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[Dark Octave]

I mentioned this before, but any game that does this:

-------------------------------------------------------
-New game <--- (default every time the game is booted up)

-Load game

-Options

-Online

-Achievments

-Leaderboards
--------------------------------------------------------

Please stop it!

 

[SkinnyPupp]

Trine

The final stage.

 

[fily]

I know this is a joke, but this was a technical design choice and not an aesthetic one.

Yeah, it was just a joke though. Don't take it too serious.

 

[nolookjones]

like others have mentioned ubisoft montreal games win this award...they all look pretty good but the mechanics are just terrible and can be very frustrating to try and finish (POP, Ass Creed, Far Cry 2, etc)

 

[malingenie]

Doom 3, FEAR 2 et al:
Revealing key pieces of the main story through obnoxiously long written e-mails/PDA data packets/etc. If I wanted to read something that long I'd crack open a book, idiots.

The ones you mentioned had uninteresting stories so I cared very little about the storytelling devices.

Thief 2 did it incredibly well. I still think it is a great way to convey a story and games like Bioshock did it well (albeit with audio as well as text).

 

[Sibylus]

Age of Empires III - is it really not possible to select all units of a particular type? CIV IV does this well. Why can't AoE3?

Huh? Doubleclick on a musketeer, boom, you've selected up to 50 musketeers.

 

[ant_]

Bioshock-
The end

Mass Effect-
Weapon/Item manager

Street Fighter IV-
No more than 2 people in one room. I want a party mode!

 

[Desi]

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - fighting. The long drawn out combat combined with the barebones battle system just took all the fun from the amazing game you were playing minutes before. Just don't get how that was allowed past testing, 'lets have the player fight 7 rounds of sand monsters in this small bathhouse while keeping this slow archer alive! YEAH!!'

 

[ScOULaris]

I am gonna have to go with Oblivion (and Bethesda's current-gen games in general) for being just plain sloppy. I know, it's not like they intended to make all of the NPCs clip through the environment and interact with the game world like a half-blind robot, so these problems can't be said to be design choices.

I just wanted to add my two cents about Bethesda. They rush their games, and it shows. As good as Oblivion and Fallout 3 are conceptually and in scope, I simply can't look past the overwhelming number of technical flaws that seem to bombard me as I play.

It's hard to be immersed when a man-faced peasant woman is spouting off random dialog while robotically walking face-first into a haystack for three minutes straight.

In terms of just plain bad design, however, I will have to say Prince of Persia (current-gen). The platforming is completely automatic, and even if you do somehow manage to screw up, the game doesn't allow you to die. Wow. It's like they were conducting a case study to find the minimum amount of control people could tolerate while still considering it a game.

 

[revolverjgw]

That was the least of the original's problems.



Lol. Forget that. A few of the later stages are duplicates with more/tougher enemies!



No more than other games. The problem was the limited button config on the hardware they were on.

The screens are so small in these games that objects in paths "respawn" more often, forcing you to switch to different doohickeys ad nauseum, which, as you said, you can only have one at a time. The others games have problems too, but this is the nadir.

 

[Boombloxer]

Infamous - The "satellite uplinks" missions.

Fixed.

Lack of a Weapon Wheel. You know the game already.

 

[baultista]

The ones you mentioned had uninteresting stories so I cared very little about the storytelling devices.

Thief 2 did it incredibly well. I still think it is a great way to convey a story and games like Bioshock did it well (albeit with audio as well as text).

I agree with you on Doom 3, but I actually found FEAR 2 pretty interesting.

Another one for Doom 3:
Zombie closets. Demons don't wait around in walls with trap-doors perfectly built to fit them to prey on their victims.

 

[Kadey]

Dead Rising. A very good game held back by the save system and extremely poor A.I of survivors.

 

[baultista]

Dead Rising. A very good game held back by the save system and extremely poor A.I of survivors.

Do either of those really constitute design choices?

Bad AI is just poor programming and a faulty save system... OK well that's a bad design choice.

 

[jufonuk]

I would say Dementium and the lack of ammo and underpowered weapons, stupid respawning of enemies even though you cleared and area, this put me off the game. I loved moon though

 

[Liam92]

Resident Evil 5: Getting rid out of the fantastically innovative inventory system of Resident Evil 4. I loved the way that a rocket launcher took up the amount of space that a... rocket launcher would, while an egg took up the same amount of space an egg would. In RE5, you either pick up damn big eggs, or small rocket launchers.

 

[darkpaladinmfc]

Majora's Mask

- Seahorse and eels part had some bad design. Once you've got through and killed all the eels you needed 3 bottles to get all the eggs. If you didn't have 3 bottles you had to get 1/2 and then get the other back afterwards. But when you went back the seahorse wasn't there anymore, so you have no way of getting through without a guide / watching a video / rewinding time and doing everything again while making sure you have 3 bottles.

- Kafei quest was ridiculous. You have to wait around and do nothing for a majority of it which is stupidly boring. Then you have to do the boring bit at least twice if you want 100%, once for the Postman Hat and then once for the bottle. You can't even save, so if you screw up on the final Sakon bit then you have to do it ALL again. I accidently jumped into the river the first time Kafei went in, then the second time I got in but I kept pressing the red switches and lost the minigame. Most frustrating thing ever at 4am...

- Twinmold dungeon on the Moon had a really bad design choice. There is one part where you had to hit a crack in the wall with a Bomb / Bombchu and the timing was semi-difficult. There is a similar bit before that, so naturally I used all my Bombs to beat that bit. Then on the second bit I had 1 bomb which I used and failed. I thought I could go back to the starting room with some smashable pots and get some bombs, but I couldn't. You can't even exit the Moon, the only way to get past is the play the Song of Time and do it all over (Which includes the other 3 mask dungeons on the Moon if you did them in the natural order). This dungeon is of course optional, but I spent 4/5 hours on the stupid Kafei quest for the FD Mask, I was definetely not going to let this stop me.

/rant. Still an amazing game though.

 

[burnfout]

Rock band and RB2. Greatest games ever!

But.

You want people to play in a band, but expert players have to play at the scrolling speed of the ones on easy, making it impossible and a horrible experience for said expert players. Fuck that shit, did you test this? Did no one of your testers say this is fucking terrible? Do you even like to play your own fucking game? Patch that shit FFS!

I never ever want to play RB in a local multiplayer session ever again, argh.

 

[Serph]

For example:


EA Active
- No way to track weight via the wii board

Yeah, I think this hits the nail on the head.... you allow me to USE the balance board if I choose (which I don't), but if I want to actually weigh myself, I have to load Wii Fit?

 

[cartman414]

The screens are so small in these games that objects in paths "respawn" more often, forcing you to switch to different doohickeys ad nauseum, which, as you said, you can only have one at a time. The others games have problems too, but this is the nadir.

True, but only in that department. The games need to be remade for something with more buttons.

 

[Speevy]

I mentioned this before, but any game that does this:

-------------------------------------------------------
-New game <--- (default every time the game is booted up)

-Load game

-Options

-Online

-Achievments

-Leaderboards
--------------------------------------------------------

Please stop it!

Why? Sometimes you just want to start over.

 

[jufonuk]

Yeah, I think this hits the nail on the head.... you allow me to USE the balance board if I choose (which I don't), but if I want to actually weigh myself, I have to load Wii Fit? GAY

edit out last word or they will ban you

 

[SmashBrosAwesome]

Burnout Paradise (PC)- no text chat, so those w/o mics (like me ) cannot communicate w/ other players. Also, not really a design choice per se, but PC gamers tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to DLC support.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl- online. Don't think I need to explain why.

Worms: Open Warfare 2 (DS)- IIRC there is no option to turn off theme-specific "events" (such as earthquakes or rising water in the Cold War theme). Could be wrong on this one, however.

 

[olimpia84]

+1 vote for Sheva in RE5

 

[ghost_face]

-FFVIII long ass summons with no way to skip them

- sonic3casinolevel.jpg

- GTAIV no in-mission check points

- Resistance 2 enemies that kill you in one hit

 

[Shanlei91]

Fable 2 - The difficulty. The game is ridiculously easy, the inability to die coupled with with every enemy basically being a ragdoll takes away from what is otherwise an amazing game.

Prototype - knockdowns ruined the game for me. Here you have an insanely powerful protagonist who can be knocked on his ass easily by anyone, and while on his ass can have all damage sent his way be stacked so that he can die within 5 seconds.

 

[Seraphis Cain]

Disaster: Day of Crisis: Driving stages. Holy crap, could Monolith have made the driving sections ANY worse?

Star Ocean: Second Evolution: Not being able to skip through the dialogue until the character is done talking. I can read a box of text three times over by the time the character is done talking. Just let me skip it already.

 

[Freshmaker]

Bayonetta

Arm capes and an ugly C Viperish main character.

 

[Helix Snake]

A LOT of things in Super Mario Sunshine. Having to go through that 15 minute boat ride to put out the slime on the pipe EVERY TIME you get a game over on the "8 red coins of the instant death water slide", and a lot of things in platforming, such as the fact that jumping towards a wall cancels your upward momentum and sends you sliding downwards (killed me SO MANY TIMES in the final boss fight), and the fact that when you hit a ceiling when using the hover nozzle you get stuck and can't move horizontally (what were they THINKING!?) and the shine where you have to get up to this place and repeatedly pound the fruit things until you get a durian (which, by the way, is the only fruit you CAN'T pick up) and if there's another fruit below it and it lands on it, it will bounce off into the water and you have to do it AGAIN. When you FINALLY get a durian, you have to be careful getting it to the Yoshi egg or you'll accidentally kick it somewhere you can't get it back. Once you DO finally get to the Yoshi, you have to spray fruit at the fish to turn them into platforms (but you'd better do it at the right height, or you'll mess up) to get across. And if you fall off these platforms, you have to swim back to the lift, get on, and pound the fruit things AGAIN (this can take up to 10 minutes). So when you get to a certain point, there's fish to get you to a certain platform and it looks like you have to do the "ride the fish platforms" another 3 times, but don't be fooled, it's impossible. What you're SUPPOSED to do is jump over to a ledge on the cliff and eat a coconut, which will turn Yoshi ORANGE, and ORANGE platforms go UPWARDS instead of sideways. So you float back, turn the fish into a ORANGE platform, and float up to spray juice on the slime and get the shine. HOW THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT? And then there's the level based after a Japanese marble game, which is mostly luck based, and apparently wasn't bugtested at all because it's glitchy as hell.

That game has a LOT of problems.

 

[PantherLotus]

^ the enter key. it's two spots to the right and one up from the period key. please use it.

Huh? Doubleclick on a musketeer, boom, you've selected up to 50 musketeers.

YOU'RE KIDDING



:: HEAD SLAP ::

 

[Syril]

Star Ocean: Second Evolution: Not being able to skip through the dialogue until the character is done talking. I can read a box of text three times over by the time the character is done talking. Just let me skip it already.

There's an option for that, actually.

 

[tadcalabash]

Star Ocean: Second Evolution: Not being able to skip through the dialogue until the character is done talking. I can read a box of text three times over by the time the character is done talking. Just let me skip it already.

Speaking of this... the new Secret of Monkey Island remake not including any form of dialogue skip in the voice acted updated version. You can still do it in original underneath, but it's noticably absent in the update.

 

[Dolla Dolla]

Assassin's Creed.

Awesome game, I loved it. But the repetition in side missions was cumbersome and dull. The second will, hopefully, remedy this. Very much looking forward to it.

 

[Jezan]

Games that checkpoint before a cutscene and you can't skip it

 

[webrunner]

InFamous: Aimed attack skills on face buttons. Aiming on right stick.
InFamous: Hard to tell if you're still aiming at someone after you shoot them due to all the pyrotechnics and the way they randomly stumble around from being hit.
InFamous: If your feet hit a power line, you land on it. If your head does, you grab on below. If the power line hits anywhere else, you just phase through it and keep falling as if it wasn't there.

Prototype: That little hop you do coming off a wall run is just big enough to jump over a checkpoint during race side missions.
Prototype: Jacked helecopters are fragile as hell.
Prototype: Boss fight difficulty and length is sharply greater than anything else.

 

[Sohter.Nura]

Chrono Cross.
I love that game, but I can't seem to understand why they decided to add so many useless characters to it, if they don't A: Add anything to the story or B: Add anything to the party.
Still love it though

 

[OgTheClever]

Fixed.

I actually disagree since I enjoyed the racing aspect of the uplink side missions, which wasn't used much elsewhere in the game other than a couple of helicopter chase sections. The hidden package things on the other hand gave me a lot of frustration on at least one of them.

If I had to choose a seperate design choice which annoyed me in Infamous then it would have to be the blast shards. It would be fine if their positions were revealed on the map after completing the story but I ended up with a single shard separating me from platinum. After quite literally spending hours searching, it was annoying to find it at the top of a water tower right next to Zeke's place. The fact that it couldn't be pinged from the ground was a definite contributing factor in making it so difficult. Also I spent a lot of the search time on other islands since it seems hard to believe that I missed one so close to home.

 

[SmashBrosAwesome]

One more for Prototype: Deactivating those viral detectors. Incredibly frustrating to do with a keyboard, especially the last two. It took me about 25 minutes, as I couldn't do it fast enough and had to evade the military every time I messed up (hint: destroy the helicopters early).

Edit: Perhaps the worst part about the whole thing was that it was really just a big waste of time in the long run, since

Spoiler

the doctor ends up not landing anyway

:/

 

[Kitschkraft]

Far Cry 2- respawning guard checkpoints

This, fucking this.

You can't go from point A to point B hassle free because of the hundreds of fucking guard post.

I'm playing through this game right now and although I do plan on completing it, I can't believe this and some of the other design choices.

The engine is fucking amazing but damn is their some design pitfalls.

 

[Maxirugi]

Star Ocean: The Last Hope

- Item creation can only be performed on your ship.
- At the end/post-game your ship permanantly placed on "planet X".
- "Planet X" is only accessible using disc 3.
- A lot of items you want to farm for item creation are on the earlier planets and are only accessible using disc 2.
- Once harvest points have been farmed, they only way to respawn them is to enter and exit your ship.
- Disc-swap hell!

 

[Sibylus]

YOU'RE KIDDING



:: HEAD SLAP ::

:lol It was a feature in all the other Age of Empires games as well, fairly standard in RTSes as I understand.

Still, I've missed some pretty key commands in games before too (That Alt was how you swiveled the camera in Company of Heroes was one).

 

[manueldelalas]

Some people will never learn that you can press B, has the same effect, and you will not answer the yes/no question. Works in most games...

I agree with Suikoden Tierkreis; there are times where you play for hours without a save point. Fuck that... add the long ass battles at the end, and the high encounter rate, and the shitty design for dungeons, and the lack of a proper map for them (I ended using the "left hand technique" to explore dungeons), and the shitty design for the cities and castles, and the annoying pseudo boss random encounters, and the general lack of money, and the saturation of characters (90+ playable for your party).

Still good game =P.

EDIT: I forgot some other nuisances of the game, like the horrible plot, the lenght of the game (30 hours too long), the fights you HAVE to loose (even if in some you can be winning and in no way dying, I really hate this shit, in good RPGs, you can win EVERY battle), having to climb that damn tower TWICE, and the most powerful power of the last boss.

 

[a Master Ninja]

Why? Sometimes you just want to start over.

I'm with Dark Octave, it shouldn't be the first choice after you have at least one save. Load/Continue should be the default.

 

[Host Samurai]

Assassin's Creed - The entire game

Any game that contains swimming

 

[ShockingAlberto]

Prince of Persia HD should have been the first post.

 

[Swifty]

Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3.

In order to aim your gun, hold down Square.

To holster it without firing it and thereby informing everybody of your presence, remove your thumb from the Square button slowly since the Dual Shock 2 supports pressure sensitive buttons. Cool huh?

If you're holding an automatic weapon, press Square halfway to aim it. If you accidentally spray out a burst of bullets because of your inability to finely control your thumbs, you're just not used to it.

Oh, and to aim it in first person, you also need to hold down R1. To move while your gun is aimed, hold down L1 but make sure you're not holding down R1.

Toggles? What are those?

 

[idofriar1313]

No More Heroes

1) The over world, while being functional and also artistic metaphor for a gamer's life, didn't really help the game
2) the whole real ending fake ending thing. After beating NMH with all the katanas, i was surprised to see the two options. Thinking one was just an easter egg, i picked the fake ending, thinking I could watch the other ending afterwards. After the credits roll, the game asks me to choose the difficulty. I was pretty pissed off and spent an entire year playing it on and off with the game. The real ending is very satisfying an I couldn't ask for a better year casually playing NMH on bitter difficulty. I like to think of the real ending as a reward.

 

[Vorador]

Star Ocean: The Last Hope

- Item creation can only be performed on your ship.
- At the end/post-game your ship permanantly placed on "planet X".
- "Planet X" is only accessible using disc 3.
- A lot of items you want to farm for item creation are on the earlier planets and are only accessible using disc 2.
- Once harvest points have been farmed, they only way to respawn them is to enter and exit your ship.
- Disc-swap hell!

I've read that just changing areas work for respawning harvesting points. But i haven't confirmed it yet since i'm busy with a post-game dungeon.

 

[Schmitty07]

Bioshock-
The end

Mass Effect-
Weapon/Item manager

Street Fighter IV-
No more than 2 people in one room. I want a party mode!

Yeah, the item management in ME was terrible. It gets to the point where I don't even open containers because I don't want to deal with deleting stuff.

Mirror's Edge also has some really frustrating parts that made me not want to play the game. The fights with the other "runners" stand out in my head

 

[Alivor]

Street Fighter IV- No online lobbies. I just don't understand this at all. WHY? Both versions they released for XBLA had this...