I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the world of video games is rife with crime -- and I'm not talking about virtual decapitations in Mortal Kombat or the countless murders of the Grand Theft Auto series. The misdeeds in question are those committed on the design level; crimes where the player ends up being the victim. We've gathered an identity parade of recent games guilty of committing various degrees of injustice, and equated them to what we believe are their real-world crime equivalents.

Petty Misdemeanor - Unlockable Difficulty Levels

No other medium has the gall to force you into a stripped-down experience prior to the real thing. It would be like making the CliffsNotes of a novel mandatory before you could tackle the true text. And yet again and again we see games like Gears of wars 3 withhold content from the player. Is paying sixty dollars not enough for me to play the game how I want? Do I need to make a blood sacrifice in the form of my nights and weekends? Even worse are games that deny you an achievement for completing them on easy upon finishing a higher difficulty level. If having to unlock your desired difficulty is a petty parking violation, then this achievement nonsense is more like some trust fund baby parking a Hummer in a handicapped spot. Oh, I forgot to mention that he has novelty license plates that read "IMNMBR1."

But at the end of the day, nearly every developer is guilty of a petty crime that acts as more of a nuisance than a dangerous act. At the same time, it's safe to say that most of us have been guilty of a minor traffic violation at some point in our lives. No one will look down on you for not refilling your parking meter, and we certainly don't condemn Epic for placing this annoyance in an otherwise fantastic game. Pay your fine, play through your games a second time, and get on with your lives knowing that you've increased your moral fiber.

Misdemeanor - An Unfriendly Shopping Experience

Any gamer who's ever dipped their toes into an RPG knows the importance of a clear and concise menu system. The genre is built around decision-making and minutia, so presenting data to the player in a quick and easy fashion is paramount to the game's success. A failure to do so immediately takes you out of the experience -- there's nothing more jarring than a game that makes you feel like you're filling out your W-2s every time you enter a shop. The worst instance of this offense is when a game doesn't inform you how a new weapon compares to your current one, doesn't allow you to equip it right away, and prevents you from selling your old stuff immediately. These things should stop a game from ever passing a quality assurance test. It's as if the concept of fitting rooms and size tags ceased to exist in stores, suddenly forcing you to purchase clothes without any idea of how they might fit you.

It's hard to condemn a game that you truly love, but Dark Souls is the most recent culprit of this dastardly crime. Surviving at the hands of a punishingly high difficulty level is one thing, but having to flip through menu upon menu to figure out if the Zweihander you want to purchase outranks your current Battle Ax is a cumbersome task that causes hate to angry up the blood. Although true role-players wouldn't blame the developer's archaic stubbornness, but rather, the virtual shopkeeper's poor knowledge of his product and apathy toward the happiness of his customer. Granted, this line of thinking may be enough to get someone institutionalized a handful of states in the Bible Belt.

Gross Misdemeanor - Rubber Band AI

We're venturing into dangerous territory here. I don't want to make light of the dangers of a DUI -- being from Wisconsin, I am well aware of the reckless damage they can cause. But no behind-the-wheel crime in video games is as devastating to the public's general well-being as Rubber Band AI, or as I prefer to call it, the systematic destroyer of all things fun and good in life. Anyone who has ever pressed down on the gas pedal in a Mario Kart title can attest to the aggravation that stems from watching your lead evaporate in front of your very eyes due to a string of deus ex machina. Your skill as a driver won't save you from the unflinchingly cold grasp of an AI that consistently rewards last place with an armory of blue shells, lightning bolts, and stars.

Nintendo seems generally concerned for the feelings of their unskilled fans. It's safe to say that the company would be all for instituting a Little League style mercy rule in the Major Leagues. But in the end, the most frustrating part of both crimes is that they are so easily avoidable. Give your keys away to a designated driver and include the option of an easy mode alongside a normal mode devoid of any rubber-banding nonsense. You're welcome, universe -- I just solved two of your problems.

Felony - Inappropriate Shoehorning of Genres

Assassin's Creed: Revelations is the Enron of 2011. No, not because both will be forgotten five years from now, but rather in the way both fleeced honest folks without any sense of remorse. Assassin's Creed excels when you're roaming the rooftops of historical icons, not when you're held hostage at the mercy of a mediocre tower defense mechanic. These jarring challenges make for nothing more than padding to lengthen the game -- and the less said about Revelation's completely silly MineCraft-inspired segments, the better. The same can be said for Final Fantasy XIII-2, which spits in the face of its own solid RPG mechanics by ripping the player out of the experience and forcing you to slog through uninspired puzzle segments that detract from the otherwise successful flow of the game.

A lot of the blame falls upon expectations that stem success. If you make a game like Assassin's Creed, you're expected to release a new one every year. If you make money one year, it's only given you'll make even more the next. Financial fraud is a hell of a crime. It's not stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family. It's fleecing your fellow man in a Ponzi scheme so you can pay off the mortgage on your mid-summer penthouse high above the United Arab Emirates. These acts are what separate creative entrepreneurs from svengali con artists who've lost faith in their own abilities.

Grand Felony - Slow-Moving Text

Murder is the deliberate action of taking away a life, and slow-moving text is its video game counterpart. Stubborn, patronizing, and crawling text takes away the very concepts of fun and entertainment. It kills ambition and drive by providing players with a Hooked on Phonics simulator for their Wii. No matter what your opinion is regarding The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, there is no denying that aspects of the game take hand-holding to a whole new level. Each time I fall off Skyloft at night, I'm forced to endure a condescending scolding that reeks of deja vu. What's more, nearly every dose of exposition in the game is followed by a rephrasing of the question, "Do you want me to repeat this?" The ability to move past the conversation switches between "yes" and "no" depending on the context, leaving you stuck in an infinite loop of misery.

The lack of confidence that the game has in its player is staggering. Think of how the pace of a novel would be ravaged if it were littered with parentheticals defining each and every multi-syllabic word. Maybe the blame falls on Link and his insistence on remaining a silent protagonist. Maybe if he plucked up the courage to tell Fi, "Yeah, I know what a key does. I've been doing this since the Reagan administration," then we wouldn't have to compare his game to First Degree Murder.

War Crime - Switching the A and B buttons on an NES games

And then we reach the end. That final act in video game design so deplorable it can only be compared to some of the most heinous acts in human history. Switching the primary functions of the A and B buttons in an NES platformer is a crime akin to Genghis Kahn's brutal conquest across Eurasia. His goal was to erase a history of tradition and culture through the genocidal decimation of an entire generation. I would like to say that mankind has evolved past such deplorable acts, but war crimes like these still exist in the world, and you need not look further than Golgo 3 for the NES.

If there is a single infallible rule in gaming, it's that the A button is used for jumping. It's a concept that has transcended muscle memory and become a simple truth in the medium. This is why Golgo 13's unexplainable decision to use the B button to jump borders on gaming blasphemy. It may sound like a slight change that's easy to overcome, but trying to play the game is like trying to write legibly with your non-dominant hand. What's worse is that this problem still exists in the form of Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the Gamecube. The swapping of the jump and shoot buttons in the game is pretty much an evolution of Malcolm McDowell's brainwashing in A Clockwork Orange. It's as if the game wants you to forget your entire life of gaming and succumb to its revisionist history of the way things are.