Annoying gaming moments...

I'll start the ball rolling with Ghosts'n'Goblins on the C64. You get to that bit where you are on these kinda towers in the air and then you jump on the platform that leads to the next area and it starts to plummet downwards and you've got to keep running and jump off *just* at the exact right moment to land on the next part of the level which is the spooky houses. Of course you fail many may times at this and have to go back to the start of the game after you loose your paltry 3 lives.

Many annoying momements are to be had in games that don't let you save just before the big baddie and you die as you have failed to learn it's attack pattern and have to continue from some previous game point that's miles away, cardinal sin. RType Final on the PS2 makes you go back flaming miles and it is SOOO anoying, the level where you are flying around the massive spaceship and have to take out it's core whilst it sprays bullets at you is ARG I don't wanna even think about it.

Also any game (like FFX) that doesn't let you skip animations is criminal and should be taken out and shot imho, even if otherwise it is good. Sure that flying dragon anim is nice, but the 200th time? I think not.

The end of Doom3 RoE really annoyed me with that massive dragon, god over and over, working out some dumb staying alive whilst firing everything I've got tactic. Actually come to think of it, the end of most games are really annoying.

Yes. That GnG level is tough. I struggled even with the aid of emulation and 'Save State'.

Annoying things I hate in PC gaming though is not so much the games themselves but the PC achitecture/OS. Examples:

1) After playing a game for a while which suddenly needs to play music,the game freezes until the CD spins back up.
2) Silly windows popup messages such as, "Media center is downloading the TV guide". Like err, thanks. How would I ever manage without such information(?)
3) The other regular one I get, "Updates have been installed. Restart now or later."
Here, 'Later' seems to equate to 4 minutes.
4) 500 other reasons why Windows needs to interupt the game.

We need a PC equivalent of [Do Not Disturb!]

Waiting 20 Minutes for Knight Lore (or any Ultimate Game) to load on the Spectrum only to have it crash at the last part of the loading process :)

Going LD in Everquest and logging back in dead :)

Cheers

Garion

Yep...seems SquareEnix learned from that by allowing it in FFX-2, as for the summoning animations, you can always put them to the short-versions under the config menu.


Super Mario Bros. - Castles 7-4 & 8-4, the time it takes to figure out the order you run through the "maze" is hard if you dont have a guide (or lots of spare lives to take death due to lack of time).

Any LucasArts PointnClick adventures - puzzles that have you going "oh DUH!" (or "WTF?") when you finally figure out somethin you spent 5+ hours trying to figure out what to do.

Final Fantasy XI : Chains of Promathia - Mammet/Omega Weapon/Ultima Weapon Fight, 45min timed battle-field of back-2-back painful battling fun.

Myst I-V - The entire game (now if only they werent so beautiful looking/immersive and streaming with AAA production values)

GoldenEye64 - Unlocking Invincibility cheat by beating 2nd level on hardest difficulty under 5:00
(reason it being so hard is that there's an NPC you had to rendezvous with who was randomly positioned in the level, and you dont have time to check all positions)

Final Fantasy 3/6 - Floating Continent area hard as freaking hell if you didn't spend time stocking up on items & leveling characters & their magic skills before-hand

Any side-scrolling Castlevania game - those damn Medusa heads....

Mega Man2 - Quick Man stage

Mario Kart64/DoubleDash/DS - Always getting slammed with enemy power-ups when you're in 1st and get knocked back a few places, which usually occurs on the last lap


That's all I can think of off the top of my head, may add more later because I know I've had alot more controller-throwing memories then that.

· I-War : when the President's Ship you're supposed to protect keeps willingly crashing with Phobos (or was it Deimos?) and making you restart all over the mission. (a lot of more annoying moments with this game - it's a great game but... ugh...)

· FFVII : Sephirot. I grew tired of him blowing up the entire solar system too many times on my head and then dying, having to go through mostly all the "($%"%) cave, and repeating the same pattern over and over... left it at that point.

· FFVIII : almost the same with the Witch Castle - this time I was very underleveled - my fault.

· Soldier of Fortune 2 : the second level, the chase in the pickup - being hit and losing health before actually making visual contact with chasing enemies, made me die a lot of times because I entered the level with low health... stopped playing finally.

· Story of Thor (genesis) : I've played and played over this game many times, still there's a chest I won't ever know how to get!!

· Mafia (uh oh) : the race mission - I left it today due to that

· Monkey Island : having to wait 10 minutes to actually see Guybrush die! lol

Probably many more but, oh well

Hexen on the PC.

There was one level where you had to jump from pillar to pillar and it was really difficult.

If you saved the game while you were safely standing in the middle of one of the pillars, when you reloaded it again you were sent plummeting down into the abyss below =/

Also one part where a magic staircase appeared but there was a gap, tried jumping the gap for ages then found out it was a bug and there shouldn't have been a gap at all -.-

First one that springs to mind is Rick Dangerous 2, which had a lot of "It's all gone now" moments, where you would progress really well for a while, then when you died, you would lose your concentration and lose about five lives in twenty seconds. It just always happened, lose one life, lose em all.

ANy game where you have to repeatedly repeat part of a level you can easily do with your eyes closed that still takes 10+ mins to do, just to get to a hard bit and die immediately until youve completed that same 10 minutes of a level enough times to figure out what to do.


and.. um... some of the latter bad guys in Zelda 2 on the NES. Couldn't figure out what the hell it was you had to do to kill them!

I spent so long on that one, the save game battery became flat and corrupted my game save, giving me infinite magic and some random start location along with corrupted info at the stats.


Mario DS: Going all the way up the stairs to the last level, entering a level, then falling out of the level, landing right in the front area of the castle, having to do the same run up the stairs again.


ANY game with a time limit.

ANY game that gives you 3 lives to complete everything, and once you lose, youre right back to level 1. Moreso, games that give you 3 lives to complete everything, and NO extra lives.

Final Fantasy: the stupid length battles. I loved FF8 but only after i gave me and the enemy 9999hp damage on each hit, so that it was still fair, but didnt take 30 mins to win a hard boss.

Megaman: most of the bosses.

Prince of Persia, WW:

Turning into the sand beast thing before your supposed to when you didnt have an earlier save.

Prince of Persia, WW: bugs that allow you to explore where you shouldnt be yet. Like, a big, pure black wall that i could walk through, to appear hanging the other side off the castle wall.

Prince of Persia, TSOT: SPAWN SPAWN SPAWN. stop that @#!*, i killed you already. 30 minutes of BLOCK, SWIPE, BLOCK, STAB.

Super mario Bros/world/any similar type game: Being killed at level 8-4 koopa, with 1 life left (and in some games, no continues) :/

So true - Crimson Skies springs to mind here. I love that game but theres a level where you have to follow 'cabbie' through a bunch of obstacles for five minutes then blow up a warehouse at the end - which involves flying through it repeatedly trying to take out the beams whilst under heavy fire. The bugger just won't collapse, then you have to start all over. Killed the game for me.

Ghosts n' Goblins - yeah it was a bit toeugh, but worth the effort.

In a similar vein to Ghosts & Goblins: Ghouls & Ghosts

You could level up your armour as much as you wanted and become TEH UBER KILLAH...

but ONE hit from an errant dandelion puff and you were down to your underwear and totally vulnerable just as much as if you had the pox-ridden armour from the start.

Bah.

Jim Brown: I hate that CD spin up pap, it's like the entire PC freezes for this "critical" proceedure. Hasn't anyone heard of caching dude, or multitasking!

Genexi2 : Are you telling me I wasted COUNTLESS HOURS of my life watching the summoning anims in FFX when I could have selected short version of was it X-II only?
"controller-throwing memories " lol, even my 4 year old son throws the controller!

Ferminho: Sof2 was annoying in places but very rewarding later on, give it another go!

Shambler: It was an ice level right and the pillers were icy omg that was bad, but the game rocked!

Cyg: Yeah I gotta amid, cool as PoP was, the combat was highly annoying.

FFX: This bit where you have to go from a round platform over a bridge to another one and so on until you get to the massive monster at the middle. Problem is each platform has REALLY hard monsters and if you die you gotta do them all again. You get to the end monster and he kills you immediately, repeat uh about 50 times (took nearly a day) and finally win, or did I give in? can't remember, but I did finish the game after 100 or so hours. Maybe I wasn't of the correct level or had "bad" tactics, it was that damn "turn to stone" crap that got me all the time.

Actually Tomb Raider was a bit of a bummer originally with those "save" crystals cunningly positioned in naff places.

Another game that I actually stopped playing despite it greatness was yes Grand Theft Auto 3 on PS2. It massively suffered from you are dead, now walk/drive to your mission pint, watch massive cut scene, drive to next place, complete mini mission but still not able to save, watch another cut scene (unskippable of course), finally get to next mission, get paast all the stuff you've done before and finally ... get killed again at the last minute ARG. I am not a teenager with 8 hours per day spare for gaming any more, gimme a break. A friend had the PC version and said you couldsave more often, thank christ.

Did anyone else have to tell the entire family to stop moving for 10 minutes whilst your spectrum loaded a game in case their tiny vibration jogged the tape machine that you had finely tuned to a volume 6.3?

I had a game on the C64 that would let you play a quick game of space invaders while the main game was loading from the tape (I'm not sure if that was common practice). The annoying part was realising that the main game was vastly inferior to the mini game i played during loading...

Agree 100%. Also positioning a savepoint with a 2 hour travel to the next huge dragon, which you need to go through 200 times before you beat anyway.


Which is why we deserve a big ending, more than just a lousy 'Congraturation'.


I'm confused. =]


Lol you know, as long as you have Quadri Magic, Ultima Sword and about half people's 4th lvl Limit Brakes, you should be able to get through that battle with him only casting it once ;]

Jams. Yeah Invadaload. There was another one as well with a grid or something. Rob Hubbard music too!

I hated Mafia for that level as well. I left it for about a month, then looked up online how to beat it and got past that level. The rest of the game is great. It's just that level that sucks.

It's the only fight to my knowledge in Final Fantasy XI (been playing it for nearly 2 years) that has seperate fights back-2-back, it be mission 6-4 in Chains of Promathia, it's setup so when you beat one of the battles, you zone into a safe area to quickly revive fallen members, then start the next fight, and repeat till you beat all 3 of the battle sessions. Not to mention the 45minute timer counts down during the cutscenes, the fights, and those quick breaks between the fights which you use to quickly heal up, so you have to be hasty, because it takes around a minimum of 30 minutes to finish the whole fight.


Yep, you have ;P, it's in both FFX & X-2, my friend for some reason keeps them on full even knowing about the shortened versions (which are a quarter of the length). Wish they were just super-short like they are in Final Fantasy XI.
(which in that game, the summoner job summons the monster, they do a 3 second "appearing" animation, and that's it)


Heh, never actually knew you could kill him when he was underwater in that one scene, was playing it on my cousins PC way back when, waited 7 minutes then got bored and climbed out.

Who doesnt hate CD spin-ups anyhow.....made my life hell in PSX ports where the CD in that system is spinning constantly, making the CD quickly accessible to start loading from, where-as in PC........5-10 second wait for the thing to start-up, that began my journey into making images of my CD for games that dont feature a "full install" option, so I dont have to deal with that nonsense.


I just used Quadra Magic-W Summon-Knights of the Round twice, that finished him off a little TOO quickly for me. There's also a save-point item you pick up in that tunnel which you can use whenever you want in that area which creates a save-point location in the scene you're in. I used mine at the point where all the characters rendezvous, then split up.

Anyhow, another couple games that annoyed me....

Turrican2 (PC port) - The fact monsters constantly drain your health-bar when you are in contact with them, in which the simplest monsters are able to kill you in around 2 seconds. Took me many hours of playing to memorize the majority of the game and the monster positions, just could never pass the 2nd last level without taking alot of deaths thanks to a bunch of tricking platforming sections.

Guitar Hero - The guitar solo's on expert difficulty, GAWD, like maybe give us a practice mode for those sections or something so I can get my hands around them, makes the hard stuff in the game Amplitude (both games made by same developer incidently) look like childs play.

I was confused about it being 'fun' in an 'annoying' thread ;]


I never got bored cuz I was wanting to see what colour his face would turn next ;]


Well obviously, but I was talking about getting things that are simple to get ;] Knights of the Round requires going through the most tedious, boring breeding to get it. The game doesn't even tell you how to get it, you need to read a walkthough ;]


That's the most logical place to put it... I just assumed he meant going thru the fights to Jenova, then Jenova, then lil'Seph... which was enough to put my g/f off playing it any more...

Ah, was being "sarcastic" there, wasn't too clear now that I've read over my post a couple times...


Wish my incomplete guide told me how to do the whole thing back when I didn't have net access, took me hours upon hours to figure out where the heck to get a "Great" Chocobo to breed with. (or whichever one it was that made a Golden Choco, been so long)

Anyhow, new annoyance!

Any game that uses password system - That is over 20 characters long, and has characters that look alike with it's current font. (the amount of NES games where I put a O {letter} instead of a 0 {zero}, or has capital & lower-case K looked alike, same for L)

I remember Mystical Ninja for the SNES having one of the largest password codes for saving game state that I have ever seen....., the many times I had to redo a couple sections due to my crappy printing (back then), and the games selected font.

Discworld II has some even more far-fetched puzzles... for example, at one point you need some mouse blood for some magic spell.

As far as I remember, this is what you had to do: Find corn, obtain some booze, soak the corn in the booze, feed it to a rooster, wait for the rooster to get drunk so you can grab it, take it to a catacomb in the graveyard, get it sober again, and get it to crow somehow. A resident vampire hears the rooster and thinks its daybreak, so he goes to sleep, putting his dentures in a cup next to his coffin. You can then swipe the vampire dentures to get the blood from the mouse.

(I don't remember where to get the mouse. ;-)

At another point you need to break down a wall. There's a large wrecking-ball machine, but it's not strong enough. You need to change the 1 Ton stick-on label on the ball to say 10 Tons, then it magically works.

(But other than two two things, a great game)

I don't remember the title, but back in the day there was some Monty Python side-scroller shoot-em-up game. You had to collect hidden 'brains' along the way.

After finishing the entire game, the entire ending consisted of something along the lines of (paraphrased) "You finished the game, but I'm afraid you didn't collect enough brains. So instead, here's a picture of a frog. <picture of frog>"

<picture of frog>" lol.

Yeah with security keys, if anyone designs one with similar letters in it like B and 8 printed on some kinda 9 pin dot matrix they really should be fired and never offered a job in IT again!

Any FPS that requires you to perform multiple tight jumps which rewards you with instant death on failure.

I love Crimson Skies, but had some annoying moments too. That one you mention, and specially the race (aw! I hate races!!) passing through all the tiny spaces and all that (when I made it through the bridge or the O on HOLLYWOOD etc. once, it was like WOW! - but I usually crashed in the next one)
I had to skip some missions in that game

I just remembered The Chaser, a very long, annoying FPS not very well known. I don't know why I finished it, it was entirely annoying >_<

God this totally anoying bit in GTA3 was having to do some kinda bike stunt thing through these rings within a really tight limit, going up stairs jumping on roofs etc. I did it in the end but must have take 100+ tries.

GTA3? Im sure I did that in MTA VC.

In GTA San Andreas there is something quite similar in a BMX stunt park, and then the terribly hard Trial cycle thing with rings, too - but finally made it one day.

Still there's this Driving School Lesson I can't get to 100%... I tried for *weeks*. I'd say it's a AGM too

Candidate for most annoying game award: Mortal Kombat 2 with it's miserable excuse for an AI. Try whatever you like and be certain the CPU does a perfect counter every time. Poor kids down at the corner must have spent hundreds of bucks trying to get past the semi-boss with the arms.

Metal Gear Solid 2: I think it was the second from last cutscene. I didn't mind watching the cutscenes (I wanted to cause i enjoyed the story) but that went on for half an hour (i think it was half an hour or my clock was broken). That annoyed me cause I knew I was quite near the end and I had to finish it before my friend (he had 2 extra days then me AND he took one of the school days off and I still beat to the end!)

Cygnus: You are totally right. IT was Vice City.

MVF: Yeah MGS2 had realy long cut scenes and some were a tad boring.

Burnout has the grand prix races where you ahve to do 3-4 tracks in sucession and get gold on them all to unlock a car and like you get to the 4th track and get silver ARG! The saving was setup so you couldn't just try that race again easily, if I knew I was gonna loose I just reset the console and it started from the last level again.

Serious Sam 2 and its lousy checkpoint system.

You have to kill thousands of stupid-looking enemies, and if you get killed by the last one, you need to restart again and again.

THE MOST annoying thing in all games ever is when you play an online game such as Battlefield 2, when you spawn and then die in 2 seconds. If this repeats itself for a few times you spend more time waiting than playing, and that happens VERY often regardless of your skill. That just drives me absolutely mad.


@Genexi,
thats BS mate, Myst is very very awesome, nothing annoying about it. Actually, only thing is all adventure games have it, when its more difficult to figure out what you can interact with than how you should interact with it.


Reading all this i realise i really dont play games that much. Which is good.

You know what I hate?

That moment when you realise how much of your life you've wasted sitting in front of a computer and staring at a flickering screen; the realisation of how many second, minutes, hours, days, months and years you've permenantly lost; the dawning dread that creeps over you when you contemplate all the friends and lovers you never met, all the places you never walked and all the wonderful things in life you never learned.

Yup, that's sooo annoying. Don't you just hate that too?

Mo you didn't; there were no bikes in GTA3 ;] You did that in Vice City... and by the way... it was much easier to go through all those hoops in a chopper ;]


Oh come on! That's not so hard =] Wait until the flying lessons =] Some of those really sheited me.


And then instead of doing something about it, you go online and moan to a bunch of other potential net dead heads? =] No, never happenned to me, I'm quite content in my blissful ignorance. =]

luke: No I don't hate it, I have met many friends over the years, lovely ladies and got a damn good job as a result of my computer addiction plus of course played some wicked games that are experiences in themselves.

I know it's an awesome series, was mainly annoyed with the fact all their logic puzzles are pretty much genuine, which makes them very difficult in their current nature, and for some reason I spend countless hours wandering the ages trying to accomplish something else while my brain cranks away at a possible solution to the previous piece.....and that usually takes a long while, dont quite like the puzzles in Myst IV that require timing & precision with the mouse either, those are a freaking pain to figure out.

Total Overdose: When I reaalized that I've finished the whole game for which I've just paid 30$ in less than 3 HOURS!!!


I don't think so. I think it's really annoying. And can't even compare with any of the LucasArts or Sierra masterpieces!

LALALALALALA-cant-hear-you-LALALALALA

playing Loom. that was pretty bad.

"LALALALALALA-cant-hear-you-LALALALALA" lol, why is it all kids actualy seem to develop that technique on their own?

Gene-memory. Must be.


BTW, you really suck at Burnout if you can't get gold in the races :)

I only had to repeat the driving-the-F1-car-sprint-timelimit race more than once before I got gold.

Got fed up of single-player Burnout though and went back to PGR2 on Live.

I hate it when I'm playing a game and Sticky Keys decides to popup when you least expect it. No I'm not disabled FFS, Go Away- Only to have it crash when you try to Alt-Tab back to your game.

vp: I meant the grand prix's with 5 tracks in a row where if you only got silver due to being pipped at the post by auto-catchup cars, you had to do them all again. There were one or two tricky ones later on in the game (I did finish it by the way). Also on Burnout 2 there was one grandprix with a really tough Ice level that kept me going for ages as the lead car wouls just get away so easily.

Believe me - I have completed almost everything but that. All schools at 100%, missions and sidemissions, just triathlon and that "(·%")=·$" driving school mission (fast lap)!



why? I love Loom! specially the spell system. The look-use-talk-give-etc is ok but seeing something different is always good :)

The dream sequence levels in Max Payne were horrible, and totally ruined the momentum of the game.

Any game of Championship manager where you make your third and final substitution only to have a player injured within the next 2 minutes. It happens regularly.

Getting trained to death in the Temple Of Three Winds in Anarchy Online because some level 60 Enforcer is too lazy to fight his way past cultists he can squash with 2 hits. This usually happens while you're about 1000XP short of levelling.

God yeah that dream sequence where you had to follow that thin line and kept falling off arg.

Or related to this, when a game uses 'CTRL' and 'ALT' as the primary and secondary fire keys, but switches back to the windows desktop to open the start menu if you accidentally hit the windows-key in between them.

Back in the DOS days, I remember mortal kombat on the PC. You could do a two-player version on a single computer/keyboard (poor keyboard!)

You could define your own key mappings -- but it didn't complain when one player had the 'CTRL' and 'ALT' among their keys, and the other had 'insert' and 'DELETE' among theirs. Now imagine 'ctrl', 'alt' and 'delete' being repeatedly hammered on during a DOS game. Oops. :-?

Hahah that'd be funny. Your oponent goes to do a 9 Hit Combo so you just hold down Ctrl and Alt. "Oh uh, I think It overheated from your extreme move."

On diablo 2 if you try to switch the map on with Tab whilst holding alt (it's a useful in game key for archers) of course it task swaps!

First crap key thing I ever saw was playing Doom or Quake via Windows 95 on a new Win 95 computer and of course you hit the windows key by accident all the time arg!

This is probably common to many scripted games, but in the game Heavy Gear 2 I was performing a mission where you had to get into an enemy compound and get someone out without being noticed, or something like that. It involved moving to an overlooking point on a cliff and waiting for the gates to open. Well I went there and the gates didn't open. I waited some more and they still didn't open. So, and this took many repeated attempts, I thought - what if I sneak past everyone and jump over the wall with jump jets and get inside. So I did, eventually, and was able to walk around within the compound for quite some time avoiding enemies before realising that there was nothing in there. Eventually if you tried to force the issue by alerting the guards to your presence (seems really odd that a 2-3 metre tall bipedal mechanical contraption can move silently only a few feet behind someone without being noticed) the mission ended in failure.

Gave the game a rest for a while and then went back to trying the top of the cliff - this time happened to put my cross hair over the specific pixel it needed to trigger the script and the gates opened at which point the mission could be completed.

Oh..I like Loom as well, but then I loved all those old Sierra/Lucas Arts adventures even on a monochrome CGA screen.

Another annoyance, but this is probably just me: Action Adventure Console games like Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers (Xbox version) - for people with no manual dexterity like myself it would be nice if you could change a setting so all those fancy combo moves which I can never manage could be pressed with a single button.

There was a way to disable those windows shortcuts for DOS games when rightclick/properties on the (DOS) shortcut icon in win95... Don't see it anymore in XP though.

xlsior: I wish I'd known that then, oh well.
Matty. Yeah actually I found all thoses combos a bit annoying in the Two Towers as well.

Actually, when the machine rebooted itself at that point, for a moment we were wondering what just happened... Until we realized that we had all three of those keys assigned. Duh. :-)

So, like, turn Sticky Keys off, then? ;]

Yeah and in your own games, code it out with Blackjumpers cool utility stickykeys.dll

Games that ship with flaws that make it so you can't ever complete the game... My first SNES game was as such.... and was also a surprisingly good game.. considering.. Home Alone 2 Lost in Newyork.

Get to the end.. climb the big tree.. and.. congrats.. you can't hold onto ledges like they had planed for. Bounce around endlessly, cause you can't go any farther.

there are other games... games that should have known better... One of the 2 GB color Zeldas has a dungeon that is unbeatable if you use the keys in the wrong order... A very big Zelda no-no, cause the tradition of all the 10 other games says that you can use your keys ANYWHERE that takes them, and you'll be fine. Nope... congrates buddy... you just saved a game that can't be completed... Why don't you start from the begining.

Also... any game that makes the camera, or other non-living technically non-existant aspect of the interface your worst enemy. I'm fine with the 10 ton gorilla that takes 100 trys to beat.... I don't want the fight to be ruined by the fact that I can't see him, or when I jump to attack he goes out of frame.

Also... now-a-days when the character isn't able to do what any normally intelligent being would... Like hop a fence or swim... or something along those lines.

unless it made sense... I can see a guy who lives in NYC not being able to swim (GTA3) but a guy in miami? (GTAVC)

Double Dragon for Atari 7800.....now how in the hell can anyone expect to beat that game? I litterally played it about 6 hours straight in order to pass the first stage....and that was a couple months ago!

FEAR / NOLF / NOLF2 - Game won't run at all if you have any codec packs installed that it doesn't like

STEAM - Pretty much all of steam. Anything related to steam. And I'm getting to dislike the word itself. In the future I plan to hate heated water vapor as well.

Any game that forces me to disable Alcohol120% or daemon tools cd emulator (or run anti-blaxx to fake it out).

Pretty much any old adventure game where you had to pixel-hunt to find a hidden object/key/etc.

Kanati: Yeah I had the same problem after going back to finish NOLF after 6 months, an installed codec had wrecked the game, fixed it though.

Reading long winded plot dialogues and then eventually getting into the game and finding it was just Diablo with no gameplay innovation or variation during the whole game at any time, and the plot didn't matter at all. This also occurred in Everquest, but I learned quickly to ignore all text and [look] for the square brackets.

To follow on from the LD comment in Everquest, it was also annoying to zone in to a new place looking for fun and finding a tonne of monsters there ... not the fault of the player that ran away through the zone line, just a daft game mechanic.

I also found it hugely annoying travelling ages along trivial routes to get to somewhere that there turned out not be any group slots open (ie: LOIO/CoM/Sebelis), or if there was a space it was for a different character class that i'd then have to run over aswell.

Also in Everquest, the difference in character power between regular players and raid guilders, making groups with strangers quite difficult for me because most stuff they could do was too easy for my characters and I wanted to play it for the social aspect of the game.

The thing I really hated about Everquest above all else though was the narrow level range of people that a character could group with, making it almost impossible for me to play with my RL friends who where either way ahead for the first few years, or way behind.

In almost all multiplayer RTS skirmish games resources are backwards, the person who starts to win gets all the benefits making it obvious who will win by the first attack, and requiring another hour or two's play just to prove the point.

RTS games in general because they proport to be 'combat' strategy games but winning is more about resource production, meaning they are really management games. Ironically that's probably why I enjoyed them, but it's clearly an issue for the trade descriptions act!

From my childhood any Spectrum game where the marketting guru's targetted girls, because making a lead character cute aswell as wear a bikini doesn't make her something I can relate too and taking the guns away really doesn't leave much of a game when all that remains is left right and jump.

Endless sequels to games i've already played, when I didn't much like them the first time around.

Most modern AAA games where gameplay is no longer designed around the player's mental processes and instead focuses on linear story telling and fancy graphics. I played that game already.

In fact, my list of gripes is endless - which is why I very rarely play games any more. I preffer to write half finished ones instead.

Becky: With C&C I found yes it was a resource menagement game (which I enjoyed) but also you could actually get some decent combat tactics going too which could wipe out a stonger force, plus there's always the nasty stuff like destroying harvestors hehe, actually we used to have a "No destroying harvesters" rule for LAN games, except that every so often one of your men might just accidentally start following it and shooting and you didn't really notice, honest.

Killing harvesters and fighting for the strategic ore fields was the entire strategic precept of the game. If you had more resources than your opponent then it didn't matter if you had to replace an entire invasion army three times over - if you have the resources, you have them. Red Alert was one of the most imballanced games in the RTS genre by rewarding the winning player. If you wasted your time with combat strategy then you where not concentrating enough on the only thing that mattered, the efficient mining and processing of ore. The capture and consolidation of mine fields by virtue of parking your invasion force there until it was ready to roll, and the invasion of enemy bases simply by clicking the mini map and not bothering to look again...

Yeah I know what the main aim was, and nobody could ever beat me, and they really tried! I was just saying that if you got good at the combat tactics it could come in useful at times, but I see your point. Did you ever play the sort of game where you immediately send your starting force out to blow up their base before they've even got it properly started, it's risky but you can win in a couple of minutes. We banned these sort of games too as "unsporting".

Yeah, I started doing the TA commander bomb in my LAN group which was a great one where you slung him to the bottom of a lifter and just flew him at the enemies first couple of factories - nearly always huddled around that first defence gun - which ironically would shoot the commander and activate his self destruct, wipping out the other player.

It was especially funny in a downloaded mod patch we tried that gave me clone commanders with a much smaller bang but the same visual explosion, the sheer horror on their faces as their onscreen display dissapeared under sustained commander bomb explosions left me laughing so hard I lost 5 minutes of play time.

We tried alsorts of rules, 2 hour build up delay - but that only meant I had two hours to gain resources 3 times faster than them, making a bigger imbalance and the actually quite taxing all against Becky game, where I fought everyone.

In my LAN group, out of hundreds and hundreds of games (40+ hour TA sessions occured almost every weekend) I lost one game when we got the Core Contingency expansion and I was introduced to the receiving end of a Krogoth for the first time - much to my suprise, and with them laughing for a good 5 minutes before they recovered.

Another game I just plain lost, fair and square and no excuses - they played well and I didn't. I played online too and I lost 1 game at that when I got ganged up on very early, I guess they knew what they where in for.

The groups replacement for TA was Warzone 2100 which I never truly got the hang of to be honest but luckily for me it didn't last long and we moved onto other game genres. We didn't go back to RTS' again until Sudden Strike which lasted for two sessions and then everyone conceded that there was no beating Becky and I had to play Battlefield ruddy Vietnam again :(

We dont meet often anymore and we've played so few RTS' in recent years that I have no doubt i'm fair game for above average players - but all in all i'd say i'm pretty good at RTS and the problem with that is I want them to challenge me and they just cannot. The format is wrong.

It's like playing Quake against a good player, we had a guy from a fairly good Quake clan join our group for a while and we decided to try him at his own game - it was impossible, he slaughtered all of us heavily.

Quake suffers from RTS syndrome in that the rewards for good play are too strong. A good player will always get those rewards over a lesser player because a lesser player relies more on chance to get the upper hand.

In a game like Battlefield Vietnam a total FPS newb can run over the crest of a hill with a machine gun, see an enemy, watch him for 20 seconds whilst he finds the right control, and put the guy down with a hit. The better player will always have an advantage, but the newb stands a chance.

In Quake one shot wont kill except with the railgun but that's a dark art all to itself. So the better player always wins even if the difference in skill is only marginal.

The same is true in RTS', only the problem is even more dire. The better player is practically indestructible because they only need be marginally better than the second best player and they can control the entire map and kill everyone.

I think it was Double Dragon II (possible I), on an ancient PC. The objective is to rescue some girl, kicking the living daylights out of everything on your way there. I made it all the way to the final screen. Finished the end boss, and started walking towards the girl... and the game locked up on me.

Now *that* is annoying: completely finishing a game, but not really.

Banshee: Once when playing Red Alert, my friend, who was a little wasted, knocked a glass of red wine on himself but he didn't notice. When questioned later he said he just though it was the blood of the men splattering on him as he ran them over with his mega tank!

I found that in C&C and Red Alert the limiting factor was actually the interface, and having to scroll up and down to click all the things to build, it shoulda been a panel with all the options on it at once, just small icons. Of course learning the in-game hot keys was totally essential as well.

Yes the construction interface in Red Alert was rather poor, Total Annihilation definately did it better but Red Alert Tiberian Sun didn't appear to bother trying to learn any lessons from either it's own failings or the sucessful aspects of TA.

They still do the resources backward too.

I think most RTS have the same bad aspects, as Becky says... I generally get bored soon, but C&C (1) and Red Alert 2 (and great Warcraft II) were the ones I liked most.

This talking about typical RTS, but I prefer ones like Blitzkrieg II or Praetorians... because there is no ever-winning recipe which you learn and repeat over and over; you have to think everytime you play to adapt your strategy, and depending on the enemy your strategy can be an extreme victory or extreme loss.
However BK2's solo missions become repetitive in just 6 or 7 games, and multiplayer is pretty bad. But the playability/game design is good!