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Universally shit things in games

Started by Noodle Lizard, January 06, 2013, 10:36:58 PM

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Thursday

This is pretty much just in Tomb Raider and Uncharted but burrowing deep through ancient trap-filled temples, making giant leaps and using incredible athletic ability to navigate through the treacherous ruins until you finally find the ancient artifact of whatever. Then the person from the evil organization appears and says "Nah mate, I'm taking that" and then they easily navigate their way out because they had the foresight to bring ropes and shit.

Speaking of ropes and shit, at this point I don't think any games character can have an excuse for not bringing a grappling hook with them. I mean clearly in games they're all magic and can grab onto anything, allowing people to escape in seconds. Ada Wong appears to be the only character in the Resident Evil universe that see's it obvious tactical advantage and still nobody has learnt from her.

The latest Resident Evil is also utterly appalling in characters not bothering to make sure the boss is dead. It's always true when it happens in games, but really, seriously you've got to make sure these people are dead. Can you please jump on their head a few times in fact, if you're willing decapitate the fucker and cut out their heart, I know it's gross, but it's better safe than sorry.

Unoriginal

Any video game mission ever where the death of a companion results in you failing. They're always shit, and always manage to run in front of guns/cars/off hills. Bastards.

My personal favourite was during a mission in Vice City where you drive around with Lance and kill a few people early in the game. Once you get to your designated drop-off point and get out of the car, Lance gets into the driving seat, says a few words and then drives off. Well, that's what is supposed to happen. In my game, he glitched in front of the car, and when the car drove off, it run him over, resulting in me failing the mission. I'm glad he turned out to be the bad guy, the fucking cunt.

Mister Six

FIXED DIFFICULTY SETTINGS
I'm 30 now, you fuckers. I don't have the time to keep banging my head against the brick wall of your hamfisted game design. Put in a difficulty level that can be adjusted at any point or your game's going in the bin. Yes, 'hardcore' gamers will moan, but they moan about everything anyway, and in any case they are cunts who should be ignored at all turns.

CHECKPOINT-ONLY SAVES
As above - I am old and busy and don't have time or patience to plug on through another hour of shooting to get to your arbitrarily designated save point. Let me save when I want! So what if it makes the game easier? It's my fucking game! Especially egregious in open-world games, as it discourages exploration and arsing about - I don't want to drive through 10 minutes of jungle to get back to the mission I died on, so I'm not going to stray from my tried-and-tested (and dull) tactics.

THREE-WAVE BOSSES
Why make me kill the same boss three times before it properly karks it? If I kill it once then obviously I know the pattern. Don't make me do it again!

Lt Plonker

Ending a level/mission on a cut-scene and watching your character fuck up all your hard work, like a digital Frank Spencer.


Thursday

Oh yes any time your character fucks up in some way or does something that you wouldn't have done if you were in control or would usually cause a game over if you'd done it is maddening.

Hangthebuggers

Worse than that ... AUTO JUMPING. Imagine playing tomb raider and every jump was perfectly timed for you?

No thanks, I want the risk of a mistake, not someone holding my hand.

Also, 'friendly fire protection' on fellow AI / over punishment on team kills. What I mean is, I want the option of having a stray bullet being able to take out a team-mate without it either having no effect 'invincible soldier' or immediately restarting the level.

I like consequences, if a badly timed explosion takes out a few fellow soldiers, then I want the risk factor to be upped, as opposed to a detraction from realism or worse extreme punishment.

Big Jack McBastard

Background fighters during riot scenes.

The Witcher 2 was a recent one that springs to mind, you clear out a section of the ramparts of a castle early on, you can then stand, blocked off from, the path just beyond in the opposite direction where duos of melee fighters stand repeating the same actions over and over with neither side showing damage or, you know, falling and dying like they were allowed to on our side.

Enemy bullets not killing/harming any AI companions you might be saddled with, also companion bullets doing no discernible damage to foes beyond mildly stunning them. Games where your guys are in false danger, where every situation requires you to intervene or else the two sides will remain in eternal  non-fatal combat.

Oh and you know that bit at the end of a level or mission where you get to a 'designated plot' house and the game screen fades to a cut-scene which moves the story on and concludes somewhere else on the map, yeah? Well the split second flash of my bod still stood outside the fucking guys house really takes all the wind out of the cut-scene that just happened. Once you start looking for it you see it everywhere with 3rd person games.

Hangthebuggers

Quote from: Thursday on January 07, 2013, 02:22:18 AM
Oh yes any time your character fucks up in some way or does something that you wouldn't have done if you were in control or would usually cause a game over if you'd done it is maddening.

Indeed. Or playing along to an alignment system (Good/bad/neutral) and then having a cut-scene ruin everything by behaving differently. Annoying.

Jerzy Bondov

Quote from: Mister Six on January 07, 2013, 01:37:16 AMCHECKPOINT-ONLY SAVES
As above - I am old and busy and don't have time or patience to plug on through another hour of shooting to get to your arbitrarily designated save point. Let me save when I want! So what if it makes the game easier? It's my fucking game! Especially egregious in open-world games, as it discourages exploration and arsing about - I don't want to drive through 10 minutes of jungle to get back to the mission I died on, so I'm not going to stray from my tried-and-tested (and dull) tactics.
Yes, anything that makes it laborious to stop playing the game for a bit and then come back later is sick and wrong. In Lego Batman 2 you can save your progress at certain points in each level. It's not a hard game and they're reasonably well spaced so that's fine, you'd think. I'll save at one of those, then turn it off and come back later. Except when you turn the game back on you're back in the Batcave, usually on the other side of the world. So you get in the Bat-Car and drive over to where the mission was, and it immediately starts playing the cutscene from the very beginning of the mission to make you think you've lost all your progress. When you skip it (after a few seconds of course, can't skip it straight away), it finally puts you back where you were. Honestly this just puts me off playing it at all.

Phil_A

Quote from: Thursday on January 07, 2013, 01:33:00 AM
This is pretty much just in Tomb Raider and Uncharted but burrowing deep through ancient trap-filled temples, making giant leaps and using incredible athletic ability to navigate through the treacherous ruins until you finally find the ancient artifact of whatever. Then the person from the evil organization appears and says "Nah mate, I'm taking that" and then they easily navigate their way out because they had the foresight to bring ropes and shit.

Speaking of ropes and shit, at this point I don't think any games character can have an excuse for not bringing a grappling hook with them. I mean clearly in games they're all magic and can grab onto anything, allowing people to escape in seconds. Ada Wong appears to be the only character in the Resident Evil universe that see's it obvious tactical advantage and still nobody has learnt from her.


Ah, ropes. Anything involving swinging and jumping from rope to rope in a 3D environment is almost always a massive game design fail. There are some truly horrific examples of this in the Tomb Raider series, but also in The Windwaker, which contains not only a fucking timed rope swinging sequence, but one that have to go through twice(you have no choice) at different points in the game. To put that kind of shit in a Zelda is unforgivable, I think it soured me on the whole game to be honest.

Which also ties into another of my gaming design hates - shit minigames that you have to play to progress the plot and can't be avoided under any circumstances. The two Playstation Breath Of Fire games were absolutely dreadful for this. They can't be just amusing diversions from the main plot, oh no. You have to play all of them or you'll be stuck in one place forever.

KLG-7B


Jerzy Bondov

Cut-scenes that you can't pause. If Mr. Game Designer wants to be a filmmaker so much you'd think he would know that DVD players have a pause button on them. If I can't pause the cut-scene to go and make a cup of tea then it will just have to go on without me.

Consignia

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on January 07, 2013, 01:17:02 PM
Cut-scenes that you can't pause. If Mr. Game Designer wants to be a filmmaker so much you'd think he would know that DVD players have a pause button on them. If I can't pause the cut-scene to go and make a cup of tea then it will just have to go on without me.

Or his annoying brother, cut scenes that you can pause but also skip at touch of a button and cannot be rewatched without going back.

Mister Six

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on January 07, 2013, 07:38:11 AMWhen you skip it (after a few seconds of course, can't skip it straight away)

As horrible as that whole experience sounds, the bit quoted there is kind of fair enough - the cutscene is covering up the fact that the game is loading in the next level in the background. It's annoying, but until we go back to cartridges, it'll always be this way, sadly.

Harpo Speaks

#44
Quote from: Big Jack McBastard on January 07, 2013, 12:13:29 AM
Water, though it's getting better cosmetically at least.

Speaking of which, characters who can do all manner of things, but will instantly drown should they touch even a cup full of water. I suppose I'm thinking of GTA3 and Vice City on this one, I find the element of cool in completing a speedboat mission diminishes somewhat when you then have to position the boat next to the pier with unbelievable care and then walk gingerly on to dry land like a pregnant woman negotiating an icy driveway.

Consignia

Quote from: Harpo Speaks on January 07, 2013, 01:26:09 PM
Speaking of which, characters who can do all manner of things, but will instantly drown should they touch even a cup full of water. I suppose I'm thinking of GTA3 and Vice City on this one, I find the element of cool in completing a speedboat mission diminishes somewhat when you then have to position the boat next to the pier with unbelievable care and then walk gingerly on to dry land like a pregnant woman negitiating an icy driveway.

It was like that in Red Dead Redemption. As soon John or Jack, or whatever he was called, got upto his knees in water, it was "BANG - You're Dead".

Jerzy Bondov

If they're going to have falling into a body of water kill you, they should come up with a really long animation where the character thrashes around screaming and gurgling before slowly succumbing to death while blank-faced NPCs go about their business nearby.

Consignia

The instant death thing is good so we don't have to suffer a long sequence, but it's just so sudden and in-escapable in RDR.

Jerzy Bondov

Oh I wasn't being sarcastic - I just think it would highlight how silly it is :-)

KLG-7B

Quote from: Consignia on January 07, 2013, 01:45:01 PM
The instant death thing is good so we don't have to suffer a long sequence, but it's just so sudden and in-escapable in RDR.
Right. There's not enough feedback to judge when you're going to die. It sticks out very sorely as a "we didn't have the time to do this bit right" thing.

lazarou

One that really used to be a pisser but has since (almost) died off - perma-locked doors that look the same as every other working door, often in levels full of the fuckers. The late '90s were an especially grim time for this. I thought they'd died out completely, but they turned up again recently in Operation Raccoon City. In a novel twist, you'll eventually figure out which ones have rooms behind them by checking the minimap (the locked doors have no geometry behind them at all), until you realise some of those still can't be opened as the game won't let you until you hit some arbitrary trigger that sends a monster crashing through it. Nice.

Any really difficult/frustrating boss fight where you finally struggle through to the end, doing enough damage to kill an entire army only for them to shrug it off, run away or just come to their senses. You've dragged us through the ringer, at least give us that little sliver of satisfaction. Dead Rising was lousy with these, Carlito in particular managed a whole handful of them just by himself.

Games that slowly unlock all the best skills and toys as you play through, leaving the really great stuff so late you barely get a chance to play around with them. For a bonus point, don't even offer a new game plus.

QuoteAny video game mission ever where the death of a companion results in you failing. They're always shit, and always manage to run in front of guns/cars/off hills. Bastards.
In addition: games that give you AI squadmates you'll be expected to revive and babysit constantly throughout the game, but who can't revive you.

QuoteEnding a level/mission on a cut-scene and watching your character fuck up all your hard work, like a digital Frank Spencer.
And one last one: games where your character is some godlike badass in cutscenes, but can't do half that stuff and folds like a paper doll as soon as you get the controls again.

Obel

Quote from: lazarou on January 07, 2013, 04:08:59 PM
Games that slowly unlock all the best skills and toys as you play through, leaving the really great stuff so late you barely get a chance to play around with them. For a bonus point, don't even offer a new game plus.

Oh, hi Far Cry 3!


mcbpete

However that's sometimes the whole fun behind the genre (eg. Super Metroid)

Still Not George

The entirety of Space Pirates And Zombies is built on that premise.

Mister Six

Quote from: lazarou on January 07, 2013, 04:08:59 PM
Games that slowly unlock all the best skills and toys as you play through, leaving the really great stuff so late you barely get a chance to play around with them.

Or, in the case of Mass Effect 2, do it with the supporting cast, so that half of them are just faceless drones that you don't care about.

Speaking of - games that give you a load of characters/weapons, but give you (relatively speaking) hardly any battles, so that you never really get to explore the possibilities. It really annoyed me in ME2, especially as I played that coming off the back of the utterly massive Dragon Age: Origins.

Rolf Lundgren

Quote from: Mister Six on January 07, 2013, 01:22:14 PM
As horrible as that whole experience sounds, the bit quoted there is kind of fair enough - the cutscene is covering up the fact that the game is loading in the next level in the background. It's annoying, but until we go back to cartridges, it'll always be this way, sadly.

They shouldn't be trying to sneak it in like that. I'd much prefer an old fashioned loading screen so at least I know I have to wait.

Deus Ex nailed this. You could pause and skip the cut scenes while the loading screens brought you up to speed with the plot.

syntaxerror

NPCs that get in the FUCKING WAY. I remember being acutely aware of this in Morrowind, where occasionally an NPC would block a doorway making it impossible to pass without attacking them.

DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK

Quote from: KLG-7B on January 06, 2013, 10:49:42 PM
Loading times, or worse: long, unskippable transitions that aren't there for a technical reason. Any period of me waiting for a game is bad times.
Agreed. I hate having to sit through company logo screens (even if I can skip them) before I even get to the main menu. They should just put their incredibly profound and exciting logos on the main menu.

Also, it doesn't really bother me personally, but 2D fighting games not having comprehensive tutorials/hitbox viewers/framedata viewers to get new players up to speed and save advanced players time is still silly. They've been around for too long not to make this standard. Blazblue and Skullgirls were the only games I've played that I thought put some effort in. Capcom are big offenders with this: they don't even explain what cross-ups are (just one example I could name from a long list), why they're integral, or how to defend against them. Can't speak for 3D fighters, never play them aside from a bit of Virtua Fighter dabbling which is fantastic in all these aspects by the way.

Gavin M

I love platform games, and I certainly love the things that can make a platform game fiendishly difficult: needing quick reflexes, a ridiculous amount of simultaneous enemies/hazards etc, all great.  Despite all this I find the dullest gaming experiences are those that require pixel perfect jumps.  There's no excitement to be had from trying and retrying the same jump several dozen times, only to be faced with a new, slightly more difficult jump. 

Noodle Lizard

Quote from: Gavin M on January 07, 2013, 10:04:38 PM
I love platform games, and I certainly love the things that can make a platform game fiendishly difficult: needing quick reflexes, a ridiculous amount of simultaneous enemies/hazards etc, all great.  Despite all this I find the dullest gaming experiences are those that require pixel perfect jumps.  There's no excitement to be had from trying and retrying the same jump several dozen times, only to be faced with a new, slightly more difficult jump.

YES.  This had me bellowing at the screen quite recently when playing 'God Of War 3'.  I was in Hell or something and there was a jump from one bit of rock to another which wasn't emphasised or anything (presumably supposed to be easy), but was just fucking impossible.  No matter what I did, I just plunged to my death.  I must have tried it about twelve times before getting it right - there was no special thing you had to do, you just had to jump perfectly.  And then about thirty minutes later the game takes you back to that very jump and you have to do it all over again.  What a disgrace.

The irritating thing was, like I said, that it was designed as if it wasn't supposed to be challenging, it was just a thing to do to get from one bit to the other.  I might check and see if anyone else had a problem with it.