Its heft is perfect. It’s perfectly balanced and it rumbles so nicely and you can really tell that it’s one of those “little” things that Microsoft just knocked out of the park.
The original Xbox Controller’s black and white buttons weren’t nicely placed. I like their movement to the bumpers.
But you could set a “house rule” for yourself to not save during battles, or some such. If you can save at any point, it’s your choice as a player, which is as I think it should be.
But why does it have to be unskippable every time? For instance, if I may again reference the Metroid:Prime series. I had a boss battle, it had a cutscene right before, and I died. I loaded my saved game, went to the boss, and was able to skip the cutscene because the game remembered I already saw it. If they are so proud of it, then make us watch it just once.
I agree with all of the points above. Another thing that will make me toss a game into the “resale” pile is making me drive a vehicle, fly a plane, pilot a boat, or any other stupid form of locomotion that is not the actual point of the game. If I wanted to do these things, I would buy a racing game, flight simulator, etc. God of War 2 had some sort of flying mission in it that pissed me off so bad I turned it off and never picked it up again.
I also hate games that require me to sit through interminable scripted scenes where all I do is click a button or press a key to advance the dialogue. I don’t care how much you’ve always wanted to make moves–I bought a game, dammit. Let me play it!
Ditto on the jumping puzzles. Noclip is your friend.
And yeah, if I wanted to drive a buggy or a boat, I would have a steering wheel. I sometimes wonder if driving games have a segment where you have to go to the store to buy oil or train for a marathon on the weekend.
Oh, and hidy-bits. The times where you have to make a left down the passage, but due to graphics constraints or design it’s almost impossible to tell where the passage opens up. Mazes can be fun, but rarely are in FPSs.
No vehicles? No jumping puzzles? You guys must’ve hated Half-Life 1 and 2. And every Mario game ever. 
That is funny, but if you can get through the Fire Temple without the Goron tunic I don’t see why you couldn’t finish the game. The only other fire area of the game is in Ganon’s Tower, which is just a little room which can be completed quickly. I forget the details though, whether it takes hearts away slowly until you die or if there’s a hard timer which then transports you away whether you have a fairy in a bottle or not.
And I’m fairly certain you can buy the tunic in certain shops, just in case it got eaten by a Like Like and you didn’t bother to get it back.
One thing that bugs me is the long-term accumulation of supplies. This was a problem for me in Silent Hill games and also maybe some Resident Evil ones. You find ammo and health supplies throughout the game, and you can build up huge stores of them which can help you later on.
The problem is you don’t know how much you’ll need. If I have trouble early on and I have to use too much ammo or healing, I’ll often go back and repeat that part until I can get through cleanly. On the other hand, I might end up with way more supplies than I needed, in which case I wasted a bunch of time. All the repetition detracts from the flow of the game. It’s probably best to just go through the game and experience the suspense of possibly dying and so forth, but you never know if doing that will make it simply impossible to finish.
The Zelda series is horrible about this. Every time you pick up some bombs you have to click through the instructions on how to equip them.
Ooh, ooh. The news Zelda - Phantom Hourglass. Let’s say you’ve picked up tons of treasure from the main temple and now have about 20 pieces of boat you don’t need and want to sell them for rupees. Well you can only sell one at a time and you have to tap the screen several times to do that.
Make us do it once if you must but after that allow us some freedom.
One example was the otherwise-good RTS Dark Reign. The premise was that this great scientist was “collateral damage” in the war between the Freedom Guard and the Imperium, and he sent out a space probe (which you find, of course) which could open a time rift to take you back to that battle, beat both sides, and save the scientist. But the time rift can only be used once, so first you have to play through a simulation of twelve different historical battles between the two sides, to prove you’re worthy of that one chance.
Except that the last mission (the one after you go through the time gate) is nothing like the twelve regular ones. You could build scouts (which can morph to look like inanimate objects, to hide from the enemy), but there’s literally nothing on the map you can morph into. You can’t build either of the two superweapons you spent the previous two missions learning to use. Unlike all previous missions where you had to gather resources for money, you don’t have access to any resources, instead being given just a huge pile of cash. You can’t build Infiltrators (who can disguise themselves as enemy infantry) at all. Say what, Togra? If the previous missions were supposed to train me for this one, you could have picked missions which actually use the same skills.
On the quicksave-quickload issue, it could be worse. Once, in Hexen, I managed to make that mistake while falling to my death. No amount of save-after-every-hit will get you out of that.
Just three huh? Well then:
That’s my single biggest reason for dropping a game. I can put up with an annoyance once, but making me walk back and forth slowly between the same points four times gets on my nerves. If I have to fight the same enemies forever, if all the environments look exactly the same, if I’m forced to perform the same actions without skill or thought behind them over and over again, if I’m forced to watch the same cut scene repeatedly, and so on.
And this goes meta-textual as well. If the same is effectively the exact same thing that I’ve already played a dozen times with nothing new to offer (like, say, 98% of the “hot games” out there) then I’ll throw in the towel.
Mine have been mentioned but my biggest pet peeve is the one about saving. I usually play for 20 minutes as a distraction from work. I want to be able to save and come back. I hate the “new” saving paradigm.
I will second that. “Strategy” is about more than a giant rock/paper/scissors game of dozens of tanks/infantry/aircraft swarming each other. One of my favorite RTS games of all time was Age of Empires II. Why? Because of it’s depth. First and foremost, you had to build an entire town of non-combatants who needed to be farming and mining and chopping so that you had the resources to build your army. You had to balance building your army, gathering resources, building defenses and researching new tech AND figure out what particular configuration your army would take in order to counter your enemy’s.
Games now advertise “removed the resource gathering and micromanagement!!” That’s great. Why don’t you create more games like World in Conflict that is, from what I can tell, simply a contest between two people to see how fast they can airdrop a mechanised brigade into a Midwestern town and blow it to shit.
True enough, but I found that playing AOEII online against humans was still mostly a matter of who had quicker rat-like reflexes. Build orders were crucial, and once you get into Castle and Imperial, it was about how fast you can queue up your multiple Town Centers and other production buildings to just overwhelm your opponent. I sometimes lost building mostly pikemen vs. mostly horses charging right in to them, simply because he was able to expand and multi-task so much faster than me. Didn’t help that most online games were on “Fast” mode, either.
Every RTS I’ve played against humans, it seemed to be mostly a matter of speed.
I hate games that require you to solve puzzles, go on an action rolling jumping shooting jag, and then require a flying dog fighting don’t hit the asteroids part, or racing on the ground part. Most people are bad at one of the sections, so the game never is completed. Don’t combine all the genres together, unless each type is avoidable and you can play all the other’s independently. I can’t play a flier game no matter how hard I try.
That’s the problem with RTS games (especially AOEII). It becomes a battle of who can rush the other person the fastest.
“In order to open this door to the realm of Bloogadar, I must first collect the twenty orbs of Heldamar, hidden behind gates which can only be opened once I collect fifty Broozark skulls, and to kill those I need to find the Spear of the Broozark Slayer, which is only available after I travel the world and collect eighty Scrolls of Spear-Finding.”
Shit like this is why I have never completed Zelda: The Wind Waker. Which I bought the day it came out. Five years ago.
Another, from No More Heroes, which I’m currently playing through -
I go to the Assassination depot or whatever and get an assassination mission. I ride my enormous bike through the ludicrously clunky, pointless, and obnoxious overworld all the way to where the mission takes place, and begin in. I fail. In order to try the mission again, I have to ride my bike all the way back to Assassination Depot., equip the mission again, and then ride all the way back. Argh!! Would a, “Retry Mission?” option have been that difficult?
Yes. Nintendo games in general are horrible about this. The Pokemon series, for instance, has probably the most clunky, counter-intuitive, time-wasting series of menus in all of gaming. And of course the entire game is 100% menu-based.
Agreed also on the “Save point, long cutscene, boss battle” thing. Absolutely infuriating, and you wonder how something like that ever makes it into the final game. Again, Nintendo games are horrible about this; it even happens in Mario Galaxy.
That’s why my Ratchet & Clank III is currently gathering dust on the shelf. Friggin’ asteroid space flying thingamabob. Which makes me deeply sorry as I love Ratchet & Clank. Oh, and this:
is what turned me off World of Warcraft. If I wanted a second job I’d go out and find one that paid me actual money.
I thought that game was great at first. It was intriguing and so scary. I was really hoping I’d get a gun soon so I could start shooting the scary people, and then when I did get a gun the game fell apart. I felt like I was playing Redneck Rampage.
I was frustrated by the saving too. I tried over and over at this part where you’re in the back of a truck and have to shoot stuff. I ended up giving up. It might have been possible if I’d be able to save after making it through the tougher parts all right and taking it a little at a time.
I haven’t played that game, but if it’s like other MMO’s you should be able to repeat the mission after failing. Just log in and try again.
I’m okay with limited save systems if they’re implemented well, but this is evil. Fortunately they mostly don’t make games like that anymore. The only recent time I’ve seen it is in amateur text adventure games, and they usually warn you upfront if it’s that kind of game.
In most of them you can pause the game, and often even issue orders while paused. But when they don’t let you it is bad. The worst offender is Command & Conquer 3. I wish I didn’t buy that piece of crap. When you have to multitask on different parts of the map while the only way to pause is to bring up the menu, meaning you can’t even pause and do a survey of what’s going on, it’s just sadistic.
crates/minutes played > 1
This one is my biggest. Can’t tell you how many times I played the “pick up your hommie from out in the sticks” mission in GTA: San Andreas.
The map is huge so it’s a long ass drive out there in the first place. So maybe your ride gets a bit beat up. Then you get your buddy and get ambushed by the rival gang so your ride takes MORE of a beating. Finally you waste everyone and start to drive back to drop your guy off, but again it’s a long ass drive so…oh no…you rear ended someone and your cars on fire…bail out…OK you’re safe…wh…YOUR HOMMIE IS STILL IN THE CAR…WHAT? DUDE! GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR! IT’S GOING TO BLOW MAN, GET OUT OF THE…BOOM…
So now your stranded out in the god damn boondocks. The only cars to carjack are old hay trucks and semis. All for the long road all the way back to the city to restart the challenge to come ALL THE WAY BACK OUT TO THE COUNTRY to try again.
I think San Andreas really probably went a bit far as far as map size.