Top 10 Worst Side Activities

Everyone has come across a side activity in a game that they find infuriating. Whether they're out of place, overly long, or just poorly made, engaging with them feels more like a chore than a game. These are the 10 worst side activities, excluding "collectathon" style diversions, Game Informer's editors and interns have had the displeasure of engaging with.

Collecting the Celestial Weapons – Final Fantasy X HD

When Final Fantasy X launched in 2001, gathering the gang’s most powerful weapons was gated by two of the worst side activities ever devised. The chocobo race was broken, originally requiring players to earn a negative total time to unlock a piece of Tidus’ celestial weapon. Dodging lightning to earn a piece of Lulu’s wasn’t much more fun, requiring a grueling feat of endurance that was easily ruined by the slightest lapse in concentration.

While Square Enix corrected the negative time glitch from the chocobo race in the HD version, they didn’t fix its controls or make the lightning dodging any shorter or easier. To make matters worse, Final Fantasy X HD adds the Dark Aeons of the international version as gates to getting most of the remaining weapons. The Dark Aeons are a cool idea, but they require a hearty helping of grinding and sphere grid manipulation to get past. Ultimately, getting to the best weapons in Final Fantasy X HD feels more like being bashed in the head with a brick than any sort of welcome challenge. 

Non-Social Link Side Quests – Persona 3 and 4

The side quests from the two most recent main entries in Atlus’ excellent JRPG series aren’t necessarily bad. The busywork isn’t anything that hasn’t appeared in scores of other RPGs, and the excellent social links are technically side content. However, the real rub with the more uninspired quests from Persona 3 and 4 is that they’re a woefully mediocre and lazy addition to an otherwise excellent pair of games.

The series does such a great job of character-building through the social links that getting handed a quest to go kill more enemies or collect items is borderline insulting; even unlocking new gear can’t make the fetch quests feel worthwhile. Taking part in them without careful planning can also cause players to miss parts of the game that are more worth engaging in. To top it all off, the game is plenty long enough without them, meaning they’re mostly just a bunch of useless padding.

Planet Scanning – Mass Effect 2

A lot of people may have hated the Makko, but at least the space-tank had some imagination and a good idea behind it. There’s no good idea or imagination to be found in scanning planets in Mass Effect 2. Even when scanning a planet spits out a side-mission, it still only comes after a minute or two of staring at a neon grid and waiting for the controller to rumble.

BioWare eventually released a patch to make the scanning reticule bigger and the planets turn faster, but even a faster scan doesn’t change that it’s still a required part of not getting everyone killed at the end of the game. Apparently the price to pay for bringing everyone home alive is unadulterated boredom. 

Created Player Skill Drills – NBA 2K

There was a time when I was fascinated by the create-a-player modes in sports games. Unfortunately, when I finally gave the NBA 2K series a shot, I was left a little surprised at just how bad the skill drills for my prospect were.

It isn’t for a lack of variety that the 2K series’ self-improvement options feel flat, but rather from a lack of usefulness. There’s just no reason to play anything but the easiest one, which means running through cones and dunking a ball over and over. It’s not a problem exclusive to NBA 2K, but at least Madden attempted to overhaul its drills in Madden 15 via The Gauntlet. 2K, on the other hand, seems content to let players dodge cones for the foreseeable future.

Nightlife – Most Games It Appears In

Are you a fan of creepy lap dances from polygonal people? How about playing a bad rhythm game while listening to underwhelming club music, or maybe even just watching your character dance in an endless loop? Do you enjoy seeing a character at a virtual bar hammer home drinks until the screen gets blurry for a few seconds?

The answer to all those questions is probably no, and that’s because nightlife-based side activities in games are almost universally terrible. From Mass Effect to Grand Theft Auto, the strip clubs and bars of virtual worlds just seem more like creepy sideshows than meaningful world-building or commentary – especially when they aren’t the centerpiece for whatever mission happens to tear through them. 

Earning Money – Fable Series

Instead of constantly doing quests and finding loot, the Fable games force players to hang out in town and earn enough gold to buy property or fill the royal coffers. At some point the bank fills and it’s reasonable to just walk away and do things, but a fair portion of the time before that is spent playing a lute on the street or hammering away at swords. The boring, recycled mini-game design and slow rate of income is so outstandingly annoying that many players started messing with the time and date settings of their consoles just to get it out of the way. 

Rifts – Saints Row IV

From its hilarious takes on how people actually behave in virtual worlds to its tongue-in-cheek commentary on video games’ approach to sexuality, Saints Row IV has plenty to enjoy. The rifts, however, are one of the few elements that seem downright antagonistic to what the game was trying to achieve. 

Lacking any type of self-awareness or creative commentary, the rifts just feel out of place in a game that prides itself on poking fun at other games. Even if they’re focusing on super powers, there’s nothing fun or funny about playing the same bland mini-games over and over. They’re a punchline that never actually gets attached to a joke. It’s like a friend who works at a different studio left a checklist of features for their game at Volition, and the Saints Row team accidentally used them.

Den Defense – Assassin’s Creed Revelations

Den Defense is terrible for many reasons, but its biggest sin is anchoring players to the top of a building and forcing them to watch NPCs march to their deaths. Its basic premise also doesn’t fit with the idea of what the Assassins are. Even at such a late point in Ezio’s storyline, the Assassins and the Templars are far from engaging in open conflict in the streets of a crowded city; yet, that’s exactly what Den Defense suggests they are doing. In the context of where the series was at the time, Den Defense’s lack of quality seems like the least offensive part of the problem it creates. 

Cash Run – Watch Dogs

Cash Run looks like something you’d see in a movie or TV show that is desperately trying to appeal to the demographic that associates coins and floating, spinning things with video games. Watch Dogs also isn’t a game about climbing around, and its context-sensitive parkour controls make being accurate – the entire point of the Cash Run game – rather difficult. In a game where one of the side activities involves blowing things up with a giant robot spider, Cash Run is painfully bland.

Hacking Computers – Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

In Black Flag anyone who plans on finding out what happened to the first civilization, or snagging more than just hints at what’s going on in the real world following Desmond’s death, has to transform into the worst officemate around. Luckily everyone in the highly advanced Abstergo offices protects their computers with mind-numbing mini-games based on spinning a globe, playing a bad version of Frogger, and arbitrarily selecting numbers to make a line wiggle. They got the naval combat in Black Flag so right; they probably should have just made you pilot a ship to hack the computers instead.

Go your own list of worst side activities? Leave it down in the comments below.