people, they stopped charging you and grabbed at whatever extremity you shot them in. Of course, they recovered more or less immediately and resumed charging. 
My memory is hazy or I might be confusing games. But wasn’t there a cheat to turn blood decals into paint? I remember doing that and invincibility, then the character would be covered in rainbows. You could also paint zombies white in Half-life 2, unfortunately sawing them in half cleared the effect.
There was a paintball cheat. I think it changed the appearance of bullets too.
It’s funny, but these gamey cliches don’t seem to annoy me so much when they happen in the Borderlands series.
I agree. Take crates, for instance. In other games, crates are, at best, a necessary evil. In Borderlands, they’re the entire point of the game.
The one that annoys me is ammunition is either ridiculously interchangeable - all handguns use the same ammunition, whether they’re a little pocket pistol or a Desert Eagle-type hand cannon, or it’s ludicrously specific whereby two guns chambered for the same cartridge can’t use each other’s ammunition.
It often appears with sniper rifles - especially in WWII, sniper rifles were just accurised versions of standard-issue infantry rifles with a telescopic sight on them. They used the same calibre of ammunition and there is absolutely no reason why a sniper couldn’t just grab infantry rifle ammunition from someone else on their side and load his sniper rifle with that if things were that dire.
You see it in modern games involving handguns and SMGs - the Beretta M92 and the Heckler & Koch MP5 both fire the same 9mm Parabellum round and there’s no reason why you couldn’t transfer rounds from your SMG magazines to the handgun or vice versa, especially if you’ve got 200 rounds of “handgun” ammo and three rounds left in the SMG or something like that.*
- One of the few games I’ve seen address this - and it’s not an FPS - is Jagged Alliance 2, where you can ammo swap between same calibre guns, but it costs double action points to reload.
I have no problem with FTPs going on rails. The Half Life series does great on rails shooters. In fact, sometimes sandbox games are boring, and require a big learning curve.
But when the game tries to give the feeling of being an open world while still on rails, I just hate that. So you are in the middle of a forest… but a slight fence in each side of this trail means that you can’t go anywhere but along this path. Or you just hit an invisible wall. That bad designing.
That is irritating. In F.E.A.R. there are several doors you can’t go through because a small wheeled cart has been pushed up against it or a book case is leaning against it. If it on my side of the door I should be able to just move the damn thing, seems lazy.
Hello, Deus Ex: Invisible War. I think that was explain by the ammo being nanites or something, but even a rocket launcher uses the same ammo as a pistol. I think the bigger guns used more ammo.
The Fallout series is mostly good with this. There are some changes - the Garand used .308 instead of .30-06, but those rounds are so similar anyway, and .308 Garands do exist, they’re just not official issue.
The series does get weird at times. I realize that it’s an alternate history, but divergence was probably in the 1950s, after certain rounds were created. New Vegas is pretty realistic, but I remember that the here-common 9mm was a available in only 1 or 2 places, while the here-rare and here-powerful 10mm was everywhere and the weakest ammo.
The Stalker series is pretty good about ammo. At least it tries to split them between NATO and Soviet weaponry. I couldn’t tell you how accurate it is but since they use fictitious weapon names I suppose the point is kind of moot.
Shadow of Chernobyl does, however, use the “fake walls” bit. In some areas it’s fine since you have a wide open zone to run around in and the radiation “walls” are only on the edges. Later on, you have to go up some road and you might as well be in a hallway since you can’t move more than a few feet off the road before getting blocked.
Still, the worst offender I remember for that was Homefront. You’d be tromping through a suburb and have one narrow path you could take. Sometimes there wasn’t even the usual debris blocking you; you just couldn’t move due to invisible walls.
Speaking of the Fallout games, I was very pleased to see .32 top-break revolvers in Fallout 3 (very common in real life in the 1900s-1950s, almost never seen in computer games) - but I couldn’t work out how the .32 cartridge fired out of the revolvers just annoyed most enemies, while the same cartridge fired out of the hunting rifle was quite effective.