Shitty Game Design

You know what really bugs me about gaming? Shitty game design, we all experience and suffer because of these design flaws. Some are a lot worse than others though and can make you just want to pick up your controller and throw it at the nearest wall. Now not a lot of things in games get me really angry, annoyed yes but angry no.

Talking about annoying things let's discuss invisible walls, Why the heck do we need these nowadays just throw up some brick wall or a bottomless pit or something. It just makes it seem retarded that you can walk up to a certain point and see a vast open space in front of you, Yet you can't walk past a certain point for no apparent reason at all.

One thing that also annoys me that is invisible wall related is items that get dropped just outside of your reach after killing an enemy. You know these item's that you really want as they could be really useful in the game, but you can't pick them up due to the retarded invisible wall. It is like the game designers are just doing it to piss me off.


Take Ninety Nine Nights where they take it to an even greater level, where they incorporate with the Trolls in the game. Upon killing a Troll power ups appear on top of the dead troll. You can't walk through the dead body or jump over to get it, so you have to wait until the body vanishes to grab it. This wouldn't be a problem if the power ups didn't vanish at the same time as the body. As a result this makes the whole power up and item drops for killing a troll redundant.

Also what is with the locked doors in games, if I have a grenade, crowbar or axe I should not have to go and find a red key or blue key to open a wooden door. Heck I don't need those to open a door in real life as my foot can open most doors with a kick in the right spot. So why do I need to find a key in a game as the heroic character when he/she surely has all the tools at their disposal to open a door with ease. If I was playing as George Bush then fair enough, although he probably would end up being locked out and the game would end.


Staying on the subject of doors this is something that annoys me a lot, and probably you as well. There is nothing worse than pressing up on the analog stick to walk through a door, only to end up coming back out of the same door and back into the area you were just in, as the camera angle switches when you reach the other side. How the hell can a solution not be found for this in games, it really is dumb. I don't walk through a door in my house only to find myself back outside the door 2 seconds later as I forgot to stop walking forwards. So why the heck do I have to stop walking forward in a game once I have gone through a door? The answer is because of shitty game design by thick as shit lazy ass coders.

What really annoys me though, in fact it downright pisses me off is games like Call of Duty: World At War. While playing on Veteran you expect the game to be a challenge by making the Nazi's harder to kill, maybe more enemies and the ability to kill you in one or maybe two shots. What you don't expect is the Nazi's to have some superhuman ability to carry fifty thousand grenade's each and throw them at your character with precision aim every millisecond. This leads to the game not being a challenge but being about luck. At one point I was hitting the button to throw the grenades back, and unfortunately the 9th one killed me.


We all love a good challenge in a game, what we don't like however is something retarded that ends up killing us through no fault of our own. We can all live with the fact that we fucked up in a game and died because it was our fault for rushing out or doing something dumb, but when it's something out of our control it really pisses me off.

We live in an age where games are supposedly getting better all the time with realistic looking graphics, amazing physics and all other bullshit. It is a shame that so much is being done to improve these area's yet nothing is done to improve the things that annoy us. With a few changes an average game can become a good game, or at least make it so you want to play it for a bit longer.

Maybe I am just getting fussy about what I expect to see in a game, but at £40 - £50 a game I think I am entitled to an opinion at least. Screw invisible barriers, dumb AI team mates or opponents and all the other crap that pisses me off as I play. Game companies need to ask us gamers what annoys us in games, then listen to us and fix a few of the realistic annoyances we have with the games they make, maybe then gamers won't be such miserable bastards that complain all the time about what is wrong with games.