10 Things Video Games Need To STOP Doing

In 1989, Fantasy World Dizzy was released on home computers. In the game, we played boxing glove-wearing egg Dizzy as he sought his kidnapped girlfriend.

Eventually rescuing her, we learned a hard lesson about women as she immediately told us we needed 30 gold coins to buy a house and marry her. That was literally all the money in the world, and if we'd missed picking up any of these coins then we had to trawl the landscape, searching for these items before we could complete the game. Oh, and did I mention that saving your game didn't exist back then?

Thirty-one years later and games are still artificially extending their lifespan with collectibles. In some cases, these add to the game experience. One example would be Alan Wake, where you collect pages of the novel that Alan was writing, each of them giving you hints of what is to come in the game.

Tied into the storyline like that, the collectibles work. But then there are the thousands of games where you have to find coins for no other reason than to make an eight-hour game last fifty hours.

It smacks of laziness. An easy fix to add perceived (not actual) value to the game, rather than spending time building the experience into something better.