Widely praised games that I don't particularly like:

Borderlands
Mass Effect
Uncharted
Halo (OK, I liked the first one, but then I got CS for my computer)
Elder Scrolls
LittleBigPlanet
Gears of War

I love The Elder Scrolls and while Mass Effect and Borderlands have some gaping flaws I think they make up for it (the former with rich characterisation and setting, the latter with rocket-launching shotguns) but on all the others I agree fully. Gears Of War in particular baffles me with how anyone seems to enjoy playing it.

Or you could just not do that particular sidequest, which is disproportionately hard compared to the rest of the game, and come back later when you're stronger.

I just finished the game tonight after pulling an all nighter. I think its ****ing incredible. Storytelling is outta the park versus the first game (And versus 90% of anything tbh)

FTL: Faster than light

An amazing roguelike game that instead of placing you in a dungeon full of trolls and whatnot, gives you a space ship with a crew and a randomly generated universe to explore. And for only 10$!
The game is brutal and unforgiving, but so fun. I managed to defeat the alien mothership for the first time yesterday, only to die 20 minutes later due to uncontrolled fires - my crew was too badly wounded to contain them, they did damage to all critical systems including the life support which made my crew suffocate. I could have locked them in a single room and vented the atmosphere from the rest of the ship to extinguish the fires, too bad I didn't think of it then ;)

I had no trouble getting to the boss and killing the midget. It's just when the stupid monster disappears to the point where I can't really locate it over and over again, it gets, well .. boring. Hard for all the wrong reasons.

Plus, endless hordes of spawning mobs is something I loathe. I much prefer the kind of games where if I kill a monster, it stays dead.

Yeah, I like to feel like I'm actually achieving something in a video game, and when I have to kill the same three bandits every time I leave Fyrestone I get annoyed to no end. I can sort of understand the appeal of the Borderlands series, but seeing as how my friends don't play video games and I hate random game joining because it's inevitably full of twats, the game series has just never been for me.

buying Arkham City tomorrow

yay!

Same here. In Borderlands, even the chests you loot respawn and so it feels like the game is erasing every trace indicating you were ever in the area.

I also remember being irritated about this in FarCry 2. I got so tired of killing guys at lookout posts along the road.

Oh god I almost quit Far Cry 2 because of that bullshit, but the realistic depiction of Africa and the Nietzsche philosophy kept me plowing through, but I definitely have no desire to play it again. I especially hated how it was sort of justified/ explained as "secret missions" and that's why faction members attacked you, even if you were doing a mission for them. I'd rather have just had one of the game devs say "Programing friendly AI is hard", I'd at least get a chuckle out of that.

Respawning enemies can be good if they're played properly, such as there being a thing that you have to deal with to stop them respawning. It becomes a challenge of skill and timing rather than a grind. Taking them away was one of the many things that made MW2 so terrible. Borderlands 1 didn't do it well but from all the good I've heard of 2 they probably gave it better implementation at least.