Things That Annoy You!

[misslilo]

*SIGH*
I have started to grow very weary of a lot of posters over on adventuregamers.com!
Every time a new game comes out or is exected or an article is written about one, they bash it to pieces.
Always so negative!

Alright, I know I - maybe it's not that bad, but it really reaally reeeeeaaaallyy annoys me.

[Andy Roark]

"Upselling" at the cash register. Worst. Trend. Ever.

I don't do retail much - since most of the things I enjoy came out fifteen years ago (games, music, etc) I am spared this indignity for the most part but every single time I go into any retail establishment I am amazed at the level it's gotten to. While the overly helpful sales people on the floor can be dismissed the cash register gauntlet can't be avoided anymore.

"Do you have a <insert store's cute discount card program name> card?"

If you answer no to this one they almost call the cops. If you don't have the card you aren't allowed to shop here. Do you know it offers a 10% discount on all purchases for only $25 per year? You'd save $18 dollars today if you purchased one. Are you sure you don't want to get a discount card? Ours are free! We're just going to pimp your name and email address to penis enlargement firms and Nigerian email scam artists to make an extra buck or two back at the home office. Come on, give us your information. Sign up. Give us some extra money today.

"Do you want a 12 month subscription to Sports Illustrated?"

No, but I would like a 12 months subscription to "Hastle Free Shopping for the Perpetually Annoyed". Do you carry that magazine?

"Do you have good cell phone service?"

How silly of me! I had a dropped call last week. Let me void my contract with my current cell phone provider, rack up a few hundred bucks worth of additional expense and switch to your cell phone service that will suck just as hard as the one I currently have.

"Do you want to donate $1 to the blind, left handed dentist association?"

No.

"Do you want the product service plan with this?"

No. If it breaks, I'll toss it and never buy from this store again. Quality matters. If your quality sucks so hard that you are anticipating this item to break and I need to buy a "protection" plan to save myself from getting screwed, maybe I really don't want to buy this P.O.S. in the first place.

"Do you need any batteries?"

Yes, but not from you. And I saw them on the sales floor. If I had wanted some I would have picked them up.

There's never just one question. The stores that do this force the customer to say "no" at least two or three times. Meanwhile, of course, the line at the cash register is getting longer and longer because it takes frekkin forever for the cash register people to stretch out the endless additional sales pitches and if, God forbid, anyone actually bites on any of this stuff then the cash register person becomes the sales floor person - filling out the paperwork, taking down the credit card numbers, etc, etc. Everyone gets to wait.

I've gotten really obnoxious about this. On the first offer I'll explain that what the cashier has in their hands is the only thing I want to buy and any additional waste of my time taken forcibly by the cashier stopping their job, holding my item in their hand while I power the "checkout machine" by declining to give the store more money, yet again, so their hands will start moving again is unacceptable.

You are a store. If you want to sell something, put it on the shelf. If I want it, I'll buy it. If I don't, I wont.

This is, of course, a pointless rant. The retail establishments aren't going to stop this. But then again, this is why I usually only buy from Amazon anymore.

[DeadPoolX]

*SIGH*
I have started to grow very weary of a lot of posters over on adventuregamers.com!
Every time a new game comes out or is exected or an article is written about one, they bash it to pieces.
Always so negative!

Alright, I know I - maybe it's not that bad, but it really reaally reeeeeaaaallyy annoys me.

The problem is that Adventure Games are made with yesterday's technology. Take Culpa Innata, for instance. That's a relatively new Adventure Game released in 2007. It might have a good story, but the graphics are so horrendous that playing it is painful. Indigo Prophecy and Dreamfall had better graphics and those two games were released in 2005 and 2006. I realize graphics aren't everything (I even said as much when ranting about the Wii), but a game created in 2007 should be playable at resolutions beyond what was considered modern in the late 1990s.

I'm not joking, either.

There's two options for graphics: High and low. That's it -- there's no advanced option tab and the ability to pick individual resolutions is completely absent. You can turn anti-aliasing on or off, but it doesn't seem to do anything. The high resolution is a laughable 1024x768 and the low resolution runs at 800x600, a graphical setting common in the mid-to-late 90s. To put this into perspective, I was playing at 1024x768 in 1997. A game released ten years later should at least offer something beyond that.

I know many here play older games with graphics set at VGA (or in some cases, EGA), but those titles have an excuse! They were made at a time when VGA or EGA was the best available. Comparing any of those games -- graphically speaking -- to a modern game would be completely unfair.

An Adventure Game made in 2007, however, has no excuse whatsoever.

Perhaps the above is one reason why many reviews in this genre are negative. I know I'd give a very poor rating to a game that didn't at least offer 1280x1024. Even that's considered a somewhat low resolution today, but at least it'd be a setting used within the current decade.

[Almirena]

I can be annoyed by myself at times, and never more so than when I have left insufficient time for something - because then the temptation is to be annoyed by other things. Stupid annoying traffic lights; stupid annoying traffic jams full of other drivers; stupid annoying clock ticking too fast; stupid annoying everything... other than the fact that I myself am trying to pack four hours into one, or something like that...

The best cure I know for that is to breathe deeply, quirk my lips into a smile, tell myself it is not the fault of the traffic lights, the traffic, the clock, the world, but my fault - but that it's not a horrendous offence, and that either I'll get everything done or I won't - and the world will not end. Calm, peace, relax... enjoy... If there are people stressed by hurrying or by being hurried, I should remember to be happy in the moment, because our lives are a necklace of moments, moments of the present strung along a string of time and reality, looking back upon the pleasures of beads already strung, looking forward to the beads not yet added, and given joy by the beads of the now.

It helps. We can all try to cram too much into our days, but I continually learn how to be anxious about nothing...

[Andy Roark]

We can all try to cram too much into our days, but I continually learn how to be anxious about nothing...

That's the eternal struggle. I know that attitude is the thing that makes all the difference but I'm always struggling against doing the easy thing and just getting mad.

In the end I don't think I've ever actually been anxious about anything that really went that wrong... and everything that's gone really wrong has been something that I've never seen coming. Might as well relax, chill out and enjoy the time I've got.

[Maiandra]

...because our lives are a necklace of moments, moments of the present strung along a string of time and reality, looking back upon the pleasures of beads already strung, looking forward to the beads not yet added, and given joy by the beads of the now.

I've always liked the necklace analogy for time, Almirena. Yours reminds me of a quotation from a Kij Johnson novel, The Fox Woman. It's one that I like very much and have used for a signature line upon occasion.

Now, this instant, time hangs, an eternal now without past or future, strung like a bead with all the other nows I have known and will know.

Both evoke beautiful imagery, but trust you to work something eloquent into everyday conversation.

[abyss]

I hate how on petty much every typing adventure game you have to say stuff pretty much specific to what the game wants. Police Quest 2 is terriable for that. Space quest 2 is actually surprsingly one of the better adventure games on that. Space quest 3 is a little bad but generally good at it. Most other adventure titles though just give you the absolute hardest time when you don't know what the game specifically wants you to type.

[DeadPoolX]

I hate how on petty much every typing adventure game you have to say stuff pretty much specific to what the game wants. Police Quest 2 is terriable for that. Space quest 2 is actually surprsingly one of the better adventure games on that. Space quest 3 is a little bad but generally good at it. Most other adventure titles though just give you the absolute hardest time when you don't know what the game specifically wants you to type.

That's one downside to the text-parser interface. Some games using it require very specific entries. This can be exceptionally frustrating if you need to "look at" or "pick up" an item, but you're not quite sure what the item is itself. Typing "look at small red thing on table" just doesn't cut it.

[Andy Roark]

The text parser is one of the things I miss about modern adventure games. I can certainly understand how someone who came into gaming after they were in widespread use might find them exceptionally annoying but fighting the parser was one of the challenges in those games almost from the beginning. In early text adventures it was the whole game.

"Look at the red thing on the table" didn't work but

"Look at room" would give you "this is an ordinary room with a table in one corner"
"Look at table" would tell you "the table has a bunch of stuff on it including a red widget"
"Look at red widget" would tell you "this widget looks like it would plug a hole in a dam"

And from there you would know what the red thing was and be given a hint of how to use the red thing. If you had explored the world enough you might have found a dam with a leak in it. If you hadn't you might know you needed to.

My wife started playing games long after the text parser and she totally doesn't get it. She wanted to try Zork at one point because she had heard so much about it and she made it far enough to be eaten by a Grue and said "this is horrible. You played this?"

[DeadPoolX]

Andy, I understand what you're saying and sometimes the text-parser interface was more enjoyable than the point-and-click one. Especially when you got all sorts of weird responses to whatever you wrote (which in my case were usually somewhat perverted).

The problem with the text-parser interface is that it was often a game of "what am I thinking?" If the developer chose one specific word for an item, then no matter what the player types, it'll be wrong unless they state the exact name.

Probably the worst thing about the early text-parser games (particularly in Sierra's case) was that the action didn't pause while typing. That meant the player had to know what was coming up ahead of time or type extremely fast.

I don't find that fun. Part of a good game isn't fighting with the control scheme. I'm glad Adventure Games moved away from typing to clicking.

[Jules]

Another that happened today...

When a fellow shopper at your local grocery store starts criticizing (to his/her signifigant other) the store, a part of the store or a certain product... speaking way above decible range as if they were informing all shoppers within a certain radius of their vast range of intellect.

Incident. A young woman standing in line to check out decides to criticize "Italian Spring Water" to her male partner and how it is detrimental to the earth if one buys "Italian" water as opposed to "American" water. And, after looking at the product myself that she criticized, the "Italian" water turned out to be a type of water... which was simply sparkling water... not made in Italy.

[Andy Roark]

Deadpoolx,

I know what you are getting at. In a few cases the text parser was used to do exactly what you are saying - forcing a replay or several replays to get the exact right sentence typed in before something ate you.

Or when the object had a very specific name that you had to bend your brain around to figure out.

And yea, it sucked when that happened.

[therogue]

You know what really freaking well and truly pisses me off, is the notion that people are not supposed to become ill over the holidays and the notion the local GP has that if they do its their own damn fault. Yes, my local utterly useless GP has buggered off for the holidays for two weeks, has not left a replacement and the only option is phoning a central office three towns over or the emergency room in the same town.
I have an earache that is driving me batty and I don't fancy waiting for the GP to return but its hardly an emergency worthy of going to the hospital.

[HarroSIN]

Not sure if this has been covered yet or not, but what really annoys me is Microsoft's poorly conceived NTVDM, which is the DOS emulator included in modern versions of Windows (2000/XP and up) which are not based off the MS-DOS architecture. It has downright awful support for anything the user is trying to run (Sierra titles!). Of course, this is why we have DOSBox.

[Collector]

Not sure if this has been covered yet or not, but what really annoys me is Microsoft's poorly conceived NTVDM, which is the DOS emulator included in modern versions of Windows (2000/XP and up) which are not based off the MS-DOS architecture. It has downright awful support for anything the user is trying to run (Sierra titles!). Of course, this is why we have DOSBox.

Which is missing altogether in 64 bit Windows. It doesn't bother me because of DOSBox. DOSBox has become more compatible than any single real DOS PC. Given all of the different settings it is like having many different DOS PCs. The range of different settings will increase significantly with the next release.