Top 10 video game pet peeves

You know, you're playing a game, and you're having a good time, and then you're hit in the face with something that makes it not fun. At all. It could be an annoying detail, an oversight, or just a plain bad idea. Whatever it is, it leaves you thinking "Videogames are supposed to be fun. This isn't fun. There's no possible way anybody else finds this fun. What were they thinking?" Sometimes these things crop up again and again and become pet peeves.

#10: Birds (and everything else that flies)

This is at number 10 because it's not longer all that applicable, but it was my first ever videogame pet peeve so it has a special place in my heart. It all started with Ninja Gaiden for the NES, back when platformers were the dominant type of game. There was this one spot where you had to jump off a ledge, catch the bottom of a cliff face, and jump from there to this really inaccessible platform. This is pretty hard all by itself, but Tecmo decided it would be even more fun if there was a bird gunning for you while you did it. I'd just about make the jump and the bird would come and knock me in the pit. I tried everything, but it always ended in the same result. It must have taken me two hours to get past this one tiny little obstacle in the game. I went from rage to exasperation to resignment back to rage again and completed the cycle a few more times.

NES controllers are indestructible. Experimentally verified

Ninja Gaiden was the first game to piss me off with birds, but sure as heck wasn't the last. It was a problem with a lot of platformers. Usually you had limited control in the air, and limited angles you could attack with, and you had no choice but to make this one stupid jump and a bird or a bat or medusa head or whatever would swoop in and knock you in the abyss, often with no warning whatsoever. Like I said, it doesn't matter so much anymore because platformers are all but dead, but to this day anything that flies becomes the target of unreasonable fury and I'll happily ruin my game just to kill the hell out of it.

#9: Using the game engine against you

Games aren't supposed to be 100% realistic. I get that. Even games that try to be as realistic as possible and present you with an immersive experience can't get it right. It's a computer generated facsimile of reality, not reality itself. Every engine has its limitations and that's fine. What is not fine is when developers make working around the limitations part of the game itself. It happens here and there, but the first time I really noticed it was in Doom 2. You couldn't jump in Doom 2, but you could walk up small steps. There was this platform that was 1 millimeter too high to step up, and on that platform staring you right in the face and taunting you was a key. A key to a nearby door that you needed to get through to pass the level. "Haha, want this key do you? Well you can't have it because you can't jump and this platform is a pixel too high. Screw you" I'm supposed to be a space marine. You're telling me there's no way I can get this key that's right in front of my face? It's like the developer is reaching through the fourth wall and giving you a slap in the nuts. Thanks John Romero. Prick.

#8: Ice levels

What's more fun than videogames? Videogames you can't control. I can understand why programmers like making ice levels. They get to make shiny backdrops full of shimmering ice crystals. It puts a little diversity in the game, and it's an easy way to increase the difficulty of the game. Unfortunately it's an artificial and exremely annoying way of increasing difficulty. You get used to the controls for an entire game and all of a sudden that rug is swept out from underneath you. Thousands upon thousands of games have had ice levels, and every single one of them irritates me, but none pissed me off like Wipeout. Just getting to the last track in the Venom class is a chore, and once you get there? Ice level. I'd love to have been at that brainstorming session. "You know what would make this racing game even more fun? Taking away your steering!" The best part of it was the cars in Wipeout flew through the air. Explain to me how the track could possibly be slippery. Please. Other racing games with tracks slippery from rain are committing the same sin. Makes me crazy.

#7: Baaaaaad interfaces

This can take many forms, obviously, but it's frustrating every time. To make a game from scratch is a tremendous enterprise, but the interface is a comparatively small part of that. Moreover, it takes just as much effort to make a bad interface as a good one. So why make a bad one? Sometimes you play a game in a genre with well developed control scheme conventions (like an FPS) and it decides to do it differently for some reason, and it won't let you change it. Would it have killed you to add a controller configuration option in the menu? One of the worst offenders is Oblivion because it's a game of such grand scope but the menu makes no sense. It's counter intuitive, and even once you get used to it it's a pain. Half the space on the screen is wasted. The map screen for example has a giant border that serves no purpose around the map portion and there's no way to zoom out so there's no way to see the whole map at once. The only way to look at the world map is through this tiny window zoomed in real close so just looking around the map is a pain in the ass. And I know Bethesda could have done a better job because I've played Morrowind. Honestly, Mr. Programmer, if you're going to spend millions of dollars developing a game it's worth making an interface that lets you play it.

Exploring Cyrodiil 10% at a time

#6: Sewers

Any time you load up a game and get a first person or even a third person perspective, you're going in the sewers. It's almost a guarantee. Not that it's impossible to do a good sewer level, but most of them are boring. Tunnels that intesect each other at right angles. It's like a throwback to Wolfenstein 3D. Visually they're drab and featureless, game-play wise they're simplistic. And there are always crates down there too. Sewers filled with crates. Why? Makes no sense. I suppose developers like sewer levels because they're easy to do, but I would just as soon they gave me one less level.

#5: Bad camera

I can't imagine this particular item being absent from anybody's list of pet peeves. Sometimes the camera gets stuck behind a wall, sometimes it's at some awkward angle. The worst ever was playing some Gauntlet game on the N64 and having the camera literally whirling around in circles at one point. Whatever type of bad camera you're dealing with, it's extremely irritating when the game doesn't let you see the game you're trying to play. You'd think that in this day and age programmers would have this problem sorted, but that's not so. Recently I was playing GTAIV and I was in a firefight in a stairwell, and because of the unchangeable perspective I had to go around corners without being able to look where I was going. It's irritating when you're not allowed to see what Niko Bellic sees but you're ostensibly supposed to be Niko Bellic. And then you get shot in the face for it.

Imagine playing it in a centrifuge

#4: Unlocking things

Sometimes unlocking stuff is okay. Sometimes you get little bonuses just for playing the game, and that's nice. Sometimes you get little rewards for doing well, and that's okay too. Sometimes though big parts of the game are locked and they make you jump through ridiculous hoops to get it. Mortal Kombat Deception is the worst example I can think of. It's a fighting game and half the roster is locked at the beginning. Not that that's unusual for a fighting game, but in MK you unlock those characters by playing Kwest mode, which is this unbelievably terrible RPG. So in order to play MK I first have to spend 30 hours playing some garbage (and believe me, it really is garbage) RPG just to unlock the game I already paid real money for? Well, I suppose you could call me an idiot for buying an MK game, but that's another matter.

#3: Grinding

This pertains mostly to RPGs but sometimes in other games too. Grinding is any time spent doing some monotonous tedious task just to progress in the game. I'M ALREADY REALLY GOOD AT SELECTING "ATTACK" ON THE MENU, OKAY? I DON'T NEED MORE PRACTICE. Some RPGs are designed so you never have to grind, but others insist that you do a lot of it. If a game makes you grind, it's nothing more than a way to artificially inflate the length of the game at the expense of your boredom. Unforgivable!

#2: Randomness

Sometimes randomness is good. Done right, random elements in a game force you to get good without relying on patterns and can keep things fresh. Randomness done wrong makes me eject discs and crush them in my fist. When I spend 5 minutes doing a mission or a level or whatever and some random factor screws me I go ballistic. Possibly the worst offender of this is Midnight Club 2. The random traffic is part of what makes the game fun, but it also makes it brutally hard at times. There's nothing like being in first place at the end of a five minute race and having a bus come out of nowhere and block path and making me lose. Nice.

#1: Waiting

This in my opinion is the worst sin a game can commit. You play games to have fun and waiting is boring. So when a game makes you wait, it's defeating its own purpose. It's even worst when it's used a game-play mechanic. Oblivion is the worst offender in this category in recent memory. So many missions make you wait. Wait to drop the deer head on the dude. Slowly escort whats-his-name across 15 miles of countryside. Meet so and so at the tavern at 7 a.m. Sure there's a "wait" function, but you have to go through a couple loading screens to use it so you're waiting in real time anyway. Oblivion might not be the best example of waiting in a game, but I found I had to do a little of it quite a lot. Enough to make me not want to play it anymore.

Bonus pet peeve Silver Edition: Fetch missions

Go to point B. Person at point B tells you to go back and talk to person at point A. Person at point A tells you he/she needs something from person B. Person B gives you item. Person A tells you he/she now needs you to deliver item to person C etc etc etc. This should be a familiar scenario to everybody. Any time a game makes me do a bunch of pointless walking I pretty much quit playing it.

Bonus pet peeve Diamond Platinum Edition: Worst of both worlds

What's worse than waiting? Having to wait during a mission and having your success at the end determined randomly! Supply lines in San Andreas is the worst offender of this. Anybody who played it will know what I'm talking about. Not to mention the shoddy controls. Come to think of it, supply lines might be the worst mission of all time in any game ever.

Well, there you have it. I hope everybody enjoyed my little rant and can relate, and I invite you to post your own pet peeves in the comment section below.