The games that beat you (or yet another thread about being a loser)

Top Gun ( NES ) After 6 million attempts I could never land the fucking plane. Devil May Cry 2 (PS2) I believe that was the last game I played on Playstation. I broke my controller and got an xbox for christmas soon after. A bunch of games for the Atari were either incredibly hard or I was too young to play them because they really kicked my ass.

Yea I tried to land the plane on Top Gun recently figuring I am a grown up now and way better at video games so I would be able to do it. Fuck no. After about six attempts I was like fuck it.

Top Gun's final mission (I think you have to shoot down a space shuttle ..?) was friggin' impossible. So was the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

However, the game that truly defined video game frustration was Battle Toads. So many friendships ruined, so many brothers turning against each other ... FUCK THOSE STUPID ROCKET SLEDS!

Without hyperbole, I have beaten hundreds of video games across over a dozen platforms over the last two or three decades. I couldn't make it past the third level of Battletoads in two player mode, and I don't think I made it past the fifth in single player.

The last time a thread like this popped up, I got drunk, and beat Battletoads in an hour. Now there's this....

::sigh:: I've got a meeting at 8 till 10. I'll be home at 11. School begins here at 11:30.

Final mission???? How the shit did you lane the plane in the first mission? OMG. Nevermind please don't tell me. I refuse to waste anymore hours of my life on this.

Had an unexpected busy day yesterday, but I'm a man of my word.

Two major screws ups due to a point when my wife came in and I was talking to her, and general rustiness, but you get the idea.

Battletoads, yes.

Top Gun, on the other hand....I had that game for a while as a kid, and was just starting to get good at the landing portions, but then it got stolen. Got the game again on the cheap a year or so later, and had...mixed success. This thread did get me to thinking about that game again, especially since it's among the bastard trio of games I NEVER beat (in the spirit of the thread, the other two being Ghosts N Goblins and Willow)

From the hallowed halls of broken controllers (aka "controller graveyard").

I was playing franchise mode in Madden 2000 with the Browns. I took the team to a 10-6 record, and won 1 playoff game. I traded all my draft picks and dead weight for a bunch of good players (I somehow recall getting Minnesota to give me Culpepper for my #1 and Tim Couch?). My team started 2-1 and I GOT FIRED DURING THE BYE WEEK. FYI those PS2 controllers do not break on the first slam, this fucker took a good 3 shots before breaking in half.

For the record, I was determined then to get the Browns to the Superbowl, only to get fired in my next 3 attempts (they fired me week 5 the first year once). I think the game just had a default setting where Cleveland is never allowed to win.

I was given a sort of haunted house game called Dr. Chaos for a birthday, and the gameplay was broken to the point of impossibility. I just wandered around trying to stab bats with my knife, until eventually a PigWoman would run out of a random door and kill me. I never got anywhere with it, despite multiple attempts to buckle down and figure it out.

They do try to make sports games as true to real life as possible.

I can get to the final level on The Thing but can never beat the damned final boss. I suck.

I always wondered why were NES games so ball shatteringly hard? Was it because the programers at the time never dealt with video games before or was it some kind of sadistic streak? I mean why design a game with only three lives but no continues? The fuck was the point?

I couldn't finish 'The Thing' either.

Top Gen NES - this is pretty funny
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofM11nPzFo0

"It sucks ace now and it sucked ass then." "landing is fucking impossible"

I broke some of my parents' furniture in a fit of frustration over Cabbage Patch Kids on the Colecovision. I kicked in the drop-down door on the drop down desk portion of the entertainment center, breaking the magnetic latch completely off. It never closed right after that.

Yes, fucking Cabbage Patch Kids. It was a lame platformer with some horrible edge detection on the jumps. Fuck you, you cabbage-headed monstrosities.

There was some kind of Track and Field game on the Atari 2600 that required you to wiggle the joystick back and forth to run. The best way to do it was to remove the rubber sheath from the joystick handle, lay the joystick on its side and hold it with your knees pinning it against the floor, 'cup' the top of the exposed plastic joystick with your palm, and wiggle as fast as possible.

I still remember the epic blisters my friend and I got from this ill-advised hack.

I remember that 'Track and Field/Decathlon' game. We broke many joysticks playing that game.

Blaster Master.

That is all.

Fester's Quest.

Fuck that rancid piece of shit. If you enjoyed Fester's Quest I hope to one day punch you in the groin. Just a huge helping of FAIL wrapped in horrible gameplay mechanics.

Not counting games I gave up on from lack of interest, the last game that made me quit out of frustration was Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones.

It was a crappy chariot race followed by a boss fight, and if you died in the boss fight, you had to do the race again AND watch some unskippable cut scenes. The game was pretty easy up to that point, and it just stopped everything dead.

Oh, and 'Leather Goddesses of Phobos' was another one that I never finished. It's a text based game along the lines of the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' or 'Beaurocracy' games.

There's a maze in it where you have to hop, crawl, clap, say 'Kweepa', and do other things in a certain order for around 100 steps. If you fail, you go back to the beginning; After fighting that maze for a couple of hours, I came to realize that I just didn't care anymore and uninstalled the damn thing.

I never beat Mike Tyson.

And embarrassingly, I had a game actually physically beat me. I've been replaying Half Life 2, and the hover boat level made me get up from my seat, go to the bathroom, and vomit. Twice.

I think it was a combination of 65" widescreen plus quick axis setup while controlliong the boat and looking around in different directions. I had to play through those levels in short sessions after that to avoid the sick.

The first Midnight Club will always be the bane of my existence, and the only game I've ever played that claimed not one, but two controllers. My friend and I were trying to unlock the time trial maps and if you didn't drive the car perfectly, you wouldn't make it. At one point he and I came in less than 1/100th of a second too late four times in a row.

I somehow played all the way through Parasite Eve II and saved before the last boss without enough ammo. For that reason, I could never beat the game because I didn't have two save spots at different locations and could not backtrack after the savepoint.

Lack of competition in the video game industry=lazy programmers.

How is the final boss-fight at the end of 'The Thing' difficult?...You're just blowing-up fuel cannisters from the safety of a circling helicopter that MacReady is piloting...it took less than 2 minutes.

...the levels before this, I might agree with.

"LEGO Batman" recently had me seeing red. I'm overwhelming bad at video games, so I always set the difficulty level to whatever the equivalent of retarded is. And that game is still a right bastard. I made it to the level where you fight Harley Quinn who won't let you get close enough to land a punch. She just backflips away. After I ran out of obscenities, I bounced my controller off the hardwood floor and turned that game off for good. I think I was streaming the vice presidential debate as I was playing, which may have contributed to my anger substantially.

Agreed. I'm not much of a gamer, but "The Thing" is one of only three games I've ever beaten (partly because I get bored with the games pretty quickly).

I must be thinking of the level before the last level. Either way, I suck.

I tried to beat dragonforce on expert.

I couldn't.

There was plenty of competition between software developers, though. How many games ended up being published for the NES, seven or eight hundred?

More likely it was just growing pains from the arcade era, with designers struggling to think outside the "quarter-munching" game concept.

92%.

I'd go further, but then I remember I love myself and loathe that fucking band.

Jordan, on the other hand: Love Buckethead. Love the song. The GHII chart is a monster.

This still doesn't excuse anything that came out of LJN. Those jag offs had no concept of ANYTHING!

Beat it.

Rocko's Modern Life: Spunky's Dangerous Day.

My mother took the SNES away from me day 1 of that rental and didn't give it back until I promised to stop using language she didn't know I knew.

Water Temple on Ocarina of Time is one where I think I lucked out from the get-go. I just kept guessing exactly right as to what I needed to do and sorta stumbled through it without too many hiccups. Nowadays, I can beat that entire game (Biggoron's Sword and all) in a weekend.

A Link to the Past is still better.

I had that problem last night. I was just about to give up on it when i realised she backflicks round the circle thing in the floor twice then stops because she is dizzy.

Half an hour I wasted figuring that out.

Not to be a total dick, but my 6 year old son beat Lego Batman alone. He kept asking me for help, and I'd play (as Robin of course, he wouldn't relinquish Batman) and try to figure out the puzzles to get to different areas. During one of these sessions he got frustrated waiting for me to figure it out and gave me a step by step lesson in how to do it. So basically, I'm not sure this game was made for adult minds. Then again, he's already a better gamer than I am and I've been playing games my whole life.

I've said it before, but the only game that I remember not beating and feeling completely defeated by was the first Driver. That final mission where you steal the limo containing the President, and you have to try to avoid both the mafia cars and the police cars all of which drive 2x as fast as you just owned me. I played the mission so many times and one night I just realized that I was having zero fun while trying it. I popped the game out and drove to the store to trade it in right then before I could change my mind.

Oh god, Driver was broken. I played it on the PC, and it took me a hundred tries just to finish the fucking tutorial.

Christ. Harley Quinn and Sarah Palin? Are you mad?!?!

This is true. That parking garage was a BITCH!

Sega Master System: Spellcaster.

I've gotten as far as the fire level, but there's a point in the game where you're suppose to jump from one cloud thing to the other, that's it, not some elaborate boss fight, just from one cloud to another, and I've never been able to do it. Couldn't do it as a kid, couldn't do it a few years ago when I took the system out to finally beat the game. Fucking straight into the lava, again, and again. Finally just turned off, but it haunts me....

No clue if this will help you at all, but here's the first in a 7 part series that a guy did to complete the game.

I cannot in good conscious actually restart that game again, but I will certainly watch what's left of it play out vicariously. Thanks for posting it.

He made the fire level look ridiculously easy...

Karnov.

Fuck him in his fat, fire-breathing kangaroo of an asshole.

Let me second Ghosts n Goblins. I remember the SNES version being pretty hard as well, but I'm pretty sure I beat that one.

Rob, spot on with Festers Quest. That thing is just miserable from the get-go.

This is the second mention of Fester's Quest. Fester's Quest isn't hard, it's broken. There is a difference. It took me too many years to realize when a game design had failed, versus when a game design was simply very, very difficult.

I beat Super Ghosts n Goblins on either the Genesis or SNES (can't remember). That was one of the most difficult games I ever beat. And, in retrospect, it was the last of the uber-hard, old school games I ever tolerated. It broke me to such an extent I turned almost exclusively to PC gaming and gave up on platforming pretty much forever (though Psychonauts did suck me back in).

I would never have the stomach for a Ninja Gaiden today.

In regards to Fester's: while it's most certainly broken, as a kid I just thought it was hard. And it's one of the few nintendo games I've never ever been able to beat. I refuse to even try at this point.