(bright tones) - [Falcon] We all know and
love lots of different stuff that happens in video games and, well, there's some things you
end up doing all the time. Hi, folks, it's Falcon,
and today on Gameranx, 20 things you can't stop
doing in video games. Starting off at number 20, and this is a really obvious
one, shooting red barrels. You play games for long
enough and it's just instinct. You see something that
is red and you shoot it. Doesn't matter if there's
enemies around or not. If it's red and, you know,
vaguely barrel shaped, cylindrical, that thing's
probably gonna explode, so I'm gonna shoot it. Here's a scenario that probably
sounds vaguely familiar: you walk into a room, there's
red barrels everywhere, there's no enemies, so you decide, hey, I'm not going to shoot these barrels. I'll save them for when
a bad guy shows up. Then without fail, when
you're walking by a barrel, some enemy pops outta nowhere
and shoots the barrel, killing you. We've all been there
and as the saying goes, fool me once, fool me twice,
won't get fooled again. That's how it goes, right? There should be no mercy for red barrels. If they're around, they're
gonna have to get shot. No question. They will always betray you
when you need them most, so I'm just gonna enjoy
the explosion regardless. And number 19 is trying to
climb impossibly steep surfaces. You're playing a game, you get a waypoint, quest marker, whatever, you
got a big mountain in the way, and you got two options: you go around it, the way the game wants you to do it; or you can do what everyone does and try to brute force your
way over that damn mountain. Like everyone does it, admit it. If there's even the tiniest possibility of taking a more direct route,
that's the way you're going. Doesn't matter how impossibly
steep the mountain is. Usually it takes longer, ends
up being a waste of time, but I don't know, just seems
more worthwhile, right? There's a joy to exploration
and an ingrained laziness in us all that somehow
makes us want to take the most direct route possible
when it's actually more work. (character's footsteps) And number 18, pressing buttons
during the title splashes. Duh. Like, originally this was
gonna be about loading screens, but how many loading screens
do we really encounter that are that bad anymore? However, a lot of games have some pretty tediously
long startup sequences, where we have to look at
a dozen production logos, publisher titles,
firmware logos, and, like, one screen telling you that
Real Yakuza use a game pad, or Detective, not leaving out our man Tak. Oh yeah, and then there's
a few license agreements that tell you you don't
actually own the game, you just own a license to play it. And it's like, holy crap, yes,
I know you're screwing me, let me play the damn game. Now, enterprising PC
players sometimes are able to delete some files and
get rid of these things, but if you're on console,
there's no luck there. Like, at least a few games out there let you do skip some of this stuff, but those a few and far between. Everyone has to watch this
stuff, but nobody really cares, so for players, the only recourse
is kind of to mash buttons and then at least you're
physically doing something. God forbid I acknowledge the
people who worked on this game or read, ew. No, I'm kidding. This
stuff is all useless. And number 17 is spinning
the camera when you're bored. Let's be real, most of
the stuff we do in games is kind of arbitrary and stupid, and this is probably one
of the more pointless of all of them. If a game gives you control during a cut scene or scripted event, you better believe I'm spinning
that camera like an idiot rather than listening to what I'm supposed to be focusing on. Especially in games with
unskippable story sequences, ones I've already beat. Maybe I've seen this
stuff two or three times. Maybe there's a difficult
fight right after that I haven't beaten, and I've seen this cut scene
a couple times, I don't know. Spinning the camera isn't the most, like, mentally stimulating activity,
but it's better than nothing. If it's a third-person
game, then another option is just spin around in
place when you're bored. Sometimes a character will
just spin around on a dime, completely frictionless, and sometimes they'll do
a little dance for you. Either way, win-win. And number 16 is knocking
enemies off ledges. Simple math: enemy plus ledge equals the falling nightmare, you know? We've all had that dream,
except it's not you, it's them, your enemy. Of course I'm doing that. Obviously any Star Wars
game is pretty much perfect for this kind of shenanigan. Force push usually makes it easy enough. And any game with a good kick
ability is made for this too, like Assassin's Creed:
Odyssey, it's got that, "This is Sparta" kick,
which is a whole lot of fun, but one of the all-time,
great mighty boots in gaming was this game called Dark
Messiah of Might & Magic, kind of an early Arkane game, and if there's one thing
Arkane has done good since the beginning, it's
knocking bad guys off ledges. Another good one, Dying Light. I don't think it gets
a lot more satisfying than a flying dropkick off the roof, hmm. (characters grunting and yelling) And number 15 is hoarding everything. You know what I'm talking about, Constantly on the verge
of being over encumbered, never want to give up anything
but never using it either. The video game hoarder can't help but collect as much stuff as possible. It doesn't matter how
worthless any of it is, doesn't matter if the good
stuff is never gonna get used, just doesn't matter. You might need something someday,
but that day never comes. You're just making life
harder for yourself, constantly saying you're
saving the good stuff for the big fight, then when
the super hard boss comes, you still don't use it because who knows, maybe there's a tougher
fight coming after that. And that's bad enough, but in games with the mechanics for it, you're always getting over encumbered, slowing your movement
speed down to a crawl until you sell something, which then you fret over
and think about way too hard only to go to the next dungeon and go through the whole
thing over and over again. And then you just get
good at playing the game without items, so it's extra irrational. You're not gonna need
any of this crap anyway. You've proven that to yourself,
but you still hoard it. Kind of like hoarding in real
life, totally irrational. Like unless you're playing a Souls game, you're never going to use all that crap for one specific reason, you're gonna die and now it's wasted. And number 14, going
the opposite direction the game tells you to. There's a healthy sense of exploration, and then there's this. Every single time a game
tells you to go somewhere or to do something, well
you'll go there eventually, but not before doing the opposite. Thing is, games just taught
us to think like this. The non-critical path is
usually where all the treasures and collectibles are, so that's
where I'm gonna go first. I fully expect the path to close up for me when I go to the correct way. So I'm gonna test the wrong way first. But depending on the game, this compulsion can really
bite you in the ass, like take Elden Ring. The game wants you to
go to the big castle, but what if I go in
the opposite direction? Oh, hey, I instantly get killed
in this miserable red swamp. It's the same reason we
go left at the beginning of the level when we're
playing a side-scrolling game. It's not crazy when so many games love to hide secrets this way. It's only rational to want
to explore everything, especially if you're a secret hunter. And number 13, shooting lights to see if they actually go out. More of a holdover from
the early days of 3D, where lighting tricks were
maybe a little more rare, and if this happened, it
was kind of impressive. But still, there's kind
of a certain compulsion to see what happens if you
shoot a light bulb in a game. If it goes out, hey, that's pretty cool. Or even better, if it makes
the light swing around, you get some cool realtime
shadows, that's awesome too. Like I said, it's kind of a
holdover from a different era where this was cutting edge,
like Splinter Cell or Fear, where lighting tech was a pretty new and awesome thing to behold. You'd think this sort of tech
would kind of be standard by now, but it actually isn't. So it's still a little bit up in the air whether shooting a light
will actually break it. (gun firing) And number 12, if there's
water, I will swim in it. So many games give you
the ability to swim, but so few games have any
real reason for the water. Doesn't stop us though. If you're exploring a cave and
find some water to jump into, yeah, I'm checking it out. Maybe there's some secret treasure. Nine times out of 10,
there's literally nothing, but if you find something, if something rewards that
little impulse at some point, that means it's always possible. And thing is, swimming
in most games sucks. It's slow, it's hard to see. You're just as likely to drown as do anything other than drown, but if there's a tiny
chance of finding something, you know I'm gonna do it. Unless you're talking about like GTA V or one of the Just Cause
games, you're just a lunatic if you want to swim in those games. There's no reason. Like, if you're one of
the people that does that, I know for a fact your favorite
part in The Dark Knight is when the Joker lights
the money on fire. You're one of those just wants
to see the world burn types. And number 11, if there's
lava, I'm gonna stand in it. Lava's really just glowing
orange water, right? Well, at least it is video games. I don't know, I'm not gonna
stand on any real lava, but just like with water,
how dangerous it is varies pretty wildly from game to game. Sometimes it's kinda
like a slightly warm pool of orange soda, and in
others it's instant death. Oh, yeah, and basically
everything in between could possibly happen. Some games like to get cute
and hide stuff in the lava. So of course you're gonna wanna check it. It's about a 50/50 chance it's
instant death or not though, because you have to know. What if there's a relic or
something that you need in there? The worst games are cruel
enough to hide an item that makes you resistant
to lava in the lava. So if it kills you in seconds, that thought is always in
the back of your brain. Better check, I need to know for sure. We're not even gonna talk about
the Joker burning the money. You're burning yourself here. Pointless either way. I don't know why game devs make
it so you can walk on lava. Like if you can, like, I figure they just wanna watch us suffer, 'cause if you can, you're going to no matter how pointless
and frustrating it is. And number 10 is obsessively
clearing out dungeons. We've all been there. You go through a random Skyrim dungeon, reach the end and go back through it just to check out every single room that you didn't check out. Most of the time, just a waste of time, but then there's that one time you missed something really good. It's just sitting out in the open. So of course you gotta go
through the whole dungeon again just to make sure you didn't,
and then maybe do it again. Maybe you missed something that time too. In games like Skyrim or
Fallout, they're just as likely to have some special piece of equipment sitting out in the open as they are to be locked behind a big obvious chest, and it could be easy to
miss stuff like that. So there's an incentive to double or even triple-check a dungeon. And obviously those aren't the only games where it's easy to miss things, but they're definitely the
ones where I find myself retracing the steps most,
because usually I find something. There's a fine line, though,
between careful exploration and OCD perfectionism, and it's a line I've
crossed multiple times. They encourage it, they
want me to do it, so eh. And number nine is
obsessive closet checking. Like a child after waking
up from a nightmare, have to check everything,
make sure there's nothing, you know, sort of residually
left over from the old dream. The closet checking is actually
a lot like the obsession of dungeon exploring,
but there's no dungeon. You're just, you know, in a
place where there's closets, like in Shenmue where you're
opening every drawer, closet, shutter in the vain hope
there's something to find. Or just like, you know,
any other RPG player who clicks every door, trashcan, bush, see if there's a potion or whatever. It's all the same. The endorphin rush when
you actually find something is enough to justify all the wasted time. I mean, who's saying no
to free stuff? I'm not. Even if it's mostly worthless, there's gonna be times
where it's really worth it to check out the whole town, and by that, I mean every
single square inch of it. And although it might look
funny to ransack people's houses and rummage through garbage,
there's times when it pays off. And number eight is hoarding ammo. You know, there's the constant reloader, the type who always has to reload the clip after just a few shots just to be careful, but then there's the flip side
of that, the ammo hoarder. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. In games where it's just
easy to max out ammo, where you can find a pickup
instead just passing by it because you're already full. Instead you fire a couple shots, reload your gun and then walk
all over the pickup again just so you actually collect the ammo. If you don't need it,
there's literally no reason to pick it up. In fact, you're probably
just making stuff harder for yourself if it's a
game of backtracking. You might come back here and that ammo might be a
little more helpful then, but you just can't help yourself. There's ammo to be picked
up, so you're picking it up whether it makes sense to or not. And number seven, the no-health guy. This is for all those people
that got the in-water ending in Silent Hill 2, you know
what I'm talking about. Your health is in the red, just one hit's probably gonna kill you, you got plenty of healing
items, but instead, you don't heal. There's a slight, little tiny chance that the next hit won't
kill you so you don't heal, and then the next hit
comes and it kills you. So do you learn a lesson? Maybe play a little more cautiously? No. Why would I do that? Some people do it 'cause
they're health hoarders, others because they can't
accept the shame of healing because it's absolutely necessary. I mean, they never get hit anywhere else. Why should I heal here? And the earlier Resident
Evil games are especially bad about this 'cause they
give this kind of player an easy excuse not to heal. Instead of a traditional
health bar, those games just tell you if you're healthy
or injured or almost dead. It's super vague and
you can kind of read it however you want. For the no-health guy, flashing red lights and warning sounds,
nothing to worry about. Sure you die more often than you need to, but at least you save one
of your 10 extra green herbs for a real emergency, right? And number six is focusing on the mini-map more than the actual game, duh. They put the damn thing in the game, so obviously I'm supposed to look at it but they also put, you know,
everything else in the game, so I'm supposed to look at that too. Still that thing dominates my attention. Like, with people who
struggle with multitasking or are inclined to hyper-focus, that minim-map is a black
hole for your eyeballs. Remember in the old GTA games, the only way to really know
what direction you were going in was to look at these things. After 20 hours with the game, you'd think you'd get a decent
sense of direction, but no, still using that map most of the time. Looking down at that thing
always causes problems too. Like expect collisions,
car collisions in GTA, horse collisions in Red Dead. Remember Far Cry 2, the game
where you have a physical map that tells you where to
go while you're driving? You're literally holding a map
over your face while driving. No wonder everybody shoots you on sight. You're a case of vehicular manslaughter just waiting to happen. And number five is unnecessary grinding. Play enough RPGs, you're
gonna do this eventually. There's gonna be a boss that burns you. You can't beat it, you
should have grinded. You're locked in the arena,
it doesn't let you leave. That's where the auto save happened and you didn't do a regular save, so you're stuck there
basically losing endlessly or restarting the game. From that point forward,
that player will grind in every single game for no reason. Doesn't matter how easy the game is. If there's levels, you're grinding them. You're gonna hit max level
while everything else is in its teens and you're
just gonna dominate the game. There's no reason for it, other than maybe that bad
experience that one time, but at the end of the day,
it's just a waste of time. I mean, there's also a decent argument that it's a good way
to let some stress out, listen to a podcast or
watch YouTube videos, and grinding can be pretty fun, but there's a lot of games
where it's not necessary. And number four is mashing
buttons to move faster. Rockstar pretty much is
solely responsible for this. They're the only one's
twisted enough to make it so you have to mash the
A button to move faster, rather than just doing
what every other game does and make it so there's a run button, or even better, a walk button. But you've played through
enough rockstar games, or you know, just played
through one of 'em even. It can be a tough habit to break. After a while, you just mash to go faster, through cut scenes, through dialogue, going from place to place,
you're just mashing. - She's mashing it. - [Falcon] It's almost
never actually quicker, but if it works in Red Dead,
then why doesn't it work here? Even in those games it can be painful, because you really don't
have to tap a little bit to reach full spit in Red Dead, but I mean, who doesn't just
mash it like crazy anyway? I know I do. It's pointless, but I wanna
keep that max speed up. And number three, refusing
to give up on your favorites. I know I'm not the only one who holds on to otherwise useless
equipment for too long, just 'cause it's something I like. In RPGs, that means wearing inferior gear just 'cause I like how it looks, or using a weak weapon
because I prefer the moveset. It even extends to games like Halo, where you only have a two-weapon limit. In fact, I'm gonna say,
especially with those games. In Halo and derivative
games with a weapon limit, I might run outta ammo for,
like, let's say, the machine gun and I probably should have
dumped it, but I held onto it. It ended up being mostly
just a worthless slot for the rest of the mission, but they'll drop some
ammo at some point, right? And they do a cruel thing
in the Uncharted games where they give you a special
weapon from time to time. One that you use up and discard, but they're so good, I
wanna hold on to 'em. But now I'm just kind of walking around with a mini gun that I can't use. Yeah, I know, but I like it. And number two is doing
all the side missions and quests before doing the story. I don't know if it's
a form of OCD or what, but sometimes our brains
really want us to fully reveal the map, find all the treasures,
clear all the bandit camps, and that takes priority over other things, especially in open world games. Your instinct isn't to progress a story, but just do everything. Like in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, I basically had conquered the Caribbean before becoming an assassin. Any Bethesda game is rife
with this sort of thing too. Most of the fun in these games is just wandering around
doing side quests. So for a lot of players, just save the entire quest line for last. The second they step outta the
vault, it's time to explore. Finding my dad, finding
my son, finding Sean, whatever, who cares? There's an empty building over there. Better check it out. And number one is falling asleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a late night. Been a long day. You sit down with a chill
game to take it easy. You think, ah, I'll just, you
know, play a bit before bed, and oops, you're asleep on
the couch after 15 minutes. This is the type of gamer
who has 100 hours plus clocked in every single game. Not necessarily 'cause you're dedicated, but because you keep falling asleep. So if you're the type that this happens when you get comfy gaming, pretty much any dialogue-heavy game or something relatively
chill, you're gonna be out. And if you're falling asleep
during the opening of, like, God of War III or something, maybe you've got a bit of a problem. I would maybe go into the doctor and say, "Could you check me for narcolepsy?" But it's something that
happens every once in a while for everybody. Like, when I'm playing a game,
I don't wanna fall asleep, I wanna play the game, but
there's not enough time in the day sometimes and
I'd rather play games than do dumb stuff like
get a good night's rest. Come on now. That's all for today. Leave us a comment, let
us know what you think. If you like this video, click like. If you're not subscribed,
now's a great time to do so. We upload brand new videos
every day of the week. Best way to see them first
is, of course, a subscription, so click subscribe. Don't forget to enable notifications. And as always, we thank you very much for watching this video. I'm Falcon, you can follow
me on Twitter @FalconTheHero. We'll see you next time
right here on Gameranx.
