8 TINY Things Video Games Do That Drive Us Crazy

Video games are entertainment and shouldn't be taken too seriously, otherwise you're missing the point. But if you really love something, you not only want to see it succeed but to be the best it can possibly be.

If we want to be hypercritical - and most of us could be accused of this on occasion - then there are a lot of little bothersome things across the video game industry that put our teeth on edge.

We're not talking about the massive issues that need addressing, like the worrying frequency of games launching totally broken and the worries about how A.I. development could change the gaming space forever. Those are far too grand to tackle right now. No, these are the tiniest little irritants that make us all scratch our heads, shrug our shoulders or let out a deep sigh of "oh cool, it's this horrible thing again".

This list is of course a little on entitled side by it's very nature, but isn't that the fun of it? The following entries might not totally ruin an experience for you on their own but they certainly shave points off the top of a game's lasting impression.

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?