The broken rules of video gaming...

[Anathrax]

I was bored so I decided to go for the Meat Boy and Focus impossible badges on kongregate. After finishing Meat Boy and giving up on Focus, here are the things I feel these games have messed up so badly...

Rule 1: Thou shall not have piss music and sound effects blasting your ears and giving thou ideas to murder thy speakers or headphones with no mute button.
Violator: Meat Boy
This was baad. Let me interrupt myself here and mention that Woodkid's Iron calms me greatly. So when I cannot listen to it and instead have to hear that same repetitive music over and over again, combined with some levels where there are many rocket launchers making fart noises I couldn't stand myself.

Rule 2: You shall not have inconsistent controls.
Violator: Meat Boy
Let me admit here, that the controls are tight. But they are so inconsistent to the point of frustration. A tap of the left key would simply edge me to a platform, while in some other times will send me flying across the room. I've tried it on same levels with relatively the same moves throughout levels and I can safely confirm that the controls change according to what they please.

Rule 3+4: Thou shall not have little children arguing, nor shall you have blocks that are hard to distinguish from the back ground.
Violators: Kongregate and Meat Boy respectively

And while on the subject of screenshots, you shouldn't frustrate me to the point of naming my screenshots Arse, Arse2 and WastedTime.avi.

Rule 5: Thou shall not include blue moons in your gameplay nor should you have collectibles from the planet jerk.

See these? I hate these one block gaps where you have to tiptoe your massive bum around till the stars align and twilight stops sucking then you will pass. Another thing, notice the bandaid in the middle? I hate those two. You have to squint, glue your face to the monitor and magnify the picture a billion times to notice it. But finding and getting to it isn't the hard part, collecting it is. You see, the last level was called sky pup. Here's the screenshot.

That bandaid was an arse to reach, and it took 60 gazillion times for the bandaid to notice I was hugging it to be collected. Then comes the scrolling screen trick where if you are a sniff away from the bottom of the screen, you are dead. Start over. Speaking of that...

Rule 6: You do NOT have crap hitboxes.
Self explanatory I suppose.

But I moved on and finally, finally I managed to end skypup.

Yay....

HOWEVER.

Focus was horror. I'll give it two awards since I don't want to think of it any more.

Rule 7: A-hole missiles of the finest quality.
Missile launchers that fire missiles at the rate of about 2 missiles a second, that are so small and so fast your slow motion can't always save you.

Rule 8: You do not cause laptops to strategically exit buildings through windows.

Post the things that made you infuriated, that broke holy rules of games that shouldn't be broken. Can be any type of game.

Capacha: Fair and square. Yeah right...

 

[Anathrax]

After playing and finishing a game called Skullface, it feels as if the difficulty from meat boy comes from placing an annoying platform in the middle of an annoying level and sending you back to the beginning. I wouldn't call skullface hard by any means, but I would love to see a hard version of it. Good controls, good music(That can be muted) and best of all... a jetpack.

Come on gentlemenly gentlemen. Share your stories about games that have broken the holy rules of gaming, that you feel every game should follow or at least grasp the basics of.

 

[Beat14]

Hm, it might not be a holy rule of gaming, but it seems pretty important to me, and that is when enemies can hit you through a wall not because their weapon allows for it. My example of this would be dark souls, I doesn't happen often but the few times I've died from being hit by a silver knight through a wall I can remember compared to countless other deaths I have had.

 

[King of Asgaard]

How about: Thou Shalt Not Have Inconsistent or Haphazard Checkpoints?
My example of this is the original Mass Effect. Since I found combat to be clunky at the best of times and an absolute clusterfuck at the worst, I do not like going through three rooms and six loading screens without manually saving just to be one-shot by a rocket drone off-screen, sending me all the way back to square one. What makes this worse is that the game does autosave, only it does so so rarely that it might as well not.
At least they fixed that in the sequels, but it still led to a lot of frustration.

 

[ArcaneSaint]

If you don't like the Kongregate chat just turn it off (either by leaving the chat room or by switching from the "chat" tab to another one, like "game" or "achievement").
Now, having no mute button can't really be excused, but you could still mute your browser's sound via Volume Mixer (or your OS's equivalent), or even mute the individual tab, if your browser supports that. Though I agree, a mute button should really be included in every game
As for the "insanely difficult" points, you were playing Meat Boy, a game that's all about insanely difficult challenges. Don't know about the inconsistent controls and hitboxes though, it's been a long while since I last played it.


Personal "favourite" broken rules of video gaming?
1) Unskippable cutscenes, doubly so if between a checkpoint and a ridiculous bossfight, bonus points if said bossfight has one of those 700-stage 5-minute attack animation bosses.
2) Tacked-on multiplayer, especially if it serves no real purpose other than excusing always-requiring-an-infallible-internet-connection-DRM.
3) Not being able to mute certain people in multiplayer games.
4) Minigames that detract from the overall gameplay, but have to be completed in order to continue.

 

[Sixcess]

Thou shalt not send me into the same monster infested cave/temple/fortress over and over again.

World of Warcraft used to do this a lot. The quest giver would tell you to go into a nearby castle and kill a certain named enemy. After fighting your way in through the mobs you'd find the target and kill him. Then you'd go back to the quest giver and he'd say "Well done. Now can you go and kill his boss - he's in the room next to the one where you killed the first guy."

In particularly annoying cases the target of the second quest would be so placed that you'd almost certainly had to kill him on the way to completing the original quest - so now you have to kill him again. Repeating this three or four times over wasn't unknown.

The Cataclysm revamp cleaned most of these up, but left a few intact. There's a multi level aztec style city full of trolls in the Hinterlands and you get sent in there about five times - hacking your way through the same hordes of enemies every single time...

 

[Subscriptism]

How about: Thou Shalt Not Have Inconsistent or Haphazard Checkpoints?
My example of this is the original Mass Effect. Since I found combat to be clunky at the best of times and an absolute clusterfuck at the worst, I do not like going through three rooms and six loading screens without manually saving just to be one-shot by a rocket drone off-screen, sending me all the way back to square one. What makes this worse is that the game does autosave, only it does so so rarely that it might as well not.
At least they fixed that in the sequels, but it still led to a lot of frustration.

Oh god, this a thousand times this, the amount of times I threw my controller down and refused to continue for a few days. The one that always got me was the level where you go to get Liara and right before you enter the mine you have to fight a fuck ton of geth and one of the geth tanks on foot. If you die there you go back to the beginning of the level about twenty minutes of bouncy tank gameplay to re-do.

Dead rising also had this problem big time. I couldn't even finish that game. It was fun but between the time constraints and the broken save system I gave up about half way through.

 

[The White Hunter]

Insta-death dice roll areas around enemies in action games.

Yeah, fuck you Resident Evil 5.

 

[King of Asgaard]

How about: Thou Shalt Not Have Inconsistent or Haphazard Checkpoints?
My example of this is the original Mass Effect. Since I found combat to be clunky at the best of times and an absolute clusterfuck at the worst, I do not like going through three rooms and six loading screens without manually saving just to be one-shot by a rocket drone off-screen, sending me all the way back to square one. What makes this worse is that the game does autosave, only it does so so rarely that it might as well not.
At least they fixed that in the sequels, but it still led to a lot of frustration.

Oh god, this a thousand times this, the amount of times I threw my controller down and refused to continue for a few days. The one that always got me was the level where you go to get Liara and right before you enter the mine you have to fight a fuck ton of geth and one of the geth tanks on foot. If you die there you go back to the beginning of the level about twenty minutes of bouncy tank gameplay to re-do.

Yeah, that was where I got stuck too.
The other egregious offender was Luna base. Those bastarded rocket drones...
While not story important, it gives a good reward, and there isn't a reason NOT to do it, but those fucking drones ruin it.

 

[Anathrax]

You know what I should play a terrible game based on norse mythology. Then I could make a joke like: This game is the King of Assgard... Too human here I come. Oh, you left? Coward...

I think if I had a massive issue with checkpoints it was Demon Souls. Oh lord was that bad.

 

[Fractral]

Uh... always put checkpoints/save points between time consuming things, such as bosses or long cutscenes. Examples of this would be Persona 3- there is a very long cutscene after the Hanged Man boss, and all I could think of was 'I hope my parents don't force me to stop playing'. Not a big issue for everyone, but it was for me.
And since I've been playing X3 a lot recently, how about: 'Include actual tutorials and explanations.' Because if you don't know what you're doing, it takes forever to start off in those games.

 

[Lazy]

Thou shalt not make attack and block the same button.

 

[MiskWisk]

Thou shalt not make upping the difficulty grant the Computer cheats and omniscience. I am now pretty much permanently against upping the difficulty on any RTS because I have never seen one that didn't just make the computer cheat more than I did on Age of Empires 2.

Thou shalt not make attack and block the same button.

What game did that?

 

[ComradeJim270]

How about we just do away with checkpoints as a main method of saving your game? They're fine as an "oops I forgot to save" thing, but I detest games that force me to rely on them. There's just no reason to do this except to make your game more frustratingly difficult (see Dark Souls, which did this on purpose), or because you're lazy and want to artificially increase the length and difficulty of it (see just about any console shooter).

 

[Gun Animal]

thou shalt not do things that i dislike, my word is law! quality is objective!

 

[Subscriptism]

How about: Thou Shalt Not Have Inconsistent or Haphazard Checkpoints?
My example of this is the original Mass Effect. Since I found combat to be clunky at the best of times and an absolute clusterfuck at the worst, I do not like going through three rooms and six loading screens without manually saving just to be one-shot by a rocket drone off-screen, sending me all the way back to square one. What makes this worse is that the game does autosave, only it does so so rarely that it might as well not.
At least they fixed that in the sequels, but it still led to a lot of frustration.

Oh god, this a thousand times this, the amount of times I threw my controller down and refused to continue for a few days. The one that always got me was the level where you go to get Liara and right before you enter the mine you have to fight a fuck ton of geth and one of the geth tanks on foot. If you die there you go back to the beginning of the level about twenty minutes of bouncy tank gameplay to re-do.

Yeah, that was where I got stuck too.
The other egregious offender was Luna base. Those bastarded rocket drones...
While not story important, it gives a good reward, and there isn't a reason NOT to do it, but those fucking drones ruin it.

Noveria peak (whatever number) did that really badly too, I remember leaving the hot labs after activating the purge thingy and getting killed, I went back to when you first arrive on the tramway. Nothing puts me off a game more than shit autosaves.

 

[King of Asgaard]

How about: Thou Shalt Not Have Inconsistent or Haphazard Checkpoints?
My example of this is the original Mass Effect. Since I found combat to be clunky at the best of times and an absolute clusterfuck at the worst, I do not like going through three rooms and six loading screens without manually saving just to be one-shot by a rocket drone off-screen, sending me all the way back to square one. What makes this worse is that the game does autosave, only it does so so rarely that it might as well not.
At least they fixed that in the sequels, but it still led to a lot of frustration.

Oh god, this a thousand times this, the amount of times I threw my controller down and refused to continue for a few days. The one that always got me was the level where you go to get Liara and right before you enter the mine you have to fight a fuck ton of geth and one of the geth tanks on foot. If you die there you go back to the beginning of the level about twenty minutes of bouncy tank gameplay to re-do.

Yeah, that was where I got stuck too.
The other egregious offender was Luna base. Those bastarded rocket drones...
While not story important, it gives a good reward, and there isn't a reason NOT to do it, but those fucking drones ruin it.

Noveria peak (whatever number) did that really badly too, I remember leaving the hot labs after activating the purge thingy and getting killed, I went back to when you first arrive on the tramway. Nothing puts me off a game more than shit autosaves.

I know exactly what you mean.
After spending a good couple of hours fighting your way through a dungeon, only having the whole run, perfect or otherwise, erased in an instant because of an oversight is what used to put me off a lot of games when I was younger, specifically RPGs. Nowadays, I just grit my teeth and endeavour to get through the section as quickly as possible, and as identically as the first time. But it's never as good as the first time, is it?

 

[Grape_Bullion]

You forgot the rule where if you take the time to make up eight rules for what video games can't do anymore, you should probably stop playing games for a bit.

 

[Zepherus14]

-Thou shall not stun-lock
-Thou shall not have unskippable cutscene that appear even when they are view for a second time.
-Thou shall not cheat (Having the computer AI cheat to ahead)
-Thou shall not introduce terrible game mechanics for no good reason (Random tripping in SSBB)
-Thou shall not steal my bacon

Kinda want to also mention the existence of the blue shell here since really, that item is completely useless. Someone in last place shouldn't care about who is in first since they need to get in front of x number of people. The only thing the blue shell does is waste an item slot for the player behind, and a headache for the person in first.

 

[RJ 17]

Thou shalt not send me into the same monster infested cave/temple/fortress over and over again.

Ahhhh yes, this is a good one that I remember from my days in WoW. Noteable offenders also include Rage and Borderlands.

I really can't stand games that have you clear out a dungeon then when you turn in that quest they're like "Hey! Thanks for killing all the jagoffwobblers in that cave! Now you get to go back to that same fucking cave, but this time you're looking for the magical jagoff crystals!"

Why the fuck couldn't they have mentioned that before? Could I not have been collecting jagoff crystals WHILE killing jagoffwobblers? Just pointless BS game-padding.

As for my own rule, "Thou Shalt Not Make A Game With Ridiculously Shitty Controls Designed Specifically To Give Players A Hard Time So The Game Can Claim To Be The Most Difficult Game Ever Made." Yeah, that's right, I said it! I'd imagine this might piss some people off as it's rather obvious what game I'm talking about. :3

But seriously, it's pretty easy to claim your game is brutally difficult when a majority of that difficulty stems from the fucking controls themselves.

On a more light hearted note: "With The Exception Of FPS's, Thou Shalt Always Include A Toggle Function Between Running And Walking If The Game Has Such A Function." This comes from Batman wandering his ass around Arkham City because you have to hold down the run button.