This! Subtitles are a standard feature for nowaday games, if your game has voice acting and you're missing subtitles you're failing hard at life.

Also, I hate games that can't be modded, I may play them and even enjoy them but the lack of modding is a no no for me.

Racism. Why should Halflings be weaker than Humans, and Elves smarter than other races?

Because Elves are more prone to commit crime and Halflings are better at math.

Of course Orcs are better at hockey, but lets leave the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers out of this.

If a game does decide to to do that, there is one requirement that I would consider mandatory: The two choices should be balanced against one another. In other words, from a power gaming perspective, both (or all 3+, if the game has more gender options) need to be balanced against one another.

Of note, look at the Elder Scrolls series. If we ignore issues of movement speed being affected by arbitrary factors, notice that male and female characters have different stats, but they add up to the same, and the difference depends on race. (In Morrowind, female Orcs have lower personality than male ones.)

By the way, in Morrowind, movement speed is affected by weight, so male Orcs are the fastest. (I think Redguards are preferred for speedruns because of their innate ability.) In Oblivion, height affects movement speed, so female High Elves are the fastest. (What?)

Personally, I don't have a problem with this, *provided that the races are balanced against each other*. Having a Dracon/Dragonewt race that can breathe fire, or a Thri-Kreen race that can make multiple natural attacks per round, or even a Robot race that gains stats from equipment instead of winning battles makes the racial choice much more siginificant, but it again has to be balanced.

The races in the Pool of Radiance series are not balanced, for example. Halflings are lousy at being anything other than a thief, and thieves are probably the worst class. (That's not even counting the racial level limits that make non-humans useless later in the series.) SaGa Frontier wasn't the most balanced either, with Mystics and Monsters being too weak, and Mechs being too strong. (It feels like they balanced the game around Humans.)

Bad puzzles.
Case in point: the gnome's name in the original King's Quest.

That's the kind of thing I mean. Make it feel like a different experience (this goes for more than just gender, it would be nice if playing as a rogue or a warrior was significantly different too) rather then just a couple of stats. Make everyone respond differently based on race, gender, even age so that all your choices have an effect on the game.

Balance is everything. There are so many games where one class (usually a rogue) is absolutely rubbish and barely worth playing whereas another might be miles ahead of all the others. If you are going to give choice, you have to make sure the choices are balanced against each other so that no single choice is better than the others, just different.

Not yet, but I've heard good things about it.
Hopefully I have the choice there.
I have a lot of peaceful games but my favourites are always the ones where I can decide if I solve a problem with or without violence.

Yep and this brings me to another point: Bad balancing.
Although it's one of my favourite RPGs, Inquisitor is a really bad case there. It would be quite easy to fix the balancing issue of the weak knight by simply boosting his stamina regeneration, but nobody seemed to care about it.
Although I have to say, that it does work another way too:
In the incredibly historically accurate "Knights of Honour" your decisions decide how hard it will be. If you try to maintain a pagan state between the crusading Christians and the similarly expanding Islam without converting to either side, you have a really hard time although there are ways to manage it and that's just realistic, so having to find creative solutions to stay alive or solve problems because of a natural lack of strength could be interesting even without a bonus to counter it, even if it would change the difficulty. In order to do that you need a lot of freedom and possibilities inside of the virtual realm of course.

On that note, Minecraft. An entire game built around crafting, and with no way to see any crafting recipe in-game. Thank god for mods.

You definitely do have the choice in Undertale. In fact, there is a special ending that you can only get if you do not kill anything in the entire game. (This includes bosses, but fortunately, there's always a way to spare them, at least for the ones you encounter when doing this.)

On the other hand, there is a different special ending that you get if you kill everything killable. This means wandering around fighting random enemies in each area until enemies stop showing up to random encounters. I should warn you, however, that this route is rather disturbing and has 2 really difficult bosses. (Note that it is recommended that you play the pacifist route first before doing this.)

I thought of one particular little thing that speedrunners of Sonic the Hedgehog games hate.

When you clear a stage, you get bonus points based on the time it takes. If you beat the level in under 30 seconds (I think Sonic 3 may have upped it to a minute), the bonus is 50000 points. That's all well and good, except for the time it takes for the bonus to count down, and there is no way to skip it. In other words, if you beat a level in 29 seconds, the count down will waste more time than if you beat it in 31 seconds.

Speedrunners have found this to be stupid and have decided to time the game based off a sum of
in-game times instead of using real time because of it.

Here is a video (not mine) that demonstrates the issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaMGf1V3MMM

Years ago i used to enjoy going to friends places for LAN game nights, usually playing multiplayer combat games up to quake 3, i was never that good but i used to have lots of fun.

Then came counter strike.

It had a 'brilliant' feature to prevent re-spawning.

So yea, of course i quickly realized i do not really enjoy playing for 2 seconds and then being a spectator the rest of the night. well DAHHHH

That was such a moron dumb game feature that pissed me off so much, i never bothered going to anymore LAN nights thereafter, and actually stopped playing any FPS shooter games evermore!!

That was 20 years ago, still haven't recovered from that stupidity.

Off-disk copy protection checks where they give you a book/page/picture/wheel to reference and you have to answer quesions

Escort missions where the AI controlling those you are escorting makes them charge ahead of you or charge the enemy on sight for no good reason

RPGs where counterattacks trigger counterattack abilities. On a few indy RPGs I've played I've seen battles turn into counterattack chains where all I can do is watch and hope my party member doesn't get KOed before taking out the enemy because I can literally do nothing but watch until one of the two goes down.