I don’t think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.
Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs — like the D&D Gold Box games — came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one’s map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there’d be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn’t like this mechanic.
Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.
In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one’s precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There’s some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don’t think that it’s necessary — a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don’t really like situations where it’s just added for the sake of being there.
I’ve got kids, if I’m playing while they’re up I have to be able to drop everything on a dime to go stop them from managing to kill themselves because that happens about 3x an evening
There’s several games I’d like to play but simply don’t because I cannot pause. Like I get it, single player is just booting up the multiplayer server without networking so only you can join, but also it’s only a single player so they should be able to pause the engine whenever they want to
In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one’s precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There’s some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don’t think that it’s necessary — a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don’t really like situations where it’s just added for the sake of being there.
I hate this mechanic so much. If a player couldn’t win with the powerup, all taking it away does is consign them to a slow death spiral. This made sense when shmups were quarter-munching arcade machines, but this “feature” remained a staple of the genre even after it moved to home consoles.
And for a non-shmup example, Super Star Wars was another major offender. The game was incredibly hard even with a maxed out weapon. Dying reverted you to the basic blaster, cutting your damage output to a fraction of what it was and making it nearly impossible to get past the tougher boss fights if you didn’t win on the first try. It’s often considered one of the hardest games of all time, and I’m willing to bet this mechanic is the main reason why.
I don’t think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.
Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs — like the D&D Gold Box games — came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one’s map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there’d be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn’t like this mechanic.
Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.
In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one’s precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There’s some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don’t think that it’s necessary — a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don’t really like situations where it’s just added for the sake of being there.
Agreed. I can understand in MMOs, but if I’m the only one playing, the game should stop when I say stop.
At least make it an option in the accessibility settings if it’s not “the developers’ intended experience”.
I’ve got kids, if I’m playing while they’re up I have to be able to drop everything on a dime to go stop them from managing to kill themselves because that happens about 3x an evening
There’s several games I’d like to play but simply don’t because I cannot pause. Like I get it, single player is just booting up the multiplayer server without networking so only you can join, but also it’s only a single player so they should be able to pause the engine whenever they want to
I hate this mechanic so much. If a player couldn’t win with the powerup, all taking it away does is consign them to a slow death spiral. This made sense when shmups were quarter-munching arcade machines, but this “feature” remained a staple of the genre even after it moved to home consoles.
And for a non-shmup example, Super Star Wars was another major offender. The game was incredibly hard even with a maxed out weapon. Dying reverted you to the basic blaster, cutting your damage output to a fraction of what it was and making it nearly impossible to get past the tougher boss fights if you didn’t win on the first try. It’s often considered one of the hardest games of all time, and I’m willing to bet this mechanic is the main reason why.
Bard’s Tale had a street you could not completely walk down. At one point there’s a teleporter that just sends you 3 squares back.
Sinister St.