Things in Video Games you Hate?

[jon]

To me it's tutorials on how to do things. Banjo Kazooie was so good but that freaking guide, Bottles the Mole, who teaches you all the new moves, is so annoying. There should have been an option to just learn all the moves at once.

[DaHeckIzDat]

Going back to the very first point I made (yes, I'm going to make you go back to the first page- HA!), I just remembered I never beat the first Darksiders game for that exact reason. I made it to the giant bat boss, but gave up after that because using the thumbstick to throw bombs was clunky, and the entire freaking fight revolved around that one mechanic.

[SpaceGuitarist]

I second the general hate towards tutorials, especially unskippable ones, but what would a better alternative be?! Modern games have a ton of different buttons and mechanics to memorize...

Personally I would love videogame manuals to make a comeback.
I've always been a "play the game first, read the manual second" kind of gamer - like most gamers, really. I would read the manual only once I had hit a wall in the game and couldn't progress.
But the feeling you got when you discovered something you didn't know the character could do buried within the pages of a manual was incredible.

So, errr, there's little doubt that tutorials are a product of our decreasing attention span and decreasing tolerance to learning curves/frustration, but if I had to pick an alternative, I'd rather have developers invest $20.000 to produce a great manual packed with information than spend $1.000.000 to make a tutorial level that makes the player feel like an idiot...

[Mario500]

A minor gripe, but still...
I hate when games ask you to "Press Start Button" to start the game, then you press the A button and the game starts anyway.
I mean what's the bloody point.

I guess the point was to tell players when they could start the game without telling them which button to press.

[Retrology]

Really hate in certain games that your progress is saved but the amount of lives you have isn't. That drives me crazy, it's like, what's the point of even collecting lives then?

[Herschie]

Those stupid intros in Madden that you have to play before you can get to the main game. Hate them. They suck. Quit wasting my time.

[juhis815]

Really hate in certain games that your progress is saved but the amount of lives you have isn't. That drives me crazy, it's like, what's the point of even collecting lives then?

Good one, because I remember when I got to the certain level in The Adventures of Lomax which was driving me nuts, so I had no other choice but to resort into emulator to beat the game.

[Retrology]

I'm surprised Jon hasn't made this complaint yet, because he usually would (not that there's anything wrong with that), but making games bigger for the sake of making them bigger.

This is an issue that plagues, what, 80% of games today? Sequels, certain 3D platformers, etc especially are bad at this, as developers think that adding more to a game will make it better. Adding more stuff isn't necessarily a bad thing, and can sometimes be a good thing, but it's how that's used. The games that do it right know not to overwhelm the gamer with too many items to collect (what's up, Donkey Kong 64?) and dead areas that exist just to make the game bigger (Skyrim?).

Maybe when I was younger I appreciated this, but these days I just want well designed games that don't overwhelm me with giving me too much damn stuff to do.

[jon]

When I was young I thought it was going to be interesting to see games with huge worlds especially war games and driving games where you roam around, I guess like the GTA series although it was before that series. And I felt this way but something changed. I was just really looking forward to 3d. To me it got off to a great start with the first wave of 3d arcade games being great. Sega had the Model 2 which was unbelievable. Sega wasn't the only one of course, but the arcade games, plus all the hype made me fascinated with 3d. But I don't think it lived up to the hype. What I really wanted was a lot more of the early 3d games from the mid 90's. But there just weren't that many games made to have a big library of games like that to play, especially with good graphics.

[ESauce]

Those stupid intros in Madden that you have to play before you can get to the main game. Hate them. They suck. Quit wasting my time.

What, you didn't think the playoff match at home for the LA Rams was realistic?