8 TINY Things Video Games Do That Drive Us Crazy

8. Unskippable And Unpauseable Cutscenes

Not to state the obvious but video games aren't movies. As cinematic as they can be, a player's control is absolutely key.

It's on us how we want to play a game and what to focus on. Maybe you don't care about the story or have simply seen it before, and so when a familiar cutscene loads up you reach for the "start" button but nothing happens. It's a tale as old as cutscenes themselves.

Thankfully, largely gone are the days of ineffectively slapping every input on your controller as you desperately try to get past another viewing of something like Final Fantasy X's "awkward laughter" scene on subsequent playthroughs or after dying and loading a save. Most games recognise that we don't always want to sit through their elongated story-beats.

But this produces another problem. What if you're deep into a 25-minute political diatribe and need to go to the toilet? Kojima and his team recognised the issues with their lengthy cutscenes in the Metal Gear Solid series and made it possible to pause midway through for MGS4.

Best of all, not only could you pause mid-cutscene, you could then elect to skip it from here. This game came out in 2008 and we still haven't strictly made this the standard. If you reach out to pause a cutscene these days in a game you never know what you're going to get: a pause-screen, nothing at all or a sudden jump forward and a lot of questions about what you just missed.

So much in gaming has become standardised these days like controller shapes and multi-format software. Why can't every major game have pauseable and skippable cutscenes?