Most video game characters have understandable weaknesses. Bullets kill you. Lava burns you. When a Hunter comes flying at you with its claws extended and it connects with your neck your head goes flying across the rooms exactly as heads shouldn't. We get that.
Then again, some games pick some very arbitrary kryptonites to inflict on their people. It can be tough to toe the line between believability and just making sure that a character advances the story or level as the designers intended, but damn some of this comes out of left field.
We gave the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword very high marks when it debuted for really upping the ante on the Zelda game playing experience. Sure, Nintendo took the opportunity to make most of the opening play more like Pilotwings than a hack and slash adventure, but hey, Pilotwings is cool.
What's not cool is the whole new shield dynamic they built in. In a ridiculous quest for realism your shield deteriorates with each hit, and eventually breaks unless taken to a repair shop. Sure, you can buy more resilient shields over the course of the game, but all of them can still be broken except the Hylian Shield available only through a grueling sidequest.
The dumbest part? It's totally inaccurate historically. Most basic wooden shields were perfectly durable, which is why they were still used until the 15th century in Europe. The only reason that the practice stopped was because knights began to favor small bucklers over standard shields, and since they were smaller they could be made of metal and not weigh as much.
We got into the original Portal from Portal 2, so we were pretty well prepared for how the game thought and how it wanted the puzzles solved. We only needed to look up an FAQ once, and the reason is because that particular puzzle is really stupid.
Basically, you have to progress through an airvent, and if you jump you can see into the air vent. However, you apparently can't reach it even though any reasonable human being, let alone one of Chell's obvious physical skill, could simply hoist themselves in and move along.
Instead, the game forces you into a very convoluted puzzle that necessitates getting a rocket turret to shoot you through a portal, dodging and having the rocket hit a companion cube delivery chute. Then you carry the cube to the air vent and step up.
Look, if you wanted to play the fun rocket game, why not just make it so the rocket destroyed a glass barrier or something? All that did was make Chell look too weak to do a single pull-up.
