I actually liked the driving sections in ME1, but the scanning in ME2 was... I don't know who thought that would be a good idea.

Also, another feature I could live without: Jumpscares.

One or two in strategically placed points is OK, constant use of them though make the game feel "cheap" and dissolves any tension may have existed. Work harder dear developers and build a world that will make me anxious, desperate, make me wanna rage quit (Oh mighty Alan Wake!) without cheap tricks, just immersion.


Call me weird but I liked the scanning because I could eat & play at the same time! The driving in ME1 left me with very good impressions (the vistas were nice) & the physics were good enough for a vehicle like Mako.

You're weird! :-P

Agree about the Mako driving. I still have a couple of nice screenshots of cruising alien planets.

totally agree on that, shame really as the story looked great, couldnt get past the lousy keyboard interface

I played it on console, so the controls weren't too bad. The biggest issue I had was that a lot of the cutscenes were throwing QTEs at you to make the scene advance in a favorable way, so its like "Well, I could watch for the QTE buttons, or I could watch the story that I'm supposedly unveiling".

Yes! Those are the worst!

Artificial difficulty (several newer games which claims to be "hardcore" relies on this one), becoming frustrating instead of a joy.

Dark Souls II actually has the worst artificial difficulty enemy I've ever seen. There is a boss called the Royal Rat Authority whose attacks are utterly broken and you start the fight with four minion rats that stunlock, poison and kill you in 3-4 hits before the main boss.

- Quick timer events

- Artificially restrictive mouselook preventing you from looking straight up or straight down. The Witcher 3 does this which is particularly annoying when fighting flying creatures that are directly about you and his neck is locked preventing looking up which is pretty dumb. Even worse in the boat.

- Extreme low resolution pixelated art in brand new games attempting to be "retro".

- Extremely complex combos that involve memorizing complex button press sequences in very fast order to pull off, which leads to 99% of gamers just doing random button mashing. Yes I'm looking at you Mortal Kombat (every game). Still like the game, but most moves are painfully difficult to do and that ends up taking away from the fun for me at least.

- Forcing you to reload from a checkpoint just prior to a long cut scene that you have seen 50 times already and have no way to skip, which is then immediately followed by an incredibly difficult task which you're very likely to get killed and have to watch the cut scene again, and with no ability to do manual save after the cut scene. The Witcher (first game) does this for example.

- Automatically detecting that you happen to have a gamepad plugged into your computer and the game uses the gamepad by default with no way to disable it other than exiting the game, unplugging the gamepad and then starting the game again in order for the keyboard and mouse to work.

- Forcing you to fight a bunch of enemies shooting-gallery style in a linear map (or the entire game) and if you die you're forced to go back to the last checkpoint. Similar to my above entry but this one is more "rail shooter" type.

I used to share your opinion, but some great retro games eased me into this graphic style. Have you played The Last Door? Extremely atmospheric and quite scary for a radically pixellated game.

* annoying check-points...common in most action games, including GTA V
* the ideology of open-world > good level design...as in Shadow of Mordor
* escort missions...or 'automatic stress generators'
* completely unexpected QTEs...if you're gonna use them, be consistent
* unremarkable boss fights....Deus Ex Human Revolution...I can't recall a single boss in that game

With ridiculously high system requirements. Man, the graphics of some newer games look like ported directly from a C-64, but the requirements are as high as the ones for Witcher 3.

- Permadeath. There`s nothing more annoying than playing a game for hours, dying without any chance to survive and then you are forced to start the game again from the very beginning. Can`t somebody tell those programmers that there is an invention, called "Savegame"?

- Loosing a game even though you won it. I only saw that in one game: Hammerfall. You can beat the endboss but still loose the game, because you didn`t find the myriads of planks hidden in the game.
Don`t get me wrong, I love Hammerfall. But since I`m simply not able to find all the planks I cannot escape after the endfight, and therefore I kinda loose the game.

Actualy, I enjoyed the planet scaning more than driving that car. I think this is related to the point 2 of OP: Genre switches. I wanted to play an RPG not a racing/driving game. Granted, the scanning was pretty boring.
I don't know which game featured this thing first (GTA 3 or maybe some Unreal Tournament) but I see this ideea implemented quite often: if in this game you can SHOOT than you should also be able to DRIVE and SHOOT at the same time.

Oh yes and if anybody knows a mod for "Risk of Rain" that disables permadeath and enables a save option, I'd be very much obliged and the same goes for "The Binding of Isaac".

Do you mean Hammerwatch? I agree and finished it multiple times but I always missed two or three extremely well hidden planks and in the end always "lost" because of this.
Giving gamers a small easter egg for finding ridiculously well hidden stuff is good, but penalizing everyone else in this way is bad.