Actually, this serves to eliminate the need to micromanage your SuperFund teams–if your empire is one coherent whole, with no outlying cities on the other side of somebody else’s empire, you just set all of your workers to Automate, and they’ll automatically clean up the pollution. If you’ve got a city on the other side of another empire, however, your workers will constantly commute back and forth across that other empire in their search for work, and the neighboring empire’s leader gets all pissy for no good reason.
Oh, hey, there’s another one: In Civ I, if I parked a galley on an opponent’s fish square, the opponent couldn’t get anything from that square. Fine. That sets the game dynamic to one where you blow away anything that crosses your border. I can deal with that. In Civ 3, your entire empire can be carpeted in enemy workers, troops, boats & settlers, and, unless they’re actively at war with you, you can keep farming & fishing every occupied square. That’s fine, too. Changes the dynamic to “let’s only attack people who we’re at war with first.”
However: If I step one foot across the border into the enemy lands, Montezuma or Gandhi will be on the line instantly, rattling his saber and accusing me of the most horrific acts. Dude, chill. I’m not stealing anything. I’m not depriving you of food. In the case of boats, I’m not even using your freaking roads and I’ll be gone in two turns, so back off. Oh, and have some incense. Moron.
Except the “Automate remove pollution” function was only added in the expansion packs, when everyone realized what a hideous nightmare pollution was. Sure, you could set workers to “Automate”, but then they’d change your improvements, chop forests, and generally screw things up.
And the ability to automate pollution cleanup just makes the whole thing pointless. It means that pollution just means you have to have a certain level of resources tied up in workers permanently, as well as suffering random productivity losses for one or two turns.
In Civ IV these things are implemented directly…too much pollution just means your cities grow more slowly than before. Simple way to accomplish the exact same thing without being annoying.
I got entirely frustrated with Betrayal at Krondor (and I’d loved the books) and put it down never to return. You actually had to keep your people fed, and to add insult to injury some of the food was poisoned! God, what a pain!
I tried from one side of the blocked off area, but not the “better” side, because I’d hauled myself around the annoyingly long level enough by that point. Besides, I don’t know how to make Nightcrawler just teleport without a target to attack.
I remember reading somewhere that the designers of the Baldur’s Gate series made a conscious decision to fully exclude food from the game. I reckon that was a great decision – I can imagine Baldur’s Gate being extremely tedious if you had to micromanage your party’s hunger levels.
Oblivion (the other RPG in which I’ve invested much of my life) also leaves out the concept of hunger. In this case, however, I reckon a carefully implemented hunger system could enhance the game. You only have one person to manage, and it would be pretty cool living alone in a forest, hunting and foraging to survive. I believe there’s a plugin to add hunger to Oblivion; I’ll have to give it a try next time.
And there are no cliff racers! I also added a mod that stopped every rat, wolf, and mudcrab from committing suicide. They’re not a threat, they’re a nuisance.
They’re also a handy supply of souls for my Umbra and Azura’s Star.
It is a bit annoying, I suppose, when you hear the something’s-coming-to-kill-you music, and you run around looking left and right and whirling around trying to see it before it attacks, and it turns out to be a measly little mud crab.
Speaking of Resident Evil, I hated the control system and still do. Frankly, it was a mess from one end to the other, and quite pointless. Many games with 3D views had used screen0based controls (your charatcer moves and acts according to the player’s perspective). But in Resident Evil, the controls you used acted as if you were playing a first person shooter. Adding insult to injury (which were frequent since you couldn’t shoot anything half the time), your character turned about as fast as a beached whale, since if they did it any faster, the game was impossible to control.
smiling bandit I’m assuming you’re talking about RE’s 1-3? Yes, that was a beef for me, though I was able to look past it…
I would highly recommend checking out RE: Code Veronica if you have a Dreamcast, or RE4 if you have a Gamecube or PS2. CV was a FPS, and is widely regarded as one of the best installments in the series by fans. And RE4’s biggest source of acclaim was the complete redesign of the control scheme from what it had been previously. It’s a lot easier to control your character and play.
Since Ogre mentioned Deus Ex , I’ll say that I love that game and still play it. The one thing about it that drives me nuts, though, is the moving of dead or unconscious enemies. See, you can’t do that without picking up all their stuff first - I rarely have room in my inventory for an assault rifle or shotgun, not to mention the heavy weapons. I’ve even taken to carrying a (to me) completely useless combat knife around, just so I don’t have to pick it up and discard from every frigging body.
That said, it’s still a gem amongst games.
On Final Fantasy, the mini-games bug me too (FFVII is my least favorite in this regard, and many others). If I get stuck on an FF game, which always happens, it’s either because I’m at a boss and underleveled, or at a required mini-game. Saving Rinoa is my least favorite.
I also hate games that allow you to save right before a difficult boss at a place where there’s no option of going backwards. I have a tendency to underlevel, so this can completely screw me over if I run into it. And that reminds me, I also hate cut-scenes I can’t skip. I can’t count how many times I got to listen to Seymore running his mouth in FFX–I was very underlevelled and he kept killing me.
Yeah, I hate games that reward tediously leveling up. If I’m to the point in the game where I fight something, I ought to be able to beat it! I gave up on FFVIII because of that damned spaceship with the things you had to kill in pairs - just wasn’t strong enough, and there was no fixing it, so I said screw it and never saw the rest of the story.