What's your personal pet peeve in gaming?

[BoneSnapDeez]

Tutorials, games that are unnecessarily long, long cut scenes, even longer loading times, achievements, no manuals.

So, most of the games from the past decade.

Yeah, many of the pet peeves here are only applicable to modern games.

Play retro games!

then let me remedy that...

-Password save system

-excessive load times

-save wipes on carts

Excessive load times? Carts don't have load times. I really don't find the load times on early CD-based consoles to be worse than the load times on modern systems (exception: Neo Geo CD).

Save wipes on carts? Well that's just old stuff behaving like old stuff. How well will the average Xbone be functioning in 2040?

Passwords aren't bad if they are merely used to start the player at a specific stage (ie: The Lost Vikings). Passwords in RPGs do indeed bite, I'll give ya that.

[Jmustang1968]

Some Ps1 and saturn load times were horrible. Modern system load times are much better with a few exceptions.

I am also not talking about dying batteries. Even back in the day cart saves would sometimes wipe. This is really more prevalent with the NES I suppose. I dont really recall this happening on SNES, N64, or Gen. No wait, I did have it happen a few times on Gen games.

I just always hated password systems then, and I hate them even more now when playing on original hardware. Obviously emulators have fixed that issue.

Oh and another

Very primitive or no AI. Enemies often only moved in a set pattern. Guess this wasnt a pet peeve per se, but I can recall wishing the enemies moved or acted in a more intelligent way.

[ExedExes]

Anything where I have to rely on the AI's survivability. Daikatana, Tom Clancy games

As a veteran of Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series, hear hear!

[Josh]

My biggest one has to be no subtitles in cutscenes, and not being able to pause the cutscenes. I do like how in newer games with longer cutscenes you can pause them in the event something happens, those with infants/toddlers who play these games at night know what I'm talking about. It just sucks when you have to either save before a cutscene or look it up on youtube before continuing, especially if it was vital to the story.

Games that punish you for grinding. In most RPG's I enjoy grinding, especially if the battle system is fun. But games that punish you for being overleveled are kind of asinine, IE: Earthbound, how your skills get nerfed as Ness if you're over a certain level before hitting Magicant, but yet you NEED to essentially grind in order to get the Sword of Kings, or in Pokemon when your Pokemon refuse to obey if they're over a certain level by a certain point.

Alternatively, games that don't give you enough opportunity to grind, such as Final Fantasy XIII. Or games that are WAY too trigger happy on random encounters like Skies of Arcadia.

[Erik_Twice]

Anything that doesn't respect my time: Grinding, cutscenes, meaningless decisions in battle and so on. I can pull so many amazing games, movies and books that playing a game in which nothing happens for one hour is offensive to me.

[Exhuminator]

Unskippable cutscenes before a hard boss battle. The developers know you're likely going to have to retry, but they still make those cutscenes unskippable all the same.

Another thing I hate is something I see fairly often in JRPGs. You will walk through the whole game relatively unchallenged, but then you get to the final boss and it's on a factor of twenty more powerful than anything else in the game. So then your only option is to go back and grind for hours just to overcome an artificially difficult challenge spike. Why the hell do this to your player?

I also hate multi-part boss fights that don't give you check points between different forms. This is something that happens in JRPGs a little too often as well. I mean like the boss you're fighting has a weak form, a hard form, and a OMFG form, and you die on the OMFG form... and then have to fight back through the other forms all over again. And again. And again. Ass tier game design right there.

[laurenhiya21]

Unskippable cutscenes before a hard boss battle. The developers know you're likely going to have to retry, but they still make those cutscenes unskippable all the same.

Ah I forgot about that one. I also don't like it when the cutscenes ARE skippable, but the game won't ask if you really want to skip it. I've accidentally skipped a fair number of cutscenes because I hit the Start button on accident ><;

[samsonlonghair]

Tutorials drive me crazy. I tried to play Deus Ex, but after a solid hour of boring tutorial crap, I just turned the computer off. What's that you say? Click the mouse to shoot? I couldn't possibly have figured that out without a lengthy tutorial.

I have better things to do than sit through the tutorial.

[SNESdrunk]

"Oh no, the player is about to beat our game. They might think the experience hasn't been long enough yet! (It has.) So guys, what can we do to artificially lengthen the game time? Oh I know! Dudes let's make the player go on a wild goose chase all over the game world seeking out hidden keys for a while.

There is no better example of this than in Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. Fixing that stupid bridge... arrrrghghghghhgghghhhh

[marurun]

Ham-fisted philosophy shoved into a game through bad dialogue (most common in JRPGs). Too many examples of this to name.

New powers or abilities that you use a ton for one level... and then rarely or never need to use again, because hey, that shiny NEW power is the only one you are using. Illusion of Gaia is a perfect example of this problem (and the one above).