The Energon Pub

Has a game ever annoyed you? Or just made you plain pissed off? Like, if you're playing the game, you get stuck on an especially hard part, play it for a while, and then just say "Screw it, the game's not good enough for this to be that hard and keep my attention"? I've done that with some games where the difficulty level and my interest are not the same. In the Suffering: Ties That Bind, after fighting the same bad guys and doing the same thing for hours through the whole game, I got to the final boss battle and died a few times and thought, "I'm really bored of the monotony now."

For me, I'm not sure if it's annoying games per se, but things that annoy me about games in general. Like at a hard part of a game where you die and try again, die and try again, and they insist you see their death animation or their game over fade out or whatever every single time. Or cut scenes you can't skip. To me, no matter how short a death graphic is, you should be able to skip it to get on with the game. These ten-second graphics can feel like hours after you've played through that part a million times. Imagine in MGS2 where you have to hear Otacon yell SNAKE!!! every time you blow it. After ten times, you just want to get back in the game. Or is that just really impatient?

The only time I remember being annoyed by a game itself was Silent Hill 2. Right at the beginning, they make you run through a forest. I got it after a minute: there's fog and it's scary; now I'd like to get to the other end. Not that the game was especially bad; it just had that flaw right at the beginning. Plus the guy (James, I think?) seriously needs to hit the gym. After five steps, he's panting.

Given enough time, I could probably list around a hundred annoying/boring things in various games, but since I'd rather not sit here all night, some highlights off the top of my head:

One thing that's annoying in games is the sheer amount of time that you have to play in order to unlock something sometimes. Gundam SEED: Neverending Tommorrow comes to mind. In that game you had to level up ALL of your helper characters to the max(there was probably a more proper term, but it's been a long time since I played it) in order to unlock the final Mobile Suit, the Red Frame with some kind of fancy back pack. Well, I did it through a trick I read about online, just doing one mission over and over again with a certain suit. The mission only lasted about 30 seconds or so with this trick, but it still took seemingly forever. And it got boring real quick. Once I FINALLY unlocked the suit though, it turned out to be nothing special, and certainly not worth all the work I put into it. I'm a semi-completist though, so that explains why I went through all the effort.

Of course this applies to most every game with unlocks though, why do they make you jump through all these hoops just for something that really isn't that great? Plus sometimes the in game "prices" are just too dang high. That can get really annoying and old fast.

Oh, level grinding in RPG's, that's something a lot of games can do without.

How about unclear level objectives, unlisted objectives, and even unlisted time limits? Few months ago I picked up Sylpheed for the 360 cause it was only $12 used and I didn't have a space shooter. Well, I played a couple missions and put it down. Then last week I decide to boot it up again, beat a couple missions, and I'm stuck, because there's a needless time limit! You only get 10 minutes before the mission fails, and they don't even give a clear reason why. Oh sure, your commander does come on and say "In three minutes we will be unable to continue combat", but not WHY. There can be one or two enemies flying around, and when it gets to that ten minute mark, boom, mission failed. Does the command ship blow up, is your fighter down or out of gas, does suddenly a hundred reinforcements come in? Nope, none of that is shown or even really said, it just says "Mission Failed". Even if the latter was true( a hundred reinforcements come in), I say bring 'em on! Let me decide whether or not I can take 'em out, or at least let them shoot me down or blow up the command ship.

You know what's worse though? Some missions have "mutliple acts". Yeah when it starts up you refilled armor/shields/weapons, but you don't get to save. You know what's even worse than that? The second act also has an unexplained ten minute time limit. Oh, and you know what's even WORSE than that? If you die or the time expires, you do get to restart from the "act" you were just playing, but you lose all the kills you had from the previous act! And the games points/money is somewhat dependent on how many ships you destroy. I know there's a logic behind it, but come on, I earned those kills, I should get to keep them.

Oh, and Sylpheed 360 also has unexplained sub objectives. Meaning, they tell you what objectives and sub objectives you completed (like 2 of 4 for example), but they don't tell' you what they were for, or what ones you missed. Just lazy programing I think.

Oh,, I still think Sylpheed is a decent and fun game, and I will eventually beat it(if only for achievements),but those factors make it very annoying.

Also, since this is a Transformers board, how bout that 07 movie game( 360 )? How bout those instant forcefields the drones can generate? How bout the fact they can actually attack AND have those forcefields up at the same time? How about bosses that you have to throw something at in order to begin attacking them(melee of course). Oh, and how about in boss battles where you fight the boss for maybe ten seconds at most, take away a chunk of energy, only to have him run away or become invincible until you defeat a set amount of drones? For goodness sake, I spent more time fighting drones in boss battles than I did the actual boss. And the final fight against Prime? Oh my gosh, wave after wave after wave of drones, and probably barely even two minutes worth of real fight time with Prime.

Oh, and silent Energon cubes? Makes finding every one(which I haven't done yet) a very boring process. Metroid Prime, Crackdown, probably some others, these games all had sound effects that told you something was nearby.

TF 07 was a pretty decent game I thought, but it had some very stupid execution ideas. If they'd have worked them out it could have been better than just mediocre.

Well that's all for now!

Duke of Luns wrote:Oh, level grinding in RPG's, that's something a lot of games can do without.

You know, I'm probably one of the few people who likes grinding in RPGs.

I'm with Me, Grimlock on the subject of unskippable death animations and cutscenes, but then, the entire gaming community is on board with that.

Common enemies with deadly attack...that's THE single worst part of Metroid Fusion. Regular enemies could take out something like 20hp. But the health items they dropped only healed 10hp...assuming the health item itself didn't fly off to create another enemy.

I also hate games where you have a very short life bar. Tom Clancy games suffer from this the absolute worst. I know it makes it more realistic, but this is a video game; I don't want realism, I want a health pool normally limited to tanks.

There's also weapons that don't feel like they're doing anything. Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and you'll see what I mean; you shoot an enemy, but they don't even flinch, so it doesn't look like you hit them.

Resistance 2, I mean I liked it and I completed it but damn why are the controls so different and why did they decide to not only cut the amount of weapons you can carry down to 2 but also cutting the ammunition by almost half? And they made the time it takes to reload a weapon so long that it'S almost not worth using the Bullseye any more.

But the only games I seriously said "F**k you I'm no longer playing you you stupid piece of crap" was Sonic the Hedgehog for the PS3, so very very bad it's annoying that I really like the game and story in general but that game seriously needed at least another year development.

Oh and Spider-Man 3 for the PS3, fail.

I'm in the minority but I couldn't be bothered to finish playing Gears of War. Generally just didn't find it all that fun (when a sniper shot to the head does nothing more than remove an enemy's goggles, you've reached the piss-off point). I'm having the same problem with some fighting games. Even on easy, clearing SF4 with Chun-li just leaves me with self-induced head trauma due to enemies performing combos that 'easy' opponenets shouldn't even know exist.

I've found frustration to be less of a problem these days than it used to be, thanks to the invention of the save-state system where having to replay the entire game to reach the hard part is a thing of the past.

Magna-fricken-Carta

How can such a beautiful/innovative game be SO boring?

Haze that was a boring game. Also Mirrors Freaking Edge, That is the most annoying game I have played in a long time.

There is two I can think of at the moment:
The Force Unleashed. It's a great game, but there happens to be an unskippable cutscene once you reach the area where the two gravitron rings are in the Deathstar. I didn't mind it at first, but it soon gets old once you go for the higher difficulty levels and die a lot, plus it being a tad long. It would be so frustrating at times that I would quit playing for a couple of weeks, simply because I couldn't stand of the tedium of sitting through that long cutscene over, and over, and over.

Turok: Evolution. This game was a craptacular spectacle, and the Ptarasaur flying levels only added to its turdy greatness. It would have been at least tolerable without them, but when I am piloting a flying reptile that repeatedly wants to 'float' upward and splat redly against the level's sky 'ceiling,' my Job-like patience has its limits. Add to that these same levels' hairpin turns and need for Jedi reflexes, and you get a tantrum in the making.

I've found a few really popular games to be terribly boring. Like Halo, I actually fell asleep playing it and traded it in the next day. It was the bare minimum of a FPS, but it looked pretty and apparently that's all that matters.

I know everybody loves it, but I hated Bioshock. Everything about it was underwhelming, the story, weapons, and powers have all been done better in games that came before it. I played it for a few hours waiting for it to get good before I gave up on it.

Super Mario Galaxy didn't do anything that Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine didn't already do. It was like playing the same game with more awkward controls.

Dead Space felt like I was just running errands an ship with bad 80's horror movie effects running around.

One thing about most BioWare games, while I love their ability to pack in enough story and content for three games, I hate all the damn walking. At least in most RPGs you have random encounters, so it's not so tedious, but BioWare games don't have that. Mass Effect attempted to rectify this with Citadel Transit, but that was only for one area.

Myst = Yawn

Bioshock wasn't all that bad.....but all the damn things you need to do to get certain weapons upgrade stations....ughhh

Force Unleashed....totally agree with that cutscene but it just made me play MORE to get past that part

FEAR - that game was boring......nothing really FEARful about it

Tom Clancy - agree, I don't want freaking realistic, i want to kill, not be killed with one damn shot to the big toe!

The super mario brothers games for the NES! All 3 of em! They annoy the crap out of me, It would be better if you had continues, but no! Five strikes and your suckin up the crap off the ground.

Another game that gets on my nerves is Maximum carnage for the SNES! Its sooo hard but yet sooo addicting! It makes me mad, but I cant stop playing it! And you get to play as VENOM! My favorite comic book charactor ever, but he gets his @$$ kicked by old men little gangster boys, and some little girls. What do these kids want with spiderman and venom anyway!? The farthest Ive ever goten was, you get to be Venom and go into a night club, I called in cloak for help and he killed all of us at the same time! Now that is some crap!

Its mostly the old games that get to me, but there is a semi-recent game that I havent beaten and it annoys the crap out of me. Its my favorite video game series, but the first one, pisses me off, The first Sly Cooper game, I remember getting up every saturday morning playing Sly 3, good times good times, it brings back such memories, but the first one! I hate it! If you get hit once you die, you get a few continues, but thats it, you dont start the game over, but the levels are hard! HARD! Its the hardest of the Sly games for me, they get easier as they come out. Sly1: HARD Sly 2: Medium Sly 3: Easy! Thats BS and when the BS man says thats BS that is BS! (PS: Im not the real BS man)

OOH and the Force Unleashed! Dont get me wrong, its a good game, Its a good game! But the part where you have to bring that star destroyer down is monotinus as cerial! It took me hours to beat it! HOURS!

Well, thats my rant on annoying video games for me. Im done, finnished, bye, I need to go do somthing now...

SlyTF1 wrote:Another game that gets on my nerves is Maximum carnage for the SNES! Its sooo hard but yet sooo addicting! It makes me mad, but I cant stop playing it! And you get to play as VENOM! My favorite comic book charactor ever, but he gets his @$$ kicked by old men little gangster boys, and some little girls. What do these kids want with spiderman and venom anyway!?

In the comic book, Shriek had this effect on people that made them hostile. So little girls hate Venom all of a sudden. I found the game hard, but once you get the hang of it and play it through a few times, it's easier than sleep. I loved finding all the secret areas. For some reason, I found Venom harder to use thay Spidey. Shouldn't he have an easier time?

Me, Grimlock! wrote:

SlyTF1 wrote:Another game that gets on my nerves is Maximum carnage for the SNES! Its sooo hard but yet sooo addicting! It makes me mad, but I cant stop playing it! And you get to play as VENOM! My favorite comic book charactor ever, but he gets his @$$ kicked by old men little gangster boys, and some little girls. What do these kids want with spiderman and venom anyway!?

In the comic book, Shriek had this effect on people that made them hostile. So little girls hate Venom all of a sudden. I found the game hard, but once you get the hang of it and play it through a few times, it's easier than sleep. I loved finding all the secret areas. For some reason, I found Venom harder to use thay Spidey. Shouldn't he have an easier time?

AAh, I havent gotten all the Maximum Carnage comics yet, I only have a few, most are hard to find! But I try to play the game enough to get used to it, but the controlls are odd, not bad, but odd.

Bloodlust wrote:FEAR - that game was boring......nothing really FEARful about it

Really? That game made me scream like a little girl.

One of the problems I have with Final Fantasy--Don't get me wrong, I love Final Fantasy--is, in several games, random encounters happen WAY too frequently. Like, every few steps. It's even worse when it's only a few weak enemies that I wipe the floor with, it's just a waste of my time.

SlyTF1 wrote:The super mario brothers games for the NES! All 3 of em! They annoy the crap out of me, It would be better if you had continues, but no! Five strikes and your suckin up the crap off the ground.

Five strikes? That's assuming you don't collect extra lives. Of course, that doesn't account for the lack of a save system...

As for Sly Cooper, you know that's a stealth game, right? If you're being shot at, you've already messed up. The same with Splinter Cell. However, Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, which aren't stealth games, are not forgiven for this.

Shadowman wrote:

Bloodlust wrote:FEAR - that game was boring......nothing really FEARful about it

Really? That game made me scream like a little girl.

One of the problems I have with Final Fantasy--Don't get me wrong, I love Final Fantasy--is, in several games, random encounters happen WAY too frequently. Like, every few steps. It's even worse when it's only a few weak enemies that I wipe the floor with, it's just a waste of my time.

SlyTF1 wrote:The super mario brothers games for the NES! All 3 of em! They annoy the crap out of me, It would be better if you had continues, but no! Five strikes and your suckin up the crap off the ground.

Five strikes? That's assuming you don't collect extra lives. Of course, that doesn't account for the lack of a save system...

As for Sly Cooper, you know that's a stealth game, right? If you're being shot at, you've already messed up. The same with Splinter Cell. However, Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, which aren't stealth games, are not forgiven for this.

So there are extra lives in that game? Ive only seen power ups, but no extra lives.

And I know its a stealth game, they should have made it like the second and third ones, but that one was the first one, and they where still experimenting with it, so I dont blame them for it, and in the first one, you cant sneak up on people, they always turn around, even when you are quiet. And thee should be a health bar too

SlyTF1 wrote:So there are extra lives in that game? Ive only seen power ups, but no extra lives.

Of course there is. There's extra lives in all the Mario games. 100 coins or a 1-up mushroom nets you an extra life.

SlyTF1 wrote:And I know its a stealth game, they should have made it like the second and third ones, but that one was the first one, and they where still experimenting with it, so I dont blame them for it

They weren't experimenting with anything, they just made a stealth game. They couldn't have based it on two games that didn't exist yet.

Shadowman wrote:

SlyTF1 wrote:So there are extra lives in that game? Ive only seen power ups, but no extra lives.

Of course there is. There's extra lives in all the Mario games. 100 coins or a 1-up mushroom nets you an extra life.

SlyTF1 wrote:And I know its a stealth game, they should have made it like the second and third ones, but that one was the first one, and they where still experimenting with it, so I dont blame them for it

They weren't experimenting with anything, they just made a stealth game. They couldn't have based it on two games that didn't exist yet.[/quot

The old Mario games are totally win in my opinion. I think they actually even hold up surprisingly well today.

I will agree with an earlier poster regarding Super Mario Galaxy. I really do dislike the controls. It take a lot of the fun away for me.

Prime Riblet wrote:I will agree with an earlier poster regarding Super Mario Galaxy. I really do dislike the controls. It take a lot of the fun away for me.

While I loved Super Mario galaxy, yeah, some of the controls were a pain in the ass, mostly navigating around a planet. Typical levels that didn't have the weird gravity thing going on were no problem.

Super Mario Bros. 2, or as we in America knew it, Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels. It was so damned annoying. "Oh, you like jumping? How about jumps that you'll need to time perfectly without even seeing the screen you're landing on yet? Not into that you say? Well too bad, we've filled this game with those, and we hate you."

Halo 3: ODST.

I got through about 75% of the game. I tried to play a coop level with my friend when he came over and wanted to tyr it out, and it erased all my progress and wanted me to start over in Single Player Campaign afterwards. I quit playing after that.

Side note about RPG grinding... I love grinding. I even do my wife's grinding for her since she hates it.

I did forget about that annoying as all hell part of taking down that destroyer. That took my friend and almost two slagging weeks. That wasn't even the part of the game that got to me the most. I collected all of the Holocrons, but it quit recogning them after about 50something. I didn't get the achievement at the end of the gamne for it, and that was 75G taken from me, rightfully earned.

Another thing that has me quite vexed about it... Not so much the DLC. Though I do think it is lame paying $60 for a game, then paying more later (or sometimes when the game is released especially) for "extras". The thing that got me the most, they released a new version of the game, which came out only costing $40 to begin with, but included both extra levels i payed $10 a piece for, and ANOTHER LEVEL THAT IS NOT AVAILABLE IN DLC. Now there is a part of the game I cannot play. It gets to me at the core, I'm a bit of a completionist to a point. ( i even got 80% of the trophies in Star Ocean.) So I payed $80 for the game, and 2 DLC levels. Now you can get the game, and 3 DLC levels for only $40. AHHHHH!!!!

Transfaner wrote:Halo 3: ODST.

I got through about 75% of the game. I tried to play a coop level with my friend when he came over and wanted to tyr it out, and it erased all my progress and wanted me to start over in Single Player Campaign afterwards. I quit playing after that.

So it's not so much that the game annoys you, but more that losing your save data annoys you.

Transfaner wrote:I did forget about that annoying as all hell part of taking down that destroyer. That took my friend and almost two slagging weeks.

Do you mean the one in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed? Because that only took me an hour.

The fact the you can erase your solo game progress by playing campaign with a friend without knowing, yes, that makes an entire game annoying. I didn't want to redo the whole game, so I quit playing all together. It wasn't a great stand alone game to begin with. I would have never even thought about it if it weren't Haloverse. Halo was really the only shooter game I liked aside from GOW. I'm more into RPG. The "stamina instead of recharge shield" was annoying, as well as reverting back to Halo one with only being able to have 1 handgun. Why can't an "elite" soldier hold two handguns? The whole nightvision for most of the game stared to give me a headache to boot.

Yes, the was the star wars game. Two weeks was a bit of an overstatement, just felt like 2 weeks. It did take probably a total of 6 hrs of trying, but we only tried for about an hour at a time before doing something else, and it was over the course of a few days.

Transfaner wrote:Why can't an "elite" soldier hold two handguns?

Because the SPARTAN-II process, as well as the MJOLNIR armor, allows Master Chief to hold a gun with one hand without shattering his wrist or losing control of automatic weapons.