Ah. I finally remembered one: the underground tunnel/maze in the first Myst. The business with the sounds (which is how you were supposed to solve that one) never occurred to me, so I tried to map it out like a traditional RPG maze. Which would have worked fine, but I got annoyed with watching the same 45-second (or whatever) animation over and over and over and over between trial-and-error stops, and looked up a walkthrough.
The penultimate level of Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle on the Mega Drive (Genesis) was impossible - you had to fly to the last level on your pedal-powered helicopter which you operated by tapping A and B alternately to pedal, then steered with the D-pad. You had to dodge enemies constantly while pedalling like crazy - if you fell too low you’d crash (there was nowhere to land) and if you were hit once by any enemy you would fall out of your helicopter and then down to the bottom of the previous level (a mountain climb) where you would have to start again for the chance at a another shot at the flying level.
I never finished the game.
Halo on Legendary difficulty is also highly annoying for segments that were designed for you to complete with AI teammates, who for some reason are utterly, utterly useless against Legendary-AI Elites that tear them to pieces. The enemy AI has no problem using cover and flanking, but your friendly AI teammates are just cannon fodder. They don’t even carry weapons you can use - they drop the SMGs they are carrying when they die which are totally useless against Covenant forces at that difficulty. It makes the “defend the building while dropships come” parts exceedingly annoying since you are essentially on your own and get very quickly overrun, especially early in the game when you don’t have the shotgun or sniper rifle. Elite shields, especially Red Elites, are just too good for the SMG or even the godlike pistol.
World 7-Fortress in New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
In that level, you have to pilot a platform up a vertical shaft by waggling the Wiimote. The platform tips as it moves, and you have to avoid missiles and bombs as you go up. But wait!, you say, aren’t Mario games platformers? Yes. You also have to control Mario at the same time. Did I mention how the cannons are off-screen half the time? And the third star coin requires you to save a bomb on your platform, make a near-perfect throw with said bomb, and, if you miss, you need to jump down and start over (which will kill you if you have more than one player unless the others jump at the exact same time). Oh! And, at the end of it, you have to fight a mini-boss with homing shots. Such that, if you jump at him when he shoots, you die. ARGH.
“World 7-Fortress in New Super Mario Bros. Wii”
Wow. You have just made me want to not finish this. I don’t play games to be frustrated beyond a certain level, and you just described it.
It’s easier if you play it in co-op, since one person can focus on tilting while the other survives, switching off whenever the first player does perish.
Castlevanyia for PS: About the first 10 minutes, never been able to get through it.
Manhunt II on Wii: Cant get to the soundstage
You could have ended right here.
I have to say, I never got frustrated by the Mama yeti, because I’m always so relieved to be out of that goddamn bird castle maze. literally 2/3 of my E.V.O. games ended at the bird castle.
The entire Hades portion of God of War. The stupid rolling logs in particular.
Seconded. Word on the street is that they didn’t even play-test that section.
Also, the “old” game Blast Corp for the N64. You played a demolition expert who had clear the way for an out-of-control bomb disposal truck. super fun, but SUPER frustrating at times, especially the later levels where you travel to the moon (?!?) and have to deal with 1/4 the gravity.
Going back to the ole Commodore 64 days, Impossible Mission was a pretty cool game where you jumped around from platform to platform and avoided robots. The object was to pick up pieces to a computer map or something to stop the bad guy, but other than jumping over robots, I was never able to accomplish much else.
Good lord, 70 responses and noone has mentioned the Epic quests in Everquest I?
Granted, they weren’t mandatory, and you could skip them if you wanted, but at least at the point when they came out and several years after, if you were any sort of semi-serious player at all, for most classes you wanted the epic item. It was really good, and worth the hassle.
But hoo-boy, the hassle! Multi-stage quests that typically involved several rare spawn mobs on 3-7 day spawn cycles that required 2-6 characters to kill. And you usually had to compete for them as there was no concept of instanced areas in EQ1 at the time, so there were 3-4 other players also waiting on Mob X to spawn.
The only reason I got my epic was that I was working from home at the time, and had a second computer. I’d set up my character in the spawning area while I worked, and if I saw the mob show up start calling all my buddies to see if I could get a group together to kill it.
EQ 1 was full of crazy hassles like this. Thank God it’s over, at least for me.
Heh, Chrono Cross has two other annoying ‘that one boss fight’.There this robot when you first step into Chronopolis, and it does massive amount of white element damage (which even as Serge you would have trouble with), until you realise that it is weak against white summon magic…
And remember Miguel? Holy Dragon Sword? It’s more challenging than annoying, but Miguel and PolisPolice did own me a couple off times.
Mass Effect 2:The Dead Reaper level is annoying, because of the Scions’ attack that goes through cover, kills you if it hits you two times and your team-mates are too dumb to deal with it. The flying dead thing too; it kills you quickly when it gets close, can regenerate its barrier while doing a massive AoE attack and has lots of HP.
**Knights of the Old Republic 1 **: The idiotic shooting gallery with unresponsive turret.
Dragon Ages: The dungeons…that just keep going on… The approval system is annoying, though it’s more of my IMHO.
Diablo 2: The Ancients, and the Fetish Jungle. Especially in Nightmare and Hell mode when they could be Fire-Enchanted Extra Strong Lightning Enchanted. ARGH! The Oblivion Knights and their Iron Maiden curse.
Bayonetta: All the quick-time events. There’s one where you have to jump off a collapsing highway but there’s a bug with the collision detection where you just fall off what seems to be a solid piece of falling road. And that one stage where it suddenly becomes a game of Afterburner, and there’s no way you can change the pitch up/down control.
Ace Combat 6: Heavy Command Cruiser. I spent 8 hours on the darn mission before discovering the wonders of the RCL. And the canyon flying in the Weapons of Mass Destruction mission (I think it’s mission 14)
I’m sure there are plenty more, but those are some of the ones which stick.
In Zelda:Twilight Princess there is this one stage where you are in a stagecoach and ther are these trolls or something (its been a while0 that are setting it on fire and there are these birds dropping bombs and you had to kill al the birds while fighting off the trolls or something, before you could move on annd I COULDN’T FREAKING DO IT. I almost quit the game, wrote a nasty letter to Miyamoto, and sold my TV to become amonk. But I finally solved it, after my right thumb fell off.
Especially since the first time you hit it comes right after an unskippable cut scene which comes right after a boss battle, and if you didn’t save right after the boss battle then, whoops, guess you’ll just have to go back and fight that fight again.
Ah, I forgot about this. Oddly enough, when I played the game a second time, I had little problem with this one.
I nearly cried my first time through. I played on the Gamecube, by the way. Not sure if it is easier on the Wii.
Quoth Crowbar:
The interesting thing with Diablo II is it was full of frustrating bits, but what they were depended on what your character is. Even the almighty hammerdin just can’t do the Maggot Lair, for instance, and almost always had to skip one of the side-quests in Hell difficulty. That said, the kinds of characters that have trouble with the Ancients usually do well in the Flayer Jungle, and vice-versa… What were you using?
And I just remembered one that I had previously managed to scrub from my brain: Chip’s Challenge, an old Windows puzzle-ish game where you’re moving around a 2-d map collecting computer chips and avoiding monsters and other environmental hazards. But then there’s level 92, the Jumping Swarm. It’s a big, mostly-open map with chips scattered all over, but there’s an endless stream of semi-random (and hence unpredictable) monsters swarming into the main playing area, and by the time you can even hope to have gotten all of the chips, they’re so thick that you can’t even tell which direction they’re moving. The only saving virtue is that, if you lose on a level enough times in a row, the game will ask you if you want to just skip to the next one.
Usually Sorceress, Amazon or Assassin; though killing the Fetish is not the problem. It’s finding the entrance to the various dungeons and the city area. This reminds me, the Sewer area is also annoying.
The Ancients, well, once one of them got Extra Strong Lightning Enchanted Fire Enchanted Ice Enchanted anyone trying to fight him in a melee is promptly owned. I’m sure with enough rune-words and good equipment it can be negated, but my group wasn’t really doing much farming.
Trying to fight Duriel as a glass cannon class is also annoying; you are slowed, can’t kite and Duriel can charge you. I always have to do Duriel with a friend.
There was a level on Medal of Honor (the first one I think) where you were moving through a European town with lots of buildings and fairly detailed and leafy trees. And you kept getting sniped, over and over again. All you could possibly see was a couple pixels of the snipers through the leaves. I still made it through the game but that was very frustrating.
The biggest problem with that level is that there’s been a snipertown level in almost every military FPS since, even though noone particularly wants to go there. The most recent example of this that I’ve played was in Bad Company 2, where you’d get a rocket to the face if you strayed more than about six inches from the wall before taking a shot.