Kya: Dark Lineage - Jumping through these fans and free falling through obstacles. If you hit one thing, you are dead…and the camera is very poor. It’s blocked by the red lines of “wind” that come off you. Hard to explain, but you can see a guy do it easily in the video.
Shinx and the Cursed Mummy - Geb Queen Boss Battle
Now, this one I played on the Gamecube and the frustration came from the frame rate dropping to painfully slow. Also, the enemies the Geb Queen(watch the whole video) generates never stop generating. Therefore, you end up having to fight the side enemies more than her, and her weakness is only revealed so briefly it is impossible.
I actually kept my save past this point last time I played it so I can skip it next time.
I just checked and this video does not show the true frustration of it, but here it is.
The part in Final Fantasy IX where you are controlling Cid in frog form and have to take the key from in front of some kind of monster. You have to repeatedly tap a button to inch closer, but if you tap when the monster is turned towards you, you get “caught” and have to start over again. It’s maddening.
Also, in order to make the ultimate weapon for one of the characters in Final Fantasy X you have to play “lightning dodging” which requires running around the world map for a while, and when the screen flashes you have to hit X immediately to jump out of the way of the lightning bolt. You have to do this 100 times in a row to win.
I actually found lightning dodging to be pretty easy, especially if you go one screen north from Rin’s travel agency and stay near the south exit. You don’t have to run around, either, just stay still and wait for the flash. That way you don’t get interrupted by random battles (doesn’t hurt to equip something with No Encounters, just in case). It probably takes about 10 minutes or so to get 200 in a row.
I thought the butterfly catching (never finished that one) and the “get less than 0 seconds in the chocobo race” (did it ONCE, mostly by luck) were much more maddening minigames.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
There’s a mission where you have to fly an RC Airplane with a limited amount of fuel. It was frustrating as hell because it was so hard to complete the goals of the mission and have enough fuel remaining to get the plane back where it belongs. It is the largest and most glaring flaw in an otherwise excellent game.
You basically had no control over where you were going. You could use the spell “wind change” but you still moved randomly. You had to land on a little piece of land in the middle of a mountain range. At least you couldn’t land on the mountain, so you could keep hitting “land” when you got close. What really made it annoying, imho, was after you got to the secret spot, an opening appeared in a dungeon you cleared previously.
Street Fighter bonus rounds:
They were monotonously boring, couldn’t skip it, and the only thing more boring was waiting for the timer to run out (at least in the car destruction and the flaming barrel destruction rounds, you could finish it faster by destroying them faster.)
**GTA: IV. **
Holy shit did that game make me miserable. I even started a threadabout it hoping there were cheat codes or whatnot to bypass the endless, endless, endless driving. I post #7Gorsnack warned me about the mission Catch the Wave. I believed him, mostly, but was still having fun with the rest of the game. Then I got to it. What. The. Fuck.
Other missions were mind-numbingly tedious in their setup. Pegorino’s Pride made you stand in a fucking driveway and wait, then drive all across Brooklyn every time you restarted the mission. But Catch the Wave?
Restarting the mission took seven minutes with nothing to do but drive across town. Seven minutes. Not seven minutes where you can go get a snack, but you had to fucking drive. Seven minutes of sitting there, tooling across town just to start the mission. Which lasts about ten seconds because the escort part of the mission (grr) gets himself killed right away.
I’d liked to have kept with it to figure out how to keep Phil alive and finish the mission. I love a challenge–that’s why I was playing in the first time. But not when a game punishes you by making you sit there for seven minutes between every replay.
I abandoned the game at that mission. Not because it was too hard, but it was too boring.
In teenage mutant ninja turtles for nintendo, there is a small platform where you have to get from one ledge to another. If you jump too high, you hit the ceiling and fall thru the gap. You are supposed to WALK across the tiny gap. If you jump, it’s impossible. There is no visual indication that you are meant to not jump across from the ledge. There is no other gap you can walk across in the game. It took hours to figure out how to get across. Damn.
I, too, hated the chocobo race and the butterfly catching game. In the middle of a perfectly fine RPG, I should waste my time like this? Oh, how I missed the days of the Golden Saucer.
There was this older game, Medieval and Medieval II. I loved the games, but in the second one they had a timed mission where I had to run around and do…something, in a certain amount of time. I fucking hate timed missions almost as much as I hate escort missions, unless they give you PLENTY of time*. I only eventually ended up beating it with a few seconds to spare.
I’m sure I’ll think of more, but I generally don’t like it when I am playing some game or other and suddenly it turns into a jumping platform game (I’m looking at you, Baldur’s Gate on the PS2).
*Funny enough, I never minded it with the traps in Prince of Persia. I felt if you had to do a timed mission, that was the way to do it.
Hunh. I really liked these segments. They serve as a nice change of pace, they make for some flashy scenes with all the acrobatics and narrow escapes, they hang a nice in-setting reason onto why you can’t backtrack after some bits, and they make the ‘good ending’ battle with the Dahaka all the more satisfying after you’ve spent so long in fear of it.
The visual indication is that the ceiling is all of one pixel over your head and there’s no room to jump. Be glad the game teaches you to that early in a low-risk setting, because they use that single tile gap in later levels to make for some fiendishly difficult jumps while under attack. The NES TMNT game was very difficult, but much more so because the entire game was an endurance test due to the scarcity of the pizza & prisoner pickups and how they were usually stuck in places more challenging than the straight route.
That video is awesome. “Now how the hell am I supposed to get up there?” - an easy solution demonstrated 10 seconds later. Yeah, that’s how. He rants about the one tile gap at 5:10, but at 3:42 he walked across two one-tile gaps in a row, so he obviously already knew the gimmick. It’s so perfectly edited to make him look like an inept whiner blaming the game for his own shortcoming. It’s great staging
Generally, needless back-tracking used as shallow game-time filler.
The most recent ‘frustration’ however was in the game Demon’s Souls (Ps3) - the boss battle at 3-2. Although the boss was easy (as most bosses are in that game… disappointingly), you are on a narrow-ish walkway. As such, cheesy one-hit knock-offs over the edge are the order of the day. To exacerbate this, there’s an odd inherent input delay on your evasive ground rolls (think Gears), so in a pinch you tend to double-press the button for this function as the move isn’t exactly immediate. An offshoot of this is you get an on-line FIFA-like second move coming out, causing obvious problems under the circumstance described. :rolleyes:
Come to think of it, the boss immediately prior to this one (3-1) was also frustrating in that the game uses an asinine lock-on mechanic for its projectile attacks like magic (*free aim lacks a reticule of any kind and is incongruous to camera control so lock-on is forced necessity), and against this teleporting, doppelganger spawning boss, this automated ‘Wii aim’ caused some teeth grinding annoyances.
Oh yes, the goddamn Dahaka. I didn’t like WW to start with, way too dark and angsty. I like my Prince pretty and fairly happy, not a psychopath, and never finished the game. it wasn’t the Dahaka that stopped me though.
There was a portion of the game where you were fighting these horrible exploding enemies. You could dodge the explosions, but you couldn’t get through a wooden door unless you lured them over there to explode.
I tried and tried and tried and tried. Sometimes I would die, having taken too many hits. Most often they would explode far away from the door. I never made it through, and I dropped the controller in disgust.
I still have to sell that game. I will never, ever play it again.
The battle on the Collector ship in Mass Effect 2 on Hardcore or Insanity difficulty levels. There’s very little cover, and what little you do have Harbinger can easily kock you out of. Meanwhile the scion on the moving platform is constantly killing off your companions.
The battle on Horizon was frustrating as well (the first part with the two scions and swarms of husks), but there’s a cheeseball way to kill the scions without ever triggering the husk rush, effectively never causing the game to even realize you entered combat.
Final Fantasy Tactics had 2 (which came so close together, I gave up on the game after the second).
You have to keep a guest character alive during a fight (on a rooftop). The stupid girl is fast enough to often act before a lot of your party, and has a tendency to run straight at the bad guy - who immediately kills her.
The guest character AI in general was horrible in that game, but that was the worst, most frustrating expression of it.
Fighting Weigraf/Belias. The fight is hard (especially since only your hero is in it), but that’s not the problem…the problem is there’s a save point right before it. That should be a good thing, right?
Wrong. It’s on the WRONG side of a door which locks as soon as you’re through it. So unless you have a second save, if you’re not strong enough to take him on, you’re screwed. And even if you do, you’d better hope you saved recently (I hadn’t…).
(I suspect a lot of people have made that complaint, since more recent Square games that let you save after getting to a point of no return WARN you to save to a new slot, because you can’t turn back at this point.)
