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[gomez]

Also Smashing Pumpkins used the shotgun sound from Doom.

[Delta Foxtrot]

The idea that half life 2 is a game that uses graphics as a crutch baffles me.

What the hell else does it have going for it

Linear missions with fun set piece battles and mostly good pacing between puzzles and shooting. Admittedly enemies tend to be bullet sponges and weapons themselves aren't best found in an FPS, but I quite like it. For comparison's sake, I didn't really care for Modern Warfare's linear missions with set piece battles.

[Neonivek]

Pay for not terrible service

Ok this is the weirdest trend for freemium services but basically they will intentionally ensure that their servers don't have enough space for anyone or enough bandwidth.

This is all to ensure that they can charge you membership for the "Actual make the product functional" aspect.

Blade and Soul does this as an example... and is probably the worst offender given that sometimes it can take you hours upon hours because the members keep cutting in line.

Luckily for me Blade and Soul but a stupid unfair grind wall infront of me so I don't care to play it anymore

[H4zardZ1]

I hate everything all of you like. Without exception. Even ESPECIALLY the conflicting ones.

...Good luck doing a suicide when he likes you.

Low-framerate scummable games
Ahh, the joy of doing timing-heavy things in slow motion when there is no slowmotion there... putting the fps into very manageable levels (such as half fps). This is more of a balancing concern than a pet peeve, through... unless you put multiplayer in it, in which case, noobs.

Losing a savefile, or otherwise crashing by heavy amounts of data in a savefile.
I think i don't need to explain this too much...

[Darkmere]

I'm 99% sure I've said this here before, but it came up again, so fuck it.

Pointless Interface Screws

I got CONSORTIUM on a giveaway. I love, LOVE that in between the first solid hour of basically nothing but infodumps (at least half of which are totally POINTLESS infodumps) the whole screen has to static out to remind me that I'm playing a simulation of a simulation. IT'S META AND CLEVER, GEDDIT?!

And the other half of the shit sandwich:

Control Screws
Amnesia was the biggest offender here, but there's a couple in CONSORTIUM as well. Sequences where you lose control of the character just to fuck with you. Parts where your movement speed slows to a crawl to poorly hide loading times.

Have a bonus!

Infodumps

Have some information on the game world in the form of 20 fifteen-page text documents and speeches from each character about your ISKS CKY RSVP equipment. It's fully RGB compliant, as you trained for in BCC and your RSVP clearance is go. What does all that mean? Don't be stupid, we know you were briefed on ISKS CKY RSVP RGB BCC RSVP protocols already, stop wasting my time.

[Shadowlord]

You didn't mention the part where you're supposed to interrogate the crew to figure out who the traitor is, but there doesn't appear to be any way to actually figure it out from the conversationing. Or if there was, it was too subtle for me to spot.

Spoiler: how I dun it (click to show/hide)

(... I figured it out by running around the ship writing down the numbers of everyone I could still see while the traitor was in the suit, and then checking to see who was missing from my list, and rolling back to finger the correct person because... might as well take advantage of it being a simulation)

[Darkmere]

I'll be honest I only made in 35 minutes in. I don't have the stomach to go back yet.

[Parsely]

I watched Xanmyral play it and he knew about the infodump, and thus skipped it. Darkmere is not lying: that was a lot of text you could optionally read, but it didn't stop me from enjoying Xanmyral not saying anything to anyone who talked to him, which was hilarious (there was only one part we ran into where the game forced you to say something but otherwise you were allowed to stay completely silent and some of the NPC's reactions were pure gold). The voice acting was very hit and miss. In some places it was surprisingly good, and in others the actors sucked shit. The gunplay seemed like it felt really bad, but before that I was rather enjoying the plot. As advertised, your decisions did seem to have some weight within the plot but we didn't play the game to the end so I can't say exactly how deep they go. You CAN have fun playing Consortium. It's a real quality B-movie garbage video game title. You can tell how much the devs wanted the game to be good, which makes it all the more fun to laugh at their failure. It's a good break from all the memetastic, ironically shitty games that have been sweeping the market today.

[NullForceOmega]

Here's todays peeve:

Enemies that can only be defeated through cheese or optimized strategies... in an RPG.  Okay devs, when I play an RPG it is to be immersed in the role I am playing, not to ram my head against enemies built in such a way that you have to abuse game mechanics or use one singular "best" strategy to beat.  If I am a high-level support class, then I should be able to rely on others to inflict damage in battle, if I am running a melee-centric character then I should be effective at least as a wall that attracts hits.  What I should not be doing is searching online to find out how to actually bring an enemy down, and find an entire community of players who have the same issue I do with a given enemy.  This is bad design, the meta should never overtake the gameplay.

[itisnotlogical]

In old-school JRPGs specifically though, I kinda like that. Because there's not any mechanical skill (running, jumping, dodging, shooting, etc.) it's difficult to make a boss fight that isn't just a war of attrition, doing 9999 * (# of party members) each turn while occasionally reviving someone. The option is to add a gimmick (Cagnazzo's shell in FF4, for example) or make the fight brutal and unfair so there has to be a trick to working it out.

Since a gimmick can usually be leveled past, I prefer the brutal and unfair option.

There's a boss in FF6 that I thought was a good example. It's a fairly easy boss, but when you kill it it casts Ultima on your entire party. Since you can encounter it pretty early on in the World of Ruin, it'll probably kill you. You could just level and level until you're able to tank Ultima... or you can get a relic or esper that grants Reraise. I didn't even know that Reraise was a thing before this fight made me use it.

EDIT: Or you can cast Osmose on it until it doesn't have enough MP to cast the final attack, which is kind of an unorthodox strategy but doesn't count as breaking the game.

[Rolan7]

The entire magic tower was a great sequence of disrupting the normal mechanics, though.  Also optional, which is nice (though I enjoyed it, and that loot!)

That said, I played with savestates.  Which negates a lot of the tower's frustration, and particularly that other ability the boss has.

[Shadowlord]

Here's todays peeve:

Enemies that can only be defeated through cheese or optimized strategies... in an RPG.  Okay devs, when I play an RPG it is to be immersed in the role I am playing, not to ram my head against enemies built in such a way that you have to abuse game mechanics or use one singular "best" strategy to beat.  If I am a high-level support class, then I should be able to rely on others to inflict damage in battle, if I am running a melee-centric character then I should be effective at least as a wall that attracts hits.  What I should not be doing is searching online to find out how to actually bring an enemy down, and find an entire community of players who have the same issue I do with a given enemy.  This is bad design, the meta should never overtake the gameplay.

I want to say this isn't always bad, and cite Baldur's Gate II, for example. Take the regenerating trolls you can meet early on, which you need fire to kill (fireball, flaming weapons, etc). Just trying to use your standard strategy won't work. You can't just faceroll everything with one strategy that you never change for the entire game.

There is a flaw in that, though, with the way spells are prepared in that version of D&D: since you have to prepare them ahead of time, you have to know what you're going to face ahead of time (or fight it and run away, or die and reload). So you run into the trolls and get whacked, then reload, and then prepare, and try again, possibly multiple times... If you had a mana pool like in various non-D&D games, you could adapt on the fly.

(Of course, most common enemies don't require a unique strategy to beat, so it's not like you have to scout and prepare specially for every battle.)

[Arbinire]

I'd say the Baldur's Gate scenario and the JRPG scenario there are quite a bit different.  Like with the trolls, any fan or D&D or fantasy literature has a pretty good idea what they are going up against, whereas JRPG's often employ these kind of mechanics to original bosses with little to no reference point.

Someone else posted earlier about a pet-peeve with MMO's having that "gated" experience for free to play where they limit player populations to give "subscriber perks" and such.  While things like that are annoying and definitely pet peeve worthy, my particular gripe with this are the self-destructive communities of subscribers who defend these practices and generally dumping on their F2P players as well.  SWTOR's community is especially bad at both hating their free to play comrades(little realizing that even if they aren't spending much money, they'll usually bring in friends who do), and then defend the shitty implementation of the free to play model because "it's the only thing keeping people subscribed".

If the only thing keeping people subscribed to your game are things like not wanting to deal with currency caps, wanting to wear best in slot gear, etc...While you're still complaining about most of your friends dropping subs and just playing as premium, then it isn't the free to play player base you should be directing your hate at.  And yeah, been giving SWTOR another try recently

[Shadowlord]

I tried SWTOR but everything EXCEPT the plot (for the smuggler) rubbed me the wrong way. The plot kept me playing for a couple days before I quit.

[NullForceOmega]

Here's todays peeve:

Enemies that can only be defeated through cheese or optimized strategies... in an RPG.  Okay devs, when I play an RPG it is to be immersed in the role I am playing, not to ram my head against enemies built in such a way that you have to abuse game mechanics or use one singular "best" strategy to beat.  If I am a high-level support class, then I should be able to rely on others to inflict damage in battle, if I am running a melee-centric character then I should be effective at least as a wall that attracts hits.  What I should not be doing is searching online to find out how to actually bring an enemy down, and find an entire community of players who have the same issue I do with a given enemy.  This is bad design, the meta should never overtake the gameplay.

I want to say this isn't always bad, and cite Baldur's Gate II, for example. Take the regenerating trolls you can meet early on, which you need fire to kill (fireball, flaming weapons, etc). Just trying to use your standard strategy won't work. You can't just faceroll everything with one strategy that you never change for the entire game.

There is a flaw in that, though, with the way spells are prepared in that version of D&D: since you have to prepare them ahead of time, you have to know what you're going to face ahead of time (or fight it and run away, or die and reload). So you run into the trolls and get whacked, then reload, and then prepare, and try again, possibly multiple times... If you had a mana pool like in various non-D&D games, you could adapt on the fly.

(Of course, most common enemies don't require a unique strategy to beat, so it's not like you have to scout and prepare specially for every battle.)

That is a good point, but what I am talking about is when an enemy has an ability or (vastly worse and truly infuriating) scripted attacks/interrupts etc. that make anything not the perfect optimal strategy or blatantly cheesing the game totally non-viable.  For instance an enemy with immunities that are not indicated or documented anywhere is dropped in your path, and not having the exact setup necessary to kill it stalls the entire game.