Also at the end of the level you get a quick time event that requires pinpoint button mashing or total loss. As a bonus this even gives you X-Box 360 button requests…for your PC game.
It has to be an escort mission. It has to be right after a long and unskippable cutscene with lots of uninteresting plot exposition. The level itself has to be very long and very easy/boring, except the last 5 minutes which are just hell incarnate. Of course, you can’t save halfway through.
So, basically, it has to be Resident Evil 4’s house siege. But longer.
This, with the person you are escorting being both extremely annoying to such extent you’d want to kill him/her yourself if you could, and the reason the last 5 minutes are hell incarnate is because s/he does something incredibly stupid, like pressing the big red button or having an extrmely loud accident that draws the attention of every hostile within a mile.
Of course, if you actually get through the level, you wake up to see it was all a dream and you lose all the xp and loot you’ve gotten.
There is a mission in Oblivion where you have to escort a guy, and you fail if he gets killed. The guy always charges off to attack enemies that are stronger than him, and if he manages to force them to fall into the lava, he jumps in after them and dies.
No no. The very long unskippable cut scene before the level starts is where you are thrown into prison and lose all your gear/abilities. Part of the escort section involves you leaving your escort to reclaim your gear leaving him/her unprotected and on their own or if you stay with them you won’t have the right abilities to finish the mission.
That 3 by 4 pixel button? It slides open the section of wall where they’ve hidden your gear.
Oh, and let’s not forget the official strategy guide that advises you to get through the level through extensive use of three different abilities that got removed halfway through the beta, plus one more that now does the exact opposite of what it did.
Ok so what do we have so far?
- Long unskippable cutscene (with a save point just previous to it) You lose all your gear in this scene.
- Escort mission with stupid AI
- Sewer Level
- Stealth based level in spite of previously being action based gameplay.
- Gear hidden behind a nearly invisible switch that is required to continue but leaves your escort undefended
- Things that look like levers or puzzle solutions that are just non-functional environment.
- Terrible eye searing colors that makes the level confusing to follow the layout.
- First person platforming (or third person with uncontrollable camera)
- Save point halfway through that leaves the game unwinnable if you hit it at the wrong time
- Quick-time event with the incorrect buttons labelled if you’re foolish enough to have the wrong control scheme.
- Control fuckery just before you need to do something delicate your controls are reversed.
- The easiest solution is a feature that was removed last min or is buggy.
God I swear I’ve played this game. Was it Daikatana?
…and the save game checkpoint is just before a really long journey, with no fast travel, even if you’ve already done it several times and killed everything on the way. Or, alternatively, everything respawns each time you have to make the journey. In fact, let’s make it timed respawning, so that if you don’t kill everything in less than a minute, another set respawns.
Bad collision detection and ballistics; that enemy grunt is protected by a pixelated leaf on a tree, but his pistol has no problem with the concrete wall you’re crouching behind.
It also involves a badly controlled vehicle portion… in addition, the only way to get the good ending of the game and/or the ultimate weapon (~40 hours later, so you won’t know unless you look it up) is to not get hit in said poorly controlled vehicle once. Or course, the enemies have gratuitous autoaim so you have to play the level 30 times just to get the pattern down, and 30 more to account for semi-random AI and get the muscle memory down.
The escort character also refuses to get in the vehicle, so you have to juggle doing your objective and rushing back to protect the suicidal lug.
However, there is a checkpoint! Midway through the fight there is an autosave checkpoint, however due to either a bug or design if you get hit and reload it will still count you as having gotten hit. Did I mention you only have one save file, so if you get hit once in this mission you have to either have backed up your save externally or restart the entire game if you want the good ending?
Some of this may or may not have been inspired by the insipid poison that is 100% Syncing a certain mission involving a screaming wooden deathtrap in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I would like to make it clear that I am not bitter at all. Nope.
Oh, and a shooter-on-rails section, with rapidly decreasing vehicle health, no repairs, 360-degree attacks and no save point until the end.
Crusoe: better yet, mismatched melee. Your weapon can hit at length X, his can hit you from X+5, faster than you can close the gap. Or you can only melee, but he can shoot and backtrack faster than you can move forward. Always loads of fun.
I believe this level needs a timer.
Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800, due to a programming glitch, could not be beaten. Unfortunately, nobody knew that before they spent endless hours playing it trying mightily to beat it.
Every possible level and interaction in Big Rigs. Alex Navarro’s video review is particularly classic.
The games have already been made. Try as you might you’ll never, ever design a level that beats those two, the first for sheer soul-crushing heartbreak and the second for unmitigated disaster in programming.
I see we have lava.
I am, however, disappointed by the lack of crates.
All of which only contain ammo for guns that have previously been taken away, or you haven’t gotten yet.
Ooh, and no matter how powerful you are, how many side quests you’ve finished and how much grinding you’ve done, you can’t actually beat the boss. You have to hit him a certain number of times, after which he laughs at you for being a foolish mortal and zooms away crowing about his superiority. Doesn’t matter that he’s physically incapable of damaging you and you regularly do more damage than he has health. He’ll show up later talking about how badly you fared in your previous encounter.
(This seems to happen a lot in Square Enix games, yet I keep playing them)
Impossible Mission. And we mean it.
Agreed. A very tight timer linked with stupidly precise jumps and stuff you gotta do pretty much by sheer instinct if you ever hope to pass. Like in Stuntman.
But, you know, not a timer that the player can actually see counting down before he dies suddenly from running out of time. (This works nicely with that save point halfway through).