You know what really grinds my gears?

Game designers who take really awesome games and screw them up in the middle with what I call "the forsaken quest"...

The forsaken quest will quickly destroy even the most amazing of games, causing the player to cringe in sheer anguish at the thought of loading it in their console. Only the toughest of the tough make it through, and even then not without scars that will last a lifetime.

Stumbling into the forsaken quest is a tell tale sign that the developer got a bad case of "writers block" and made an unholy sacrifice to the dark demons of gaming hell to produce the additonal needed content.

Perhaps the most classic example of the forsaken quest can be found in "Zelda: The Wind Waker". This is one of the most incredible games I have ever played... Yet it created one of the most frustrating periods of my gaming life...

I'm talking of course about collecting the 50 billion broken pieces of the Tri-Force... Not only was that quest annoying and stupid, they added insult to injury by making me PAY freaking tingle to put together my map. This quest had nothing to do with what I love about Zelda games. Instead Miyamoto got a burr up his anus that the game was too short... What to do? Instant Fix! The forsaken quest!

So why am I talking about this now? I've discovered another legendary game under the curse of the forsaken quest... The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. What's sad about this is that this game is so massive that there is absolutely no call for this.

I don't want to post spoilers, but the game kind of spells it out for you in the opening cut scene. You have to manually close pretty much every single one of the 50 billion freaking gates that open. Each gate takes 45-60 minutes to close. This wouldn't seem so bad, but playing in Oblivion feels pretty much like... Well... Hell.

I guess that's what it's supposed to be like, but honestly it get's really old after a point. Come on... Cut this stupid filler crap and let me kill the bad guy already... It's pretty bad when I consider just about every other quest in the game superior to the main quest...

Oh well... Whatever... I finished Wind Waker... I reckon I'll probably play through this too ;-)