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Petty/Small Annoyances in Video Games

Aulos

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This is a topic meant to be for those complaints you personally have, but wouldn't put anywhere else, because they will sound kind of silly to anyone else. You know, issues you have with a game that don't really deal with the gameplay or the actual quality of a game.

I'll start with three, to give a good idea of what I mean:

1. The overabundance of sunshine rain/snow in video games as a whole. Is sunshine rain/snow a real thing? Yes, yes it is. However - at least where I live - it is a rare occurrence, one that is odd and a sight to see. Yet in all kinds of video games that have variable weather during gameplay, there tends to be rain and snow with the sunshine lighting in effect as opposed to overcast, and in addition, sometimes there aren't even clouds in the sky, or are little. It's ridiculous, and it happens far too often. It drives me up a wall!

Example: The Sims 4 (also very much a thing in The Sims 3)
FSa2lHD.png

AND in the trailer for the newest EP, it is all over the place! For shame!

2. Lack of brass and woodwind instruments in life sims. Yes, of course I had to bring this one up! I'm looking at both The Sims and Animal Crossing here. Animal Crossing has gotten better beyond New Leaf, but I'll explain why it is here. So, The Sims. Number of instruments made in a title for the series is rather limited, given all of the need for extensive animations and recordings. I get that. But... The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 both featured an instrument from every single big family of instruments...except for woodwind and brass instruments. I think people might understand given my username, avatar, and signature that I quite like wind instruments, so I'm quite bothered by this. It was one thing in The Sims 2, but then in The Sims 3, they added more instruments, and still no woodwind/brass instruments. They gave a poll for a medievalesque world and only gave the option for a lute or a violin... Um... excuse me, but string instruments most certainly weren't the only instruments that existed in the middle ages! The Sims 3 already had an orchestral string in the form of the double bass.

To this day, there has never been a playable woodwind or brass instrument in any The Sims title ever. Aside from the snake charming instrument, which I understand is a legitimate instrument, but the game doesn't consider it as so.

Animal Crossing. Oh geez. Yes, it has gotten a bit better. But in the New Leaf era I was really mad. Animal Crossing is different from The Sims. There are no animations, no recordings, only models. So Animal Crossing New Leaf went wild and added a bunch of instruments. So far that they had a harpsichord, sitar, etc. So you'd think they'd have a sizable chunk of the standard wind ensemble/orchestral wind instruments right? Wrong. The only one in New Leaf (pre-Happy Home Designer) was the bagpipes, which were a special Gulliver item. (Don't get me wrong here, I love the harpsichord, and world instruments like sitar are important, but I hope my point is understood?)

3. This isn't a Pokemon section, but this still has to be brought up: Pokemon mainline series handling of Leaf. Especially HeartGold/SoulSilver. For those of us who played since the original games, battling Red at the end of G/S/C was a pretty neat thing, right? Well, when the originals got remade with FR/LF, they repurposed a (scrapped?) female protagonist from Gen I (who has made an appearance in a recent game which shall not be named - it's the only good thing about that game =P) and added her as playable. Then comes HG/SS, a remake of G/S many years later. I doubt FR/LG was just for us who played the originals, I'm sure they brought in new people, as well. People who, perhaps, had Leaf as their Indigo League Champion. But what did HG/SS do? Only Red. No trace of Leaf. Absolutely none. I mean there are so many different ways it could have been done and she could have been implemented, as optional to fight instead of Red or in addition to Red if the games didn't want to make sense (like the games which shall not be named).

This really upset me. I've really come to have disdain for Red because of this. Time and time again (except for the games which shall not be mentioned) he has appeared alone, with no option or ability to fight Leaf or the original Gen I female trainer concept.

And there's that mini-series anime they did a few years back or so, where they did mini stories from each generation. Every single protagonist was represented as male. UGH. Do they think that us women don't play Pokemon?

Okay, so that's three ideas of what I'm going for here. These are things you'd feel silly for complaining about anywhere else.
 
Peer-to-peer type of connections where they are least suitable to have. In many fighting games, that's fine since most of the time, it would only have to take two players into account, but a shooter like Splatoon needs some kind of central server like a dedicated server because of a larger number of players present at the same time, thus randomly designating a player making the peer-to-peer connection would make it a lot more flimsy.
 
subtitles that don’t match up with the dub. It can be excused for 90s and early 2000s where video game dubs were “a miserble pile of secrets” at best and “what am I fighting foooooooooooor” at worst. But that isn’t these days, so it’s less excusable, Yakuza games are a serious offender due to their dub being seiyuus only.
 
subtitles that don’t match up with the dub. It can be excused for 90s and early 2000s where video game dubs were “a miserble pile of secrets” at best and “what am I fighting foooooooooooor” at worst. But that isn’t these days, so it’s less excusable, Yakuza games are a serious offender due to their dub being seiyuus only.
Two more examples: Kage, Gill and Seth's intro lines in Street Fighter V. It's like they forgot to alter the lines after sending them to the VAs.
 
In case you didn't already know this, there's an ocarina in New Horizons.

My petty pet peeve is how English translations of games rarely use British English. I remember being really surprised to read the word "trousers" in Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise. And then there's Spirit Tracks, where they swung too far in the opposite direction and gave it two English translations, where some - but not all - of the names are different between them, for unknown reasons.
 
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In case you didn't already know this, there's an ocarina in New Horizons.

I know that. I could go off about how the ocarina is only there because of Zelda, but they also added a pan flute, which is one of the "playable" instruments, so that's neat.

New Horizons cut so much furniture/objects. It's a wonder that even one Happy Home Designer instrument (saxophone) survived the cut. The trumpet on the other hand, is gone.
 
I didn't know there was a panflute in New Horizons.

Also, it bothers me that in the first two stages of Spore, the left mouse button is used to move and interact with things, but in the last three stages, it's the right mouse button.
 
My petty pet peeve is how English translations of games rarely use British English. I remember being really surprised to read the word "trousers" in Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise. And then there's Spirit Tracks, where they swung too far in the opposite direction and gave it two English translations, where some - but not all - of the names are different between them, for unknown reasons.
Not just in English. The European and American Spanish versions of both Spirit Tracks and Phantom Hourglass are pretty different. In my case, it was for the better...
 
When I have to organize my inventory myself.

If I'm playing games that revolve around hoarding a bunch of random stuff, I expect a way for it to be readily organized. Spending a half hour in my bag isn't fun.
That was one of my main gripes with Mega Evolution, the fact that Mega Stones didn't have their own pocket while Z-Crystals did have their own pocket is baffling.
 
When the game isn't 100% accurate with its information. The Wiki Berry from Sword and Shield, for example, is stated to make curries sour even though it really makes them dry. It takes one tiny misdirection from a game to completely mislead a player.
 
When you have to pixel hunt to find something in a game to advance the story along, much worse in 3D games since it can take much longer...

EDIT: Pixel Hunt - TV Tropes

TvTropes explanation for what a Pixel Hunt is.
 
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Sidequests that are just padding. Like, no, I’m not incentivized to go collect 57 grasshoppers so the leek farmer can complete his collection of insects. I wish developers would start sidequests that are either fun and/or unique, or add to the world’s lore. Other than that, the only incentive to help the leek farmer is completion, which few people are invested in.
 
Sidequests that are just padding. Like, no, I’m not incentivized to go collect 57 grasshoppers so the leek farmer can complete his collection of insects. I wish developers would start sidequests that are either fun and/or unique, or add to the world’s lore. Other than that, the only incentive to help the leek farmer is completion, which few people are invested in.
This, Majora's Mask wasn't as interesting to me as many others think. This and the fact that going back to the first day will undo any change in an NPC's life on any sidequest.
 
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