Irreversible in-game decisions. If I’m spending power or skill points, or slotting weapon upgrades, I absolutely hate it when the game won’t let me change my mind. It assumes I went online and consulted for 40 hours of webforum geekery to get the best impression of which choice would be funner. (Diablo, I’m looking your way.) No matter how they pretty up the interface or playtest power balance, some of the choices they give just aren’t compatible with how I play, and if it sucks, I want my skill points back.
Character saves (instead of game saves). Oh, so the game’s so smart that it knows that I want everything I do to be permanent? Let me save the game myself so I can give myself a branching point or a “this part of the game was fun, let me do that again” spot. (Diablo, I’m still looking at you.)
The two together are specially annoying (ahem, Diablo!) because if you mess up picking a skill point for a level 20 sorceress, you have to do all 20 levels all over again to undo.
Learning from previous deaths. This is a reward for player failure. It is particularly true in death-trap rooms, or when zombies come bursting out of the walls unforeseen (hello, Wolfenstein?) or the floor collapses (Jedi Outcast II) or similar. I’m smart, I pay attention, and I’m relatively skilled with the controls. If the game can’t outwit me, I don’t respect its design much — and death trap rooms aren’t usually the pinnacle of intelligent game design.
If you’re gonna make me do it over and over, it’d better be a) worth it, and b) fun to attempt each time.
On timed puzzles: some are very exciting and some are foolish; I don’t lump them together. Sherlock Holmes “Secret of the Silver Earrings” had an incredibly finicky control system + confusingly bad graphics + poorly depicted maze + bad collision detection + timer that demands perfection + isn’t all that fun to repeat anyway. The last level of Halo (timed race through the interior of the ship) was a blast with good controls + clear graphics + clearly depicted maze + fair collision detection + timer with some leeway + fun to repeat (for me).
Well, I only play sports games, so here’s two from them:
1. Super tight cameras that don’t show all the action. So I’m Peyton Manning, standing there waiting for someone to get open when WHAM! I’m tackled by the cornerback on a blitz. He ran from offscreen. You gotta let me know that someone WHO WOULD BE RIGHT IN MY FACE IN REAL LIFE is invisible.
2. AI’s as stupid as a rock on heroin. ESPECIALLY for my teammates. I can’t tell you how many times I have been returning a kick and thought “All right! One guy to beat, and I’ve got three blockers forming the wedge!” and all three get out of the way of the defender so that I can get tackled.
What I’ve noticed about that corner blitz is that the instant you find the guy that’s open is the instant you get nailed. It almost never fails except for the rare times your QB shrugs off the defender (in time to have is lights put out by a linebacker).
Because I can only control one guy at a time, my defensive secondary generally reacts like a sack of wheat. Sweeps and screen passes? Yeah, here’s eight or ten yards for free while my nickel corner stands there swatting flies. Even if I’ve got nothing but superstars on my defense, they still refuse to move/cover the dude running the post route.
Corollary: no matter what the score, if the computer has the ball at the end of any half, they will score. It doesn’t matter if it’s an 80 yard pass (which it frequently is) or a good two-minute drive. The CPU will score barring a freak turnover.
On about 25% of passing downs, the right guard will pull left. I have no idea why, but this will sure as shit leave a 'backer or safety a direct lane to my QB. Except for when the fullback actually blocks…in which case it was a corner blitz all along and I get blindsided.
Yeesh. I love my EA games, but I hate 'em sometimes, too.
What’s everyone’s problem with platform jumping? Video games have their foundation in jumping! Though if you’re talking about jumping puzzles in games where they don’t belong, with game engines not designed for precision jumping, then I understand. And games with just plain clunky controls are a pain to play no matter what you have to do. But well done jumping puzzles are incredible fun.
My gripes? When grunt enemies you face a million of through the course of the game are really difficult to kill. I’m all for exciting challenges but if you have to face a really hard enemy over and over again it just gets tedious.
Also, bosses whose sole point of challenge is that they take forever to kill. I hate it when the tough boss battles merely involve the boss having a million HP and you having to spend an hour chipping away at it like a chore. It’s also disappointing when the final boss is no different from any of the other game bosses except that it just has more powerful attacks and 10 times more HP, but otherwise does not involve any special strategy different from other boss battles. All this goes not just for RPGs but any other adventure game as well.
YES! Again with FFVIII one of the final mini-bosses had one attack: spell out “DARK FLARE,” then use it. As it happened pretty much all of my characters were fire immune/absorbing, so I basically spent 20 minutes paper cutting an enemy who couldn’t harm me. Grr!
Tell me about it. I can’t tell you the number of times my boneheaded Bravo team on SOCOM has blown my cover by deciding to suddenly go Rambo while I’m using stealth. There was one time in the first installment where I set a C4 charge and both of the member of my Bravo team ran right up to it as it exploded - naturally both were killed. Not to mention the fact that they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from four feet out with a high powered sniper rifle. It’s like going on missions with three guys who are all trainees on their first day.
What I really, really hate in games is bad pathfinding. The problem only manifests itself in third-person games where you can control a group of characters or units and have to direct them around a map, like Starcraft or Baldur’s Gate, but when my characters start running into each other and dashing off around the map away from where I told them to go, I go crazy.
The worst cast scenario is when you order your guys to walk through a door or a narrow passage and half of your group just turns around and walks the other way because they’re thinking something like “the door is blocked, I’d better go all the way around the house and enter it from the other side.” Then half of your guys walk blithely into a pack of enemies that all too kindly slaughters you because your characters are still in “walk” mode and they won’t defend themselves.
Concepts like waiting and following do not exist to people in these games, they have to be constantly on the move. Even if it takes them on a path five times as long that leads through a group of enemies.
You mean like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Defender, Berserk, Gorf, and Pong? Or Centipede, Missile Command, Sea Wolf, Pole Position, or Battle Zone?
Platform jumping games can be fun. I remember playing Jumpman and Impossible Mission for hours on C-64. I loved The Killing Game Show on Amiga.
I hated, hated, hated Donkey Kong. I kept trying to play it, but it always ended the same: I died on the first or second screen because the random barrels were in an unjumpable, unavoidable configuration; or a fireball changed course as I jumped over it. On the rare occasions I got to the elevator screen, I could never time it right for lack of practice. Those original games were designed to be quarter-eating sadists, anyhow; you weren’t meant to succeed at them for long.
I put it down to game design rather than an inherent problem with jumping. Nintendo’s implementation of jumping games never really clicked with me.
Icewind Dale was one of the worst offenders in this. When I was playing it, Mr. Clawbane came into the room curious as to who I was calliing morons, and laughed his ass off when he saw me sitting, disgusted as my party ran everywhere but where I told them to go. (Including running into walls and grinding their noses into them by running in place.) At least in IWD you can take off the “autofollow” feature, and move party members one at a time though.
Rail sequnces. Call of Duty has done some good ones(In particulary, the car ride during the American Campaign). The Worst offender that I can think of off the top of my mind is the helicopter seqeunce in Soldier of Fortune 2. Basically, you’ve just been rescued by US helicopters and Navy Seals from the middle of Columbia. The helicopter pilot has you man the M60 and says “Okay, we’re going straight home. Just keep the bad guys off our backs!”
Which apparently means, “lets find the bad guys with SAM’s and then circle around them repeatly and hope you kill them all before one of them shoots down the helicopter.”
“All hands on deck” in Vice City was also pretty bad. You know, if you want to get to international waters, there was no reason you had to go through the choke point under the bridge where all the boats could blockade. Hell, even if you had to, you could have gone under the OTHER BRIDGE!
Oh, and I also despise jumping puzzles. Not once in 15 years of gaming have I made it past the first part of the Gutsman stage in the first Megaman. It makes me a little crazy just thinking about it. Barf.
More so than you’d think. There’s a lot of research into pathfinding algorithms in general, but all of it’s basic on static environments, that is, those where the obstacles don’t move. Getting characters to do something as simple as wait in line for space on the bridge is phenomenally difficult; I’m doing that research right now and it’s kicking my butt.
FPS or Third-person Actioners on consoles that don’t support the LEGACY CONTROL SCHEME (where the left thumbstick lets you move forward/backward and turn left/right, while the right thumbstick lets you look up/down and strafe left/right). Having grown up and been used to this control scheme for many years, it is too difficult and confusing for me to use the default control scheme (where the left thumbstick moves you and the right one lets you look around).
While there are some games that support the legacy control scheme (e.g., Halo, Halo 2, Rainbow Six, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, etc.), there are plenty of games that don’t and it’s infuriating (e.g., Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, Battlefield 2, Killzone, Xbox Half Life 2, etc.)
While the Xbox 360 is moving in the right direction as having all their games support this control scheme, Xbox and PS2 games are a mixed bag in terms of support. Too bad there aren’t third-party controllers that are wired to allow you to use the legacy control scheme for games that don’t support it.
Hell, how you youngsters can handle those controllers I’ll never know. I can kick ass pretty well with a mouse and keyboard, but put a controller with 8 buttons and two thumbsticks in my hand and I’m running in circles accomplishing absolutely nothing…
Youngsters? We’re probably the same age! I’ve never been big on PC gaming (all that memory, graphic cards, configuration nonsense), but I have been console gaming since the late 80s. That’s why I’ve adapted to console controllers and can’t use a mouse and keyboard very well, unless it’s a real-time strategy game.
Whoa, whoa, that just sounds confusing. My control scheme is left thumbstick makes me go forwards/back, and strafe left/right, while the right one lets me look up/down and turn left/right. I think this way makes more sense, because the left one is where you move. You move forwards, back, left, or right. The right thumbstick is where you look, be it up, down, left, or right.
My big one (that I don’t think has been mentioned yet) is in RTS games where you lose all your troops and tech between levels (and I think Homeworld is the only one that doesn’t do this). I HATE busting my butt to develop and build nukes/dragons/battle cruisers and start the next mission not only without those units, but without the “knowledge” of how to make them!