The A to Z of things that annoy me in videogames

I felt like doing a (click-bait) top-‘something’ list. Just some of those things that bug me in computer games. So without further ado...drumroll please.

AI needs saving

Best example: Resident evil 4.

Saving character A no matter what. It happened in Resident Evil 4, The last of us and, most famously, in Metal Gear Solid: Sons of liberty you got her killed for your effort.

Nothing wrong with saving a character as long as (often) 'her' AI is up to scratch. Unfortunately usually the –to be saved- character walks around like a gigantic alarm clock calling all monsters to dinner.

Backgrounds keep resetting

Best example: Wolfenstein (2009).

There is nothing more annoying than walking through a house and destroying everything in sight, then leaving, only to find minutes later that the entire room is in top notch condition again.

If all rooms already look similar it really makes you second-guess if you’ve been there before.

The same goes for self closing doors. How can you explore a house when every door you open, to mark a room searched, automatically closes itself again? Let alone if a door closes on you mid combat.

Conjuring up more enemies

Best example: State of Decay, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, any 2-D scroller.

The Norway level in Return to castle Wolfenstein. You killed each and every Nazi on your path but somehow, as you backtrack to collect some ammo, you find a new bunch of Nazis blocking your path. Where did those bastards come from? The level doesn’t have any locked doors or anything so what...did they spawn from a tree or something?

In State of Decay it is even worse. You just cleaned the area of zombies, there isn’t one for over at least a mile. You turn your back for one second and suddenly a whole group of them spawn right behind you.

I want my enemies to be countable. It’s not a Hollywood movie in which the hero finds himself against an army of henchmen simply because the main villain decided to open up another acme canister labelled ‘instant henchmen’.

Digital protection

Best example: Batman Arkham Asylum.

There’s nothing wrong with a company trying to keep a game from being stolen. However, if the failsafe mechanism you put on the game actually prevents players from either playing or (later) re-playing it you have a problem.

This happened with my legal copy of Batman Arkham Asylum. With the big digital copyright safe door it is now impossible to play.

Everlasting cut scenes.

Best example: Ducktales: remastered, any Metal Gear Solid-game

Computer games only recently managed to take stories to a new level. ‘You are the torturer!’ (Grand theft auto). 'Your choices dictate the end’ (the Telltale games). ‘You are this person and this is your story and these are your faults –take it or leave it’ (The last of us).

Before this computer games never really managed to outgrow the B-movie narrative (Alundra: everybody dies). Games tried to put the ‘fate of the world’ on your shoulders. But in the end it all comes down to ‘goodie’ killing ‘baddie’.

The problem, however, is that computer games don’t always recognize that they are telling a 'not very good' story. And, in that sense, there’s nothing more frustrating than an unskippable cutscene wherein some character is going on and on.

A sub-category would be the unskipable cut-scene mid game. So Scrooge McDuck pausing his adventuring to give a lengthy monologue about a coin he just found in the Amazones in Ducktales remastered. It takes the flow out of the game.

Following the law?

Best example: Driver.

You are driving along following all the traffic rules. You stop at a stop sign and the AI car behind you accidentally nudges your rear.

Suddenly the cops are all over you with deadly intent. No matter how good you are, one misstep and suddenly you're the worst of criminals.

Grinding.

Best example: Any Final Fantasy game.

Grinding is like digital training. Doing the same kind of fights over and over again in games for the experience point to make you character stronger (for the next episode of the game).

Grinding isn’t a bad thing per se. You can use it to develop you characters a bit this way or a bit that. But in ‘ye olden days’ there wasn’t a lot of variety of character development. In Final Fantasy 6 you, pretty much, taught every spell to every playable character.

Grinding is annoying if it limits the enjoyment of the game. Skyrim stopped being fun for me because I finished every single quest at level 60. Which meant I still had over ten levels to go before the dark knight would pop up.

Final Fantasy 6 to 10 would usually bring you to the end fight with characters severely outclassed at level 50.

A good game levels you along the way. You can, pretty much, finish it without any additional grinding. A bad (or even terrible game) let’s you grind for three days straight. A worse game, however, leaves you with a barrel full of ruby encased golden rings just because you wanted to up your smiting skill – I’m looking at you skyrim.

Helping characters.

Best example: Rainboy six.

Again like ‘AI needs saving’, helpers have a tendency to stand in the way. Sometimes I think I shot more of my brethrens in Rainbow six than actual villains because those fools decided to disco-dance in front of me.

Other examples would include: you are trying to sneak somewhere but the helper keeps attacking everything in sight. You are trying to hide but your helper pushes you forwards so the enemy spots you. You are trying to flee but lo and behold your helper is standing in the way. You just evaded standing on the trap button, your helper however...

Even more annoying are helpers who, by trying to advance the mission, keep repeating the same line over and over again while you are exploring the area: “Go through the door…Go through the door…Go through the door…”

I know!

Impossible controls.

Best example: Metal Gear Solid and Tomb Raider.

Making Lara Croft jump accordingly while balancing on a cliff. Having Solid Snake actually escape a perilous situation instead of crouching. Or, with PC-ports finding the right button on your keyboard.

More often than not I died because I couldn’t quite remember which button to push on my keyboard.

Jumping is a no-no

Best example: The Silent Hill-games.

You can walk, run, swim, limp, climb on a ledge, handle a chainsaw but you cannot jump.

There are still some games that give you all kinds of handy traits yet our hero cannot jump. It’s one of those ‘barriers’ that don’t work anymore in this day and age.

Also, characters dying when they fall in water...really?

Killing yourself is a no-no

Best example: The Silent Hill-games.

When I played Alex Kidd in Miracle World I would (sometimes) lose a life in the very first level. Instead of continuing I would kill ‘Alex’. After all it’s easier to die and play again than to go on or reset the system and wait for the game to load. So there I was saying: “Here birdy...”

But sometimes you can’t kill yourself. You can’t throw yourself in a chasm in Silent Hill and in other games the hero keeps on taking health packs until he runs out. Actually getting a 'game over' screen in some games is qute the challenge.

Levelling helpers.

Best example: Any MMORPG.

You enter an online roleplaying game fresh: ready to explore. And the minute you spawn there is already a cult hanging around you wanting you to be part of their guild, tribe, whatever.

Those ‘level fifty’ or so are often seen walking together with a low level player defeating high-level monsters to give the ‘new kid’ some experience points.

What’s the point of playing if some guy helps you level faster?

Moving levels.

Best example: Super Mario brothers.

These 2D-levels are usually combined with a death fall. Mario is the worst. A screen that moves and the minute you are too slow and get off-screen you die. So you have to plan your jumps correctly...a bleeding nightmare.

None-existent plumbing or: no logic in map building.

Best example: Chrono Trigger.

If you’ve been playing computer games for as long as I have you’ve seen a lot of development in het housing department. Around the 1990’s games houses suddenly gained pluming and toilets.

True, sometimes a household of two only had one bedroom (Chrono Trigger and his mom) – but it was a start.

However, the inability of logical reasoning of housing still persists to this day where computer games forget the necessities every once in a while.

But what is more annoying are those moments you are exploring an open 3D world and walking towards an open field only find out some invisible wall is stopping you (especially if you can see your target).  Why not put a wall there or something? At least something visual to keep the game map logical.

Also games that put a flimsy crooked fence in front of you that you cannot pass or a door you can’t blast open with a grenade launcher should be condemned.

Overpowering the player early on.

Best example: Bioshock.

Some games give a player an edge early on in a game. Wolfenstein (2009) had the time-stopping technique. Bioshock 1 and 2 the bees. The minute you’ve got those weapons/skills in your arsenal the rest of the game is a breeze.

It’s difficult to balance a game between easy and (Battletoads) sheer impossible. But when a game fails in this department it fails hard because people want to be challenged.

Ports and glitches.

Best example: Silent hill homecoming

Around 2005 a new trend in games started to pop up: unfinished games.

Apparently it is cost effective to just sell a game even though it isn’t finished. Another method is by simply transferring a games from a consol to a PC or vice versa without actually checking for bugs.

Quicksaves.

Best example: Fallout 3 and on and Skyrim.

Games try to balance between accessible and difficult. One way of making it easier on the player is by means of the so-called Quicksave. Every step of the way the game saves for you. However, saving every step I make in a game doesn’t automatically make it any better. I want to return every once in a while. I don’t want the game to hold my hand.

I learned this the hard way when I killed all the Ghouls in Fallout 3’s Tenpenny Tower quest. Suddenly the radiohost Three-Dog called me a scumbag every time I turned on the radio. And there was no way of me returning to a previous Quicksave to fix the error because it had already been overwritten.

Though, this questline is a bit problematic. If you help the Ghouls everybody in the tower dies. So it’s not really a win-win.

Revenue

Best example: any EA or Star Wars game.

This is the silly one. Having to buy extra stuff for your game that makes you wonder why the developers didn’t include it in your game in the first place.

Back in the day one could buy a game manual for Final Fantasy 9 on the Playstation. This manual had every trick and secret of the game. Except it wouldn’t tell you. You had to write down a codeword, fire up your computer and fill in the word one some website to unlock the secret.

Then there’s Alex Kidd in High Tech World -an unabashed commercial for Sega.
Imagine that you are in a town with some shops, a temple and, at the end, a guard post where the guard tells you he requires a passport for you to proceed. Now the tool-shop sells a printing press. The bookshop sells a handy book about printing false passports. Do you print the passport? Of course not; you pray at the temple a hundred times for some spirit (you didn’t know existed) to appear and give you a passport.

I’m convinced that this trick was conceived to get kids, like me, to call the SEGA tips and cheats hotline (0,50 per call).

Sufficient to say this kind of reasoning never really went away, but it is still silly.

Sierra-logic

Best example: King’s Quest V.

The game gives you certain items and you just have to used them by trial and error to see which one works. There are no clues given, you just simply click the pie instead of the sword on the yeti and lo-and-behold it works. Don't think, just experiment. It degrades the player to just lucky instead of an intelligent problem solver.

If you know what Ifnkovhgroghprm means you are as ancient as I am.

This technique or guessing was first implemented in Sierra’s King’s Quest V –hence the title- but it still continues to this day in Hidden object games.

You want to cut open a parcel tied by rope. Do you use: A) a knife? B) a saw? C) a pair of scissors? or D) you go all over the place looking for a letter opener? If you answered ‘D’ you know hidden object games.

Tried and tested old-school puzzles.

Best example: Fear for sale: tiny terrors and many other HOGs.

There are some puzzles that have been around since the Victorian age. Like peg-solitaire, sliding puzzles or The Tower of Hanoi. Hidden object games love to include these games in their repertoire. So if you play a lot of hidden object games you will find that you will be replaying peg-solitaire over and over again because the designers were too lazy to come up with something original.

Underwater levels.

Best example: Sonic the hedgehog.

Not only can you not move the way you want to (usually slower). You are also bound to a silly breath-meter that tells you when you are going to drown. I hate those levels. I can’t count the ways I almost had my little Sonic near the exit only to wait for an air-bubble that never came.

Viewfinder

Best example: any first-person shooter.

Those unlimited ammo guns that a locked at a single place (“press F to use”). I never use them but sometimes I have to. So you have this gun and you are firing at everyone and everything while you cannot move and every enemy is throwing everything at you.

Walking back and forth.

Best example: The castaways: the island, Wolfenstein (2009).

Walking back and forth all the bloody time between mission givers and mission. Bad games often place the mission giver and the actual goal a million miles apart. There is some deluded reasoning behind it that all that trekking actually makes for enjoyable game time – it doesn’t.

In Wolfenstein (2009) the game-designers tried something new. A city under Nazi siege would be your (RPG-like) homebase where you would receive missions to carry out.

However, the person giving the mission and the actual ‘door’ to the mission were often at the other side of town. So you spent a large chunk of the game running from one side of the city to the next like a glorified errand boy before you could actually play a mission.

X is the end (not).

Best example: My Hero and Jade Cocoon.

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Confucius says. But a journey is nothing without an end –I would like to add.

So, there’s nothing more frustrating than a game that doesn’t end. I’ll forgive the early games like My Hero (beating up the bad guy for the seventeenth time – the guy never learns). But it sticks. It went all the way to the PSX with Jade Cocoon.

Now with games like Fallout and Skyrim there will never truly be an end to any game (unless the quests run out). And with massive landscapes to walk upon and constant respawning enemies (I must have killed most of Pennsylvania by now) the game stays divers.

However, wandering the wasteland gets boring after a while. Everything needs to end sometimes (just not like New Vegas ended – freaking Romans? Really?)

Yes Dave, I can’t do that Dave.

Best example: Tetris.

Like 2001’s HAL couldn’t truly grasp the sense of human reasoning computers can’t grasp the notion that sometimes a random generated move might leave the player without a chance.

So whoever player Tetris will recognize the feeling of waiting for a ‘long piece’ that never comes (or too late). The computer merely randomizes, but the player (sometimes) suffers.

Zooid

Best example: The lion king and any early PC game.

The ‘I just can’t wait to be king’-level in the Lion King is a gamer nightmare. The rich animation of the game makes it very hard to pinpoint the ‘mask’ that would make little Simba hang on to the hippo’s tail. And that’s only the start. After that there’s an ostrich ride that is sheer impossible with a ‘double jump’ nightmare.

In short I’m talking about the mask around a game sprite. An invisible layer -where the code is at- which you are actually playing. The animation layer is just there so you can see your avatar.

The mask is usually a little bit bigger than the animation. If the mask is hit the animation layer plays the ‘ouch’ animation. But if the animation is too complex -consisting of multiple divers frames of different sizes- it becomes quite challenging to make an avatar move through a dangerous field without dying. Your eyes see a small frame but the mask is actually big – dodging bullets or (bird nests) are then quite impossible.

So there you have it! My (personal) list of twenty-six annoyances in videogames. Enjoy.