I've been a gamer for quite some time, in fact, I'm playing Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia right now, and I felt prompted to make this list. So. I present... the Seven Obnoxious Things in Games.

7. Callow Youth/Amnesiac/Angsty Loner Saves The World
Vaan? I liked him better when he was called Tidus. No, wait. Zidane. Wait. Squall. I mean Cloud. Fuck. I definitely mean... oh to hell with it, you get it. Final Fantasy isn't the only offender. There's too much of this Blonde/white/brown/black haired guys with swords under the age of 20 learning about the power of friendship by going on quests to save the world. What about a 40 something merchant questing to save his soul after inadvertently making a deal with Satan? And for God's sake, do I even have to go into why amnesia is a terrible idea these days? it was always stupid. What really burns my ass is all the RUDE amnesiacs. Look, buddy, considering you don't remember anything, you're kind of in need of a lot of help, so why are you being an outrageous douche to everyone you meet?

6. Broken Secret Characters
Fuck you, Lu Bu. So much. In all your holes. Nothing makes me madder than unlocking a character who is blatantly broken and sucks most of the challenge out of a game. You know the one. The guy who pops up out of nowhere to totally screw up the finely tuned balance of a game. "We're gonna play dodgeball. But I'm gonna be a bear with a railgun."

5. Forced Minigames
This goes double for forced Stealth sections, but only in games where stealth is not the norm. Basically, let's say you really like poker. You love poker, and poker is your game. Let's say you're playing poker, and you won the game, and then one of your buddies stands up from their chair and exclaims "okay, we're gonna play mumblipeg now, and if you lose I take back all the money you won!" Why do we let games do this to us? When I rented Dirge of Cerberus I was doing so because I wanted to play a third person shooter, not Cait Sith's Magical Unarmed Stealth Adventure. Fuck. If I wanted to do stealth, I would play MGS4, or Tenchu. I was enjoying the shooting people in the face. I played DoC to shoot people in the face, not fart around with a silly Irish robot cat Squeenix crammed into the game in the name of fucking with me.

4. Fetch Quests (double for those with drops)
Why? Why? Why in God's name do we continue to play this card? What is wrong with game designers? Who keeps allowing this to happen? I understand that as a ((insert main character title here)) it may be necessary to do favors for people, such as obtaining a whatever the fuck, or ten whatever the fucks, but why does it need to be such an arbitrary chore? And why do I have to do so many of them? The only games where I've ever enjoyed this sort of bullshit were Oblivion and Fallout 3. Why? When I need vampire dust, I find a Vampire, I kill it, it's carrying vampire dust. EVERYTIME. Daedra have daedra hearts. For some reason, likely to inflate play time, many games have drop rates for varying items, so I'm forced to kick the piss out of the same mangy fodder enemy fifty-five thousand times in hopes that this time I'll get lucky and he'll drop his toenail. It's right there, I'm hitting him with a sword! I can just cut it off! There's no skill involved, I'm just repeating this task over and over again until luck kicks in!

3. FPS Unoriginality
If there was ever a genre that was stagnating, it's FPS. Does this sound familiar? Pistol, SMG, Assault Rifle, Shotgun, Grenade (Launcher), Melee, Rocket, Big Ridiculous unreal weapon that melts people or some shit.
Well excuuuuuuse me for not being impressed with your latest game about World War II, dude, but for crying out loud, everyone and their mom makes those games! When I saw Zeno Clash, with its emphasis on melee bareknuckle combat and improvised weaponry in a fantasy setting, I was stunned because I didn't know creativity still lived in the FPS genre.

2. Quicktime Events
This makes my blood boil. It always has. It sucked when Shenmue did it, it has always sucked, it will always suck, and there's nothing anyone can do to make it suck any less. It's garbage. Resident Evil and God of War did so much right and then they spit in my eye with this outdated, uncreative bullshit. Ooh, and guess which game I'm talking about now. "The one where the guy climbs up on the big monster and the monster swats at him and he stabs it a bunch during a quicktime event and he jumps off and poses while the big monster falls down and gushes fluids." Why do we reward this? It's not immersive, it's not innovative. It's just puerile and silly.

1. Rigid Karma systems
It seems developers have a raging hard-on for feeding our inner douche/crusader, as many games on the market feature choices that allow us to make either a wunderkind godchild singing songs with the lovely fluffy bunnies and tickling their tummies or an eye-socket fucking assbag who can only get it up when he's destroying innocents. Which makes sense, right? Everyone falls neatly into one of those two categories with no middle ground of any kind. What's this "ambiguity" and "gray area" you speak of? I know not of this. Everytime I go to the grocery store there's always people redecorating the store with the entrails of their fellow customers while others lovingly alphabetize the breakfast cereals to help children learn to read while simultaneously teaching an abused woman to love again. Where is the spectrum?!