9. First Day Patches
While some may contend this is a good thing considering patches fix issues in games, I cant stand it. The problem is, when I make my way to my local games retailer or go on Amazon because this isnt 2002 and buy a game, I want the full game, not ninety-seven percent of it; and I damn sure want the game to work. Again, I understand that there will be some who will state: Well if you hate the patches so much, dont download them and have a defective game, but the First Day Patch shouldnt be as common as crabs in a university frat house. Maybe I should re-name the title to: Lazy Developers, but that doesnt seem right either. Perhaps the fault lies with game testers who spend months painstakingly playing through the same levels only to fail in unearthing every problem. I dont know. Maybe everyone's to blame.
8. New Gimmicks
Ive spoken about gimmicks a lot over my articles, but it does stand to reason that we now have a thicket of devices and toys that block our actual gaming experience. This trend is as old as gaming itself and should be forgotten a long with rail-shooters and The Saga CD. This whole Skylanders rubbish is a prime example of a gimmick that needs to be throw head first into a fiery volcano. It's honestly one of the most pointless pieces of tat ever thought up, designed, put into production and sold on the market I've ever seen. Yes I know I'm not the target audience for Skylanders, but I can still appreciate when something is good and will still be good ten years on, and when something is obviously going to die cold and alone as soon as it's out of the box. Developers need to understand that the best way to play video games has been created; and its called a Video Game Controller. The other vexatious issue is, its not like gamers are lining up outside developers houses screaming bloody murder for new gaming peripherals, yet they keep coming like a wave of plastic mediocrity while developers are blissfully unaware that the majority of gamers have batten down the hatches for this particular flood. Burn them all I say, figuratively of course; literally.