The only escort mission I have ever enjoyed was in Syndicate. Arm all 4 team members with lasers and keep them at the four compass directions around the escortee.
I recall one escort mission in City of Heroes; you are supposed to rescue a General from the Rikti. As it happens the General is weak, aggressive, and armed only with a pistol; meanwhile the Rikti are powerful, resistant to control powers, and have multiple types that *explode *upon being killed. On top of that the General starts out surrounded by Rikti; a team could easily get the General killed just by fighting his guards.
It was not a popular mission…
How am I the first one to mention the iron boots in Ocarina of Time? The Water Temple should’ve been called the Boot Changing Temple.
They need a separate slot for lockpicks in Morrowind. It feels like I’m switching back and forth between my sword and my lockpick every five minutes.
A lot of Sierra games had arcade type sections that I did not like. I was also not a huge fan of mazes either.
Every boss fight in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. One of the big selling points of the original (and most of Human Revolution) is that there are multiple possible ways, including non-violent ways, to finish all objectives. Except the boss fights that are straight up shooter sections. The DLC, thankfully, reverted to form.
The idea of Realm Divide was a good one. The implementation was compeltely self-defeating and measurably made the game worse, to the point where it remains one of the worst elements of Shogun 2 to this day. The twisted versions in the mini-expansion campaigns were markedly different for a reason.
In case anyone here is not aware, Shogun 2 is a game of conquest in feudal Japan, and it is fantastic… except for Realm Divide. You generally play the game by conquering territory until you’ve successfully come to dominate the land. Eventually, your successes fill up the Realm Divide meter (at about 20% of Japan conquered) and basically, everybody else in the game goes completely berzerk against you. There are several reasons this is a huge problem:
(1) Your tight, beloved allies that fight alongside you through thick and thin? Will betray you, possibly instantly. It’s basically impossible to, say, play as the Oda and make a powerful Tokugawa vassal or whatever. Allies and vassals are often an active hindrance, especially as the AI is sufficiently bad that they will often get in your way or require an aggressive bail-ouit of their own incompetence.
(2) There are basically no logistics in the game. So you can randomly get enemies zooming across half the map to YOLO into you randomly.
(3) The AI ignores several basic game mechanics, which is annoying. In fact, the AI frequently beats even experienced players in expansion, but the RD mechanic doesn’t apply to them at all. It’s not uncommon for the player to fight aggressively and still have a fraction of the land of somebody else. Usualy, one or two factions will go completely crazy and take over half the country.
(4) The late game, far from becoming an exciting duel of rival alliances, turns into a grinding slog that’s actually WORSE than the old way of having to deal with a horse of trivial powers.
Since I’ve been playing some turn-based strategy games recently, one thing which irritates me a lot is the flat way that chance usually works in these games. Think XCom. Usually, you end up with alot of middle % chances to various actions.
It’s a small thing in some ways, but I’ve noticed that in a lot of these games, it almost always boils down minimizing any chance that something will go wrong than it is about taking any risk for doing something fun or intersting. The flat % chances are a big part of this. You can have the perfect strategy in mind, but it all comes down to a 1-100 dice roll. That itself is the issue: there’s a very narrow range of potential values. You can never try for a one-in-a-thousand clutch shot, and even extremely easy actions fail annoyingly often. So even when it’s fun, there’s often a lot of “I did nothing incorrect, there are no lessons to learn, but everything went completely wrong and now I have to restart.” (Basically, imagine if, 1 time out of every 100 you tried to tie your shoelaces, you accidentally broke them, slammed your head into the wall, and suffered a mild concussion.)
This is one reason I like games where you get a pool of luck, fortune, or whatever points to tilt the odds in your favor. It adds strategic depth to the game and allows for some more intersting risk/reward. You can use a bit at a time to go from “easy” to “guaranteed”, or use lots of them on a nearly-impossible task to pull off an amazing twist. Battletech has a mechanic like this and it works well.
Likewise with the classic Battletoads. The bike scene was enough to make me tell my console to go fuck itself.
The underwater/swimming stage in the original TMNT.
The Meat Circus in the PS2 version of Psychonauts was never fully finished and was much harder and frustrating than intended.
Amazingly, they patched the PC version a couple years ago, many years after release. It play smooth on PC now and the few jumps and slides that were flawed have been smoothed out. It’s great.
The worse part, to me, was:
(5) All your carefully-crafted trade deals are instantly cancelled, leaving you with no money and a massive deficit. I will fight every faction on the map if I have to - but I can’t do it when half my soldiers are deserting because I can’t pay them, and I can’t recruit new troops.
I’ve owned and played all the Total War Games. Shogun 2 is the only one I’ve never finished.
Oh come on. Like you haven’t an iron lock on every trade node in the game by then.
Besides, the funny thing is, the gigantic negative diplo hit of realm divide doesn’t affect allies or partners or vassals made after RD. So you can absolutely shitkick someone(s) to get you back into the black.
So, yeah - it’s implemented weird and dumb ; but when you know how it works it’s all right and one can work with it. Which pretty much sums up TW games, really (ask me about* Medieval 2*'s diplomacy layer wot I modded back in the day)
I think I could substitute about eighty different games for “Bioshock” here. I absolutely loathe exponential-at-the-end difficulty curves and really the entire idea of “boss mobs.” “This guy is so evil he can take fifty rocket-blasts to the head!”
Without spoiling the whole thing, I take it you haven’t played Bioshock :).
any square soft boss fight from the nes to possibly now
As I learned when I was talking to a Nintendo game councilor (remember those?) back in the snes days :
ever wonder how a boss could be a god and then get beaten like a scrub?
"leveled up as high as you possibly can? bought every weapon spell armor and trinket you possibly can? "
WELL IT ACTUALLY DOSENT MATTER
All their bosses are based on a invisible RNG that changes with every encounter
You just keep redoing the fight until you hit the predecided number that lets you win in secret of mana it was 1-5
Now some of the games rolled it as a percentage chance to win like if the game rolled a 2 you had a 20 percent chance of winning
I don’t know if that changed for the ps/2 games………
Ah yes, the escort mission, beloved of … game designers and nobody else. Besides “suicide” and “snail” there’s a third variant, where every enemy unit on the map will ignore the things that are hitting/shooting/spelling them to Leeroy directly at the unit being escorted - which has 1HP, no armour and gives you a Game Over when it dies.
You avoid the immediate massive hit - but you still get the cumulative diplo penalties as you conquer more territory. The way the numbers work, that means that the vassals you create immediately after Realm Divide will turn on you juuust as you approach the number of provinces you need to win.
I didn’t mind Realm Divide - but I don’t know anyone who beat it first try. You had to know the mechanics and prepare in advance.
Pretty much every strategy game has at least one of them - Civ3’s corruption, Civ5’s expansion-unhappiness penalty and terrible pathing, RTW’s idiot unrest rules, MTW2’s meandering Mongols, RTW2’s veteran revolt stacks (and terrible pathing), EU2’s ping-pong rebels, EU3’s can’t-declare-war-during-regency rule (which made it into EU4 for reasons I cannot imagine), EU4’s movement lock and incomprehensible fort-control rules.
But my biggest gripe is: Twitch sequences in nominally turn-based games
I’m a middle-aged fumble-fingers, I play turn-based games because I’m terrible with a controller, never mind trying to remember and hit the right one of 57 key combinations while my character is being hacked apart by orcs.
If you throw in a sequence where I have to hit Left-Left-Up-Left-Right-Right-Down-Up-Down in rapid tempo, without errors, with insta-death when the wrong button is pressed, I won’t actually punch the the screen, but if you’re in range, I would cheerfully punch you.
Hey, that’s still better than a sequence of square-circle-square-triangle-X-circle-triangle. I mean, I can remember that “up” is the one on the top of the pad, but which button is X and which is square? They could at least have the decency to refer to the buttons as “jump”, “shoot”, “grenade”, and “cancel”, or whatever they’re used for in the game itself.