Bad Idea - Limited flashlight batteries

Question: What do Gordon Freeman, the protagonist from FEAR, and Master Chief circa Halo 1 all have in common?

Answer: Despite being equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and armour, they're all hampered in their efforts to save the world by being given flashlights powered by the quality of batteries that you'd expect in the remote control for a cheap DVD player. You know, the sort that has a fake power meter on them.

I'll never understand this design decision in a game. It doesn't add any tension, it's just annoying. You've obviously decided at some point to make a level in your game that's so bloody dark that no-one can see where they're going. Fine, you're already probably an idiot, but whatever, maybe it genuinely does add to the atmosphere of the game (like in Condemned). So the player needs a flashlight to navigate. But there's the thing, when their flashlight runs out, players aren't going to barrel on in the dark (because they might miss something, or get lost), they're going to stand still until the blasted thing recharges.

Thankfully rubbish batteries seem to be doing the way of the instant death trap in games, even HL2:Episode 2 increased your battery's lasting power considerably (though with no real explanation in-game, which is a bit odd for Valve, maybe they just wanted to gloss over their previous mistakes without drawing attention to them), and ever since Halo 2 Master Chief has had as much battery life as he needed.

Bad idea - Army of Two's limited ammo

Army of Two features the same design decision that I really disliked in Criterion's Black. In a game that's all about how great it is to shoot the everloving fuck out of everything (and in AoT's case making it an important gameplay element when you're trying to get aggro from your partner), which bother having limited ammo?

I can understand having a limited clip to force the player to stop shooting and reload, but running out of ammo just makes you start running around to find some more, or switch to your secondary, less exciting, weapon. It's forcing you in to doing less exciting action in the middle of a firefight.

Bad idea - PGR4's horizontal menus

It's nice when a company spends a lot of time and effort on their game's presentation. It often leads to menu systems that look great, are a little bit different, and are very functional as well.

But PGR4's menus have made a bit of a blunder. Every option is listed horizontally, meaning that typically only 2 or 3 options are visible to you at once. This means that you can't see what all of the options in any given menu are without scrolling through them first, and if you're on the middle option you can't tell if you should scroll left or right to get to the option you want.

Please, no more horizontal menus. It was tried and ... it didn't work.

Bad idea - Overlord's repeating dialogue

I sometimes feel sorry for the guys who write dialogue for games. Imagine crafting what you think is a perfect little one-liner - a throwaway funny comment for a towns person to make as their oppressor strolls past with his goblin army.

Then imagine playing the game and realising that your joke has been ruined in the implementation by five townspeople saying it one after the other so it sounds like some sort of fantasy land catchphrase.

I mainly feel sorry for the people who were playing it through as good overlords, at least the evil players could kill everyone.