1Up - Top 5 Hates in Games

magerette

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1UP posts their view of the 5 most annoying things in games today. Obviously console-focused, it still brings up a few frustrations found in pc games as well, such as the irritating cutscene and the even more irritating save point:
1. Unskippable Cut-scenes

Cut-scenes are fine, no problems there. I'd much rather actually be playing a game 99 percent of the time, but sometimes I don't mind wasting a minute to go "oooooh, airships." And then there are the times that I just plain ...don't want to. Maybe I already played through this thing once. Maybe the voice acting is embarrassing to the point that I want to mute the TV on the off-chance anyone nearby might suspect that I'm enjoying it. Maybe I just wanted to play the game more..I can appreciate that making little movies to pepper through the game probably cost a lot of money and effort...but making it impossible to just skip the things isn't by any means going to increase my enjoyment..Bonus points for anyone who actually puts an unskippable scene right after a checkpoint.
2. Save Points

Which brings us to this. Nobody should ever be faced with the prospect of saying "right after I get to a save point" when someone is calling you to bed. Actually, you deserve whatever happens if you ever actually say that, but the temptation shouldn't exist. In the age of hard drives there aren't many sound technological reasons why I can't save my game at any time. It's even possible to do it without screwing up the difficulty. Not every game is going to be as good when faced with the quicksave-quickload abuse that got me through Half-Life, but you can have the option of a less-permanent quicksave that's wiped after you load it, leaving me to rely on actual save points for making progress.
More information.
 
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Totally disagree on the save points issue.

Some games, and I am thinking mainly of the baldur's gate series or champions of norrath, work well with the save points. I mean there has to be some penalty for bad play. At least it's a critera for my games,.. I don't think we've seen the best use of save points even from those games, but even for action games I think there are good formula's that could be used.

If your being called to bed and you have to go right away, you may want to also grow a set of balls and just suck it up and get to the save point.
 
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In BG you can save your game at any point. There's also an autosave, but that's not what the article is discussing. The article discusses games where you actually can't save your game except when you reach certain points.
 
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What annoy me the most about cutscenes is not when they're unskippable. I do want to see them usually, and since I rarely replay games, it's only frustrating when there's a long scene just before a tough sequence I failed a dozen times before. My problem is when they can't be paused, and with the increasing use of fully voiced scenes instead of text it's getting worse. I mean, seeing a long FMV after a hard boss fight is nice, but if the phone decides to ring at that precise moment it can be frustrating. Okay, I get maybe 1 call per month on average so it's not that bad, but everytime there's a cutscene I hope my parents won't decide it's time to check if I'm still alive.

As for saves points, I agree with the article. I HATE save points. For me, it only add uneeded stress when I haven't found one in a long time. I don't like getting killed because the game suddenly threw a monster way too strong for my level just because I was apparently a little bit too curious for my own good. And, well, power outages can happen...
 
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I think by now most people know how much I dislike both Save Points and Cut-scenes!! :)
 
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If your being called to bed and you have to go right away, you may want to also grow a set of balls and just suck it up and get to the save point.

Or realise that games are not more important than a relationship, and realise that game designers should acknowledge that their audience has lives and does not put the game first.
Gamers should not be forced to replay the same content over and over and over again because of things like game difficulty or real life taking precedence. Why should I be forced to replay a sizeable chunk of a mission because something extraneous comes up? Why can't I do the rational thing and save my game and come back to that same point later? It's absurd and utterly crap design.
 
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heheh 1up is on my list of most hated sites does that count?
 
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Actually, there is one thing I hate worse than save points- those games which save continuously so you don't get any 'real' save games!! You make a mistake, TOUGH, start the game again!!
 
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I'm not a fan of save points either, but when I think back to some of the early RPGs, I have to admit that there was a certain thrill in going for a long journey into the wilderness knowing you can't save the game. It forces you to really prepare for the journey, and it's hard to describe the sense of relief when, with just two hit points left, you suddenly see a town in the distance. Only a few more steps to safety...

Nowadays, I'm a compulsive user of the quicksave key and certainly wouldn't want to go back to the old days, but every once in a while I get that wistful, nostalgic feeling telling me that something special has been lost from RPG gaming forever.
 
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In BG you can save your game at any point.

He was talking the a-RPG-lite 'Dark Alliance' games - console stuff.

Playing handhelds I see the save-point and checkpoint stuff *all the time* and I have come to the conclusion that 'it depends'. While I prefer save-anywhere systems, I am OK with well placed full-save checkpoints.

What I hate worst is non-saving checkpoints (i.e. when you power off you find they didn't save) or checkpoints that are poorly placed. I'm finishing up Medal of Honor Heroes 2 on the PSP and it is littered with instances of checkpoints that occur after a major firefight that comes after a major objective completion. So rather than just starting after you destroy X, you have to start waaay back before getting to the firefight that got you to the destruction point that then leads to the firefight. To me that is up there with unskippable cutscenes.

Anything that treats my time poorly annoys the crap out of me.
 
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non configurable controls and games that dont allow the use of the mouse wheel.

This is the year 2007, get w/ the program you know
 
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Gee, it's about time the console crowd realize how developers are crapping on them and games, it's only taken 7 freaking years of xbox crap! :rolleyes:
 
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