This is the thread to rant about what you don't like about games -- any games, general or specific examples.

• Games that are defined by loving or hating particular teams. It feels like nationalism and it's a big reason why I have a hard time getting interested in a lot of sports.
• The principle that card games like poker (and other similar betting games) are popular because of their real-world risk, which I'd argue ceases to make them games.
• Strategy games. I have a hard time caring about what happens to a bunch of hard-to-identify blips on a screen with (what I feel is) an often overly-complex management system. Admittedly, from what I've seen, they're getting better with the former with increasing graphic performance, allowing the camera to zoom down and such, and there's not much that can be done about the management system since that's sort of what defines a strategy game. I just feel there has to be a way to make the genre more accessible is all.
• The reliance for the players to understand a (usually complex) number system to play a role-playing game. In most cases, a character shouldn't be defined by how many points in DEX they have, or to do "21 points of damage" during their turn. It's understandable how they started out that way, but a new understanding of what makes a role-playing game needs to be developed. Admittedly, this isn't just the fault of the game designers -- I'm sure fault lies with players who think that's what an RPG should be as well.
• Pre-rendered cutscenes in videogames. It has almost always felt inconsistent for me, though moreso back in the days of Playstation 1 when the difference was a lot more obvious.

-Zombies
- Overkill graphics on powers that dont need visual effect (ie the force)
-Zombie Games
- Any game EA ever made
- Halo 2 & 3being restricted to crappy Vista and having too much security.
- Any similar to the SIMS its only for girls!
- Idiotic alien designs and concepts, ie, Crysis, Stargate Alliance
- Any game with Black Ops american soldiers fighting... you guessed it... ZOMBIES!!!

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

That last point is especially true in games like Mass Effect where they just pre-render games at a low resolution w/o AA. The difference in quality to the real time cutscenes is enormous.

forcing stealth missions in games were stealth makes zero sense (recent example... Viking: Battle for Asgard)

escort missions... especially when what you're escorting should not require escort

cut and paste level design... WHERE THE **** AM I GOING? IT ALL LOOKS THE SAME!

out of place in game advertising... a billboard on the side of a road with an ad is believeable... a billboard in a post apocalyptic far future advertising a movie from now is eye rollingly stupid

- Overall laziness of developers these days when it comes to innovation. So many game formulas are being used over and over again. It is sad when the FPS genre is full of "LET'S BE MORE LIKE HALO!!!" games and the MMO market is "LET'S BE MORE LIKE WOW!" The general focus for a lot of games (especially so called "next gen" console games) is to make a game as pretty as possible by going nuts with pixel shaders but reuse the same old game designs that haven't change much in nearly 8 years.

- "Disposable entertainment". I really hate how a lot of games are running low on replay value. Sooo many games try to hard to deliver a cinematic experience by designing their games with a strong story narrative but unfortunately such games become really linear in their progression. It is sad that the fact that most games (mainly FPS games) only last about 10-12 hours, which can easily be completed in two days, you pretty much just play it once and then shelf it like a dvd movie. One of the reasons I play MMOs now of days because at least those games will last you at least of month before you burn all the content.

- Lame attempts at trying to increase replay value by adding "achievements" and "reputation grinds" and so on to extend the life of the game. Achievements in console games to me are dumb because are people really going to give a damn about how big your e-peen is?

The fact that many of them are now completely lacking of any kind of charm or are simply just not fun anymore.

I like zombies. >.>

And as for achievements, I haven't played much of any games with them, but I think the idea is fine enough so long as there's also a good game behind it. I'm sure it could use some innovation, relevance or whatnot though from the sounds of it.

I agree with everything else so far.

I'm annoyed by this, too. It also bothers me when the physics are scaled up to provide Hollywood effects. It's okay in Painkiller or Serious Sam, but my jaw dropped when, in Deus Ex 2, shooting a guy in the foot made him fly across the room.

Particularly in older games, they did this so that the player understood that their actions were having an effect. Realism could be too subtle for the effects to take notice. It's still an issue, but again, with improving graphics, I think developers can worry less about that.

I'm getting pretty tired of Japanese games.

What about them?

Movie/game tie-ins: no, just no.

Short game length: minus Portal

Strategy Games: same reason as above, but because i like the artsy, closeup, feel an FPS lets me have when i'm looking at something straight on and not from above - also, what am i supposed to be? God? A guy in a helicopter? Strategy games POV isn't loved by me

Every game ever nerfed because of the MP - Some people still like SP and don't care about MP mode, I'm looking at you Halo 3 for having zero storyline.

Serial codes at install - i don't want to keep track of the cd case if i'm lugging my cds around in a binder and suddenly want to install a game when away from home/Cds packed away

Just to be difficult, Goldeneye 007 worked. I hear Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, while not a direct movie-to-game, was pretty good too.

I don't like professional gamers or "pro shooters"

what genk said about MP vs SP

games that are supposed to be really awesome, but have a terrible control scheme.

- Camera deaths. This is more symptomatic than anything else: the real problem is having a camera which is inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable. All game developers could take a cue from Wind Waker on how to create a good 3D action game. Offender: all 3D Sonic games.

- Invisible walls. I know having your magical land surrounded by cliffs is a little played-out but, I mean, usually these things are dropped in right on top of a natural obstacle anyway. Cliffs, mudslides, fallen-over trees... I don't care. I want to see something that's blocking my path. And at the very least, I might be able to understand why I don't feel like moving past an invisible line in the ground, but I don't understand why my arrows don't feel like it either. See: Oblivion, most sandbox games. Trespasser.

- Playing an early-teens orphan whose quaint small village burns down in the outset. See: All RPGs.

- There being a church, and that church being the appendage of the ultimate evil. See: All RPGs.

- Fighting one of God or Satan at the end. Loose allegories still count. See: All RPGs.

- Padding a game out so it seems longer than it really is. See: All RPGs.

- Plodding storylines. See: All RPGs.

- Unexplainable lack of coop. There isn't a single non-turnbased game that wouldn't benefit from having coop support built in to the singleplayer campaign. There's really no excuse for it anymore. See: Almost all FPS games. HL2 I'm looking at you. Seriously, there's no excuse Valve. In Episode 1 and 2 you even had two characters basically the entire time so it's not like you would have even needed to change the damn script.

- "Realistic" level design (i.e. hiring a structural engineer or an architect to do it). This is horrendously detrimental to actual gameplay because everything looks the same, but probably even worse is the fact that they have to invent air ducts and hidden passages and block of obvious routes with debris and force fields so you're forced to take a meandering path instead of the one the hypothetical actual builders of the facility would have used. Notable offender: Halo 2.

- Any form of realism at the expense of gameplay, except...
- Unrealism that serves no purpose and is fairly obviously due to nothing more than a lack of effort. Like how HL2 had stacks of hundreds of palettes sitting all over the damn place but nothing was ever sitting on top of one. Or buildings that are obviously fake... like an ancient lost palace that is about 20 times larger than it needs to be, with one long meandering hallway full of the newest state-of-the-art energy weapons and absolutely no doors leading to any kind of room or enclosed space that could even theoretically be described as a dwelling.

- Mandatory gimmicky crap tacked on to a game. Usually something like fishing, sports, racing, games of chance, questionable vehicle segments... If the sidequest is fun enough to warrant making it mandatory, you should be able to sell it as a standalone product. If your players are so bored that they find Chocobo Water Polo to be an amusing distraction then you did something horribly wrong in your design document.

- Here's a gimmick, use it until you're sick of it-syndrome. Games with gameplay elements that diverge from the core gameplay can be excellent, assuming you have the correct blend and the correct pacing. The gold standard for vehicle segments is the original Halo, because you have a fair variety of different vehicles that appear scattered throughout the entire game and it's entirely your choice whether you want to use the vehicles or not. The crap-stained uranium standard for vehicle segments is HL2, where you have two different vehicles, you are forced to use them constantly for far too long and once you get off of them you will never ever see them again for the rest of the game. This is something that HL2 also repeated for the powered-up gravity gun, the pheropod and the turrets.

- Brown bloom. No, it's not realistic. It's not gritty. It's not dark. It's brown and it's blurry. That's not how real life works and that's not how real life light behaves. By which I mean it's pretty accurate when you're looking out a picture window in LA or Leeds but compared to normalcy hyper-colorful japanese games are still more realistic looking than Resistance.

- The Wii Remote. If Nintendo can't put in the effort to design an accelerometer that doesn't have a quarter-second lag built in, I don't see why I should put in the effort to point the stupid thing at the screen to get around their design flaw.

- Having to pay for console UI themes and avatar images. If I download the console UI themes and avatar images for a certain game it probably means I am endorsing and advertising the goddamn game for free. What the ****?

I'd make a rant but at this point I'm just really irked at how in the 1990s there were games like Earthworm Jim that had awesome music, fun levels and humor and stuff whereas now everything's so... brown. With an orchestra. And some kind of an AK-47 wannabe-clone-thing-a-ma-jing.

Oh schmell.

The fact that good storytelling is passé. Where are the great adventure games of yesteryear.

I used to think it was just nostalgia.

But then I realized that Contra and GoldenAxe really were better games.

I'm getting tired of how easy games are. Back in the NES days you were LUCKY if you had a save/code feature to come back and resume play whenever you like. Now, you get checkpoints and quicksaves and you can load any level you like (typically once you beat them). Screw that... I DARE a FPS to make a game you have to beat without turning it off. Yes I know, not everyone can spend the 30+ hours of gameplay most games have in one sitting. Who says all games need 30 hours? I'd be happy to play a game thats only 4-6 hours long in one sitting if it was still good quality, and cheaper. I think it would be sort of like sam and max, each game an 'episode' of the story. *shrugs* I just think too much effort is going into how games look these days and not how fun they are.

Like TF2, looks like a childish pixar movie, graphics aren't amazing, considering its on one of the better engines available right now. Yet it's extremely fun to play for hours on end. Thats what I like in a game. (duh, fun...)

I keep all of my serial codes in a text file, my CD cases stay home.


As for what I don't like; focus on graphics over gameplay, dumbing down a game on PC because it was/will be ported to console.

console ports that are so lazy they kept the console button graphics in the menus and the in game tutorial popups

i don't want to be using mouse an keyboard and see "press square to [actionhere]"

Most GFWL games I've played only do that if you have a 360 controller plugged in.

I hate games that place dumb advantages towards using a pistol over a machine gun.

Like you can shoot a guy once with a pistol and he's dead, but a machine gun that uses the same bullets takes like 5000000 rounds to kill a guy.

but if they made the machine gun behave even remotely realistically it would make that 12 year old on xbox live's 1337p1570l5n1p1n65k1llz worthless because all the noobs will use their machineguns

something that claims to be a simulator yet has no vehicle damage

racing games with "ai" drivers that stick to a strict racing line (really noticable if you restart a race and notice the same crash happening at the same spot every time)

developers who claim their ai is entirely unscripted but when you play the game you find EVERYTHING is scripted

I don't care.

Machine gun wins, like always. Otherwise they wouldn't be used in real life.

Hmm.

First off, I want to see people take risks with games. Why cant I see WW2 from the point of a view of a german soldier?.

Secondly, I hate the silly quick time events that some console games love. I mean why?. Its great for guitar hero but not much else.

Lastly the brutal slaying of decent licenses for crap games (Old hellboy game, many SW Games and many others)

This reminds me of all those instances in Civilization games where horsemen frigging spear tanks because THEY HAVE THE HIGHER GROUND.

Urgh.

For the same reason you can't play as Japan in a Rape Of Nanking scenario.

No one wants to play a game where you spend all your time between fighting Americans rounding up and shooting jews.

not all germans were nazis... plus you could have the game set on the eastern front... it would be more acceptable in the US to release a WW2 game where you play as a german shooting at russians... could also be a hit in finland as well

Nope, just the ones that weren't jews or fighting for hitler.

Agreed, assuming were talking aboot SP anyhow. Even though a game set mostly in the rural areas of Ukraine, random shanty towns and Pragues might get really boring rather fast.

Then again, there should be a game full of levels like Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell's Leningrad one. Burning fancy buildings, blowing up tanks and the Hymn playing on the background while at it. G'times.

Bad cameras. It's something that just kills games for me. Games like Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey offer these beautiful scenes, amazing atmosphere, etc. Then they lock the camera down and you can't see or explore anything. I can't get through these games because of it.

I could probably make my list, but this is the most important thing for me. I can't even take Halo seriously because of this. None of the architecture makes any sense whatsoever.

Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45.

You didn't have a heck of a lot of choice. Object to conscription, and you might as well be a jew. Besides, after living through the bombing raids, even objectors to Nazism probably a hard time seeing anyone as being any better. There's a reason that the Wehrmacht was using kids and old men in 1945. It's because everyone else had died trying to take on Russia's massive expendable population.

History is not made up of the idyllic black and white struggles that our craptacular history textbooks make them out to be.

The Japanese were really freaking screwed up, though. That wasn't so much brainwashing by a master propagandist, that was just the result of an arrogant culture with insane values. They killed 16 million Chinese civilians. They weren't even going after anyone in particular, they were just douche bags.

This.

Phoenix Wright is a fun adventure game.

That's a slippery slope, though. Take Jedi Outcast for example. Most of the level structures, especially in Cloud City and on the Doomgiver that made no sense whatsoever. You'd be moving through areas that no one except a Jedi could ever navigate through, and they're supposed to be critical systems. The Doomgiver comm puzzle was beyond retarded. You had a 9x9x9 grid of little cube rooms, each with a symbol inside, and you had to force jump between them and press buttons in the right order to change the comm frequency. I mean, what? What were the designers thinking?

It's one of those instances where lack of realism takes away from gameplay. Realism contributes to atmosphere, which has a huge impact on gameplay. The atmosphere made no sense and, at least with me personally, I couldn't think about anything else but how dumb the place was. Especially when I kept falling off the catwalks because Kyle would slip and slide as he landed on the floor.

And it wasn't just the puzzles, but also the stormtroopers placed in random locations where they had absolutely no way of getting there. Who remembers the bit where you had to jump over the spinning, electrified cylinders? The gaps in between had stormtroopers just standing there. HOW DID THEY GET THERE? This isn't Super Mario 3, there's a certain element of realism that has to be expected to provide a believable environment. I want to feel like I'm a Jedi on a mission, and providing ridiculously unrealistic scenarios doesn't make me feel like I'm in the game at all.

Haha. I remember that. I thought, "goddamn, I hate to be the debugger who has to maintain such a thing." It's like putting the company server on a minefield.

Also, don't forget the INFINITE STACK OF CRATES ROOM in Nar Shaddaa.

Thank you Ravensoft.