There are certain things that I just can’t stand in video games.   Some of which are just plain the prevalence of the entire video game design system, the game-think as it were, that you simply have to go with the flow and accept that they exist because, like all other systems, the idea of introducing new avenues of thought gets more difficult the larger and system.   Then there are those things that are just ridiculous.   Things that make my blood boil and keep me from actually enjoying the game.   Here are a few:

1.        Game progression means less cooperative environment. Grand Theft Auto / Prototype are excellent examples of this.   At the beginning of these games you see little resistance to your actions in the environment.    If, for example, in GTA you drive your car into a police cruiser, the police will pursue you with one star, and assuming you don’t slip away quickly the star increase will be gradual and you will have plenty of time to actually elude the police.   Later in the game, as you progress, getting into that same ‘accident’ with a police cruiser will immediately call out the national guard, as the star will almost jump to three or four.   Apparently your ‘rep’ is such that the minute you put a toe over the line you get a beat down.   Sure they are trying to keep the excitement and challenge available, but come on.   In the end it only distracts from the rest of the game as you must spend lengthy time trying to do the opposite of the games design, that is: stay out of trouble just so you can progress the story.

2.        From out of the woodwork.   Another aspect of the first issue, is that once you do something that draws out the authorities they seemingly appear out of nowhere as if all of them were disguised or hiding in buildings, or were using magic.   In Prototype, you could spend the first hour or so of the game barely seeing any official military, and eluding them is pretty easy.   Yet, later in the game you could attempt to hijack what appears to be a lone tank, but the minute you climb on it suddenly there are twenty guys with machine guns, a helicopter, and two other tanks on scene.    Entire countries have few soldiers than one has to kill in order to get away from this and it happens every time.   Where the hell did they come from?  Are they cloning these guys on a ship off shore somewhere?   If the idea is to make the game challenging, then this act of allowing the AI to seemingly teleport into a location to counter the player only distracts and after a few times of fighting what amounts to an entire countries military might stop you trying to even get involved with this aspect of the game and dread having to deal with them when the story drives you to it.   I don’t know about you, but dread is a word I don’t like to spend 50 dollars on let alone a few hours of my life.  I have a day job and was married once...dread is already well versed in my vocab.

3.        The Demigods of Boss fights / or they move just as fast as my character.   Some games throttle back your character’s movements and skills at the beginning of the game and give you the ability to unlock powers over the course of the game.   They also, tend to change the actual clock of the character so that you can move faster in relative comparison to the AI.   This is cool in and of itself, but at some point the clock is at a hyper speed which is great for the player but makes the boss fights a series of jerky screams and tear riddled prayers, “Jesus, just let me hit the guy!”   you scream as you mash the jump button or the fire button or both, hoping that somewhere in those finite clock cycles you get to have a say in the actual playing of the game.   What’s worse is that games are so predictable that you actually need boss fights.   I know, plenty of people swear by them, and in fact they feel a game that doesn’t include boss fights is missing something.   I don’t completely disagree with this sentiment, but I find that the current game design system of bosses isn’t about giving the player anything but a serious challenge and not about progressing the gaming experience.   It’s almost like the designer said, “Let’s make this hard” not “How will this progress the value of the experience.”

4.        AI leveling?   In games like Oblivion, you level up, increase your stats, become a stronger SOB.   But so what, every other character, including the rats, do the same right along with you.   In fact, games like this (by the way this game is a huge offender of number three) it’s better to level up only when you have too.   To simply stay at level 1 until you meet a creature that requires you to level up.   In the old roll playing days of D&D a good DM would make the game interesting through the story and challenging through the battles, and his thirty skeletons wouldn’t be two levels about the players in the game.   They would simply be skeletons.   Instead the DM would introduce new monsters that were just more powerful, new NPC that complicated the player quest.

5.        Terrible targeting systems… I think that’s pretty self explanatory.   There is nothing more frustrating than a targeting system that uses your movement system  as part of its set up.   Move, stop, aim, move, stop, aim....wash rinse repeat.   Or a targeting system that changes your orientation, One second you’re facing north, pretty sure you’re pointed at enemies down range, only to select the targeting system and find yourself turned one hundred eight the other way.   Genius, I hope they gave that guy a promotion!

6.        Multiple button combination strings so complicated that you need a degree in large number theory to remember them and the speed and dexterity of superman to actually perform them.   The worst part of these is that the enemy doesn’t stop to let you string this thing together and you can’t start the button combo from six feet away.   You have to be right on top of the enemy who is trying to pummel you at the same time.   If he knocks you down the combo gets reset.   What use is the combo then?   In the end you spend more time mashing the attack buttons in hopes that you stumble into a combo.

Frankly all the things I mentioned are just signs of lazy programming and rudimentary concepts.    It’s easier to have the AI level up than design new ways of progressing the leveling system.   It’s easier to throttle down the player’s clock speed so that bosses move faster or slower than giving the player character better skills to work the battle.   It’s easier to all the AI to come out of no where to attack the player than to write a system that changes an outdated model of attack.   It’s easier.   Sigh. Just like it’s easier for me to write this.