Criticize your favourite games.

[random_bars]

Maybe it's just me, but I find that the more I like a game, the more I like to criticize its few flaws. So here's a thread for just that purpose!

I'm just going to go through Double Fine's games, since "my favourite games" and "games made by Double Fine" are basically interchangable.

Psychonauts

- too reliant on cutscenes. I mean a few short ones are okay, but christ, the intro takes about 10 MINUTES to get to the actual game... And the fact that there's a 8 minute long cutscene near to the end. I mean seriously. Is this a game or a movie? It's an entertaining cutscene, sure, but still.

- how it's so happy to let you skip its dialogue. A single accidental button press can skip a cutscene that you'll never see again unless you restart the whole game. Some dialogue is actually unhearable unless you use cheats. The game has such good writing, it seems ridiculous that it makes such an effort to have you not hear any of it...

- the god damn cobweb duster. Okay, an item you can get to clear blockages in levels. Fair enough. Some later levels require it to get through. Okay, still fine... But making it cost 800 arrowheads and be necessary right as the game starts to get really interesting, so you have to quit one of the best levels to go hunting for arrowheads because there's no prior warning that you'll need it until right before the level? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Brutal Legend

- the pretty terrible tutorial systems. I mean, this game has some of the most well-designed gameplay I've ever seen, with the stage battles bringing together all the different elements - combat, vehicles, solos, double teams - and putting them in an RTS style context, and it all just fits together so beautifully. Which is why it's such a shame that the game makes little-to-no effort to explain this, and consequently left so many players confused as to how to play the battles... And some stuff, like the fact that you can use your stage's spotlights, speaker blasts and fog machine, isn't explained at all. Why?

- too much stuff on the Y button. A lot of complaints like lack of a minimap, or way of checking what units you have, I can deal with, because there's alternative solutions built into the game. But why is so much stuff done on the Y button? If I'm carrying the flag, it's a huge challenge to put it down amongst my troops without ending up in some double team or other. And god damnit, trying to find a specific hierachy unit when I'm playing as Tainted Coil amongst the general clusterfuck of all my units is so frustrating.

- random little annoyances. Why don't the Hearse or War Chariot make nice blood splatters and thumps when you run stuff over with them? Why do Battle Nuns and Frightwigs randomly decide to run off from your other troops? Why can't I fly into the engine room bit in Altar of Blood without dying?

Costume Quest

- I can smash a wall with a candy pail. Am I the only one who thinks there's something very wrong with this?

- The update has given me, and me alone in the world, an annoying sound glitch in which the first few seconds of the battle music don't play. Does it affect gameplay? No. Does it annoy me enough that I un-updated my game? Oh yes.

- Grubbins on Ice. I'm sorry, it was fun, but... Ehh. I just don't think it really fit. All the gameplay elements that fitted percetly into the main game just felt weird and forced. Why am I still collecting candy? Why am I trick-or-treating by another name? Why am I bobbing for eyeballs? Why do we still have costumes? Why does everything feel a bit out of place?

_________
And despite all this, I still love these games and Double Fine are my favourite developers ever.

Okay, your turn!

 

[Radeonx]

Halo 3-
The game was far too easy, even on legendary. Personally I breezed through the single player.
The multiplayer community is pretty shit.

Starcraft II-
The game's plot is pretty mediocre, and the full game is being split into 3 games.
I understand that they are bigger stories for each race, but still.

 

[IBlackKiteI]

Metro 2033
It occasionally has dodgy voice acting.

Call of Duty 1
The only remaining players are hardcore fanatics.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
...

Dragon Age Origins
The combat sucks.

That is all.

 

[Busdriver580]

System Shock 2
Too many builds end up being essentially un-winnable
Trial and error is the only way to find what abilities are worth anything
Co-op removes all tension and horror

STALKER
automatically assumes you're familiar with its mechanics, providing no intro to mechanics outside the original, even though all 3 are stand alone games

 

[ilikejelly]

I don't wish to be a spoilsport, but I'm pretty sure there was a thread on this exact same topic not too long ago.


Feel free to carry on though, I'm not stopping anyone

 

[Vendayn]

Haven and Hearth

Lag is horrible
Servers crash often

Rome Total War

Crashes randomly, usually at the worst of times

 

[EzraPound]

GoldenEye 007

- I was an only child, and the multi-player would've been more enjoyable had it included bots, like Duke Nukem 64, Turok: Rage Wars, and Perfect Dark did

Resident Evil 4

- While brilliant from a gameplay standpoint, and the story's enjoyable in a hokey kind of way, the art design in this is often clichéd survival-horror shtick, and conceptually it could've been far more interesting (think Bayonetta)

Super Mario 64

- The missions in which you had to collect 100 coins were, generally, fairly tedious, so it was nice to see that they were excised from Super Mario Galaxy

King's Bounty

- Any discerning designer should've realized a fifty-two character password is way too long, and the balancing error of the Ghosts--who increase in number when they defeat your armies, and can thusly become virtually undefeatable--was egregious

SimCity

- While the city-building is fun, the economics of this game are dubious--for the most part, there's very few ways to make money other than simply waiting, and stinginess of the tax you can collect (residents start to leave when it exceeds 12%) suggests the neoliberal nineteen-eighties climate in which it was made

Conker's Bad Fur Day

- The difficulty curve of the single-player was inconsistent, as well as--at six hours--too short (though don't get me wrong, it's otherwise brilliant). Also, while several of the multi-player modes--Heist, War--are riotous, some of the others (Race) are exceedingly trite.

Shenmue II

- It would've been nice, generally, if the game included more optionality, and less looping dialogue--failing a few QTEs, for example, more often that not brings you to a screen in which you're offered the choice to merely restart

Pokémon Gold/Silver

- While the Johto region--in which you play the majority of the game--was great, I always felt that the Kanto region seemed woefully rushed, with a slew of landmarks from Red/Blue simply inaccessible and many of the major portions of what comprised the first's gameplay siphoned off

Red Faction

-- Not necessarily wholly the designer's fault, but the limitations prescribed by the geo-mod technology used meant that many of the multi-player levels were--while fun--absurdly small; a problem that Red Faction 2 fixed whilst expunging much of what was good about the first

Civilization: Revolution

-- While I never played the earlier Civilization games heavily (now Pirates!, on the other hand. . .), the critical line that this is simply Simp Civ can be felt instinctively: much of the micromanagement just feels abridged (not being able to set your tax rate, for example, is somewhat inconsistent with choosing your type of government), and after 2-3 playthroughs the average player will have discerned most of what there is to know about the game's fundamentals

BioShock

- While the art design is exceptional, deduce a few of the game's features--atom, and the simple hacking portions--and what you're left with is a fairly standard FPS with a few bells and whistles (also, the elusiveness of Little Sisters--you can kill Big Daddies and they're nowhere to be found, then you have to wait for them to respawn whilst being mindful of not finishing the level--is annoying)

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

--Crashes, bugs, the ability to kill NPCs necessary to advance the plot--you know the checklist

No More Heroes

-- The world map is spartan and unoriginal, and while the boss fights are sublime, the game's graphics are often shoddy, and the gameplay tends to suffer from a lack of depth (also, I chose the gimmick ending at the game's conclusion, and would've ultimately had to replay the whole game in order to see the 'real' one, as I saved afterward not knowing it would preclude me from redoing said part)

Super Mario World

- It's just too damn easy

 

[Ordinaryundone]

Red Dead Redemption:
-Riding places can get old after a while, and the game is testy about where it lets you fast-travel from.
-Finding all the animals can be a pain, especially since there is no checklist or anything.
-Its very easy. A combination of aim assist, high and regenerating health (with items to boot!) and dead-eye makes every fight a breeze.
-Touchy controls, just like GTAIV.

Left 4 Dead 2:
-Poor gun balance. The AK blows just about every gun out of the water in nearly every situation. There is really no reason to use any of the others unless you want a change of pace.
-Rage quitting abound in versus.
-Dead Center has a crappy second half.

Knights of the Old Republic:
-Guns are basically useless for a PC. So is armor. This is really more because the force powers and lightsabers are so powerful, but it really limits your options if you wanna min/max.
-Going from that, with the exception of T3 most of the non-Jedi party members are pointless. And T3 is terrible at combat, so unless its a tech heavy area he really pulls a team down.
-Its a bit on the easy side. It starts off alright, but somewhere around the second or third planet you complete the difficulty just disappears.
-Alien voice acting. Characters that speak Basic have a pretty wide range of voice acting, and most of its pretty good. However, any character speaking an alien language just loops a voice track over and over. Its ok at first, but after a while it gets annoying.

Skies of Arcadia:
-Ba gawd, the encounter rate! For a game very heavily focused on exploration, actually exploring is a total chore thanks to the super high random battle rate. About halfway through you get the ability to avoid random battles while in the overworld, but it takes a long time to get there.
-Magic, and basically any tactic, pales in comparison to spamming special moves. This wouldn't normally be a problem, but the encounters are numerous, and often dangerous enough that doing it is the only reliable way to get through fights efficiently.

 

[Zantos]

Fallout 3

- I don't care what they say about "Gears Clones" etc., noone with any bloody sense would spend a firefight NOT taking cover behind the nearest convenient object. Or does growing up in a vault make you a bit of a moron?

- Enemies should be a little level scaled, so it's at least worth the caps you payed for the ammo used in shooting the useless little prats.


Fable 2

- Did you fire your entire story writing team after the first game and replace them all with the sort of people who wouldn't take cover in a firefight? Seriously, we had an ancient war between the first hero and creatures of the void! Someone who's a little bit obsessed with a tower and genocide is a bit of a step down. Seriously Peter.

- Scythe was awesome. You put Theresa in, and she was a bit rubbish. Would it have really been so difficult to give him a cameo?


Portal

- I hate you, stop appearing in my dreams. You're barely welcome in my concious mind as it is.

 

[TriggerHappyAngel]

Damn you Timesplitters: Future Perfect, for no longer having online services

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

Rome: Total War.

I loved it, but I won't deny that a campaign could get extremely repetitive after a while. And the AI always were a little predictable.

X-Wing Alliance

A wonderful sequel in a long series of great Star Wars games, but they totally botched the multiplayer. Which is cruel considering how much I loved the previous games' multiplayer design, but the netcode made it all but unplayable.

Mass Effect 2.

Bioware, you outdid yourselves and continued to surprise me with your character and story design... but WHY must the conversation system be so trivial!? When I'm trying to decide on a response, I would prefer to have the full context of what I'm saying, since the little snippet of a phrase sometimes gives me the completely wrong impression of what I'm telling Shepard to say. Argggh!

Dungeons and Dragons Online.

I love the game design wholeheartedly. Focusing on dungeons, exploration, and a more active combat system makes it unique among mmo's. But then why do you insist on a free 2 play model that really just forces you to grind to death or pay the premium anyway. If the game had developed a better business model (say, having one person chip in 10 bucks for the whole party to be able to play in an entire area) I think my friends and I would've continued playing.

Mechwarrior 4.

I love the Mechwarrior series to death, but chassis and heavy weapons design created a huge vacuum of heavy weapons power builds that brought combat down to "who can shoot the biggest gun first wins".

 

[LaughingAtlas]

Dead Rising 2- It's probably all been said, but, difficulty curve, silly story, incongruous main character, (Frank too, I'd say) broken boss combat, and of course a lack of a "just play without the story or timer" mode.

Saint's Row 2- Bullshit-laden activities, (on higher levels, anyway) my own gang causes me greater hatred than I feel for the pimps, whores, politicians, smoothtalkers, and enemy gangs put together, the ridiculous "gangster" theme is pretty weaksauce, it's kind of buggy, and there's a subplot or two that never goes anywhere. (what the hell happened with the cop guy? He betrayed us but now I can call him up as a buddy?)

Fallout 3- Same complaint I have with every RPG that features lockpicking, why the fuck can't I just smash things? In the point lookout DLC, savages break doors before your eyes, but you can't leave a dent with mini nukes! I don't care if it makes lockpicking useless, would you take the bus if you had a fucking jetpack?

Oblivion: Psychic goddamn gua-! ...oh, hell, skyrim's coming out soon enough, time to let it go.

 

[Midnight Crossroads]

-Call of Duty: United Offensive has terrible servers which play the same maps over and over again with mods to make the game like MW2, i.e., full of fail. Oh, and almost no servers allow you to use anything but bolt action rifles. Goddammit. The positions of the 88s on line make it easy to aim your gun at a 45 degree angle and hit someone in their base as they spawn. If you compare the map size to something in MW2, you'll find that the distance is quite greater. Those people are bastards. So are the people camping tanks in the corner of a map with open field in front of them and the map's boundary behind them.

-Final Fantasy 9 is impossible to get into. It's an amazing game, but one where you must work for your story. It's easy to get lost and have the significance of events lost on you when you forgot several hours ago what you were doing or if you couldn't recall one line of dialog on disc one during some dramatic scene in disc 3. Also, would it have killed square to put in a few side quests to at least explore Freya or Steiner or Beatrix in more detail?

-Okami holds your hand like you're a drooling moron. I've played the game many times, now shut up and let me do the puzzle. I don't need some blabbering bug screeching in my ear to draw a circle on the stone slab with rays from the sky falling on to a plant. I get it.

-Persona 4 is ridiculous when it comes to fighting new enemies. And new enemies are common. Every new encounter becomes a game of chance and if you lose, you heal your enemy. You have to go through every element to find out what they're weak against, and that costs mana which is hard to come by.

 

[Nimcha]

After playing a few hours of KOTOR I realized the characters have only four or five animations they keep cycling through and it breaks the immersion a little in scenes where there's supposed to be some interaction involved besides talking. :<

 

[revolutionaification]

Mass Effect
-You're so god-damn buggy. I had to reinstall you twelve times just to get you to run past Eden Prime (not to mention the additional reinstalls later just so I could finish you). Admittedly, the struggle to get you working ended in me replacing important computer parts right before they would've gone kablooey and wiped my rig so thanks I guess. But that doesn't get you off the hook!

-Your main storyline felt surprisingly short. On my first playthrough I thought I must have glitched it or something but no, there just wasn't that much there. I mean, I know you made up for it with all the side-quests and I suppose it's good that I actually felt a sense of urgency about the main quest but focusing purely on the plotline, I was kind of disappointed.

-Those awkward conversational animations. I mean c'mon, is there a single person in the galaxy who doesn't feel the need to punch their own palm when making points? Not to mention, Sha'ira's awkward hug creeped me the hell out the first time.


Mass Effect 2
-Chest. High. Walls. Honestly, predicting ambushes was as easy as checking whether the surrounding scenery was past my waist. I was hoping there'd at least be something to catch me off guard once in a while.

-Lack of specialisation. Now, while this is generally a good thing in my opinion (being able to fully customise to suit your tastes combat-wise) I couldn't help but feel like classes had suddenly been made redundant by the ability to unlock abilities or weapons you shouldn't even have had.

-The occasional awkward pause in dialogue. That metaphor went somewhere horrible did it? I hadn't noticed, I zoned out about an hour ago.

-CALIBRATIONS

(Edit)-More context for the dialogue wheel please. I was a real dick to Mordin when really, I was just trying to point out that maybe the Genophage wasn't all that great.

-And would it of killed you to have more Paragon interrupts? The only ones I really remembered involved destroying someone's personal property, punching your colleague's son in the face and mocking your alien love interest for being a little nervous about what is presumably a pretty damn big cultural gap. I don't have to be an asshole to take action.


Okami
-You seem to be in two minds about this brush control here(Playing on the Wii); One minute my lines are barely recognisable yet I'm still executing powers just fine, and the next you're making me give up in frustration over my inability to write the Heaven kanji or bloom a tree as opposed to cutting the forest down.

-Also, your freakin' Demon Gates. Those things weren't fun, they weren't practice. They were go-damn torture for the sake of those beads! Just the length of each round was enough to make me seriously consider chewing my own arms off.


P.N.03
-You're so repetitive, especially during the bonus missions, that I can actually use you to lull myself into a sort of trance where all I register is the little 'be-beep' of a room cleared without taking damage.

-What kind of merc (or whatever the hell she is) can only use their legs or arms at once and never the twain shall meet? Seriously. Come back once you've developed some more co-ordination, kay?


Black and White Series
-Shut up. I'll make my own choices. You're fraggy and have irritating voices and I hate you, both.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

Mass Effect 2: Say what's actually on the damn wheel for once. There is nothing wrong with saying "Goodbye" She actually says what's on the wheel once in Kasumi's mission, its one of the down options. I was like this: 0_0


If ammo clips are universal, how can I run out of sniper ammo but not shotgun?

WH40k Dark Crusade: All your units need to STFU! Cultists' lines are like 7 seconds long, good lord everyone just be quiet

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
sigh... so many little things. Rings disappear if you aren't extra special careful. Almost perfect dialog. Spazing out if you walk on a physics object. The RAM bug. Most of the characters clothes were boring except the malks and tremere female.

- the god damn cobweb duster. Okay, an item you can get to clear blockages in levels. Fair enough. Some later levels require it to get through. Okay, still fine... But making it cost 800 arrowheads and be necessary right as the game starts to get really interesting, so you have to quit one of the best levels to go hunting for arrowheads because there's no prior warning that you'll need it until right before the level? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Damn straight, I was hoping I remembered that wrong or missed something, but apparently not. That was total BS

 

[random_bars]

anc[is]

- the god damn cobweb duster. Okay, an item you can get to clear blockages in levels. Fair enough. Some later levels require it to get through. Okay, still fine... But making it cost 800 arrowheads and be necessary right as the game starts to get really interesting, so you have to quit one of the best levels to go hunting for arrowheads because there's no prior warning that you'll need it until right before the level? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Damn straight, I was hoping I remembered that wrong or missed something, but apparently not. That was total BS

Well there was the dowsing rod, you did use that, right? But even so, having to dig up that many arrowheads was annoying and completely unnecessary.

 

[bassdrum]

Mass Effect 2

-Every single standoff can be defused by passing a single Paragon or Renegade check, and it's rare that you'll run into a situation where you can't talk someone down from the brink of murdering you to being all chummy.

-The combat, while competent, can sometimes feel like a bit of a samey third person shooter with conveniently placed walls to hide behind.

-I should go. I should go. I should go. I should go. I should go.

Red Dead Redemption

-The introductory segment of this game goes on for quite a while before the real action starts. Once you get past the first 30 minutes or so, it's fantastic, but you'll need to wait a little while to get there.

-Weapon selection can be difficult to do quickly (since weapons are layered on top of each other, I'll need to open the weapon wheel, choose the right class of weapon, and scroll over to the one I want... all while getting shot at). It's no fun to get stuck frantically trying to put away your lasso in the midst of a pitched firefight.

BioShock

-Vita-Chambers make the game improbably easy. Seriously, once you realize that you can respawn instantly with no side effects, all of the tension of combat gets thrown aside. I took down a Big Daddy with a wrench because death really didn't matter anymore.

-Hacking was... well... a bit silly. The mini-game made very little sense in the context of hacking, and was generally irrelevant (you could buy your way out of most hacks, particularly since you're tripping over money and my wallet was maxed out for most of the game, and auto-hack the rest).

-Like I mentioned above, resources are way too readily available. Isn't one of the main tenets of horror games (which BioShock clearly borders on) resource management? If so, then why do I so frequently find myself maxed out on Eve, first-aid kits, money, and ammo? Granted, I played with a melee focus, but still--I shouldn't have to walk over resources in a game like this.

Half-Life 2

-While the world is wonderful, the actual plot of the game itself is a bit basic (generally amounting to 'Go here. Alright, now go there. Now go to this third place.' I know that most games do similar things, but in Half-Life 2 in particular, it struck me as odd (particularly when the rest of the game world is so richly detailed [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_236/6999-Gordon-Freeman-Private-Eye].

-Fast zombies. I was not at all prepared for those buggers. I suppose that that's technically praise, but you still owe me a replacement pair of pants.

MineCraft

-Several resources can be unnecessarily difficult to find. Seriously, why is it next to impossible to find Lapis Lazuli, which (as far as I know), only makes blue dye?

-Please, PLEASE, for the sake of my sanity, stop being so damn addicting. It's beginning to ruin me.

 

[Lost In The Void]

Mass Effect 1

Fix your damned combat I want the combat to work with being an RPG not suck because its an RPG

Mass Effect 2

Alright combats better but you've trimmed my RPG stats, made checks for Paragon and Renegade too easy and too many chest high walls

DA: O

Fix your combat please

The Witcher

Don't make me feel like a 13 year old looking at porn

 

[Magic Muffin Man]

Zelda: Majora's Mask:
-The Three Day Mechanic, while interesting, gets to be a bit grating after awhile
-The Anju+Kafei sidequest. The story behind it is good, but no-where near as interesting as the main plotline. The fact that it's about as long as the main game and is required to get through about half of the other sidequests (needed for the best items) doesn't help
-The only real supplementary material on Termina's backstory are the two bed time stories at the inn. I want to know more about the world: is it a parallel world to Hyrule? Another world? A pocket universe where only the small Termina isle exists? I wanna know more!
-The story is great, but the dialogue needs polish. I had a fever dream where The Coen Brothers circa No Country For Old Men wrote the dialogue to a new translation of the game. When I woke up I had to change my pants.
-The Gilded Sword looks like ass. I want the Razor sword, damn it!
-They have the gall, the GALL, to have not remade this.

No More Heroes:
-The side jobs are boring as fuck
-The combat is repetitive
-There is absolutely no set up. I didn't even know Travis got his lightsaber on Ebay until I read the wikipedia.

GTA IV:
-The Cars Handle like ass
-Ballad of Gay Tony should have taken place in Vice City

Silent Hill 2:
-Needs better combat
-The puzzles range from "I feel like a genius!" to "I need a genius to help me figure out what the fuck is going on here"