Weekend Hot Topic: What game mechanics are you bad at?

metro.co.uk:

Readers admit the game concepts and moves that they can never get right, from flying a plane to special moves in a fighting game.

The subject for this week’s Hot Topic was suggested by reader Razzledazzle, who used the example of web-swinging in Spider-Man. It could be any element of a game though, from a general concept to something more specific.

Everyone was surprisingly happy to admit their blind spots, although the most common by far was rhythm action games and, to a lesser extent, QTEs.

Fascinating rhythm The one mechanic that always troubles me in games is any time I am expected to perform actions in time to music. If there’s a visual component such as the moving icons you get in most rhythm games then it’s fine, and if there is something clear like a steady drum beat then that’s also not too bad, but if I’m supposed to listen to a complex tune and somehow deduce which notes are important then I quickly come unstuck.

I tried Cadence Of Hyrule but really couldn’t get to grips with it. Some of the tunes have a drumbeat, but they frequently add in extra beats you’re not supposed to tap along to, miss drums out but still expect you to keep tapping, or fade the drums out leaving you to rely on a tune with no obvious beat. I ended up using an accessibility option to ignore the beat and turn it into a DROD style turn-based game, but that just made it too simple to be much fun.

The worst case I can remember though was the Yoshi race from Super Mario RPG, in which you are simply told to tap two buttons in time to the music with no further indication of how this is supposed to work. I googled it and found an explanation written by a guitarist which sounded like Adam and Joe explaining the rules to Quizzlestick. Fortunately, that