Video Game Pet Peeves

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- Games with no continues
- Limited save points
- Cutscenes which you can't skip (I've played the game, I know what happens, I don't need to watch the cutscene)
- Having to lead a NPC from point A to point B
- NPC's that get in my way, especially if they then say it is my fault.
- Button combos that are nearly impossible to do

Yeah, the no pause thing is highly annoying. Especially because that pizza I ordered ALWAYS arrives right in the middle of a boss fight or something, no exceptions.

Any and all sports games based off real sports. Seriously. They're f*cking old. If you want to play football, go f*cking play football. Not a game that's an exact copy of the last 15 games in the series.

Also, not being able to simply punch an offending person in an RPG when you're absolutely certain you could take them, their minions, the minions outside the room, and everyone else in the dungeon all at once without breaking a sweat. Or at least see your character act as arrogant as you feel (thank you sooo much for letting me be that arrogant a**hole ME2, it felt good to put thugs in their place with a pistol to the face).

Lengthy cut-scenes that you can't skip. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is a big offender, but the undisputed king of lengthy cut-scenes (that I've played, anyway) is Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on the GameCube. I should have just watched an episode of 24 instead - it would have been more entertaining, better acted, and a much less soul-destroying experience.

Places in platform games where if you don't jump just right, you fall to your grisly death. Mario games are nasty when it comes to this - I was playing through the last level of New Super Mario Bros. on my DS at lunchtime today, and the final few levels of Bowser's castle almost made me scream with rage. I dunno why, because I've completed it several times before, but some of those precision jumps just yank on my last nerve.

Not being able to save (and thus risking losing a huge chunk of what you've achieved if you die) unless you make a massive trek back to the last save spot - Resident Evil games do this to me. A lot. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but they always seem to abuse my love. Those evil witches...

Games that invlove someone else's storyline. I only like games such as Zoo Tycoon or the Sims where you can make your own.

The old civilization/RTS games where you had a limited amount of time to build up forces and expand influence to counter an impending threat (Imperium Galactica 1 and 2).

RTSs with absolutely USELESS tier 1 units (cmon, once you get to make super soldiers, what is the need for standard infantry, or basic infantry without some useful ability).

RPG "Henchmen" that get in the way (NWN, and a few others in that category . . . good games otherwise most of the time).

The impossible button combos (whoever comes up with that crap needs to die . . . who the hell is ever gonna pull it off in a PRACTICAL match up).

The "Combo-only" fighter games . . . cmon, who wants to get stuck in the corner just because some guy starts a combo that destroys most/all of your character in the first 10 sec . . . boooooorrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnggggg.

In some RPGs, having to wait to divvy up level points until after a mission is complete, or waiting until you get to a "camp."

A game that was shipped half-baked (see Metal Fatigue . . . good game, good concept, decent play, awful bugs).

. . . <to be continued>

in no particular order:

1. The bait and switch. when a game gives you an option, and whatever you choose, the opposite happens. for example, In Lost Magic (some spoiler) The villain confronts you with a choice: You can either keep fighting her at the cost of both your "friend's" (I found the girl kind of annoying) lives, or give up. If you Say you'll never give up, the sight of seeing her pretend to kill your friends (thats right, she doesn't even go through with it!) causes you to surrender and submit to her control, but if you surrender, your friends give you a pep-talk and you go back to fighting! I'm so sorry I had the moral failing of putting the fate of the entire freaking world over two people I just met!

2. The idiot protagonist. Japaneese RPGs are particularly bad at this: casting you as a complete moron incapable of the most fundamental logic. "Hello powerful archmage living in these mountains, we are looking for a powerful archmage living in these mountains. Since you are clearly a powerful archmage and you are also clearly living in these mountains, and since these poisonous mists and abundant monster population make it highly unlikely that many people, much less many powerful archmages are living in these mountains, we where wondering if you know the guy we're looking for."
"I am the guy you're looking for."
"Oh shock and awe! I did not see that coming! Truly, my mind is blown! What a plot twist!"

3. The dungeon/city you can't go back to. Generally a feature of multi-disked RPGs, in which dungeons and cities are destroyed on one disk so new areas can be accessed on the next. But it's still frustrating as hell for completionists.

4. the esoteric secret. If I take the time to look down every nook, cranny, and dead end, talk to every NPC, and complete every side quest in sight I should find every secret. I hate when games have hidden content so esoteric as to make it nigh-impossible to unearth without the help of a strategy guide.

5. A cliffhanger ending with no sequel. there just really is no excuse. none.

that's all off the top of my head.

"Fallout 3 also amused me when I'd be walking around in power armor with a gatling laser strapped to my back, and a Raider with a tire iron would charge me yelling about how it's time for me to die, are all the Raiders supposed to be ret*d or something?"

That's funny, because in Fallout 1 and 2, random Raider encounters would run screaming from you if you were clad in power armor. The brave ones would knife you for no damage.

Getting "caught" (scripted) by bad guys and losing all my stuff. GAH!

A boss protected by a shield, with the shield generators located OUTSIDE the shield so I can just shoot them and walk in. WTF??? Why even bother putting the shield in?

Being attacked by swarms of smaller monsters while fighting a big boss character. GAH!

Jumping puzzles in FPS games. Oh how I hate those! If I wanted to jump around like an idiot I'd play a Mario game instead.

Games where characters have better guns than me, but conveniently the guns disappear when I kill the baddies so I can't pick up a better gun until much later when I just happen to find one sitting in the middle of a hallway.

DRM. Nothing makes me unhappier than to purchase a game and find out that I don't actually own it, I'm simply borrowing it from the publishers...for money (Un)fortunately, piracy does a decent job of fixing this issue.

Low FOV (field of view) in first person games. Back in the day it used to be 90°, which wasn't exactly the most optimum (or even close to what the average human has), but it was passable. Nowadays it's 75°, which gives me this claustrophobic tunnel-vision feeling...I seriously get uncomfortable after a while and have to stop playing, and a lot of games don't give you the option to change it.

Over-the-right-shoulder third person. I had a heck of a time playing RE4 and Arkham Asylum. Half of it was because it made me feel like a left-handed person (which I am not), since I'm used to FPS games where your gun is on the RIGHT side of the screen...the other half, especially in Arkham Asylum, was that it made it really difficult to see anything that was going on to the left of me.

Bloom (HDR, they call it?? Ha.). Honestly, it's not realistic, unless you're used to seeing the world through the lenses of a crappy webcam. I'm waiting for it to go the way of the late 90s' lense flare, but so far, it's still around...though game devs are starting to tone it down a bit.

Needless clipping in level design (invisible walls). I can understand clipping off geometry that the player is going to get stuck on, or clipping off something that might possibly break the game...but seriously, I've played games where you can easily climb up on top of a fence, but not jump over because it's clipped off. Maybe you should rethink that fence, sir.

Valve Software. In L4D for instance, there were a lot of people who would crowd together in the corner of a room and just melee the heck out of zombies and win. Obviously this is cheating, and could easily be solved by a kickban to the back of the head...unfortunately, Valve decided the best way to tackle this problem was by severely limiting the amount of times you can melee. So instead of actually fixing the problem, EVERYONE has to suffer. And since Steam prettymuch automatically patches everything ALWAYS, it's very difficult to play the game the way it was originally inteded. I'm sure CS fans are probably thinking "Hi, welcome to 1998"

Wireless anything. I would much rather spend two minutes every once in a while untangling cords, than spend ten minutes every few days looking around the house for batteries that aren't dead.

Games designed for HDTVs. Believe it or not, there are still quite a lot of people in this world who play console games on old analogue sets, and cannot read that tiny little text at all. Or even worse, 2D elements running at high res with blurry bilinear filtering with blatant disregard for flicker...ouch, my eyes

Games that sounded amazing before they were released, only to have the publisher rush them to finish it, and getting maybe half of a product =( Jurassic Park: Trespasser and STALKER being two very "good" examples.

Uh...I could go on for quite a bit, but I think I'll stop myself here =P

Well the thing about hardware upgrades is that if every game developed assumed no one upgraded then every game would look like crap. What's the point of having decent hardware if there's no software that uses it?

Bad pathfinding in RTS games...There's no point to direct your army to a point if it takes forever or flattens out into a line if it goes around a corner.

Clipping through solid walls in multiplayer, especially in FPS. MW2 lets people kill you if they shoot your clipped part with a weapon that has no penetration ability.

Screwed up tutorials that tell you the wrong key, and don't let you change the key binding for it. (Mass Effect Mako tutorial)

Long cutscenes that can't be skipped. I watch most of them the first and maybe the second time around, but the duration of some of the cutscenes in Final Fantasy X makes me not bother completing the game again after a few times.

My pet peeves:
- goofy dialogue
- disappointing boss fights
- quitters
- repetitive level grinding

The whole terms "hardcore games" and "casual games" I play video games all the time, though a lot of the games I really like are considered to be for "casual gamers" Just because I don't like all the stale recycled BS FPS's or overly complex RPG's. :/

My biggest pet peeve?

When an entire game is based on secrets, such as Milon's Secret Castle and Super Pitfall, both games for the NES. If you were a kid in the late 80's/early 90's without internet, and you got stuck, you were screwed, plain and simple. And these were games you wouldn't own, but rather rent from the video store for a weekend. The end result: after playing for only 7 minutes, you'd get stuck, and your weekend was ruined. You didn't have anything else better to do!

Ah, good times.

Usagi1992