OH GOD.
cry It’s been most of a decade since I played FFX, and I still haven’t gotten over the trauma from what it took to beat those.
Stuntman for the PS2. Basically the entire game consisted of you screwing up and hearing the director say “Too slow!” and then doing the segment over again until you got the entire course for that stunt memorized. Luckily the game was a rental so I didn’t break the disc in half like I wanted to.
I really like the Grand Theft Auto series, and I completed III and Vice City with no cheats. But that stupid “fly the toy helicopter through this huge building with shitty controls and an even shittier camera until either time runs out or your stupid helicopter gets shot to death” in San Andreas caused me to hurl my controller against the coffee table. It didn’t break, so I threw it again MUCH harder. Take THAT you stupid fucking helicopter!
On the PC one developer has been proactive with stuff like this - Valve. Through their Steam service they gather data about how the game (Half Life 2, say) is being played. Example here. On at least one occasion they noticed a huge spike in player deaths on one map with a subsequent drop-off in map progression and time played. Players were dying, getting frustrated and quitting. They patched the game (not possible with earlier consoles) and reduced the difficulty of that section. For designers wanting to tell a story with a game (which pretty much means the player has to finish it to see your story) this seems to be a great way to iron out things that make it past the playtesters.
I wasnt able to get past the parachute lesson in some Army game. my timing and landing was never good enough to pass…
eventually I had my (ex)bf get me through it.
Oh, and Black&White… I have issues with the way the controls are set up.
And, to top it off, I cannot play games that I have control of multiples (like World of Warcraft offline). I have “CONTROL ISSUES”
I’m going to guess that you mean Warcraft and not WoW, because otherwise this sentence makes no sense at all.
[QUOTE=pilot141I really like the Grand Theft Auto series, and I completed III and Vice City with no cheats. But that stupid “fly the toy helicopter through this huge building with shitty controls and an even shittier camera until either time runs out or your stupid helicopter gets shot to death” in San Andreas caused me to hurl my controller against the coffee table. It didn’t break, so I threw it again MUCH harder. Take THAT you stupid fucking helicopter![/QUOTE]
I absolutely agree! But wasn’t that mission from Vice City? It was a mission from Avery at a construction site, wasn’t it? Mind you, I never did finish San Andreas since I could never get the hang of flying the airplanes. Apparently, I have a problem with flying!
Yeah, there was a mission like that in Vice City at a construction site. I didn’t have too much trouble with that one for some reason - it only took me a few tries to complete it.
But for whatever reason the one in San Andreas just frustrated the hell out of me. It might be because it came shortly after another control-nightmare mission: the one where you have to move a bunch of barrels out of a warehouse using that stupid forklift. My patience was already tried and that helicopter just pushed me over the edge. I never played the game again after that.
God damned hoverboard race in Conker. Actually, a good number of things in Conker.
The Siberia mission with no save points in Timesplitters for X-box. Ah hah! You died within seconds of getting to the top before you could even figure out what’s going on! Again! There goes the last 30 minutes of your life again!
Lately the drums part of Blitzkrieg Bop in Rock Band. I was so starting to think I was almost adequate on the beginners level.
Lessee, there was Ultima 3, a landmark computer game for me, because I distinctly remember destroying the disk no less than FOUR TIMES. (Two of them when I got swarmed by a huge enemy force, one more time when that whirlpool took out most of my ships, aaaand the very last time when I inserted the cards into the wrong slots and got wasted.) I swear that game took at least three years off of my life. A greater source of electronic aggravataion and frustration and pain and horror and misery I’ve never seen. My dad actually threatened to cut me off of computer games permanently twice for that one game.
Defender of the Crown. Every system, every incarnation. Here’s how a typical game goes: 1. You suffer horrible disaster. 2. Repeat 1 until you lose the game. And lord forbid you have anything other than perfect, glorious triumph in any of the tasks, or else you lose even faster. I have never seen a more ludicrous, sloppily-programmed excuse for a game in my life*.
The time I hooked up my joystick into a PS1, loaded International Track And Field, turned on rapid fire…and was greeted by “Using Trick?” and rapid fire being rendered useless. Tell me, how is it a huge colossal titanic improvement to TAKE OUT EVERYTHING THAT MADE THE GAME FUN?? (I feel exactly the same way out of the revamped Pirates, Defender of the Crown, etc.) Want to placate the purists? Fine…make rapid-fire lockout an option. That you choose. Not an automatic feature that can’t be turned off. An option. Which can be turned off (or not turned on, depending). Putting the choice in the player’s hands. That’s not asking for the universe, is it?
Puzzle Bobble (a.k.a. Bust-a-Move) for the SNES or whatever system. See, when the object of the game is to line up three objects of the same color, three things happen: 1. you match up two objects of the same color, then have to wait the equivalent of four stages of the Tour de France for another object of that color, 2. the color that’s blocked and inaccessible, you’ll get a minumim of three objects of that color for every triple-able object you get, and 3. 1 & 2 will repeat rougly 200 times every damn level. How Taito managed to avoid going bankrupt to release no fewer than 5 chapters of this utterly execrable franchise, I’ll never understand.
World Heroes 2. Dio. The Tiger Woods** of fighting games.
Prince of Persia 2. Stupid, stupid tossing out of simple running jumps at the edge(necessiated due to making stupid, stupid, stupid before-the-edge running jumps required), resulting in stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid jump timing, resulting in roughly half a million stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupidstupidstupid STUUUUPPIIIIIDDDD falls.
Street Fighter 2. I freakin’ hate this game. I’ve fought hundreds of matches, I know all the moves, all the attacks, all the strengths and weaknesses, and to this day I still get utterly obliterated by Sagat at anything higher than kiddie difficulty. Don’t get me started on this “Champion Edition” insanity.
Well, that’s about it for the classic stuff. Now to the highly coveted “PS2 games I rated 3 or less on GameFAQs” category.
Bloody Roar 3 - Too hard. Can’t do a damn thing. Bashing my shins in with a crowbar would’ve been more enjoyable.
King of Route 66 - The most frustrating thing? Races where you have to blast nitrous pretty much continuously to have a chance. And races where you run out of time before you’re even two-thirds done, which constutute the other 70% of the game.
NBA Ballers - “Win the game by Taking Down The House! Of course, the command to do this isn’t given in the game or the instructions, nor is it anywhere on the Midway website. You’ll just have to, er, hunt and peck for it in the heat of an incredibly intense one-on-one basketball game. And this is perfectly fine because…uh…it just is, all right?”
WWE Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth - Another one of those games where you have to absolutely perfect or get smashed 300 ways from Wednesday, and can dominate for 95% of the match, slip up a bit, and get smashed 300 ways from Wednesday. :mad:
fiddlesticks - Super Maro Bros. 2? If you die at the final boss, you start over at the final boss. I’m surprised that you brought that one up; I didn’t find that frustrating at all. Well, maybe Clawgrip, but even he wasn’t that frustrating.
- I finally learned the winning strategy, but too late to undo years of frustration.
** Yes, I already know about “Omega Tiger Woods”, no need for a link.
I could do the lightning bolts, once I impressed upon my family that they were courting death if they interrupted me while I’m gaming. I could NEVER complete the butterfly or chocobo minigames, though.
I never was able to finish Rolling Thunder, in either the arcade or console version. I could get to the last boss, and then nothing I did seemed to affect him.
In Final Fantasy Tactics, some of the NPCs that were forced on me in various battles seemed to have a suicide wish.
They actually released a patch that removed the race, although I never used it. I tried many, many times until I found out that it’s possible to beat, and not too hard once you get the hang of it. The trick is to drive slowly, especially on the turns. I don’t remember how slow you have to do the turns, but I think it’s something like 25 MPH or less. On the straight track you speed up, then slow way down when a turn is coming.
You think that’s bad. I was down to the final full bar of life. Yes, he had no reserve life bars left and his final bar was halfway down when he wiped me out.
After that, I decided to run and save every time my party ran out of mist points. (I was previously using elixers and megalixers to replenish along with giving my main fighter the ability to steal mist points every time he hit and siphoning those off to the other players. Even still I was running out of mist points. Granted, in the second time I took him on, I still did the siphoning trick, but the fight became dramatically easier the second time around, and I never even had to reload.)
I never managed the lightning - I got up to around 190 when my flatmate walked in front of me. :mad: (I can safely say I didn’t throw the controller at the wall.) At that point I decided the ultimate weapons weren’t worth it. Are they any good?
You know, I could generally win that, but only if I played the Saxon who lived furthest north (or one of the Normans), but the one thing I could never, ever do was win at a joust. How the hell were you supposed to do those? Although now that you mention it, I remember never really feeling like I was doing any of it right, even when I was winning. I guess that’s a good definition of a sloppily-programmed game.
I played an old game for the Apple II called Xyphus for hours and hours and hours, but kept getting stymied by the final level because I simply couldn’t get to the weapon that was needed to kill the final boss. That caused me more adolescent frustration than any dating rejection ever could.
I’m sure I pounded on the keyboard whenever Privateer 2: The Darkening decided to crash and die yet again right after I had just completed some long and complex actions and didn’t have a chance to save. Absolutely brilliant game (even ten years later, I’d be happy to pay $30 to play it again (in a stable version)) but it would shit itself if you so much as looked sideways at it.
The original Gran Turismo probably inspired most of my controller flinging moments, especially trying to get the damn licenses. GT2 seemed much more forgiving in this regard, but GT1 was just hellish. I remember one license required you to complete an entire course so fast that you had to do it absolutely perfectly: slow down only just enough into each turn, and if you heard the tires squeal going around a bend even once you knew you’d blown it. It must have taken me at least 50 tries just to get that one license, and it was far from the most advanced one.
I never got past the scene in the bar with the rock guys. I’d start to… do what you need to do… and then the guy would wake up and smack me across the room.
Man I loved that game. (Impossible Mission on the C=64, but I suspect anyone who remembers it got the reference.) Awesome summersaults over lightning-wielding robots. Taunting Evil Overloard. Puzzle bits to find and put together. The Prisoner-inspired black orbs. Wonderfully monochromatic green screen monitor. It had everything.
But I never solved it. Hey, I was only eleven or twelve, but for some reason I either never had time to finish it before dinnertime or ran the clock out. But I’m pretty sure I know the secret word or whatever (alligator?) it was eventually spelling. I know because I almost got there once… almost. (joystick throwing ensued)
Is there an emulation of this out there anywhere? Heck, I still have the original 5.25 disk, and an old drive I could load it with.
The final level (forget the name) in Call of Duty: United Offensive. Hard enough to live through (eastern front, urban combat. Nuff said.), but I was playing on a seven year old computer.
The final section of the map was a railyard, and a total bloodbath. Germans coming out of the walls like rats. I think the frame rate sank down to about five frames per second, fairly often. This affected my controls and maneuverability, of course, but not the AI’s. I was moving and shooting like a patient from Awakenings, but the Germans always shot straight. With their bolt-action rifles. And the Schmeissers. Dead-eye straight.
The Stukas started coming. I actually managed to get one with an 88 before I even saw the AAA mount.
I died. I died contantly. Fast, and often. I got used to dying. I went through more lives than a Buddha. And reloading…the constant reloading. Reloading at inopportune times, reloading after making so much progress—maybe even minutes worth—and then getting my head bashed in by a rifle butt from a kraut who dashed up out of nowhere before my keyboard would respond to my controls. But not before I saw him, and tried to act. Oh no. I almost always had plenty of warning. Time to react…or try to. Impotently.
Always reloading.
And I made them pay for every inch.
I performed acts of bravery, of barbarism, and of outright insanity to beat down that horde. I turned a flak gun against men at spitting distance; chewed them into ash. They ran right into it. They kept running into it. They wouldn’t stop—the question was only if I could keep killing them fast enough. Sometimes I almost couldn’t.
Panzers crumpled, dying in an instant, belching flame. Too close.
I ran from good cover to kill men, just so I could take their ammunition. Keep killing.
I scraped the edge of darkness back with fire.
It worked. I made it work.
And then, after that…after all that…
…an error message came up, when the game tried to load the final screen. The savegame files I was using had become corrupted, or something. That’s it. Quit to desktop.
My reward.
I replayed it from a slightly earlier save file, and spent most of the rail yard tucked away in a nice hole behind some stairs, while everyone else fought around me. So I could finally see the damn ending screen.
I’m now a strong proponent of tactical and strategic chemical warfare.
(Especially preceeded by atomic demolition. Glass and gas, all the way.)
Erf. I had that happen, too.
It wasn’t as bad, to me, though, because by the time I got to that point, I’d already taken to saving every half hour or so.
Of course, I never did go back to it, because I was about to go on vacation, and wanted to finish the game, so I jumped straight to the Bahamut, and when I got the urge to play FFXII again, I restarted completely, and accidentally wiped my Yazmat file. >_>
Having just played Soul Calibur III for the first time in a few months (Talim’s Tales of Souls story)…that game is so full of these moments.
Especially the Japanese characters - except Taki, who’s pretty balanced - Setsuka, Mitsurugi, and Yoshimitsu are cheap, cheap bastards. As is Siegfried.
It’s gotten to the point I tense to toss the controller just from seeing that I’m going to Japan, next.
Setsuka has two styles of infuriating fight - 1) She comes on strong, and wipes you before you can hit her. 2) You manage to hit her, early on, and take her down…down…down…whoo, one hit from winning! What the hell? What the helling hell?! ‘Setsuka wins!’ fling!
(Oh, and getting Setsu and Mitsu in rapid succession? TOSS!)
Metroid Prime…the latest one…about half-way into the game I got sick of: Learn muscle memory to kill boss that will never be used again, walk down short hall, find next boss that takes intricate muscle memory technique to kill that you’ll never use again.
I’m hoping Half Like 2 Episode 2 isn’t that way. I’m at the ‘use contrived new hard to use bomb, throw at indestructible baddy, then shoot at it with a gun…btw, there’s about a dozen baddies, and they move faster than you.’
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
Periodically, you have to run from the main villain/monster of the game. While this was a neat plot idea, the game is an intense platforming game(brilliant by the way). You are running away from an enemy, with no knowledge of what platforming obstacles and moves are ahead. This leads to repeated deaths. The game features time-rewinding, but this has a reload time to reuse, so you end up dying multiple times to learn the chase path.
Combine that with poor camera placement, there to make it more cinematic, and you get me screaming like a child and having a temper tantrum.
The Return of the King
The level where Aragorn(the character I played) had to shoot the Witch King. I had not leveled up my arrows at that point, and the auto-lock-on was pathetic. It’s timed as well and I nearly broke my television with this level. I quit this game eventually, unable to make it past certain levels. Not enough health drops, and the health that does drop disappears too quickly.
Star Fox Adventures
Super easy game. No deaths or even scares the entire game. Until the final boss fight.
The final boss fight does not play like a Zelda clone, which the rest of the game did. It played like the original Star Fox games, focusing on piloting a ship. It was difficult, poorly controlled, and did not require any skills you had “learned” in the game that preceded it. I never finished it. 
Zelda: Twilight Princess
Easy game, except one part.
I played this on the Gamecube, and the section where you have to rescue the runaway carriage was terrible. These birds/bats drop from the sky and bomb it, which cause it to run off. The aim to kill these birds was horrible with the Gamecube controller, and it drove me crazy.
Beyond Good or Evil
Final Boss.
Same as what everyone else said. For some reason, I persisted death after death, and my copy of the game(for the Gamecube) gave me the win after a very short time on the second round of “reverse moving”.
Anyone else experience this?
Final Fantasy X
Chocobo Racing and Lightning Dodging. I am playing this game now for the 2nd time. I won’t even bother trying these. Pointless.
I completed X-wing, Imperial pursuit and the B wing add on without a joystick. Used a mouse as flight control instead of the keyboard.
And the fact there has not been a another x-wing game (or any space combat sims for that maner) since 1998 makes me want to throw something right now.