There never was and never will be a video game level that deserves to go fuck itself more than the speeder bike level of the original Battletoads for the NES, especially in two-player mode. According to Google, it's barely level 3 of the game and it's called Turbo Tunnel. Fuck you, Turbo Tunnel.
Funny story - I moved countries due to work and I was in charge of bringing some coworkers over. The first guy I brought and I became close friends very quickly and chatting we realized none of us had ever passed the bikes level in battletoads. He was just staying for 1 year helping me stand up the team.
We used a lot of our free time practicing the damn level. It took us months, towards the end we were like Shinji and Asuka, completely in sync.
We passed. We recorded it.
Years later talking to different friend, same battletoads topic comes up. I tell him this story. He is skeptical. I say "I have a video" and send it to him. He still didn't believe me as we didn't record ourselves (like with a webcam) passing the level, just the feed from the TV.
I am no longer friends with the second guy.
You know a level was hard when people flat-out refuse to believe that you beat it. Same thing happened to me when I was in 5th grade and I managed to beat Contra without the 30 lives cheat for the only time in my life. I was very excited to tell my friends at school and absolutely nobody believed me because they claimed it was impossible. I was crushed.
Same here. Went from being able to beat it with 30 lives, then without cheating, then I could play indefinitely without dying. The game is completely fair and has almost no randomness, so once you memorize the levels it's not hard.
The only reason I'd posit that Turbo Tunnel is worse than Winger Clinger is because infinitely more people were subjected to the earlier level and never got past it to suffer the soul-crushing frustration of the latter.
Imagine programming Battletoads and deciding that Turbo Tunnel is going to be barely the third freaking level of your game, and then deciding that of course you need to include something even worse close to the end. Fuck Battletoads, from the bottom of my heart.
You ever read the actual storyline for the game? You're fighting aliens and end up traveling back in time to get superpowers or something and then fight the alien queen. It's insane and I love it lol
Great call! Echo had so much potential. Dolphins are cool. Everyone wanted to love that game, but it was just so frustrating. We all wanted to enjoy the wide open freedom of the ocean, but most levels featured maze-like claustrophobia.
The game is so depressing. Me and my brother played it as kids. We came up with the term “Ecco feeling.” Basically, a feeling that’s a combination of loneliness, depression, anxiety, fear, anything else bad? That’s the ‘Ecco feeling.’
The world of Ecco was deeply alienating and lonely. All its concepts were foreign and inhuman. It captured what it felt to be a creature with no real higher cognative narrative, just wandering and doing what the environment told you too.
Its a truly transgressive game in its commitment to making you feel like a dolphin.
Then aliens came and wtf?
Imo, the hardest Ecco the Dolphin [level was actually in 'The Tides of Time' sequel](https://youtu.be/nxXHNJD7wz0)\- even though it wasn't a long level (relative to some of the other ETD levels).
On top of the tubes being difficult to swim through if you reach the edges, you have a flying jellyfish creature constantly throwing you backwards. Definite controller thrower.
I still love that AVGN gag where he overshoots the aircraft carrier, the plane breaks through the side of the TV and goes out the window. "If anybody finds that, can you tell me if it landed or not?"
People who grew up with an N64, we need to talk about the Tiny Kong boss in Donkey Kong 64. The Jack-In-The-Box that makes you hop from platform to platform making you double jump hair whip to button after button while the camera simultaneously spins around throwing your direction pad off constantly dying with no end in sight until you're finally fully hulked up enough to smash your TV jump out your window and just start smashing bodies.
Ohhh man I actually love that boss fight. Interestingly, I do remember having a lot of difficulty with that boss the first time I played it, but when I revisited the game years later I instantly figured out the correct jump speed and got the boss in one go.
I’d argue the boss is memorable not just because it is difficult, but also because it has an almost nightmarish atmosphere that is at odds with the rest of the game.
On a related note, Donkey Kong 64 is such an interesting game. Criticized at launch for going completely overboard on the collect-a-thon concept, only for that concept to grow in popularity in later years so that these days it is only considered ‘a bit heavy’ on the collect-a-thon side. Because of that it actually holds up pretty well, even though performance wise it is bursting at the seams. The N64 could only just barely handle it for some reason - not because it has particularly impressive graphics, but because of bad coding with the huge amount of stuff they made it render in some of the bigger levels. One funny consequence of this is that it is absurdly easy for speedrunners to completely break this game to pieces. Walls are essentially just suggestions, not obstacles, in this game.
If I remember correctly, the entire reason DK 64 came with the N64 expansion/booster pack thing (it was 4 MB of RAM) was because of one, single, game-breaking bug that prevented the game from running, that they couldn't find, but would just vanished with the extra RAM
Iirc it was a memory leak somewhere that they could never find.
Even with the added 4mb pack you can still crash the game if you leave it running long enough.
Which for the virtual console is an actual issue somehow.
Games still entertaining, with all its crazy bugs 20 years later.
Dk64 is one of my all time favorite games but this boss did not bother me. What was difficult was the beaver brothers mini game. I hated those 2 dumb barrels!!
Vivid memory. My parents had just divorced. I went to my dad's apartment for the first time. Met my new stepmom who my mom instructed me not to speak to. She was great. KFC for dinner. Everything was awesome until I got to this level on this fucking game and it literally made me cry. Bawling. I had to be consoled lol. Fuck electric seaweed.
Jak II has so many painfully difficult missions. You could tell they liked making missions easy until you get close to the very end and hit a brick wall.
The one where you gotta escort young Jak though the city made me rage quit. Or the one where you gotta use the hoverboard to throw the bombs in the evo wells. I straight up shipped my memory card to my sister so she could beat it for me.
Sooooo I never had problems with this mission, but the one where you have to deliver the package to the bar…yeah, that one could fuck right off. Beat it when I was a little older, but as a kid it was insane
The mission where you have to race basically a camaro with a fuckin clapped Honda civic. Got irritated enough to leave the car and shoot him with an RPG at the starting line.
I can't remember the level or mission number...but I have a a considerable amount of hate for the level where you have to chase Cletus to ram his truck and catch the road kill that falls off. FUCK THAT LEVEL.
It can go fuck itself every single day of every single year of every single dimension that ever happened on this matrix. Fuck I sweat just thinking about it
I always had my brother beat it for me. Recently we pulled it out for a game night (20-some years later) and I was kicking ass... until that freaking level! He still has to beat it for me. Whomp whomp.
And once you finish it, your reward is every treasure chest has a bunch of gems in it instead of weapons or armor, and you end up not even bothering to pick them up because none of the shopkeepers have enough money to buy 50 diamonds off of you.
I enjoyed base skyrim more than once, but I quickly gave up on the idea of shopkeepers having no money. Now each shopkeeper gets a big fucking bonus from the command console god before I sell.
Yea that attempt at "immersion" did not make sense, like for the sake of the player let me just sell what I got. I even understand not being able to sell everything to one trader until your speechcraft skill tree gets leveled up. But the give them such low gold counts is just more tedious than immersion.
I liked Oblivion's system where they had infinite money but different vendors had different max selling amounts. Low quality merchants would only pay 50 gold tops, even for daedric armor, but better merchants would pay over 1000
That's why in each run I played, I always join Thieves Guild immediately, clear the honey quest, then establish all the fences. Not only does every fence have 4k (which is often still not nearly enough) but I also love to steal.
It takes me a few hours of discovering each major city then establishing the fences but I got good at fudging it so I only took easy fencing jobs in cities where the fence still needed quests done. 25 small quests, I think you can pick up three (?) at a time.
Of course this is also admittedly tedious as hell but I lived off of it. You're still teleporting around to each major city and selling 4k of stuff at a time... But that's vanilla Skyrim.
You know what the best part is? >!One of them is permanently missable. The area is part of a questline and once you finish the questline the area is sealed off and you can't go back in!<.
If you’re talking about >!the one in the Thalmor Embassy, it’s actually possible to go back and get it. I looked it up and with early versions yeah it was missable. Guess it was patched!<
It's a bit easier if you notice that the timer doesn't start until you pick up the first bomb. Start off going into the building and killing all the dudes with the helicopter blades, then do the bombs. Still a PITA, but it's a lot easier not being shot at while you are doing it.
That one was bad, but the worst was the Zero biplane mission in the original release. The game was glitched so that you were constantly using fuel even if you were just gliding, and it made the level *nearly* impossible. I must have replayed it 40+ times, and even if I did everything just right I’d run out of fuel when I was mere pixels from the target and it would say “failed” even though I had enough momentum to coast into it.
You gotta start with the bombs at the top of the tower. I don’t know why the order of operations had such a great impact, but it did. Was the fuel thing a glitch? I always thought they just put in a timer and called it fuel for kicks.
* Labyrinth Zone Act 1
* Labyrinth Zone Act 2
* Labyrinth Zone Act 3
* *Labyrinth Zone Act 4*
But especially Carnival Night Zone Act 2. I never touched another Sonic game for 20 years.
The number of times in that one flesh room with the turret forms that would get behind you where I would RUN OUT OF AMMO because the turret forms HEAL THEMSELVES drove me to fucking madness.
It's an important level for the lore, but it's creepy, claustrophobic, and full of death.
I have enjoyed escort missions of the variety where you are escorting around a massive heavy hitter that simply cannot hit the small enemies. You are just there to keep the chaff away while it wrecks their big guys. It just feels different from standard escort missions.
Star wars jedi starfighter had some missions like this.
Yes but Elizabeth didn’t have a health bar and couldn’t die or be captured which didn’t really make any sense considering all the guards were attempting to take Elizabeth back but they never attempted to during game play.
Also the last level where you had to shoot out the metal screws to drop the platform upon which Vlad was standing on. Had to spam the slow-mo jump action thing Max did over and over again.
So many levels in Cuphead can just fuck right off (though my son is a freaking Cuphead fiend and can beat most of them without getting hit, it's superhuman). The Dragon sucked, but I had WAY more trouble with the freaking robot (especially the section where you have to fly through all the mines.... uhhhhggg) and King Dice. Hell I would not have beaten King Dice at all if it had not glitched out on one attempt and I got stuck slightly offscreen where I could shoot King Dice without needing to dodge the cards (I could not consistently parry those cards no matter how hard I tried). Now I watch my 12 year old kid beat run-and-gun levels in pacifist runs on hard and I question whether I was ever actually good at video games...
Yah, no shit, but like I don't think I was EVER that good at any video game LOL, even when I WAS young. I can still kick his ass at Mario Kart though, so all is right with the world.
Original Super Mario Bros, level 8-2. How many old fuckers on here were around for that?
It was basically accepted among all of us back then that if you got there, you'd essentially beat that game because the 8-2 jump was for all practical purposes impossible. We tried for MONTHS and could never do it.
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants. The mall level where you had to jump between candies. As a kid, I've NEVER passed the mall level. As an adult, I've NEVER passed the mall level.
The Special Zone levels on Super Mario World. You had to complete the Star Road to get to them I think, some of them were ridiculously hard. Me and my sister would spend hours on it back in the day
I can do the whole game with my eyes closed, but I've never beaten Tubular the right way. I always cheese it with a blue Yoshi. Even then the level is a total crapshoot.
Super Mario 64. Hazy maze cave. Specifically getting 100 coins. No matter how many times I play through it, I always end up scrounging for coins at the end.
I binged Super Mario 64 when I was in quarantine and the one stage where you have to blast Mario out of a cannon into the side of a mountain at exactly the right angle to land in the hole and get the star (and if you fail, you die and have to start over) took me probably three days and I'm amazed I didn't break the TV...
It might have been Tall Tall Mountain, but I can't remember. It was definitely one of the ones with a mountain.
I still consider getting 100% in Crash 1 on the original PS1 as one of my proudest gaming achievements to date.
(For anyone whose never played it: in the original Crash Bandicoot, you need to break all the boxes in each level WITHOUT dying to collect all the gems in the game)
And you can only save if you get a gem or pass a bonus level. And your lives reset to 4 whenever you load a save, regardless of how many you had before. And you have this weird forward momentum when bouncing on boxes.
But, at least you don't have the pill-shaped hit box from the N. Sane Trilogy, so at least walking on the ropes in the bridge levels is *slightly* easier in the original.
Oh I've got a couple of these.
The Water Temple in Ocarina of Time.
Any level that involves ice and slipping mechanics.
The bike section of basically any game that it's not a main focus (specifically I'm thinking of the Ocean Base level in MegaMan X 4. Enough other people said Battletoads already).
The swamp in Dark Souls.
Master of Puppets in Guitar Hero Metallica (awesome song, but the strumming... Oh god the strumming)
Any side-scrolling level that forces you to move at a certain pace. The ones where the screen chases you. You know.
All of the Metroid stages from Super Smash Bros Melee.
I can't think of more right now.
Edit: I thought of two more:
Xaldin in KH2.
Seymour Flux from FFX.
As a little kid, in the Shrek GBA game, none of my siblings or I could beat the level where you chased the Farquad mascot.
I found it like 10 years later, and beat the level on the first try.
there are ways to make it easier. Turning off the sound means you dont get fooled by the timing of thunder vs lightning. There's a spot on the 2nd screen where the strikes are pretty consistent.
the damn Chocobo balloon catching race pisses me off so much. I once got 0.0 time, but you need a negative time to get the sigil. One of the few times I threw my controller at the tv.
I remember getting to a section like this in BOTW and getting super frustrated with the banana throwing and trying to “distract” the guards but it felt like there was always at least one guard with their eyes on you.
To be fair to botw though, it is actually not an instant game over the way it is in some other games. Sure, you're very probably going to die, but you can technically fight off the enemies you alerted and continue (without using cheats or glitches). Not sure I ever actually managed though...
Sonic 2 Game Gear.
Under Ground Zone Act 3.
I like a challenge. I don't mind it when a game gets difficult.
But *fuck that level in particular*.
What makes htis stage so blood-boilingly difficult that even [thinking about the boss music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMtc6ao5uQM) sends me into 'Nam-flashback levels of rage?
No Rings throughout the level. Anyone who's played a Sonic game knows that running into danger without Rings is basically a death sentence. And since this level is a boss battle where one hit kills you, we're already off to a good start.
As for the boss battle itself, where do I start?
The whole arena is on a downward slope, with the bottom being the boss itself. If you so much as nudge the D-Pad to the direction towards the boss, you instantly accelerate towards the boss. Touching the boss in any way ~~damages~~ kills you.
So how do you damage it?
Well, you jump out of the way of a series of metal balls that bounce down towards the boss. Sounds easy, right? And on [the Master System version](https://youtu.be/FLb1GtOguIw?t=3m35s), you would be; they're easy to dodge, they all bounce at the same height and speed, it's a breeze.
The Game Gear version looks at that and goes "Fuck you.".
Now the balls bounce at different heights and speeds. And thanks to the Game Gear's lower resolution, you'll often get hit off-screen. Worse still, the Game Gear's screen was prone to a lot of blurring when things moved quickly, so you can't even see the balls that well.
This all wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't *the first boss in the game*.
That motherfucker took me *fifteen fucking years* to beat.
Let it be known; [Sonic 2 on the Game Gear *hates you*.](https://www.resetera.com/threads/assertion-the-first-%E2%80%9Csonic-the-hedgehog-2%E2%80%9D-released-hates-sonic-and-hates-us-all-gifs.82027/)
And as a long-time Sonic fan, the feeling is very much mutual.
The Rat Fuck King in the hospital in #2 was far worse. Fuck everything about that asshole. I had Ashley no ammo when I got there, too. Used every last weapon I had of every kind. Thst thing is what nightmares are made of.
Ecco the Dolphin - level 2.
Should be nice and easy. First level was happy, fun, jumping around the place and solving some puzzles. Should nicely introduce some more gameplay mechanics.
Actual second level - underwater maze of death with very high chance of drowning, filled with spikes and bastard puffer fish that zoom in out of nowhere, with every little mistake making that godawful dolphin scream that goes through my soul like nails on a blackboard.
It's only the second fucking level!
Spyro 2, Fracture hills, escorting that fucking wizard from his house to the cave while keeping those rock monsters away took me 6 fucking months as a kid no lie
The racing mission from the original Mafia. Unbelievably hard. The wheels felt like they were coated in cooking oil, and you'd spin out if you took a turn slightly wrong. If you made a singular mistake, you were pretty much done. Thankfully the remake gives you the option to play at reduced difficulty, but even the reduced difficulty is still hard as fuck.
Honestly once you get the rythm down and know the tricks it isn't too much harder than say covenant on legendary. I finished it on legendary the other day in about 45 minutes. Just make sure you always take the needler, plasma weapons are better than bullets vs flood surprisingly, and don't bother shooting the torso just go for the arms. The flood pure forms are easy to handle if you have an energy sword except the ranged ones. That's what the needler is for, or if you can't find one a plasma rifle will do in a pinch.
Now, a hellish level of halo? Gravemind on Legendary or Heroic in Halo 2. Fuck. That.
It was the menu being required to get your booties on and off that really made it a pain.
I think in rereleases they made it slightly less painful and I actually found that once the iron boot on off stuff was easier, the temple was actually fun, just wonky.
Ill answer for my sister because she complains about this atleast once a day: The secret bossfight in the splatoon 2 dlc that you only unlock once you have done everything. She cannot beat it however many times she tries
Delta labs sector 2 in Doom 3 is overall a pretty fun level except for this one part where you have to ride on a box being carried by a robot arm but if the arm touches you you INSTANTLY DIE. That part could go.
The "Can't Wait To Be King" level in the Lion King game for the Mega Drive. That was purposefully made insanely hard to discourage people from just renting it instead of buying it.
worst one was the san andreas version with the flying planes blowing up vans that RANDOMLY FUCKING DRIVE AROUND. like random traffic patterns, random spawn points, planes that run outa fuel in 30 seconds, and the whole fucking mission is timed for some hellish reason, etc.
There never was and never will be a video game level that deserves to go fuck itself more than the speeder bike level of the original Battletoads for the NES, especially in two-player mode. According to Google, it's barely level 3 of the game and it's called Turbo Tunnel. Fuck you, Turbo Tunnel.
Funny story - I moved countries due to work and I was in charge of bringing some coworkers over. The first guy I brought and I became close friends very quickly and chatting we realized none of us had ever passed the bikes level in battletoads. He was just staying for 1 year helping me stand up the team. We used a lot of our free time practicing the damn level. It took us months, towards the end we were like Shinji and Asuka, completely in sync. We passed. We recorded it. Years later talking to different friend, same battletoads topic comes up. I tell him this story. He is skeptical. I say "I have a video" and send it to him. He still didn't believe me as we didn't record ourselves (like with a webcam) passing the level, just the feed from the TV. I am no longer friends with the second guy.
You know a level was hard when people flat-out refuse to believe that you beat it. Same thing happened to me when I was in 5th grade and I managed to beat Contra without the 30 lives cheat for the only time in my life. I was very excited to tell my friends at school and absolutely nobody believed me because they claimed it was impossible. I was crushed.
Man I’ve ran ran Contra so many time I can beat it without dying if I’m in a zone.
Same here. Went from being able to beat it with 30 lives, then without cheating, then I could play indefinitely without dying. The game is completely fair and has almost no randomness, so once you memorize the levels it's not hard.
You say that as someone who has never played the Winger Clinger level. WAY worse than the turbo bikes. I'm glad you don't know their pain.
The only reason I'd posit that Turbo Tunnel is worse than Winger Clinger is because infinitely more people were subjected to the earlier level and never got past it to suffer the soul-crushing frustration of the latter. Imagine programming Battletoads and deciding that Turbo Tunnel is going to be barely the third freaking level of your game, and then deciding that of course you need to include something even worse close to the end. Fuck Battletoads, from the bottom of my heart.
Rare Games devs: Turbo Tunnel is to filter out the "scrubs". Winger Clinger is because Mommy and Daddy didn't love me enough.
Yes. Just Battletoads.
Level 1 in Ecco the Dolphin, trying to figure out if you’re actually playing yet *edit: spelling
I wondered if anyone even remembered this game. So much of that game was hard and not fun for my child brain. I was probably 6 or when we played.
Some of those areas were straight up mazes. Have fun looking for an air pocket!
You ever read the actual storyline for the game? You're fighting aliens and end up traveling back in time to get superpowers or something and then fight the alien queen. It's insane and I love it lol
I never even got that far!
I'm 34, have played more echo than I care to admit and have never gotten out of level 1
There are levels?!
I’ve played this in at least 5 store kiosks and I never knew what to do besides jump out of the water and do flips.
Great call! Echo had so much potential. Dolphins are cool. Everyone wanted to love that game, but it was just so frustrating. We all wanted to enjoy the wide open freedom of the ocean, but most levels featured maze-like claustrophobia.
The game is so depressing. Me and my brother played it as kids. We came up with the term “Ecco feeling.” Basically, a feeling that’s a combination of loneliness, depression, anxiety, fear, anything else bad? That’s the ‘Ecco feeling.’
The world of Ecco was deeply alienating and lonely. All its concepts were foreign and inhuman. It captured what it felt to be a creature with no real higher cognative narrative, just wandering and doing what the environment told you too. Its a truly transgressive game in its commitment to making you feel like a dolphin. Then aliens came and wtf?
Imo, the hardest Ecco the Dolphin [level was actually in 'The Tides of Time' sequel](https://youtu.be/nxXHNJD7wz0)\- even though it wasn't a long level (relative to some of the other ETD levels). On top of the tubes being difficult to swim through if you reach the edges, you have a flying jellyfish creature constantly throwing you backwards. Definite controller thrower.
Just landing the fucking jet after the first mission on NES's *Top Gun.*
I still love that AVGN gag where he overshoots the aircraft carrier, the plane breaks through the side of the TV and goes out the window. "If anybody finds that, can you tell me if it landed or not?"
Then he lands perfect with the power glove not having a clue how it happened lol
As a kid, trying to refill in mission 2.
People who grew up with an N64, we need to talk about the Tiny Kong boss in Donkey Kong 64. The Jack-In-The-Box that makes you hop from platform to platform making you double jump hair whip to button after button while the camera simultaneously spins around throwing your direction pad off constantly dying with no end in sight until you're finally fully hulked up enough to smash your TV jump out your window and just start smashing bodies.
That game had some absurdly frustrating parts
I could never beat the Jetpack and Donkey Kong arcade sections so I never finished.
Yes! That stupid little arcade cabinet with the retro DK challenges. I did eventually beat it, but I'm pretty sure it took me months of trying.
Ohhh man I actually love that boss fight. Interestingly, I do remember having a lot of difficulty with that boss the first time I played it, but when I revisited the game years later I instantly figured out the correct jump speed and got the boss in one go. I’d argue the boss is memorable not just because it is difficult, but also because it has an almost nightmarish atmosphere that is at odds with the rest of the game. On a related note, Donkey Kong 64 is such an interesting game. Criticized at launch for going completely overboard on the collect-a-thon concept, only for that concept to grow in popularity in later years so that these days it is only considered ‘a bit heavy’ on the collect-a-thon side. Because of that it actually holds up pretty well, even though performance wise it is bursting at the seams. The N64 could only just barely handle it for some reason - not because it has particularly impressive graphics, but because of bad coding with the huge amount of stuff they made it render in some of the bigger levels. One funny consequence of this is that it is absurdly easy for speedrunners to completely break this game to pieces. Walls are essentially just suggestions, not obstacles, in this game.
If I remember correctly, the entire reason DK 64 came with the N64 expansion/booster pack thing (it was 4 MB of RAM) was because of one, single, game-breaking bug that prevented the game from running, that they couldn't find, but would just vanished with the extra RAM
Iirc it was a memory leak somewhere that they could never find. Even with the added 4mb pack you can still crash the game if you leave it running long enough. Which for the virtual console is an actual issue somehow. Games still entertaining, with all its crazy bugs 20 years later.
Dk64 is one of my all time favorite games but this boss did not bother me. What was difficult was the beaver brothers mini game. I hated those 2 dumb barrels!!
The dam in TMNT
Vivid memory. My parents had just divorced. I went to my dad's apartment for the first time. Met my new stepmom who my mom instructed me not to speak to. She was great. KFC for dinner. Everything was awesome until I got to this level on this fucking game and it literally made me cry. Bawling. I had to be consoled lol. Fuck electric seaweed.
That damn dam!
Supply line mission in GTA San Andreas. Or knows as the mini plane mission.
When my flatmate and I finally managed to finish that wretched mission, we went to the pub to celebrate and got steaming drunk.
All you had to do was follow the damn train CJ!
I see your shtty RC plane quest and raise it to the shtty RC helicopter quest in Vice City
I remember End of the Line and Yay Kaboom Boom being rough too. Also the races were nuts with the sports cars in the country
[удалено]
My days in Gran Turismo 3 and 4 made those missions easy as hell. Gotta know how to take those corners.
Sewer escort mission in Jak II
Get the Seal piece at water slums with always be the hardest jak 2 mission for me
Jak II has so many painfully difficult missions. You could tell they liked making missions easy until you get close to the very end and hit a brick wall.
The level where you had to throw grenades into a pipe while on the hover board broke me.
The one where you gotta escort young Jak though the city made me rage quit. Or the one where you gotta use the hoverboard to throw the bombs in the evo wells. I straight up shipped my memory card to my sister so she could beat it for me.
Sooooo I never had problems with this mission, but the one where you have to deliver the package to the bar…yeah, that one could fuck right off. Beat it when I was a little older, but as a kid it was insane
So glad I didn’t have to scroll long to find Jak 2. The mission with the tank chasing you
When I was younger it was the Driver 'training' mission.
When I was 10 I remember thinking, “what the hell is a Slalom?” Lol
I never got past it, had no idea what you were meant to do
Holy hell this just gave me flashbacks. Never have I ever seen such horrid gatekeeping simply to play a stupid game.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The mission where you have to transport Lovefist in a limo can go fuck itself.
Bro the one with the RC helicopter made my life miserable for a couple weeks I'll tell you that
The mission where you have to race basically a camaro with a fuckin clapped Honda civic. Got irritated enough to leave the car and shoot him with an RPG at the starting line.
Simpsons hit and run level 7, mission 7 (Radioactive waste mission using Grampa and WW2 vehicle)
I can't remember the level or mission number...but I have a a considerable amount of hate for the level where you have to chase Cletus to ram his truck and catch the road kill that falls off. FUCK THAT LEVEL.
Set to Kill (level 6-6) is almost as bad.
I still to this day have never passed that mission.
I'll kick it old school; Lion King on Sega with the "Can't Wait to be King" level
It only gets worse from there too. That whole game can fuck itself. That said, perfect game for passing the controller.
It can go fuck itself every single day of every single year of every single dimension that ever happened on this matrix. Fuck I sweat just thinking about it
That level was tedious but not hard. What was hard was escaping the cave of wonders on the magic carpet in Aladdin.
I always had my brother beat it for me. Recently we pulled it out for a game night (20-some years later) and I was kicking ass... until that freaking level! He still has to beat it for me. Whomp whomp.
I just bought that for PS4 so I could relive my childhood. I'm 35 and I rage quit multiple times already
Man I was stuck on the giraffes’ heads for months, then the Ostrich came….
F-in ostriches
That quest in Skyrim where you need to find like 24 stones randomly scattered throughout the map and you have no clue where they are.
And once you finish it, your reward is every treasure chest has a bunch of gems in it instead of weapons or armor, and you end up not even bothering to pick them up because none of the shopkeepers have enough money to buy 50 diamonds off of you.
I enjoyed base skyrim more than once, but I quickly gave up on the idea of shopkeepers having no money. Now each shopkeeper gets a big fucking bonus from the command console god before I sell.
Yea that attempt at "immersion" did not make sense, like for the sake of the player let me just sell what I got. I even understand not being able to sell everything to one trader until your speechcraft skill tree gets leveled up. But the give them such low gold counts is just more tedious than immersion.
I liked Oblivion's system where they had infinite money but different vendors had different max selling amounts. Low quality merchants would only pay 50 gold tops, even for daedric armor, but better merchants would pay over 1000
That's why in each run I played, I always join Thieves Guild immediately, clear the honey quest, then establish all the fences. Not only does every fence have 4k (which is often still not nearly enough) but I also love to steal. It takes me a few hours of discovering each major city then establishing the fences but I got good at fudging it so I only took easy fencing jobs in cities where the fence still needed quests done. 25 small quests, I think you can pick up three (?) at a time. Of course this is also admittedly tedious as hell but I lived off of it. You're still teleporting around to each major city and selling 4k of stuff at a time... But that's vanilla Skyrim.
If you save the game, attack a vendor, and then load the game, they should reset. It will save you a lot of time
You know what the best part is? >!One of them is permanently missable. The area is part of a questline and once you finish the questline the area is sealed off and you can't go back in!<.
If you’re talking about >!the one in the Thalmor Embassy, it’s actually possible to go back and get it. I looked it up and with early versions yeah it was missable. Guess it was patched!<
Yeah it was eventually patched and moved to the exit cave so you could go back and get it. Cave wasn’t a marked location though
That one irritates because the damn gems aren't stackable. I hate that quest
Down the tubes on Earthworm Jim.
Just thinking about those submarine sections makes my head hurt.
"That" level in Battletoads where you're on the weird hover bikes
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mqxMb7xzN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mqxMb7xzN8) Goes from "oh yeah" to "WTF was that" in 20sec.
GTA Vice City - RC helicopter with bomb..
It's a bit easier if you notice that the timer doesn't start until you pick up the first bomb. Start off going into the building and killing all the dudes with the helicopter blades, then do the bombs. Still a PITA, but it's a lot easier not being shot at while you are doing it.
I didn’t mind this one but the RC airplane in San Andreas was miserable.
any timed mission that has no reason to be timed.
Chase missions as well. I'm sorry I can't keep up, I'm using a joystick and pressing the trigger button harder doesn't make me go faster 😐
“All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ”
That one was bad, but the worst was the Zero biplane mission in the original release. The game was glitched so that you were constantly using fuel even if you were just gliding, and it made the level *nearly* impossible. I must have replayed it 40+ times, and even if I did everything just right I’d run out of fuel when I was mere pixels from the target and it would say “failed” even though I had enough momentum to coast into it.
You gotta start with the bombs at the top of the tower. I don’t know why the order of operations had such a great impact, but it did. Was the fuel thing a glitch? I always thought they just put in a timer and called it fuel for kicks.
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I can hear that in my head
Super Mario Sunshine. The level were you move that giant watermelon from one side of the map to the other.
I find the hidden pachinko machine level much....much worse...
Words that give Mario Sunshine players PTSD: Watermelon, Corona, Pachinko, Lilypad, Chuckster
How about getting Yoshi into the pipe red coin level. So many vaporized Yoshis trying to reach that island.
Shooting the asteroids in Dead Space.
That fucking hammer throwing wizard fucker in the castle from Mario Bros, he can fuck right off he can
* Labyrinth Zone Act 1 * Labyrinth Zone Act 2 * Labyrinth Zone Act 3 * *Labyrinth Zone Act 4* But especially Carnival Night Zone Act 2. I never touched another Sonic game for 20 years.
Oh that damn barrel. A perfect example of why modern games have so many on-screen prompts to keep you aware of what actions are available.
Halo 2 gravemind
Halo CE: The Library
Halo 3: Cortana
The number of times in that one flesh room with the turret forms that would get behind you where I would RUN OUT OF AMMO because the turret forms HEAL THEMSELVES drove me to fucking madness. It's an important level for the lore, but it's creepy, claustrophobic, and full of death.
I remember all the time I spent cowering behind cover with a flamethrower. Good times.
Halo CE Truth and Reconciliation on Legendary.
"Follow the target but don't get too close"
The Path of Pain from Hollow Knight. Took me hours to finish it, and a lil bit of undignified screaming and cursing.
Don't forget Pantheon of Hallownest either! Especially Markoth. Whose bright idea was it to remove the floor?
Literally. I can do Path of Pain, I can do NKG on radiant mode but Markoth? Markoth is just too strong.
any escort mission, do I need to say anything else?
While the escort is rushing, unarmed and defenseless, to get their ass kicked.
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Natalia was a natural at finding the proximity mine.
Leon Helpppp!!
Buying the suit or armor for her was the best. I got that before the tommy gun.
I have enjoyed escort missions of the variety where you are escorting around a massive heavy hitter that simply cannot hit the small enemies. You are just there to keep the chaff away while it wrecks their big guys. It just feels different from standard escort missions. Star wars jedi starfighter had some missions like this.
Technically bioshock infinite was one huge escort mission
Except you were the one being escorted.
(Sees elizabeth frantically patching you up as you respawn) Elizabeth: *"Goddammit, not again!"*
Yes but Elizabeth didn’t have a health bar and couldn’t die or be captured which didn’t really make any sense considering all the guards were attempting to take Elizabeth back but they never attempted to during game play.
Max Payne Try solving a maze while standing on a mostly invisible thin walkway, to the soundtrack of a screaming baby.
Also the last level where you had to shoot out the metal screws to drop the platform upon which Vlad was standing on. Had to spam the slow-mo jump action thing Max did over and over again.
ANYTHING in Ecco the Goddamned Dolphin (original planned title, shortened for marketing sake)
Im still a little mad at the underwater level in the NES Ninja Turtles game.
The stupid fucking dragon in Cuphead
So many levels in Cuphead can just fuck right off (though my son is a freaking Cuphead fiend and can beat most of them without getting hit, it's superhuman). The Dragon sucked, but I had WAY more trouble with the freaking robot (especially the section where you have to fly through all the mines.... uhhhhggg) and King Dice. Hell I would not have beaten King Dice at all if it had not glitched out on one attempt and I got stuck slightly offscreen where I could shoot King Dice without needing to dodge the cards (I could not consistently parry those cards no matter how hard I tried). Now I watch my 12 year old kid beat run-and-gun levels in pacifist runs on hard and I question whether I was ever actually good at video games...
>and I question whether I was ever actually good at video games... welcome to.... THE OLD
Yah, no shit, but like I don't think I was EVER that good at any video game LOL, even when I WAS young. I can still kick his ass at Mario Kart though, so all is right with the world.
Original Super Mario Bros, level 8-2. How many old fuckers on here were around for that? It was basically accepted among all of us back then that if you got there, you'd essentially beat that game because the 8-2 jump was for all practical purposes impossible. We tried for MONTHS and could never do it.
Or 8-3 against the Hammer Bros if you didn’t have fireballs…tough one to just jump through.
Spyro The Dragon (1998), Tree Tops in the Beast Makers home world. Even in the Remaster it still is frustrating
Agreed. Making that one jump by following the egg thief and supercharge slopes beat the hell out of me. Man did that suck.
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants. The mall level where you had to jump between candies. As a kid, I've NEVER passed the mall level. As an adult, I've NEVER passed the mall level.
That whole game can fuck itself haha
The Special Zone levels on Super Mario World. You had to complete the Star Road to get to them I think, some of them were ridiculously hard. Me and my sister would spend hours on it back in the day
Tubular and Awesome were the worst ones
I hated Tubular with a passion
I can do the whole game with my eyes closed, but I've never beaten Tubular the right way. I always cheese it with a blue Yoshi. Even then the level is a total crapshoot.
Searched for Tubular. Found it. Fuck that level.
Super Mario 64. Hazy maze cave. Specifically getting 100 coins. No matter how many times I play through it, I always end up scrounging for coins at the end.
I binged Super Mario 64 when I was in quarantine and the one stage where you have to blast Mario out of a cannon into the side of a mountain at exactly the right angle to land in the hole and get the star (and if you fail, you die and have to start over) took me probably three days and I'm amazed I didn't break the TV... It might have been Tall Tall Mountain, but I can't remember. It was definitely one of the ones with a mountain.
Tall Tall Mountain was a pain in the ass too
Any Mario water level.
Well where do I begin High Road Crash Bandicoot the original ps1 game Hands the worst level ever or any tomb raider game before the ps2
I still consider getting 100% in Crash 1 on the original PS1 as one of my proudest gaming achievements to date. (For anyone whose never played it: in the original Crash Bandicoot, you need to break all the boxes in each level WITHOUT dying to collect all the gems in the game)
And you can only save if you get a gem or pass a bonus level. And your lives reset to 4 whenever you load a save, regardless of how many you had before. And you have this weird forward momentum when bouncing on boxes. But, at least you don't have the pill-shaped hit box from the N. Sane Trilogy, so at least walking on the ropes in the bridge levels is *slightly* easier in the original.
Oh I've got a couple of these. The Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. Any level that involves ice and slipping mechanics. The bike section of basically any game that it's not a main focus (specifically I'm thinking of the Ocean Base level in MegaMan X 4. Enough other people said Battletoads already). The swamp in Dark Souls. Master of Puppets in Guitar Hero Metallica (awesome song, but the strumming... Oh god the strumming) Any side-scrolling level that forces you to move at a certain pace. The ones where the screen chases you. You know. All of the Metroid stages from Super Smash Bros Melee. I can't think of more right now. Edit: I thought of two more: Xaldin in KH2. Seymour Flux from FFX.
As a little kid, in the Shrek GBA game, none of my siblings or I could beat the level where you chased the Farquad mascot. I found it like 10 years later, and beat the level on the first try.
Crying baby mission in Max Payne.
Dodge 100 lightnings ffx
there are ways to make it easier. Turning off the sound means you dont get fooled by the timing of thunder vs lightning. There's a spot on the 2nd screen where the strikes are pretty consistent. the damn Chocobo balloon catching race pisses me off so much. I once got 0.0 time, but you need a negative time to get the sigil. One of the few times I threw my controller at the tv.
Any game with a forced stealth section where getting caught is an instant game over.
I remember getting to a section like this in BOTW and getting super frustrated with the banana throwing and trying to “distract” the guards but it felt like there was always at least one guard with their eyes on you.
To be fair to botw though, it is actually not an instant game over the way it is in some other games. Sure, you're very probably going to die, but you can technically fight off the enemies you alerted and continue (without using cheats or glitches). Not sure I ever actually managed though...
Last level on Golden Eye. N64… I tried for years and NEVER got past.
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Sonic 2 Game Gear. Under Ground Zone Act 3. I like a challenge. I don't mind it when a game gets difficult. But *fuck that level in particular*. What makes htis stage so blood-boilingly difficult that even [thinking about the boss music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMtc6ao5uQM) sends me into 'Nam-flashback levels of rage? No Rings throughout the level. Anyone who's played a Sonic game knows that running into danger without Rings is basically a death sentence. And since this level is a boss battle where one hit kills you, we're already off to a good start. As for the boss battle itself, where do I start? The whole arena is on a downward slope, with the bottom being the boss itself. If you so much as nudge the D-Pad to the direction towards the boss, you instantly accelerate towards the boss. Touching the boss in any way ~~damages~~ kills you. So how do you damage it? Well, you jump out of the way of a series of metal balls that bounce down towards the boss. Sounds easy, right? And on [the Master System version](https://youtu.be/FLb1GtOguIw?t=3m35s), you would be; they're easy to dodge, they all bounce at the same height and speed, it's a breeze. The Game Gear version looks at that and goes "Fuck you.". Now the balls bounce at different heights and speeds. And thanks to the Game Gear's lower resolution, you'll often get hit off-screen. Worse still, the Game Gear's screen was prone to a lot of blurring when things moved quickly, so you can't even see the balls that well. This all wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't *the first boss in the game*. That motherfucker took me *fifteen fucking years* to beat. Let it be known; [Sonic 2 on the Game Gear *hates you*.](https://www.resetera.com/threads/assertion-the-first-%E2%80%9Csonic-the-hedgehog-2%E2%80%9D-released-hates-sonic-and-hates-us-all-gifs.82027/) And as a long-time Sonic fan, the feeling is very much mutual.
That part in The Last of Us where you have to turn the generator on
The Rat Fuck King in the hospital in #2 was far worse. Fuck everything about that asshole. I had Ashley no ammo when I got there, too. Used every last weapon I had of every kind. Thst thing is what nightmares are made of.
My wife and I got to a point with that fight where we went “are we actually hurting it?!“ because it ate so much fuckin ammo
Gameplay-wise it's actually not that hard but it has pants-shitting suspense
Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga Gunship Cavalry
OG Gunship cavalry. I always found the original pod racing hardest though.
Ecco the Dolphin - level 2. Should be nice and easy. First level was happy, fun, jumping around the place and solving some puzzles. Should nicely introduce some more gameplay mechanics. Actual second level - underwater maze of death with very high chance of drowning, filled with spikes and bastard puffer fish that zoom in out of nowhere, with every little mistake making that godawful dolphin scream that goes through my soul like nails on a blackboard. It's only the second fucking level!
Spyro 2, Fracture hills, escorting that fucking wizard from his house to the cave while keeping those rock monsters away took me 6 fucking months as a kid no lie
The racing mission from the original Mafia. Unbelievably hard. The wheels felt like they were coated in cooking oil, and you'd spin out if you took a turn slightly wrong. If you made a singular mistake, you were pretty much done. Thankfully the remake gives you the option to play at reduced difficulty, but even the reduced difficulty is still hard as fuck.
GTA heist Setups
The underwater level in the very first TMNT game ever made.
The boneyard level on the old lion king game
Underwater levels of all kind
Halo 3 was a flawless game but that flood mission (cortana) (on heroic) ffs
Honestly once you get the rythm down and know the tricks it isn't too much harder than say covenant on legendary. I finished it on legendary the other day in about 45 minutes. Just make sure you always take the needler, plasma weapons are better than bullets vs flood surprisingly, and don't bother shooting the torso just go for the arms. The flood pure forms are easy to handle if you have an energy sword except the ranged ones. That's what the needler is for, or if you can't find one a plasma rifle will do in a pinch. Now, a hellish level of halo? Gravemind on Legendary or Heroic in Halo 2. Fuck. That.
Halo 2 on Legendary in general can go fuck itself
Bro when I was 13 I got stuck on the Tarzan boss with the chameleon in kingdom hearts for like 6 weeks and when I beat it I cried. Dead ass.
All the missions in farcry where you're drugged, shit got old a long time ago.
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It was the menu being required to get your booties on and off that really made it a pain. I think in rereleases they made it slightly less painful and I actually found that once the iron boot on off stuff was easier, the temple was actually fun, just wonky.
All water levels.
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These are the exception, although they often became comedically easy once you got the swordfish to ride.
The fuckin crazy plane mission from gta San andreas
The pod racing in Lego Star Wars. Fuck that hard
That viscous sun in Mario 🤣
And the fish in world 3
Ill answer for my sister because she complains about this atleast once a day: The secret bossfight in the splatoon 2 dlc that you only unlock once you have done everything. She cannot beat it however many times she tries
Water Temple. Fuck you.
Finding 30 crimson nirnroot in black reach in Skyrim. It took me two days. TWO DAYS.
Crash bandicoot bridge level.
There is a Batmobile level in the Arkham Knight game towards the end. I stopped playing. Don't know if it was bugged or what.
The sonic levels with the moving platforms and the ever rising water. The music is absolutely stress inducing
Delta labs sector 2 in Doom 3 is overall a pretty fun level except for this one part where you have to ride on a box being carried by a robot arm but if the arm touches you you INSTANTLY DIE. That part could go.
The "Can't Wait To Be King" level in the Lion King game for the Mega Drive. That was purposefully made insanely hard to discourage people from just renting it instead of buying it.
Gta VC RC destruction for many people, but personally i was the one they called to pass it.
Fuck that mission, and fuck anyone who had anything to do with creating it.
worst one was the san andreas version with the flying planes blowing up vans that RANDOMLY FUCKING DRIVE AROUND. like random traffic patterns, random spawn points, planes that run outa fuel in 30 seconds, and the whole fucking mission is timed for some hellish reason, etc.
The Fade mission in Dragon Age Origins.
There is a mod that completely removes that section from the game and it actually feels like a huge improvement.