Aspects of games you dislike

[Skummy]

Achievements. It's lazy, and needlessly giving "rewards", more often than not, for things reward blind persistence over any actual skill. Oh, you've not really completed this game until you've got the Platinum Trophy for killing 100 bad guys under specific circumstances? Fuck off.

The worst for me was the Sonic Mega Collection for the 360, where to unlock certain games you had to play Sonic 1 for 20 hours or something ridiculous. What does that prove? Why not reward ability and skill rather than just giving you prizes for leaving the console switched on while you go out to the shops?

Online trophies even moreso. I don't play online, but I can never "100%" finish some games because I need to do X number of capture the flag or whatever missions.

I get the idea of it creating an incentive for replayability and whatnot, but you know what, just make a better fucking game. If the game's good enough, I'm going to want to play it again because I enjoyed it, not because I haven't spent 60 hours on a menial task and "need" to go back and do that.

That said, the Lego games have amazing trophies. "Solid Snape" in Lego Harry Potter especially.

Also minecart levels. The last Donkey Kong game could go fuck itself for that. Anything where you have to press jump at precisely the right moment, to the nearest millisecond, or else you're fucking dead, and half the time you can't even see what's coming up to know that you're going to have to jump. That shit's just cheap.

Broken cameras. I'm playing through Xenoblade at the moment, I'm 90+ fucking hours in, and I still end up in battles where I can't see what the fuck's going on because the camera is somehow caught between my main guy's back and a wall. Similarly, Epic Mickey - could have been a great little game, was ruined by a camera fresh out of the early days of PS1 3D platforming. In a post-Mario Galaxy world, there's no excuse for a 3D platformer to be that broken.

First person shooters can, for the most part, fuck off. I started playing video games as a kid, as I'm sure most if not all of us did. And you know what I enjoyed about them? They were bright and colourful and crazy, and totally different from real life. They followed an insane logic all of their own. You're a super fast blue hedgehog freeing little pig guys from robots! You're an Italian plumber in a world of mushrooms fighting turtles to save a princess! And, you know what, I still want that from my games.

I want games to be silly and fun and colourful. I don't want to be trudging around a world of greys, browns, dark greens and wooden fucking crates looking at the front end of a rifle bobbing around like a dick extension. The guns will still never look as cool as the shotgun in Doom, anyway.

Obviously, yeah, there are some good games in that genre, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and most games suffer from it. The likes of Battlefield and Call Of Duty I find absolutely interchangeable and couldn't tell one from the other - army man shoots bad guys. Whatever. ZombiU's great, admittedly.

But then you look at something like Bioshock Infinite which, while enormously over-rated, is a cool game that dared to take some risks in terms of the storytelling, and created a fascinating game world. Yet the intricate story it's trying to tell doesn't really match up with the "shoot the bad guys with a machine gun and throw magic fireballs" gameplay. It's just not the right medium. Nor do I ever find myself emphasising with the central character, or his story arc, because I only see his face about two or three times in the entire sodding game.

[Sousa]

Civ V has an achievement called "Rock the Casbah!" where you have to send a Great Musician on the "Concert Tour" mission to Morocco. It's the only achievement I've ever cared about getting.

[Skummy]

Stuff like that's fine. Achievements that are basically just in-jokes are brilliant. Like one in Tomb Raider for killing a specific crab. Or Lego Lord Of The Rings having the achievement "One Does Not Simply...", which you unlock my walking into Mordor.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I liked the two trophies on Uncharted 2 which you got for jumping into the swimming pool on the roof of the hotel.

MARCO!

POLO!

Brilliant. Otherwise I care not about trophies. Only if they're amusing, especially if not researched beforehand - like the crab one in Tomb Raider too.

I'm massively bored of military FPS games. I'll generally only touch an FPS now if the whole story behind it is different - like Dishonored or Far Cry...Or if stealth is heavily involved like Deus Ex.

[DJ Ice]

Oh man I got ridiculously furious the first time I tried to play Empire Total War without an internet connection. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'M NOT ALLOWED TO PLAY THE GAME?! I BOUGHT IT! IT'S MINE! HOW DARE YOU NOT LET ME PLAY IT!

This. Also that was my first encounter with Steam and someone else had used the code before me so I couldn't play. God I was fucking pissed off.

[Bobfoc]

Going back to binary moral choice systems, something similar I'm not keen on is enforced in-game relationships. There's a point in pretty much every Bioware game when, if you haven't already pressed the issue yourself, you're confronted with a choice between at least two members of the opposite gender to have a romantic relationship with. That might not be a problem in its own right, but I can think of at least two Bioware games in which you're forced to choose one or the other, and the game won't continue until you make a decision. Where's the "I'd rather not sleep with either of these two people I first met last week" option?

The Witcher was even worse. Almost every time I'd save a female from a compromising situation, if I then said anything that wasn't mildly insulting in the follow-up dialogue exchange, the scene would cut away to a sequence of Geralt, the main character, taking said female to bed, and I'd be rewarded with an artistic portrait of the subsequent intercourse. All I did was ask her if she was OK, game. The rest was all your idea, and one I didn't have a say in.

[TKz]

So to summarize, we all like different things.

[Gazz]

But we all hate you.

[OctoberRaven]

I'll confess to having tied up a random townie to the train tracks in Red Dead Redemption JUST to get the trophy for it.

While rubbing my hands and going MUAHAHAHAHA.

[Noah]

I hate random respawning in single player games. If I clear an area, it should stay clear unless there is a legitimate storyline reason and not simply be suddenly full of enemies again because I just had to pop back into the area for a second.

[Clawson]

That said, the Lego games have amazing trophies. "Solid Snape" in Lego Harry Potter especially.

There are a few things that annoy me about games nowadays but this is the medium's shining moment. Nothing will ever beat this.

[Benji]

Oh, thought of another one (and it relates to stealth). When you shoot someone, and suddenly every enemy knows exactly where you are to the very spot. It's even more annoying on games with snipers, because you spend about half a minute trying to figure out where you've been bloody well sniped from, let alone the exact spot.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

It's even more annoying if you ARE a sniper. If you're well hidden it should be ridiculously tricky for folk to know where the shot came from. But too often it isn't. Suddenly bullets start thudding into the ground around you.

[Hajjhowe]

I have to say games that force you to 'grind' to catch up. This is obviously a big thing in RPG's (At least the one's I remember as a kid). I find it absolutely kills the flows of a game when I have to stop at a boss I am not at a high enough level to beat and need to go back and do 654 random fights to get to a level to beat them. Killing gameflow on games where the storyline is actually, you know, a big factor? Kind of ruins it.

Also I hate really bad menu systems. Nothing is more annoying then trying to fix a setting in your game and having no idea at all where to look for the sliders/settings/difficulty/whatever because everything is just jammed in all over the place.

[Noah]

When you are given some quality moral choices in a game/series and canon ends up choosing to go in the most boring direction.

[Your Mom]

There are forced stealth sections on Disney Infinity

To be fair it's light stealth, but I messed it up like twice and it took a bit of restraint not to lose it in front of my son

[METALMAN]

I have to say games that force you to 'grind' to catch up. This is obviously a big thing in RPG's (At least the one's I remember as a kid). I find it absolutely kills the flows of a game when I have to stop at a boss I am not at a high enough level to beat and need to go back and do 654 random fights to get to a level to beat them. Killing gameflow on games where the storyline is actually, you know, a big factor? Kind of ruins it.

Also I hate really bad menu systems. Nothing is more annoying then trying to fix a setting in your game and having no idea at all where to look for the sliders/settings/difficulty/whatever because everything is just jammed in all over the place.

I hated that sort of thing! I remember when everyone was playing the Pokemon games I never got into it, because you had to fight hundreds of them just to go up a single level and I simply couldn't be bothered doing the same thing again and again.

[TCO]

Games that have an over-reliance on timed events. Like I don't mind being under pressure to do something quick but I hate having a clock ticking at the top of the screen. I'm too busy looking at that and rushing when I'm trying to enjoy the game.

I don't even remember any specific examples from memory it was just always something that bothered me.

[Cymbols]

Games that have an over-reliance on timed events. Like I don't mind being under pressure to do something quick but I hate having a clock ticking at the top of the screen. I'm too busy looking at that and rushing when I'm trying to enjoy the game.

I don't even remember any specific examples from memory it was just always something that bothered me.

I agree with this. One example of a game that does do this well is the Call of Duty franchise. The couple of fast paced "get to the chopper" moments mixed with the normal gameplay makes it neat.

Difficulty spikes are annoying. Like World Class on fifa is easy but legendary is too hard. Admittedly, it means that I have to be inventive and make up handicaps but it's not the same.

[Vamp]

Is that not a result of general sports AI shittiness? I've long since stopped playing football games but even the NHL games (I'm only up to 12 admtitedly) have annoying AI. I'll be the better team during a game with more shots, plenty of which the goalie makes astounding saves to stop, I'll trounce them physically, give up about three shots to the opposing team and they'll win from scoring a weak ass goal or getting a burst of speed and invicible status where I'm unable to stop them skating. Sport games just don't seem to be that well made.