I figured by your avatar that you must have liked it. Yeah, I regret not picking it up during the sale, instead of Pacific Assault. I'm pretty sure I would have had mor fun.

Anodyne + gap jumping mechanics

I realized after I did it Zone of the Enders cat would have been even more awesome.

You only realize the full magnitude of Hotline Miami when your out of games to play and your forced to push through it.

Oh yeah, there are a few other games that do this. No matter how enjoyable they are, that's a definite no-no. On a similar note, any game that takes longer than 30-40 minutes to play through and doesn't give you the option to save your progress - regardless of whether it's challenging or just a walking simulator, that's not the point; I can't really enjoy a game if I run the risk of having to start all over again, just because I got tired or something else came up before I was able to complete it. Even worse when there's no clue at all how long it will take.

O my <deity> THIS. I hate not being able to save where I want/need to.

D was atmospheric and mysterious ... but then that ending came, and I exploded with laughter. I'd say it ruined the game in a fantastic way!

A lot of games would get crushed for this.

Maybe the biggest is SimCity.

The Diablo III launch was a disaster too.

Oh man, the Diablo III launch was an epic fail. One of the biggest fails in gaming history.

: The [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxe8JRLYHy8]Voice Acting!

For a game with pretty good gameplay, the voice acting was still terrible! Luckily one can just mute the "cut scenes" and read the text!

It's interesting to note that Cookie Clicker does not store its saves as a cookie, but instead uses persistent storage. (It used to store its save as a cookie, but doesn't anymore.)

Since I'm here, I could mention Shiren the Wanderer DS. While it doesn't ruin the entire game, the save system does ruin one of the bonus dungeons, namely the Ravine of the Dead. The game auto-saves when you leave town with your equipment missing, so if you die or something goes wrong, you can't reload to get your equipment back. The problem is that this particular dungeon basically requires maximum or near-maximum equipment, so if you try the dungeon and fail, you just lost your equipment and need to spend a lot of time building up a new set of equipment so you can try again.

I prefer the way Torneko: The Last Hope (PSX) handles saving; if you fail, you can reload your save from before you started the expedition. This way, if you fail the Ordeal Mansion, you can try again just by reloading your save, and you don't lose more than the one run.

Incidentally, I could say that the Ancient Cave in Lufia 2 was ruined by the lack of any way to save; the dungeon is too long to complete in a reasonable-length session, so the lack of a way to save in the dungeon ruins the dungeon. Lufia: The Legend Returns fixed the problem by adding a self-deleting quick save, but then Lufia: The Ruins of Lore specifically disallowed it to be used in its Ancient Cave (though the one in tRol is significantly different from the others, so I don't know if the lack of saving ruins it).

Spellforce
The hero (by definition the most important unit in the game) not attacking automatically. The main hero is the ONLY unit in the entire game that does not engage automatically but only if he is attacked or something. Especially during huge crowded battles (which are quite common in the game) this absolutely cripples his usefulness. This flaw is stupid beyond belief.

Max Payne
Dodge rolls making Max invulnerable. I shit you not, while doing dodge rolls (only possible with melee or throwing weapons equipped) his hit box seems to be completely removed or something and enemies are perfectly unable to harm him. Sure, as long as you don't know about it the game is awesome but once you've discovered this you can just roll your way through every fight, up to each and every enemy and just bash them to pieces with your lead pipe or baseball bat. It's what I did during my last playthrough and ruined the game for me.

Sacrifice
Like Max Payne a game that I actually do love but suffering from one deep flaw: that dead units' souls appear where they died. Soon enough the only source of souls (the most important resource used for creating units) are dead enemies. Especially in combination with how they are collected (just touch your own ones but perform a complex procedure to collect the opponent's) it makes the game highly monotonous and even tiresome. As a result of this there's always only a single important strategic point on the map: your opponent's main army which always follows around his wizard. So it's always a battle between two armies (unless there's more factions on the map) and whoever wins an encounter and manages to snatch some of the opponent's souls grows in strength, so often only the first encounter matters and after that point you tend to have a notable advantage and the match only gets easier from there since the enemy soon finds himself with a tiny army, unable to grow it in any way. And using units anywhere else than next to your wizard is suicide since the enemy will easily snatch the killed units' souls while you're unable to recover them.

Chrome and Chaser
Okay, this is an issue that troubles probably hundreds of shooters but the ones I always instantly think of are Chaser and Chrome: perfect enemy aim (especially in combination with instant reactions). The devs were simply too stupid to implement the most basic sensible weapon spread for enemies and regardless of distance and whatnot you just get shot straight in the face ALL THE TIME. Hilariously in both games this is countered with a bullet time mechanic which gives you a tiny advantage in terms of reaction time but until you get that you just always have to swallow a few bullets before even being able to pull the trigger, not to mention aim at the enemy.

Stronghold
You defend a castle and must prepare for the attackers. Unfortunately, you have no clue what type of enemies will attack and have to restart the mission if you prepared for the wrong one.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Where you have to control Tanya (?) and don't do base building. Also RTS where all of a sudden you get timed missions.

Vietcong 2
Your allied soldier will get back to life after they got killed (which they do often because they are stupid).

I'm going to very respectfully disagree with you here.

Yes there is no building with her, but that means the game gets a little mix. This has been a tried and true aspect of all good RTS games. They throw in the occasional "run&gun" level to break up the monotony of every mission being "build up, defend, attack".

Here's another one: Final Fantasy 2. (No, not the one released for the Super NES that is really a variation of 4, but rather the one released for the Famicom in Japan.)

In FF2, your evade % stat is probably the most important stat; it affects your chance of evading attacks (of course), but it also affects turn order, the chance of ambushing/being ambushed, and the chance of running away. The difference between low and high evasion is huge: If your party's evade % is low, the enemies could easily get 2 full rounds of attacks before you do, while if it's high, you could easily get 2 full rounds of attacks before the enemies get their turn. This can mean the difference between winning without taking damage versus having the entire party killed. Also, in the low evade case, the inability to run from any battles makes the situation even worse.

The problem becomes especially apparent because of two other factors: 1. Heavy armor lowers your evade % drastically. This means that, especially later in the game, wearing heavy armor will make the game much harder and more frustrating; this makes heavy armor worse than useless (and that fact isn't immediately obvious). (Note that shields are OK, and are actually incredibly useful because they boost your evasion.) 2. Evade % is affected by agility. Only problem is that the chance of agility increasing after a battle is based on your evade %. Hence, if you wear heavy armor, your agility won't increase.

Even worse is that this whole aspect of the game is not immediately obvious, so the obvious strategy (equipping the armor that gives the best defense) won't appear to be causing problems until it's too late, at which point you likely won't realize what the problem is.

(There's also the fact that some equipment (including heavy armor) interferes with your spellcasting ability, but the game and manual don't even *tell* you that, so the average player will end up thinking that status spells are useless when used by the player, when in fact those spells (and especially instant death spells) can actually be game-breakingly powerful when used by the player.)