I’m sure it’s happened to all of us. You’ll be playing a game, and some minor bug or poorly-designed sequence in the game just drives you up the wall. I suppose this is unavoidable. But when I see the same issues time and again in different games, I can’t help but wonder if they couldn’t have been better addressed by the game developers.

Certain annoyances have disappeared entirely as the medium has evolved. For example, I can’t remember the last time I played a game in which you were able to save your game in a state from which you can’t possibly proceed. (stuck in terrain, having permanently lost a plot-critical item) I think the last time I played a game with that particular issue was on the Commodore 64. But there are plenty of other problems that I see all over the place.

The most recent was when I was playing Ghostbusters last week. I’d reached the edge of a rooftop, and having captured all the ghosts on the roof, I found that there was nowhere else to go. I ran around making sure I didn’t need to trap more ghosts in order to trigger an event. I checked the doors and ladders to see if there was another area I needed to go to. I tried talking to Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler. No love. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Reloading the game fixed the issue, but the same exact issue popped up again later in the game, when I was in the museum. I’d killed all the ghosts in the area, and found myself locked in the Aztec exhibit with no exits.

Ghostbusters wasn’t the first time I’d seen that issue. In God of War 2, I hit a very similar situation – I’d reached the edge of a cliff I thought I needed to jump off, but there was an invisible wall stopping me from proceeding. When I reloaded and replayed, the invisible wall was gone. In Vampire: Bloodlines, someone told me to go to the second floor of building – I hunted for that second floor for hours, but it didn’t seem to exist and I in the end I had to stop playing the game.

Another issue that I hit in Ghostbusters is that of erratic difficulty. When playing the game on normal, I found that whle certain parts had a perfectly good difficulty level, certain parts were just way too hard. I had to restart the game on easy difficulty. Maybe the game should have a Kind Code.

And then there are my gripes about partner AI. There aren’t many games that make you play with a computer-controlled partner. Enter The Matrix comes to mind. (If Niobe was a blue pill, she’d never have passed her drivers’ test) The game I’m primarily talking about here is Resident Evil 5. In Resident Evil 4, you at least had a good amount of control over the girl you were protecting. I’m sure that was made easier by the fact that she had no inventory and didn’t try to fight enemies. You could tell her to follow you, or stay put. But in Resident Evil 5, your partner tries to fight and to help you solve puzzles. And worst of all, at certain points in the game, you need her.

At this point, I need to make a disclaimer. I’m referring to the AI partner as ‘she’ because I chose to play the game as Chris Redfield. Had I chosen to play as Sheva, Chris would be the idiot AI partner. No gender bias here. Purely circumstantial.

Sheva loves her handgun so much that when she runs out of bullets, she won’t use the machine gun. I can’t count the number of times when I’m fighting a miniboss and Sheva refuses to use her grenade launcher. I’ll be out of magnum ammo, and have to resort to using my handgun and flash grenades despite the fact that my partner has a goddamned grenade launcher. Sheva also likes to run far away when I’m being attacked so that when I go down and need her to revive me, she has no way to get to me in time.

But I’m not the only one she likes to get killed. One time, she ran ahead of me directly onto a conveyor belt that led into a furnace. Another time, she refused to stay more than three feet away from a reaper with an instant-kill attack. I wish I could ask her to hide in a dumpster while I fight the enemies by myself.

The most recent thing she’s done to piss me off is when I was fighting Albert Wesker. One of the items you need in this fight is a special rocket launcher. She took it and ran away, leaving me to fight the boss who I couldn’t possibly hurt without the rocket launcher. A minute later, I died because she was too far away to revive me when I was hit. If you’re reading this and can identify with my complaints about Sheva’s mental retardation, I suggest checking out Yahtzee’s review of the Resident Evil 5. He agrees, hilariously.

My last game gripe for the day? CD checks. I could vent all day about oppressive DRM, but CD checks aren’t oppressive so much as they’re simply antiquated. Why do games still require you to leave the CD in the drive in order to play? In the days before CD burners were mainstream, it may have been an effective anti-piracy measure. Today, I think its primary effect is to annoy me and make me buy more of my games from Steam. I tend to play 3-4 games at a time, and I’ve only got two optical drives in my PC. This means constantly swapping out CDs, which annoys me to no end. I generally go out and find a no-CD patch, which I have no qualms using because I’ve legitimately purchased the game. Companies like Stardock and Steam have it right. Just let me play the game for which I’ve paid you without the goddamned CD in the goddamned drive!