I've never minded it as much as others do. To me it changes things up, and when a game has tight controls it can add a new dimension to the shooting if you're doing it while flying around or jumping between towers. That's pretty much the only thing that kept me playing Unreal Tournament back in the day.

Mirror's Edge is one of my favorite games of all time for a lot of reasons, but the platforming being almost perfect is a big one.

That said a lot of times it is done badly.

OK if not Mirror's Edge then what about the Portal games?

Its not even First Person but I was playing Enter the Matrix the other day and I'd pressed the 'Focus' Bullet Time button to shoot some guys better and in the course of the firefight I instinctively sidestepped but, because I was in Bullet Time Naobi did a cart wheel instead - right off the edge of an inst-kill platform, but it was OK because she'd grabbed the ledge but when I told her to pull herself back up the game remembered the ledge had railing and she STILL fell to her death anyway!
And back to the last checkpoint I went!

Also Realms of the Haunting has this thing where it's quite happy to let you save on a moving platform but then, when you reload, it turns out that it totally hasn't remembered the position of the platforms as part of the save data so you usually fall into radioactive slime or whatever - that could kill someone's entire playthough if they were dumb enough not to use multiple save slots!

Being a K&M user QTEs are a bitch. Enter and backspace look the same, oh wait all other buttons are displayed as identcal rectangles.

I loved Turok.... and i did not think it was too hard at all, although i could not solve a few of the puzzles despite many days and weeks of trying. And that is the one thing that really urks me most about computer games, because if i am going to do the hard work to earn the right to solve a puzzle, i expect to solve the puzzle, if not, then the game is broken, its that simple.

This thread reminds me of something I've wanted for quite a while in all genres: if you have a linear path to finish the game, allow the player the option to say "screw this!" on a particularly hateful level and let them just jump to the next level.

Now *that* I would like to see very, very much in many games.
Being able to skip some minigames / minigame-like puzzles in Deponia made the games so much better, for example.

They never removed it, they just haven't finished Xen; IIRC their plan is to pretty much redo the section completely and polish it up. Not a fan of that TBH, I always loved Black Mesa for how faithful it was to the original, yet managed to redo it extremely well. Still, the sticking to the original is important here - if I wanted to play a simple Xen mod, I would just do that.

Even worse than platforms: Swinging ropes.

Man I hated HL:Opposing Force for them.

Also since my FPS days I'm afraid of latters. Either you stick to them, when you want to get off, or you want to go down but can't get a hold and fall to your death, or you just laid some explosives and want to escape upward, but can't get a hold.

Also hated:
Escort missions (Not FPS, but I gave up on May Payne 2 for that bomb-rigged guy).
Bullet sponges, especially human enemies (KingPin was already mentioned, IIRC Sin had similar problems).
Railroaded shooting galleries, where you have to kill lots of enemies but can't take cover (Call of Duty).
Endless spawning enemies without telling the player - I like to clear sections. This caused me some frustration in a certain level in Riddick.
Trial and error=death (MoH:AA Sniper Town)
Enemies with Instahit-Weapons and no reaction time (spot = hit)
Things that look like cover (to hide from sight or bullets) but aren't (see FarCry).
Levels where you can't go back and grab much needed powerups you left behind (Jedi Knight).
NPCs blocking doors (Requiem IIRC, Deus Ex).

Also very hard to get right from first person is melee combat. It works in RPGs (most of the time) since movement speed is slower. In Hexen it was terrible, Hexen 2 a bit better. DMoMM was pretty good in that aspect. Another problem is that in first person view on a flat screen it's hard to guess your weapon's range.

You grab the game which has the best implementation of meele in a FP game, and one of the best implementations of meele in games in general, and call it 'pretty good'? Come on :-P

Maybe I just suck for melee. And I'm not that experienced with 3rd-person melee games. PoP:SoT worked pretty well for me (although I suck at it). Jedi Outcast also worked okay. Blade of Darkness is said to be good.

I just know that DMoMM worked pretty well for me. Since there are tons of games out there I wouldn't know if it's the best there is.

Can we just go ahead and turn this thread into a Dark Messiah of Might and Magic thread? I'm not even sure if there is a story in that game and I couldn't name any of the characters, but man...the actual gameplay is outstanding. Well besides the jumping system or anything that involves running.


On topic: jumping puzzles/platforming sections in games that aren't platforming games generally tend to be....well....awful. However a worse mechanic is undoubtedly the "escort mission". Does ANYBODY actually enjoy escort missions in any game of any genre?