Crowning Achievements in Poor Game Design

Oftentimes when I am playing games, I will be generally enjoying myself until I come across that one feature that just makes you shake your head and say, "What were they thinking."  Whether it be frustratingly difficult, unnecessarily onerous, or simply just bafflingly bizarre, this list showcases those game design choices that not only are terrible, but are so fully implemented as to be not just erroneous oversight but official back of box bullet point features.

List items

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  1. Halo: Combat Evolved

  Halo: CE is first because this is the first game where I ever used the term "One of the worst decisions in the history of gaming" to describe it. Those of you familiar with the game already know what I am talking about. Yes, the Library level.

  Bungie, creator of so many beautiful things, decided to program a level that deliberately takes all the good things from the rest of Halo and does their exact opposite. Take Halo's liberal and innovative checkpoint system, and now make it so one or two enemies is always hanging around somewhere off screen where you can't possibly kill them, and you end up just praying for the next one. Take the fun and satisfying weapons, and now make sure none of the enemies drop ammo so you can never use them. Take the varied and skillful combat against elite troops, and instead replace them with mindless hordes of suicide lemmings. Take the forgiving but challenging shield system and instead use plenty of one-shot exploding enemies. Start with the beautiful, open environments and instead use the same black and blue corridors for an entire level. Get rid of the sultry Cortana AI for a Navi-like floating orb.

  Quite possibly the single worst level I have ever played. And I grew up in the NES days, so that is really saying something.

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  2. Guitar Hero

  Guitar Hero burst onto the scene as the first widely successful plastic instrument rhythm game, and even after losing Harmonix and plenty of steam to Rock Band, still maintained a strong presence in the genre.

  However, Guitar Hero also decided that the best way to improve the single player game was "Boss Battles." Seriously? What was wrong with encore performances or just plain harder songs? Nope, instead you get to play a contrived track against a "real" AI guitarist.

  What made it really bad was the odd victory conditions, whereby sometimes the AI would just beat you no matter how well you played, and the completely asinine power-up system. If the AI got the first power up, you lost. Why would you make a game where the opponent can completely remove one of your buttons until you mash it back into shape? Why would you make a power up that adds twice as many notes? Sure, there were fun ones like the "lefty flip," that could be mitigated with skill, but barely. The best way to beat the computer on the hard difficulties was to restart until you got the "broken string" power up first. Using it on a hard difficulty is instant win.

  I suppose, in the interest of fairness, you could "wuss out" and skip these altogether, but then again, why would they advertise these a great new feature? How about you got together and made the full band a little earlier, or got your DLC service up to speed with Rock Band instead?

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  3. Oddjob

  One of the first really great multiplayer FPS games was, of course, Goldeneye. The game was exciting, had tons of cool side modes to play (slappers only, golden gun, paintball, big head), and supported four players. Why, then, did the developers decide that every single character should handle the same, except for one? Seriously, why? Later games, such as Time Splitters, at least included 8 short characters, so everyone could have one if he or she wanted.