Games that ramped up difficulty and dang near destroyed the experience

[Sean Hollyman]

Loose Ends in Modern Warfare 2.

The rest of the game up to this point, wasn't exactly easy, but it was at least doable.

Loose Ends had me raging at multiple points. Defending the computer thing, I died a lot.

And the bit when you have to run down the hill was hell. I hit a checkpoint while I was in a snipers line of fire and just died as soon as I spawned

 

[Hemlet]

Spoiler: I don't get it...

I really don't understand what's so hard about the Meat Circus in Psychonauts. I'm not a platformer genius by any stretch of the imagination (anyone who's seen me play a Mario game can attest to that), but I ripped through Psychonauts multiple times with relative ease. The only part of that level I'd call difficult is that platforming section in the middle of the final boss fight, and even then you have more than enough health to brute force your way through if you alternate between having Invisibility up and just taking the hits.

OT: The last boss at the end of the story in Dead Rising was a ridiculous difficulty spike. Here, fight this boss on a very small area, where if you fall off you land in a horde of zombies. Oh, and we arbitrarily took away all your weapons. Hope that's cool.

There were a LOT of games on the N64 that were guilty of having moments like this. Quest 64 went from being hilariously easy to soul-crushingly hard the instant you found the first dungeon (not that finding the dungeon itself was difficult since the game had exactly ONE road). Racing games like Diddy Kong Racing and Star Wars Pod Racer would just crank the difficulty to ridiculous levels near the end. Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire had some levels that were just downright mean at the half-way point. Hell, even Super Mario 64 has Tiny Huge Island, the level specifically designed to point out exactly how badly the camera wants you dead.

Sonic Adventure Battle 2 on the Gamecube had a positively retarded difficulty spike in some levels. One that stands out in my memory is the level where you're playing that huge breasted bat girl and you had to find a bunch of gems in under a time limit, and the level was fucking huge.

Another one was Gladius on the Gamecube. You'd be doing fine through the first and second maps, but then you'd get to the third map and get stuck on an arena where you could only use animals to fight. What's that? Don't have any animals? Don't worry, we have a bunch of grossly underleveled ones to hire on. Oh you want to go back to a previous area to train those ones up? Well too bad, we won't let you through. Enjoy being stuck.

 

[Dragoon]

Final Fantasy X.
"Oh. This sin't too hard," *Third Seymour battle* "FFFFFUUUUUUUUU--"

Am I the only one who found third Seymore to be easy?

It wasn't that bad but Yunalesca was a ***** of a battle, stupid megadeath, took me awhile to find out it doesn't effect you if you're a zombie.

 

[Dragoon]

For me the FFXIII boss fight agaisnt barthandelus ruined teh whole game because I couldn't beat him and I couldn't even grind properly

 

[SageRuffin]

Beat em ups with annoying last bosses usually ruin the game for me as well as I like to play arcade mode. This gen that would be street fighter 4 and Dead or Alive 4 so much rage ARGHHH!!

Alpha-152 was a nightmare till I figured out throws to 3x damage on her stage. Tina destroyed her. I hate Tina, and I destroyed her. But for anyone not based around throwing, she was a pain in the rear.[/quote]

As a connoisseur of fighting games (I'm not "pro" or top in the country or anything), I can tell you that there seems to be an even split of final bosses that either behave like they're supposed to - i.e. Demon Hyo (Project Justice), Dural (Virtua Fighter 4/5), Gill (Street Fighter 3), Shao Kahn (MK9... hush, he's stupid easy once you know how to fight him) - or they're ridiculously broken; SNK has a big problem with this, so much that there's a term dubbed "SNK Boss [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SNKBoss]", aptly named after the various bosses from SNK's fighting games that did shit that was downright unfair and nigh impossible to defeat as such.

Observation: Hmm... you know I retract my earlier statement about the even split. :/

Ninja Gaiden for the xbox when I first got it kicked my ass so hard I stopped playing a about 6 months. Later I picked it up again and eventually became a master ninja. Again not a ruin but a game with a vacation time requirement.

Ninja Gaiden Black is one of the few games that did high difficulties right, or so I choose to believe. And I'll tell you why: the combat, while fast and some times frantic, was methodical - you couldn't just spam certain attacks and think everything's gonna be all right.

Now let's factor in enemies. In most games, if you amped up the difficulty, you either took more and did less damage, or you fought more difficult enemies sooner (DMC is notorious for both). In NGB, you fought new enemies with new and more damaging abilities. Let's take simple ninja: on Ninja Dog and Normal difficulties, you had brown and white ninja (the latter being more agile, and thus harder to kill), Hard difficulty had you fight against white and black ninja (the latter here now having a high-damage throw and projectiles), Very Hard gave you black and blue "Windmill" ninja (the latter here now very hardy and possessing a projectile that tracked your position), and Master Ninja let you have fun with red "Flame" ninja (I'll give you 3 guesses here, with 2 freebies...). The best part? Those are just the introductory, low-level enemies.

NG2 for the 360, however, is just a mess. While for some enemies the game stuck with the "higher difficulty = new enemies" route (giant pink demons called van gelfs now were black or gold and could fly and throw fireballs), the game instead uses the old "higher difficulty = more damage" method. And some of the "new" game mechanics leave you quite ill-equipped for fighting certain enemies. Add this with the game sometimes breaking its own mechanics for the sake of difficulty and the game becomes more of a slog through frustration and boisterous, sometimes imaginary, obscenities.

Shame too. It had the capacity to outdo NGB in almost every way (save story and mission flow).

 

[Frankster]

King arthur the role playing wargame. Love the game but towards the end of a campaign you'd be invaded every year by multiple strong armies attacking from different directions, requiring you to spend most of your time and ressources protecting your hard earned lands, which in turns slows you from actually finishing the main quests and therefore the game.

And when you're done with this round of invasion, you'd get a new wave even stronger then the last!

I dont know if they ever fixed this but only way I beat the campaign was with the use of cheats to autowin battles.

 

[Brownie101]

Final Fantasy X.
"Oh. This sin't too hard," *Third Seymour battle* "FFFFFUUUUUUUUU--"

Am I the only one who found third Seymore to be easy?

I think I was just bloody unlucky. For about 4 years.

 

[WaffleCopters]

I honestly cant think of a-

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard was an awesome game but got stupid hard at times. The Tentacle Beast of Traam was the moment that made me stop playing for like a month.

oh wait that. that exactly. i found the game pretty amusing (make that extremely amusing) with the way your guns were so contrasted going from zone to zone. then i hit this boss and stopped playing. havent played since.

EDIT: I'd say Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, since normal difficulty is still annoying, but thats a "tom clancy" game, and theyve always been for the "be tactical or die" approach. which is what i like about them.

 

[MuzzleFlash]

Dropship: United Peace Force.

The last two/three missions were impossible.

FUUUUUUUU-

Damn you, Sir. My brain had suppressed all memories of the last couple of missions of that game.

It was a fucking awesome game in it's day, looked and played superb. Great fun and a lot of variety too, and then just...I....those....missions....AAAAARGH!!!!

In the meantime I have hooked up my old PS2 and am giving it another bash, the dambusting mission is pretty tough too but enjoyable, and the tank mission in China is epic. The whole game is like eating a delicious cake, which only gets more and more delicious as you go through the chocolate icing jeep mission, the nice spongey base raid, the chocolately furball over the fleet, but you know there's a big rotten cabbage or something in the middle.

You guys got me so curious about this, I'll have to check it out just to punish myself!

You my friend are in for quite the journey, just don't use the cheats until you have failed the 3rd to last mission for the 20th time to truly feel the Dropship experience.

 

[Leemaster777]

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard was an awesome game but got stupid hard at times. The Tentacle Beast of Traam was the moment that made me stop playing for like a month.

Wait, someone else played this game? And enjoyed it? Hell, I thought I was the only one.

Personally, I found that guy difficult, but not COMPLETELY impossible.

Anyways, I've got to go with Prinny 2: Dawn of Operation Panties, Dood.

Now, the game is build on it's punishing difficulty, but I was really getting into it. But THEN, I got near the end of the game, and hit a brick wall.

See, near the end, you have to do a boss rush against all the previous bosses. Okay, fair enough. But the boss of the boss rush mode is yourself. Times 100. Yes, you have to fight 100 clones of yourself. God damn it, I spent SOOOO many lives trying to beat these fuckers, only to get my ass handed to me over and over again.

I still haven't beaten that level yet.

 

[Jfswift]

I still feel like I only beat the Flamelurker in Demon's Souls by luck. Not a fun fight for strength-based weapons (it just attacks so fast, it's hard to find a moment to get a hit in). But at least it was quick getting back to that boss.

I agree but I found it glitched if you hid behind the bones.

 

[janjotat]

I would have to go with ACE Combat 5. I was close to the end (I think) and all you had to do was provide air cover as 10 tanks attacked a fortress. Sounds easy, right. Except the area has a lot of hills making it hard to make good bombing runs,enemy tanks and planes spawn inside the base, there are 50 billion bunkers, there are more SAM sites than anywhere else so you have to constantly have to dodge missiles, and there are more targets than you have missiles (you get 99 + special missiles). All the that bull makes it hard and hell I AM PLAYING ON EASY and its still insane. I love the game and try it again every few months but it is a little unfair.

 

[ImmortalDrifter]

The Capra Demon almost killed Dark Souls for me.

Seriously From, there's a difference between difficulty and fighting satan in the space of a half bathroom. >.>

 

[Dutch 924]

Call of Duty: World at War - Veteren difficulty

So. Many. F@#!ing. Grenades

 

[MetalDooley]

Warhammer:Battle March

Now I'll admit I'm no great shakes at RTS games but I managed to work my way through the Empire campaign on normal difficulty and was enjoying it until the final battle.Suddenly the game just ramped up the difficulty to ridiculous levels and I repeatedly got my ass handed to me.Annoyingly too there's no checkpoints which means you have to restart from the start every time and considering you can easily be 25+ mins into a battle before defeat it's a pain in the ass having to go back to the beginning.Hell I even tried dropping the difficulty to easy and still couldn't beat the damn thing.It remains on my shelf unbeaten to this day

Were you on the last battle, the one with the city and all?

Yes the one where you have to defend the city of Talabheim(?)

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Wait till you meet the fire guys, they would be my nomination for this thread.

First time I ran into them I got pissed. They were surviving headshots and explosions and teleported at different spots in the map. Almost unplayable...

...Until I found out the game rains down M32s and Tau Snipers the entire time. Double-tap grenade them, if they still live, quickly shoot them with your Tau. After that, the only difficult part was the last encounter when you're stuck with maybe six of them at once.

 

[katsabas]

Hmmm...

The game that immediately springs to mind is DMC 3. Well, I have blasted through DMC 1, 3 and 4 but 3 is the only one that I haven't beaten on Dante Must Die. Apart from getting stuck in a mission twice by now cause I have forgotten to save, I realized that using anything else than the Swordmaster style pretty much guarrantes that you are 100% screwed from the minute you begin a mission. I don't want to have to use Real Impact on every enemy I encounter and while I have played the game enough to know every enemy and when I can do that, the mode overall comes as extremely cheap. Especially when you consider that enemies HAVE THEIR OWN DEVIL TRIGGER MECHANISM.

In DMC 4, surviving Dante Must Die and subsequently Hell Or Hell requires knowledge and proficiency of every style. DMC 3 tested your limits as well but it did it wroooooong.

 

[aprildog18]

Oblivion's difficulty was really stupid if you didn't use game-breaking combinations of enchantments/skills/stealth/magic.

Seriously, on max difficulty Dread Zombies have like 10000000 hp, and you consistently run into BANDITS (as in people so poor they take to thievery for a living) who have legendary armor/weapons. Wtf?

This. First time I played Oblivion, I had to restart because I created such a bad build. Second time I played it, it was easier, but still difficult on max difficulty.
Then I enchanted my armor to give me 100% chameleon and the game become a bit too easy...