Dumbest video game mechanics!

[default]

A button for blinking in Alone In The Dark.

The stupidest design choice I've ever seen. And you have to constantly be blinking, or it will be impossible to see anything.

Stupidest, stupidest, STUPIDEST fucking design idea I have EVER seen in a game EVER.

What the hell were the designers thinking?!?!

 

[vxicepickxv]

Unskippable cutscenes win out of all your nominations!

If they're fairly short(3 to 5 seconds) and won't show up all of the damn time, then they're not so bad.

BulletWitch and Too Human are examples of bad Unskippable cutscenes.

 

[Sinclair Solutions]

A button for blinking in Alone In The Dark.

The stupidest design choice I've ever seen. And you have to constantly be blinking, or it will be impossible to see anything.

Stupidest, stupidest, STUPIDEST fucking design idea I have EVER seen in a game EVER.

What the hell were the designers thinking?!?!

Wait, wait, wait. There was a button...for blinking? I thought that was just a joke in Unskippable.

 

[TiefBlau]

That annoying thing in Braid where you are presented with two doors and one key, and if you use the key in the wrong door it breaks and you have to restart the whole level.

It forces you to be logically prudent. During this part of the level, time goes forward as you go right and backwards as you go left, so naturally anything exempt from time, like the glowing key, will stay broken after you use it and anything that changes with time, and anything else, like the door, will close again if you go backwards in time.

So Yahtzee was wrong in saying that there was no indication as to which door would break the key.

Losing your key is still a lot like stubbing your toe in the darkness though.
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Here's one that really irritates me: In-game arcade games. Yes, it's a game in a game. No, that doesn't make it fun squared. This really pissed me off in Bully, where they had you beat a high score on an arcade game to win the respect of some nerds. In retrospect, however, that was probably one of the highlights of that childish GTA clone.

 

[thethingthatlurks]

2D sections in normal 3D games, where the required path is a straight line, but the character maintains a modicum of freedom from that path. Arkham Asylum comes to mind, the Scarecrow levels in particular. It's annoying when you run into an obstacle only because of the stupid controls.

Other than that: fuckmothering QTEs. Whoever came up with the idea, kindly die in a fire.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

There's the one mechanic in Overlord II in which you have to hold down RMB and LMB at the same time and push the mouse to control your minions. I think Yahtzee pointed it out in his review of the game, but it really is a shitting stupid use of mouse control.

Oh, and the original Dead Rising's save system was bloody annoying. I'm glad Dead Rising 2 got the whole "save after finishing a case" thing down pat.