Oh shit oh shit, I can’t believe I forgot to mention:
Myth: The Dark Ages and Myth 2: Soulblighter
the RTT (real time tactics - not real time strategy) from Bungie.
God dammit…those games were so fucking hard it’s insane. Even on the easiest levels, you have to micromanage each troop to succeed. When I first played it I thought it would be like Warcraft. I saw like two small enemy monsters coming, and selected a unit of five or so knights to attack them. All my guys were slaughtered. It wasn’t until later I realized you have to use intricate tactics, retreating, alternating archers and dwarves, constantly selecting and deselecting and moving different units, even in a minor skirmish. The bad guys will lure your guys into traps, the AI will work as a team to confuse and misdirect you. Wow! I could never enjoy a conventional RTS after playing that game. But Jesus, is it frustrating!
It was either 2000 or 2001, I can’t remember exactly which one. A friend of mine pointed it out to me. He was playing a full length season, and noticed that if he was winning comfortably, the AI would always make a superhuman comeback, hitting freakishly long home runs your comfortable lead was no more. We also noticed it in the “extreme home run derby” (the one where you got points for hitting objects). The length of the home runs were what made us think the game was deliberately making things more “challenging”, they were about as long as when we would use the home run cheat when playing eachother (650 ft or more).
I had the PC version of “Triple Play Baseball” (no year in the title, came out in 2001 I believe) and I noticed the same thing.
I should’ve been MUCH more specific–most of the Arbiter mission is pretty beatable, and pretty fun too. The part that’s killing me is where you actually have to destroy the Heretic Leader, and he has two holograms who can kill you just as fast–and you can’t tell the difference except by hitting one of the two holograms and watching it die.
The problem is that they were in Chinese for a while and only released in that part of the globe (to my knowledge). When it goes down enough in price, I’ll buy a Playstation 2 just for Romance of the Three Kingdoms 10.
If you have a way to get some translated or know something I don’t, please lemme know.
Oh my fucking god. That boss is such a pain on Legendary. On Legendary, he spawns the same amount of holograms, and they’re all cocksuckers, but he’ll disappear up into the tubes by the ceiling and come back down. Then he’ll re-fucking-spawn the holograms and you get to do the dance over again. He’ll also run up there and make you redo it all if he gets too damaged, so you’ve got to come out like a crazed wolverine and fuck his world up good and fast.
Last time I played it on Legendary, I think I spent almost an hour on that boss alone.
My BIL loaned me the game after he threw his mega-sized turbo-controller at his living room wall, leaving a big hole. He said it was time to put it away when it made him THAT angry.
My brother put it this way: "Are you sure this thing is called a Mother BRAIN?
It weirds me the hell out to play modern games. I’m just conditioned to reload to a previous save if I fail - it took me ages to figure out that I don’t have to do that in, like, Bully - I can just keep trying! Time doesn’t move forward, I don’t really lose anything, I can just try again. Crazy. Kids today don’t know nothin’ 'bout falling down a hole and dying.
The Atari Impossible Mission was quite literally impossible in the US version. Too bad because the concept was cool for the time (but quite dated now).
Yep. I stalled out on Mother Brain herself for years before I came up with a strategy that worked. It’s yet another boss that’s incredibly hard until you come up with the “right” way to beat it.
I’ll add one from the old days of the Commie 64: Alien. Yep, based on the movie.
Basically, you got the setup from the movie. There are seven crew members. At the beginning, one random crew member is killed by the alien (it’s not always Kane, the first one to die in the movie). So, you start off on a real high note there. After that, your mission is to complete the game in the best way you can manage. The best you can hope for is killing the alien (I never managed it, despite attacking it with lasers and opening the airlock it was in to blow it outside).
Failing that, you have to set the self-destruct and abandon ship. But the shuttle can only hold three people, and it won’t launch if it detects anything alive on the ship (the alien isn’t detected as a living thing), so you’ll have to capture the ship’s cat and wait for three crew members to die. Oh, did I mention that one random crew member is an android (not always Ash) and may freak out at any moment and start attacking the crew? Yeah, there’s that too. And as the attacks go on and they get hurt or frightened, the crew gets more and more panicked, and their hearts race, and they may break from your control and flee to a random location on the ship before you can find them again.
The highest score I ever got was 20%. If the alien makes it back to Earth, you get 0%.
The first Discworld game is insanely difficult. Legends speak of the notorious “Babel Fish Puzzle.” Forget about it. In Discworld 1, the whole game is as maddeningly involved as getting the Babel Fish, only you don’t get to do it all in one room. You have to run all over Ankh-Morpork. And the puzzles really are very clever “lateral thinking excercises.”
A similar thing happens in EA’s football games like NCAA and Madden. It’s especially prevalent if you’re playing low difficulty and blowing the game out by like 60 points. When you get down the last two minutes of either half the AI can turn a team of scrubs into freaking all-stars.
Pass, 18 yards. Pass, 12 yards. Sack. Run, 4 yards. Pass, 34 yards. Pass, 15 yard out-route goes the distance because your safety is sitting with his thumb up his butthole. It’s not like you’ll lose the game but it gets frustrating as hell when your the AI just turns your defense into so many tackling dummies.
Oh, certainly there were glitches (none of the specialized swords (Rune, Dragon, Coral, etc.) actually work any better against their supposed targets, not just Ice). But at the time you got those swords, their base damage was still often enough for one-hit-kills. And those Gas Dragons were insane, but they only showed up very briefly, and if you were lucky, you wouldn’t encounter any. As for spells, there was almost never a need to use them, aside from FAST and your most powerful CURE spell during boss battles. There were a ton of items which cast spells, and you could use them as much as you wanted.
Someone mentioned Myth II, and that was mostly just a matter of playstyle. I like playing games like that, and caught on quickly. Plus, if your units survive battles, they get experience, and start needing much less babysitting. Still, though, there were some specific levels that nearly drive me insane. I think that the first time I finished the mission where you recruit the Trow, I was hearing those thudding footsteps in my head for three hours afterwards.
Of my collection of games, there’s only two I’ve never finished.
The first was Prince of Persia - Warrior Within, and the second was Prince of Persia - The Two Thrones.
Loved the games, but could never get through the endings. I hated how the ends were designed to be a die-then-reload type of adventure in order to get through the fights, rather than be the style where you might be able to get through it the first time.
Ah…the “No Fucking Way” drive. Nothing you can do stops them. Zone? Nah. Man? Nah. Zone blitz? Nah. What If I use the playmaker control and bring someone completely unexpected? Nope. They just slowly drive down the field and you get to watch your defense, which was flawless up until now, get obliterated by the Neo-Favre.