Games that you felt were ruined by one game mechanic

[Canadamus Prime]

Fallout 2. Fallout 2, Fallout 2, Fallout 2.

Why the hell can't I hit anything in Fallout 2? If I start a game and immediately get into combat with scorpions that can kill me in a few hits, making me run around in endless dodgy circles for literally 10-20 minutes per enemy is not going to tell me this game is good. It's going to tell me that the developers really love giving me the shaft. Honestly, I'm going to say that accuracy in any game should never be below 50%. Making my attacks have tiny damage, okay, fine, I can at least measure about how long it's going to take to kill a big enemy with my tiny poky stick. But giving me a 10% chance at best of hitting anything just makes me want to demolish your game with a hammer.

Let me guess, you made the same mistake I did the first time I played that and sunk everything into your firearms skill only to find out you don't actually get a firearm until like 30 minutes into the game and even then it's this shitty pipe rifle that has to be reloaded after every shot. Am I right?
In Fallout 2 you want to sink some points into your melee skills and there's a guy in your village who'll sharpen your spear for you which'll cause it to do more damage.

 

[funguy2121]

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Having an ammo system for missiles, power bombs, and the only 2 guns you have for most of the game that can do any damage, plus the constant health drain while in the dark world, ruined much of the atmosphere and enjoyability of the game.

Prince of Persia (the newer one): Inability to die. Ubisoft's unwillingness to present a challenging game makes me die a little on the inside

 

[mireko]

Dragon Age- Level scaling
Oblivion (after 30+hours) level scaling
Final Fantasy- using summons for damage
RPGs with blob combat- blob combat
Tripple Play baseball- cant throw balls

Oh god, this.

Somebody at Bethesda must've been drinking when designing that game since the best way to make your character strong is to never use your class skills and never level up. If you actually do what your class is supposed to do, you end up with level 300 enemies chasing you through samey caves for half the game.

 

[Axelhander]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

And I'm going to cheat a bit and name 2 mechanics:
1. Unlockable characters; and
2. Tripping.

 

[Bling1907]

Dead Rising 2, the god damn damage system.

Seriously, a hit from a chainsaw won't kill a stupid chef. Is this even possible?

 

[Randomorific]

The Oblivion minigame for lockpicking. You wouldn't think an Orcish Barbarian with a Lockpick skill of 5/100 could pick the hardest lock in the game, but then you obviously haven't played Oblivion. Come to think of it the persuasion minigame was broken as well.

The QTEs in Mercs 2. Simply for being QTEs.

The stat grinding in San Andreas. That game was fun from start to finish, except when you were building up physical stats (lung capacity!) and weapon skills.

That last bit about GTA SA, you do know you could just shoot at a car's tyre constantly, even after it burst and the weapon skill went up ridiculously quick, I mean like 5 mins total for all guns.

OT: Red Dead Redemption and making me spam A to make my horse gallop, this has tenderised the A button soooooo much on my controller.
Also Reach with the stupid Armour Lock ,on smaller team based maps, it is sometimes game breaking for me, people just run around in twos or threes and take it in turns to armour lock and shoot at you. To me the whole armour ability thing made Reach a worse multiplayer than Halo 3, however I preferred the Reach campaign even if it was incredibly disjointed.

Finally for AC Brotherhood multiplayer: The gun, it just annoys me becuase i'll be just about to get assassinate someone when BAM got shot from about a mile away. Also smoke bomb stunning and people who chain stun you constantly in teams.

 

[afterburnzz]

The timed freeform challenges in Marc Ecko's Getting Up

Apparently, some of the devs are mental defectives. Chapter 3, Mission 1. One of the most frustrating, mind-boggling and difficult missions if you're going for the 100%. The van challenge is very frustrating, but the garage door - freeform was...You have what, 40 seconds to put down 10 tags on a 3x3 garage door. The tags mustn't overlap, otherwise they don't count. Placing down one tag takes about 3 seconds to finish. Add to that the dodgy control system and the fact that if you screw up, you're back to square one - o hai ragequit after the 59th attempt. As the game progressed, these challenges kept getting easier and easier. After I pass Chapter 3, the rest of the game is a breeze.

A couple of honurable mentions go to :

1)TES IV: Oblivion for the incredibly obnoxious persuasion and lockpick minigames
2)Fallout 3 (again Bethesda) for the hacking thing. Ah!
3)Bioshock for the water puzzle

 

[Red Albatross]

Mining in Mass Effect 2

I fully expect ME3's minigame to be Excel sheets.

snip


oh, just thought of another one: Blitzball in FFX. not because it was bad, but because it was actually far more fun than the actual game.

Hah, I agree with that last one. Recruit Shaami in Luca, assign her as center, and proceed to win more than Charlie Sheen.

OT: I know it's supposed to appeal to people who like tactical combat, but I hated the constant pausing in Dragon Age: Origins. If the AI party members weren't so codwanking stupid, it might not have been so bad.

 

[Qitz]

Cameras. Mainly perspective locked cameras. Usually because developers want to shove the camera into a corner while monsters are attacking you from the other side.

Invisible walls I can obviously jump over but the developers don't want me to go that way. Nothing wrong with having invisible walls in an area, but at the very least, have a HUGE object that I could no way get over.

Bloody Screens. Thanks for shoving some jelly on my screen, now go away and give me a freaking health bar.

Multiplayer / coop having the exact same story as single player campaign. If I just beat the game on single player I don't want to play the exact same game with a couple more people. Give me something new to do.

 

[Kaanyr Vhok]

The timed freeform challenges in Marc Ecko's Getting Up

Apparently, some of the devs are mental defectives. Chapter 3, Mission 1. One of the most frustrating, mind-boggling and difficult missions if you're going for the 100%. The van challenge is very frustrating, but the garage door - freeform was...You have what, 40 seconds to put down 10 tags on a 3x3 garage door. The tags mustn't overlap, otherwise they don't count. Placing down one tag takes about 3 seconds to finish. Add to that the dodgy control system and the fact that if you screw up, you're back to square one - o hai ragequit after the 59th attempt. As the game progressed, these challenges kept getting easier and easier. After I pass Chapter 3, the rest of the game is a breeze.

A couple of honurable mentions go to :

1)TES IV: Oblivion for the incredibly obnoxious persuasion and lockpick minigames
2)Fallout 3 (again Bethesda) for the hacking thing. Ah!
3)Bioshock for the water puzzle

What would you like to see in place of those mini games? I loved the water puzzle thought the lock picking was ok while I didnt like the hacking in FO 3 I would say it was the least of the game's problems.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones. Great game, incredibly satisfying gameplay and classes, a great sense of growing more powerful, tons of content etc.

But any character deaths are permanent. And the game saves AUTOMATICALLY when you switch the GBA off, meaning that you have to play a skirmish every time from the start if you don't want a specific character to die.

Simply put, the game is just a pain to play on anything but the easiest difficulty setting. Who the fuck thinks that in a game where you amass a small army it is fun to see your most prozed fighters fall and then replay the WHOLE GODDAMN FIGHT again?

Oh, and Mass Effect's inventory, even though I played it on PC. Just ew.

 

[zehydra]

MW2. The Fucking auto-aim. Or rather, the lack of an option to turn it off.

you can't turn it off? Isn't that like, rule #1 of good fps games ever?

 

[DanielBrown]

Well, not ruined, but any game with mini-games that you gotta complete to continue usually test my patience. Especially hacking mini games, like in Alpha Protocol. I really love that game, but I hate the mini games so much!

 

[Ulvai]

Fallout 2. Fallout 2, Fallout 2, Fallout 2.

Why the hell can't I hit anything in Fallout 2? If I start a game and immediately get into combat with scorpions that can kill me in a few hits, making me run around in endless dodgy circles for literally 10-20 minutes per enemy is not going to tell me this game is good. It's going to tell me that the developers really love giving me the shaft. Honestly, I'm going to say that accuracy in any game should never be below 50%. Making my attacks have tiny damage, okay, fine, I can at least measure about how long it's going to take to kill a big enemy with my tiny poky stick. But giving me a 10% chance at best of hitting anything just makes me want to demolish your game with a hammer.

Let me guess, you made the same mistake I did the first time I played that and sunk everything into your firearms skill only to find out you don't actually get a firearm until like 30 minutes into the game and even then it's this shitty pipe rifle that has to be reloaded after every shot. Am I right?
In Fallout 2 you want to sink some points into your melee skills and there's a guy in your village who'll sharpen your spear for you which'll cause it to do more damage.

Melee initial 55 (45 if "gifted" perk is taken) + 1% * (ST +AG)/2
unarmed 40 (30) + same as above. max rank in skill is 300% so you can divide that by 3 and get your actual hit expectancy (more or less). anything under 50 is barely usable. You probably just created character that sucks. Do your math, it's that kind of game. I'm used to this, played a lot of D&D and GURPS in my days.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

The time limit in the Dead Rising games.

I don't want to get a bad ending just because I spend all my time exterminating the zombie infestation.

THIS. And the stupid save mechanic. I tried so hard to like that game... alas, it was not to be.

Oh god, this.

Somebody at Bethesda must've been drinking when designing that game since the best way to make your character strong is to never use your class skills and never level up. If you actually do what your class is supposed to do, you end up with level 300 enemies chasing you through samey caves for half the game.

AGREED! Bloody Oblivion, I love the game so much but the leveling system just whips my ass every time. I've heard people defend it to the death though, saying it ballances the game... Umm no, because if I spent that much time in real life trying to improve a skill, I'd want to actually get better at it and not "Level up" along with everyone else and have gained nothing... geez.

Also the lockpicking was a pain and as for the persuasion mini-game... I never even used it. Just level up your damn illusion and get a charm spell. Or speechcraft, that's always a better option.

 

[icaritos]

Oh I have one.

Rune Factory Frontier. THE perfect Harvest moon game. I fell in love with it. And then...IT WAS RUINED BY THE STUPID RUNEY SYSTEM.

See, in harvest moon type games, you are trying to cram in as much as possible into each day, and RFF had tons to do (grow crops, meet townspeople, forge stuff, and clear dungeons). And then they throw in this stupid mechanic where you need to babysit the population of little magical sprites and keep their food chain going, or your farm will DIE. This was bad for several reasons.

1) We already had enough to do, this is one MORE task to do, and it's pretty much mandatory. And it's BORING.

2) It takes too long. You need to run to the clock tower to use the runey map (ONLY available there, or if you find the runey girl around town), take notes on what the populations in each area are, decide how many you need to remove/add from each place, then go and do it.

3) The tool you need to use sucks. It's this crappy little vacuum that only sucks up runeys near you, including ones you might not want to suck up (like, say you want to only remove gras runeys from an area. You'll probably pick up a few other ones instead). That and the animation is too slow and long, wasting even more time.


So that wastes a good chunk of time that I would rather spend on slaying monsters or wooing village girls! It ruined an otherwise perfect game for me.

This may seem low content, but i just feel the absolute need to agree with you here. Seriously fuck the runey system, whoever though of that should be shot into the sun.

 

[angrykirby]

ultimate spiderman on gamecube you fight carnage, there is a mechanic where you mash the shoulder buttons at the same time to open a door, its not possible on a standard gc controller, it broke the game

spiderman 3 on 360 with its broken missions left me stuck, throw the bomb! any time i pick it up or shoot a web at it it explodes and i lose what the hell, take pictures from this exact spot without getting spotted while the camera has an aneurysm

in tony hawk project 8 on the last mission or near the last mission there was this crazy complicated move and even though i swear i did it right 5000 times it never would register as that move so i never beat it

ssx3s hub world was so retarded I have to go to the shop on a downward hill to upgrade but if i miss it i cant go back up hill to get to it so i have to restart my guy at the top of the hill and not miss it for god sake what a load of pointless crap just let me add upgrade points at the end of the race like in tricky, oh and the lyrics fading out of the songs when your losing, made it extra annoying, well your doing badly so lets take away the tunes so your having as little fun as possible. and when you'd knockout a character and they'd spawn way in front of you. god fuck that game

skates stupid mission set up, i love skate but I spent way to much time trying to find the objective, or waiting for it to load so i could get to the next objective, considering you have to pretty much do it in order, when you finished one thing you should have been close to the next thing, or something

skate3 anytime i tried to grab in air my guy would jump off his board, I don't know if that changes later in the game but it drove me nuts

I accidentally used a bridge i wasn't supposed to in actraiser on snes and I couldnt get to one of the last levels because there was no way to get the bridge back

the dumb battle toads race on level 3 its a great game until that point

any gamecube game that wasnt converted fully so that it took an entire god damned memory card for 1 save file

 

[soul_rune1984]

The movement controls for Parasite Eve2 and Silent Hill (the first one). I couldn't get used to them and you couldn't switch them.

 

[Rivers Wells]

Mass Effect's pacing. Not the story. It was a cool story. I just don't want to complete the correspondence course necessary to enjoy it.

It's not skimping to move a story along. It's tight, controlled, refined writing where a little bit of narrative restraint improves the momentum of the plot. Oh, you've got multiple novels worth of dialogue? I wasn't looking for that at all, I just want a story well told. Not dragged to death well after I should have reached the finish line!

To this day, I still can't beat it. I just get worn down by the monotony. It's plot comes across as bloated and unintuitive. Hell, half the time I was forgetting why I was even in most locations.

 

[UnderCoverGuest]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Mechanic: Gravity/Co-Op
I hate, hate, hate walking down stairs and suddenly going flying to my death. I hate, hate, hate getting stuck trying to overcome obstacles like ledges and walls that are just barely outside my jumping reach. "Walking" on the thin edge of a stair, but not able to "climb" up on to it and not able to "jump" over it, as well as not being able to "walk" over it. Annoying. Oh, and the 'start/stop' movement system. AND NO *@$^ING CO-OP!!!

Modern Warfare 2:
Mechanic: Player
If IW hadn't decided to make the player A TOTAL $*@%ING PUSSY, maybe the game would have been more enjoyable. But being yelled at constantly by hubris-induced NPCs with superiority-complexes, and CONSTANTLY BEING KILLED OVER AND OVER AGAIN IN HUMILIATING-OH-I-TOTALLY-SAW-THAT-COMING WAYS is simply not the most enjoyable experience I've found in video games.

Fallout 3:
Mechanic: ???/Co-Op
It's definitely an improvement over Oblivion, but that "can't climb ledges" issue does still exist sort of, as does the 'falling down stairs' issue to a degree. I don't think Fallout 3 is ruined because of that. I think it's ruined for the same reason Oblivion is ruined, in that THERE'S NO CO-OP STILL. ARGH!!

I can't think of any more, but my coffee is almost done anyway so it works out. Cheers.