There are a lot of things to love about video games, but there are also some pretty horrible things that can pop up too. In this top five, we look at gamers' worst nightmares.

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Top 5 Gamers Worst Nightmares

5. That Game You’ve Been Looking Forward to For the Last 2 Years has Been Delayed Another 6 Months

The whole wait from it being announced to its eventual release for a hotly anticipated title can be arduous. Between all the speculation about what the game will be like, developers trickling out tiny morsels of information about it, and fanboys praising / berating it before it’s even out, there are a lot of emotional ups and downs involved with the process. What can really be a downer is when shortly before release, the developer or publisher comes out and says that they’re going to have to delay the game.

While there may be plenty of good reasons for the delay, and the game may be better off for it, the news can come like a 2X4 to the kidneys for gamers that have been looking forward to the title. Here they were thinking that at long last the waiting, speculating, and bickering would be over, only to learn that they’re going to have to put up with it for another few months. Not fun.

4. Corrupt Save Files

Where would we be without the ability to save our progress in games? Using crappy password systems straight from the 8-bit era, that’s where. Saving games has made it much easier for players to navigate long, time consuming games. Nothing spells satisfaction like beating a particularly tough boss and thinking, “Whew! I finally beat him. I’d better save quick.” The same can be said for unlocking really cool, but difficult to obtain items in a game.

That being said, the last thing a gamer wants to see after accomplishing all of this is a message on-screen telling them that their console, handheld, or PC cannot load up a saved game because the file has been corrupted. All that hard work just went down the drain. If it’s at a halfway point in a game, it can be difficult to want to go back and replay a bunch of that content just to progress again. Even worse is when the person has long since finished the game, and has shifted into completionist mode, trying to unlock every last thing in the game, then lose it to a corrupted save. So, remember folks, back up your save files!

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3. Someone Hacked Your MMO Account

This one is similar to having a corrupted save file in that the player will put in a large chunk of time leveling up their character, and getting him or her better gear, all to make their in-game alter ego as powerful as possible. Then one day they log in and discover that their password isn’t working anymore.

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Once they get the password issue sorted out, they log in to discover that their character has been deleted, and all their gear was sold off.

A lot of companies will do their best to restore the character, and as much of their gear as they can. However, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be 100% successful. Worse still, at least with a corrupted save file, we can chalk it up to some sort of hardware or software glitch. With a hacked MMO account it’s the result of a malicious individual going out of their way to make someone’s life miserable. It’s not just a bummer to see the account has been hacked. It reduces our faith in humanity a little in the process.

2. Your Console Just Died

It doesn’t matter if it’s the red ring of death on a 360, horrible error messages popping up on a PS3, or learning that despite taking impeccable care of your Dreamcast, it’s finally died, seeing any of these just sucks. Memories can be tied so closely to a console, as each generation of systems walks in parallel to specific points in our life. It could be remembering early childhood and an NES, high school days and a PSOne, or going to college and playing an Xbox. There is a lot of overlapping of specific pieces of nostalgia with specific consoles, making it all that much more painful when a system goes kaput.

Even worse is when the console gets older, and there’s a possibility that a replacement cannot be found. Suddenly the thought of a whole library of games becoming inaccessible springs to mind. Since games are locked to a specific console sometimes when that console dies there’s the chance that we can’t play them anymore. At least with PC games, they carry on from one rig to the next, but this isn’t always the case with consoles unless they support backward compatibility.

Of course, the other problem with a console dying is that either it’s still on warrantee, and will need to be shipped far away for repair or replacement, leaving the gamer to twiddle their thumbs and wait, or, even worse, the warrantee has expired, because then one has to fork out some serious dough to get a new console.

1. Your Favorite Developer is Going Under

While all of the other possibilities above are certainly unpleasant, none is worse than learning that your favorite developer is being shutdown. They’re the wellspring from which all of our good times flow. When they go down sometimes we never see games like they were putting out ever again. On top of that, even if popular series put out by the studio are picked up by someone else, one can’t say for sure that these new releases will be as good.

Sometimes key members of a shutdown studio start new companies and go on to great things, but the initial news that super awesome developer XYZ is going bankrupt is horrible news for gamers (as well as its employees, of course), and the last thing they want to see.

roygbiv

June 23, 2009