Think of a game that you have played, and loved (for the most part), that still had one GLARING design flaw that was a near deal breaker for you while playing it.
The game: RC Pro-Am. Awesome game. I still love this game. BUT…
The flaw(s): First (and worst ever) case of rubberbanding for losing CPU cars to catch up and beat you in the later levels. I remember trying to get all the letters for the last car (dune buggy I think?) and I would be winning the race by a long shot and then I would hear a “PEE-UUUUU” and look at the track map and see a PC car shooting around the track faster than imaginable. It would actually make that sound “PEE-UUUU” when it happened and there wasn’t anything you could do. It was BLATANTlY flying in the face of the rules and physics of the game. It was INFURIATING to lose by bad, unhidden, cheating by the CPU. The thing that made it the most infuriating was the second flaw…
NO PASSWORD OR SAVE SYSTEM. This came out long after Zelda and Metroid so it should have at least had a password system if not battery backup. But it didn’t and it took hours to collect “NINTENDO” and get the car upgrades and get to later races, only to lose to the f’n cheating ass CPU, lose your letters, upgrades and throw your controller in anger. The ONLY time I EVER lost was when the CPU rubberbanded in prime form. It made me SO mad.
the PC version of Stolen. In some levels, the CPU doesn’t recognize you’re there. The archenemy is supposed to run away and I’m supposed to catch her, but she just stands there. I wave in her face “HellOOOO!!! Gotcha!” but we just sit there staring at each other…Grr.
Pretty much every Madden game: no matter what defense you run, and how deep you move your safety, a deep pass to a wideout running a streak will be completed about 50% of the time.
It *has * gotten better over the years (on '93 for the SNES I once scored touchdowns on 13 consective plays) but the AI still hasn’t caught up to it.
There was something similar in an SNES hockey game; I think it was an EA game. If you skated down center ice and hit the button to dump the puck just at the right point, it would go right over the goalie’s head every time.
Final Fantasy Tactics: Good story. Nice gameplay. 2 major problems:
Half the landscapes, due to the limited camera control, have major blind spots that can’t actually be made visible. Which makes battles on those areas very, very frustrating.
The friendly AIs are MORONS. NPCs you need to keep alive saunter up to the bosses. Friendly NPCs move in ways which take away landscape advantages you’ve got. Or do nothing but buff themselves over and over.
Star Ocean: The Second Story: DAMN good game. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to mess up character advancement via skills, and render your party unable to survive the late game bosses.
Star Ocean: Till the end of Time has a similar ‘fuck you, player’ boss, but at least she’s the second-to-last boss in the post-game dungeon, not in the main game.
Gothic: The fact that half the challege of the game is figuring out how to actually pick up items. Once you figure out that you have to hold the action buttom while pressing forward, the rest of the game is a piece of cake.
I didn’t mind GTA: San Andreas’s RC plane level, but I really loathed that f***ing level that made you jump into the crappiest plane in the game, fly out of the city for five minutes, intercept an incoming jet that was noticeably faster than you were, and somehow maneuver into a sweet spot just behind the damn thing. I think you were officially supposed to do some kind of arcane barrel roll that would boost your speed just long enough to hit the ring, but what I always ended up doing was timing how long it took you to reach the enemy plane from the airport; I would fly toward the plane, but about 50 seconds before it would come within sight I would turn around and try to put myself directly in its flight path, heading towards the city. With any luck, the thing would come barreling past me, at which point I’d try to make sure the sweet spot hovering just behind it would clip me enough to trigger the next part of the mission.
I came in here to mention Madden games, also. Everyone knows the Madden flaw, where the bad computer AI is compensated with extraordinarlly bullshit tackle breaking and 76 yard field goal completing superpowers that seem to activate whenever the programing “decides” that you’re not going to win.
The “Commander” of the team has to spot enemy infantry in order for them to appear on the radar for all of the soldiers. Unfortunately, for some reason that totally baffles me, the game designers decided to actually have the sound clip play of the commander spotting whatever it is that he’s spotting. And the commander has to be doing it constantly, in order to help his team.
So the whole time you’re playing, you’re constantly bombarded with ENEMY INFANTRY SPOTTED! or whatever it is that he’s spotting.
I own the PS1 version of Theme Park. The game is a hell of a lot of fun…
…except the tiny eye-straining text that they use for everything makes it maddening. You can sort of play the game by looking at the icons but status updates and reports are nigh impossible to read. I’d usually give up after awhile and turn it off.
Stanley Cup hockey for the SNES. It didn’t have the NHLPA licensing, but it had the teams and numbers. The “dump the puck” button lofted the puck over the goalie’s head perfectly when you got to their blue line.
The Bust-a-Move series has one flaw in that the colour scheme absolutely SUCKS. On a good day I can hardly tell the orange and red apart, and on bad ones I have similar problems with other colours. But despite that, my colourblind husband was able to play because each colour of ball had a different pattern to it.
The newest version, Bust-a-move Bash for the Wii removed the patterns. And I still can’t tell the orange apart from the red. The lame multi-player mode (which is supposed to be one of its main selling points) does not come close to making up for this–honestly I feel ripped off.
No More Heroes for the Wii is a fantastic game, but the amount of time you spend in the boring-ass overworld just about killed it for me.
Edge magazine’s review has this whole thing praising the banality of the overworld in contrast to the over-the-top action of the assassination missions.
Whatever, it was boring and it made me want to stop playing.
I bought WW the day it was released. I played up 'til the Triforce hunt, said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and shut the game off for about four years. I fired the game up again last year and did the exact same thing.
Reminiscent of the “super goalies” in the EA NHL series. I think they’ve been toned down a bit of late, but for a few years you simply couldn’t score on the buggers in certain games no matter what you did (absent stuff like the dump bug mentioned upthread). 50-60-70 shots per game, and no goals. :smack:
That’s just because you were playing as the NY Islanders. On Sunday, the Islanders had 53 shots on goal. They lost 1-0. By the way, it was the Florida Panthers backup goaltender.