#9. Fishing With Big [Sonic Adventure]
To truly complete Sonic Adventure, you have to go fishing with Big the Cat. This lummox travels to different watering holes with his fishing line, and must throw the bobber to (eventually) catch his swimming tadpole buddy. Anyone with a Dreamcast suffered through an entire campaign of fishing mini-games, and I don’t even know how to explain the existential ennui I feel while trying to complete these stages.
Once upon a time, fishing mini-games were an impressive feat of engineering. But by the time Sonic Adventure rolled around, they were just boring curios to attach to your game. And there’s nothing fun about Big’s fishing adventures. The best part of the campaign is that you can eventually unlock an upgrade so Big can swim directly to Froggy, making the entire exercise so trivial, I wonder why we were forced to do it at all.
#10. The Big Race [Mafia]
Here’s hoping the upcoming Mafia reboot fixes one of the major missteps in the original game. During a set of missions for the mafia (naturally), you’ll have to join a race and win. The problem is, this game is set a very long time ago, when race cars weren’t the amazing performance machines they are today. You can barely control the thing, and one wrong move will send you careening out of control, knocking off a wheel and immediately ending any chance to win.
It doesn’t help that the race is pretty difficult, so you’ve got bad controls, almost-perfect AI, and you stuck in the middle. This mission is a giant roadblock (no pun intended) for so many players. Even if it isn’t really a mini-game, just an extension of the gameplay we’ve already had. I’m just crossing my fingers for a massive improvement in the reboot. Here’s hoping.
And that’s all the biggest mini-game offenders. What are you favorite (and least favorite) mini-games? It’s something I think about literally every day.
