He’s like if Edison and Henry Ford had a baby and it only inherited the worst parts of both.

No Man’s Sky is a repeat offender for both of those things. How they’ve released constant major updates for a decade but never taken the time to fix their terrible user interface is one of life’s great mysteries.

“And we’ll announce their presence in the pre-mission credits so you spend the entire mission waiting for the moment things suddenly start to suck.”

My headcanon is that Abigail is so sick of getting random rocks as gifts, she pretends to eat them so she can throw them away later without you noticing.

The forced stealth level early on is what keeps me from replaying Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Far Cry 2 as well. Low durability didn’t break your weapon, it just increased the chance of a misfire or jam and made combat more chaotic. And if it really bothered you, you could always buy a simple AK (which was practically indestructible when upgraded).

Warframe has spearfishing, and it’s much more fun than any minigame using a rod.

Could also be Aperture Science tech, given how their turrets behave.

Bethesda’s random leveled loot is another contender for worst mechanic. It was always fun picking the lock on a master-level chest deep in a dungeon only to find thirteen coins and a wooden spoon inside.

“Some may call this junk. Me, I call it treasure.” could be a line from their design document.

Okay, but it turning out that the iconic “Who is Number 1?!” “You are Number 6” exchange from the intro was Number 2 literally telling him the answer was freaking brilliant.

Poorly done procedural generation where it’s a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.

I love how the one game where this would make sense, FEAR (where the enemy is a clone army controlled by a single psychic commander), is also famous for how well the AI communicates with each other. They shout out detailed tactical chatter and announce their current moves even though it’s pointless due to them all sharing the same mind.

At least THAC0 was fun to say!

• 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.