Your gaming "kryptonite"

[thatman]

What this is, is basically things that cripple either your gaming experience or the game itself for you. Mine would be multiple boss battles one after the other. Don't get me wrong, an epic boss battle here and there is a good thing, but if you have 3 or 4 bosses all lined up?

So tell me, Escapist, what is your gaming "kryptonite"?

Nah Man, I LOVE these bosses. Sure they can be a ***** to actually beat but a multiple stage boss offers a satisfying cap-off to a game when you finally beat it's ass down.
Casing point, final bosses on shin megami tensei games (at least the ones i've played) are nearly always like this and they're easily my favourite bosses (despite the crushingly hard difficulty level).

 

[Chiasm]

Gaming Vertigo

Any game that wants me to cross over a ledge or other huge height and pans the camera at a angle to show the vast distance to the ground; worst is if I do fall and the game shows the character falling to their death.

 

[sune-ku]

Two words instantly came to mind:

Cliff Racers.

Oh how I hate them.

 

[Frostbyte666]

In RPG's really, really bad voice acting (Star Ocean 4), I'm looking at you Sarah and Lymle (thank god for the switch to Japanese option, though Sarah's voice in that is horrible as well).
Also needing a guide to figure out how to collect an item or recruit an npc (Suikoden 3)
Games that try to portray realism yet give the AI an unfair advantage, i.e. I can take only one shot to the head, fine, they can take 3, what! (Operation Flashpointragon Rising).

Really annoying plot twists can sometimes destroy a game, like your actually a computer character, your in a time loop etc. Or we the main character is just being so completely thick headed for the sake of it, going against their previous character development, yes of course I'll hand you the doomsday device ms. nice lady who has run illegal experimentation on various people.

 

[Magus44]

Puzzles with specific turning of cranks/switches.
You know.. 3 switches. You have to turn them in the right order to move cogs or something...
I look at them. Sigh. And go do something else.
Something about them, I just cant get them. Give me Portal-esque spatial visual puzzles. Not some boring sequential one. Prince of Persia is notorious for these.
This and terrible escort missions.

 

[Russian_Assassin]

Escort missions with the subject being a hemophiliac NPC with brittle bone disease and underdeveloped leg muscles that make him move at a snail's speed.

 

[ZehMadScientist]

Boss battles where regular minion enemies infinitely spawn. It makes my my blood boil having to deal with those motherweeperrs while trying to damage the already annoying boss in front of me. I'm looking at you Dante's Inferno

 

[Cuppa Tetleys]

OOHHHH a big list I smell! These things might not make me never play the game again but I often don't play it for a while;

-As previously mentioned, bosses one after another or ones with regenerating health
-Extremely difficult timed missions
-Escort missions
-As mentioned, difficult puzzles (half life made me quit quite a few times, especially cos the answer's normally really obvious but I always overlook one detail and I end up walking round for half an hour not knowing what to do. Also that puzzle with Ashley in Res Evil 4)
-Lenghty, unskippable cutscenes, even if they're skippable they annoy me because games aren't films.

 

[WaReloaded]

Any game which has very difficult environmental puzzles.

Resident Evil puzzles were always my bane, especially the ones in Resident Evil 2, 3 and Outbreak File #2.

 

[nuba km]

game that is hard not challenging and crap controls (sometimes they go together).

 

[teebeeohh]

hardcore button smashing, i never finished peace walker because i could not get past the torture part
bad camera, more than anything else the lack of a top down perspective ruined DA2 for me
and minigames. there is nothing worse than minigames, especially on the PC with horrible controls.

oh and unskippable cutscenes, preferably before a hard boss.

 

[thedevilscousin]

Long loading times, and cheap difficulty. Seeing as i always play games on the "normal" setting they always seem to get up my ass on some one level that i can't get trough. Then also i hate RPG games where you need a spefific item or weapon to get trough something and have to go on a fetch quest for the 1/4 of the game to get it, ok this doesn't apply to all RPGs but i hate those kinda fetch quests that take over half the game because you can't get trough one measly gate.... Exept for DeathSpank, it was funny there.

 

[Wutaiflea]

Hm, I hate games with "you just missed him" syndrome. I don't mind chasing after someone, or hunting a man down, but it needs to be paced correctly- having a sequence of a billion different locations where every single one goes "aww, you literally just missed them..." and all other plot/character development is withheld until you catch up to them really winds me up.

I also hate blurry maps, driving in aggressively narrow places and poor choice of hair-dos. For me, a game is just starting off on the wrong foot with me if I haven't seen a few appealing hair styles in character creation.

 

[8-Bit Grin]

Honestly, a really AWFUL story forced where it shouldn't be murders my experience.

Terrible characters can kill it too.

I'm looking at you, Just Cause 2.

I'm sorry, but your voice acting... gak!

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

Stealth missions in non stealth games, or just bad stealth mechanics altogether.
Boss battles where the boss gets 2 or more health bars, because you never know if that is the last bar so you dont know how to pace yourself.
Save points...
Anddd the last thing i can think of is bad writing, just completely pulls the immersion especially when trying to be taken seriously.

 

[Kenko]

Way too young "hero's". It just irks me something fierce when the main character is a teen or a twenty something-something. Enough of fricking children characters thank you.

So yeah, its obvious that the majority of JRPG's are a cancer from my point of view as you are always children because the pedo's in japan thinks thats cool or something.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

When the narrative starts to come in bursts between gameplay sections (as either voiceover or cutscene). When done badly, it starts to feel like you're just watching a movie with gameplay sections thrown in to pad it for length and make it a "game". Whenever I feel like I'm playing each sections solely to be rewarded at the end with more plot like a rat pressing a feeding button, I start to get bored.

Some parts of Portal 2 strayed dangerous close to this. If it didn't make so much sense given the setting and if the setting itself weren't so entrancing and full of little clues, I'm not sure I would have ended up liking it particularly.

 

[Ninjafire72]

Bad endings that make me feel like I shouldn't have bothered. I'm looking at you Dead Space.

F.E.A.R 2 beats that by a mile, at least the dead space ending had SOME sort of closure.

The thing I hate most in games right now is auto aiming NPCs (Sniper Ghost Warrior cough* cough*)

Yes, I'm hiding in a bush. Yes, I have a guillie suit on. No, you shouldn't be able to see me from behind a rock two miles away. And no, you shouldn't be able to shoot me with the accuracy of a precison sniper. You are a simple terrorist, after all.

.... But you do all that anyway. sigh.

 

[Xerosch]

1. Forced driving sessions in non-driving games
2. 2-second-endings
3. mute protagonists