Half-Life.

The most horrible thing (after upay and badly optimized PC controls (aka "press x for everything")) is the game's habit to attempt to connect to network constantly. Want to check map - wait while game will try to connect. Want to craft something? Wait while game will try to connect. Simply paused the game? Yeah, you guessed right.
And is it me or there is no slider to gradually adjust music?

Personally, I adore his hamster Boo even more ;)

Pretty much any game with microtransactions. League of Legends comes to mind even if their model was better than most.

It's funny to see a lot of games I like in the list here.

Squeak!
Who is Minsc without Boo, and Boo without Minsc? :)

At least for adventure game fans (setting aside one scathing review online), Still Life seems to be highly regarded. People note some of the problems, but I really think it's terrible all around. I'm almost done, and I expect one thing I complain about to be addressed by the ending, but I think I have enough reason to think it's not a good game. Some pieces of evidence in support of my case:

1) This terrible sequence:

First, boss comes in and is mad. He won't talk unless you get him a cup of coffee. Problem 1: stupid "puzzle". Maybe we're supposed to feel like we're wasting our time and identify with the protagonist, but I just was annoyed with the developers.

Second, boss says that the protagonist is off the case because she's too involved and has made it personal. This makes no fucking sense because the boss doesn't seem to have any reason that the protagonist is making it personal. Of course, the boss might be taking the protagonist off the case for some other suspicious reason. But it doesn't fucking matter because the protagonist keeps on with the case, and the boss never complains about it or mentions how he took her off the case.

Third, the protagonist goes home and makes cookies with a stupid fucking recipe. I know how to make cookies, but I'm wasting my time trying to figure out every possible permutation within the subset of possible ways to make cookies. Also, the instructions say to sieve or sift the flour, but there's no sieve or sifter.

2) The lock-picking puzzle. In principle fine. But the instructions were terrible. First two master locks took a little bit of time to figure out, but a nice challenge on the easy end of the spectrum. But the third master lock is way way way more complicated. I eventually resorted to a walkthrough and am glad I did. This is just bad puzzle design: you shouldn't have mid-puzzle such a huge jump in difficulty or complexity, and which utilizes very different strategies than the earlier parts of the puzzle. I'm fine with the final master-lock puzzle in principle, but good puzzle design would have you work your way up more gradually in difficulty.

3) The puzzle with the paintings was made more difficult in a stupid way. Namely, the protagonist only says the title of each painting once, and so if you didn't pay full attention you forget the titles before the point of all of it becomes clear. This could be a fair puzzle, but it violates a standard convention in adventure games including this one up to this point: each time I click "look", I get a description. A game maker shouldn't mess with player expectations arbitrarily in this way just to make an easy puzzle difficult in a pretty mundane way.

4) Lots of fairly standard issues with adventure games, but made even worse. Pixel-hunting, but, oh, the developers decide to use later in the game items that you couldn't even "look at" or describe earlier. Which basically means that the player doesn't think that those things are usable parts of the environment.

I think I had a few more major complaints, but I don't want to waste more time on this game. Maybe I'll try to ride it out for the last part of the last chapter.

I don't outright "hate" Skyrim, but I get really annoyed by it at times. There are plenty of things to like about Skyrim, but it's also very flawed in my opinion, but its flaws are rarely discussed (in comparison to how often/how heavily it's praised). In my opinion, beside the level scaling being somewhat improved and the graphics quality improving, I think it's inferior to Oblivion, which is a game I didn't find to be "the greatest game ever" either. I've had more bugs/glitches in Skyrim than in Gothic 3 and Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines combined, and I played Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines without any of the fan patches for my first few playthroughs.

Fallout 3. I didn't put too many hours into Fallout 3, between the boring gameplay, awful dialogue and the uninspired scenery/game world, I didn't see anything worth the amount of praise it gets. I honestly can't think of anything nice to say about it, it's like Bethesda took the worst parts of Oblivion, read a fan's paragraph long summary of the first two Fallout games and wrote down the key parts on a pizza box, combined those two things and threw the result into their game engine and called it a day, then spent the rest of the budget (I would assume 99% of the budget) on marketing. Oh, and no, I'm not one of the "old" Fallout fans who "can't let go of the past", Fallout 3 was the first Fallout game I played, unfortunately. ...I guess it's overall graphic's quality is of the average quality of the time it was released...? There. I said something nice about it, whew.

Wow. I just love it when someone replies to a post I made almost 4 years ago, and then I get to read my own post from back then and get a glimpse of what I was thinking at the time. Thank you!

I still don't like adventure games by the way. I think the genre has improved a little bit with the Telltale games, because they embrace the advances in technology that have happened since the mid-90's a little more than most other adventure games. However I believe that deep, story-driven and slow-paced RPGs are still superior to adventure games in every way. Even if you prefer a slower and simpler gameplay experience (which is a legitimate preference by the way). For that reason, I'm still waiting for adventure games to die.

I didn't realize you made that post 4 years ago because I don't understand why people would necro threads from 4 years ago...

Still, it's pretty cool. I like thread necromancy when it's like this.

Skyrim.

By itself I wouldn't mind it (I still think it's got the crappiest controls I've ever seen). The problem is, it's such a hit that everyone and their dog wants to copy it.

I don't like open world/exploration centric games. I want to play through the main story-without feeling like I'm being punished for every cave I don't explore.

Now though, everything from Dragon Age to freaking Zelda is going in that direction.