Controls / UI and changing disks are the big ones.

Long games with a limited number of lives are another one. I'll never beat the classic Sonic games without cheating, which means I won't bother with them at all.

The two things that popped into my head right away were pixel perfect jumping and the "you need to add more quarters" difficulty that came over from arcade cabinets.

I remember so many games played back on the NES that I just couldn't do well in because I was still young and had still developing hand eye coordination and just couldn't make those idiotically precise jumps.

The second is just the idiocy that they used in arcade games to make up for how small the games actually were, and it ended up carrying over into a lot of early console games. Probably PC type games as well, but I didn't get into those until the mid to late nineties. (Gradius 3 was one of the big offenders I remember, and it was freaking toned down for its SNES release I'm told.)

I don't miss having a limited number of "lives" and "continues". Nothing was more frustrating than to get to the last level of a game only to die on your last life with no more continues.

Now-a-days, I can retry and replay as much as I want. Not succeeding at an attempt is punishment enough. I don't need the aggravation of re-starting the whole game over again if I make a mistake.

Oh I also enjoy being able to resume games at all.

Many of them, in particular action games, simply had no saves. Each gaming session meant restarting the game from the beginning.

When you were lucky, you were rewarded some codes, to write down snd type in next time, allowing you to start from a given level. I don't miss those very much either.

I enjoy the fact that there are certain art styles that have carried over from past games, but we have a much better sense of what is acceptable when it comes to graphics. The same can be said about controls. We know what works, and we know what doesn't work in these two categories. Customers expect a certain level of quality when paying a premium price for a modern game.

Indie game devs shouldn't be underselling themselves despite the saturated market, imo.

Grid Paper. Auto-maps should have been the very first thing invented for RPG's.

And what I DO miss the most is MANUALS. Every new game I buy now I feel like I'm playing blind because of the lack of explanation. I had the same ritual for EVERY game I ever bought. Buy it. Open it. READ THE MANUAL. Then install it. And not only would a good manual explain the way the game works so that you feel at least semi-competent playing it, but a really good one would have you watering at the mouth ready to play. I am reminded here of Fallout 1's manual, Realms of Arkania manual, and the manual for the old (German I think??) RPG where there really wasn't any "story" or main quest to beat buy your goal was fame (and fortune). Damned memory is so bad I can't remember the name of that one despite enjoying the hell out of it.

For awhile I boycotted (refused to purchase) any game without a manual. And once again (sigh) consumers made it clear that developers could sell games without adequate explanation.. save money (and make more profit)... and that was just A-ok with them. I'm going to die without understanding today's consumers. Which is okay.. because they're WRONG. And when they grow up they'll likely learn that. Or not.

I love that you mention art styles and your avatar is from Machinarium. That game had a great art style, I thought.

This.

Bad controls and DRM in the form of requiring a manual to get through the game, literally.

Absolutely amazing art style in Machinarium. One of my favourite games of all time!

Lack of drag select, as in Dune 2, or only very limited drag-select as in Warcraft 1.

CD that had to be in the cd-drive while playing.

For me it was buy it (knowing full well the system requirements before-hand), and while installing it, read the manual so I could play it once installed (and the old OSes restarted).

Now most games follow the same controls as other games of its type, and the first levels are nearly always designed to babysit the new player and gradually introduce gameplay mechanics as they go.

I miss those SPECIAL manuals those old top-shelf games had that were made of special paper, made to feel old & such. A nice touch that was.

- counter-intuitive UI
- disk swapping
- unfair, rage-inducing difficulty

Edits:
- green blood or any other stupid censoring
- lack of auto-mapping
- pixel hunting


Do you mean Darklands?