12 Awesome Video Games With One Awful Mechanic

2. Friendships - Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA IV took Rockstar's flagship franchise to the next level, but it also overstepped its bounds when it came to the game's obtrusive friendship system.

The main issue was that protagonist Niko Bellic's cousin Roman would hassle the player far too often about mundane activities like going bowling, to the point that it felt like the game was aggressively trying to ensure you knew about its litany of peripheral mini-games and side content.

At first you might've felt slightly bad about turning Roman down so often, but after the fifth or sixth clingy phone call in a single play session, it became much easier to shut him out guilt-free.

And let's face it, if Roman died at the end of your game, how much sympathy you felt was basically directly correlated to how many annoying, begging calls you received from him throughout your playthrough.