I’m currently playing GTA:SA as well and the amount of time it takes to get anywhere is seriously grating on me. I’ve pretty much given up on it because I’m not that good at it and I resent having to spend five minutes driving to the mission giver and then another give to the mission area. Wash and repeat about ten times and that’s two hours worth of effort for little achieved.
Boring industrial environments (generic warehouses, factories and water treatment plants.)
**Underground corridor/sewer levels. Is there anyone who actually enjoys those?
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The same character model being used over and over again. Example - Hitman: Blood Money, where every beautifully-designed level was jam-packed with 300 of the same 3 or 4 NPC models, repeated again and again. You’ll see the same guy with the black shirt and beard sitting next to four of his identical twins in the lobby of a hotel. Jesus, mix it up!
City of Heroes does these somewhat interestingly, although you do get sick of the scenery by the 50th sewer mission.
This is even worse in games like WoW where you start to walk an NPC to his yay location and some 8 year old with a hardon jumps out da bushes and hits you with an arcane powered instant cast pyro + fireblast, and does this repeatedly, every time you try to do the damn escort.
Only things that annoy me about console games is rifuckingdiculously hard final boss battles or incredibly easy final boss battles (like Super Metroid, where I don’t think it’s even possible to lose). But by hard I mean like PS2 Shinobi, where the boss is invincible, then once an hour drops his shield for a nanosecond.
I’m all for hard. I’ve beaten Ikaruga, completed multiple No-Sphere Grid challenges in FFX, and other things of the sort, but Shinobi makes me feel like a scrub.
I had recently played Bioshock. What a great game. You can change difficulty levels. save almost all of the time, skip cutscenes, and the tasks you do advance the plot of the game.
Then I tried GTA SA. What a padded game. I couldn’t figure out why F8 didn’t save the game until I realized there were only certain times you could save. I gave up when I realized I had to make multiple trips to a Gym and actually do exercises for my character. This is boring enough in real life, but brings some results.
Because their cutscene is so unspeakably awesome that you couldn’t possibly not want to watch it every single time. And what if, when you’re watching their unspeakably awesome cutscene for the 48th time, you accidentally press a button on your controller? You’d miss part of the scutscene! Can’t you see, they’re doing you a favor by making the cutscene unskippable!
Actually, in my experience, it’s simply because they’re self-important bastards.
I play other MMO’s. In WoW, for instance, you have interesting timed quests, that gaspdon’t count down when you are offline.
In EvE, according to the whiny tutorial lady, the quest-giver is now pissed at me. And I think my 14 days are up, so that boat sailed. And I’m insulted in the first place, so I don’t want to.
Boss battles - by the time you get to the end the enemy should be pretty darn weak and you can ‘play’ with them a bit, much like a cat playing with a mouse. Boss battles really make no sense, the big powerful guy should come at mid battle, not the end.
The “escort mission” thing bugged me as well in Metal Gear Solid 2. It was the only part I couldn’t beat on the Hard difficulty level. I think it was Raiden (?) who had to protect Snake in the Tengu fight near the end.
This is the point where, instead of going slowly back to the city and starting over, you just reload the game you saved right before you started the mission.
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Unnecessarily complicated maps with entry points that make it incredibly difficult to make it from one region to another. Combine this with ‘‘vague mission descriptions’’ and you have my worst video game nightmare. There is a rather hilarious and fun game called Whiplash that features a corporate building map that is so complex I never actually have finished the game because it is damn near impossible to figure out A) What the hell the game wants you to do and B) Where the hell the game wants you to do it.
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Ditto unskippable cut scenes, especially before boss fights. Final Fantasy is the biggest perpetrator I know, and their masturbatory cut scenes take like an hour. I think they fixed this on XIII.
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Timers. I fucking hate timers on just about everything. If a game involves timing me frequently to do some scrambling, panicky task I will probably not play it. I hate time pressure. I also hate ‘‘sneak pressure’’ – where you have to creep around and not get caught. I can’t handle the stress of either one, sorry.
What’s worse than unskippable cutscenes?
Unskippable cutscenes, in a RTS, in which the combat continues to go on during the cutscene, while you are helpless to give your troops orders. Homeworld 2 final level … so much hate for it I has.