That rubber band shit drives me up the wall. I can't count the number of perfect races ruined by that nonsense. One crash and as you're checking into the wall, zoom zoom zoom, hello fourth place. A related and specific version of that is the item weighting in Double Dash, leading to what I dubbed the "raped on your doorstep" phenomenon, which is pretty self-explanatory.
Here's a huge one for me, out of genre missions. Thought you were playing a run and gun FPS? Well surprise, bitch, welcome to the stealth mission. Oh sure, the engine doesn't support it, and none of the previous levels gave you the skill set to complete it, but fuck you. Stealth missions, escort missions, first person turret gunner shit out of nowhere, driving for no good god damn reason, whatever the hell it ends up being. The best is when they combined the two. Here's this new game mechanic -QUICK! It's the only thing that can protect the McGuffin! Huh? Wha? Oh, it's been shot once, now I get to watch the unskippable cutscene introducing the new game mechanic.