If you ask me, Planescape's hand-drawn 2D graphics have hold up a lot better than early 3D from the same era. Hell I think it's sometimes downright beautiful;
It's amazingly atmospheric.
This is generally true, that the last generation of 2d games look significantly better than many old 3d games. This is doubly true if you can play the game at a high resolution (a term that means something different today than it did in 1998, hands up if you can remember when 800x600 was high res!) since 2d sprites and backgrounds from the late 90s basically look as nice as the artists could draw them.
As for my rules picks, I've got to go with:
1) Never auto-save before the cutscene. Allow saving between cutscene and boss fight.
The only thing more frustrating than repeatedly failing is having the game show you the same tedious exposition every time you try again. Example: Mass Effect, boss fight with krogan and geth on Therum, riding that damn elevator up 18 times, listening to Liara's nails-on-a-chalkboard voice over and over.
2) Never show me my corpse or death animation in unskippable slow-mo after I died.
Salt in the wound. Burnout gets a pass on this one because it rewards me for crashing.
3) Stun-lock must be killed with fire.
This one's popped up since the dawn of action games, but it saw a huge resurgence after WoW was released. The player should NEVER be killed without having the ability to act. I dont care what type of game it is, this one is such a huge deal breaker (and a keyboard breaker). Get out of jail free moves are a bandaid on the problem, remove stun-lock from everything everywhere.
4) Suicidal escorts should be left to die.
Escort missions don't have to go away. They've been done right on occasion. But for every decent escort mission in gaming, there are 20 more that involve babysitting a suicidal twat who doesn't wait for you, runs into the line of fire, takes the least efficient path to their destination, or otherwise finds a way to make you wish you were doing something else. If you're a game designer and you put an escort mission in your game, you'd better be DAMN F-ING SURE that its done right.
5) Grossly inconsistent difficulty - playtest your damn games!
Sometimes it seems that the largest studios with tones of staff and the most lavish budgets are the biggest culprits here. Dragon Age: Origins is one of the best examples I can think of. Good games can really be dragged down by inexplicably hard trash mobs and bizzarely easy boss fights. I'm not talking about optional bosses either; I mean when you come around the corner in the hallway on your way to Major Plot Objective 3 and you stumble into a group of goblins with no special names and no awesome loot who absolutely destroy you thirteen times before you either get lucky or cheap the encounter. Then half an hour later, when you get to the showdown with Major Boss 4, you mash your way through without breaking a sweat.
I could go on like this for hours, but yeah, those are the big ones.
