In the Walking Dead in Episode 3 someone dies. In a stupid and unpredictable way. It IMMEDIATELY yelled at me 'this person was meant to die earlier, but you saved them, so now we have to kill them off'.

Episode 3 in general was a huge let down for me on this front. For a series that goes on about choice and consequences the entire episode seemed to be about leveling everyone to the same place.

Personally I think all of that sounds awesome. Screw reality in videogames, its a one way ticket to boringville, sonny.

I'm going to add another one:

Recently played Space Marine, which gives you (and then takes away) the assault jet pack 4 times:

1st: In cut scene, could have been annoying to the character, fair enough.

2nd: 'Not enough room in here', looked like HEAPS of room to me....

3rd: 'Out of fuel' - While walking past some magical barrier. Come on now you're not even trying.

4th: 'Out of fuel' - Again? Really?

It's not about reality so much as consistency of world design and story. When something silly happens, like the myriad examples in this thread, it drags you out of the world they've created and suddenly you're well and truly aware of the fact that you're playing a game. It's like reading a novel about the American civil war which, two thirds of the way through, has someone talking in modern slang. It's poor, thoughtless design that leads to a break in the flow.

Myriad? I haven't seen any posts that fit this description (Ok one maybe two)

and the guy I was replying to seemed to be distracted by the lack of realism with "why does this forklift have a machine gun?" when others have pointed out that that seems consistent with the game world ...so actually it's about realism and not about consistancy of world design and story.

But really I don't care that much.

All I know is over the top silliness is great and should live on forever

Punching trees to get wood.
Not being able to mine diamond with a stone pickaxe.
Exploding bipedal penis monsters.
Instant breeding.
Chicken comes after the egg.

I can go on brother.

I would class pretty much all of these in that category. Why don't you think they belong there?

Oh wow, don't get me started!

OK, here are my top two pet peeves.

DOOM. The original DOOM. Or for that matter, any DOOM. Better yet... ALL the DOOMs. You're walking down a hall, you get to the midpoint of the hallway, and suddenly... doors on both sides and each end of the hallway slide open and bad guys jump at you from all sides. OK, how did those guys get in those little "hidden closets"? What are they doing in there to pass the time while waiting for their next unsuspecting victim? What if they have to go to the bathroom? What if they leave to go to the bathroom just before I walk down the hall? Actually any FPS that puts enemies in little hidden cubbyholes with no alternate entrances and is just big enough to hold them irritates me to smithereenies.

Thief. Primarily the first Thief, or Thief Gold, since I just finished playing that one. Probably the best "sneaker" of all times (well Thief 2 was even better - no zombies) and one of my personal favorite games (T2 was the other). OK. Moss Arrows. This game gets soooo many things right, but then... there are moss arrows? Why on earth can't Garrett (the thief) just... take off his shoes? In fact, what self-respecting thief would EVER enter a job with hard metal floors wearing hard-sole tap shoes? Totally blows it for me and pulls me right out of the game.

Then he gets back on the carpet and the game pulls me back in again. Just sayin'.

Because I thought your American Civil war transitioning to modern slang analogy was horrible. If that actually happened, that'd would be idiotic unless the book was a comedy..That's just bad writing that a 12 year old should be able to fix. The other things that were listed weren't as nearly as inexcusably stupid and avoidable as something like that. A lot of the complaints were just cliched comments on how videogames aren't totally like real life, but those things aren't all because of poor thoughtless design like the one in your example. Some are things that a lot people actually want(personally I like collecting things, and I'm totally against the idea of removing collectibles like the thermoses in Alan wake). Complaining about locked doors that you can't smash open? Screw that. Ever play Zelda or any game where you gotta find a key/puzzle to a locked door? Personally I like those.




Also, not all of them showed inconsistency in world design and story

It could have been some wierd bug, but it happened=) Also in Half Life 1, on our second playthrough 2 soldiers exploded out of a giant box in one of the levels. Did not happen during our first playthrough, but did the second. The last time we tried to go back through HL2, the dude in the floating box was not there...so...it could have just been a wierd thing that was fixed as we played it the first time when it just had come out.

I feel like this has potential as a Slenderman-style urban legend. Except instead of a mysterious horror that drives you insane, he's a soldier... in a box.

Could have sworn I was reading the dialogue of Mass Effect then. But seeing how Bioware is developing the next C&C, if they can survive that long, I'm not really surprised by that.

Speaking of Mass Effect, nearly all of the main "plot" of ME2 shattered my disbelief and well, everything about ME3.

Sounds a bit like Double Mumbo Jumbo to me. It's a rule of sorts I read about in a screenwriting book. It's basically that it's OK to have one bit of magic per movie, everything else has to be consistent with the rules of the universe.

Such as in Spiderman, having Spiderman be created via mumbo jumbo is OK, but also having the Green Goblin created via mumbo jumbo on the other side of town that soon tends to strain the ability of the audience to suspend their disbelief. Which is probably why later films were generally better than the first one in the series.

This is also why it's so hard to typically get vampires and zombies in the same movie, but why pirates and zombies are OK. Unless of course you pretty much just say screw it and do it anyways. Twilight folks, I'm looking at you.
That was probably the only area of Diablo that had good writing. They simply explained that the monsters would go out and search for gold, basically because it was shiny. So that's why they dropped gold.

OTOH, they didn't bother to explain why they were stealing the rest of the gear at all.

Re: the edited version of your original post: oh, sure. That game is designed that way, and silliness should always remain. I wasn't really talking about that example in particular, more just pointing out that it's not about reality as much as it is a consistent fictional world (Shadow Warrior being a game that kinda revolves around the silly, the forklift thing is consistent with its design).

Regarding this post, I mean, yeah, the civil war example is exaggerated, but it still gets across what I mean — and it's not that unlikely a thing. Language has changed, and many turns of phrase we use today that come totally naturally would never have been said back then. That said, perhaps more relevant to gaming is when a game in which you can kill anyone prevents you from killing a story-important character via invisible shields, or otherwise reasonably well-thought out dialog turns into unedited mush (still not bitter!), or the voice acting is headsplittingly bad.