Video Game Pet Peeves

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Let the countdown begin!

4. Trying to pull off finishing moves in the early Mortal Kombat games. Suppose I want to slice someone in half; I would have to press and hold the High Punch button, release it, tap Back and Foward while holding the Block buttons, lightly press Low Kick and tap up. I got an idea: how about about a button that says Kill the Guy? It'd be a hell of a lot faster.
3. Games with no continues. Once you die, you have to start the game from the beginning. Need I say more?
2. Video games based off of movies.
1. Spiders! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGBMVmgQpX0

Uselessly small inventory limits, and also having to destroy items instead of just leaving them behind.

-limited save points
-inconsistent check points
-bosses that surpass the difficulty of the rest of the game
-achievements on XBL that require more than one player
-guys online who ask me if I'm single or ask me for a 'pic' (I'm a girl)
-game freezes
-super long cutscenes that aren't skippable

-NPC's who constantly nag you
-NPC's who always get in your way
-NPC's who you have to protect
-NPC's who suck at fighting the enemy
-NPC's who have glitchy scripted paths and you have to follow them

Crappy inventory/item management interface.

Ocarina of Time was great right up until BOOTS GO ON, BOOTS COME OFF, BOOTS GO ON in the Water Temple. Cripes.

Limited inventory space; most notably painful in any surival horror game. DA: Orgins also is an offender for giving for you so much crap to collect during the game.

Unkillable cheap Bosses. You know the kind. Like Beatrix in FF9. I could easily beat her but the game cheats so that you always lose no matter how good you do. If it's going to be like that, save me the time and make it a cutscene.

NPCs being right where you want to be. Nuff said.

Unlockable content that you can't unlock. Ever. (I'm looking at you Forza 3)

Insane button combos in certain fighting games. Who the hell designs these sequences?

One hit deaths. Not as common anymore and for good reason. Some games pull this off well like Contra, but most don't.

Playing card mini-games. I don't think it's common anymore, but god these annoyed the crap out of me in FF8 and FF9.

Video games based on movies for sure. Easier to just flush the money down the toilet than buying one.

Console ports that are a "copy+paste" to PC, with poor key mapping, not implementing the mouse properly, etc

MMO quests in single player games, eg go kill x of monster y then return style quest

Having to protect NPCs that would die from heavy rainfall.
Limited choices in RPGs; the whole point of RPGs is to make your own choices.
Cross-genre mini-games; no I do not want to shoot stuff with a gun in first person view, this is a freaking RPG.
Generic and repetitive character/environment/equipment design.

All knowing computers, that is computers that know exactly what you have or your strategy amd make it very difficult, this could be say a card game where the opponent is privy to your cards or like DOA4 which had a boss that analysed your play style and then would fight to squash me, you could win on the first round, then on the next get beaten in a few seconds.

- The insistence on referring to adventure games as RPGs, when in fact there is no real "role-playing" involved, and your choices are limited by the programmer's imagination rather than your own. JRPGs are, IMO, the worst offenders for this.

- NPC sidekicks who are supposed to help you in combat, but who wind up being more of a hindrance (Garrus and Wrex during the ambush in the bar in Mass Effect, I'm looking at you!).

- Tacking silly "sandbox" elements onto what is actually an adventure game on rails, just because GTA: San Andreas did it first.

I hate it when you're fighting a boss, lose and have NO CHOICE but to watch a long, unskippable cutscene before you can try again.

The inability to define my own controls. Presets are limited at times and usually are somewhat illogical or uncomfortable for me, and some games don't even offer presets!

Lack of thought or a design flaw. Sometimes it just seems like the developers don't play their own game. You see a problem and know the fix to it, and wonder how they didn't. Like for Fable 2's spell system, you can't really change the spells easily. A "spell interface" menu would have been nice, allowing you to quickly change spells in combat without having to navigate through a menu to do it. Gears of War and their "cover" button matched with the run button, so sometimes you'd cover when you just want to run by. To fix this they "made cover less sticky" when in reality it could have been "let go" next to go to cover or "let go and tap" or "let go and double tap". So, now the accidental cover problem still exists, it just happens less.

Mystery data. There are a lot of subtle things in games that the game itself doesn't tell you. The only way to find these things is usually from trial and error, or acquiring it from somebody who already did that. Knowing those things can sometimes improve your playing experience tremendously, and you can't help but wonder why you weren't informed of this by the game.

Inability to test play spells or abilities. Fable sort of remedied this problem with a "preview" but I find that the preview isn't enough, because I can't -feel- the ability, I can only see it. This problem is even worse with online games where the only way to reverse the selection in most cases is by completely remaking your character. Ouch! Better do a lot of research first, otherwise you might be in for a 20 hour marathon to regain lost progress because you simply HATE your selection to bits and pieces. Maplestory to those who have played this may be able to relate with job selections.

I probably have too many pet peeves to list, but I don't play a lot of games like I used to, so I only see a limited amount of them now. Very cool I must say!

There's also no reason today why games shouldn't be able to pause or save AT ANY TIME. I don't care if I'm three frames from taking a rocket in the face. Hard drives write and restore data fast, and if my oven is beeping or I need to go to work or my child is crying or the police are towing my car, I need to stop playing NOW without losing 90 minutes of progress.

The game experience loses nothing from this, except a little urgency. But no more urgency than you'd lose if you paused a thrilling movie at a bad time, so it's hardly a problem, and always up to the player's choice anyway.

Games that feature a point when you are "captured" by enemies that you could have beaten with your eyes closed... I'm most recently thinking of Fallout 3, but ti's such a common game plot point, and it always pisses me off, especially when I later get to kill whoever it was that caught me and they're a total pushover, ChronoTrigger being a classic example there. 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?