Annoying Game designs

I spent some time going playing an old game last week, Gears of War.  I'm playing it because back when I first tried it out a few years ago I didn't really know or care for the achievement system, so I'm making up for it now.  I also enjoy the Gears of War story, so this is like a refresher.  Going through the campaign story again on insane in coop mode has been fun, but what I've noticed the most in the game are wha seems to be painfully bad design choices made regarding the game.

The stuff I'm going to rant about in this post exists in many games.  These issues just happen to really bug me as I worked with a friend to replay the game and chase old achievements.    Let's start with one of the most painful and annoying ones, cut scenes.   In general I'm a fan of the cut scenes.  They add to the game, if you're really interested in the story, and can show some excellent computer generated graphic detail.   However, if you're playing a portion of the game and have difficulty with it, such as dying over and over again, a mandatory cut scene that you can't skip, you can only play for so long before you want rip you hair out.   Unfortunately, in Gears of War playing through on insane difficulty, we ran into this issue quite a bit.   This also leads into a second annoying design, checkpoints.

Checkpoints are supposed to be your saving grace, and help a player through their domination of the game's campaign.  However, I'm not sure if game designers built the checkpoints based on normal difficulty in play through because when playing certain sections of the game, on its hardest difficulty, it is amazing what little things can ruin your enthusiasm to continue.   Again, playing Gears of War with my friend, it seemed we would run into these long stretches of action in the game that were difficult to cope with, and we would end up restarting at the last checkpoint..  Even as we progressed through that section, one of us would die only to find out we had to completely restart the whole segment.   Adding to the pain, imagine a long segment preceded by a cut scene, TORTURE!!  Yes, definitely, not fun.  So, the checkpoints become an issue if there are not enough, or if they are poorly spaced in the game.  

Other thoughts for annoying game design can be music.  Some games make AMAZING music, for instance Martin O'Donnell of Bungie.  I own every Halo soundtrack he's made and I love them all.  In fact, I recently came across a website listing tour dates and locations as a traveling symphony (http://www.videogameslive.com/) visits many worldwide locations specifically playing the music from popular games.  However, even with these genius music creations, there's the share of experience in gaming with music that may be close to listening to fingernails running down a chalkboard.   Granted, the game music may not start out that way, but tack on those annoying un-skippable cut scenes and lack of checkpoints hitting you in the face over and over, and your tolerance for anything will drop like the price of a poorly marketed or unpopular game (aka: Bayonetta, Kane & Lynch 2).

Typically, I think if you follow a game that is in a series, you will see the game designers build off the community feedback and be cognizant of what gamers want out of the next game.  However, it is the year 2010 and gaming has been around for over 30 years.  We still find games that have nasty annoyances built into them, and we just end up dealing with it.   They have colleges now that help focus on game design, but I think in the end its experience...just catching past mistakes and growing from them.

Keep the good games coming!