Creative types have been selling their stories to the masses for centuries, whether it's been through action heroes on the big screen, soap melodrama on the small screen, flamboyant overacting on stage or intricately penned in a novel. Compared to these entertainment mediums, video gaming is still in its infancy - we've come a long way since Pong, but we're dealing with an industry which has only recently become properly interested in nuanced narrative development. Games like Heavy Rain and Grand Theft Auto V deliver a story with depth and complexity to match anything out of Hollywood, but even the best writers in the industry sometimes fall back on the same tired cliches we've been subjected to since the dawn of gaming. In the early days no one was overly critical of corny plot elements or cheap shortcuts to move the story forwards... In short, we were easily pleased. So thrilled to be part of this exciting new medium, it didn't matter that the same worn out gimmicks were being dressed up and resold time and time again; it didn't even occur to us to complain when it was obvious that developers were shamelessly rehashing the same narrative tricks. We're wiser and more cynical now, though, aren't we? We see a cliched game mechanic or another generic story component and we head straight to the interwebs to flame and troll and whatever else you want to call the ramblings of a million obnoxious, opinionated brats. Yet developers, for the most part, don't seem to be getting the message - they still try to repackage the same shoddy nonsense and hope we wont notice. Whether it's a terribly cheesy main character stereotype, an exhausted plot twist idea that surprises no one, or tedious "clever" bits that were barely clever twenty years ago, we're being subjected to this drivel far too often considering how long we've been at it. And it has to stop. There are hundreds of offenders in this industry, those aspects of a game which make you cringe with tiresome familiarity, but we've whittled it down to just ten stand-out examples. If you're a gamer, you'll have had to sit through at least a couple of these miserable narrative constructs in your lifetime...
Game-obsessed since the moment I could twiddle both thumbs independently. Equally enthralled by all the genres of music that your parents warned you about.
