The one (or more) mechanic that ruined a game you loved.

[Mischief Maker]

Is there a game you were really into at first that got ruined after you figured out one or two badly designed mechanics?

I'll start with a few of mine:

Ruiner

I really was loving this gorgeous anime cyberpunk belt scroller/shooter hybrid with zwee-fighting, playing through the new game+ with a filled out skill tree and enjoying the smarter and better distributed enemies. Then I made the mistake of watching a video of someone clearing the arena stage and noticed they were leaning pretty heavily on "ghost hack," an ability that reprograms an enemy's cybernetics and turns them into a permanent ally. I hadn't used it much because I didn't like the puppy-head icon that denoted they were charmed.

After seeing the video I went back to my game and started using Ghost Hack. It turned the game into a virtual cakewalk. I could effectively instakill three normal enemies at will, and then for several seconds afterward I had a posse of bullet-sponges that aggro'ed any and all enemies. And once my zombies were dead, it was quick and cheap to do it all over again.

Majesty 2

Majesty 1 is one of my favorite management games of all time, but it looks and sounds fucking awful. Majesty 2, while aged, has all the animations and visible character changes I wanted in the first game along with one of the best fantasy soundtracks of all time, but they rewrote the rules and in several ways dumbed the game down. Still, it was a game I played for relaxation/podcasts anyway so I was willing to overlook the shallowness for the sake of the aesthetics.

One problem I had with the game was how in harder levels it seemed like a total dice roll whether I'd survive the earlygame. The exact same strategy would carry me to victory one run, or result in my kingdom being squished another. Then I learned about character stats. In Majesty 1 characters had differing stats, but for every weakness they also had a corresponding strength. A warrior with low offensive value would also be an impenetrable tank. But in Majesty 2 it's just independent D&D attribute rolls and there is no balancing involved. You can have a thief with horrible stats from an unlucky dice roll who just dies over and over again, or you can have one with max stats who out-tanks a fighter, and the stat effects multiply as the character gains levels. Horrible design decision, an hour-long match decided in the first couple seconds by the RNG.

Ys VIII:

I've said it before, Ys to me is all about high-speed movement and combat where you don't slow down for the enemy. I was really enjoying the music, tropical island theme, and behind-the-back perspective of Ys VIII.

But after hitting a difficulty brick wall with one boss after getting stuck in an inescapable save spot (another screw-up on the part of the designers), I watched a video of a pro doing the fight and they didn't move at all thanks to flash guard. They just stood still in front of the boss and used flash guard every time the boss attacked. It was the most boring and un-Ys thing I'd ever seen, clearly also the "right" way to play, and I couldn't go back after that.

[Ruldra]

Afterlife

Last year I bought this game, I played it as a kid and wanted to give it another go. It's basically Simcity 2000 in Heaven/Hell, but there's a mechanic there that completely ruined the game for me. You are required to balance every building in the field, which means clicking on every single individual building and place a gauge in its optimal position. My city wasn't even that big but I already had like 200 buildings to balance. Even when you do, a couple minutes later it gets unbalanced and you need to adjust it again.

You can choose an option to balance every building in the map but it costs several millions in cash, often far more than what you have. And it doesn't matter anyway because a few minutes later they all get unbalanced again.

I have no idea what they were thinking with this mechanic because it's just unnecessary micromanagement.

--

Saint Seiya Chapter Sanctuary (PS2)

This game has a special mode that's quite interesting. You're the Grand Master and you need to stop the 5 bronze saints from reaching the final house and defeating you. All the gold saints are available to protect you and you can put them in any of the 12 houses to stop Seiya & co..

In this mode the bronze saints put one hell of a fight, they're super tough to beat. Normally you can kill them quickly with a super move when their lifebar is low, but here they always counter it and instead you get hit for massive damage. You need to beat each one of them normally 3 or 4 times until they're out for good.

So I'm playing this mode and getting my ass kicked hard. They make it all the way to the Pisces house and I accidentally find out that Aphrodite has a special ability that makes them unable to counter your super move. Meaning you can go for a quick kill.

Next time I play, I put Aphrodite in the Aries house and he single-handedly kills all the bronze saints. One single ability wrecked the whole mode.

--

Lastly, the newest Alone in the Dark has a button to blink your eyes. If you don't blink, your vision gets foggy and makes you unable to see. You need to blink every 5 seconds or so. That alone was enough to make me stop playing.

[spmbx]

Not sure if its called a mechanic but anything with ranking completely ruins the game for me. Which is a shame because i love the way ibara looks and sounds

[Blinge]

I assume you mean 'Rank' or a rank system, ie dynamic difficulty, rather than the game ranking you at the end like "S++ well done :O"

More seriously, Binding of Isaac any version: Curses. All of them. What purpose do these serve other than wasting your precious gaming time in your busy day? They're not even challenging, just super annoying.

"chucked you into a random room LOL!" Yeah it's dumb as shit.
I think no map and not knowing how much health you have does increase the challenge but it increases the annoyance a helluva lot more, as you say.

Darkness curse is the worst one. I don't consider it a legit challenge if all the game has done is turn out the lights. What's the challenge there, more strain to damage my eyes?

Speaking of which, Doom64's darkness pretty much ruins the game for me.
Gonna play through the cart once then rely on the PC conversion for later use.

[RiderKick]

Speaking of darkness, i also find Spelunky's dark rooms more annoying than challenging, with the bigger challenge just being that you have to walk a lot slower because you don't know what is in front of you, even worse if you have an item like a shotgun and you want to carry it with you to the next level or you want to rescue someone but you can't hold the flare and another thing at the same time, requiring you to constantly drop and make sure you don't lose your item/person in trouble or make them die all while coming back for your flare.

The dark levels are easily the worst thing in Spelunky as they just take a lot of the fun and just slow everything, i don't even know why they are there to begin with.

[neorichieb1971]

Not a fan of Raidens color collecting orbs. If you could rotate your weapon on your ship that would be much better. Not a deal breaker, but still one that bothers me.

[drauch]

Gonna play through the cart once then rely on the PC conversion for later use.

Oh man, fire up that PC version. The darkness on the cart, not to mention the controls is horrendous.

[Durandal]

DESYNC is one of the few first-person shooters to try and dabble into more mechanics-focused gameplay á la DMC and Vanquish, building upon Bulletstorm's "kill with skill" system where the trick is to kill enemies in as many special ways as possible, much like Tony Hawk Pro Skater in some regard where things came down to chaining as many special moves as possible together

But unlike THPS and DMC's styling, DESYNC suffers from one fatal flaw: it doesn't punish you for reusing the same moves over and over.
What this means is that you can figure out the most optimal combo and apply it throughout the whole game, leaving most other weapons and tools to rot. It got so bad that in the span of two days I managed to achieve the World Records for all main levels, purely because of an advantage in knowledge, as several records involved a lot of deaths, were quite frankly shit, and not worthy of a WR at all. But shit like this happens when your scoring system is broken.

I haven't checked, but I think one guy has razed most of my scores by now. The game being painfully obtuse about its mechanics may have also deterred others from giving the game a serious shot.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The dark levels are easily the worst thing in Spelunky as they just take a lot of the fun and just slow everything, i don't even know why they are there to begin with.

Old PC version or the remake with higher res graphics? The dark levels on the older version are tough but manageable, but I can't stand the higher res remake myself because of various bugs/issues I had when I first played it. Some of them were patched and address since, but one thing I think that remains unchanged is the remake still shows less of the screen in terms of the total number of blocks on screen visible at once, which is a big issue when it comes to vertical height. In the old PC ver you could safely see blocks at the "safe" drop distance without having to stop and look down (the game has speedrunning built in as a challenge so this is very useful mechanically) whereas in the remake it is possible that some blocks below you are safe to drop, but your more relatively limited view makes it much more treacherous going.

I really like this thread and wish I could contribute; I remember having this exact complaint (where one purposefully added, poorly implemented mechanic actually spoils the game) about a couple games but I can't actually think of them at the moment.

[Immryr]

things like what MM dislikes about ruiner don't really bother me. a lot of games i love can be 'broken' by abusing certain things but i generally find them easy to ignore.

for a mechanic to ruin a game for me it has to be unavoidable and core to the game. the durability system in the shadow tower games comes immediately to mind. but then i guess i don't love the games so it doesn't really work.... i probably would if not for the durability system though. (i will go back and give them another chance at some point)

[drauch]

Not really a mechanic, but I quit Link's Awakening because I couldn't stand running into boulders and having long, unskippable text about how I couldn't lift them.

[Blinge]

Gonna play through the cart once then rely on the PC conversion for later use.

Oh man, fire up that PC version. The darkness on the cart, not to mention the controls is horrendous.

Haha i don't mind the controls because I rebound them this way:
Z - left strafe
R - right strafe.
B - shoot
A - use
leftC - up weapon
rightC - down weapon

Works for me. I just have to rebind, whack brightness up, and raise analog sensitivity every fucking time I turn the machine on.

[RiderKick]

The dark levels are easily the worst thing in Spelunky as they just take a lot of the fun and just slow everything, i don't even know why they are there to begin with.

Old PC version or the remake with higher res graphics? The dark levels on the older version are tough but manageable, but I can't stand the higher res remake myself because of various bugs/issues I had when I first played it. Some of them were patched and address since, but one thing I think that remains unchanged is the remake still shows less of the screen in terms of the total number of blocks on screen visible at once, which is a big issue when it comes to vertical height. In the old PC ver you could safely see blocks at the "safe" drop distance without having to stop and look down (the game has speedrunning built in as a challenge so this is very useful mechanically) whereas in the remake it is possible that some blocks below you are safe to drop, but your more relatively limited view makes it much more treacherous going.

I really like this thread and wish I could contribute; I remember having this exact complaint (where one purposefully added, poorly implemented mechanic actually spoils the game) about a couple games but I can't actually think of them at the moment.

The remake is indeed what came to mind, it's my one big complaint about the game though i still love it and can't wait for Spelunky 2.

[Sumez]

Not really a mechanic, but I quit Link's Awakening because I couldn't stand running into boulders and having long, unskippable text about how I couldn't lift them.

It's kinda funny that they seem to be tied to specific locations, and not just that type of item. Because the ones you run into later in the game, that you couldn't reach without the glove, don't say that.

Too bad, though, because Link's Awakening is an amazingly good game. Possibly the best Zelda out there.

[Hoagtech]

Any shining force title after 3 basically turned away from its castle political stories and excellent fantasy turn based strategy into very generic lukewarm action titles.

Shining force was so good that EX should be banned From existing

[Marc]

I won't lie and say that the dark levels in Spelunky have never annoyed me, or indeed led to the end of a previously fantastic run, but I find them a nice change of pace. That's what I like about the game, sometimes shit goes wrong and you have to deal with it, so it isn't always easy to cart the gear you want to the end. When they crop up in conjunction with another 'event' though, that gets frustrating.

[BrianC]

The slowdown button in the Atari 800 Centipede. It's a very good port otherwise, but holding the fire button slows enemies down and makes the game less intense than it should be.

[Vexorg]

Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages: The Goron dancing part. Got stuck on this and stopped playing.

Crazy Taxi (DC): Some of the weird gearshift mechanics for things like dashes and drifts. Couldn't figure out the timing on any of them, stopped playing when they became mandatory to pass certain challenges.

[Austin]

Crazy Taxi (DC): Some of the weird gearshift mechanics for things like dashes and drifts. Couldn't figure out the timing on any of them, stopped playing when they became mandatory to pass certain challenges.

I usually hit a brick wall in the arcade mode of Crazy Taxi because of the weird shifting mechanics. I am horribly inconsistent with them, but it's one of the few instances in my overall gaming experience where it doesn't feel like it's me that's the problem.

[Specineff]

Shared lives in Wild Guns Reloaded. Went back to the original instead, didn't regret it.

[RiderKick]

Can it be story based?

Like, i love Super Robot Wars, it's a strategy RPG series with freaking mecha, and many of the games have anime mecha at that.

But the plots tend to have one problem even if i think they are good, they always have a lot of villains that are supposedly fighting each other or uniting against the heroes while plotting to betray each other, so far, so good, right?

Except they tend to focus heavily on their canon enemies and seem to think that if they kill their enemies from their home series, there will be no one to stop them.

Gendo Ikari will ignore the existence of the other mecha even when there are aliens or non-human pilots that will still be able to fight no matter what.

Dr.Hell will only care about Kouji and the other Mazin Guys most of the time, ignoring the Gundams and the many other super robots and real robots around.

And so forth, and it's just confusing, sure the villains did lose against one particular mecha in canon(most of the time unless it's a series where the villains won like Baldios) but SRW is a world where they have a bigger army, are more willing to use them and there are a lot more threats rather than just the original one, so seeing something like "Once i defeat Mazinkaiser, there will be no one left to stop me, not even the other really powerful mechas piloted by guys that want to save the world!".

And sure, sometimes the robot they are focusing on is quite stronger than almost every other robot in the team if not the strongest, but it still feels weird to disregard the others, Dr.Hell, no one is saying that Mazinkaiser isn't strong, it's an overpowered unit in every game it's in and even canon wise it's powerful, since, you know, it had a whole OVA and movie where it destroyed really tough enemies without ever getting scratched, but there are still like, 40 Gundams and more by the side to deal with, can you at least pretend to give more than a few glances at the other pilots not named Kouji?

It's just weird having a RPG series where the villains tend to be pratically yanderes only focusing on one or two characters out of dozens of others that are equally strong or skilled if not moreso.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Crazy Taxi (DC): Some of the weird gearshift mechanics for things like dashes and drifts. Couldn't figure out the timing on any of them, stopped playing when they became mandatory to pass certain challenges.

I usually hit a brick wall in the arcade mode of Crazy Taxi because of the weird shifting mechanics. I am horribly inconsistent with them, but it's one of the few instances in my overall gaming experience where it doesn't feel like it's me that's the problem.

I got back to playing CT recently and it definitely required re-familiarizing myself with that crap.

[null1024]

Crazy Taxi (DC): Some of the weird gearshift mechanics for things like dashes and drifts. Couldn't figure out the timing on any of them, stopped playing when they became mandatory to pass certain challenges.

I usually hit a brick wall in the arcade mode of Crazy Taxi because of the weird shifting mechanics. I am horribly inconsistent with them, but it's one of the few instances in my overall gaming experience where it doesn't feel like it's me that's the problem.

Crazy Taxi took me absolutely ages to figure out how to do the Crazy Dash and the lot with any consistency, and they're mandatory. Game's a real charm once you get it, but it's a bit tricky.
- Shift to reverse. Release gas.
- Shift to forward.
- ...ever so slightly after shifting to forward, FLOOR IT. This is the tricky bit.
every movement action in the game is based on the reverse/forward gear shift, and there's no timing involved in the shift, it's a back/forth flick
but getting to any location so you can get that +5s bonus requires the crazy dash, and sometimes I'll just screw it up like 3x in a row in a run where I'm in a really, really bad place to be not moving

If you don't get the speed boost, repeat the action, doesn't matter if you're moving. If you do get the speed boost... repeat the action while moving, since it stacks like 3 times.
I really wish there was a clear visual indicator for whether you got it [you do hear the engine go into overdrive, at least].
Drifting is just a quick shift to reverse and forward while still accelerating and turning, it's not too tricky. If you do it from a standstill and then accelerate, you peel out in place.
you can also do the dash in reverse [shift forward -> reverse, floor it], but I can't do it consistently, it's messing with my head on controller

playing in the arcade is an exhausting experience with the constant stick flicking [and probably mis-calibrated pedals], I'm flailing around like I'm drowning
much less pain at home on console
doesn't help that I play Gus since he's fast and heavy, so when I'm drifting and dashing well, his shit acceleration and turning are non issues, and when I'm fucking up, he's damn near entirely unresponsive

honestly, the real mechanic that kills me in it is when you drift into a wall -- you get on two wheels, get stuck in the wall, and get a huge tip bonus, and it looks like something that was knowingly left in or implemented on purpose
and it fucking blows and getting un-stuck from the wall is absurdly unreliable, so you'll be right on top of the goal and almost time out anyway

[Marc]

Yeah I'm pretty much a klutz, but I found those easy enough to pull off, on a pad at least. Can't imagine it on the original machine though.

[trap15]

Dash requires holding back for a short amount of time, it's actually rather similar to doing a sonic boom with Guile in Street Fighter. For reverse dash, you do a regular dash but right after you floor it you shift back to reverse. It's a bit tricky, but oh so worth it when you need it.

[Blinge]

Oh man, fire up that PC version. The darkness on the cart, not to mention the controls is horrendous.

You know what, you're right.
Fuck this game on the cart, I was just unhooking the 64 from my little CRT about to hook up my shitty flatscreen so i can whack the brightness up to the absurd levels the game would require when I thought, man.. what am I doing. I can just enjoy the game more on PC.
Got to level 16 on the cart, I had a good run. "Dark entrances (lol) " Was horrific.
As was the Dark Citadel or w/e beforehand.
Dark indeed.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

I've actually been playing Crazy Taxi, so I'll say that I genuinely don't understand how drifting works at all. What is the actual input for it? Everything I've read seems to suggest that it involves a gear shift like with the crazy dash, but I can only get drifting to work by holding down both gear-change buttons simultaneously.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I've actually been playing Crazy Taxi, so I'll say that I genuinely don't understand how drifting works at all. What is the actual input for it? Everything I've read seems to suggest that it involves a gear shift like with the crazy dash, but I can only get drifting to work by holding down both gear-change buttons simultaneously.

There is definitely a gear shift (reverse to drive) required.

http://crazytaxi.net/skills.html

[orange808]

DK64 isn't a game, it's a chore. I hate games that try to substitute collecting a ton of random shit for real gameplay. It's okay to tease us with a meaningful upgrade or two that are initially out of reach, but I don't want to spend hours backtracking for hundreds of useless identical tokens.

Shadow Man also has a backtracking problem; how many dark souls did we really need? Even worse, Shadow Man creates "challenge" with a weak weapon. Every enemy is a tank bullet sponge. Fighting is such chore. I spent the entire game avoiding it at all costs--and Shadow Man isn't a stealth game. Some better texture variations would have been nice, too. Huge levels should have plenty of landmarks.

[BrianC]

DK64 isn't a game, it's a chore. I hate games that try to substitute collecting a ton of random shit for real gameplay. It's okay to tease us with a meaningful upgrade or two that are initially out of reach, but I don't want to spend hours backtracking for hundreds of useless identical tokens.

Yeah, the Jetpac and DK ports are more fun than the game itself.