Topic: Game mechanics you despise

"Oh those guys over there are shooting at us and you want me to take cover? Nah how bout I stand out in the open ten feet away from you and scream for back-up!"

Also, "I'm gonna use common sense", said no escort AI ever.

Games that are only winnable through luck

When one could win even after losing most if not all of the mini games.

I was ready to throw mario party island tour out the window.

Dude, aren't most Mario Party games now just random luck?

I was under the impression most Mario Party minigames were based on luck. I haven't played one since 7, but I don't recall any single game having more than just a few skill-based Mini-games...

When the screen is zoomed in on the character, giving you a poor view of what is going on, and giving you too little time to react.

Forced Tutorials.
Well tutorials being forced upon you, especially over some simple little detail that the instruction book could cover.
"What's an instruction manual?" you say?
It's a little booklet that comes with the disc that tells you on how to play the game.
"Well isn't that built in the Menu's?'
Well you mean that slow & awkward digital manual that takes a couple of minutes to find out what the jiggly line statues aliment means as opposed to a couple of seconds to flick to the right page in a physical manual.

Just games are over reliant on stupid & slow tutorials instead of quickly finding out in a simple little booklet.
It's what those clips are for, it's for the games instruction manual.

I don't know about you, but I HATE the unlimited lives and lack of punishment mechanic because it just feels rather dull!

Not sure if this is a mechanic but terrible AI companions.

Useless collectibles, why put them in the game? Just a lazy way to extend game play.

Forced time limits are frustrating if there's no good story behind them and/or the game has a big focus on exploration (glares at Sonic CD)

Quicktime events.

Also, it's not a mechanic, but I despise grinding. It isn't fun to spend time on and it just doesn't feel rewarding to me.
Invisible walls and unskippable cutscenes aren't really mechanics, either, but I hate both.

I don't really hate it, but I don't exactly like the typical lives mechanic that has no punishment aside from wasting time sending you back to menus, too. I made a post about that on some other thread, but basically, if all a "Game Over" does is send me back to the title screen or world map, then what's the point? It hardly sets me back and wastes time. That kind of Game Over system should be eliminated and live counters gone for most games, except for those where a Game Over is actually punishing and lives aren't too easy to collect.

I dont Know if this is a game mechanic but when the mini bosses are stronger then the main bosses.....It happened to me a lot in Hyrule Warriors for some reason

It's funny because I feel the opposite. I don't like to be coddled entirely, but with my limited time to play after work I don't want to spend it all playing the SAME part over and over just because the dev didn't want to let down fans who live to troll other fanbases about how awesome they are because they're masochists...in short: I hate lack of saves/checkpoints. If you want to limit them, save it for a hard mode or something. Then everybody wins.

@R_Champ I think that's what I meant by saying lack of punishment. Like instead of not having lives to have checkpoints, you like start from that point again without any loss of lives which itself is pathetic because there's really no punishment that will motivate you to play more. This is what I felt when playing Teslagrad and Limbo.

But like you said, either put checkpoints or saves and put lack of saves in hard mode or something, or make the levels short.

Unentertaining cutscenes. If you put a decent focus on story, yes your game is way worse because parts of it are boring, I don't care how good the game is on a second playthrough, you still wasted time to make me not care.

...VANQUISH IS STILL OVERRATED

• Taking control over the player for set pieces
• Driving sections in genres that are not driving related
• Tutorials that cannot be skipped
• Cutscenes that you cannot skip that you've already watched
• JRPG traditions

Endless character drama masquerading as storytelling. Characters standing around bickering with each other, wangst, all that crap. It just seems like lazy writing and almost always fails to make me care about the characters. Less is usually more. Recently, Guardians of the Galaxy made Rocket one of the most sympathetic characters with a camera pan over his back revealing surgical scars and one drunken, angry outburst. Three lines of dialogue and a camera shot made his character more interesting than most attempts at character drama in JRPGs.

And all the usual stuff, like locked camera angles, forced tutorials, escort missions, fetch quests etc.

Something that is missing in games nowadays, unless it's digital? The only funny part in Borderlands 2 to me was actually manual - "the paper is not cheap. And the written word is dead anyway" (or something like that - you get the point).
I have nothing against "forced" tutorials as long as it is implemented correctly, but yeah, it can be annoying sometimes.

And I hate people saying something like that, because most of the time they end up being the biggest hypocrites. There's easy solution for you, but quick question first - why are you actually using it when you hate it? I mean, when you die, just go back to main menu and start a game over. And when you exit the game and come back to it, don't hit continue either, just go for the new game. It's THAT EASY. And yet here we are, people complaing about it, and the same people using it. It's not like that anymore, when the game took 30 minutes to 1 hour max when you mastered it.

I hate it when designers mistake hand-holding with explaining what the hell is your game all about, and them bragging about how there is no hand-holding in their game, because they don't explain anything, even how to play the game or how the mechanics work. I hate that.

Also as someone mentioned, games only winnable with luck.... but in adventure games. It was common in the late 80s and 90s in adventure p'n'c games, when they added some minigame to not only waste your time, but also to screw with you, either be it some slot machine or beating high score, you name it.

And I also hate it when the game collapses on itself when the designers though it is a good idea to change the genre of game in the end. A lot of games had and still have this problem. Example - remember what an awesome stealth game Thief was back in the 90s? And the hair pulling moment in the end when from stealth game it turned to action game with time limit? Or hell, even Uncharted, it went from adventure with light puzzles right into Resident Evil towards the end and not only that, but also Gears of War. Uncharted 2 was ridiculous with it, bodycount turning into Gears of War. The only balanced one was the third, actually. Same with The Last of Us - from stealth game with decent story, to a Gears of War cover-based crapshoot. I don't know why stealth games turn into action games, it must be a fetish I don't get or something.

And I hate people saying something like that, because most of the time they end up being the biggest hypocrites. There's easy solution for you, but quick question first - why are you actually using it when you hate it? I mean, when you die, just go back to main menu and start a game over. And when you exit the game and come back to it, don't hit continue either, just go for the new game. It's THAT EASY. And yet here we are, people complaing about it, and the same people using it. It's not like that anymore, when the game took 30 minutes to 1 hour max when you mastered it.

What do you mean? This just confused me. How am I "using" that kind of lives system? I've never made a game and I don't see a solution to it here. Besides, I said in that post that I don't hate it that much. It just kinda bugs me and seems a bit archaic. Maybe it's just because I mainly only see it in Mario games now and it's horribly easy to collect lives in them, plus thier Game Over doesn't have any real punishment aside from erasing checkpoints you've passed. It's a thought that's been stuck with me since I got a Game Over on Spyro a while ago (all the Game Over which dying itself didn't was force me back to the title screen and clear my checkpoints).