Invisible walls
We hereby declare that any game, no matter how good, will suffer a review point penalty if we find even a single invisible wall. The next-gen doesn't start until this preposterously lazy blight is eradicated.

The dock level
We ran out of amusing ways of dropping this into features about things we hate ages ago. But still developers insist on including dock levels in games. How can we put it more clearly? What about: A dock is a shit place to set a level?

Squad-based games
Come on. How often have you found yourself thinking "Wow, my AI squad really helped me through that level. I couldn't have done it without them. Go Team!"

Japanophiles
You are not Cloud. You are not a cyborg. You are not a samurai. You do not spend your days poetically whirling through cherry blossom while pink-haired rabbit-girls faun over you. You will never go to work in a mech, and watching un-dubbed, unsubbed anime you can’t understand does not make you any more Japanese or any cooler than the rest of us.

Cut-scenes you can't BASTARD skip
Developers may feel that skippable cutscenes threaten the cohesion of their work and devalue their effort. Fair enough. But, then, if most cut-scenes weren't unnecessary self-indulgent crap, we wouldn't be mashing all the buttons and muttering "Skipskipskipdamnyou" under our breath in the first place.

Self-indulgent game scripts (ie. Hideo Kojima)
We appreciate that actions in games need to have purpose and meaning and all that, but when there's so much excess waffle that the game is lost amongst a convoluted belly-flop of flabby wordage, we start glazing over like a lobotomised cake.
Believe us, we really don't need to be filled in by a ridiculous 20 minute spew of back-story for Non-Playable Character B when all we want to do is shoot terrorists in the face.

Bad ports
Wii owners, we know your pain. There’s nothing lazier in game publishing than throwing an old game out on a different machine to make a quick buck without having to bother with any of that pesky development stuff. And when the ‘new’ game is unimproved or even sloppily converted, it makes the wait all the more of a kick in the teeth.

Games that end just when they start getting good
Tomb Raider Legend, we're looking at you. We play you for about eight hours, start really getting into your gameplay, watch a glorious plot-twist of a cut-scene and anticipate your next level. But the credits roll.
And no, it's not like a Square-Enix game where you're about to see the title screen. It really is the end. Dammit!

Crap voice acting
"Sure hope this is not Chris' blood..." It's funny now, but Resident Evil's voice acting was atrocious. And it's not the only culprit. If Uncharted: Drake's Fortune can get it right, then what excuse is there for others? None, that's what. And the worst part is when you can tell an actor is reading a script with no idea what context the line is in.