I agree with this completely. I’ve abandoned the game at this point, after being ridiculously excited about it, because my character got stronger and stronger in the wrong areas without being able to do more damage to even the most basic enemies. This flies in the face of everything about RPG’s, where a major part of the fun is building up your characters.
I’m a bit iffy about platform games for the N64. I’ve tried DK64, Mario 64 and Jet Force Gemini. They were all a bit, fiddly, for want of a better word, to control. That and the camera options, which weren’t that great.
I agree with your point about direction, DK64 suffered from that too.
EDIT: Editing to add Syndicate for the PC/SNES. Once your agents went inside a building, that was it, you had to fire and walk blindly. Send four guys in, fully tooled up against one enemy agent they need to assassinate and its quite comedic. Flail around with the mouse and hit him if you can, sometimes its better to find a rocket launcher to use on them from a distance than to run in with miniguns blazing.
But, don’t use the persuadatron (a device that completely hypnotises someone to follow you) by mistake, you might think it a good idea to order the silly sod outside and then shoot him, but once “persuaded”, you can’t shoot them.
Iif you make yourself some good weapons then most enemies are easy to dispatch.
You basically need Umbra for catching souls and a weapon enchanted with weakness to magic, weakness to fire, and fire damage (you can use any elemental weakness/damage combo, not just fire.) With a weapon like that most creatures go down in less than five hits. The problem then is that it’s too easy, which was my beef with it.
It’s also one of those games which can become so easy on second run (once you’ve figured out how to minmax which skills level you, and those low-level places where you can get indecently good items) that it can be a bit ridiculous.
Every game should be easier the second time around - but so much?
No, I didn’t finish it twice. I started it, got frustrated with the leveling system, analyzed how it worked, minmaxed a second char and just bounced my way through it.
Yeah on master system there was a hocky game i was to play and if u where 3/4 of the way down the screen and went all the way from one side of the screen to teh other u could score a gole 100% of the time. Was a pain in the ass when u where playing a real person and they would do it, so u would start doing it then the game would just end up seeing who could do it the most.
There is also somthing simular to that in the old fifa games on com. Never liked them that much so didn’t really bother me
I found it easyer to play GTA on the computer. I prefer it. The shooting is so much better and you have more controll.
I bet you play your games primarily on the computer anyways.
That’s another annoying thing. It’s totally possible to start gathering TriForce shards right off the bat. Had the game simply told you about it right away and made the shard-hunt something that was spread throughout and maybe something that you needed to advance to the next dungeon or something, it would have been fine. It might even have encouraged more exploration of that ghastly overworld.
But they didn’t. They didn’t mention one word of it until they dump the whole thing in your lap, slaughtering the (quite compelling) momentum of the game and, for me, ending it.
God damn Wind Waker.
You can blow them up with a time bomb, though.
My absolute, ironclad, solid gold champion of the universe of all time in this category…Wishbringer. It was the only “Introductory level” game Infocom ever released, designed to give non-fanatical, non-mega-hardcore, non-map and explore text adventures inside and out and sign up for the BBS and subscribe to the newsletter and buy the hintbook players a fun, NON-murderously difficult text adventure experience. Unfortunately, there was a slight problem…nowhere in the game does it give even the tiniest hint as to where the Wishbringer is! And of course, that very item is required to complete the game. Nothing. No hint, no premonition, no guidance, nothing, nothing, nothing.
This dropped my estimation of this game from “most enjoyable text adventure ever” to “just another colossal waste of time”. This was what convinced me that I was a total sap if I ever went through another adventure game without being spoonfed each and every hint beforehand*. Think about that.
Honorable mention to Dynasty Warriors 4 Empires. Three things, actually: 1. Have to pick policies in pairs. Ham-handed, frustrating, and what’s the damn point, anyway? 2. Constant whining about not being sent into battle recently or not having ones policies picked recently from the officers. 3. (the worst) A territory that invades you CANNOT BE INVADED THAT TURN. That means if the same territory attacks over and over and over, you have no choice but to meekly defend and defend and defend, gaining jack squat every time, or give up the territory without a fight. One of those outrages that shouldn’t have made it past the first round of playtesting. Sooooo stupid. (Here’s an improvement; if a territory invades and you defend successfully, you gain the territory. If you invade and fail, you lose a random territory.) DW5E is much better mainly because it fixes this ridiculous screwups.
Someone mentioned it earlier, and I have to second it: The blood trail mazes in Max Payne. I didn’t think it was that great a game to begin with, but these just about killed it. Oh, and the tightrope sequences that made up like a third of the game were no fun either. Just one of those things, like the Riven marble board, that anyone with five brain cells should be able to instantly say “No, horrible idea.” I had this game for all of a week, and I was all ready to throw it away after running into the second maze. (And then once I finally got to the end, I threw it away for good.)
Finally, Castlevania. Anyone who thinks that SNK invented hideously impossible bosses should get to the end of this. The last boss is The Count (he wasn’t definitively called Dracula until the sequel), a freely warping enemy whom you could only get one hit on at a time, two if you were lucky, and who often teleported right on top of you. He takes 16 hits; you’re dead after four. If you somehow manage to beat him, congrats…now you get to face the REAL final boss, who also takes 16 hits, and even better, you don’t recover any life. Some think Dracula being really easy to beat in the sequel was a letdown. I call it atonement.
'Kay, that’s about it…everything else was either crap to begin with or had a laundry list of flaws, not just one.
- Yeah, yeah…look, in Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, there’s a decision path where allowing yourself to get shot results in a simpler endgame. I’ve lost all hope of programmers ever getting it right.
Eh? The can rattles now and then. And the old woman insisted on giving it to you.
All you folks complaining about Oblivion being too hard or too easy do know there’s a difficulty slider bar, right?
Works in real time (so you can adjust it whenever you want it to change), and can turn the game from “sneeze and every monster within a city block drops dead” to “you’ll be lucky if you even get to see what killed you” in a second or two – and a couple hundred increments in between.
Yeah though I generally feel that a game should be about right for a casual gamer at the default difficulty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really complaining about it being easy, it’s only easy while you have one or two monsters, if you happen across a swarm you still get into trouble even with a wicked weapon. I quite like Oblivion but I think I ultimately need a bit more direction, I tend to get sidetracked by quests and then lose focus in the game and lose the desire to keep playing it.
Speaking of old games with ridiculous difficulty, that reminds me of Ghosts and Goblins. I play it sometimes on Gametap, but still never get past the 2nd stage.
I’m still pissed at Masters of Magic. Great concept, and great development potential. But the !@#$% AI would always rest their entire army ONE SQUARE outside of a city, letting you just walk in and take it!
At the risk of bragging, The Count isn’t actually that hard to beat. While I can’t remember the pattern he follows, he does, like the vast majority of video game bosses from that era, follow a pattern, and once you learn it, it’s quite possible to beat him without getting hit. It only took me about an hour to figure it out and beat him, having never played the rest of the game, when my friends in college couldn’t do it (you get to restart almost at the end every time).
Lynn Bodoni - That’s it?? That’s how I was to supposed to discover the secret??
Don’t forget that there’s a rattlesnake in the can, and that said animal is necessary to even reenter the town (even better, the empty can clatters to the ground after you’ve employed it. There’s nothing to indicate that you’re supposed to pick up the can again and do something with it.
“A rattlesnake wouldn’t have enough space to rattle in the can.” Excuse me? This is a place where seagulls know wizardry, cemetery gates open and close on their own, tree stumps have hinges, mailboxes are ambulatory and sentient, oversized footwear serves on the police force, and movie theaters show live events in 3D, and I’m supposed to somehow just assume that this is the one place in the entire game where real-world logistics are obeyed to the letter?
So an absolutely critical, can’t-miss item is buried under layers upon layers of mystery, with not another clue given at ANY point anywhere later in the game. I’m sorry, but this is completely, utterly wrong. Infocom, in effect, put one unbelievably obscure, nebulous, insanely difficult task in a game where every other problem can be overcome with some thought and/or effort, which is infinitely worse than making the entire game obscure and nebulous.
For about 98% of the game, I loved it. I left feeling utterly cheated and ripped off. If that doesn’t meet the OP’s criteria, what does? (Go ahead and read my writeup of this on GameFAQs if you like, where I pull no punches about what I feel about this decision.)
iamthewalrus - Yes, yes, of course there are patterns. Death had patterns, and I was able to beat him I found them. Not every time, but I could definitely hack it with enough attempts. That said, I would never in a million years consider Death an easy foe, and I can never see The Count as anything but a nightmare.
Look, you gotta understand…I honest-to-god considered the NES to be kid-friendly. I was in high school at the time and thrilled as punch at the sheer number of games that didn’t require monklike dedication or godlike reactions. Everything up to The Count was at least managable. Tight at points, but managable. It was a hell of a game. And then Konami…really hit 'n miss for nearly its entire history…decides to throw in this 32-bar near-unhittable juggernaut. When that body exploded and my elation turned into dismay when I realized I was only half done, all I could ask was, “Why? Who the hell thought this was a good idea?”
I would be asking that many, many more times through the 16- and 32-bit eras, and all for games that you and a million others wouldn’t consider to be much trouble. (And my family was in awe of my skills. No joke.)
Antinor01 - Yeah, that was unbelievable, and Ghouls 'n Ghosts was, if anything, even more ridiculous. No wonder Capcom took so long to revive the series. On the plus side, it’s games like this that inspired the creation of the Game Genie, easily one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of console gaming. 
I guess that what’s obvious to one person isn’t obvious to another. The first thing I did when I got the can was open it in the magic shop, and then on my way down the foggy hilltop. I had problems with the statue of a cat, I didn’t realize just what that hole in its forehead was meant for.
Yeah, but why should you even have to touch it? Or push it all the way to “biscuits and tea” for your first run and “Dirty Harry” for your second?
I played BF1942 (mostly desert combat) for many many hours. So I was excited about the release of BF2.
Except… the thing you describe is such mind-bogglingly stupid design that I could no longer play the game. Every time I heard that stuff, I immediately thought how stupid and annoying it was, and it became nails on chalkboard for me. It just got worse and worse until I couldn’t play.
I went to BF2 boards asking for some sort of solutions, a console command, delete the sound file, anything. Nothing.
Funny thing is - there’s a voice volume level option in the game, and all it controls is the volume of the tutorial voice you hear maybe once or twice. So the thing that barely matters at all has its own volume slider, but a CRITICAL GAME BREAKING ANNOYANCE THAT YOU ARE CONSTANTLY BOMBARDED WITH does not.
Dice makes a game that’s 95% fun but the other 5% is so HORRIBLY STUPID WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?!?!? bad design that you can’t even have fun with the good 95%.