Difficulty spikes!

[scorptatious]

The final boss of Final Fantasy IX. I've recently beaten this game, but not before having to take out this guy. I was kind of pissed too, because if I lost to him, I had to face Trance Kuja again, who is piss easy compared to him. He's really fast, his attacks include one that drops one of your party member's HP to 1, and one where he casts this really flashy attack called "Grand Cross" which inflicts several random status ailments on your party. Some of them you cannot protect yourself from, mini, slow, zombie, and DEATH. By the time I was able to get my party back in fighting shape after that, he casts it AGAIN.

He took me several tries, and I finally got him by having Steiner, who entered Trance mode, wail away at him. When I finally defeated him, I was shouting and yelling obscenities at the television. Thankfully my parents weren't home. >_>

Another difficulty spike I experienced recently was the Cerberus/satyr fight in God of War 3 on Titan mode. God... fucking...damn. The dogs...the exploding dogs...

 

[Legendairy314]

Latest: Was replaying Halo on the second hardest difficulty. On the second to last level you reach a certain point and are then assaulted by 3 huge waves of flood. Afterwards you open a door and are introduced to a new elite type that kills you in 5 shots. Oh and there's 3 of them with some rocket launcher grunts giving them back up. You died? Well enjoy going through those 3 waves of enemies again as well as re-opening the door.

Most Memorable: Mirror's Edge. I walked into a room with 7 fully armed bad guys and no idea where to go. I try and think for a single second and am met with a 10 second reload. I returned the game shortly after.

 

[Korolev]

"Takedown" in MW2 - that level got my blood boiling. Oh and Call of Duty: World at War, any time the enemies decided to throw grenades at you was rather annoying.

And let's not forget Uncharted 2 and the blue-guys. Although that was towards the end of the game, so you might not consider it a spike.

Oh and then there's that Rainbow Six Vegas 2, where you had to quietly kill those guys before descending to defuse the bomb. It wasn't that hard if you knew there was a silenced sniper rifle, but otherwise, it was quite difficult and took me about 7 tries to get through it. Yeah, I'm not good at aiming with analogue sticks.

And as Yahtzee said once, some early parts in Halo 3 were far more difficult than any point of the last few levels. In particular, in the second level, there's a room full of tough enemies, one of which has a large hammer that can easily kill you. It took me a good long while to get past that part on Heroic. But the rest of the level is really easy.

I don't really have a problem with difficulty spikes, as long as they don't occur too often.

 

[TheColdHeart]

The meteor part of Dead Space had me raging a fair few times, it was probably the only part of the game where I really struggled to get through.

The end of the sniping mission in COD 4 in the Pripyat funfair...I died so many times playing that I started playing with sound muted as I was getting sick of the sound when you died.

Prototype, started out good and was fairly enjoyable then bam...difficulty spike. I gave up playing as instead of doing missions I spent all my time avoiding hunters and strike teams.

Need For Speed Pro Street had a fairly steep curve too, I went from 1st placing races and events to being left for dust especially in the drags.

 

[Korolev]

The final boss of Final Fantasy IX. I've recently beaten this game, but not before having to take out this guy. I was kind of pissed too, because if I lost to him, I had to face Trance Kuja again, who is piss easy compared to him. He's really fast, his attacks include one that drops one of your party member's HP to 1, and one where he casts this really flashy attack called "Grand Cross" which inflicts several random status ailments on your party. Some of them you cannot protect yourself from, mini, slow, zombie, and DEATH. By the time I was able to get my party back in fighting shape after that, he casts it AGAIN.

He took me several tries, and I finally got him by having Steiner, who entered Trance mode, wail away at him. When I finally defeated him, I was shouting and yelling obscenities at the television. Thankfully my parents weren't home. >_>

Another difficulty spike I experienced recently was the Cerberus/satyr fight in God of War 3 on Titan mode. God... fucking...damn. The dogs...the exploding dogs...

Oh god - Necron. That's brought back unpleasant memories.