Criticize Your Favorite Video Game!

[NAC1]

Just what the title says! This may be difficult for users who feel strongly about their favorite games, but I'm interested in seeing what the users here have to say. comments don't need to be multiple sentences of criticism towards a game; a comment can just be a sentence long.

I'll start. My favorite video game is the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Not only has it's graphics aged a lot, Hyrule Field is practically empty with hardly anything to interact with and barely any enemies to fight. This issue was fixed in the sequel Majora's Mask.

Now it's your turn.

[Pacman0001]

Pac-Man can get repetitive.  Other games in the series change the maze layout to help prevent this, but with the first game it seems like your playing the same level over and over again.  (This happens with a lot of old games.)

[JustLikeHeaven1]

In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past there were a few enemies that had cheap hits, plus these were always in areas with bottomless pits that caused you to less even more life when you fell down them.  

Also if I'm nitpicking - there is a lot of stuff in that game that is pretty cryptic and I never would have figured out with Nintendo Power.  "Oh, i'm just supposed to toss my arrows into the pond/well?!!?"  

I don't think of it as a flaw any longer because I know what I'm supposed to do...however this sort of game design is generally frowned upon nowadays.

[Adamant1]

[QUOTE=JustLikeHeaven]

Also if I'm nitpicking - there is a lot of stuff in that game that is pretty cryptic and I never would have figured out with Nintendo Power.  "Oh, i'm just supposed to toss my arrows into the pond/well?!!?"  

[/QUOTE]

Eh, it asked you if you wanted to throw something in and allowed you to cycle through your inventory... while it's true there aren't really any hints towards WHAT you're supposed to throw in, it's obvious something will happen if you toss in the right thing, so there's no reason to not just toss in everything and seeing what happens.

[JustLikeHeaven1]

[QUOTE=Adamant][QUOTE=JustLikeHeaven]

Also if I'm nitpicking - there is a lot of stuff in that game that is pretty cryptic and I never would have figured out with Nintendo Power.  "Oh, i'm just supposed to toss my arrows into the pond/well?!!?"  

[/QUOTE]

Eh, it asked you if you wanted to throw something in and allowed you to cycle through your inventory... while it's true there aren't really any hints towards WHAT you're supposed to throw in, it's obvious something will happen if you toss in the right thing, so there's no reason to not just toss in everything and seeing what happens.

[/QUOTE]

That was just the one example I provided - which wasn't really the greatest.  The game as a whole has some stuff that isn't easy to figure out when you first playing through.  

Trust me, I'm not really complaining - It's still my favorite game and it's still A+ material.  I was just trying to chime into the thread with nitpicky stuff.  Not much else you can do when you're critiquing your favorite game 

[soporj1]

Civilization II and Roller Coaster Tycoon, you sucked up way too much of my time ten years ago. 

[pixelated1]

Super Mario Bros. 3. To me, the only thing I could really criticize is the lack of a save feature.

[N64Dude1]

Oh how this pains me

Banjo-Kazooie needs better swimming controls

Super Mario 64's dated camera doesn't hold up well

[HardcoreSadism1]

Mortal Kombat's ending seemed kinda like a screw-over to the entire premise and possibility Raiden can put front. 

Lumines Electronic Symphony has a sometimes-unbalanced difficulty, it's not to a horrible extent in any way but really. 

Halo Reach's Firefight has reasonably noticeable decay online, Anniversary only having one map for it speaks volumes. Now people just tolerate wave after wave just to max out their rank.

Starfox gets pretty hard on a 3DS versus the console version. 

Croc 2's sandbox experience is rather cheap and stiff sometimes. 

[m0zart1]

The original Legend of Zelda's final boss is super easy... too easy really.

 

Adventure of Link and A Link to the Past should have had second quests!

 

Entering your continuation password in Metroid starts you off in a very poor state of health and with very little inventory in your containers, forcing you to farm for long periods of time to replenish and continue at a point when you really just want to continue the quest.

 

Super Metroid's wall jump is hard to achieve at first, especially since the only in-game instruction for how to perform it is a few animals giving a visual demonstration, which doesn't expound in the least on how to do it using the controller.  Thankfully, you only need the wall jump if you want to finish the game at 100% in under 3 hours.  Nonetheless, I spent much time in frustration trying to achieve it until I found the real technique explained in a guide.

 

The original Clock Tower is only in Japanese, which means if you want to play it and understand it, you have to follow a guide or do some "gray" and "black market" things, to which I personally object.  Nintendo could have localized the game when they put it out on Wii VC, but they chose not to do so, nor release it in the US.  It's a shame, since Clock Tower 2 (what we knowin the States as Clock Tower) on the Playstation is great but lacks coherent explanation without playing the original.

 

Another Japanese only conundrum:  Sweet Home is a truly unique RPG, a horror game, and a precursor to Resident Evil, and yet is only in Japanese.  This is even worse than Clock Tower, because as an RPG, there's a lot more dialog to fail to read, and a lot of it is very important.  Guides can try to be comprehensive, but none of them will ever be comprehensive enough.  It's another situation where I really wish Nintendo had remedied the situation with a Wii VC release.

 

Castlevania 64 had too many blind leaps, drops, and ledges to grab.  Even when you get used to them, you can still fumble and die, falling into an acidic lake.

 

Ocarina of Time only implements an auto-jump.  It's fine after you get used to it, but it is frustrating when you are playing for the first time and can't control when you take leaps.

 

Metroid Prime is saddled with a first-person view.

 

Dark Seed has such a long learning curve that without a guide you will spend possibly days trying to complete the first day of the game without dying, without any real explanation of what you need to do and no real hint.  Turns out you need to go to the medicine cabinet right away and take some aspirin, but clicking on that cabinet in a certain way will not take that step, making you think that you have already checked that important spot, causing you to skip it.  Bad BAD game design on what is otherwise a great game.

 

Silent Hill implements only tank-like controls common in Resident Evil.  Way too much of the difficulty in Silent Hill is around the handicap placed on you by these controls rather than game's challenging enemies.  Luckily sequels to the game gave you an option for more traditional controls.

 

Eternal Darkness is missing two characters and their stories, which I would have loved to have seen -- one being a native American in Rhode Island before the arrival of Europeans, and one showing the story of a Knight Templar.  As good as the game is, I've always felt it hurt itself by cutting those two out altogether.

 

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has too many cheap shots in very important battle stages, which are almost impossible to avoid, yet must be avoided if you want to get the all-important ending.

 

Siren is so difficult and has such a steep learning curve that requires so much personal patience that most people will never be able to experience it's unique story.

 

Silent Hill 3, while a lot of fun to play, goes the B-movie route storywise for what up to that time was an A-list psychological horror series.

 

The motion controls on Twilight Princess for the Wii work well except in a few key game battles, such as the stage coach escape from Hyrule Castle Town to Kakariko Village.  At this point, the controls are such an abysmal failure, that even I almost gave up on the game at that point.

 

Knights of the Old Republic has lots of framerate issues that, at key points, can almost ruin all the fun you're having.  The worst one is at the ambush on the unknown planet, where if you go into the battle with too many force power ups, spells, weapons, et. al. applied, the game will freeze up every single time on the XBOX.  The ambush is unavoidable, so if you saved after applying those extras but before the battle, you might as well kiss that save goodbye.  Here's hoping you kept another one prior to all of that.