[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
The game “Blast Corps” for N64 had a lot of levels that frustrated me to the point of physical anger. One of the worst levels was one called Diamond Sands, where you had to use a dump truck to destroy these long rows of houses at a mining camp, and the only way to do it was to do donuts over and over again or back up at high speed and crash into them.
It was bullshit because the Blast Corps team ostensibly had access to a wide variety of vehicles and robots - so why the fuck did they decide to deploy the dump truck (“Backlash”) to the one level that would be most difficult for it? Well, I mean, obviously, the game did it to be challenging, but in reality, they just would have used the J-Bomb or the Thunderfist.
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Oh geez. I actually came into this thread just to mention Blast Corps, and Diamond Sands specifically, as a matter of fact! (For anybody who’s unfamiliar with Blast Corps, the shtick is that a nuclear missile truck’s runaway autopilot is steering it directly towards a disposal site, but there are a whole bunch of inconvenient cities and buildings in the way. As the slightest impact will set off a cataclysmic explosion, your only option is to employ a variety of vehicles to demolish everything in the way before the missile truck bumps into it.)
What really pissed me off about Diamond Sands was the fact that this enormous dump truck was, for some insane reason, completely incapable of driving across the train tracks (train tracks!) that ran through all the buildings in the level. Instead, you had to zip through tunnels that went under the tracks. So, between the dump truck’s horribly slow speed (compounded by the sand you had to drive it through), the need to waste time constantly crossing under the tracks to keep the path clear on both sides, and the fact that the only way to do much damage was to send the Backlash into a circular spin and whack the building precisely with the corner of the truck bed, Diamond Sands was so insanely difficult that just thinking about it makes me want to dust off the old N64 controllers again just so I can throw them across the room.
Timing the spins was very difficult. Usually what would happen is that I would go into a spin and run out of momentum immediately before touching the building, so I would wind up stuck against the side, or in a corner, repeatedly annoying the building with a series of completely impotent taps. While I was weeping in rage and frustration and hopelessly trying to disengage my enormous dump truck from the side of the building, the carrier truck would merrily bump into the front of it and usher in a nuclear apocalypse.
When I finally beat the game and discovered that I just had to do it all over again with the carrier moving faster (to earn platinum medals!) I gave up in disgust. :mad:
You know, I thought your name seemed familiar! I think all the trauma and mental scarring from my Blast Corps experiences had been blocking it out. 
