Take this information and use it to improve your games

I've been told before that I'm "mean" to video games and I tend to agree with that. Well, not so much that I'm mean, but I am hard on them. I expect a lot because games like Bioshock, Demon's Souls and Uncharted have really raised the bar this gen.

 

As much as I expect though, there are a lot of things that I'm willing to let slide. Like companies releasing DLC (sometimes as much as $100 worth) when games already cost $60 to begin with. Or the slowdown that tends to plague games such as Dark Souls and Silent Hill Downpour. It's frustrating at first, but after a half hour I'm so used to it that it doesn't even phase me anymore...Which really isn't a good thing, you shouldn't have to get used to slowdown, the developers should fix that issue before releasing their game. But it still doesn't bother me.

 

Some issues, however, are unforgivable. Here are my top five most hated things about video games.

 

5. Button prompts

 

There's no skill involved here, unless you count response time as a skill. There are games that sometimes substitute button mashing for combat (Resident Evil 4's first fight against Krauser was entirely dependant on pressing the right buttons), or require you to press a button in order to prevent yourself from falling off a cliff and if you aren't fast enough, you plummet to your death. It's pointless. I would rather have a boss I can actually fight than one where I'm required to hit a combination of square and x to defeat it. And as for hitting R2 to prevent myself from falling, there are better ways to implement climbing in a game. Have you played the Uncharted series? Take a note from Naughty Dog. Button prompts are not entertaining, it's more fun to be able to work these things out yourself.

 

4. Poor control schemes

 

I have an entire post dedicated to this on here already. Games rarely have perfect controls mapped out for you. And they change game to game, which is confusing if you switch back and forth between multiple titles. Even switching between Dead Space and Dead Space 2 takes some time because the controls were changed. This issue could be solved if we were given the option to fully customize controls for console games. Video games have been around for decades, I cannot understand why the ability for us to customize controls still doesn't exist.

 

3. Autosave

 

If you're like me, you probably like to make multiple saves while playing a game, just in case something goes wrong. Maybe you used too many health drinks during an earlier section of the game and now you have to fight a really tough enemy, but you have nothing left to heal yourself with. Or you've run out of ammo. Just reload the game from an earlier save and conserve your items better, right? Autosave takes that option away and in some cases, it saves at the most inopportune times. At the very least, we should be able to manually save our games as well, don't make autosave the only thing we have to fall back on.

 

2. Multiplayer trophies

 

Of course you don't play games just to get trophies, but in some cases, trophies can add an extra challenge to a game and give it replayability that it might not have had otherwise. It's satisfying to complete the most difficult tasks a game can throw at you and earn a platinum trophy for it. Then games like Bioshock 2 come along and require you to complete several multiplayer trophies in order to earn a platinum, and some of them are level-up trophies which isn't fun, it's just tedious.

 

Aside from the fact that leveling up just isn't enjoyable, there are some people who I am sure do not have a decent enough internet connection to play online. Requiring them to achieve these trophies is unfair. If you want to add them on as optional trophies, that's fine. But they should not count towards the platinum trophy.

 

1. Unskippable cutscenes

 

Have you ever played a game multiple times and been forced to watch the same cutscenes repeatedly? Even if it's a game you love (like Silent Hill Downpour), this becomes annoying. And it's especially frustrating when the opening cutscene is ten minutes long, such as the one in Dead Space 2. I had to watch that cutscene three or four times on my Hardcore playthrough and it almost made me want to give up. Developers, regardless of how great your game is, trust me, people do not want to be forced to watch your cutscenes after their first playthrough. The sooner you figure this out, the happier we'll all be.