Oh, where shall I start?
Bioshock, for its over-hyped rubbishness. Oh, it's pretty, but the roleplaying was nonexistent, the vaunted ethics dilemmas were vapid and black-or-whitely irrelevant, and the oh-so-hyped water effects always mean it's time to run so you don't actually get to watch them. Worst of all, though, was the fact that it went along the classic line of scare cliches - dark rooms, skittering spider monsters on ceiling dropping on you randomly, shambling figures in the darkness, meathooks, spooky whispers, and did I mention characters appearing suddenly behind you? The combination of those is irritating, not scary.
Crashday - or possibly
Flatout 2, in fact probably
Flatout 2, I forget - was supposed to be fun. Driving, crashing, carnage and driver-launching shenanigans - it should have been great. But there was something about it - I'm not even sure what now - that just made it incredibly disturbing. Okay, launching the opposing drivers from their cars could be amusing. But the game just ignores it, leaving their ragdolls to be bounced about the track by AI drivers who see them as just another bump in the road. Perhaps it's odd that it would have been less disturbing had the game acknowledged that they were ostensibly human and would be promptly killed to death by being repeatedly run over, but treating them as just another physics object made it distinctly unpleasant.
And of course if we expand the remit to include hatable bits of otherwise good games, well then the list just grows.
The ghastly hunt-the-bomb bits in, well, any tactical shooter ever, but particularly
SWAT 4 and
Raven Shield. And the sewer level in
SWAT 3. The stupid monsters in
Far Cry. The fire extinguishing level of
No One Lives Forever 2.
That level in
Mafia. You know the one I mean. The race.
The Tremors ripoff in
Jedi Academy. The rescue mission in
Vietcong, where the guy you're supposed to rescue just keeps getting himself killed. The irritating bits in
CoD4; much as I loved the game, the Pripyat levels and the escape-from-the-ship bit always annoy me. The walking-on-ice steering in
Half-Life and its derivatives. The turret gunner bits of the
KOTOR games. The overall awfulness of
ArmA, what with the almost unaltered graphics and vastly worsened controls.
Why yes, I am a grumpy bugger. What's your point?
