Think about older games like the first Legend of Zelda. What tutorial did that game have? You went into a cave, got a sword and went off on your merry way to kill things. The game itself didn't have much narrative; however, if you looked in the instruction manuals (If you don't know what an instruction manual is, you are too young) it would tell you the story and what exactly was going on. The booklet would also have some cool art to give better detail with what you were fighting. Along with all that nice stuff were the instructions on how to play. The game didn't need that because it was in the booklet that came with the game.
Now I'm not going to say that all games now a days are committing this atrocity. With the well developed trend of no longer needing a booklet because they can just milk another half hour out of your game play with cinematics and "how to" game play. The major offender here are the instruction segments where you cannot continue because you didn't do it right, didn't do it enough times or you were slightly off. Along with this tends to follow an hour of enraging gameplay as you try to pass what would seem like a simple tutorial. Luckily I have only seen this a select few times and you were aloud to skip the intro scenes.
Now I reviewed a game recently that had a decent tutorial to the game. Metal Gear Rising. As most of the Metal Gear series goes, the tutorials are occasional calls form your team mates telling you what do to. Or if you feel ballsy enough, and you are playing the right game, you could do VR missions, which either prep you for the game or test what you can already do. Anyway, MGR does the tutorial through a series of OPTIONAL VR missions. These give you a decent grasp of what to do and don't punish you if you do them wrong.
During the first missions the game does a pretty good job of making sure you know what your doing with subtle reminders, like the current mission would be "Ninja Run across the bridge" or one of your team mates will remind you how to parry. At times it seems like the game is treating you like you are stupid but these games are still tailored for those that don't fully know what they are doing, even if the difficulty is on some unforgiving level.
One game series that comes to mind. with horrible tutorials is the Elder Scrolls Games as of late. Morrowind wasn't all that bad, sure it tells you how to move and what button is the action button and what buttons bring out weapons and magic but it was short and simple with a series of easy quests you can optionally do that help you further understand that game.
However, Oblivion takes the cake for annoying tutorials and unfortunately brings it into Skyrim. I don't know what penchant Bethesda has with criminals saving the world, some strange savory in the irony?
Oblivion and Skyrim don't have optional Tutorials and when you make a new character you have to do the tutorial over again each time. You need to relearn how to walk, run, swing a sword, hide, talk, use the action button, cast spells, use a bow, learn about poisons and monster. It gets very old after the first few times of doing it. At least Oblivion had the niceness of allowing you to modify your character before you left the tutorial section so you could just reload there and not have to deal with the horrible tutorial again.
It's things like this that make me really question what the game developers think of its player base. Do they think that we all are missing a good chunk of out brain or do they think that we are just plain dense? These tutorials are nice the first time, sometimes, but when they aren't optional and we are forced to sit through it each time it gets a bit tiring. In the next installment of the Elder Scrolls Series (no not the MMO) the tutorial better be a guy just handing me a sword and a bow and letting me go on my merry way or I will riot.
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