Written by Citizen Alpha Monday, 01 March 2010 23:53

10 Absurd Boundaries

Picture this: your some mega hulking badass with a flaming sword, laser eyes, and super strength. You just slaughtered thousands of enemies and pulled the still beating heart from the chest of some mega boss. Despite all your evident awesomeness you still can't manage to make it over that rickety sheep pen fence. No, you've got to go find the gate key to get that glowing sword out of the center. Nevermind you can jump 8 feet in the air, only good that will do will cause some mime routine of you smashing your face on a big invisible nothing.

9 Single Player Console Games

I'll get a lot of grief for this but I rarely like them. I buy consoles so I can sit down, be social, and play my friends. After all, I just dropped an extra 120 bones on controllers so all my friends can play. I can't count how many times I've hit the rental store and did the "game box flip and shuffle" reading the backs of all the games I could reach just to see if they're multiplayer simultaneously. I understand every game can't be mulitplayer. It just doesn't work like that. But don't dupe me into dropping a ton of money on controllers that are only going to work for 10% of the games.

8 No Gray Area between hardcore and casual

My life changes around quite a bit. Sometimes I've got gobs of free time and can put it into a really crazy complicated in depth role playing game. Other times I've only got a spot hour here and there to have a little fun. I know I'm asking a lot here but is there any way to have a hardcore and casual setting on some games? Maybe an RPG that gains skills and stats twice as fast and drops a few tedious points. Build a robust game then pop in an option to shave off a few features. I know if someone asked me to do less at work I'd be pretty apt to oblige.

7 Video Games that think they're books

I don't mind a good amount of story in a game. A great story can really make a great game. It's all about the delivery though. If a game uses more than two sentences in a row to further plot, then it's completely forgotten what medium its delivering a story in. You don't see TV shows scrolling text 30 minutes into the show to further the plot along, do you? Why do we put up with it in video games. Now I'm not talking about item descriptions or in game bonus literature. Stuff like that is fine and doesn't deserve a cut scene or elaborate animation. The plot though? Come on put some effort forth!

6 Things easier to do in real life

Most games focus on fantasy and doing things you can't quite do in real life. It's like action porn. I can't ever picture myself in a situation where I'd be getting into a slow motion gun fight. Some games put all the focus on making the controls easy for the whizz bang aspects of the game but never quite test the basic actions. Dodge bullets? Check. Summersault dive down the stairs? Cake. Step over a shoebox while people are shooting at me? Disaster.

5 Dumb Logic

Most of us have played comedy orient adventure games in the past and dumb logic to that regard is pretty commonplace and fun. When you've got a game that's playing itself off as serious you expect a large degree of rational thinking or deductive reasoning. So when you talk to the chef and get a brief on nuclear propulsion, crawl through an air vent when there's a perfectly good door right around the hallway, or have to bend over backwards to do something for some NPC who wouldn't save his life for a sandwich, you're left a little irritated.

4 Half Assed Replay Value

As you watch the end credits roll of a great game you really enjoyed you feel a twinge of regret for completing the game. Wondering if you missed any hidden treasures during your play. You felt thorough but you just never know. Then at the end of the game you get informed, "Play the game through again but with a blue hat!" The only thing worse than playing the exact same game through twice is playing the exact same game through twice under the guise it's going to be different. Making the game absurdly easy the second time through by giving me super weapons doesn't make it any more replayable either.

3 Unskippable Cutscenes

Everyone hates these. I make it a point to watch pretty much every cut scene that comes up at least one time because I'm interested in seeing them. Oftentimes you're going to run across the same cut scene again depending on the game. When I was playing assassins creed I had a hardware issue where the game would crash right when it entered a certain point in the tutorial. I had to watch the beginning cut scene each and every time to see if my tweaks took place. Probably saw it like 20 times. Almost completely gave up on the game before it even started.

2 Protagonists with long hair

Stop it. Just stop it. Guys don't wear their hair like that. Well, not guy guys. It's really hard to feel like a badass super hero when you're forced to sit through cut scenes of some starry eyed metrosexual gazing off into the distance with his obviously-used-a-straightener hair rustling in the breeze. Stop giving these guys female love interests too. We all know what's going on here and unless that princesses fun parts dangle I really don't think there's much attraction there. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

1 Getting Good

You find a game you absolutely love and adore. You play it to death. Immersing yourself into every aspect of the game, reading about it, talking about it, and eagerly awaiting until the next time you can play it. By doing this you doom no one to ever want to play it with you. No one wants to play a game they always lose at, I can't blame them. For me it's the worst aspect of gaming because you're always doomed to never be able to play your favorite games with your friends. Stupid video games.