I’ve loved video games ever since I got my first Atari 2600 (in 1986, when everyone else was getting Nintendos :().
Well, I guess it’s kind of a love/hate relationship. There are a few things that kind of bug me about video games. Among them:
Cruddy plots: a staple of old NES games. How many Mario games were there in which he didn’t have to try to save the damn princess? With some of these old games, you’d swear that all the text was originally written by the programmers themselves and then translated by a 12 year old Japanese kid with very limited English proficiency. Would it have killed them to hire a native English speaker to proofread these things before they printed half a million copies?
Cruddy plots in RPGs : C’mon now, these are the games that are actually supposed to have decent plots. However, up until the Final Fantasy series started to evolve, 90% of these games involved either saving a kingdom or rescuing a princess. The enemies never really displayed much imagination either. Dragons, wyverns, etc, etc. yawn (Hey, maybe if I kill 5 more wyverns, I’ll gain a level and I can go fight that fire-breathing, pixelated cliche that keeps killing me!)
I am getting sick of the over the shoulder view (like Spyro2 or Tomb Raider). If you are going to go 3D, go ahead and make it 1st person already! The over the shoulder look gets so frustrating in small places or when up against a barrier of some kind.
The other thing that bugs me is games that change the direction controls based on which way the character is facing. This just makes it harder to control. Be consistent and when I push down, the character should always back up, etc.
Those are my biggest 2.
This used to bug me too (well, once the video games I played actually got advanced enough to show corpses), until I got hooked on ASCII-based rogue-likes. If you play a game like NetHack, you’ll find that within minutes you’re wading through mountains of corpses, even though a corpse is only generated every other kill. Think of how that would affect a lot of shoot-'em-up games: the entire level would be knee-deep in the things. Better just to let the enemy fall, disappear and be gone.
Oh yeah–playing ASCII rogue-likes really shows up cruddy plots on commercial games. Hmmm…I haven’t played Ancient Domains of Mystery lately…<sneaks off to www.adom.de>
The immediate belief that a game with a 3D environment is better.
Castlevania 64 wasn’t -all- that bad. But Symphony of the Night on PSX belongs in a damned art museum! And it’s initial success was mediocre because it was a 2D platformer in an age of 3D revolution.
I have a few to add:[list][li]Suddenly Invincible CPU Syndrome - This is my biggest frustration in a lot of the older Nintnedo and Super Nintendo games (haven’t noticed it much in Playstation). The one that leaps to mind is Tecmo Bowl. There were certain times during a game where the computer running back would tear off a 90 yard touchdown run and I couldn’t tackle him no matter how hard I tried. I would often find myself screaming at the TV “God Damn It! You can’t do that! It’s not fair!”[/li][li]Bad Translations - Hoo boy, I’m with you on this one.[/li][li]Poor Physics - Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the great physics in Gran Turismo, but a lot of games out there (sports, racing, etc) suffer from poor control because the action on the screen doesn’t happen the way you would expect it to.[/li][li]Linear Stories in RPGs - There are some good RPGs out there, but the crappy ones just send you from one event to another with little choice on your part (Seventh Saga, anyone?)[/li][li]Useless Powerups - You mean I just spent two hours trying to get the Mystical Thing of Whatever, and all it does is give me some stupid ability I will never use?[/li]Horrendous Music - I usually turn the music off if I can, but some older games don’t give you this option. And the ones that don’t usually have the worst music.
I despise poor quest/dialogue flagging in rpgs. Dontcha just hate it when you bust your ass performing some ludicrous quest only to be ignored by some important NPC who was supposed to reveal/give/do something in exchange?
Just wanna add lengthy cutscenes that you cannot escape out of. Is there anything more annoying than watching the same damn two minute scene because you keep dying? Add to that games that only let you save in certain places. My bladder isn’t on a schedule you know!
Anytime the game has to cheat to be competitive. Baldurs Gate 2, since when the hell have those damn Illithids had such a high magic resistance? Interstate 76 with the “catch the dude” mission where his car can take more damage than a friggin tank. There is nothing I hate more than the rules being changed so the game can be harder.
First Person Shooters nauseate me. I’d hate to have my options limited to two or 3 genres (even if it’s to my favourite genres - RPG, RTS, and Fighting), just because they CAN make it 1st person.
In every video game, I don’t care what genre, there ought to be a level/course/layout/whatever creator. That’s where PC games tend to shine better than consoles. But Tony Hawk 2 has the right idea, if a little limited.
I recently got Motocross Madness 2 and it is a great game. But the peripheral course creator is maddening.
I haven’t played BG2, but (IIRC from my DM days) illithids are listed in the monster manuals with something like 70-90% magic resistance. Those guys just suck! (Any resemblance to actual puns–living, dead, or undead–is purely coincidental.)
Bad translations (and plots) bug the hell out of me, particularly in RPGs (which are virtually all I play these days).
OK, I can see it for Shooters, RTS, Racing, even Fighting…but for sports, or RPGs?
Although, I CAN see a way to make something similar work in an RPG, though…your character’s an architect…at the start of the game, you have to design a building (to certain specifications, which I’d make more lax than real architects have to labour under), and later have to enter the building for a quest/subquest.
Try checking out the camera system in MDK 2, which works obscenely well, even though it’s an over the shoulder view. Especially if you throw in Kurt’s sniper site.
I really have only one gripe. I just recently finished Square’s Xenogears. It would have been the finest RPG I’ve ever played, if not for the simple fact that there was no way to skip through the text! For one thing, I can read a heck of a lot faster than the scrolling text. Second, I don’t need to read five minutes of text if I just read it ten minutes ago before dying. Third, most of the game was expository scenes, heavy on the dialogue. This is the reason it took me sixty hours to beat the game. (That, and I suck.)
If you are going to make an RPG, it is mandatory that you include a way to skip the text.
You can do it in RPGs. In Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption, you have a storyteller option that is really cool.
In Starcraft, there is a campaign editor that is kinda cool.
I have a few pet peeves myself:
“Nerfed” weapons: I’m sorry, but if I shoot something with a stinger missle, it’s going to go splat or boom-tinkle-tinkle. One shot, no miss, laser guided, all that. If you don’t want the weapon to be so powerful, don’t make it a bloody Stinger missle.
Retarded AI: There’s nothing worse than watching your partner or golem or whatever run repeatedly into a wall while getting shot full of fire or arrows or something like that.
I’m always mildly amused/annoyed by plot sequences which don’t seem to take the actual game into account. For instance, in Resident Evil: Nemesis, you reach a part where you’re talking to some wounded guy in a train. He’s going to die no matter what and he’s supposed to be all heroic by the fact that he’s fighting while wounded. However, I can’t help but think “Hey! I have four cans of first aid spray! They always heal me fully from near death. Give one to the poor guy!”
Come to think of it, I’m also annoyed when you spend half a lifetime getting one character all buffed up and ready to rock and the game suddenly decides to flip you into a new character for plot reasons who’s armed with a pointy stick and a pair of torn jeans.
Sports games that won’t let you get too many points ahead when you’re playing the computer. I was playing Baseball Stars 2 for Neo Geo the other day (stunning graphics and gameplay for a 24 bit system, I have to say) and I scored 12 runs in one inning. Well, the CPU simply couldn’t have that. It let loose on me like nobody’s business, ripping doubles, triples, and home runs for two solid innings until it tied me. Then the opposing team just started to suck again! Same deal with NFL Blitz, an otherwise incredibly fun arcade (and n64 & PSX) game.
I also agree 100% with the slow text thing. Hell, it could be worse. Remember the old NES games (Metal Gear comes to mind) where the text would appear one letter at a time accompanied by a horrendous clickety-clack sound that could best be described as the sound of a typewriter on PCP? WTF were the programmers thinking?
The extended cut scenes that you can’t skip bug the hell out of me too. What’s even worse, though, is when you turn a game on and it plays a long intro that you can’t skip. Oh how those games drove my impatient teenage mind crazy. I’d slap those buttons repeatedly the whole time, knowing they wouldn’t do anything, but still feeling the need to do something.
When I mentioned the disappearing enemies I was thinking more along the lines of side-scrolling, Double Dragon-type action games. By the time the bodies started to pile up, you’d already have moved on to the next screen.
I’m a female. I’m a gamer. I love RPGs. Most of them, though, don’t have female characters that I can identify with. I tend to identify more closely to the male characters than the females. To me, most of the female characters seem to be included just for the sake of PC, or for a love interest.
I loved Macha in Chrono Cross, though.
I have a PSX, and I really, really don’t want to see the PSX opening screen again…or at least, I don’t want to wait that long for it to load. Just put it on the screen and let me go to the game, already! I BOUGHT the console! I like it! Now I want to play a game on it! You don’t have to sell me on the console again! Can you tell that I get excited about this?!?
Yeah, I probably DO spend too much time playing video games. On the other hand, I watch less than ten hours of TV a week.