Kid Icarus - ducking to avoid an enemy causing me to fall through the floor and die at the end of one of the vertical stages in world 3. Every other video game that lets you fall through floors requires you to press down AND A so that you don’t do it accidentally…my brother also had to throw his controller at the TV for this game once, when he was 2 seconds from entering the door to stage 2 and one of those red medusa heads pops up from the ground right in front of him, causing him to die.
Final Fantasy 1 for NES - my first time playing through this game, and I was trying to conquer the Sea Shrine. Level 2 of this dungeon is filled with Ghosts, and each physical attack they did could kill a character and you couldn’t run from them…after my 5th time trying to get through that level, I threw my controller at the NES, causing the connectors to come loose and the game to reset…with my saved game erased…
I haven’t yet seen mention of the chocobo race in Final Fantasy X. I’ve managed to get the 0.0 time on two different playthroughs but it probably took several years off my life.
Omniusha 2, where they still have that out-dated tank control. At the beginning, you have to run around a squarish maze to get to a lever, which will lower an elevator down, and you have to go back to it before the elevator moves back up.
I never could get it right with the game’s darned it tank control system. I done it five or six times before I throw the disc away to one side.
Wizardry 4, Return of Werdna. A game so bad it’s not even packaged with the current Wizardry compilations.
Okay, so you’re a level 1 wizard, with level 1 monsters. You have to fight adventuring parties that are designed -specifically- to take out groups of level 1 monsters…
There are ‘step in the wrong place and die’ death-traps.
There’s an actual timer (new for games of the era) that makes it if you dawdle too much, the ghost of your arch-nemesis shows up and kills you.
Aaaaand, icing on the cake? If you ever save the game, all your enemies respawn.
Hated it. So much. Luckilly, on an Apple 2+, there wasn’t actually much to throw… Or there would’ve certainly been throwing, and a lot of it.
Fighting Janus/Trevelyan on 00 Agent level in Goldeneye. God, how I hated that bastard. Never did beat him.
The final level of Pilotwings on the SNES- playing all the way through the game and then again on Expert only to discover that the final mission was exactly the freakin’ same!
To whoever nominated the racing level in Mafia- boo! I loved that one (although it did take me 26 attempts to win). What killed me was the level where you had to get the racing car to a garage for “modifications” without getting caught by the cops or making too much noise or so much as brushing another vehicle or building or person.
As for Mafia. I found that level much easier than the race. The trick was all in the route - map out the route ahead of time on the map. Yet it is counterintuitive, the shortest route was through crowded narrow streets with many turns. The best route was more roundabout but with wider streets and more straightaways. Still it seems the cops would pop out at random.
One of the last levels of Psychonauts. A wonderful game with a rather casual difficulty to it until the very end, where they decide that they hate the players and toss in some incredibly hard jumping puzzles.
You know the type… Impossible jumps, obsurdly short time limits, etc…
I managed to break both the controllers that came with my NES back in the day. The frustrations I remember most were the final levels of Mario 2 and Ninja Gaiden…both involved repeating the entire final level when you died facing the final boss.
Final Fantasy has a lot of potential ones (which is why I pretty much never finish any, though I did finish IX and did finish X). The Tactics series isn’t much better in that regard. FFTA, in particular, flippin’ screwed me over.
See, I have this nasty tendency of progressing too fast for my own good. Underlevelling isn’t a chance of happening, it’s a certainty for me unless I work hard not to. The first time I tried playing this game, my main character got to about 50, with my other high-levels more towards the mid-40’s.
Anyways, I hit a sequence of story events and saved just before going into one of them. After a couple of attempts against a bunch of level 50 enemies, I realised that I couldn’t do it with the characters I had, mainly because of their low levels. So, after being soundly defeated, I reloaded and told my person to go do something else for a while.
And got thrown right back into the event I was stuck at.
See, I had saved right on top of the place the event was at, and so it wouldn’t let me do anything but enter the event. And there the save file sits, to this day.
Then there were the battles with laws like “No attacking monsters” when I’m staring at a field full of chocobos or something. For those unfamiliar with the game, breaking a law would give that person a yellow warning card. Killing an enemies with a law-breaking move got them a red card and removed from the field. So basically, it was possible to get a law/foe combination that literally made it impossible to win without landing all your people in jail. I took to carrying around a Level 4 anti-law card with me, but those weren’t cheap.
Fortunately, FFTA2 fixed both of these issues.
Jedi Knight (XBOX) - Got through almost 90% of the game to meet a chick with two swords that cannot be beaten. Only a worn out handball has hit my living room wall that many times.
thanks! That’s good to hear. That’s what we were going for, but it’s really easy to miss that particular mark.
I thought of another game which has frustrated me recently: The World Ends With You. I just started it last week, and I want to like it so much, but the battle system is incredibly frustrating so far. As soon as it was possible to lose battles and die, that’s pretty much all I did: managing two screens is difficult, and the battles are over too quickly. I must be doing something wrong. I’m making progress, but it’s so slow. I know I just have to keep trying, but I wish it wasn’t such an uphill battle…there’s so much potential in this game, but I just want to smash my ds
And this is why I have multiple saves on any game that allows it…and get rather pissy with games that don’t.
I didn’t get to that battle in FFTA, but I did have the same thing happen to me in FFT…which ended up annoying, even though I did have a save before that one.
When I backed up to my prior save, I remembered that it was several hours, and several missions previous. D’oh. But I leveled up, came back…still forgetting to save before the area I couldn’t back out of. Still had my ass handed to me. Backed to the prior save again, leveled up in a different class…won the battle, finally.
Yeah, unfortunately both FFTA games only allow 2 saves, and I wasn’t particularly diligent about swapping, so when this happened my other file was like 20 hours behind.
Like I said, FFTA2 at least doesn’t allow this (events start when you pass the space, and if there’s two in one area you can still move away after doing only one). I’m currently 100 hours in and just have one more story event to go–I could’ve probably finished it much sooner, but I spent a lot of time on sidequests.
That’s not true… the boss battles were annoying but never unbeatable (unless you went in with 20 health). And the dual-saber bosses were actually relatively easy.
I’ve thrown tons of controllers in my day, but the last one I can remember was Ultimate Spider Man for the PS2. The game has plenty of strikes against it: lousy story, oversimplified controls, and voice work that would set your blood boiling. It also had one huge controller throwing stage of frustration.
As Spider Man, you had to follow a hulk jumping Venom through NYC via web swinging. If he got too far ahead of you, stage over and back to the start. The problem is that Venom could get a stage ending distance away in a single jump. If you were a hair behind him, he’d make the jump and you went right back to the beginning. The only way to finish the stage was to essentially be ahead of him when he made the jump.
That game was traded before my controllers all found the wall.
There were a lot of those moments for me, but one that stands out is Metroid, for the original NES.
I spent many a frustrating hour trying to kill the Mother Fu…sorry, I mean Mother Brain and the controller hit the floor–with great force–more than once!!
Oh wow I forgot about this. Thank the lawd I didn’t pay for this game, but that stage broke the game. I can’t believe the play-testers even made it past this level, there must have been a cheat-code.
That’s what we were going for, but it’s really easy to miss that particular mark.