Or obey traffic laws. I'll always steal a really nice car only to have it rear-ended on a downhill stoplight.

That's when I get out of my car and shoot the driver through their windshield. :gun:

Invisible walls and not being able to jump. Bonus points if its an object blocking my path that I could easily jump over, but cannot. Why does this wooden fence stop me? It's barely higher than my torso. Let me crawl under it then. I COULD AVOID THIS WHOLE AREA IF I COULD JUST GET PAST THIS ONE STUPID FENCE. Bad level design...

This is the littlest, but most annoying thing ever. I loathe it.

RPGs that send hordes and hordes and HORDES of enemies after you constantly as a means of padding the game.

Arcania: Gothic 4 was an egregious abuser of this, I finally got so fed up with having to fight ten goblins, five wolves, seven berserking Orcs and three Sand worms at once that I finally stopped playing it al-together.

The original Two Worlds did this, as did Risen, Fable 2, and now more recently Dragon Age II, in fact DA 2 is almost as bad as Arcania in respects what with enemies CONSTANTLY spawning out of thin air to blindside you without even knowing it.

I hate this cheap tactic because it forces you to NOT use tactics, the ONLY thing you can do most of the time is run around in circles occasionally looking behind you to throw a fireball. I believe in WoW terms this is called Kiting. which I did a disgusting amount of in Arcania.

generally games that force you to do stupid, arbitrary tasks or put you on a time limit, I HATE time limits. They're incredibly unforgiving most of the time and, like the hordes method, serve mostly to pad the game with the amount of times you inevitably fail.

Grinding in RPGs. I can't stand it. Some RPGs do it well, like Nocturne, while others don't, like Digital Devil Saga, Dragon Quest, Star Ocean, etc. I hate fighting the same enemies over and over and over and over again to gain levels or acquire difficult loot, especially if said levels and/or loot are essential to a pleasant gaming experience (Which is extremely ironic because the grinding isn't pleasant in the slightest. Way to ruin the point of that).

Puzzles that require nothing but repetition to solve. No complex thinking, no devious tricks, just trial and error for upwards of an hour. If you can't design a decent puzzle, don't put the [censored] thing in the game.

The lack of a feature in a game to save at any time or place that I want. Seriously, why is this such a rare thing? Why are checkpoints and save points so [censored] common? Being able to save on my own won't make the game easier, it'll make it less stressful to play (More FUN). Go take your "it provides more challenge" BS and shove it where the sun don't shine.

Level scaling. When done correctly (Final Fantasy 8. Yes, even though I claim to hate that game so much, I really like how it handled level scaling), it keeps the enemies from becoming dull, but never vastly overpowers them. When done horribly wrong (Oblivion), it makes me dread gaining levels.

Boring dungeons. I'm looking at YOU, Star Ocean 3. When crafting a successful dungeon, remember to do more than just carve in a [censored] tunnel and give it poor lighting. [censored]s. Same goes for any other developer that's lazy enough to do this.

Quick Time Events. Stop abusing them. It's the middle of 2011, you'd think game developers would be competent enough to put in context sensitive actions within the gameplay itself and not make me play a stupid minigame. Get creative with our controllers, don't wuss out and decide to turn half of the game into a batch of cutscenes.

"Hard" difficulty settings being nothing more than "Enemy attacks hurt more and yours hurt less". Or worse yet, "Enemies have extreme amounts of health, their attacks hurt more, AND you hurt them less." You know what game got difficulty right? Ninja Gaiden. Higher difficulties meant different enemies. Not just palette swaps, but actual difficulty-specific enemies that had better AI and stronger moves. Learn from Ninja Gaiden.

Games whose unlockables are "cutscene viewer" and artwork. Worse yet, sometimes I have to put in a ton of effort to get them. Dude. Those should be available after game completion on any difficulty setting. Give me unlockables worth working for. Which leads me to another thing I hate...

DLC. 'Nuff said.

The way fighting games are usually designed. Tekken, Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Blazblu..these are not "fighting" games to me. They are tests of gamepad skill. If the person I'm fighting can perform that ten input-long,
carpal tunnel-inducing combination and I can't, I [censored] lose. I could know every single minute detail of a fighting game's system and know which characters are in which tiers, which moves beat others, etc., and I'd still lose because I cannot perform miracles with a gamepad like other people can. It's a huge disadvantage and it pisses me off. And before someone tells me to practice, I have. Street Fighter, a relatively simple example of this type of fighting game, had my hands trembling in pain after an hour of "practice". Bah.

Backtracking.

Stealth games with extremely good AI. I think in order to make a good stealth game, the AI has to be somewhat oblivious. Not completely stupid, mind you, but if the AI in a stealth game is as alert (if not moreso) as a human being in reality, that generates constant quickloads and frustration. This is why MGS games drive me crazy. Trying to "ghost" them is torture beyond the likes of which I can handle.

Generally savepoints are used to keep the save file size from getting too big and to cut down on the amount of coding needed. It's a lot easier if a programmer can put the player in a closed off area away from stuff that tends to move around, get killed, fire weapons, etc.. so they don't have to keep up with it. Then when the player moves away from the save area the new map loads, stuff is at their default positions and the player hardly notices. This is less of an issue for modern games but if the type of game you're playing doesn't absolutely need a save-anywhere feature many programmers are going to say "why bother?".

Edit: Of course there's a few games where this isn't really an issue and they do it just to "add challenge" as you say.

Let's see:

Inability to climb over http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InsurmountableWaistHeightFence.

Sneaking segments where if you get caught, you're automatically sent back to either an easily escaped cell or simply outside. While it is true that I do everything in my power in most cases to avoid killing the guards, I much prefer to be given the choice to do so instead of obligatory surrendering. Especially when you've killed far worse things than a few guardsmen.

When you can never look as cool as the Villain's henchmen aside from the "disguise stage". It drove me so crazy that I couldn't look like a Sith Trooper or fully armored Mandalorian in the KotOR games I actually did some light modding to allow it. And it's much worse in JRPGs.

End-game armors that leave large portions of the body exposed. At its best you're expected to wear something underneath it, like Daedric pauldrons and greaves in Morrowind. At its worse (and most common form), it's just fanservice. Which brings us to my next gaming pet peeve...

sixual fanservice. My idea of service for fans is Easter Eggs and ascended memes from the fan community. Like Fishy Sticks and M'aiq the Liar.

Save points.

Inability to save more than one game for any one single-player character.

Complete or near-complete inability to recover from recoil between attacks (Getting punched in Morrowind or getting attacked by wolves or mummies in Gothic 3).

Whenever http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards. A few levels of being weaker at the start does not constitute balance.

Whenever http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KatanasAreJustBetter.

Too much http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkerAndEdgier (unless that's the point of the franchise in question).

Undead that paralyze you. Especially if there's no way to avoid or prevent it when fighting them.

Anything heavily based or dependent on either luck or trial and error.

Edit: Here are some more.

Blatant political messages in games. Vague philosophical messages, on the other hand, are acceptable.

The knowledge that the save game batteries of old cartridge video games will die, if they haven't already. Especially games that never got remakes.

Online-bought content that's no longer available. It's so depressing that I can't buy premium modules for Neverwinter Nights. If you're going to cut off content only available as buyable DLC, at least have the decency to release it as free DLC for the masses that never got the opportunity to buy it.

Bugs not being fixed
PC ports being shafted with bugs, unoptimized, and a lot of times not allowed to have expansions or add-ons
Requiring pure luck at certain areas
Enemies that refuse to die and take an ass long time to kill
tedious gameplay
Everything Crimson Paladin just said. And to iterate, nothing infuriates me more than a katana being more powerful than the blast from the Death Star + multiple exterminatus + The Warp
more to come.

And that's something that really impressed me when I first played the Elder Scrolls, I had always found it odd that in some games a monster that clearly carries no weapon would end up dropping some high quality weapon (Where were they even carrying them? It's probably best not to know), or an armed enemy would drop no weapon or a different one from what he was carrying, I was quite pleased to see in Morrowind that not only did enemies drop loot that made sense for them (A creature that can't use armor and weapons wouldn't drop these things, for example.) but I could actually loot every item I see people using, not just their weapons, but armor as well, something that is rare even in games where the loot does make sense for enemies.

Anyway, as for some things that annoy me, I agree with the save point thing, it could be justified in older console games due to memory restrictions, but for modern PC games, there's no excuse, and for Xbox 360 and PS3 games too, I'd say, since they can clearly handle games that avoid this horrible idea, being forced to fight a boss you already defeated because the game did not have a save point right after the boss and you got killed by a weak enemy does NOT make the game more fun, and being forced to watch through an unskippable cutscene introducing a boss multiple times because you kept dying against that boss does not either.

Also, developers intentionally leaving out content to market it as DLC (Any day one DLC I automatically assume is this, because if you could have it ready to release on the first day of release, then I see no reason why it couldn't be in the game from the start.) also, DLC that adds only a suit of armor or some otherwise minor item, if you expect us to pay extra for additional content for the game, THEN GIVE US SOMETHING WORTH PAYING FOR! I'm not forking out money so I can give my horse armor when I can't fight on my horse anyway.

Single player games which require Steam, or other such disservices that should not be necessary, on the PC.

Any form of overly oppressive DRM, whether it's forcing me to always have an active internet connection to play my single player game or limiting how many times I can install the game I paid money for. I certainly don't mind developers trying to protect their games from being copied illegally, even if it doesn't work in the end, but I draw a line once they DRM causes more problems for paying customers than for the pirates it's supposed to stop.

Enemies that are not fun to fight, not challenging, and in no way rewarding, and instead seem to exist purely for the purpose of annoying the player (Cliffracers come to mind.) Games are supposed to be entertainment, not a test of patience, if you can't think of a way to make a fight fun, then maybe you should consider if you really need to have a fight in at all.

Escort missions, in particular escort missions in which the target I'm supposed to protect is weak, has terrible AI, and runs head first into enemies without any concern for his own safety. If you must have an escort mission in the game, at least have the character you're supposed to escort make an effort to stay alive.

"Unique" items in RPGs that are completely identical in appearance to their generic counterparts, Fallout 3 was a rather serious offender, and the fact that this was changed in New Vegas was, I felt, a small but very welcome improvement. Maybe it's just me but if you want to claim a weapon is actually "unique", I feel it should have something visually distinguishing it from similar weapons, even if it's just a different texture, of course, the function of the weapon is important too, but even if it's stats are completely different from other weapons, if it still looks the same, it still doesn't really feel like a different weapon.

There's a few things that always bother me, I'm sure I could name more, but those are the ones I've thought of now.

The main thing that angers me in games, is when I can't jump, especially in MMOs or any third/first person game really. I'm also not fond of games where I have little or no control over camera movement, fixed cameras really frustrate me.

The thing I hate the most in games is - Increasing the difficulty level should make the AI more intelligent, dodging, hiding, finding cover etc. All it does is make them take more hits to kill and you less.

Games that are supposed to have stealth but the AI knows "exactly" where you are, even though you are two miles away in deep grass and haven't moved a muscle for the last half an hour.

Long dungeons with no save points even remotely close to the boss at the end.

Unskippable cutscenes. Why was this not a concern from the very start? Surely someone stopped and thought "There's 10 minutes of dialogue before this tough boss fight, maybe we should let 'em skip it in case they have to replay it." Then they thought "No way, and let's remove that save point for good measure."

Text-scrolling sound effects. Yes, I'm looking at you Yakuza 3. You're a 40+ hour game that in addition to having no English voice track, also conveys 90% of your dialogue in speechless scenes that are advanced manually. Why must I suffer through a typewriter-esque sound for each and every letter that scrolls? You're lucky I could hit the X button again to have the entire text show up all at once.

Navi.

I get annoyed by Depth of Field and Motion Blur. Seriously, I'm not playing a camera, and I sure wouldn't want to play an outdated one that blurs so heavily if I would.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a match!

My PC easily exceeds the recommended PC requirements for SR2, but no matter what settings I use, I always get stuttering while driving cars. GTA 4 runs and looks way better, and I thought that was a bad PC port already.

Not even a gameplay thing:
Games that don't launch at my desktop resolution after installing
Inability to turn of autosaving

I have to agree on that, cutscenes can be cool the first time you watch them, but that doesn't mean I'll want to see them over and over again, and I really can't see letting you press a button to skip the cutscene being that hard to do, nor does forcing players to watch cutscenes when they don't want to add anything to the game, so why not just let us skip them if we so choose? I mean, maybe the developers are proud of the work they did on the cutscenes and want to make sure no one misses them, but that's not reason enough to not let us skip them.

Oblivion-being attacked by giant rats

Horror survival games make me want to cry, but when you have a time trial, that's even worse. Another thing is repetitive and tedious combat controls or gamplay, it's just boring doing the same thing over and over.

Oh yeah, this. Such a simple problem for developers to avoid too.

Time limits
Bonus objectives (Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood)
When you have no reason to buy anything from stores but can simply find everything you need in the wilderness.
Race missions.
Slow menus (AC:B had load times for opening the map)
Annoying or repetitive player sound effects.
YOU always have to do everything.
Long loadtimes. (one of the main reasons I never finished ME2)
The generic "military" male voice that seem to be in every game.

Tutorials that act like you have never even touched a video game before. I can understand if it's for a very casual game, or one aimed at children, but I really doubt it's necessary for a game like World in Conflict which really annoyed me. I just wanted to learn some of the mechanics that set it apart from other strategy games. But it was literally so bad that the camera movement controls (WASD) were divided into separate segments for each individual key.

Also, games that stream/load stuff ingame so you first see really blurry low-res textures gradually replaced by high-res ones. Pretty immersion-breaking. UE3, I'm looking at you.

In multi-player games, cheats and jerks. That is why I don't play them anymore. MW2> too much the same as MW which was my last besides COD5.

When there's no jump feature :brokencomputer:

Console games ported to PC that were never really meant for PC users. Especially the controls... I love to use a keyboard and mouse, but despise the controller (eventhough I can use one on my computer), so why are the controls still set up for controllers?!?!

I'm thinking Mafia II here because I'm playing the game now (Mafia I was originally a PC game, and it shows). I don't like to see my player turn around on his feet because I want him to walk backward, or face right because I want to slide right... I always get confused when the player is facing me, so I press "w" to walk forward just to see him make a 180 degree turn... I never liked console just for the controllers.

A keyboard has how many keys? Why can't I have thousands of shortcuts then? It's so much quicker to use a keyboard then a mouse in menus... As time pass, I can see keyboard shortcut being forgotten so often, it's scary.

(This is not a complain about console users, just my personal dislike of consoles.)

p.s. Skipping cutscenes is crucial.