I'm talking about games like NFS Carbon with its random territory takeovers (which are really just a mild annoyance rather than anything serious)
I feel you there. While as far as the career goes, they weren't a big deal since you could easily reclaim the territory later on, but if you're trying to get the reward card for Cross's Corvette by winning 20 defensive races, that's where it can become a problem.
Like for instance, when I have tons of unsaved progress that I need to save, don't have the time to do another race and I get a message saying my territory is under attack, that's where it can get annoying because you can't deny it and then do it afterwards because it won't count towards that 20 you need to get the reward card. Not to mention, you have to either accept or deny it just to get to the save option, which can be a pain if you have a lot of unsaved progress and don't want to miss a single defensive race. Seems like I remember the AI was much more aggressive in these defensive races than most of the games standard AI races, which honestly doesn't help in this situation. (I haven't touched the game in a long time though)
I love NFS Carbon, but I do recall getting annoyed with these inconvenient defensive races at least once.
Juiced with its incredibly annoying respect system where you can (and will) lose a ton of respect by refusing some dude's Pink Slip challenge.
Never played Juiced before, but it does sound like it would be pretty annoying.
I can remember Midnight Club Los Angeles being sort of like this, except if you denied it, they just make a snarky remark and that's it. It was no big deal really. However, I do remember if you quit the game/turn off your console during a pink slip race, you lose your car and I think they did something similar with police pursuits as well. Rockstar apparently knew people would try to get around losing their car by quitting the game/turning off the console and then reentering the race to try again, so my guess is they implemented this to stop people from doing it. Pretty clever thinking on their part.
I'm annoyed slightly with Enthusia Professional Racing for breaking away from the standard menu controls on a PS2 game. With every other game I played on my PS2; it's been programmed into my mind that Triangle is "go back". However Konami for some reason decided for this game to make it the square button. I know it lists the controls on the menu screen, but I still end up not listening due to my muscle memory.
After revisiting Ridge Racer Type 4, I certainly can understand that. Ridge Racer Type 4 for whatever reason has it where you have to press circle to accept and X to go back which is pretty irregular in my opinion, not just for its time, but even now. Doesn't make sense to me why it had to be this way.
I typically think of the square button as the brake in pretty much any game that involves driving, but the Twisted Metal series is weird about this. They always had that button as the accelerator instead. I'm sure they had a reason for it, but it's still kind of weird to me.
When I was younger I thought it was kind of strange how NFSMW 2005 had you press L1 and R1 to change the color of your decal instead of square like NFSU2. (it doesn't bother me anymore though)