How fucking cryptic old games can be.

For me, there's almost nothing worse than when a game doesn't clearly communicate what it wants you to do.

Wandering around aimlessly or having to look up a walkthrough to see how to progress is annoying as fuck.

20-30FPS is definitely top of the list for me, though this is me speaking as somebody who only really got into video games starting in 2017.

I just recently played Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty for the first time, and I've got to say that I would probably really have disliked the game without the quick save feature introduced in this remake. It was frustrating enough at times even with it, let alone in the original where you would have had to replay much longer sequences, often stemming from cheap difficulty or poor controls. I'm happy finally got around to plaing the game after playing a demo of Abe's Exoddus (and maybe Abe's Oddyssee too) as a child, but the game definitely had some cheap difficulty.

I ended up not recommending the game on Steam, which really pained me.

Iam having that minor issue with turok2 atm hahahahha funny enough.

Probably stuff people have already mentioned, but:

The load times of early CD/DVD-based games in the 90s and early 2000s.

Controls of most early 3D games before developers figured out how they should work.

Similarly, controls in many 8-bit games for a very similar reason. Many developers just hadn't figured things out yet, so you'd get some really weird control schemes.

Motion controls in general. Very few times did they actually improve the experience for me in a way that I just wouldn't have preferred normal controls.

Moon logic in games. This still does happen occasionally, but not nearly as much. Anyone who's played old adventure games knows exactly what I mean.

Yeah while the action of that game was awesome, it was a pretty bad offender as far as being obtuse in terms of level design. A lot of games from back then are like that, labyrinthine stages where everything looks the same and there's barely any direction or signposting.

I recently played the Perfect Dark Remake on Xbox and while it is a great game, I had to consult a guide sometimes cos it's like the devs expected to read their minds in terms of "wtf am I supposed to do next?"

I feel like wired controllers were only an issue if they were under 6 feet and especially 4 feet or under. Most people didn't have big screen TVs for the longest time, so they didn't need to sit far from the TV. 

Sega Mega Drive and PC Engine had short cords. 

Atari 2600 only had a 4 ft cord too but for the time I think that wasn't short at all even if it should've been longer. 

Man I love wired controllers. I literally only play PC with wired. Ensures minimal latency and no need to worry about battery life or anything of that sort.

Only that the optical/disc drive of the consoles used to wear down and by implication games started to load slower if at all, but that was because it was used excessively, and tell you how good the experience was.

Glacial loading times, limited use of autosaving, massively inferior ports of games to hardware unsuited to it, a greater emphasis on level grinding in RPG's, less localization, bad use of licenses, etc.