Shitty endings! I HATE when i’ve just spent a day, a week, or a month to beat a game and the ending is, say, a picture of the developers and some scrolling credits or a really horribly done FMV. I’d rather see “Sorry Mario, but our Princess is in another castle” (which nowadays would just be funny). ::sigh::
punk snot dead,
broccoli!
Yup, RPGs. Two words.
Neverwinter Nights
Probably the most exciting RPG concept in the history of computer/console RPGs.
What? That’s one of the reasons I love Capcom games.
One of my main peeves of some games is that game companies thought that if you take a bad game and lots tons of gory violence to it, it’s suppose to be good, but it ends up being worse.
Also, I can’t stand horrible multiplayer games being tacked onto 1-player games. Yes, multiplayer games are fun, but only if the game was meant for muliple players, not for games like Kirby or StarFox.
poor translation definitely.
and crate moving puzzles, or find-the-key-open-the-door levels.
A lot of the things you people mentioned (i.e. 3rd person perspective) don’t bug me at all. In fact, I think they are pretty cool.
There are a few things that really piss me off. To list a few:
FPSes where the guns are ALWAYS on the side. Okay, it makes sense if you’ve got a shotgun, or a rocket launcher, but nobody shoots pistols (and probably even machine guns) aiming from the side. I should know, I’ve used these kinds of guns before (okay, only once, but that’s still enough experience to know how to hold it.)
Games that require you to press a bazillion keys just to do a simple action. The best example of this is Freespace 2: Collossus (or something like that.) That game came free with my new computer, but I can still complain. I’ll compare it to Terminal Velocity.
Freespace: See a ship. Move around with the keypad. Scramble around in the dark to find the “H” button (hostile target) and press it a bunch of times until the crosshair is over the ship, to confirm that it’s an enemy. Fumble around through your primary/secondary weapons until you find a good one. Fire a weapon a bunch of times until you destroy the target, not hitting any of your friends, and pay attention to the objective, which is a totally pointless goal, like assisting a ship. If you get in trouble, you have to fumble around in the dark to find the “C” (communications) key, and select a bunch of options from the menu to get a ship to assist you. Okay, maybe it’s a bit more like what life would be like if you were in a real combat ship, but when I want to play a video game (especially a space shooter), I just wanna play.
Terminal Velocity: See a ship. Maybe select weapon using number keys on the top. Steer with numpad or arrows. Shoot it. Shoot target objective or go in tunnel. If you need health, get a health sphere. The end.
Maybe it’s just my opinion, but personally, I think it’s much better to make a game with simple rules, which can then be made into many many different situations, than to make a game with incredibly complex controls and not be flexible. FPSes have this problem a lot, too.
(I’ll confess! I’m a Doom fan! I play Doom, for all of the reasons above. Still! In fact, I’m still making levels! Especially for the new source ports…I was even in the 10 Sector Megawad at Doomworld.com)
Bottle of Smoke wrote:
This happens a lot in Japanese-style CRPGs. You beat the crap out of the special NPC because you’ve just spent six hours buffing your character, but suddenly the enemy does a devastating move and you are forced to surrender.
Ptahlis wrote:
The end of Baldur’s Gate 2 really pissed me off, because not only did I have to skip through a bunch of dialogue, I had to get rid of the pesky demons, who had a habit of bothering me while I was trying to murder the main guy. And I couldn’t save at that point no matter what I did, so if I didn’t manage to win, I’d have to do it all again.
Lexicon wrote:
As the Wanderer said, in her famous last words, “Ow, Ian shot me in the back.”
Jophiel wrote:
PCs in D&D games can be brought back to life at almost any time, but NPCs only live long enough to reveal information, and then they turn to dust.
Lynn Bodoni wrote:
The closest I’ve seen to a compelling portrait of a female character, qua female, is Maia from Septerra Core. Her gender is at the core of her role in the game, and suprisingly it’s not because she’s a lover or even a mother figure. She’s a big sister, which is something I’ve never seen before. She begins as a big sister in a villiage where all the parenting-age adults have been killed, and as the plot becomes increasingly global in scope, she becomes a big sister to the whole world – wiping noses and confronting bullies on an epic level. Except for an interlude in which she disguises herself as a prostitute in order to sneak aboard a pirate ship, she is the perfect answer to the cries for a strong, non-degrading female character in video games. Unfortunately, she didn’t sell so well. So I guess it’s back to Lara Croft.
Games that are toooo haaaaard. Has anyone ever, ever finished Ghosts 'n Goblins or the first Castlevaina without a cheat code? And remember, this was a time when most video games were aimed at children.
Censorship. All of it. As someone who’s had to endure too much idiotic dialogue, miscolored blood, and defanged death blows to count, I can say that no amount of paranoid parent appeasement is worth it. What happened to designing games for the people who actually play them?
Damage buffers. Cheap “mercy” feature and the most stupid, ham-fisted way to limit combo damage (almost anything else is better, even Midway’s “Maximum Damage” feature). Also, the “training buffer” feature in Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (where training becomes less effective the more you do it) is absolutely pointless and mars an otherwise very good game.
CPU Assistance. Enough said. I’ll friggin’ decide whether I want to give some schlub I’m whomping by 40 points a break, thank you.
Nearly every racing game in existence. Teflon tires (i.e. they never stick), opponents on rails, always having to start from the back, unavoidable crashes with stupid opponents, and the mercy feature which prevents a player from pulling away (see CPU Assistance)…and that’s just for starters.
Loading time. Occasional problem for Playstation, CONSTANT problem for Neo Geo CD (which is why I’m trying to figure a way to unloade it).
The rapid-fire disabling feature (which can never, ever be shut off in any game, BTW). The single most idiotic idea since Nintendo’s “family friendly” policy. Okay, I’m sure there are at least five or six gamers out there who hate the rapid-fire feature with such an insane passion that they don’t want anyone, anywhere to benefit from it, but I’m not one of them, all right??
The increasing difficulty feature in War: Final Assault, where the more kills you get, the faster the enemies attack and the more damage you take. Um, pardon me, but where exactly is the justice here? I haven’t really improved a hell of a lot between 1000 kills and 9000, I suspect that not many players would, and anyway, what’s the point of a feature that will dissuade them from continuing on to War Master. If higher ranks resulted simply in more enemies, that would not only be fairer, it’d make more sense, since you need more kills to advance in the higher ranks.
Those gaudy, oversized square stickers that some dope who can’t name five video games thinks is actually going to make a difference. Where I live, I’ve yet to observe one person so much as glance at those eyesores. I’m not one of them…I always note how garishly out of place they look on a title board and how much of the time they’re not even CORRECT (one Neo Geo cabinet with Metal Slug 3 has a “Suitable for all ages” sticker).
That’s all I can think of for now. Trust me, I’ve barely just begun…
AMEN!! My husband just got done solving a flight simulator game (it took forever) and there was NO ending at all! Just like “Game Over”. Nothing!! What a rip off!
On the other hand, ToeJam and Earl for Sega had the coolest ending ever when you solved it. Well worth the time it took to play it through.
My other peeve is repetitive sayings. I mean, shit- this is a high level, technical game, right? Then why (for example, the Olympics game for Playstation I just rented) do you say the same damned comments over and over? Is it that hard to record a few thousand voice blurbs so I don’t have to hear it repeated? This went for the last Madden football game I got, too. Constant repeats.
The only computer gaming I’m into is the Sims, and the only gripe I have there is that you have to complete one action before starting another. In other words, if you’re chilling in the hot-tub, you can yell for someone to come over from in it. You have to get out, get dressed, then call them over. But that’s pretty minor, and I love the game.
Zette
Game systems had limited processing power. By making them disappear after death they avoided unnecessariy slow down that would have detracted from the game. It was more of a hardware limitation then poor design.
Marc
Oh, I just remembered a few more that I meant to post earlier.
Fortunately, all hope is not lost; I made a game called Binary Quest, which actually does let you choose what to do. In fact, that’s the only thing you CAN do. And there are many different endings for each game. 
I don’t have it uploaded anywhere at the moment, though.
My game, Guggoids, is just about 50k zipped. It’s not a full game yet, but still, 100 megabytes for a DEMO!? What’s wrong with these people!?
(BTW, you can get Guggoids here.)
Johnny Angel, why didn’t Septerra Core sell well? It’s a good game! Growl. It has some intelligent dialogue, consistent character action, female characters that do something besides be the obligatory token female character, good graphics, it plays well and has a good plot, I mean, come on! What’s not to like? Just don’t spoil the ending for me. I had to start over because my first game (I got to the pirate ship) was on another computer.
Fights too hard, damn but Baldur’s Gate (1, not 2) annoyed me. Traps all over the floor, a couple of strong henchman, and a bossman for whom my wonderfully strong armor doesn’t seem to pose even the mildest irritation and who is also almost completely resistant to magic as well as being nearly impossible to hit. And the ending for that game sucked. All it did was say “Hey! There’s going to be a sequel!”
Jumping puzzles annoy me. You know, the kind where you have to jump from platform to platform, but if you miss, you fall to your death? Marathon had some particularly annoying ones. Even Half-Life, an otherwise fantastic game, had some. And Heretic II (though the thrid-person view does make them a bit easier). And Heretic. And Hexen.
You either have to save after every successful jump (something you couldn’t do in Marathon), or you’d have to do the damn thing over again several times until you got it right.
Yet another :
Games where the main character can kill something 20 times larger than him, yet he is completely incapable of swimming or climbing over a fence or a rock.
The “Shitty Endings” peeve goes on my list, too. Anyone remember Quake? Was there an ending for that?
I really hate it when an RPG gives you control of a really kickass character, only to take it away, no matter what (for example, getting General Leo in FF3).
Go buy a copy of Gamepro magazine. It comes with a CD with a whole ton of nifty shareware games.
Well, hell, man, we live in the day of the gigabyte. Doom came out when few hard drives had more than a hundred megabytes of total capacity. Games are bigger 'cuz there’s more stuff in them.
I remember when I first played Daggerfall. I was astounded that it had a 450 MB max install size. Now, that’s small potatoes.
Anyway, it’s now 2:30 in the morning, and I have classes in… fuck, seven hours, meaning I have to be awake in six… so I’ll post more pet peeves tomorrow. Trust me, I have a lot.
I have bought 4 Tomb Raider games and NOT ONCE has Lara Croft gotten naked and danced for me!!! For a combined total of $150 dollars or so I deserve better! That Lara is such a tease with her tight little shorts and sexy little… nevermind.
Seriously I hate games that have long dialogue scenes with no option to skip over them. It gets particularly frustrating when you die right after one and have to sit through it again.
Also with playstation the load times kill me. Everytime i die in the new tomb raider there is a load sequence to the start screen then one to the actual game. If it’s a particularly difficult scene I end up sitting through like 10 load up scenes in a 20 minute time frame!
Excellent point. Last year I noticed a dearth in RPG’s in my personal video game library. Wanting to round out my gaming accumen, I went right out and bought Star Ocean for the Playstation (at the time I had a kick-n-play PC, so that was just about my only option). Overall, it seemed a cool little game, and I understand it’s not that in depth, so it made a nice RPG primer, as it were.
But, Jeez Louise, from the time you ploink the disc in there to actuall playing time is about 10 minutes - no exageration. And there’s no way to skip all the exposition.
It almost threw me of RPG’s all together.
Now that I got the juice, looks like I’ll have to take another swing at it and get a good PC RPG - PDQ.
Hey Jack, that’s what MADE Star Ocean good!! I had gasp a story! A thing that most PC titles lack totally(Unreal Tournament and Quake 3A comes immediately to mind). RPG’s are supposed(well, in MY book) to be interactive stories, not some dumb hack and slash à la Diablo/Diablo 2(don’t get me wrong, I like those games, but they shouldn’t be called RPG’s. A fitting name would be Action/Adventure). If you don’t want to read stories and just play, then (console)RPG’s aren’t for you.
Sales weren’t exactly abyssmal, mind you. But the game didn’t compete with lesser games, and Maia didn’t even get mentioned on GameSpot’s Reader’s Choice Top Ten best Female Characters.
As for flaws in the game, the only complaint I have, and it’s a big one, is that most of the gameplay is simple-minded maze-and-switch puzzles. Most games resort to this, and it’s usually not so bad because the maze is disguised as something other than a maze, and the switches are disguised as something other than switches. Some story element is wrapped up into it. But in Septerra Core, it’s most often literally mazes and switches. The rest was a lot of go-everywhere-and-talk-to-everyone-again to advance the plot. But I trudged through this nonsense because I cared about the characters and wanted to know what would become of them. I was quite satisfied with the ending, which was unexpected but inevitable in retrospect.
re: Lara Croft naked
http://www.game-revolution.com/download/lara.htm
http://www.adultgamereviews.com/nudepatches.shtml
I’m all for a good story, and I crave decent interaction, but Star Ocean’s exposition was a little much.
Like I said, it’s not that in depth, gameplay wise. It starts off telling you the story, which you must sit through for 10 minutes, before even choosing which character you want to play as.
The first time it was cool. But after that, it’s like - ok, ok, I know the freaking lead-in story, let me go!
