It was rez that took the Essence Emerald. Corpse summon needed a store-bought reagent.
I knew someone would know. Yes that’s it. I can’t believe I ever beat that game without a walkthrough. I guess I just had more time on my hands in those days.
Oh yes, The Immortal! I remember that one, it must have been one of the first games I ever had. I remember being impressed by the level of detail in the graphics, and I liked the fighting mode – whenever your character had an encounter of some sort, you’d go to a separate screen showing only you and your enemy, and there you’d duke it out, left swing, right swing, dodge, and kill. Not surprisingly for a game that reliant on death traps, a lot of creativity went into devising your death scenes (YouTube link).
The last level of GTA: San Andreas is stupidly hard and complicated and if you fail at any point it’s back to the beginning. Here’s how it goes:
Drive to Big Smoke’s crackhouse. There is a firefight going on between a SWAT team and gang bangers. To get through the door you have to steal the SWAT APC. So you have to take out the cops and gang members. No sweat, done that a million times by now.
Bust through the door with the APC. Several men await you inside but you can run them over.
First floor. Fight a million dicks.
Second floor. Fight a million dicks.
Third floor. Fight a million dicks.
Fourth floor. Fight Big Smoke, who can survive about half an hour of pounding with your strongest weapon because he has body armor on. Apparently the body armor protects his face somehow. Oh, also while fighting him, fight off random flunkies who come into the room. During the fight Smoke turns the lights out so you have to fight him and his guys in the dark.
If you finally defeat Smoke (not too hard, he’s a bad shot) then Officer Tenpenny comes for you. He taunts you and then sets the whole place on fire as he leaves. So now you’re stuck on the top floor of a burning building and you have to go back the way you came.
Unfortunately for you, the three million dicks you killed on your way up are back and much harder to spot in the smoke and darkness. Not only that, your path is fully blocked by fire in several places and you have to use a fire extinguisher to put these little blazes out. This leaves you totally vulnerable to enemy fire, which can be described as withering.
Did I mention you also have a 4 minute time limit? That’s right, take too long getting out and the building collapses on your head!
So assuming you survive the fight you now get to do the chase. Officer Tenpenny has taken off in a fire truck but your brave brother has grabbed onto the ladder and won’t let go for a least a couple of minutes! You give chase in an old car that is about as fast as the firetruck is, making it damn near impossible to catch up. Tenpenny leads you all over town. This is all taking place during a riot so you are also having to deal with a constant barrage of molotov cocktails. They don’t damage your vehicle but they can flip it over and that’s unrecoverable fail right there. They’re also distracting.
So half an hour later you’re still chasing Tenpenny (he drives across half the goddamn game) and you have to close the distance so your brother can fall on the hood because if he falls onto the road he dies immediately (even though you can fall from way way way higher and survive). Assuming you can catch him, he will start driving so that you can shoot cops off your tail. This goes on for about half an hour too. Finally, after Tenpenny has driven everywhere he finally crashes and dies. End of storyline. Insanely tough and not particularly rewarding as you don’t even get to kill the bad guy.
Huh… I really enjoyed that finale for GTA, but I musta been REALLY lucky, because I recall doing that whole thing in one straight shot (the Chase sequence). The Big Smoke sequence I don’t really recall too much, but I remember the finale fight was great as it was basically me vs. Sam Jackson, but i managed to do it all on my first try…
Maybe I got really lucky?
Also unique in that it’s a game known for it’s PAUSE SCREEN MUSIC.
Perhaps you did the firefighter missions. It’s apparently a lot easier to take down the crackhouse if you’re fireproof.
And one thing that has always dismayed me about GTA:SA is that while Samuel L Jackson plays yet another bad mofo you never really get to take him on- his character never appears in the gameplay, only in cutscenes.
You’re not alone then. I actually beat San Andreas on Sunday finally (the game bugged out on me on my first play through a few years ago in the Las Vegas section so that I could no longer receive missions) and while the last mission was long, I can’t say I had any real problems with it. That was without fireproof as well. The autotargetting locked onto Smoke’s head and he went down in two clips from the M4 without that much trouble. Getting out the building wasn’t that hard since I just cleared the rooms of enemies before putting out the files. The fire truck was pokey and they put you in a decent car with reasonable handling so I wasn’t swerving all over the road. And the cops in the last segment didn’t do that much damage as I picked everyone off. It’s long but not really exceptionally challenging if you take your basic preparations. You even get a complete health and armor refresh on each floor.
I suspect that DWMarch might not have worked his way up to hitman level with his weapons (not that hard to do when you’re taking territory, which is also a really convenient way to build up a few thousand rounds for your M4 before that last mission). There were much worse missions in that game like some of the flight ones.
Oh come on. That hoverbike level with the ramps and walls and so on was a friggin’ deathtrap. You had to know it by heart and make the perfect sequence of split-second position changes, or bam, dead…and start again from square one.
That game is the only one of which I can say “it cost me a controller”. I threw it at the wall. On the plus side, I now know what the inside of a NES controller looks like 
As to GTA San Andres, the endgame wasn’t that hard, but you’ll give everyone a shiver if you mention the last FUCKING Red Baron mission for the nerd. Piloting that thing all across Frisco trying to shoot down bikes zipping around, on a limited fuel supply, and then going back ? With the fucking awful flying controls ? GAAAAAAAAH.
And back in Vice City, there was The Driver mission - racing a crack pilot in a racing car with whatever you can manage to get your hands on FAST because he doesn’t wait for you, with all the cops in town chasing JUST YOU ? Oh, what fun.
Me too. I actually found it anti-climactic because it was too easy. DWM, you know there was body armor at the start of every floor, right?
The mission where you had to take back Mad Dogg’s house was much harder.
I nearly gave up the game at this point. It was literally “one more try and I’m done with it”. The strangest thing happened. He sped away as usual, but this time evidentally outran the scenery/draw distance. I came up on him part way through the race with his car half buried in the road and totally stuck. After that, the race was a breeze just dealing with the cops.
Metal Gear Solid (I think) had a Boss (Psycho Mantis?) which the player could only defeat by switching the controller from one socket to the other. Not the hardest deathtrap ever, but I have no idea how people were supposed to figure that out.
You couldn’t do it with two controllers?
He’s actually beatable without doing that. I kept at him for a long time until I figured out his pattern and when he’s vulnerable for a brief second, then just whittled him down in a long fight.
Ignorance fought. I never actually tried it myself, just watched a friend do it. He was convinced it was the only way, but obviously, it was not.
Ah, but there *was *a way to figure it out : call your advisors on the radio - they’d always give you hints during boss fights, the do’s and don’ts, which weapons to use etc… I don’t remember the specifics, but I think after one or two tries the Colonel would go “As long as you keep using that controller, he’ll read your every move !!” or something to that effect. The entire MGS series breaks the fourth wall quite matter of factly
And of course, his whole “hmmm, you like to save often… And you enjoy that other game, don’t you ?!” routine was a clue that Mantis was using the game system itself.
No, the real idiotic, friggin’ asshole “deathtrap” in this game was the “call Meryll using the radio code on the back of the CD case !”. Which is great when a friend loaned you the game. Or you lost the friggin’ box. Or, in my case, when the dialogue is badly translated in French and ends up saying “the radio code on the back of the manual !” (or maybe it was on the back of the CD itself, I don’t remember all that well - but I do remember my friend and I spent a whole week stuck on that stupid riddle, in the days before everyone had Internet and GameFAQs.
Super mario frustration. My patience wouldn’t last long here.
You guys are playing on console, aren’t you? The advantage of the PC is that you can move around much more smoothly but you lose the ability to lock on to enemies. I had hitman on all the best weapons. It didn’t matter.
Another game that comes to mind is Soldier of Fortune: Payback. The last level is incredibly, stupidly hard. It’s literally take three steps, get ambushed, die. Take three steps, get ambushed, die. For the whole level. And then you get to fight an almost invincible boss that kills you from full health in two shots. However, I suspect most people never saw that boss because they never got past the Hind helicopter boss that you have to pound on for about an hour with your best weapon before he even begins to smoke. Now that game was a deathtrap!
I have it on PC and PS2 and I didn’t notice any appreciable difference in the difficulty… and you can still lock onto enemies.
Did you play it with a mouse and keyboard or something? THAT would be hard. I just use a Dual Shock clone pad.
I just wanted to say I love this thread. I don’t play these tough games but I do like watching them. (Jumping games pretty much turn me off immediately.) I watched all of the videos linked, though. Awesome!