10 Baffling Oversights In Otherwise Great Video Games

By Josh Brown / June 6, 2015

Every player on the planet has been there; firing your way through a new favourite game only to suddenly stumble across something that makes you put the controller down, step back from the screen and just go “Huh?”

For as much as any pre-release trailers and hype would have you believe, games rarely manage to fine-tune every single mechanic and feature, and often miss the mark entirely on one significant aspect of gameplay. As a result, even in good games players can end up running across a half-baked idea that just doesn't fit in with the rest of what's on offer.

Often these oversights are a case of dissonance between gameplay and story; for instance, didn't it always feel a bit weird to be robbing stores as good-guy John Marston in Red Dead Redemption? A character isn't really being being redeemed by pillaging and murdering everyone they see, yet Rockstar gave you the freedom to do so despite it being entirely at odds with the character and story shown in cutscenes.

Small oddities like this can serve to completely break the immersion of any given title, and often end up be nagging frustrations that pull back otherwise good games. And even bad video games come out all time, it's always hurts more to see a title that's so close to reaching greatness get dragged down by of one simple lapse of judgement. 

10. L.A Noire's Interrogations Turn Cole Phelps Into A Psychopath

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Just about everything in L.A Noire was ground-breaking for its time; from its stunning facial animations to its meticulous crime-solving structure, the 2011 title was unlike anything gamers had ever seen before.

Unfortunately though, the detective thriller had a few tonal oversights that made the whole experience feel a little, well, unstable. For starters, your character, Cole Phelps, is given the able to interrogate people in order to find out information that could prove to be invaluable to whichever case he's currently working on. Likewise, the game gives you the option to analyse whether the character being interrogated is telling the truth or lying, with different outcomes based on your different accusations.

A brilliant concept on paper, in execution these dialogue choices are flawed to their very core, thanks to some very random-feeling animations from Mr. Phelps. The options are left vague, with either "lie", "truth", or "doubt" providing no real signifier as to what your character will actually do. While "doubt" in one context could be nothing more than a stern look, in another it could result in Cole loudly threatening an undeserving suspect.

Even worse, after such a misjudged outrage, the character would always slip back into his reserved demeanour and the game would carry on as if nothing happened, resulting in some of the weirdest interrogations ever seen in a video game.