Difficulty spikes!

[MiracleOfSound]

You know the feeling... you've been happily enjoying a game for hours, going through it at a good pace and suddenly you're stuck in your tracks, starting to get frustrated by the sucker punch of a sudden huge leap in difficulty.

It can be a new control mechanic introduced late in the game that reacts differently to the main game mechanics (Dead Space Meteor sections... ugh)...

Dead Space meteors​

It could be a ridiculously hard boss fight (Kaileena from Warrior Within, final colossus from SOTC...I hate you both)...

It could be a flat out broken piece of shit game design (God of War's spinning blade pillars of death, Gears Of War 2 defending the Satt Comm from the reavers, Metro 2033 Acid Blobs)...

Metro 2033 Amoebas - don't feel bad, just blame the AI​

It could be a flat out unfair fight against overwhelming numbers of powerful enemies (Oblivion - Meridia's quest... 5 constantly self healing necromancers, a bunch of undead skeletons and zombies in a tiny cave... goddamn that was tough)

Oblivion - Necromancers are great for practicing my difficulty slider skills​

...or just a section that requires a lot of luck and skill (Half Life 2, fighting 2 airships at once with just a dumpster for cover and some antlions as bait)

Nova Prospekt - toughest moment in Half Life 2​

Share the times you found yourself suddenly stuck and how you you eventually beat it!

 

[the_pleasure_is_mine]

That Metro bit on hard... until I figured out I could actually kill the spawners... yeah I'm that thick.

Also Prototypes random spikes... I overcame that by snapping the disc in two.

But seriously Prototype was needlessly difficult at points...

 

[Breaker deGodot]

The first section where you fight the Flood in Halo: CE... yeah. I won by luck.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Psychonauts has a well documented case of this. The first half is easy, but still brilliant, and then there's that sudden huge spike in difficulty. With controls as imprecise as that, it's quite frustrating.

Also, CoD 4. The Pripyat mission, with the end of level defence. It was going so well up to that point.

I didn't get that far in Psychonauts, the controls started to bother me on the very first mission and after the cubic mind level from the scientist guy I got sick of it.

That fairground level was nasty alright... especially on Veteran.

 

[AlternatePFG]

Psychonauts has a well documented case of this. The first half is easy, but still brilliant, and then there's that sudden huge spike in difficulty. With controls as imprecise as that, it's quite frustrating.

Also, CoD 4. The Pripyat mission, with the end of level defence. It was going so well up to that point.

That fairground level was nasty alright... especially on Veteran.

Yeah, that part was pain. I tried everything, but it didn't work. I gave up eventually.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Psychonauts has a well documented case of this. The first half is easy, but still brilliant, and then there's that sudden huge spike in difficulty. With controls as imprecise as that, it's quite frustrating.

Also, CoD 4. The Pripyat mission, with the end of level defence. It was going so well up to that point.

I didn't get that far in Psychonauts, the controls started to bother me on the very first mission and after the cubic mind level from the scientist guy I got sick of it.

Oh you must, it gets so much better as you go on.

Someday... I re-downloaded it recently and gave it another try. Must finish it.

I find Tim Schafer's games frustrating because they have such a great aesthetic and setting but they just aren't great fun for me to play (Brutal Legend was the same.)

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Psychonauts has a well documented case of this. The first half is easy, but still brilliant, and then there's that sudden huge spike in difficulty. With controls as imprecise as that, it's quite frustrating.

Also, CoD 4. The Pripyat mission, with the end of level defence. It was going so well up to that point.

That fairground level was nasty alright... especially on Veteran.

Yeah, that part was pain. I tried everything, but it didn't work. I gave up eventually.

The best way is to hide behind the bumper cars and plant a lot of claymores. The rest is all luck, dodging grenades and a bit of 'de skillz'.

 

[The Procrastinated End]

The difficulty of score attack mode in BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger spikes once you go from Nu to Ragna. It still frustrates the hell out of me.

 

[Amazigh]

Dragon Age, I found most of the game pretty decent in difficulty but when they randomly throw in Blood Mages... that bit outside Fort Drakon was an absolute beast too.

 

[Sejvos]

Dead Rising's 7 day achivment was a big long pain, But I loved that game.

 

[Raijha]

The Emperor at the end of Force Unleashed. On hard took me almost two hours to get that guy down cuz I was always getting caught when he would randomly blast out that full shield that knocks you down and does like 1/3 of your life bar and he had no tell for that. So if you weren't careful and spent too long doing melee he would get you with it every time, lol. Took me a while to properly get past that fight.

 

[Harlemura]

I know I've had loads of moments like this, but the only one in recent memory is Todd... whatever the third Evil Ex's surname was in the Scott Pilgrim game.

There was a slight rise in difficulty during the level, suggesting a bit of a challenge, but me and my sister struggled through it. Then we got to the big cheese himself.
Bam. Adding it all up, he took four lives off us. Stupid Todd Whatsyourname.

Spoiler: Mild point prover

Now bare in mind this takes up the vast majority of the screen. Finding the one safe spot's better found before your pal's out of lives and you only have 8HP left.
Darned vegans...

 

[paddyshay]

Arkham Asylum Poison Ivy boss fight...a big spore-shooting monster that's only vulnerable for 1 second every so often, a bunch of vines that strangle you to death unless you button-mash like a Mortal Kombat player on coke, and constantly respawning grunts that (although not difficult on their own) became wall-punchingly difficult because of how distracting they were from the actual boss you were trying to defeat. Plus the camera angles made it so I would prepare myself to exploit the boss' weakness only to be sucker-punched by the douche who conveniently disappeared from the screen for 5 seconds. The game should have at least awarded you for beating that with a fight between Ivy and Harley...in mud.

 

[enzilewulf]

I think the game is called Digimon world four... a game me and my mates played a while back... We beat four worlds and were in our 4 evolved phase.. after that we would get our badass guys. Well fighting those guys in the 5th world were a pain in the ass! It took at least 50 hits for one to die.. and If one was a king.. well damn't all.

 

[LeighAlura]

Proto. Type.

I so wish that I could enjoy this game. I really do, it would be the first third person free roaming game that I've actually enjoyed in my life.

But, there's a problem:

How do I enjoy a game where the only time I'm safe is when I'm standing around in a disguise DOING NOTHING? If I so much as run in that game, some Blackwatch creep suddenly decides he can see through Mutant disguises and calls in a strike team on me. I get rid of that strike team, suddenly another one gets called. I get rid of THAT strike team, guess what? Another one's already on the way. I even killed the radio guys, and the calls still went through.

Oh, and let's not forget Hunters. Even when you have your most powerful abilities, these guys smack you around like you're a punching bag taped to an absurdly flexible pole. I'm over here, minding my own business, thinking that if I help the Hunters kill stuff, they won't bug me, and I fail to realize just how close to a Nest I am, suddenly a Hunter pops in off-screen and smacks my sorry hide into a car and alerts the military on my ass, now I've suddenly got six Hunters beating on me with their un-interruptible punch-and-run attacks, and as if that wasn't enough, now I've got flying alert drones, tanks, helicopters, and guys with rockets charging at me like a rabid bull on steroids.

The mission where you fail to assassinate McMullin and have to run from both the military and the infected? Oh, that's also fun. Because it's really fair to have seventy soldiers shooting you like crazy and not missing a single shot, where before, they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, and it's really fair to have helicopters firing rockets at you like rockets are going out of style.

Ugh.

And don't even get me started on some of those Landmark collectibles.

 

[Scobie]

DELETED

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Just thought of a couple more:

Red Faction: Guerrilla final mission

Red Dead Redemptin turret sections

GTA San Andreas flying school, races

 

[demoman_chaos]

Revenge of Shinobi on the Genesis/MegaDrive (whichever your country called the 16-bit masterpiece), the first levels are fine and dandy. Then you get to a waterfall where the picky doublejump starts causing problems. Then you head through a city before facing a ninja in a night club that can mass murder you in seconds flat even with the invincibility spell. After that you are in a military base and things turn to shit. Once you meet the first grenadier, you might as well turn off the game. They can lob grenades over walls and hit you and you cannot hit them. The part that made me want to murder the creators wasin the airplane level (which is just after the military base). A grenadier was chucking nades at me and I couldn't hit him. I jumped over the boxes that were in my way when a door on the plane randomly opened and out I went. I never ragequit before or since like I did then.

Demon's Souls after the supposed-to-lose fight against the Vanguard (or as Yahtzee called it, the "turd monster"), you get some easy goons and levels that only have a few dickmoves and asshole enemies. Then you get to the Flamelurker at the end of stage 2-2. The fun kicks off then. At first he is tough, but manageable. He hits hard, but at elast you have some time to heal. Then you get him down to the last 3rd of health and he goes into rage mode. Now he is on your ass the whole time giving you almost no time to breath. He spams AOE attacks that do damage through your guard and take away a lot of stamina per hit. The 2-3 boss after him is a pushover and all other bosses are fairly easy (save for the ManEaters that are only hard because they love to knock you off the ledge and the False King who is like a harder hitting Flamelurker with a very large AOE attack (but much later in the game).

 

[Altorin]

that meteor section in Dead Space suuuuucked.

 

[MicrosoftPaysMe]

The first section where you fight the Flood in Halo: CE... yeah. I won by luck.

Really? I got stuck on the part after the libery when your back outside and the covenet are EVERYWHERE and the flood are everywhere else.