The Video Game Critic

I'm pretty sure we all have at least one thing that video games do that drives us crazy. What's yours?

For me, it's using the thumbsticks as buttons. It works well enough for sprinting and centering the camera, but when they go beyond that it's pretty terrible. I'm playing Dark Souls 2 right now, and one of the biggest downfalls (so far) is that they make you jump by pressing the L3 (left thumbstick). What was wrong with sprinting with O and then pressing it again to jump, like in the first game? Pressing the thumbstick is clumsy, especially in a game like DS where you have to time yourself just perfectly or else you'll miss it entirely. Sometimes I'll even think I pressed the thumbstick, but end up running right off the cliff because it turns out I didn't.

You can change the jump setting in Dark Souls II in the options menu .

I HATE unskippable tutorials of any kind.

Oh, really? I'll have to check that out next time I get on. I don't hate tutorials, myself. I consider them a warmup for the real game. I especially don't hate them if they're for complicated RPGs. I never beat Final Fantasy XIII, but I wouldn't have even gotten as far as I did (Barthandelus fight on Gran Pulse) if I hadn't read every single tutorial it gave me

I'll take a good hard copy instruction manual over a tutorial any day of the week.

I'll second the OPs dislike of thumb stick buttons. There aren't enough buttons already?

And a FPS with the inability to invert the Y-axis is unplayable to me. Seriously.

And sports games with too many plays/schemes to choose from. Actually there's a lot about post SNES sports games I could write about..

For the most part I like to keep my consoles offline. But whenever I fire up my old Xbox 360 I get repeated prompts "do you want to check for updates" and "Press B to go online" or whatever. It's as if they designed their systems to nag you so much that you put the system online just to avoid that crap.

Unskippable dialogue. I don't give a damned about your story, let me enjoy the game.

The reboot of Tomb Raider including the ability to pause during cutscenes has made me wonder why in the hell this isn't standard protocol for games to allow. Not everyone is able to play a game with no outside interruptions whatsoever, and most games force you to either sit through the entirety of a lengthy cutscene all at once or skip it. Why can't I just pause the cutscene to use the bathroom or answer the phone or whatever else was bothering me and then go back to it without worrying what I missed?

Non-mutable licensed soundtracks. I don't listen to the latest pop music on the radio, so I definitely don't want it playing during a videogame.

Another problem that bugs me to no end is text in video games being too small to read. For whatever reason, this seems to be an issue specific to this generation and the one preceding it, probably because many developers assume everyone owns a huge-ass screen nowadays.

Escort Missions. Period.