Scrappy Mechanic: Difference between revisions

* Any game (looking at you, Evergrace II) where all the characters you play have a shared life bar. This leads to frustrating moments, especially if some of the characters you control are played by the computer!

* Motion control on the PS3. Having to suddenly jerk the controller around runs counter to most gamers' instincts, and its detection is inconsistent and random, but first-party titles continue to shoehorn it in because it is a system feature and ''must be showcased''.

** It's not just motion sensing. The analog buttons on the [[Play Station 2]] had the same issue, such as in MGS2 where pushing the look button hard in a locker caused you to bang Raiden's head into the locker door and alert the guards.

** Flower did it well.

* ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'':

** It had a "much-maligned, super-secret hidden interaction between + Monster Level and + Noncombat Chance" (as the creators themselves would later call it) that was added with NS13. Specifically, if you had a positive net + Noncombat Chance, then for every + 5 Monster Level you had, it would cancel out + 1% Noncombat Chance. Due to the considerable advantage one can gain with even a mere + 5% Noncombat Chance, this had the problematic side effect of making anything that gave + Monster Level not only useless, but an active detriment to the player in most scenarios. It was removed a year and a half later.

** "Ronin". In a Normal run after ascension (which the game heavily suggests you take), you cannot gain any outside help for 1,000 turns. In theory, this is to make the game more fun and challenging by making the player have to rebuild from scratch (with what they have in Hagnk's as a buffer) instead of just getting everything from their friends. In practice, having to do the early levels over without even being able to tap into the Clan meat generators, Flea Market, or Mall is just plain ''boring'' and takes forever (most players can only do about seventy turns a day). Players griping about how many turns of Ronin they have left are common sights in chat.

* ''[[Lusternia]]'' has a few:

* ''Pixeljunk Eden'', such a beautiful game, but:

** Want to explore the beautiful, almost-abstract art levels? You can't. The whole thing is on a [[Nintendo Hard|strict]] [[Timed Mission|timer.]]

** [[Back Tracking|For full completion, you must visit each level 5 times.]]

* ''[[Donkey Kong Country Returns]]'':

** The Aegis Cave mission in [[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]] certainly counts, mainly because it's the most frustratingly tedious mission in the entire game. And, yes, it is mandatory. Basically, all you do is try to solve three word puzzles by spelling out the words ICE, ROCK, and STEEL. To do this, you have to collect stones with the correct letters on them from the Unown (Trust me, you'll run into [[Goddamn Bats|plenty of Unown]]). Unfortunately, the Unown that drops the letter you need must be randomly chosen for the list of available [[Mons]], then it has to randomly spawn, then you have to ''find it'', and then, after all that, it only drops the damn stone 1/4 of the time! Which basically means you'll be going through the same parts of the dungeon over and over and over again until you slowly lose your sanity trying to collect whichever stones you need so you can get out of the blasted cave.

* The ''[[Eye of the Beholder]]'' games and the first ''[[Lands of Lore]]'' game contain tiles that spin you around when you stand on them and require compass watching. The former game series has complicated spin tiles that turn you based on the direction you entered the tile and the latter is nice enough to have your characters verbally react to the spin each time ("Woah!").

** The level-up system. Namely, that it doesn't exist. What you have instead is [[Stat Grinding]]--the idea being that the more you use your various stats, the better they get--cast a lot of spells? Magic and MP go up. Get attacked a lot? HP and stamina rise! Sounds good...in theory. The practice is much different. Instead of having a gauge (Perform X physical attacks/deal X points of damage before next Strength boost or some such), stat boosts have a ''chance'' of being awarded after any given battle. And the chance is directly proportional to the length of the battle. Presumably designed to prevent rampant abuse and grinding low-level monsters indefinitely, but the end result is being punished for fighting battles efficiently. And the chances are still not that good--after fighting a dozen battles with Firion only attacking while the other party members idle in the desperate, futile hope of securing a STR boost for Firion--and never getting one--drastic actions are often taken, generally either starting to attack fellow party members or drop-kicking the gaming system. Or both.

** Getting HP boosts. The odds of receiving a boost to HP seem directly proportional to the difference in HP at battle end as compared to battle start. So, if, say, Guy is knocked into the red, but then is healed out of it, it doesn't count towards boosting his HP. But, if he loses ALL his HP and has to be revived, that also seems to reset the odds of HP stat boost. The margin of error ([[Luck-Based Mission|or just bad luck]]) here is very unforgiving.

* ''[[Dangun Feveron]]'' never shows your total score during gameplay; it's only shown at the end of each stage, as well as after getting a high score and ending your game, which wouldn't be as big of a problem if the lowest default high score of 1.2 million wasn't difficult to obtain for new players. This caused a huge problem at a recent shmup tournament where many players who couldn't get on the in-game high score table either manually calculated their scores by hand or [[Rage Quit|simply didn't bother to submit scores]].

* ''[[Guwange]]'' has you collect coins to raise your score, while shooting enemies to keep the coin collection timer from running out (at which point your coin count drops to 0). And the chain timer is more lenient than ''[[Do Don Pachi]]'''s, so chaining in this game shouldn't be as big of a pain in the ass, right? Well, here's where the game kicks you in the face: your coin count carries over between stages, meaning that in order to obtain a very good score, you need to keep your coin timer from resetting ''at all'' throughout the entire game. Have it reset halfway through the game? Time to [[Rage Quit]]!