Hot Heart

I like it. I don't often run up against this kind of thing, but I hated it in GTA: San Andreas because it gave me the same play system as GTA3 and GTA:VC, yet even though I had all my skills from those, it artificially sabotaged me until I did enough grinding to get up to par again.

I think a lot of your later examples also show cases where the "infrastructure" of the game starts to show too much and starts to get in the way of gameplay.

Thanks, guys! And, yeah, that's a good example actually, fuchikoma. Completely forgot about it in that game. I think the territory thing being part of one of the later missions earned it the most ire from me.

Good stuff.