Another vote for moronic jumping puzzles. I was very disappointed with the Xen levels in HL.
I also quite dislike when you’re progressing through the story, when suddenly a scripted event happens, you find yourself unconscious, captured and disarmed and forced to start from scratch. Feels to me like they just ran out of ways to make the game challenging, so they had to nerf the player. Especially annoying since I always hoard ammo and stuff for a rainy day, and then it turns out that rainy day is a scripted event and I’m screwed.
After consulting on-line guides and watching YouTube videos of others’ attempts, I set aside an entire afternoon just to complete that goddamn mission. Luckily, it “only” took me about an hour, with several minutes to cool down in between failed attempts. That was the only mission in which my controller “slipped” out of my hands at 50 mph straight down…
Strangely enough, I had no problems with the driving school, and only a little trouble with the flying school. Plus, I actually liked the one where you ride onto a moving plane - thought it was brilliant. Those RC missions do indeed suck, but I doubt if I’ll ever finish them as I’m not much of a 100% completion guy.
Well, maybe that’s not quite fair. It’s nowhere near the first two, but if it can be gotten cheap you might have some fun. Dwarves blowing the shit out of everything is kind of hard to mess up.
Seconded. In fact, as many times as I’ve addictively played Super Metroid over and over again, I’ve always hated all of Maridia.
The Land of Summoned Monsters from Final Fantasy 2/4. You had to cast Float every time you zoned. It was such a pain. Sure, it was an optional area, but I’m a perfectionist, dammit.
Can’t think of more right now, but I’m sure I will later.
Rock Band 2 - someone decided to include a strobe effect.
When I’m playing those rhythm games, I have a stare that goes straight through the screen and kind of zone out, trying to let the notepath go staight to the fingers without having to stop in the brain to ask directions. It does fine right up until the point where someone flashes a strobe light that goes right through the stare into the cerebellum like a crowbar on a railgun.
A crowbar dipped in acid.
Poisonous acid.
A number of the metal songs are bad for this, but Battery by Metallica is a guaranteed migraine every time. I have to play it again to progress in the World Tour, and the game can sodomise itself with the aforementioned crowbar if it thinks I’m going to bother completing it.
This is what made me quit Twilight Princess. Not that it was a game I LOVED anyway (I hated that stupid stuff with having the wolf find the fairies around town), but that stagecoach escort mission was not only unbeatable, it was one of the most fustrating sequences I’ve ever played in a video game, period. Interestingly enough, the spotlight dungeon section of Wind Waker is what made me quit playing that game too.
Trying to do a perfect game in Psychonauts and getting all the goddamned figments in Mila’s Dance party. Ugh.
The bottom 10 levels or so in Nethack before the elemental planes, with the mazes and the mindflayers. Also getting teleported into a vault, with no pickaxe or anything.
Practically any boss encounter in Conker. “Oh I wonder what random tricky arbitrary sequence of things I have to repeatedly do here? Must have something to do with a can of Pepsi, a goat, and this leotard.”
Man, the Library is my favorite level in that game. I blow the dust off Myth II about once a year, but it’s ultimatly just so I can play that level again. There’s something about turning that nice, flat, pristine courtyard into a charred and smoking abbatoir that just defines what the Myth series was all about.
A close second is the level where you’re fighting a delaying action through the twisty ice canyons.
Yeah, I turned the sound completely down after the 25th time of that.
And I forgot to mention another immensely frustrating part of the PS2 port: the sniper rifle. Even on the lowest sensitivity the analog stick was too responsive. I mean, did they actually have playtesters for that port?
The writing in the game was phenomenal. It really is one of the best games for atmosphere, plot, and storyline, and the bullet-time mechanic was fun, but using the analog sticks for precision motion was frustrating as all get out.
More support for Myth II here. My goodness, after every battle is so sweet - blood, char and once-was-armour-now-is-shrapnel scattered everywhere. Excellent physics, excellent combat management, fucking awesome editors - Fear & Loathing are absolutely fantastic.
Oh, I feel giddy now. I’m picturing fetch lighting bolt dwarf bottles mid flight and sending them flying across the map. An advanced strategy - kicks arse if you’re good at it.
Oh, and the whole twisty little passages thing originated from Adventure/Colossal Cave. Though, that game didn’t have an annoying thief who would move your dropped objects around.
I quite liked the game, and forced myself to keep trying until I finally beat the stagecoach mission. I have yet to start a second playthrough of the game, though, and the only reason is that fucking stagecoach.
(someone else says: the video-game bit in Knights of the Old Republic where you shoot the fighters out in space).
The thing that’s especially annoying about the outer-space fighter-shooting minigame is that you’re dropped into it the first time with no warning, and no chance to save. I had to go back and do the last boss battle on the planet again the first time I hit the video game. At least with the swoop races you can save right before.
(BTW, I never tried losing the first swoop race - the one on the opening planet where the “prize” is the Jedi captive - again and again. What happens if you just never win that race?)
ETA: Oh, and the end game of just about any 4x game, when you have 500 individual troops and 50 cities and about 40000 routine decisions to make.
The ones in the new expansion have been less annoying, especially since they seem to have given up on the whole “three new enemies pop up out of nowhere and attack the escort target” thing. On the other hand, that makes them so easy that it’s hard to see the point.
Yeah, and some of the escortees actually move at a decent pace. You know, like their life is in peril if they linger around the area too long, rather than treating the escape like some sort of stroll thru the park.
Do they fix the part how the escort you are trying to protect runs up to an enemy that is nowhere close enough to attack them if you just walked past them, starts hitting them and then yells “help help they are attacking me!”