Event-Obscuring Camera

"In third-person games, the camera is like the working class. If you can't control it, it will plot to destroy you."

— Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, Epic Mickey review

When the camera adds Fake Difficulty to a third-person view game by keeping players from seeing what's going on in-game, you have an Event-Obscuring Camera, combining elements of the Interface Screw, Static Screw, Behind the Black, and potentially Camera Screw. It has many causes:

• Choosing a camera position which is fundamentally unsuited to the style of gameplay (for example, platforming in first-person games is rarely well-received).
• Lazy or incompetent programmers and/or level builders.
• A mistaken belief that impressive visuals are more important than gameplay.
• Coding the camera to best show off your Third-Person Seductress.
• Camera controls that are bad in general.

There are also several ways to avert this, including:

• Always Over the Shoulder
• Camera Centering
• Camera Lock-On
• Fixed Camera
• Free Rotating Camera

Can happen when a franchise makes a jump from 2D to 3D. Screen Crunch is a variation of this where the camera problems are caused by a lack of screen space. See also Camera Screw, which refers to bad camera controls in general.

---

Examples:

Action Adventure

• Batman: Arkham Knight:
  • The game suffers from camera issues in the APC vehicle pursuit side missions. Whenever you start pursuing, the APC vehicle calls reinforcements, which have to be taken out because they get in the way of you and the APC. As soon as you take one out, the camera decides to slow down and focus on the crashing vehicle and doesn't reposition itself. Even if it did, considering that this is a vehicular pursuit, you want the camera always pointing either forward or at the vehicle you're following. As soon as you crash one of the reinforcement vehicles, good luck not crashing yourself. Were you lining a pacifier shot at the APC, ready to shoot right before the crash? Tough luck, you have to line up your shot again.
  • In the Cobra Tank fights (or the Cloudburst Tank battle), if you're discovered, the camera pulls back as you race away, which makes it harder to evade the enemies, as it becomes more difficult to notice where you can make turns without crashing into buildings.
• The otherwise good game Beyond Good & Evil has a terrible camera that switches from full control to fixed often and at extremely inconvenient moments, among other things. In fact, at some point the camera adds two extra difficulties: Moving the camera inside the player character's head, blocking the view and showing a rather disturbing inverted face at the same time, and making the "invert mouse axis" option change both axes together, rather than allowing you to pick one and/or the other.
• In Killer7, the camera mostly displays from the ground, giving you the best view of your chosen assassin's legs with the only camera control being a choice between looking in front of you or behind you. Otherwise, the camera will be switching back and forth between different angles unpredictably, from aerial shots to side views, to a fixed point in the corner or at far side of the room, to viewing the front of you so you must walk towards the camera, to making you walk away from the camera. Sometimes, the camera doesn't bother focusing on you at all and instead chooses to look at a poster of a bikini-clad girl — and when it decides to ogle the poster of the bikini girl, that's actually a clue to one of the game's puzzles. This is just that sort of game. And yet it's not as much of a problem as you may think, because when you pull your gun (the only time camera position matters in this game), it goes right into first-person view, no matter what it's doing otherwise.
• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver has an awful camera system which always gets stuck on the walls, and you'll often be facing a large mass of grey. You can control the camera, but just when you've got it placed correctly so you can see yourself and the ledge you're jumping to, it has a knack for returning to its (horribly inconvenient) starting location. With some dodgy controls and the lack of Edge Gravity, this becomes very annoying.
• LEGO Adaptation Games:
  • At a certain point split-screen was implemented... as was dynamic split screen, which merges the halves together when the players can be shown with just one viewpoint, and splits in half when they get far enough away. And the split can rotate as it pleases, thus causing many players to choose the Fixed Split Screen option.
  • The rushing water scene in a level based on The Temple of Doom also has the camera face the water — if the water catches up to you even once, it still lets you move on to the next part, but getting to the end gives you a Minikit piece required for 100% Completion.
  • Some levels require the character to face the direction of the camera and maneuver or attack. In other words, the character is looking toward the player. At times, you may even be shot at from off-screen.
• LEGO Dimensions has a number of locations where due to a very limited range of camera motion it's difficult to see things like pick-ups or even exits. Also, when something significant happens the camera will move to that point for a moment, causing the player to sometimes miss the opportunity to access pick-ups and, even worse, they will sometimes be attacked while the mini-cut scene plays out.
• MediEvil's camera is infuriating for two reasons, the first being that it's super slow. But the bigger issue was that if the camera touched a piece of the environment, the game wouldn't let you move it at all! This often caused cases of accidentally locking the camera the wrong way around by exploring a dead end corridor, or just spinning the camera at the wrong place at the wrong time. In certain constrained levels, like The Ant's Nest or Dan's Crypt, you often need to do a three point turn just to get the camera pointing the right way!
• In Messiah, the camera is always between you and the closest obstruction behind you, which can mean lining up for difficult jumps when all you can see is your character's backside.
• At first glance in Mirror's Edge, the camera control seems just fine; it does more or less what you tell it to, because the entire game is played from a first-person perspective. What they don't tell you is that in many cases, the height of Faith's jumps and the accuracy of her landings (especially ones where she has to grab a ledge or drainpipe) depend on where she's looking when she makes the jump. The problem with this is that if you need her to jump very high AND catch a ledge, she needs to be craning her neck up; if the landing surface is below the point where she leaves the ground, it requires the player to dive off a building staring up into nothing and hope. They didn't call her Faith for nothing, you know.
• There are some chase scenes in A Plague Tale: Requiem where the camera is focused on Amicia from the front, showing the rats chasing after her. Not that bad once as these are mostly cinematic scenes where all you have to do is to run "backwards". It becomes more frustrating when the camera changes between this position and normal during the scene, and you have to switch controls too.
• Remember Me
  • The game is clearly designed to be played on controllers. When you hang in a ladder, the camera automatically fixates on a pre-designed viewpoint. You can glance around if you like, though. On a controller, this is easy: Just tilt a thumbstick towards the direction you want to look. However, on mouse, although you can move the mouse towards the intended direction, and the camera will move, the moment you lift up the mouse, or even slow down its movement, the camera will reset like a rubber band. The only way to take a long look in a direction when playing with mouse is to have a very large table and keep steadily moving the mouse towards the same direction. On a typical desktop setup this makes it impossible to enjoy artistic details they have hidden in the corners of some scenes, or to scout around for secrets.
  • Sometimes in fighting scenes the camera likes to hide behind bushes and plants that are positioned around the fighting scene; maximizing the chances that you can't see a thing you are doing.
  • There are a couple of locations where the camera moves to a different viewpoint, almost creating a Game-Breaking Bug scenario as the player finds it nearly impossible except by luck to know where to move the character because of the changed angle.
• Shadow of the Colossus has issues with this constantly while climbing, but the most poignant example is when you have to climb up the side of a decorative torch with a wall directly to your rear to prevent the Colossus from killing you while trying to climb. Unfortunately, though, because of the way the camera works, you have to slowly move the camera in between the torch and the wall so that it rests inside the protagonist so that you can jump up to the top of it, and since the camera doesn't like being in that position, you have to do it very quickly before you lose the necessary angle again.
• Tomb Raider:
  • The camera in the reboot series has a nasty tendency to stay fixed in one angle when Lara gets shoved down from an enemy attack, which means players will have to wrestle the camera to turn it around so they can see their attackers.
  • Tomb Raider: Anniversary and Tomb Raider: Legend both have a camera that frequently moves when you're trying to line up tricky jumps, often putting the jump destination offscreen. This wouldn't be so bad, but the controls (unlike the first 5 games) are relative to the screen, and not Lara.
  • In several entries in the series, particularly Tomb Raider Chronicles, there are a few puzzles that would be incredibly simple if you could see from Lara's point of view, but for which the camera is stuck in a ridiculous place so you can't even see your character, let alone her destination.
• Too Human's camera is difficult to align and will often end up with enemies off-screen in front of you.

Action Game

• Devil May Cry:
  • The Fixed Camera angles in the first four games can be confusing depending on where they are placed, but usually, the camera faces the door where you just came from, so you have to walk several steps further when you enter a room before knowing what you're about to deal with.
  • The camera in Devil May Cry 2 is particularly bad. You'll often find yourself shooting away at enemies the camera seems to have no intention of showing you.
  • Devil May Cry 2 and Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening contain some sections where the camera is so far away your character becomes a little figure almost indistinguishable from the similarly-colored objects in the environment, or is hidden by a foreground object. Fortunately, moving your character around reveals their position or shifts the camera to a nearer perspective.
  • The Advancing Wall of Doom sections in Devil May Cry 3 and Devil May Cry 4 have their camera facing the thing that's chasing you from behind, which makes it a bit hard to anticipate the path ahead.
  • Some fights against gigantic bosses are made more challenging because of the camera angles, especially when you're locked-on. In Devil May Cry 1, the camera would look down when you fall off the platform during the second phase of Mundus's fight. In Devil May Cry 3, the camera might not properly show Cerberus when he charges forward. This is more prevalent in Devil May Cry 5 because the camera would always face and focus on the boss, so your character can be off-screen when fighting Nidhogg, or the camera would look down when you're jumping near Urizen during his third boss fight.
• Ninja Gaiden 2 has a camera that has a disturbing habit of only giving you a nice view of Ryu's spandex-clad bottom and the creature you're currently hammering at — despite the fact that there's another five enemies just five feet away, looking for ways to ruin your day, along with their buddies much, much further away, ramming some very fast-moving projectiles up said spandex-clad bottom.
• Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion has no option to control the cameras, which leads to the camera slowly panning or turning around and obscuring the player's vision. At times, the camera won't move even when there are clearly more enemies in the area, thus making it easier for said enemies to ambush the player.
• Robot Alchemic Drive is played from the perspective of the teenager remote-controlling a Humongous Mecha... except when it decides to dramatically follow a missile or Rocket Punch. Cool, yes, but it would be preferable to see one's robot and the enemy, thanks.
• Spider-Man 2 is one of the sixth generation's^note Dreamcast, GameCube, Playstation 2, and Xbox few good movie tie-ins, but sometimes — with the GameCube version at least — the camera gets stuck pointing at Spidey's groin, making navigation and combat impossible until you save and reload.
• The 2000 action game features an event-obscuring camera, including a final chase scene in which Spidey is running away from a monstrous Doctor Octopus who has fused with the Carnage symbiote, going out-of-control Ax-Crazy. The camera is placed in front of Spidey and sometimes if you run up against a wall, you actually can't see it because it's behind the goddamn camera. Cue much on-the-spot jogging without actually moving forward, until the "Monster Ock" catches up and turns Spidey into mincemeat. Or, dodging the giant Mysterio while running around the lip of a circular pit... while the camera keeps turning perpendicular to the edge so the one thing you can't see is how close you've gotten to falling in.

Adventure Game

• The camera in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy may kill your brother. Indirectly, by making it freakin' difficult to find the telephone and warn him.

Beat 'em Up

• Bayonetta enjoys tormenting you by keeping enemies out of your view, especially when you're trying to manually turn the camera to see them instead of locking on with RB/R1. The fact that the enemies all attack you at once seems to discourage you from focusing on one at a time, which sort of defeats the purpose of locking on at all.
• God Hand: A frantic, Nintendo Hard beat-em-up with rotational controls based on Resident Evil and the camera fixed behind Gene? That should surely be the most teeth-gnashingly frustrating thing ever. And it is - but not because of the camera. On the normal mode and below, enemies can only attack you when they are actually in front of you, meaning you can avoid damage for a moment by turning your back on them.

Driving Game

• The camera in Burnout Paradise goes crazy as soon as you put your car into reverse. While the new angle it assumes might be helpful if you intended to drive backwards for long distances, you're usually just trying to make a quick 2-point or 3-point turn, for which the new camera angle is useless. Not to mention, the default camera angle you see whenever you drive fills up almost the entire screen with your car's bumper, making it almost impossible to see far ahead of you. This is useful if you're going uphill, or at slow speeds; in Burnout Paradise, you're very rarely doing either. You can adjust the camera to fill more of the screen with the road, but constant pressure is necessary, or else the screen snaps back to show you how neat your bumper looks.
• Driver: San Francisco invokes this with certain dares, requiring you to complete otherwise easy objectives with the first-person view (which is serviceable, but makes it a little tricker to tell how wide your car is or if you're going to tailswipe something during a drift) or Thrill Cam (a dynamic camera mode that constantly shifts before different shots; makes impressive replays a snap, but hell to actually drive with). Fortunately, these rarely have time limits.
• Mario Kart 7 has a camera screw for Rock Rock Mountain. On the last stretch of the track where you climb up the mountain, the camera slowly shifts to a different angle so you can see up the hill. The problem is the angle switch is done slowly to begin with, which means you can't see the oncoming boulders rolling downhill.
• The fourth game in the Project Gotham Racing series does this in the form of the in-car/helmet camera. Specifically, how it impedes your ability to drive some of the cars properly from that view. Unlike the 3rd game, in which the game always provided you with its own gauges/readouts of vehicle speed, gear selection, and engine speed no matter what view you were in, in the 4th game, it does not do so for the cockpit view (which incidentally was introduced into the series in the 3rd game), instead making you reliant on the interior model's gauges and readouts to get the info you need. How the camera screws with you here is that either the interior point-of-view is usually a bit too far back from the gauges and makes them hard to read, or it's mis-elevated (too high/low) and allows the steering wheel to block a part of the instrument panel or, in extreme cases, ALL of it. What makes this worse is that these screws made some cars returning from the 3rd game undrivable when using the helmet cam to various degrees, due to a change in seating position from their PGR3 counterparts.
  • Returning car made mildly undrivable: The TVR Sagaris. The cockpit view in the 3rd game gave you a clear view of every important element in the instrument panel, from the analog speedo and tach, to the shift-up warning lights above them, and the digital; numerical readouts of vehicle speed, engine speed, and gear selection below the analog gauges. In the fourth game, the helmet POV is lowered such that the wheel is now blocking those digital readouts, leaving only the analog gauges visible.
  • Returning car made a nightmare to drive: The Aston Martin DBR 9 race car. The 3rd game's cockpit view of this car gave you a clear line-of-sight on the digital gear/speed/revs readout. The 4th game's cockpit view is altered as such that the readout is not visible, again due to the steering wheel obstructing it.
• The PSN game Smash Cars has a camera that sticks low to the ground and cannot be moved. And often hides gigantic holes in the track from view this way.
• TrackMania's specialty is putting the camera underground inside the track or parallel to the track so that the players can not see it. The first person view camera is located close to ground at the car's nose, giving a limited view of the track and no idea where the corners of the car are. And then there are forced perspective changes, some of which switch to first person view when stunts require it but others just screw up the gameplay. That said, there's a third-person angle which is usable.

Fighting Game

• Dissidia Final Fantasy suffers from some rather wonky camera mechanics on indoor maps such as Pandemonium and Ultimecia's Castle where it will get stuck in corners and trapped behind walls. This is particularly prominent during the Quick Time Events when the camera is already zooming in and around the fighters. Even more frustrating is that some of these problems don't go away even when you are controlling the camera during the Battle Replay mode. On the upside, there's a bug when the problems allow you to see the maps from unusual angles, and outside of those two stages the camera control is generally good enough you barely notice it.
• Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 has this issue during the free-roaming sequences. The game uses a new style to essentially insert the three-dimensional characters into lush painted backgrounds, giving it a similar look to the anime. However, this results in a fixed camera in most sections, making it frustrating when you're looking for items or trying to talk to someone (due to the camera generally being pulled WAY back to show off the scenery). The battles also have a camera screw of their own, sometimes positioning themselves behind the enemy, instead of the player.

First-Person Shooter

• In an admittedly optional morphball puzzle in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, a very common glitch forces the camera behind a wall, almost entirely obscuring your view of where you are. Worse, the puzzle is constantly in motion. Luckily, the player is able to see the puzzle in its entirety before undertaking it, giving them a chance to memorize it.
• Attempting to stand up and shoot from behind low cover in Rainbow Six: Vegas is an exercise in futility - if it seems like the camera would be most helpful viewing the action from the left side of your character, it will go on the right side instead (promptly burying itself into the nearest prop or hiding all visible enemies behind your own character) and vice versa. Peeking out from the sides of cover is more manageable, as the position of your character forces the camera to go where it's most useful.

Party Game

• Mario Party 9:
  • Perspective Mode invokes this. You play 10 mini-games that has the camera focused on you instead of showing all 4 players at once, making the games more challenging since you can't see everything.
  • Zoom Room is a mini-game where two players are tasked with catching Bowser Jr. as he runs around a maze. While an overhead view of the maze is shown before the mini-game starts, during the game itself, the camera is zoomed in very close to the player characters, limiting the visibility to their sides.

Physics Game

• Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge: This is a one-position camera in perspective view. When placing rats at the upper corners, it may sometimes be hard to see if the rat is sufficiently on the corner in case he needs to fall off.

Platform Game

• Starshot: Space Circus Fever has a horrible camera that seemed to actually be a small object following the player. It frequently got stuck behind objects (as in you go on without it, requiring you to retrace your steps until it sorts itself out and follows you again.) and in actual fact cannot keep up with the player, requiring you to stop and let it catch up with you! (i.e. stop every minute or so and then zoom in again.) Very impractical for a platformer and highly irritating.
• B3313, being a megamix fangame of all Super Mario 64 urban legends with a big focus on its beta version, has a camera that is a hazard in itself:
  • In Cold, Cold Crevasse, for example, the player must avoid the spin-glide from jumping on Spindrifts or else the camera will point straight upwards the whole time in what's a platforming course set over bottomless pits.
  • The "SGI Indy" stage is set on the motherboard used for Nintendo 64 game development, and most of its terrain functions as insta-killing quicksand. The camera in the level is always aimed at a low angle that blends platforms together and makes it very difficult to judge the distance for jumping between them.
• The Bubsy: Being 2D platformers, the games couldn't go for wonky angles, so they instead decided to make the camera so claustrophobically close that Bubsy routinely jumps out of the player's view. Additionally, normally the camera positions itself to expose everything that Bubsy is facing, but when he starts moving quickly (which is pretty much every time he moves, being a post-Sonic Mascot with Attitude), he immediately starts running against the edge of the screen and you can't see anything in front of you. The player is afforded a degree of "camera control," but it's unwieldy and can only be used while Bubsy is standing still. Pretty much every death in the game comes from the camera - either running or jumping into something you can't see.
• Crash Bandicoot (1996): The camera moves on a rail just behind your character. The problem? The camera never shows you how far the next jump is. As a result, you will have to take it on blind faith that you will find solid ground if you jump as far as you can in one of the four cardinal directions (forward, back, left, and right.) Don't even think about jumping diagonally, you'll only plummet to your doom. According to Andy Gavin on War Stories, their reason of "Character Runs Towards the Camera" was Rule of Cool and believing that some camera screw was worth it to not make a "Sonic's Ass Game" like other 3D platformers that kept the camera firmly behind the character and aimed at their ass, and because Crash had a highly animated sprite inspired by Looney Tunes shorts and so they wanted you to see his expressive face and body language.
• Dawn of Mana has a very poorly done camera, which often leaves boss enemies and jump destinations offscreen as soon as you turn vaguely left or right. While it is possible to rotate the camera and refocus it so you can see in the direction that Keldy is facing, it's still a massive pain in the rear to navigate tight corners.
• Donkey Kong 64 had similar problems to Super Mario 64, to the point that one would be forgiven for thinking that Bowser outsourced his Lakitu Camera to King K. Rool. Again, you got the most problems when you were trying to move carefully with the camera oriented behind you, which would for some reason cause the camera to go all over the place.
• Psychonauts:
  • In one section that has camera issues, you have to run an obstacle course inside a moving air bubble at the bottom of a lake. The camera is not only out of your control the whole time, but stays so far away you can sometimes hardly tell what you're doing. This is mostly due to the camera switching to the enemy's point of view (the player is being chased by a giant lungfish in this section) but still proves problematic.
  • There are multiple jumps in the final level where the camera changes direction mid jump and a couple where you can't even see where you're trying to jump to. And occasionally, the camera gets stuck inside a solid object, forcing you to restart completely.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • The otherwise perfectly done camera in the series will occasionally "helpfully" lock onto your next jump destination and refuse to let you look away. Useful for finding otherwise non-obvious jump platforms, but annoying if you just want to look around and explore before making the jump.
  • Tools Of Destruction plays with the run-toward-the-camera sequence. You're forced to rail grind towards the camera, but there are no hazards in front of you. You just have to dodge laser fire from the Cragmite battlecruiser chasing you, and the camera gives a clear view of it.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog: The camera is set up to focus on Sonic from a particular view, but it never just "switches," instead, it transitions over to where it needs to be. Therefore, if, during a transition, you stop moving or face the wrong way, the camera gets stuck in that transition.
  • Sonic Adventure's camera has a habit of going too low and getting stuck under the floor. Since you have no control over the camera's y axis (possibly due to the camera controls having to be mapped to the shoulder buttons as the Dreamcast lacked a second analogue stick) there's not really any easy way to get out of this other than jumping around a bit and hoping that the camera catches up before you accidentally jump to your death due to not being able to see anything. At least some version of the game can also have issues with the camera getting caught behind assorted level elements such as parts of upper paths, and having the camera jump around between various odd angles in certain places; Hot Shelter gets the worst of it, with Gamma's version of the stage including metal grabby things which pick Gamma up and can cause the camera to spin wildly, as well as a section which takes place on platforms zooming through a tunnel where the camera likes to point in exactly the direction which would be most inconvenient, which can be highly disorienting.
  • This seems to happen a lot during Team Sonic's version of the boss fight with the Egg Emperor in Sonic Heroes.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) had it the worst. The camera always seems to focus on the ground, even though this game has lots of huge, expansive levels that are often filled with enemies that you can't see. The camera angles also rarely adjust automatically even as you turn corners, and while you can readjust the camera angle with the right analog stick, it moves painfully slowly and often gets stuck on objects in the environment.
  • In the early, 2D games, it is possible to run fast enough to outrun the camera. Because the level sections in which this can happen generally have no danger, instead of a problem it is a fondly remembered special effect. Sonic CD, on the other hand, sends the camera some steps ahead of Sonic when he goes fast - but because of a glitch the game doesn't do that when he's spinning in midair, with awkward results.
  • A multiplayer romhack of Sonic 2 named Battle Race uses an event-obsucring camera as an actual mechanic, by making the camera focus on the leading player while the other player can lose points by letting their character fall out of view.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • By the time of Super Mario Sunshine, they had improved the camera a bit, making it more controllable by the player, reducing the wobble that plagued the Mario 64 camera, and having a one-touch button that instantly centers the camera behind Mario. But it had a bad, bad tendency to let elements of scenery such as trees and overhangs completely block the player's view of Mario, and even worse, it was next to impossible in some cases to adjust the camera to a position where you had unobstructed visibility; often you couldn't see Mario unless you pulled the camera in super tight, and the second you tried to move... bam, there's that tree in your way again. In addition the camera can also be a little on the hyperactive side at times, and at the slightest provocation will suddenly fly out to a long view of Mario, then right back in on him, followed by another sudden shift to a long angle, rinse and repeat. This naturally gets annoying during the game's many precision platforming segments.
  • The camera in Super Mario Galaxy is much more intuitive, giving players decent camera angles more often than not. But strangely, it was less controllable than in Sunshine, and in fast-paced levels, it doesn't always keep up with Mario's pace. Even worse, it seems to be designed primarily with the more linear stages in mind. This makes it a royal pain in the ass in missions with more open gameplay such as the Purple Coins, as it often refuses to let the player look at corners or to the sides of the road, despite these being the locations of many of the coins. But at least it didn't automatically readjust itself once the player moved it like the camera in Super Mario 64.
  • Super Mario 3D Land has a pretty decent camera system for the most part, though it has a couple of issues, most notably in the Bowser levels, where it tends to go to a semi top-down view that's focused in on Mario a little too closely, which doesn't give the player a sufficient amount of time to react to what's coming up.

Puzzle Game

• In English Country Tune, the camera is firmly centered on your square, and objects that may disturb a direct line of sight between the camera and the square do not become translucent.
• In Portal, when you go through the more elaborate portal patterns, if the screen has to spin, your up/down view will not be changed. Frustrating when you come out of a portal and suddenly see the ceiling and have no idea just where's the damn floor. Even more frustrating when you have to shoot a portal at the floor while in mid-air.

Rhythm Game

• Rhythm Heaven: Rhythm Rally 2 makes the camera unwillingly fly around, with planets and such blocking the view.

Role-Playing Game

• Alpha Protocol exists in a world where funny moments meet awesome moments meet horrible camera-induced frustration. When you're not crouched down, the camera is basically three inches from the back of your head, making it impossible to see anything. When you can see anything, aiming is another task altogether: You're either moving it at a snail's pace or so quickly you turn yourself around sixteen times trying to go left before someone grabs the last bagel. Not fun.
• In Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII on the field screen the camera will "stick" on obstacles and refuse to move. This makes discovering treasure chests quite a bit more annoying than it has to be, since swinging the camera away involves moving away from the walls. But moving away from the walls triggers enemy encounters - which leads to the other camera screw. The buttons that control the camera in the field screen switch to selecting commands in the combat screen. Sadly, the camera does not pull out enough to display the entire combat area, leaving some enemies off the screen - which becomes even more annoying when they use ranged attacks. Oh, and then there's the stealth section where you need to watch out for guards spotting you...
• Final Fantasy X: Macalania Cloister of Trials has a puzzle that requires players to create an icy path by putting spheres in the right place. When the player finishes and goes to use said path, the player must be careful not to step on a tile that partially resets the puzzle. The problem? The camera angle suddenly changes right before reaching the tile, and if you don't know it's coming, the player will step on it.
• Final Fantasy X-2: Camera issues are a big problem in the Yojimbo fight, since the camera occasionally shifts to primarily show the enemy's back. The issue is that it has significant tells that inform you whether it's going to use a harmless attack, a harmless attack that poisons you, or an incredibly dangerous attack that puts you on death's door. Since it also has an untargetable flunky, you need to immediately react to that third attack or risk being killed.
• Final Fantasy XII: If your characters have a wall behind them, the camera WILL be shunted into the air and point directly at the floor. Very frustrating if you're trying to look ahead, guys. Fortunately it's an RPG, so you won't instantly die from it.
• In Final Fantasy XIII the camera is actually programmed to rotate to one side or the other as you're walking to show off the admittedly impressive scenery, which can make getting around a bit irritating. It also spins around during battles, but due to the combat system being unable to see who is where and being attacked by what is only mildly inconvenient.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • There are several sections of exact jumping where the camera veers away from the walls and makes your life incredibly difficult. For example, the platforming sections in Deep Jungle and Wonderland.
    • The camera in general was poorly realized, with the controls given to the R2 and L2 buttons and the speed FAR too slow to keep up with athletic, bouncy Sora. Locking-on helps most of the time, but god help you if it's a fast opponent that likes jumping around like a maniac...
  • Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days has an unskippable stealth sequence that starts you off with a fixed camera. You can turn off the target camera, but the way the other camera works means it is very difficult (at no fault of the player) to follow Pete without accidentally turning the camera in a completely different direction while attempting to move.
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, the camera is fairly cooperative most of the time, but with the reintroduction of platforming to the series, vertical platforming is hit-or-miss, and much of the detail in the stages is hard to see, mostly due to the inability to look up/down while moving in third person.
• The Force Unleashed locks the camera onto the rancor from a ground-level-Indiana-boulder perspective. The beasties have a large enough reach already before attempts to retreat run the player into stage walls and exploding flowers half the time.
• Breath of Fire III is an isometric view that has a camera that can only rotate a fraction of the full 360 degrees. This is used to hide things like chests and hidden passages.
• Persona 4: An intentional case found in the Void Quest dungeon. In the 7th floor the camera will abruptly shift in every crossroad, effectively disorienting you. hen you open doors and step through the camera focus can screw up for a few seconds which means that the Shadow next to the door can get the first move. Quite lethal, specially if you found yourself running into the shadow you were trying to escape moments earlier.
• Dark Souls:
  • Movement is relative to the camera, and the camera is also bound by physical objects in the game. This can mean that your walking direction can change suddenly just because the camera has bounced off a tree branch or a pillar. Anor Londo is a minor offender, but the Great Hollow and the tree in Ash Lake will do its damnedest to kill you.
  • In every game, fighting a giant enemy up close is a nightmare for the camera. You'll only see a portion of the boss at melee range, which makes it easy to get hit by attacks you don't see coming. It's especially disorienting starting from Bloodborne, where enemies in general move faster and make wide swings, and the games developed a habit of turning off lock-on or locking onto a different part of an enemy and disorienting you when an enemy stands above you or moves a little too far away. FromSoft is really stubborn about zooming out the camera for whatever reason.
• The first game in the Monster Hunter series, and its portable port, Freedom, can get frustrating because the camera follows quite closely behind the player character, sometimes too closely, which prevents you from seeing monsters and the environment around you. One section of the Forest & Hills level in particular can be a nightmare because of how cramped it is, making it easy for the hunter to get knocked into a corner and beaten up. Oddly enough, the right thumbstick on the original PS2 version was used for attack inputs rather than controlling the camera.
  • The 3DS version of Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate quickly becomes a nightmare to play if you don't have a Circle Pad Pro for camera control. Your only options are the L-button for repositioning the camera behind you, and an on-screen camera D-pad, and your fingers are probably the last thing that should touch the 3DS touchscreen. Underwater quests quickly become an exercise in patience if you don't invest in the attachment.
• Drakengard 3 has the Final Boss in route D, in which you fight against all the Intoner Sisters in their Grotesquerie Queen forms. During normal gameplay this would be annoying enough, but due to the Rhythm Game controls it is complete hell. You have to press a button to dispel large waves of magical rings when they reach a dragon (the player character in the boss fight), but the camera just swings around, making it all but impossible to see exactly when the rings hit you. Additionaly, missing even once gets you a Game Over making this fight an exercise in frustration.

Run-and-Gun

• Contra 4 combines the two Nintendo DS screens into one large portrait-orientation screen. By itself, portrait-orientation Contra is not necessarily a terrible idea, since the first two arcade games use vertically-oriented monitors. However, the gap between the two screens count as space, which means you can easily get ambushed by enemies and bullets coming out of the gap.

Shoot 'em Up

• Cardiaxx allows the player's ship to move both left and right in the level, with the camera showing what's in front of the craft. When switching directions, the camera doesn't pan fast enough to see what's far ahead.
• In the 1983 arcade game I, Robot, putting the camera as low as possible (making it harder to see the playfield) yields higher points.
• With a deeply tinted view (in a pretty dark game, especially the deep space sequences), cockpit furniture that takes up over a third of a screen, and general lack of orientation and peripheral vision, one wonders what the first-person camera in Star Fox 64 is actually good for. Aside from being a form of a Self-Imposed Challenge. And making Virtual Console players repeatedly curse at accidentally stabbing the C-Stick/right control stick upwards.
• Ether Vapor has a few segments where, instead of having a horizontal or vertical perspective, the camera is behind the ship. The beginning of Scene 6 has one such segment...but the camera's yaw is at an offset, making it difficult to aim or dodge. A similar camera angle happens later in the same stage, during the boss battle with DECIDER, where the angle can make dodging its lasers very difficult.
• Robotron: 2084 received a PS1 remake titled Robotron X. While the original Robotron was a single-screen game that showed the whole playfield, X employs a constantly shifting offset overhead camera that goes out of its way to not show the entire field at any given time, a death sentence in an overheard shooter filled with fast-moving, constantly respawning aggressive enemies. One of the reason its N64 port Robotron 64 is considered a big improvement is that it pulls back the camera to display the entire playfield.

Sports Game

• The camera keeps switching positions while doing a combo in Backyard Skateboarding: sometimes to the ground, sometimes to the side, sometimes to the sky. And you don't even control the camera while this happens.
• MLB 09: The Show has camera-dependent baserunning controls in the Road to the Show mode, leading to more than a few camera issues. The controls require you to move the left stick in the direction toward the destination base when you start running, but if the camera angle changes in the split second between when you decide to run (and therefore when you decide which direction to move the stick) and when you actually move the stick, you'll end up running in the wrong direction, usually leading to you being thrown out rather easily.
• Mario Golf and especially its sequel, Toadstool Tour: Camera issues don't affect gameplay, but frequently a shot will be totally obscured by a weird camera angle; you don't know what happened until the ball comes to a stop.
• An intentional case shows up in Thrasher Presents Skate and Destroy. If you run out of time, an assailant enters the arena and chases you. The camera switches to their POV, which makes skating and performing tricks much harder. On the other hand, you gain triple points during this period, making it a risky way to meet a target you missed.

Stealth-Based Game

• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: The first two MGS games utilized semi-fixed cameras that required the player to go into first-person in order to get a dynamic view of the surroundings. This wasn't a major problem, as these games took place in mostly indoor areas with plenty of obstacles, and the player was aided by nearly-blind guards and a radar that pin-pointed enemies' locations and directions. Cue MGS3: Wide open outdoor areas, no radar, guards that can spot you from a good distance if you weren't wearing proper camouflage and lying down...and the same old camera system. This made the game initially difficult for many players, who were now forced to go into first-person view (which disables them from performing any action other than looking around and shooting) in order to track any off-screen enemies. Metal Gear Solid 3's special edition re-release, Subsistence, mostly fixed this problem by adding a fully adjustable third-person camera (only camera screw moments is fighting "The Boss" at the end-game). This system was conserved and improved in the series' fourth game.

Survival Horror

• Alone in the Dark:
  • The original was the originator of the fixed-camera survival horror angle where movement was based entirely on camera angle, sometimes resulting in losing view of the entrance to the room just when a monster conveniently enters it.
  • The second and third game have passages that look like solid walls because of the textures and camera perspective.
• Dino Crisis 3. The cameras are fixed — as if you're watching yourself from security cameras. On a spaceship. Where dinosaurs can appear spontaneously out of the walls to attack you.
• ThanksKilling Day: The game is a Retraux of PS1-era survival horror games, so of course this also includes the camera fixed at specific angles. That said, you CAN switch to a first-person view at any given time in the game.

Third-Person Shooter

• Control has a generally reliable camera, but it runs into a unique problem during the fight against FORMER, a giant entity of a boss who towers over you and the battlefield, pretty much commanding your attention since its attacks are relentless, but heavily telegraphed, and its giant eye is its weak spot. However, FORMER has the ability to destroy the floor into a bottomless pit with its attacks, and due to the camera always remaining right behind Jesse, there isn't a good enough angle to keep track of both FORMER and the ground, so you'll often end up dying by accident because you walked into a death pit you had no way of seeing until it's too late.
• Max Payne 3 has a Last Man Standing mechanic—if your health runs out and you have painkillers available, you have a few seconds before you die to kill the enemy that landed the fatal hit, which will instantly bring you back to full health. Unfortunately, sometimes the game will outright refuse to let you see the enemy you're supposed to kill, resulting in you running out of time and having to reload the last checkpoint.
• Warframe: Sometimes, if your back is too close to a wall, your camera is filled with your character, making it impossible to aim in front of you. Since this game features some stealth elements, it is really difficult to stay out of sight, but yet land the necessary headshots while your Warframe's head fills 70% of the screen. Moving away from the object/wall puts you out in plain sight where you can be seen, and missing a shot will likely alert the enemy, ending your attempt a stealth mission. To avoid this, they could simply make your character transparent if the camera is forced too close because of a wall/object behind you.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Grand Theft Auto IV: The "in-car" camera inexplicably filled a fourth to third of the screen with car hood, never mind that you'll never see your own hood while you're driving in real life (unless, of course, it's an old Caddy) because real car hoods are designed to avoid that.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
  • The game has the "Helpful" camera change problem. While driving the camera focuses directly behind your vehicle, meaning you can't see what's in front of you on the road. There's a button you can hit to move it to a much more useful angle, but as soon as you let go of said button, the camera slides riiiiiight back into crap-town. Of course, you can drive in first person mode, but then you can't see anyone pulling up behind or to the side of you; it becomes incredibly difficult to extricate yourself from the kind of 46-point turn scenario that often comes up when trying to drive through alleyways, and over everything else; and of course not forgetting, the car inexplicably gets wider when you're in first person view.
  • The camera is much more of a dumb chase cam than in Vice City, where it helpfully stayed behind the car to show you where you were going. In San Andreas, when you turn a sharp corner, the camera coyly fixates on the side of your car until you have already driven a little distance in the direction you can't see.
• Saints Row: Getting too close to an obstacle with your helo causes the camera to face the obstacle and consequently you drift towards said obstacle. Cue impacting the obstacle a few times and plummeting towards the ground in flames.
• Second Life: By default, the camera cannot clip through objects and can only zoom out at a limited distance. If your avatar is behind a wall, the camera will zoom in really close just to let player be able to see their avatar. While you can change the camera to be able to clip into objects, it may also create a problem where objects block your view and you can't see yourself.

Other / Multiple

• In one Beautiful Katamari level, you katamari eventually becomes so big that the only things left to roll up are the meteors flying by Earth but they're in space, you're still on earth, they vary drastically in size, & they're usually only on screen for a split second. Good luck telling where they are, which ones are small enough for you to roll 'em up yet, & which ones are so much bigger than your katamari that they'll send you rolling repeatedly around the planet.
• In the "Desert Run" table of Obsession Pinball, the indicator of what Place you're at in the race is only visible when the camera is at the top of the playfield.

---