Tank-like controls, such those found in the early Resident Evil and Tomb Raider games, are difficult to go back to.

Oh, yes. Absolutely this. I wonder why I didn't think of it immediately!
Tomb Raider was bearable, but I have never been able to play the early Resident Evil games, the combination of tank controls and fixed camera made me quit with no remorse.

I also dislike QTEs but I'm playing Sekiro currently and a thought struck me; the Mikiri Counter is a QTE woven into the battle system. For those unfamiliar you can swing your sword or guard with it. If you guard at the EXACT moment the enemy strikes you it counts as a deflect and begins to throw the enemy off balance. There is also a special Mikiri Counter move. A kanji (not sure what it says) appears just as the enemy is about to do an unblockable(not undodgable) thrust type attack. If you hit a certain button you negate their attack and deal a decent amount of posture damage to them instead. Basically a sudden random QTE in the middle of a back and forth sword battle. Watch a YouTube of the Genichiro battle if I'm not making sense. Lazy design QTE we need zero more of though.

No, that isn't a QTE. It's a timed counter, a regualr move based on player skill; QTEs are just interruptions of the action to press buttons following prompts, usually during something similar to a cutscene. If the game suddenly stopped to force you to parry with a sequence of buttons in a scenic pose, then it would be a QTE.

Fair enough. I've never seen an actual definition of QTE but I think we're on the same page. If it's based on player skill I'm good with it. The reason I even brought it up was because of the kanji "prompt". It is a timed counter as you said but playing through this game (and loving it) virtually all combat is timed counters. These one are just implemented a bit different.

I think we agree though. I'm not against pushing certain buttons at a particular time (I had to hit precise buttons sequences to beat Contra), but QTE are a lame solution to making a game seem more exciting or cinematic then it is. While we're on QTE discussion I'm thinking about older games and how they handled it. Specifically Battletoads (you know which level), and Dragon's Lair. Thoughts?

Not sure if this counts as a QTE, but I played a WW2 FPS on the PS2, and it was great, until this moment where you get jumped, and suddenly it's a mini-game where you have to press alternating buttons very quickly to struggle out of his grasp. It was so immersion breaking and such an utterly crap mechanic, that after trying a few times to avoid it, and there being no way, I rage-quit and never played it again. Pity, the rest of the game was quality. Can't remember the name.

I never played Battletoads, tbh. Also... Dragon's Lair is probably the most brutal example of "trial and error" gameplay I can think of, totally not fun. It might be a precursor of QTEs, indeed... I never thought about that.

I'm glad I somehow avoided that entire era of controls.

They're pretty terrible although I understand why they were chosen for the first few Resident Evil games. The constant changes in static camera angles meant the character had to be moving the same direction even as the view changed. Running from dogs? You don't want Chris running towards the dogs because the camera angle suddenly changed. Controls mapped to the characters view vs the player watching the screen was the solution. I'm not saying I agree with the solution but I do understand the issue they were facing.

Why fully 3d games like Tomb Raider ever embraced it is a mystery to me. Nothing like a game with acrobatics, precise jumps, and gunplay while running.....with tank controls.

Tank controls in anything other than a tank simulator.
And saying that, I don't even like tank simulator games. (Yes, they exist.) I'm only acknowledging that take controls have their place even if I never want to encounter them. Looking back, I'm not sure how I found the first Resident Evil game to be fun. The only thing that actually made that game hard was that you would be moving along a hall, only to have the game switch the camera on you unexpectedly as if for some dramatic effect or to try to get you killed... probably the latter. If it didn't do this, there would be no need for tank controls.


Draw your own maps on paper.
A lack of auto-mapping is fine with some games, but you really don't want to be drawing out maps yourself when the game world or maze is just too large to feasibly be able to map it out. There's a few games, like Might and Magic 1, that I've never finished because of no auto-mapping.


Wacky DOS era style Non-DRM copy protection is probably more obsolete than anything else.

Some games are not too bad about this. The Legend of Kyrandia: Fables & Fiends, for example, only asks me to look up something one time from the manual after exiting a single cave such that I've never felt like I need to repurchase the game just to have a version without copy protection. I just found and downloaded a PDF copy of the manual, so that I don't have to actually get out the paper manual that is stored away in a box on a closet shelf. I have a DOS era version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for the same reason.

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos only made you prove you owned the game when you entered this one castle where they would ask for a password (meaning look something up in the manual) to prove you're not Scotia with the Nether Mask, and you only really needed to go to this location a few times early on. Unfortunately, my disc for this game was scratched enough to be non-readable such that I ended up replacing this game anyway.

However there are also the games that constantly made you prove over and over again to seemingly no end that you actually own the game.

qte should be banned
coin/point collecting is totally useless feature
long videos
unrelated texts to the current events/story, many rpg-s fill the world with these, pointless i dont care what the Karens cat name was or what it liked to eat
long texts, they shouldn't be more than a few pages, if I want to read I just turn on my ebook reader
no modern easy to read fonts
no borderless window option
no stop sound/pause when not in focus

Super Mario 64 has a bad camera, particularly when near walls (the camera can't go through walls, forcing bad camera angles in some situations). The DS version didn't fix it (though it introduced Yoshi much earlier; instead of needing all the stars you need none).

Well, it had a bad default camera. The pulled back Mario Cam was much more conducive to gameplay and even correctly refocuses on Mario.

Yes indeed, and in some games like Battle Garegga you kinda have to die at times to lower your rank and make the difficulty manageble.

In WB3 you also respawn the chest contents by loading a password, so it can be used to farm.

The second thing happened as recently as the other day for me, in Okami from 2006. I had to talk to some NPCs in town (actually at the end of a cave as far inside the town as possible) several times to be able to exit it and move on even though they didn't have anything that important to say and you're not told specifically when trying to exit the town that this is what you need to do.

Final Fantasy 2 had a bunch of empty rooms, some of which also placed you in the middle of them and had enemies attacking you. No way to tell which ones beforehand.