Today ends Hater Week here at Aftermath, where you've watched us bemoan software, TV, social media, AI, and so, so many aspects of video games. But you shouldn't just have to listen to us complain; we wanted to know what really grinds your gears.
Below, our readers join the Hater Week fun by sharing some of the things that piss them off, from the major to the mundane. We couldn't include everything you all sent us or we'd be here all day, but rest assured we read them all while shaking ours fists at the sky alongside you.
Some entries have been edited for length or clarity.
Games
I hate when you want to close a PC game so you go to the menu and choose 'quit game' but instead of closing the game it instead takes you to the title screen, so you have to look at the logos, press any key to continue, wait for the menu to load, navigate down to quit, then say 'yes I would like to quit to desktop.' And that's for the games that don't have autoloading sub menus! Yeah, I hate that.
--Craig
I hate competitive matchmaking in multiplayer team games. While it helps people get into the game faster, it also has a tendency to make other players seem like NPCs to a very large number of players and groups. When players become interchangeable and almost never seen again from day to day, it creates toxicity that permeates the community at large, making the game much more frustrating to play.
We see this all the time in games like Overwatch, DotA 2, League of Legends, and several other coordinated team games. While they fight the resulting toxicity with various gimmicks, from role queues to forcing people into toxic lobbies, it never fully addresses the issue and several games turn into a sort of backfilling or tantrum-fighting hell.
These games are wonderful for building connections between people passionate about a game and genre, and instead these players with shared interests become obstacles to one another. These games should be building better tools to foster these existing bonds and help people find like-minded players to play with, but instead they chase after metrics they can easily monetize and measure.
--Daniel
Stop giving games badass titles based on classic literature and philosophy. When I can't remember the name of Sartre's book and I search "Being and Becoming" I don't want a hundred results about a metroidvania.
--Nick
I hate the auto-exposure light effect in games. I do not care if it is realistic. I do not care if it accurately recreates the effect of my eyes adjusting to the dark over 0.98 seconds. I do not buy videogames to be temporarily blinded. Do not test my eyeballs. They are fine.
--Brendy
Doesn't matter which Final Fantasy it is, if a moogle approaches me I know I'm about to get dicked around for hours by a cluster of gormless flying shits and that I probably won't be able to progress the story until they're done with me. I would like to DNI all moogles forever.
--Cami
I am not an achievements hater, but they can absolutely be implemented in a terrible way. Bad achievements make me 100% understand people who outright hate achievements.
Achievements are at their best if they make you experience aspects of the game you otherwise would not have tried or known about. They are at their worst if they make you try something stupid hard, or are impossible to achieve without some dumb external things. The worst achievements in my opinion are:
- "Beat the game in like 4 hours." That is a horribly inconveniently long amount of time for one attempt at an achievement.
- Ones that require playing the multiplayer part of a game with a heavy single player focus, which are never separated from the main achievements. (Oh, you don't pay for PSN, or are playing an old game that's either basically dead or literally no longer available online? Too bad!)
- Games that have a separate achievement for "beat the game on easy," "medium," and "hard" that don't automatically unlock the easier difficulties upon completing the harder ones. What are we doing here???
- Achievements that unlock at an important or impactful story moment. Thanks for ruining the vibes!
- A special f-u to the rare achievement that only unlocks if the player ranks high on the online leaderboards, which are most certainly going to be hacked by the time you play it.
--Maxwell
On the side of "Focus, M" dialog. I'm not a hater, I'm a lover! I love when NPCs explain game mechanics in-character! My heart skips a beat every time Bentley tells Sly Cooper to jump and press the circle button to perform a super sneaky master thief move. It's game language, same as NPCs telling you their life story as soon as you meet them, or recording their innermost thoughts and secrets in conveniently placed journals and audio logs. If you can't suspend your disbelief around the storytelling shorthands unique to games as a medium, that's a skill issue. (I must emphasize that this is separate from the phenomenon of characters never shutting the fuck up.)
--Marco
Something I really hate is when there are cute critters as enemies in games. Wolves are likely the most common. It really bums me out to have to fight or kill them! One of the things I love about Earthbound is that if you do beat up a cute pupper, it simply "becomes tame" rather than being severely injured or killed.
--Rivven
Games that only let you invert the y-axis (and change any other options really, but the y-axis is usually the worst for me) until after you've played the intro.
--Lionel
I hate the artwork in Stardew Valley. Really I dislike the entire game, as it's taken the default spot of a genre full of much better games due to the happy accident of landing during an overall drought in that field, but more than anything I hate the art. The color palette is painfully generic, buildings look like cheap toys, the level of detail everywhere creates constant visual noise, the food is ugly, and the character portraits look like they've chugged even more drain cleaner than CD-i Zelda.
I don't want to pick on a game mostly made by a solo dev, but it's such a big fish at this point that I can't let that be an excuse. I love pixel art but that means I have standards, and Stardew Valley fails on every possible level. This game being the face of farming/life sims is actually embarrassing.
--Tom
Pinball, specifically
I am an avid pinball player. I love the hobby despite all its incongruities. Pinball is a game that is frequently technically on your control but is also impossible to fully wrangle. So many parts and pieces of it can be out of your hands on any day of the week. It was legalized because you could control it, but only really exists as a competitive game because eventually you must drain. And so I’ve come to accept that I will have my bad days and I will have losses outside of my control.
But then there’s the genie. This motherFUCKER. The villain of the 1996 Williams joint Tales of the Arabian Nights. Very appropriately, as he’s a piece of shit that murders you for fun. The main objective of the game is to rescue Scheherazade from his clutches by completing various scoring modes. You start the modes by bashing the genie, which temporarily holds the ball in place via a magnet.
That magnet proceeds to throw the ball in really any direction with no reason or pattern. Often this means the jerk tosses you straight down the middle without any hope of salvaging. You started a mode, but at what cost?
This would be one thing if I could just avoid TotAN. But for some reason, multiple other pinball designers thought this was a great concept and reimplemented it wholesale. Are you a fan of Aerosmith? Well Stern’s 2017 Aerosmith table features such a deadly magnet, only instead of your reward for the risk being rescuing a princess you instead get to listen to "Toys in the Attic." Two years later Stern brought the genie back, only in the form of the beloved Frankenstein Herman Munster. In 2019’s The Munsters, if you hit Herman and he throws you down the middle you miss out on an entire multiball. Thanks man.
It’s really not just that it’s a risky shot, but it’s a risky shot that can kill you if you hit it correctly, and it’s often necessary for progress, AND it’s random whether it’ll send you at a good angle or throw you into the depths. While pinball is a very random hobby, there are usually ways you can influence the game to save yourself. Not with these!
So yeah, for Hater Week, I hate the “magnet that kills you” AKA the Tales of the Arabian Nights genie.
--Twak
I am an arcade technician by trade. I go around the Southeast US as a contractor fixing and building games for clients.
In this industry, the big 800 lb gorilla is Betson. More than just the biggest distributor in the continent, they have their tendrils in game installs, turnkey operations, site planning, and now they even own the biggest manufacturer of video arcade games in the West, Raw Thrills.
And I fucking hate them. No other distributor comes close to their size, and like any monopoly they have made it everyone's problem. I hate every part of their operation. I hate their sales who tack on exorbitant markup if you do not agree to buy in bulk exclusively through them. I hate their parts department who will send me the wrong fucking part even if I email them a god damn photo of what I need. I hate how they've fired most of their techs and now farm out installs to subcontractors who are consistently terrible at it, leading to incorrectly built, malfunctioning games. And I hate what they have done to Raw Thrills, a company I previously had begrudging respect for but now loathe as they make their games increasingly irreparable wherever it's by encrypting their PCs with TPM so you can't so much as swap the GPU on your own or by HIDING THE SCREW HOLES TO A JOYSTICK GRIP BY MELTING OVER IT WITH PLASTIC SLUGS. FUCK BETSON.
--Anonymous
Internet culture
I hate short-form food videos where they rip the food in half, tear into it, squeeze it, or smash all of the juices out. The food looks perfectly fine--you do NOT need to rip it in half to make it look appetizing.
Cross section views after slicing are okay.
--Kevin
Kyle Gordon is weird Al for people who hate music. I said it, and I mean it.
Yes, "Planet of the Bass" is a bop. But think about it for a second, and you'll realize that despite sounding exactly like the eurobeat of the mid '00s, the song doesn't really have any jokes. It's a cover of a song that doesn't exist, not satire, and the funny moments the song does have (the phone conversation, the bad translation) exist in the exact same way in the songs "Planet of the Bass" claims to be a tribute to! "Running in the 90s" has a full verse about cybersex!
Once you realize this, that Gordon is an observational comic in the mold of Jerry Seinfeld except without any jokes, everything falls apart. "Selekta"'s one joke is that British people sound funny. That millennial indie parody's one joke, "we will never die," might be funny if Peter Bjorn and John, fun. feat. Janelle Monae, and countless other bands of the era didn't make it first.
While Weird Al's satire comes from a place of elevated ridiculousness, the thesis of Gordon's comedy, both in his songs and sketches, boils down to "look at me recreate something we both agree is cringe." The thing that really pisses me off about this is his popularity and success are based on the fact that the cringe shit he's making fun of and profiting off of is good. If you have "Planet of the Bass" on repeat because you think it's catchy, you should be listening to more eurobeat. If you have "Selekta" on repeat, there's an infinite library of '00s UK garage for you to peruse. And if you like "We Will Never Die," kill the part of you that cringes and dust off that Edward Sharpe LP you bought in college.
There is a longer version of this rant that gets into how Elvis made rock 'n' roll safe and palatable for a larger audience, and how about 15 years ago, future funk DJs started doing the same thing with Japanese city pop and motown. Each abstracted genres for their personal benefit while positioning themselves as an acceptable pipeline for listening to a genre that was previously obscure, unpopular, out of fashion, or indeed, cringe, paving over musical history and burying smaller artists. I'll let you fill in those blanks. Kyle Gordon is talented, but he isn't funny, and worse, what he's doing is anti-art. Fuck him.
--Sam
I hate the "shit on things" economy. It usually is a bunch of young white dudes on YouTube who have little experience with actual problems complaining about how small problems in games means they are complete shit. It's easy to hate things, it's hard to love things.
--Mafuchi
The Bluesky Discover Feed is a fracking nightmare to deal with. Doesn't matter if you're subscribed to it or not, some rando poster with "follow for follow" in their profile is going to come into your thread about game layoffs and tell you that actually the economy is doing great, your lived experience is just an outlier, never mind your lying eyes. Or whenever you post a joke or do a sportsball post there is always a response about how dare you do so at a time like this 'cause "There is an orange tyrant in the White House!" Just about the most annoying jump scare that makes me want to turn off all notifications on the app and/or throw my phone in the sea.
--Christian
Food
I hate that hot chicken has gone from a hearty Nashville meal of bone-in chicken with real sides (Baked mac and cheese! Collard greens! Corn bread! Baked beans!) to the homogenized baby food that is chicken tenders and French fries. I hate that what's happened to hot chicken is now befalling the cheesesteak as well.
--Kevin
I hate Liquid Death. That stupid fucking seltzer brand. Some douchebag took water, the source of all life, named it LIQUID DEATH, and gave it violent flavor names like "mango chainsaw," all to cater to a certain type of man who believes drinking water is gay.
--Brian
Nutritional pseudoscience. Most of us don’t need to eat 12oz of steak and four eggs a day. Stop putting protein powder in coffee. Stop putting mushrooms in coffee. Leave coffee alone.
--Emily
Papa Murphy’s Pizza is an affront to the concept of restaurants. The whole point is that I walk in and pay for the food, and then they cook it. But Papa Murphy’s thinks it’s too good to sit in the frozen food aisle next to DiGiorno. It wants its own real estate so it can violate the basic contract by making me pay them [for me] to cook their food. Do they want me to change their diapers too while they’re at it?
--Connor
Technology
Fuck the scam era. Fuck crypto. Fuck gambling apps. Fuck every grifter in the White House. Fuck the DNC’s infinite fundraising loops. Fuck AI with a rusty spoon and a cactus. I know I’ll suffer if the bubble popping sets off a global depression, but if all this bullshit gets swept away forever in the process of recovering from it, then I’ll come out the other side feeling like it was worth it.
--Connor
Everything about generative AI, but especially the idea that we need to “teach students how to use it.” (I am a college teacher.) We fucking don’t.
- They know how to use it.
- It’s not hard to use, goddamn it, you type in your homework problem and it spits out an answer that might be right or might be wrong. It’s easier to use than a TI-84 and less reliable.
[I also hate] the fact that I used to be genuinely excited about technological possibilities and now I’m 100% pessimistic. I used a computer to do symbolic calculations as part of my PhD thesis, I used to give talks about the math behind Google PageRank, I have dreamed of self-driving cars since I got my drivers license! I think it’s human nature to want technology to solve our problems, but right now all technology has been coopted by the oligarchs with the new goal of making them rich, damn the human costs.
--Emily
A few things I hate:
- Typographical inconsistencies, especially in subtitles, and especially when there's a mix of straight and curly apostrophes.
- Simple UX/UI options that are not implemented by devs, such as not activating the keyboard that contains the @ symbol when filling out an e-mail field, or not activating the numbers-only keyboard when filling out a field that is only numbers on a smartphone.
--Lionel
One that's bothered me for near enough a decade now, and I fear it's only going to get worse, and that's the ever-decreasing presence of the 3.5mm headphone jack in portable devices, especially mobile phones. I want to avoid getting too rambly about this (it's something I feel quite passionate about), so I'll try to distill it into a few key points.
The removal of the headphone jack in most mobile phones today is a severe backwards step in accessibility. In order to use wired headphones on devices without a jack, you need to use a dongle, which can be both unsightly and ergonomically unpleasant to use, far more so than any angled 3.5mm connector I've ever used. This isn't even accounting for the inherent additional cost of a dongle in the first place.
Otherwise, you're going wireless, but wireless headphones are also inherently and unavoidably more expensive than a wired equivalent, on account of needing DACs, Bluetooth receivers and batteries alongside every other thing that makes a headphone a headphone.
Batteries also degrade over time with, in many cases, no way of replacing the batteries, forcing the user to upgrade eventually because they won't hold a sufficient charge after a few years of use. By comparison, wired headphones don't have this in-built expiry date and will last long into the future with proper care and handling.
I don't begrudge people wanting or even going all in on wireless audio, and indeed, there are benefits to it beyond the convenience of not having to deal with wires. But when wireless audio starts being treated as the default for device manufacturers rather than one of two options for users, all the while most of my own environment revolving around being able to use wires for virtually anything I do, it gets really annoying. People might well say that "wireless is the future," but it isn't my present.
--Daniel
I hate poorly designed automated phone tree menus when you call into a place. Every one of these nowadays are poorly designed, intended to get the caller to hang up instead of actually helping them. Properly designed systems like these and help desks and customer complaint lines can efficiently move callers through and resolve problems, but most of these department heads can't mentally deal with properly running their shit and instead make up systems designed to incite instant violence.
Don't get me started on the voice prompt. Let me make a number selection like God intended.
--Joe
Random stuff
Love: I love the 2023 Wonka musical. People say it's embarrassing and the music sucks, and to them I say, all musicals are embarrassing with bad music, at least Wonka doesn't shy away from that.
Hate: Rene Descartes. I think therefore I am? My guy, you forgot that your ability to think came from other people, which you had to discard in order to get to the cogito!!
--Lucas
I despise the mother of Theosophy Helena Blavatsky. She created a racist brand of woo that both inspired the Nazis' weird spiritual/historical worldviews and, like, all new age religions. Anything you see about aryans, enlightened masters, or the Akashic Records is sourced from her, and it's all horrible bullshit.
--Amber
Lawns are an affront to the planet. I understand the desire for outdoor green space, but if your definition of that is just 800 square feet of nothing but the WORST FUCKING PLANT, we have a problem. Grass is trash; it’s incredibly water-intensive, its roots choke out other plants in the area, and it’s a pain in the ass to manage. You’re telling me you need a whole separate special little car to keep your special little Kentucky Bluegrass at the HOA-approved 2 inches in height? Your grass lawn sucks and you should feel bad.
--Alvin
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
