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Avoozl

Pointless features in games

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Wiping the blood of of your sword in the new shadow warrior, the game even advertises it as a pointless feature.

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Doominator2 said:

Wiping the blood of of your sword in the new shadow warrior, the game even advertises it as a pointless feature.


Unless it does less damage with blood on the sword or you get a bonus for wiping it. But yeah I'd say that's a winner right there.

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I guess leaning in Jedi Academy would count as one, besides the available weapons since Jedi Outcast leaning really wouldn't be needed and you can't shoot while doing so, you can always go into third-person mode and turn the character to see whats on any side while behind a wall corner.

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The Wolfenstein (1992) scoring and lives system borders on pointlessness. I think its main use is to collect lives so you can die more before game-over. But unfortunately you respawn by restoring the whole level, which is just not fun to repeat, and if you also collect extra-lives, then it's nulled. Other games have done it better, such as Descent, where you respawn in the same session and have to retake your stuff, so it feels less like reloading the game and more like strategically using up your lives as a resource (and the score to raise them).

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I dunno, back in the day the Wolf scoring system was the reason for me coming back for an additional play or two to see if I could get a max score for an episode or something.

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I think the only reason the scoring/lives system was pointless in Wolf 3D was because the game's save-anywhere feature kinda rendered it pointless. You die, you reload your last save in the middle of the level you died in. Why bother with lives at all?

The most pointless feature I can think of is reloading in Rise of the Triad [2013]. It literally does nothing but waste time, because your clips were bottomless to begin with. Scoping would also be useless, since your guns aim the same regardless of whether you're scoped or shooting from the hip, but the small amount of zoom scoping gets you is actually useful for sniping distant enemies, so at least it has that going for it - more than reloading can say for itself. All reloading has going for it is that it has really cool animations.

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GTA 2 tokens. They are just collectibles in the map that give you nothing, it's almost impossible to find them all, AND when you finish the game without picking them, you get a message like: "Didn't get all tokens, sucker!" or something. So they're not totally pointless, they provide frustration. Not that the real ending is much more than that.

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Shadow Hog said:

All reloading has going for it is that it has really cool animations.

That and some players have borderline fetishistic attitude to weapon reloading, judging by how ZDoom weapon mods nearly always feature reloading as a selling point.

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Super Metroid has the ability to moonwalk that you can set in the options before the game starts. While it's a neat little touch, it's ultimately useless because you won't be able to turn around while shooting or charging, and that hampers gameplay a lot.

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I sorta like RotT included reloading, despite how pointless it is. It's kinda like a take that at games that have you reload a lot. At least Pointless =/= Bad imo

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The story in Crusader games - and many other 90s games with cinematic cutscenes. They heap cliche upon cheese, feature terrible acting and effects, connect poorly to ingame events and bloat the game by orders of magnitude. Pretty much everything that wasn't Command & Conquer was unwatchable.

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Jimi said:

Megahealth rot in singleplayer was pretty dumb too.

i dunno, i thought it was pretty unique: you're given one hundred health points, which encourages you to rush through dangerous sections of the level, and take a lot of damage, which you then can absorb thanks to the extra health given. at least, it makes more sense in the first game with its fast-paced action, in the second one it IS a bit useless because gameplay never really makes you feel that threatened.

i'm not a huge fan of having to unlock stuff that requires subsequent playthroughs to get. i mean, if you get a super-weapon that destroys all challenge in the game, but you need to beat the game on every difficulty level, what's the point? there's no need to use it on the hardest difficulty anymore, because you already beat it. or if it's simply stupid cosmetic stuff, like the wallpapers in Advance Wars DS. there's one for every CO in the game, but you can ONLY get them by beating the game, and having these COs being in the top three COs you used in that playthrough.

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There's nothing like watching someone get themselves killed due to the reloading animation in RotT 2013. Pointless feature, fun social experiment.

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ASD said:

Mouse is more effective, and I never bothered to press the turnaround during the keyboard times and thought basic turning was equally fast.


the only time I used 180 quick turn was in an arch vile trap in MM map12, it was useful for that, though.

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Kontra Kommando said:

For old-school games, I always thought it was pointless to have a high score list that always resets every time you turn the game on again.

They probably felt it mandatory as kids were so conditioned to arcade machines.

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