I don’t know if anyone’s seen this lately, but this article really hits a few sore spots. For example:

12. Don’t bulls&^% us on the difficulty

Gradually tougher enemies, more enemies, mind-bending puzzles, it’s all good. It’s all fair. But DO NOT try to artificially make your game harder with:

Arbitrary triggers in RPG’s. Why isn’t the Dark Elf waiting at the Black Temple like he said? Because I haven’t talked to every f’ing person in town yet. Can we at least write in some kind of actual cause and effect here that might make some kind of actual sense to me? Because I don’t get any sense of reward or accomplishment by randomly activating subroutines via mind-numbing repetition.

Ammo starvation. I’m looking at you, Resident Evil for the Gamecube. I have a gun. LET ME USE IT. Don’t pretend your game is “challenging” because you only give me four bullets to kill eight zombie dogs with.

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Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot them for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness.

Unnecessarily difficult end levels. I’ve worked for 50 hours to get to this point in the game. Don’t make me watch the “Loading…” screen and then the f’ing climactic cutscene 75 times, once for each attempt to beat the last boss. And don’t make the method of attack so f’ing obscure and specific that nothing short of a trip to GameFaqs will get me through it. Talk about killing immersion…

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Hard games are fine. We like a challenge. But be fair about it.

There’s nineteen other points in the manifesto - just in time for Summer Games 2005.