XL Episode 14: 50 Things In Games That Make Us Go ‘Oh No’

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A little while back, we celebrated 50 things in games that make us go ‘ooh yeah!’ Now it’s time for the opposite pod: a catalogue of petty grievances from your two hosts, most of which are far too incidental to be taken seriously.

This episode was edited by Liam Richardson, and paid for by you, our brilliant supporters. Music this week comes from the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack by Yoko Shimomura and the Marvel’s Spider-Man soundtrack by John Paesano.

Samuel

1. Using growl or a debuff attack in Pokemon when you could just tackle or scratch because this RPG is easy as piss. Grow up. (Pokemon Red/Blue)
2. Two-gun limits in first-person shooter games, I think popularised by Halo. Why did we decide bringing 9 guns to the field was bad? ’90s shooters had this right. 
3. Any section where you’re forced to play as a secondary character and it’s not very good - Mary Jane in Spider-Man being a classic recent example, though Ashley in RE4 is a rare exception. 
4. When an RPG gets so suddenly hard you’re trapped in a location where you can’t grind or you can grind and it’s really boring (FF3 and FF10). 
5. Tie-ins that have a good licence and waste them - and that was your one shot. Lost: Via Domus is a good example. Futurama. The Sopranos (okay maybe that one had no chance). MI
6. Those fucking turrets at the start of Control in GoldenEye. Generally the late game difficulty curve in that game. 
7. Crawling through gaps in cliffs, even though we’re now in the era of fucking SSDs (Jedi Survivor). 
8. Character barks in any hero shooter you can name where the character’s got a bit too much personality. Particular shoutout to ‘New kill leader. They can have it, my sights are set higher’ from Valkyrie and ‘mama got a brand new bag’ from Loba in Apex Legends.
9. RPG characters who go ‘I’m not sure about this guy!’ and you have to win them around. Like Panam’s gang in Cyberpunk, I’d have just headshotted the lot of them if given the opportunity. 
10. When you’re shot at so many times in a first-person shooter you now lack visibility because it’s gone black and white, thereby making you less effective at defending yourself. 
11. When enemies use flamethrower attacks on you, and all you can do is roll around or stand there and take damage - there’s no good counter for fire and you can’t really take cover from it. (MGS3, TimeSplitters 2, Jedi Survivor again). See also, poison attacks. Are these ever good unless you’re playing a turn-based RPG?
12. When you cannot kill or injure friendly NPCs in an open world game (mention mad Max water NPCs). 
13. When you see a red symbol in a Bethesda RPG that says not to pickpocket something. It means I never do and get to see the hilarious consequences.
14. When you scour every radio station in an open world game and it has zero music you like. Rockstar always get this right, so why can’t every game? 
15. Barriers in games that stop you from driving vehicles into impractical places and doing dumb shit like taking a tank through a corridor. In Halo 3, I want to play a mode where I can drive the Scorpion everywhere. 
16. The Random Rule in Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad. 
17. When games have an achievement referring to the pet the dog phenomenon (also Jedi Survivor - the Twitter account is fine but let’s not overcook the point).
18. Codexes. I ain’t playing a game to read dawg. 
19. When games tell me what my friends have been up to in that game - Returnal sending me messages about Tom Senior’s progress Atropos can get in the bin. 
20.  When God of War tried to make me feel bad about beating Zeus to death. My guy needed to get that out his system. 
21. Any racing mission in an open world game that’s otherwise not about racing - this goes all the way back to ropey races in the PS2 GTAs. 
22. When the run button is on anything but the left bumper, A button or clicking in the left stick (my preferred option). Mad Max has you running with the right trigger, which is clearly deranged. 
23. People talking about breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild (not the weapons themselves). 
24. When you get to the end of a Lego game level and you have like three bits of a minikit even though you spent about 2 hours exploring that bad boy.
25. How crap the summons are in Kingdom Hearts - all-timer bits of Disney iconography turning up to do no fucking damage. 

Matthew

1. Mashing button to kill minotaur in God of War OR God of War medusas turning you to stone and you insta dying.
2. The Koopalings in Mario: always shit boss fights.
3. Underwhelming statistical perks or skills in RPGs - shotguns have extra 2% accuracy! 10% damage boost against robots! I want my options to open up and blossom.
4. Knockback when you attack something else in Hollow Knight. And yes, I know there’s a charm to negate it. 
5. Photo modes on weird button combos that you can easily activate by accident. Cyberpunk/AC Valhalla. Think of players with heavy thumbs.
6. Obscure story triggers in visual novels. See: Famicom Detective Club and Ace Attorney investigation segments.
7. Giant wasps/flies/mosquitoes. Spiders: fine. Buzzing things that are small and hard to hit: bad.
8. Bad companion AI - worst case: Melia in Xenoblade is basically unusable unless you play as her.
9. Eric Idle saying “That doesn’t work” in Discworld as you combine every item with every hotspot trying to crack it’s nonsensical puzzles.
10. Metroidvanias with bad collectibles - Star Wars Jedi is bad for this - new antennas for BD1? Urk! - but also Control stash box with random mods/crafting materials.
11. The noise it makes when Link only has one heart left.
12. When Minesweeper forces you to make a guess. (Never the first move - if that’s a mine it gets moved to top left corner or closest square to.)
13. Zelda: when there’s a ‘listen again’ cue at the end of text boxes you mash through so you end up hearing the owl tutorial in Ocarina ten times in a row. 
14. Objectives or items hidden in caves underground but there’s no height indicator and you can’t find the entrance.
15. The moons you have to buy in Mario Odyssey - oh cool, a portion of the game I complete in a shop. Bad.
16. The Keihen Gang incursions in Judgement forcing you to face the same minibosses again and again. See also: Majima Everywhere in Kiwami.
17. Complicated menus you need to navigate in real time. Monster Hunter, Elden Ring… just pause motherfucker. 
18. Hidden puzzles and picarats in Professor Layton forcing me to tap on every bit of every screen out of fear of missing out.
19. Why do 3D Mario games have a Game Over condition when it does nothing but waste a tiny bit of time. Sunshine is terrible for this.
20. Xenoblade 2 - the amount of dogshit you get from blade resonance. In a world where bonding is meant to feel special why do I end up with 50 chumps hanging around.
21. Not being able to auto swap better weapons into your inventory in Breath of the Wild.
22. How weird and empty Psychonauts 2 levels are after you’ve completed them.
23. The writing in Platinum games.
24. Items/mechanics that mark all points of interest on a map. Makes the rest of the world instantly redundant. Give me option to turn it off (like the Witcher 3 does with undiscovered map markers)
25. Games which encourage you to search for collectibles but are also full of invisible triggers for points on no return so you accidentally cut yourself off. Plague Tale does this.