I’ve been on a “recent classics” kick recently, making use of the post holiday downtime to play or replay the best games of the last two years. This week, I’ve been all about BioShock, my favorite title of last year. I played through it on PC when it came out, and of course, it blew me away for all the reasons that everyone cites – the incredible story, the atmosphere, the freedom to choose power-ups and fry enemies in creative ways. It’s won just about every award in the gaming pantheon (actually, I’m surprised that it hasn’t spawned it’s own award), so I won’t throw any more adjectives at it.

But as I started capping Big Daddy ass the other day, I noticed a few padding issues. Why the hell does that scientist need a bunch of plants? Why does the freaky fisherman want me to take pictures of spider splicers? I get that there are elements of teaching you how to play the game in some of this – but I definitely caught the stale whiff of padding in Rapture’s moldy hallways.

The first time through, I was probably too googly-eyed and creeped out over the splicers to notice, but this time, it was painfully obvious to me that damn near everyone that you meet wants you to scavenge a bunch of crap for them. Nothing will keep me from loving this game, but the pedestal has been lowered a little bit.

Padding is my pet peeve in videogames. I’ll define it here as anything that draws out the game experience in an annoying or artificial way – like endless fetch quests or lame inescapable minigames or mismatched game mechanics. You can add long cut scenes to this little pile of shame as well – and then go right ahead and light that pile on fire. Where’s that pyro plasmid when you need it?

Of course, 2K’s masterpiece (and yes, I still think it’s a masterpiece) is far from being the worst offender. Most titles have some element of padding stuck in there, and I understand why. Developers want to make games that justify the $60 price tag – and that means pumping as much content as possible onto the disc. The problem is – most of that extra stuff is crap that dilutes a game, rather than adding anything to it.

A case in point: Sonic Unleashed. A very solid, very fun Sonic game – a return to form, even – lay hidden beneath so many layers of terrible brawler levels that getting to the good stuff was an intolerable chore. Those “Werehog” levels were padding in the worst sense – they were boring and slow, with crappy controls and lame, archaic level designs.

Oh, that’s not all. The game was also weighted down with incredibly lame RPG-lite elements, like talking to clueless townspeople, stupid QTE’s and awful, inescapable cut scenes. All told, the time spent playing the fun levels compared to everything else was, at best, a 1:3 ratio.

The developer’s response from the inevitably under whelmed reception was, “In order to make a game where Sonic is running and everybody enjoys the whole thing we'd have to design this many miles of level, and it was some ungodly number... and that would be like maybe a three hour game.”