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What breaks a game for you?

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The only real game breaker for me is if I can't get into the general gameplay (or controls). I'm very patient, but games I just totally gave up on near the beginning include Final Fantasy IV, Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends With You.

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1) mickey mouse (ie. high pitched voices) in batallion wars didnt just break the game but made me feel violated.

 

2) there is also that thing about playing games in the living room with your mum watching. XXX Adult themes are a no no.

 

3) also any game that involves being the bad guy. (e.g. playing as the nazis or the terrorists). I am an all round good guy. Even when i play chess, i am always white becasue they are the good side of the force.... though my friends misinterpret this as some kind of race issue.

 

 

4) and anything that involves standing up or waggling.

 

 

 

*these are breakers and not necessarily "bad" in the orthodox christian sense of the word

.

Edited by blender
god whispered in my ear

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A game just needs to draw me in. I can usually get used to the controls, get my eyes used to poor art/graphics, and similar stuff, but if the game really has no overall reason to want to play it, that's when i have a problem. For instance, I was just never able to get into final fantasy Crystal Chronicles, but I've been able to get into other similar games (perhaps I need to go back and try this game again one of these days). There isn't really one thing that makes a game fail to draw me in, its usually a combination of different things. I don't think I can explain this very well in words.

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Turn-based/Menu-based combat systems.

 

Other than that, it depends on the game. Sometimes they just don't feel right, for example:

 

Super Mario Sunshine was broken by disrupting the flow of movement that SM64 had.

Burnout Revenge was broken by the lack of suspense due to traffic checking.

Mirror's Edge was broken by bringing you to a halt so often.

Prince of Persia was broken by the magnetism and almost non-interactiveness of the controls.

Far Cry 2 was broken because of the awful driving, lack of anyone/thing/where interesting and poor shooting mechanics.

Condemned 2 was broken by it's non-working combat and stupid plot.

 

These games should have (and could have) been great, but to me, they were completely broken by something.

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Posturing in the storyline causing you to have to wade through text after text after text or cut scene, move two steps, cut scene cut scene cut scene

Edited by Serebii

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well i always kinda knew what breaks a game for me.. but I needed some examples..

 

the word break is a bit strong for a lot of these... let's say spoiled.

 

1: when a game takes too long to start.. like most rpgs and some zelda games.

2: bad camera angle... there is one stage in super mario sunshine in the theme park.. where you had to climb up a cage and I couln't believe it made it into the final game... I mean the camera is bad in galazy too but it hides it very cleverly by having large open spaces at all times..

3: everything about gta: san andreas...especially the way everyone talked.. I don't care if that's actually how people in black gangs talk or whatever it's just annoying.. keep it real!

4:music rarely can be offputting... but when i think about replaying a game most of the time it's just an excuse to listen to the excellent music... this is like soul blade, wind waker metroid prime.. when bad is bad thats gone for me.... phantom hourglass was very very disappointed and lazy in the music department..

5: broken waggle:.....im looking at you super monkey ball banana blitz multiplayer!

6: bad graphics:.. should be obvious really im not normally fussed but again back to san andreas.. the game was very dull and uninspired.. and most games these days look brown, black or green anyway ...

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I can let a lot of things slide if there re other aspects that make up for the bad stuff. For example, Assassin's Creed was amazingly repetitive but the world had such a weight to it I still loved it.

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The best example for me of what breaks a game is actually banjoo and kazooie the xbox360 version at least.

 

I was discussing it with Jayseven and we both remarked on how we couldn't get any 'feel' for the game, there was too much going on at the beginning.

 

Now I like games with a challenge, but to draw somebody in you don't shoot the player with information all at once and this is what to me banjo did, thats a deal breaker. I was a challenge without needing everything at once otherwise you sit there for half an hour processing all the information without any real direction.

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Bad controls is perhaps my biggest gripe - a game which is unresponsive instantly disconnects me from what's going on and causes me to curse and swear at the game.

 

I don't see how bad graphics can break a game. Sure, if they're so bad that you're unable to make out what's happening on the screen then by all means, but I think other factors such as sound, storyline and gameplay are way more important.

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In all honesty, I think I can overlook quite a lot when it comes to game breakers. The thing that really puts me off is the playability of the title, i.e. developers not creating something worth playing or putting little effort in to make a game that is enjoyable from start to finish. It's incredibly rare to find a game nowadays that is fun from start to finish and that's in all genres across all platforms.

 

Controls also wreck an experience if the developers make poor use of them or provide the completely wrong setup for the game at hand. Played many things recently that fall into this category. When you're spending your time with a controller in your hand where the idea is that you can control what is happening on screen with ease, having a setup that doesn't work or is placed wrong is a nightmare. Wii games are the biggest culprit due to developers thinking that they need to use the motion gestures to map things that could easily be done with button presses.

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Being able to see so much more potential that was unused and wasted by the developers of the game. I hate playing a game with obvious flaws that could be easily fixed. Some games these days are also broken by being too easy, and too linear, my suspicions being for a more 'casual' market.

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A few things.

 

Mazes I hate them all, including the Pictobox maze in Wind Waker and the desert maze in Breath of Fire III

 

Pitch dark areas I still dont understand developers desire to include extremely dark areas with little or no light source. Resistance 2, Infamous and MP:Echoes spring to mind. Even in survival horror games, it doesnt incite fear, only bitter anger

 

Timed-button presses- Ive recently started replaying FFVII and there are these fucking annoying timing-based sequences leading up to and inside the Shinra building that i wasted an hour trying to get past

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Honestly, my biggest gripe with games is those that have a distinct lake of polish. Glitchy game play or graphics, dodgy frame lag, and other little paper cuts a game may have. That being said, the biggest show stopper for me is horrid controls. Red Steel made me a very sad person.

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Difficulty is my biggest gripe, lack of.

 

I'm not asking games to be stupidly difficult, that can put me off if the game doesn't hold it's fun factor, but nowadays there are too many games you can just stroll through without any sort of problem or issue. The game gets boring if it doesn't challenge me throughout - of course its worse when the challenge is unfair due to poor game mechanics or whatever.

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Cut scenes that can't be skipped i RAGE at this!!!

 

A lot of RPG's and even other types of games do it now, and if you die, you have to go through the whoooooooole scene again, making it damn annoying. >_>

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causes me to curse and swear at the game.

Lol.

 

For me, certainly in FPS games, if you fire a gun it has to feel like you're actually firing it or at least it seems like there is weight to the gun. Sometimes it doesn't feel like you're actually shooting anything and that puts me off a lot.

 

It's the same with anything really.

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Posturing in the storyline causing you to have to wade through text after text after text or cut scene, move two steps, cut scene cut scene cut scene

 

Cut scenes that can't be skipped i RAGE at this!!!

 

This. The length of cutscenes in MGS:TTS was just about bearable (except for the one just after the Grey Fox fight).

 

And why is it so hard for people to include Skip and Pause options in cutscenes?

 

The best example for me of what breaks a game is actually banjoo and kazooie the xbox360 version at least.

 

Do you mean Nuts & Bolts or the XBLA one? I can see your point for Nuts & Bolts, but not for the XBLA one.

 

I hate it when games built around exploration block your access to areas for absolutely no reason (it's fine when there's a good reason), like some of the Fallout DLC (Anchorage and Zeta, mainly). Although that's more annoying than a game breaker.

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1) Helplessness.

Whenever I play a game that's not in real time, or where I'm for som other reason not in control, I just feel helpless and that truly ruins my experience. I don't play DotA or WoW because I'm not actually controlling the action. It's more like I'm telling the hero what to do.

 

I also hate random. Random is only good in a select few events, like what weapon I get in Mario Kart (where it's not random anymore).

 

I want to be 100% responsible for my victory or defeat! I don't want to be detached from the game in any way!

 

2)Short game

When the game is short (Below 10 hours) that truly pisses me off.

 

3) Bad/unrealistic balancing

I rarely ever play a game thats got bad balancing. For example, I would never pay money to play Battlefield: Heroes, as the balance is completely messed up. A sniper can take out a plane with only a few shots and a soldier vs a tank is actually an even battle.

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Well this is probably mainly for PC games, but kind of applies to some consoles too. And one of my biggest pet peeves are PATCHES.

 

You've spent ages installing a game to get it to load faster or whatever. You sit down ready to play and blow however many hours doing whatever, and then downloading updates 1% of 397957930579034793479MB

 

Back in the day there was none of this patches rubbish. Games just worked. Testers did a thorough job. Although one could argue games weren't as big. We had invisible walls and less games were in the pipeline, but at least pretty much 100% of the time without fail the damn thing would play from start to finish without error. These days games get crippled by poor workman/womanship

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The words rockstar or bungie at the beginning....

 

durrrr hurrrrrrr

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Well this is probably mainly for PC games, but kind of applies to some consoles too. And one of my biggest pet peeves are PATCHES.

 

You've spent ages installing a game to get it to load faster or whatever. You sit down ready to play and blow however many hours doing whatever, and then downloading updates 1% of 397957930579034793479MB

 

Back in the day there was none of this patches rubbish. Games just worked. Testers did a thorough job. Although one could argue games weren't as big. We had invisible walls and less games were in the pipeline, but at least pretty much 100% of the time without fail the damn thing would play from start to finish without error. These days games get crippled by poor workman/womanship

 

Well, while patches were previously unexistent for console games, they were really annoying on the PC. Once you never knew when a new patch was out, you'd just try to play a game online, and you'd be kicked. Either you had an old version, or a new version had been released which removed a popular exploit, and hence noone else had updated. Now you install a game, wait 5 minutes to get the patch the first time, and later it takes so little time you don't notice.

 

Back in the day, there were games that were jut broken, and without patches they were broken forever.

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