I generally am leery of mini-games. Most of them feel tack on, as if the devlopers acknowledge their game sucks and need some ‘additional’ depth.
When they are designed well, kudos to the game developers and designers. But there are some which are so horribly designed, so annoying that I would flung my mouse (or controller) and scream “I hate mini-games!”
(Yes, FF X seems to be the gravest offender here, with butterfly catching and dodging lightning).
The one that grates me to no end is the slow, bulky turret sequence in Knights of the Old Republic 1. It has nothing to do with the game except as a piece of slap-on action sequence. The controls are numb, the gun moves at the speed of snail and if you lose, game over.
I have heard from people who hate the Okami’s flower blooming sequences, but having to plot the dots on some of those stone doors are pretty much impossible (no, I don’t mean the last blockhead, but the one on Ninetails’ island). I have to get a water-based marker to mark the dot on my TV (thankfully it was a CRT back then. I wouldn’t done it on my LCD).
And here’s one from Hellgate London. The hack job of a RTS sequence in between one of the quests, and it is complusory. Worse still, if you are playing in a party, only one can take part while the other four just watch. Wow.
Agreed with your pick of the KotOR turret shooting. Apparently I’m an awesome Jedi but can’t handle a gunner turret to save my and my group’s lives.
One that was annoying to me personally was in Sanitarium. It was an interesting point-and-click adventure game until suddenly I was at a farm’s pumpkin patch, and there was a big evil scarecrow and hostile crows. I sucked badly enough at trying to kill them that I couldn’t get past that part.
I really hate any kind of jumping game. I especially hate it when it is just plopped in the middle of an otherwise good FPS. Why do designers think we like this?
The ambulance mission in GTA III were a right pain in the ass. Even if you used the “better handling” cheat.
All the other driving type missions (i.e. vigilante, taxi driver) didn’t require you to accomplish everything in one run. If you failed, you just restarted your current task. Unlike the ambulance missions where you have to save 1 then 2 then 3…all the way up to 12 patients and if you run out of time you have to start all over at 1. And if you bump anything, you lose 5 seconds off the clock, and you can only have a maximum of 3 patients in the ambulance at a time. And the siren while helping get cars out of the way doesn’t seem to work as well as you’d expect.
On the topic of stupid FF minigames, it wasn’t the worst but I found Tetra Master in 9 to be a big letdown after Triple Triad in 8, which I think is one of the best minigames around.
In Zelda: Twilight Princess there is this one sequence where you have to put out a burning wagon and kill some birds and fight off some ogres or something all at the same time and until you do you cannot really do advance in the game. It went from being a fun challenge to being an extremely annoying (and painful) experience. It almost made me quit the game.
The jumping puzzles in God of War ruined the rest of the game for me. Worse, if you die 3 times in a row to something, the game prompts you if you want to lower the difficulty level. Playing through it on normal at night, and a way to long game session, I accidently lowered the game to easy mode. There’s no way to turn your game back to normal at that point, and worse, changing the difficulty level does nothing to the jumping puzzles, the part I was having a problem with.
I will never, ever buy God of War II because of this. No matter how much I liked the rest of the game or the story.
I was rather disappointed that, in a game of Bioshock’s quality, the mini-game for hacking, well, everything, is basically Pipe Dream. Amazing how you can get surveillance cameras, security robots, vending machines, and safes to do what you want by running fluid through a pipe.
Yeh, Tetra Master’s random aspect was a bitch…I lost more than one A card to a 5 card, due to really bad random rolls.
All the mini games in X are pretty bad - Butterfly catching and lightning dodging are hard, Chocobo racing I’m convinced cheats, and Blitzball is BORING (it’s better in X-2). X-2 has a couple bad ones, too: the tower calibration in the Thunder Planes (particularly Payne’s).
Most of the minigames in Kingdom Hearts II are badly integrated - the last level of the rhythm games in Atlantica is nonsensical, skateboarding anywhere but Twilight Town and Hollow Bastion (OK, and Disney Castle) is absurd… The 100 Acre Wood minigames are well-integrated (each being based on a Winnie the Pooh story), but Tigger and Roo’s jumping game is unreasonably hard. (Or at least it was the first time through…I’m finding my current run absurdly easy.)
There’s this “Professor Lame-Town” or something where it’s like every person and their sister ask you to solve some stupid riddle or mathematical word problem or spacial perception quiz.
Some are less annoying than others, but it’s not like brain teasers are the point of the dang game.
KOTOR2 suffers from this. There are a lot of logic puzzles which are presented as a straightforward logic puzzles simply on the terminal. The rotating of cubes to get a door open, guessing the transponder frequency of the ships and ooohh the Sith use mathematical formula to lock their computers!
I chuckle when I was doing the core recovery in Mass Effect for the planet (Nirvera? The one infected by the ranchi). It’s just tower of hanoi…I don’t know if anyone find it annoying (I solve it quickly because it’s like a basic recursion puzzle) but thank goodness there not many of those riddles/puzzles in ME.
The Tower of Hanoi puzzles used to be the single most overused puzzle in adventure gaming. Running into it in Mass Effect was a strange throwback.
Oh, and screw Bioware for making it a four tier version instead of three. Once you know the principle solving it adding more tiers just makes the puzzle annoyingly longer instead of more difficult.
Too bad, because there are no insane jumping levels in GoW 2. It’s a good game.
And, yes, I too turned my game on Easy dif by mis-clicking. And that’s the time, after you’ve died for the 999th time on the same stupid goddamn jump and your rage has condensed into a tiny core of intense, primal blackness lodged deep in the icy pit of your soul, yes, that’s the time you want to headbutt a newborn baby and you can’t help yourself from ripping out the spine of anyone who dares walk into the room. With your goddamn TEETH.
A bit of forced roleplaying courtesy of the devs, there.
Oh, the best part ? They acknowledged that this portion of Hades (both the horizontal spinning death thing, and the vertical death tower that followed) hadn’t been playtested at all prior to release.
I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to Hulk out now.
