I freakin hate it when a level ends automatically after you kill the last guy, especailly when you don’t even know it’s the last guy. I worked pretty hard, and would like to pick up those sniper rounds over there on the floor…but noooooooooooo.
Also, I would like flame throwers to be as ubiquitous as shotguns and rocket launchers.
Crusty Bum brand ass chapstick.
Do jumping puzzles count as minor? If so, jumping puzzles.
Otherwise, I would go with the enormous pockets of weapon holding. I know it’s stupid, but where exactly does Mr. Freeman store his headcrab gun when it’s not on his arm?
Enemies that always know where you are, thanks to the omniscience of the computer. So you’ve ducked out of sight, stealth-crept around three corners and a hundred meters from your last position? Sorry, Magic Homing Hand Grenades will always find you.
The best part is in games with an x-ray type weapon, you can see the enemies through the level staring right in your direction, regardless of how miles and walls that separate you two…it’s sort of creepy (Perfect Dark, I’m looking at you).
I always have a problem with environments that are supposed to be functional but there’s no way on earth they could be. A factory that requires that you travel down conveyor belts and dodge crushers to get to the main office, for example.
Or when you have to creep over collapsing narrow beams over a tank of toxic waste to a tiny platform and there’s an enemy there. Just how does he get to work in the morning anyway?
And then there are warehouses clearly designed by someone who has never seen the inside of a real warehouse…
Sewers. Yes, I’m sure that our intrepid hero needs to use them to sneak into the nuke factory, but after ten games like that, it gets a little old. Also, the sewers are all extremely spacious, obviously to allow armies to travel through them, rather than narrow drains that allow runoff or sewage to pass through and little else.
I’m just fuckin’ sick of every FPS having the same levels. Warehouses, toxic chemical plants, water treatment plants, underground corridors, office buildings, secret laboratories - when are there going to be some unique levels? Far Cry was on the right track for having a predominantly outdoor, tropical environment that was a lot of fun to look at, but then it too had to be like all the others and have a bunch of levels in underground tunnels, warehouses and laboratories.
These are annoyances currently manifesting themselves in Resistance: Fall of Man, an otherwise gorgeous and exciting game. They’ve been problems off and on since DOOM, though.
Your character can’t easily manipulate the environment. There are all these nifty, lightweight carts, crates and trashcans around, but is your guy able to move them? Nope. Way back in Ancient Greece, Kratos could shove around a big-ass chunk of stone so he could leap off it and crush some skulls. Flash-forward to the middle of the 20th Century and all our hero can do is bust stuff up with his rifle butt. What the hell – is it a first-person thing? And don’t get me started on the non-driveable forklifts.
Jumping without the ability to “edge hang” so that your character can pull himself up to the ledge.
No ability to dash in Campaign Mode. I guess sprinting hadn’t yet been invented by the 1950s.
Really awful hit detection, especially with melee combat. I’m talking specifically about Far Cry, in which an entire class of enemies consisted of mutant monkeys you would barrel towards you and attempt to disembowel you with a swing of their mighty arms. The actual hit detection of that swing seemed to be a good two or three feet longer than the enemy’s arms, so you’d still get hit even if it looked for all the world like you’d dodged. It made me furious!
Artificial level barriers and fake doors. I hate when I’m walking down, say, a city street, and my ninja-cyborg-mercenary-superhero-whatever character finds his progress impeded by a row of traffic cones that I can neither move nor step over. Similarly, it bugs me when a game pads out a level by adding a lot of fake doors that aren’t openable, so it looks like the level is bigger than it really is. Especially when, at some other point in the level, I have to destroy or disable a much larger, more secure door. Five rounds from my rocket launcher can blow up the bank vault, but not the door to the managers office?
Indestructable doors.
Napalm that doesn’t stick. (I know it’s hardware-straining—though maybe less an issue these days—but still, it’s annoying.)
Lack of wounded—either the characters are dead, or they’re just stunned for a second before they get back up. (Postal 2, of all games, actually takes this one on—plenty of twisted wrecks of people writhing or crawling around in agony, sobbing or begging for mercy, if ya hit 'em right.)
Overdone night-vision levels. It’s a fine and practical tool, don’t get me wrong, but if to find your way through the detailed, atmospheric level designs, you have to stare the world through a dull green haze…it just takes a lot away from the experience.
Something that has been bothering me lately is in a cheap game I acquired called “The Operative: No one lives forever” and it is a strangely addicting spy game. The plot is cheap and cheesy, and I love it. The problem is, even if you sneak, enemies know where you are. Of course, there are certain things you can shoot through - such as doors or windows (and some walls) - but they always know when you are behind a door and shoot you. It gets worse when you are beside a door, against the (non-shoot-through-able) wall, and you are getting hit because there is someone outside the door. It’s just not realistic.
Another thing that bothers me is when you are given a sniper rifle, but it isn’t that functional. I love the Medal of Honor games, and I love using the sniper rifle to clear out areas before I get to them. If I sneak around, find great position, and have a bad guy’s head in the crosshairs, I should be able to shoot them. I only have so much ammo, and I don’t think that a bullet to the face should glitch a character into movement but cause no harm. Originally I thought that it was too far away (a reasonable possibility) but from the same position, the enemy can then turn, aim, and hit me…
I get angry at games…heh
Brendon
Highly accurate handguns. You know the ones, the games where you can pull out your pistol and shoot a guy 200 yards away, hitting him repeatedly in the exact same spot until he drops. Really, now. I’ve only seen one game that really handled the pistol well. I don’t remember the name, but it was a green beret/special forces type game. The pistol had a range of maybe a hundred yards max, but the bullets spread noticably, so really the pistol was only useful at very close range.
I’ve always hated ascending/ descending ladders in FPS games. Alos, grenades are badly handled; I’d like to be able to accuratley roll a grenade down a hall way than throw it overhand. I hear that FPS games on the Wii allow you to realistically throw or roll grenades- can anyone confirm?
I came in here to specifically mention ladders, so far I have not played a game that does ladders right.
About the Wii grenade toss I would assume the implimentation would depend on the developer but it certainly seems like something the Wii could do.
Graphics issue… Hands. Hands in computer games always look like meat mittens. It takes away from the experience when you’re interacting with another character and he looks like he was born in Chernobyl.
I know its a small thing, but man it pisses me off.
Another slight thing that bothers me is specifically related to the GTA series. C’mon… either the guy is a world class amazing car thief who can hotwire a car in two seconds or he’s got a magic key of some sort.
And El Cid Viscoso, they don’t leave the keys in the forklifts. 
Not a shooter, but if there’s a wooden door. Wooden. Not metal. Not metal grid, not metal planks, wooden. And a big freakin’ axe in my hands. Axe. Instrument originally made for, hey, chopping up wood. You kind’a ought’a be able to chop the freaking door down. If it’s metal then ok, I’ll bring out the lockpicks.
People who stare at you even though the game icon says that you are succesfully stealthed. OK, then why is he staring at me. There’s a chick just went by him, he’s a guard on guard duty, he oughta stare at the chick, it’s what guards on guard duty do. They don’t stare at a spot where nobody is, they stare at the chick unless there’s something in their field of vision more dangerous-looking (in which case they get kind of irritated because as a general rule they’d rather stare at the chick).
NPC models where the body is generic and only the head varies. You have an ancient head on top of a body as perky/muscular as they go. Or a green-scaled lizard head on top of a pink, human-skinned body. There’s a lizard’s tail, but the back in between them is perfectly scales-free.
The sewers, unpickable objects and Mary-Poppins-bag-like pockets have already been mentioned. Mind you, if I could get me some trousers with pockets like those, I’d wear them every day even if they were fuchsia with green-and-yellow frogs; just sayin’!
…torches wth batteries that only last two minutes. Grrrrrr.
There are two other ways to do this, both of which have been tried ad nauseum in RPGs and both of which suck harder than John Foster Dulles trying to remove grout from a tile bathroom:[ul]
[li]A bag of holding, which you are constantly wasting precious seconds fiddling with.[/li][li]A hard limit to the number of items (or mass of items, in slightly more ‘advanced’ games), which means you never have all of the essentials to survival on you at any one time.[/li][/ul]Both of those scenarios constantly disrupt your flow, something the Surgeon General has shown makes gamers 100% more likely to insult mothers, crackmonkeys, and blind Indonesian mongoose tamers.
Squad-based games can reasonably get around this because each squad member carries mainly what he or she uses in his or her specialized job. On the other hand, squad-based games require AI up to the task of outsmarting itself long enough to keep the squadlings you aren’t controlling alive until you need them again. Imagine the sheer cubic footage of suck engendered by a game that requires a lock picked a full three levels after the lock pick dude got his ass nailed by a sniper.