Let's be honest, all games have their bad moments. Even games that get perfect scores across the board aren't flawless, but they can still be great games.
However, some games also have some horrible decisions that make my head want to explode as I try to figure out what on earth they were thinking. Here are just a few bad decisions that have ruined otherwise good games.
[Bioshock Inifinite, Skyrim, and Assassin's Creed III contain spoilers]
10. Starfox - Jumping the Dino
If you were a 90s kid, you remember Star Fox. If you were really in to gaming, you remember what happened to our favorite fox when he made the transition from Nintendo 64 to Gamecube. If you need a refresher, try to imagine a game where one of your favorite games took the character out of his ship, gave him a magical staff, and is told to go save dinosaurs or something. Heck, my explanation is probably more coherent than whatever was pitched at a design meeting one day.
Now true, the game had an actual story that didn't involve a floating head that floated there while you shot it. But I will never accept that Star Fox needed to be pulled out of his ship in order to have an interesting story. Star Fox Assault tried to make him a bit less pathetic by giving a mix of ground-based and aerial combat, but the game felt more like a final cash-in than an actual attempt to revitalize the series.
9. Bioshock Infinite - Lack of Combat Options
I love the Bioshock series. The first game broke amazing ground in terms of story and making traditional gameplay elements feel fresh. The second was good in its own ways, and I think it was a worthy entry in to the series. Then Bioshock Infinite was previewed, and many were hesitant about leaving the familiarity of an underwater Rapture and taking the story of a failed utopia above the clouds.
Bioshock's story can (almost) do no wrong in my eyes. I am happy to see unique ways in which an ideal society fails, because so far they always manage to deliver a beautiful punch to the gut when it comes to analyzing the human condition. However, story is usually pushed to the background when there are enemies in view, and gameplay is huge for me in any game. So when Biocshock Infinite promised the ability to use Elizabeth's wormhole powers to bring in items from another universe, I was all in.
Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that all the tactical options I'd imagined where actually completely arbitrary. During a gunfight there were specific areas on the map where you could use her powers to summon a wall, turret, grappling point, or ammo to the battlefield. There was nothing tactical about the decision - if you saw a funky blotch on the environment, just aim at it and Elizabeth would bring it to life. While I expected to pull in items from all eras and all universes, I instead spawned the exact same items in my current universe, because apparently multiverses all mirror their technology and architecture.
Not only that, but the special abilities were awful. Bioshock 1 and 2 had a certain unique charm to their powers, and you had the option to improve your guns, improve your powers, or mix it up. With Infinite, powers seemed destined to play second fiddle to guns. Overall the game had very weak gameplay with a story that almost made up for it.
8. Resident Evil - Artificial Difficulty
Despite its popularity, Resident Evils' difficulty was archaic. Rather than making you feel tension through immersion, it seems like every game insisted on having some arbitrary means of difficulty. The first games had really bad aiming mechanics coupled with camera angles that were obviously meant to make things difficult.
The worst offender is moving while shooting. Or the complete lack thereof. I get it - they want you to feel the tension as a zombie or mutant is bearing down on you. They don't want it to be a run & gun shooter. But this isn't the 90s anymore, and players don't want unrealistic mechanics that only exist to shackle them.
How when we had shuffling zombies, and I didn't have as much gaming experience, I didn't mind as much. But a game released in 2009, with fast-moving enemies, has no excuse for making you plant your feet every time you want to take a shot at a horde of creatures that want to eat you. The developer says they want it to maintain that Resident Evil feel, as though someone would bump their left thumbstick while aiming, realize their character can move, and yell "Nope, this isn't Resident Evil! I want my money back!" It's laziness, because without adding something artificial to the difficulty, they would have to find another way to up the game's tension.
7. Dark Souls - Poor PvP servers
PvP in Dark Souls involves one player having their world invaded by another, and things become "kill or be killed" in the truest sense. I played Dark Souls for a long time before I was brave enough to try it, because after being invaded while fighting two other enemies I realized that I wasn't nearly up to snuff.
Fast forward several months, and I had a character ready to roll with the big boys. As I began my first real fight with a player, I utilized a lot of evasive maneuvers in order to catch the enemy from behind and stab him in the back. When I finally got my moment and went for an easy kill, their character parried my attack, something impossible to do from behind, and killed me immediately. After several more attempts I realized that Dark Souls' servers were so shoddy that I was almost an entire second behind what was actually happening. That seems small, but when you can roll behind someone and stab them in the back in less than 1/4 second, or when many attacks require split-second perfection... it matters. Dark Souls 2 is supposed to have an improved system, but after two months of trying to enjoy PvP I have a lot of reservations about a colossal improvement.
6. Skyrim/Oblivion - The End
Although the endings to these were different, they held an equal level of disappointment. These are games that feature huge landscapes with hundreds of areas to explore, fun classes, great story, and the ability to play almost any story you want. So at the end of Oblivion, when you're battling through hordes of evil creatures who are sacking the capital, you kind of expect to feel like a king at the end of it. Instead you're treated to an epic battle featuring a giant demon, a fire dragon, and your tiny little character trying not to get crushed underfoot. Woo...
Skyrim had you fighting a lot of dragons during the game. Knowing that the final battle would be another dragon fight, I expected something breathtaking. Instead the dragon had some unique abilities that did nothing to change my typical means of killing dragons. I had a team of champions helping me out, and honestly they were a lot better at it than I was. Much like Oblivion's fight, I barely felt like a participant during the end of my character's story. Sure I got to attack the dragon, but it was all a mixture of him flying around, followed by him not flying around and getting pummeled until he started flying around again.
5. Legend of Zelda - Motion Control
The Wii completely killed my favorite game series for me. I love the Legend of Zelda series, especially when it's on a console. When I first learned that the newest game would rely heavily on motion control, something that has always felt incredibly gimmicky, I had 0 hope that the game would be good. Even using the Wii Motion Plus to improve the controller's accuracy, the Legend of Zelda just isn't a game I was willing to risk with the Wii's buggy controls.
I bought it anyway because I wanted it to be good. Unfortunately the game was even worst than I imagined. The controls just didn't have the needed precision for an otherwise amazing game, and I never finished it because that single game was single-handedly obliterating every good memory I had of its predecessors. The horror was made even worse because there was no options to play the game like it was meant to be played - sitting on the couch with a normal controller. So horrible was my experience that I never bought another Wii game after that. I know a lot of people loved the game, but I found it to be a gimmicky joke that turned me away from the series altogether.
It's an anthropomorphic ice cream cone.
I understand that there are something like 1,000 Pokemon out now, and that some are going to be duds. But the charm and characterr of the first few games are gone. Look up any Pokemon from the last few games and you'll wonder if someone spaced on their design deadline and decided to bring their child's doodle notebook to work. Even the coolest looking ones can barely match up to the average looking creatures from previous generations. And with the games never really changing, there are times when I'm glad I shook myself of the series before my childhood memories were tainted by the lazy garbage players are stuck with today.
3. Call of Duty - Emblem Creation
One of my favorite things in Call of Duty is completing challenges to unlock emblems, backgrounds, and titles for your player card. Finding a combo that looks cool is exciting, especially when it somehow reflects who you are. Modern Warfare 2 had a mixture of great emblems peppered with an annoying amount of childish weed references. When Black Ops released, they decided to instead allow players a full suite of shapes and tools to let them craft their own emblems, because what could possibly go wrong?
Oh yeah, many gamers have the maturity level of an 8 year old. The number of racist, pornographic, and otherwise idiotic symbols I saw was astounding. Meanwhile Treyarch is sitting there with their minds blown, seemingly unable to believe that their plan somehow failed! It's a good thing the game itself was the worst in the series, because I'd have hated to see a good game ruined because people find swastikas, KKK art, and penises to be original. They decided to save that for Black Ops 2.
2. Battlefield - Losing an Hour of Progress
Despite a lot of my beef with the Xbox version of Battlefield 3, I really enjoyed the game when I got it for free on PC. However, one thing that absolutely infuriated me was having my game lock up after playing in a single game for nearly an hour. My favorite thing in the game was those huge objective games that featured a lot of back and forth. Sometimes someone would have a custom server where games would have their score cap increased, making them go on forever.
However, if your game crashed, it was all for naught. Data only saved at the end of the game, and anything you accomplished in-game was wiped if their servers had even the slightest hiccup. Sometimes it didn't even have to be a long game - if they were having issues, you could play a "short" game and lose 20 minutes. Over the course of a night, a week, or a month, those little losses really started to add up. I could forgive it on Xbox because the servers had some growing pains at launch, and I had other games to move on to when I finally gave up on the game. But when I starter BF3 on PC only a few months ago, I was dumbfounded that I was still losing progress because of crashing servers! I hear BF4 is suffering the same headaches, so I am politely, but vehemently, passing on the series until they stop wasting my time.
1. Assassin's Creed III - Releasing the Game
Too mean? Not even close. This is the least polished game I've played since the early Gamecube days. I love the Assassin's Creed series. Although they never really change the core gameplay, the ongoing story is fascinating, and the gameplay and level design are usually quite solid.
Apparently they listened to people crying to something new, and decided to take things like coherent story, responsive controls, and a functional game and just got rid of them. In its place was a game that seemed to completely bypass playtesting in a mad dash to get it out the door for their annual release. The only part of the game that felt complete was the side-missions involving naval warfare, which is interesting since that's what the newest game focuses on.
The world of AC3 was horrendous. After the 10 hour tutorial, I would waste 10-20 minutes running to a new area, searching online for information because the game's help system was nonexistent, or just trying to find something interesting to do. It was only a fit of stubbornness that even had me completing the game, because I would have given up on it before the tutorial, which I reiterate was 10 hours long, was even finished.
This game never should have been released in the state it was in. It was littered with bugs, had sadistic design decisions, played horribly, told a terrible story, and gave me one of the most unsatisfying "boss fights" I've ever experienced. I would have rather had choice taken away from me a la Oblivion and Fable 3, rather than be subjected to the game's failed attempted at a dramatic ending that had me running through sluggish platforming, falling through a dock, shooting the badguy who stood over you and monologued while you shakily grabbed a pistol that was obviously next to you, had you sloooooowly limping after the bad guy, the somehow immediately finding him in a tavern in the middle of nowhere (all while shuffling your way there, yet never passing out or getting better).
I could go on and on about every single poor decision made for this game. You could even argue that I have a vendetta against the game, because there's just no excuse for what was shipped out. Even if AC4 is amazing, I can't forgive the atrocity that wasted several hours of my life.
Well, that was therapeutic. Now let's hear some game decisions that had you shaking your head in disbelief!
See you tomorrow!
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