Gaming’s Most Ridiculous Tropes and Traditions

For an entertainment medium that is constantly keeping up with advances in technology, video games are so bizarrely mired in convention and tradition that they make the Amish look progressive by comparison. Just for fun here’s a critique of some of the more common gaming tropes and traditions.

Flower picking
Why do so many games these days involve flower picking? Far Cry 4, Metal Gear Solid V, Fallout 4, Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Shadow of Mordor; the list is bafflingly endless. Listen up game developers, I want to spend my gaming time stabbing idiots in the face, not skipping gaily through a meadow, singing and picking daisies. Do you think I am some kind of FREAK or what?!?!
Worst offender: Oblivion
One of the side-quests in this game involves collecting a plant known as Nirnroot for some lazy elven alchemist. Only each time you bring him the desired amount, he asks for more, and more, and more, until eventually you feel as though you are indebted to some mafioso botanist and struggling to keep up with the interest payments.

Bleeding out
Oh dear, you’ve been shot several times in the spine and liver and left crawling helplessly on the ground in an ever increasing pool of your own blood. Don’t worry though, in video game land all it takes is for one of your AI team mates to crouch down and drag you to your feet and you’re instantly cured. Who knew you could walk off bullet wounds?
Worst offender: Gears of War
The worst thing about the revive mechanic is constantly having to risk your own life saving suicidally moronic AI team mates that feel the best battlefield tactic is to walk casually into a group of shot-gun wielding mole people.

Dude, where’s my ammo?
I’m not sure where these video game baddies get these magic guns that have seemingly infinite ammo when they use them, but are spent of all but two bullets once you pick them up from their corpse.
Worst offender: The Last of Us
C’mon man! You just spent the last 10 minutes shooting at me whilst I cowered behind cover fashioning smoke grenades out of bags of sugar. How the hell does your gun only have one bullet left when I pick it up!?

Health bar
Of course video game worlds aren’t real, but developers do little to hide this when they fill their games full of stats and bars, the health bar being the most common. Upcoming shooter The Division has taken this to its logical conclusion, replacing the usual spray of brain matter you get when shooting enemies in the head with a bunch of numbers indicating damage. Oh the immersion! Generally speaking modern games have largely replaced the traditional health gauge and the player’s health is usually measured by how much they are bleeding from their eyeballs.
Worst offender: Street Fighter (series)
Why is it that when down to only a sliver of his health bar Ryu can still jump around the place throwing fireballs like a magical rabbit on ecstasy, but one girly kick to the shins is enough to knock him unconscious?
Honourable mention: Residential Evil (PS One)
What made this one interesting was the more injured you were the more you began to stagger around the place like a one-legged drunkard trying to perform Riverdance.

Collectibles
I’m not sure why developers insist in ramming their games full of collectibles that make you feel compelled to search every inch of an area like someone that has lost their car keys. All this serves to do is utterly sap the momentum.
Worst offender: Assassins Creed 2
Utterly useless collectibles scattered randomly around the map with no in-game mechanic to either help you locate them or tell you which ones you already have? Game design at its best.

Restore power
Its ridiculous how many mission objectives in games involve restoring power to some lift or door or whatnot. This is particularly common in post-apocalyptic games like The Last of Us or Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. When the apocalypse came, someone apparently turned off all the generators.
Worst offender: Alien Isolation
I dearly loved this game, despite the story having more padding than the cell in which I spent most of my formative years. So often were you fixing some damaged ship system that by the end I was convinced the aliens on board the ship all had engineering degrees and were secretly messing everything up “for teh lolz”. In fairness the retro future vibe did make repairing each system a delight.

Is that a Nokia 3310?

Food = health
According to games there’s no injury you can sustain that cant be healed by eating some food. Whether that be a a mushroom in Super Mario Bros, a cooked chicken found in a bin in Streets of Rage or a lovely bowl of Horker Stew in Skyrim. This is why most A&E departments in Britain are fully stocked with Horker Stew
Worst offender: Fallout 4
In Fallout 4 you can drink irradiated bottles of Nuka Cola to restore health. To test how effectively this would work in real life I infused a bottle of coke with some plutonium in the hope of curing a small paper cut, however the results were somewhat disappointing. The cut did disappear, but only because all the skin it was attached to dropped off. I also didn’t acquire any super-hero like abilities, apart from the ability to vomit my own bowels.
Honourable mention – Metal Gear Sold 3: Snake Eater
Rather than have a direct correlation between eating and health, Snake Eater instead had a stamina bar that increased when you ate food, which in turn increased your ability to heal over time. Failure to eat regularly enough would make Snake hungry, resulting in a hilarious gurgling noise that would alert guards. Unfortunately Snake’s mum didn’t make him a packed lunch so all food had to be hunted in the jungle, and the game had a pretty diverse range of fauna from flying squirrels to crocodiles.

Hacking mini-games
It must be a curious task for developers, designing mini-games within their games that make the job of computer programming seem a doddle. These range from Fallout 4’s guess the password game to Bioshock’s frankly bizarre pipe game.
Honorable mention: Enter the Matrix
Not a very memorable game this one, but it did have a pretty interesting hacking mini-game that had actual commands and file directories. You could use these to hack into the Matrix and enable cheats or leave weapon drops in levels.

Overpowered vehicle sections
Get ready to kill 17 times more enemies than you have in all the previous levels combined in the obligatory vehicle/turret level. Bonus points if its on rails in a helicopter and explosive red barrels are scattered at convenient intervals.
Worst offender: Halo (series)
They say the Master Chief is humanity’s best weapon against the Covenant. Nonsense! The Scorpion tank is humanity’s best weapon against the covenant. This metallic behemoth of death is virtually unstoppable.

Audio-logs
Who are these bloody narcissists that feel the need to constantly record their own voice, even as the world is going to hell around them? When the zombies or the aliens or the gene splicers come to claim humanity you sure as hell aren’t gonna find me in a recording booth documenting my thoughts on the current situation. Find some other story telling device!
Worst offender: Metal Gear Solid V
I’m not really sure why Snake carries with him to every mission a gargantuan cassette collection that would rival that of a HMV megastore circa 1996. These tapes are supposed to flesh out the game’s story, but they’re virtually unusable during missions, as Miller insists on constantly talking over them.

Sewer levels
Games have the ability to transport you to wondrous places beyond the limits of your imagination. So why do I spend so much gaming time walking down rivers of excrement and dodging faecal matter?
Honorable Mention: Demon’s Souls
The Valley of Defilement feels like the ultimate sewer level; a river of poisonous filth littered with discarded trash that has been fashioned into something resembling a settlement. At every turn the player is attacked by deranged outcasts and deformed monstrosities that emerge from the foreboding darkness. The hideous finale is a boss battle involving a swarm of plague infected aborted foetuses. Dark Souls and its Blighttown level lingers longer in the memory of most gamers but arguably From Software nailed it first time in this utterly sublime masterpiece.

Well that’s it from me. I leave it to you now dear reader to share your favourite and not so favourite gaming conventions, tropes and traditions. Look forward to my upcoming feature covering when video game conventions were wondrously subverted.