Irritating Game Mechanics/Subgames

[FuckedUp]

The Pipe Dream hacking mini game in the original Bioshock definitely gets old after the 50th time and it says it all that all of the sequels skipped hacking minigames.

I think hacking/lock picking minigames can be fun, but Bioshock's was too involved, they should tend to be somewhat simple.

...the Pipe Dream games were really simple, IMO. I only failed a couple on my first try.

 

[Pissmaster]

There's a secret puzzle minigame in Banjo Kazooie that's very easy to miss, and doesn't give you anything to help you beat the game. The prize is a few cheat codes for cosmetic transformations.

But in the 360 version, it has an achievement tied to it that I never could get. It's all I had left to 100% the game.

 

[Dom Cruise]

They've also thankfully died out now, but QTEs. Resident Evil 5 was probably the worst offender, the infamous bolder punching scene was physically painful to get through.

It's funny how trends come and go in gaming like that.

I don't think QTEs were a bad mechanic in of themselves, but they could be done poorly which is what many games did.

...the Pipe Dream games were really simple, IMO. I only failed a couple on my first try.

I seem to remember them taking a few minutes each and you're hacking stuff constantly, it just gets old after a while.

Ironically the original System Shock has a pretty involved hacking minigame too, but that one is more fun given the VR theming.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The Pipe Dream hacking mini game in the original Bioshock definitely gets old after the 50th time and it says it all that all of the sequels skipped hacking minigames.

I think hacking/lock picking minigames can be fun, but Bioshock's was too involved, they should tend to be somewhat simple.



The random fights in the Yakuza series get really irritating, I'm not saying they shouldn't be there at all, but they happen way too frequently.

I was going to say the the Fallout hacking minigames sucked because I often make the right guess on the first try without really understanding how the damn thing works. That should have been replaced by a pipe dreams hacking game. There was one game that I can't remember that had a spin on pipe dreams where it scaled really well in complexity.

This may sound autistic, but Chris vs. Boulder was one of the most entertaining, out of left field, exaggerated badass scenes I've ever seen in a game. I always viewed RE5 as an over the top, "MGR: Reveangeance-esque" copy of RE4 with a tone that felt more in line with Dead Rising than a RE game.

As someone who has never really cared about the lore/story of the RE series and played it for shits and giggles it gave me a hell of a laugh. I could definitely see why people who do care about the tone of the series would hate it though.

To me there's a lore reason. Chris realized he had to get ultra swole to take on Wesker.
Ungodly amounts of steroids might have fucked up his balls and that's why Claire is the only one that can carry on the Redfield bloodline.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I was going to say the the Fallout hacking minigames sucked because I often make the right guess on the first try without really understanding how the damn thing works. That should have been replaced by a pipe dreams hacking game. There was one game that I can't remember that had a spin on pipe dreams where it scaled really well in complexity.



To me there's a lore reason. Chris realized he had to get ultra swole to take on Wesker.

I've never quite fully understood how the Fallout hacking minigame works either but it's a good example of a minigame like that feeling like you're doing something but not taking too much time.

And I've heard people throw theory around before that Chris gets super pumped up in order to help fight Wesker and I guess that makes sense.

I just wish Resident Evil 5 didn't suck so much shit, I've tried and failed to play it twice, I couldn't even make it through a Youtube let's play of it, I find it that boring.

It had nothing to do with Resident Evil and is peak "identity crisis" era for Japanese developers.

 

[FuckedUp]

I was going to say the the Fallout hacking minigames sucked because I often make the right guess on the first try without really understanding how the damn thing works. That should have been replaced by a pipe dreams hacking game. There was one game that I can't remember that had a spin on pipe dreams where it scaled really well in complexity.

Fallout's hacking game is even easier; I literally never failed those across all the games they were in. Just pay attention to the amount of letters shared between words.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Mechanics that you don't technically have to take part in, but the player will lose out in some way if you don't. GTA is particularly bad about this:

• You don't have to complete missions in the exact way the developer's planned, but you won't get a gold medal.
• You don't have to rush to protect your businesses in V (every fucking time you are anywhere near them), but you will lose money if you don't.
• You don't have to rush across the map to protect your hood in San Andreas, but you will lose income and respect if you don't.

R* North doesn't seem to realize that you can't make a mechanic fun and engaging by bribing and cajoling the player. There are tons of examples just like these where the player has their arm twisted into engaging mechanics that aren't really fun, just annoying.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Fallout's hacking game is even easier; I literally never failed those across all the games they were in. Just pay attention to the amount of letters shared between words.

I'm like a monkey looking at the alphabet, picking the letters to spell the word shown in the picture and gets a peanut if it's correct. Monkey doesn't actually understand alphabet yet monkey get peanut almost every time.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Bactracking, is always cheap as fuck , the exact same level in reverse is not a new level, the exact same level but with a boss run is not a new level either. Its just cutting corners.

I second with the retarded minigames that sidetrack you for way too long like the card game in FF8 and FF9 that i never ever understood or Blitzball. At least the card games were optional, some people liked it and autistically completed those long ass card quests. With Blitzball they really push the roleplay, because you are told your team is a piece of shit and it turns out that it legit is worst than gargabe, i hated that section.

Something that also piss me off, getting a hundred lines of dialogue where you can choose between two or three replies and it will have no consequence whatsoever, sometimes the npcs wont even reply differently regardless of what you choose, but you know theres going to be one of those simple selection momments, and you won't know when its coming without a guide, that you can answer wrong and you lucked out of a quest that would give you some important item or worst, the good fucking ending to the game. Thats really a piece of shit because even if you are paying attention you really cannot foresee how one answer will change the game against the next one, its all luck. I wish i had an specific example but i haven't played jarpigs in years,seems like every other one has these. Either that or you didn't talk to someone right after something in a completely different area and that arbitrary thing fucks you. "here, have some shit endgame, your save game is dog shit now, you ruined it 7 hours ago, didn't you realize??"

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

I was going to say the the Fallout hacking minigames sucked because I often make the right guess on the first try without really understanding how the damn thing works. That should have been replaced by a pipe dreams hacking game. There was one game that I can't remember that had a spin on pipe dreams where it scaled really well in complexity.

I fucking suck at puzzles in general, so the Fallout hacking minigame is a nightmare for me, and I usually avoid it whenever I can. I get what I'm supposed to do, I'm just not smart enough to actually follow through on it. I end up save scumming and throwing myself at the terminal until I get it right.

 

[Vapewizard]

Escort missions are a pretty obvious one. I don't encounter them too often but I played Nier automata not too long ago and they were just a typical case of the pacing grinding to a halt as the escort targets slowly plod along until the game spawns something to kill. Though at least they're optional sidequests.

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

I hate musical puzzles. Like when you get a melody and then have to recreate it.
Best I'm able is to tell that two tones playing after each other are different. How different? Is this one the same as the one before the last one? I have no fucking idea.
I think this is the only situation where I consistently need to go and find the section in a video walkthrough.

 

[M0JY0]

I personally don't like games where if the main character dies in a fight the battle ends altogether, forcing you to do it again even if all the other party members are alive. The Persona series is a good example of this.

 

[BOONES]

There's one thing that's extremely rare but its happened to me like 4 to 5 times in all the times I've been gaming.

Those deaths you couldn't prevent cause you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Most recent example was Terraria. Now boulders are a mechanic and avoidable 95% of the time however when I started the wall of flesh fight I got hit by a stray Boulder coming from off screen less than 10 seconds into the fight.

I laughed it off but felt a little cheated as I didn't want to farm another guide doll. So I put one in my inventory with an editor and called it fair.

Its just a bit annoying to get hit by a random flying object out of nowhere.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Every single minigame in the first Sly Cooper. Especially the racing ones.

 

[OmnipotentStupidity]

Bactracking, is always cheap as fuck , the exact same level in reverse is not a new level, the exact same level but with a boss run is not a new level either. Its just cutting corners.

I second with the retarded minigames that sidetrack you for way too long like the card game in FF8 and FF9 that i never ever understood or Blitzball. At least the card games were optional, some people liked it and autistically completed those long ass card quests. With Blitzball they really push the roleplay, because you are told your team is a piece of shit and it turns out that it legit is worst than gargabe, i hated that section.

Something that also piss me off, getting a hundred lines of dialogue where you can choose between two or three replies and it will have no consequence whatsoever, sometimes the npcs wont even reply differently regardless of what you choose, but you know theres going to be one of those simple selection momments, and you won't know when its coming without a guide, that you can answer wrong and you lucked out of a quest that would give you some important item or worst, the good fucking ending to the game. Thats really a piece of shit because even if you are paying attention you really cannot foresee how one answer will change the game against the next one, its all luck. I wish i had an specific example but i haven't played jarpigs in years,seems like every other one has these. Either that or you didn't talk to someone right after something in a completely different area and that arbitrary thing fucks you. "here, have some shit endgame, your save game is dog shit now, you ruined it 7 hours ago, didn't you realize??"

GTA V was one of the worst with this: "Oh you didn't make the right decision that you were forced to pick on the last mission and actively killed one of the characters you've been playing as for hundreds of hours? Well hope you hated them and were done with all of their missions beforehand, because now you can never play as them ever again on this save, and all of the leftover missions involving that character are completely removed from the game. Hope you weren't aiming for 100% completion, fuckboy!"

I'd have less of an issue with that if the Franklin option actually did outright kill him too, so that no matter what you chose, one of them was going to die. But it doesn't, so there's just an objectively better ending than the other two.

 

[Fromtheblackdepths]

Two things off the top of my head:
Those bastard helicopters in Saint's Row 2. Fuck them when you have to take those jet skis in the final mission and five or six show up guns blazing.

Weird difficulty spikes where the game shows up with a curveball enemy or arena.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I just remembered two:
The toy cars minigame in Yakuza 0, it wouldn't have been as bad if the game didn't imply there is any skill involved in those races outside of just autistically getting the best build for the track. Not to mention there is a random element that can fuck you over with a build that should work.
More of a mechanic - Puzzle games like The Witness where you have both a large open space and no clear sense of puzzle order. The problem with this combination is that you can get completely lost if you miss a puzzle that serves as a tutorial for the next mechanic or alternatively skip a doable puzzle because you think you missed some clue elsewhere.

 

[The Wizard]

Controls that cannot be changed without mods/breaking the game. The first two Gothic games immediately come to mind. Although I could get used to the abysmally unintuitive controls after a couple of days, I wished that I could just add in a new configuration without screwing up my actions.

"Wave" levels. It just gets tedious and frustrating to defend a small area for a set length of time against wave after wave of enemies.

Puzzle minigames that are the same as any other puzzle minigame, but with the game's aesthetic. My all-time most hated is the Simon minigame.

I seem to remember them taking a few minutes each and you're hacking stuff constantly, it just gets old after a while.

I felt that Bioshock 2's hacking was a massive improvement over the original.
The thing that irked me was that the pipe dream game made no sense. Time apparently stops while you flip over tiles, one by one, and try to make a connection to two ports.
In the sequel, hitting the right point in a meter felt a lot more in tune with the game's style, and you often had to do it while trying to avoid enemy fire. Plus, it'd only take maybe five seconds at max.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Every single minigame in the first Sly Cooper. Especially the racing ones.

I just replayed Sly Cooper earlier this year and I enjoy most of the minigames, including the races.