Panzer General: turn limits on the scenarios. Turns it into a puzzle game.

Ruined for me, that is.

I hate cliffhangers in story-focused games. Sometimes enough is resolved that they're not a huge problem, but when the things the entire game builds up to are left unresolved and you're stuck waiting around for DLC or a sequel to have any of your questions answered, it's downright disrespectful and enough to undermine all or much of what that game did right.

In fairness, the Ancient Cave is 100% optional and presented more as a side distraction for hardcore players. It'd defeat the point if you could reload a save whenever something bad happened or you didn't obtain the ideal items from chests.

Deus Ex: Invisible War
The constant loading screens and the universal ammunition

Dead Island
General performance of the Mac port, voice acting, strange feeling combat

SWAT 4
Teammates shooting hostages, hostages not cooperating no matter what sometimes

The Elder Scrolls Online
Personally felt too derivative of other MMOs

Perfect Dark Zero
The movement speed, strange art style, and weapon limit

Unreal II: The Awakening
Entire game (story, visuals, gameplay) lacked the imagination and impact of Unreal Gold

For the record, I do enjoy Deus Ex: Invisible War and SWAT 4 most of the time. But the parts I mentioned dampen the experience somewhat. The other games I mentioned are just ones I can not enjoy.

My point isn't the inability to reload if something goes wrong; the problem is that there is no way to save the game when you are done playing for the time being, or if you have to go somewhere. A save that deletes when loaded (like in Lufia: TLR) would fix this issue.

That bothered you? What about having to go through 20 minutes of dialog to just save your game.

Rise of Nations Gold: a 90 minute time limit on missions (ie. even if you are on your way to victory, not being able to conquer all enemy capitals within that 90 minute limit means you lose the battle. What?). That is why I got seriously stuck already in the first mission I tried in that game, and had to quit the game.

The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall: vast twisty dungeons with an useless automap, you will serioulsy get lost in them all the time, causing it very hard to finish even the most basic subquests where you are merely supposed to find and/or kill someone hiding in such a dungeon.

Ah, a bookmark/suspend save. Yeah, that'd be pretty useful, but did any SNES games use something like that? They eventually started popping up on other systems, so I can't help but wonder if some kind of technical limitation made implementing something like that difficult/impossible on the hardware. Possibly backing that up: Ogre Battle apparently included the feature, but only in the PS1 release.

Lost me, don't know it *googles* ah ha, *plays* *grumbles about a new mouse *
Mouse killer, fun tho, :D

Shmups. Checkpoints.

Civ 5 - 2 unit tile limit

Yeah, got to agree with you there. I was glad when The Scorchers DLC kind of fixed this, at least from a gameplay perspective. But the way the story just ends... Not something that is easily fixed.

I don't have The Scorchers so I wouldn't know. Maybe in a couple of years I'll feel like playing Rage again and then I;ll pick it up.

Normally I love Id games and I don't mind games with minimal plot. But Rage tried to have a plot and missed the mark.

STALKER: Clear Sky
The final wannabe Call of Duty stretch of the game. It was pretty awful :P The first game also ended with a similar lengthy action sequence, but it was implemented far better.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - the save system.