Sadly, the latest FIFA is afflicted with the uber-play rubberband offense like Madden. If the game is close in the final minutes, there will be a full field unstoppable untackleable computer play that wades through your defense and walks it in right past your goalie. I feel completely ripped off and probably won’t put in the time to try and enjoy the game on its positive merits.
Pokemon Stadium was infamous for adjusting its random number generator in favour of the computer. It didn’t even try to be subtle about cheating. I guess that was cheaper than developing an actual AI for the game.
Looking at the thread title again, I don’t think Pokemon Stadium qualifies as a “great game”, but the rubberbanding discussion reminded me of this.
Birdie King was my favorite arcade golf game back before Golden Tee showed up on the scene. But it had one horrible thing in the game play, which was not a flaw (maybe its frequency was a flaw). Namely, during random shots on random holes, a BIRD would show up out of nowhere right after your swing, hitting the ball so it would drop straight down. Instant loss of stroke. Yeah, that happens to me all the time IRL.
(bolding mine in quote)
Hence the name? 
Psychonaughts - this wonderful, glorious game that I really really loved kept leading me a merry dance before smacking me into a brick wall. There’s a part in it (which actually has its own thread around here somewhere) where you have to do this jump that is absolutely impossible. To add insult to injury to get into position to try said impossible jump you have to do two minutes of dull, repetitive jump onto bar, swing onto bar, swing onto other bar, jump onto ledge, shimmy along ledge, walk along tightrope, power jump up to roof, try impossible jump and fall and have to do it all over again. Rinse and repeat.
After what must have been the 40th time I gave up, bitter in the knowledge that I was leaving behind a game that I thought was stellar but which clearly didn’t want me to keep playing it.
Max Payne had those dream sequences with the mazes. Great game, really fun and innovative, but when the second maze came up, I turned it off.
As mentioned in a couple other threads, the Temple of the Ocean King in The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. After every level or two, you have to go back, do the whole thing over again, and then a couple new levels. I think there’s 14(?) in all? At one point you get to warp right to the sixth level, but that one is one of the worst! You have to keep going between that floor and another one, wait for floating blocks to come by, grab keys from certain areas and bring them back. Couldn’t they at least have made the warp the next level?
ETA: Forgot to mention MY peeve about GTA:SA. It’s another plane level, but for me, it was the Harrier jet (or was it a helicopter?) level. You had to hover around, fire missles, then move, hover some more, etc…From what I understand, it’s not hard on the PS2 version, because of where the buttons are mapped on the controller, but it was damn near impossible to do on the PC with a keyboard.
Dear God. No wonder you hated it - I can’t imagine playing any of the GTA games with a keyboard.
Saitek P990 Dual Analog pad - $10 and uber-comfortable.
What was wrong with it? I can’t remember what that bit was like, but I loved the game overall from what I remember.
Yep, I remember that thread; as I recall, I advised that the wall really isn’t as tough when you realize that you can climb either the outside or the inside of the wall, and the inside is much easier. Watch this video starting at about 5:26 to see how to get around to the inside.
I want to add Bioshock to this thread. Great game, and I’ve enjoyed it very much, but the vita-chamber system makes things far too easy. Basically, any time you die, you’ll be reconstituted at the nearest vita-chamber, instantly. There’s no cost for it, no penalty at all, and any enemies you were fighting are still wounded, so they’re even easier to defeat this time. So basically, there’s no consequence for failure. I thought that was ridiculous and turned the damn things off in the preferences so that I’d at least have something of a challenge.
About any game that was written for a platform and then moved to PC without the option to remap keys.
This is specially fun if you have a keyboard layout different from whatever the morons doing the keymapping were using. Or if what’s bound isn’t the keys but the symbols and those symbols that would be easily accesible on the programmer’s keyboard require a shift or even an alt-graph on mine.
A different but related case: one of the details I hated in City of Heroes was that when I remapped the keys to fit my Spanish keyboard, the keys would be read correctly on the play screen but display incorrectly on the list of binds.
Example: say that semicolon is bound to something. On a Spanish keyboard, that means “shift+,”, the key that has “,” and “;” is the one to the right of “m”. Let’s say I go and rebind that to the “ñ” key: now it’s to the right of “l” and I don’t need a shift… but the keybinds list still displays “;” (which is what a US keyboard has to the right of “l”) Aurghhhh!
I did try to follow the various advice in that thread but it didn’t seem to work. The vid you’ve linked to isn’t the situation I was referring to either (you’ve posted the meat circus). However I did find this which does show how to do it (if you watch from 2.30 onwards). Maybe I’ll go back to it as I really did enjoy that game.
While this was not a game-breaking flaw as I loved the game otherwise, Dragon Quest 8 had one horrible flaw. This was a lengthy RPG in which for nearly the first third of the game you could not resurrect your companions during battle. And you only had four companions, no switching anybody out.
Around the end of the first third, AFTER the first big boss as I recall, you cdould purchase a leaf to resurrect your comrades - for 1000g. In a game where new weapons would eventually cost several thou. Eventually two people would gain a spell that would resurrect them. However, the lower level of this spell only had a 50% chance. So if your girl - who had ridiculously low hitpoints, and joined the party late, too - died, you could spend several turns trying to get herback up.
Finally about halfway through the game, you’d get a spell that would guaranteed resurrect them. Ugh. This thing did make me quit the first time through, as I had been relying on being able to do it.
Doom 3. Space Marines don’t carry Maglites, they have lights on their helmets.
Quake 4 and Assassin’s Creed - Many scenes where I could’ve kill the enemy using the element of surprise in half the time it took for the cut scene to play out where I ran out cluelessly into the middle of the enemy’s field of view, making an easy corridor difficult for what they think is dramatic impact, but really is just super fucking annoying.
Wind Waker moves along at a brisk pace for most of the game. Right up until after you play through…
…that one dungeon with the leaf spirit and the other with a… water spirit or something? Memory is fuzzy.
Immediately after that, you are informed that, oh, hey, you actually have to sail all around the world and collect 8 Triforce shards.
Also, they’re hidden.
Oh, and to find them, you have to first find the 8 Triforce charts that tell you where they are.
The charts are also hidden.
And you can’t read them. You have to take them to Tingle and have them translated for you. And you have to pay.
And the cost for getting all 8 charts translated is more than you can hold in your wallet.
I was absolutely flabbergasted. Like I said, I shut the game off for four years, and did the same just last year. A shame, too, because I love the game up to that point.
I read somewhere that there were two full-fledged dungeons that had to be cut late in development because they weren’t going to be finished in time for the game to make its scheduled release date. The Triforce-gathering segment was a last minute replacement for the scrapped dungeons, which is why it feels so half-baked compared to the rest of the game.
Jet Force Gemini for the Nintendo 64.
Once of RARE’s last outings for the Nintendo 64 this game had everything going for it. Great controls, beautiful environments, multiple characters, cool weapons, expansive massive levels.
One problem, the game was huge and elaborate but gave little to no direction as to where or what the player was supposed to do next. You were left wandering in these massive levels not knowing if you were progressing through the game or not or what your current objective was.
And, the frogurt is also cursed.
I remember that now, as you described. I think my love of the series got me through it, that and possibly having done some of that ground work before while aimlessly sailing around.
Elder scrolls: Oblivion was an incredible game apart from its leveling and monster spawning system. It was a skill based game with skills that leveled up when you used them, every 10 skill levels would raise your character level which would make ALL monsters in the world tougher. The problem was a grand mayority of the skills did not help you at all in being able to kill those monsters, things like running, swimming, jumping and even haggling were all skills. This lead to incredibly overpowered monsters you were simply not able to handle if you didn’t manage to level up using the right set of skills making the game impossible after some point.
That’s how I did it too. I don’t think any amount of fancy flying helps. You just have to let the jet catch up to you.
The RC plane mission is from Zero’s shop and doesn’t actually need to be completed to finish the game.
I thought the worst San Andreas mission was the one where you end up in the bottom of the open-pit mine and you have to use a motorbike to make a series of complicated jumps on all the equipment in order to get out. What a pain in the ass!
Second least favorite has to be the mission where you have to ride your motorbike onto the back of a jet that is taking off while the guys on the jet throw barrels at you.
There were some ultra bitchy driving and flying school missions too, especially the helicopter test where you have to blow up 3 trucks that are sitting still and then immediately turn around and blow up 2 that are running away.