Last week I was one of the speakers at the IGDA Orlando chapter meeting. I had almost missed it due to some… complications. (*ahem*) However, I did get to present my topic in Pecha Kucha presentation form to a captivated audience that consisted mostly of college students.

I am sure I told those students things that night that they will never hear in those game design classes that they SHOULD hear. I’ve grown up as a gamer and because of games such as River City Ransom, Chrono Trigger, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario 64, Rez, Street Fighter II, and even more essentials I have been imbued with a fiery passion for games.

Those games made me fall in love but if I were to meet videogames now, I don’t know if I would have the same feeling. The game industry and its creative talent have taken some very wrong turns that lead me to wonder what the hell they are all trying to do. There are a lot of common trends that really make me angry, and while they are not new to games they certainly have made a bigger presence than they should have. So with that…

6 Things I HATE About Modern Videogames

#1 – Mandatory Tutorial Levels

I played Borderlands recently. It was pretty lackluster and it’s essentially Doom with stats and an inventory if you break down the game to its core mechanics. I don’t think Borderlands was made to reach an audience that have not yet played a first person shooter before.

So… why do I have to start the game following a trashcan on wheels who tells me how to crouch and shoot and reload!? I already know how to do that! And why can’t I shoot the talking trashcan!?

The first time I played a game with an annoying tutorial level I couldn’t skip was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. You can see in the video above that you have to grind through some boring snowball fight before you wind up in the fantasy world of Ivalice. Like Borderlands, there’s not too much new in the gameplay and it’s debatable if the game was even marketed to a new audience who had never played turn-based strategy JRPGs.

It really bugs me that we have to play through these tutorials to be told things we already know because it’s not exciting. If anything, it feels like the game designers are telling the players that they are too stupid to figure out their grand design so the players MUST play these tutorials that explain the most tedious of details to them because the designers think that this will keep buyers playing the game.

A game like New Super Mario Bros. doesn’t even bother doing this because how hard is it to figure out how to move left and right, jump, and throw fireballs?

I’m not saying that tutorial levels should be eliminated but they certainly should not be mandatory. The recent re-release of the classic FPS Perfect Dark on Xbox Live Arcade shows a more practical method of tutorials. By choosing to tour the Carrington Institute you can practice tactics and train with newly acquired weapons and vehicles. You don’t have to do it but it helps if you want to learn how to do something in the game before doing a campaign mission or a multiplayer match.

#2 – Quicktime Events

Nothing like interrupting the flow of an intense battle with a game of Simon appearing out of nowhere! Imagine you are some badass like Kratos from the God of War games and you are mashing buttons(I’m assuming you’re a noob if you mash buttons) and doing all these crazy murderous combos on a big giant boss monster. (What the hell are those?)

You get really into kicking lots of ass and then you have to press the X button to let the game take over and pull off a cinematic finisher and you were so into what was going on and now you are being FORCED TO STOP HAVING FUN and engage in a unique feeling that I would like to coin as “Gamer Blue Balls.”

If you mess up- and you will because these “Quicktime Events” are never designed to appear at the right time because they are ALWAYS out of place in any game they show up in -you pretty much have to restart building your lost momentum.

Quicktime Events are the videogame industry’s failed attempt to make videogames both cinematic and interactive at the same time. You can’t do both simultaneously! Well you can, but it is certainly not fun! You could either play or watch and interrupting play with a chance to watch during the heat of the moment is the most annoying thing a game can do.

I discovered a database that lists over 100 games that feature Quick Time Events. Many of them are recent. Stop the madness now!

Next time I’ll cover a couple of things that helped First Person Shooters become lame in the span of a decade.