I just finished playing Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and I’ve started playing F.E.A.R. In each game I’ve encountered some very frustrating elements.
While I enjoyed Call of Cthulhu, as more of an adventure game than a FPS, the most frustrating part is that the game designers had an irritating habit of placing save points — and let’s not forget that there are save points and not quick saves in the first place — just before crappy cut scenes. Very very irritating to have to watch the same damn clip a dozen times in a row while trying to get past the portion of the game.
FEAR, on the other hand, was irritating before I even started playing it. Stupid copy protection meant the damn game wouldn’t install in the first place. I couldn’t even copy the disk to the hard drive without resulting in an error. I eventually got it copied over by booting into linux and just telling it to retry copying the files over and over. I knew I should have just downloaded the torrent. That would have been a lot easier than having to go through this.
It seems that it might occur to someone that pissing off your customers wasn’t a very smart think to do…