Games that ramped up difficulty and dang near destroyed the experience

dimensional

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RJ 17 said:
As for games that became retardedly difficult...anyone remember Battletoads? The frickin' Hover Bike level?! Good god! Even after I grew up and downloaded that game as a rom, I could STILL never get past that part, and it's like the 2nd frickin' lvl!
Dammit why did you remind me of that I only ever got past that stupid level once and had so few lives left that I never got much further, but I think it was the 3rd level the 2nd one was inside that tree on those hover disk things.

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!!

Wartech senko no ronde seriously ramped up the difficulty for at least one characters final boss fight I could not beat it as even on very easy the boss could kill you one hit it was just a joke.
 

DustyDrB

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Jan 19, 2010
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AlternatePFG said:
DustyDrB said:
The rest of the game didn't give me much trouble at all (knockdowns make everything rather easy). Just Flamelurker (and Old King Allant until I figured out his moveset well enough to plan the fight out).
Yeah, the bosses in that game were pretty easy. (Especially the Valley of Defilement bosses, not a single difficult one throughout the whole area) Never understood the problems people had with Old King Allant, on both of my successful playthroughs I beat him on my first try. Maybe because I had a huge stock of healing items on hand.

Dark Souls on the other hand is a whole other story. Capra Demon (At least until you figure out the trick to the fight, but it's still bullshit), Orstein and Smough, the final boss were all particularly difficult for me the first time through.
I've heard Dark Souls can be a bit more BS from a few people. I haven't tried it yet. I only played Demon's Souls in October, and need a long time to cool down on that type of game. The atmosphere was a bit of a drain.

Allant was hard for me initially because he's a bit deceptive. He was totally immune to knockback (which was a big part of my game) and had a larger move set than most of the other bosses (some of the long range ones caught me off guard). I beat him on my third try. It was just a matter of becoming familiar with his abilities.
 

RJ 17

The Sound of Silence
Nov 27, 2011
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dimensional said:
RJ 17 said:
As for games that became retardedly difficult...anyone remember Battletoads? The frickin' Hover Bike level?! Good god! Even after I grew up and downloaded that game as a rom, I could STILL never get past that part, and it's like the 2nd frickin' lvl!
Dammit why did you remind me of that I only ever got past that stupid level once and had so few lives left that I never got much further, but I think it was the 3rd level the 2nd one was inside that tree on those hover disk things.

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!!

Wartech senko no ronde seriously ramped up the difficulty for at least one characters final boss fight I could not beat it as even on very easy the boss could kill you one hit it was just a joke.
Seriously...of the "double dragon type" games, Battletoads goes down in my book as the hardest one ever. Think that's why I liked the Dynasty Warriors series so much...that's essentially "double dragon type" games in a 3D arena. I took all my pent up rage over Battletoads and put it into slaughtering countless faceless enemies with a character that had demi-god like powers.

As for Dead or Alive 4, I've gotta say that I do prefer my Rock-Paper-Scissors to have big bouncing breasts. :3 But yeah, the naked clone-monster of Kasumi that was the boss COULD be a huge pain in the ass. You don't so much "fight" her, more like "find your character's power/knock away move, stand in a corner, and hope you connect with it every time she gets close." At least that's what I always ended up doing. :p
 

RJ 17

The Sound of Silence
Nov 27, 2011
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Sorry for the double-post, but this was posted as I was posting.

Shawn MacDonald said:
Game that haunts my dreams to this day, Damn you Little Nemo. Really need to beat this game because it's been kicking my ass for years. Always thought it was a hell of alot of fun to play and it has good controls. Pretty much anything made by Capcom back then kicked ass. Even though my memory is a little foggy, there is one level where everything is upside down and it becomes hard as tits. Very hard to get to that point, then it feels like the developers just cranked up the difficulty to the extreme. I have tried to beat this game so many times without cheating. Now I can't cheat because it's me and the game now. Even I was fooled by the box art as a kid, it makes Contra look like a walk in the park.
Little....
Frickin'.....
Nemo......

Screw your dreamland AND your god forsaken train level!!!!! Never had much problem with Topsy-Turvey (the upside-down level) though. That train 9 times out of 10 would utterly kick my ass though when I was a kid.
 

Raggedstar

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Sagacious Zhu said:
peruvianskys said:
I love Psychonauts but definitely the meat circus level was a pain in the ass. Shame it left the game with a bit of a sour end note.
THIS

Timed escort mission combined with sadistic platforming and followed by the rail grind sequence from the Ninth Circle of hell made this game nigh impossible to finish
Thirded. Man, what a difficulty curve that game had x___x. Not to mention on how the game used the life system and kicked you out. I found it funny that towards the end of the meat circus Double Fine just decided "Wow, this is hard as hell. Maybe for the first time in the game we should disable lives". It's also passed the point of no return, so can't upgrade your crap without backtracking and picking up extra figments.

Oh, and Jak 2. Hardest 3D platformer I've ever played, and yet I prefer that game over it's much easier siblings. Harder than Psychonauts with an even funkier difficulty curve (rather than spike at the end, it's just all over the place). I kinda don't want the difficulty to be easier in my sick little mind. In no order, this is what happens in the game. 3 sets of tournament races (+1 street race) with a bunch of cheating buggers, escorting 3 helpless dudes in a sewer that spew the same lines over and over, handling a robot through underwater catacombs, sitting in a rail-shooter section against a massive tanker that takes forever to kill (plus has back-up), and being flanked on a winding maze of docks by constantly respawning Krimzon Guards being shipped in on armed dropships while there are insta-kill robots waiting for you to fall off...and no health packs or checkpoints in sight. Did I mention the game is stingy on health and checkpoints AND you can only take 4 hits?
 

Kyle Downes

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The Uncharted games are famous for their ridiculous difficulty spikes towards the end. Usually when some ridiculous superpowered entity is introduced, which 3 (somewhat) cleverly aped. But the mutants in both 1 and 2 just wreck the difficulty. Especially in 1 where they kept mixing the crazy fast overpowered mutants with a crazy amount of soldiers. Much rage was had.
 

Kermi

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Skyrim. If you go too far along the sidequests and gain a bunch of levels in magic disciplines, you're going to quickly find yourself unable to take down even regular enemies without a lot of trouble. Ihad to drop the difficulty to Novice last night doing a thieves guild quest because the enemies I was fighting took almost no damage from my legendary-quality ebony mace but were tearing big holes in me despite my legendary-quality dragon plate armor. Even then I wasn't really able to use any magic because all I could do to get through was spam attacks and healing, to avoid dying from 2-3 arrows.
 

Foxblade618

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Esotera said:
Also, in Mass Effect the fight with Lady Benezia was incredibly hard considering it was one of the first missions. I must have done that same fight scene about 50 times over.
Ain't that the truth...I saw that pre-fight cut-scene more then I care to admit. The weird part is that the game turns down the difficulty after that and never looks back - just a strange little spike for no particular reason.
 

LookingGlass

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Uncharted 3 had one of the most bizarre difficulty curves I can recall. Half of the game basically alternated between the game practically playing itself and annoying difficult fights with waves of enemies which were ridiculous the first time because someone with a grenade launcher would appear from out of nowhere.
 

Fidelias

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I always thought that the Mechwarrior games had this problem.

I mean, I LOVE the games, but about half-way or two-thirds of the way through, I ended up having to retry every mission at least 5 times.

It's not that it's incredibly hard, just hard enough that the game forces you to use Mech X, with loadout Y, and approach the area from the North direction, unless you want to FUCKING DIE!!!!

I just hate it when games offer you loads of customization and options, but in practice restrict you to just a few ways to tackle the problem.

Skyrim and Oblivion have the same problem, but that's mostly because of enemies scaling with you when you level non-combat skills like SMITHING. They should really have a separate lvl just for non-combat skills.
 

GirDraconis

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Jun 11, 2011
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Left 4 Dead 2 was absurdly difficult on realism mode. It was almost unbeatable when playing offline.
 

GirDraconis

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Fidelias said:
Skyrim and Oblivion have the same problem, but that's mostly because of enemies scaling with you when you level non-combat skills like SMITHING. They should really have a separate lvl just for non-combat skills.
Smithing wasn't a problem though because your weapons and armor would still increase, ultimately. I played it through on master difficulty with 100 smithing and 100 enchanting (don't have the patience for 100 alchemy). Once you get those two to 100, game goes from very hard, to ridiculously easy immediately.
 

SanguineScale

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Two games:

FF IV on old school difficulty. I think the DS had this along with some older versions before the GBA. The dungeon where you have to ditch all metal equipment.... Jesus Christ that's tricky :/ Plus basically all of the DS bosses actually made me try more than once. Now that I think about it, other versions are kinda boring in terms of difficulty, so maybe that actually made the game better for me.

Also, Super Mario Galaxy, for the last few purple coins missions.... I know there are some people who think the "Luigi's Purple Coins" level was no big deal, but I spent over a year of on and off learning the perfect stratagem for running around that clusterfuck of spinning and shrinking tiles.

So fucking gratifying when you finally make it though :)
 

SL33TBL1ND

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ChupathingyX said:
Well I was actually kind of enjoying Crash Bash up until relics start getting introduced.

Supposadly, what they do is replace some of the people with the mini games "champion". Of course all this means is that some characters get replaced and now all of the AI opponents will go for you, only for you and will not stop attacking you until you have lost.
Oh God, I remember that game. Never has able to finish that thing.

OT: Metal Arms: Glitch in the System just became fucking ridiculous once you hit the junkyard area. Never bothered finishing it, honestly.
 

The Wykydtron

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Nyaoku said:
All I have to say is New Londo Ruins ...
And not a single bonfire was found.
NOOOOO! You can't be serious?! I just started that part! So they expect you to beat the Troll Ghosts (lol i'm in the wall, LOL i'm in the floor! Nah jk i'm actually in the ceiling Trolololololol) with no checkpoints... FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU(walkthrough tiemz)

I'm not even sure what's worst about that part, the room that gets filled with ghosts (woman screams, shit gets dark, Ghost Army Assemble!) or the fact that you can't block for shit when they're coming out of the bloody scenery!

OT: Speaking of Dark Souls...

Fucking Bell Gargoyles... Flame breath spamming pieces of shit. I swear the one of them just covers the other with his flames. It's like playing UMVC3 against someone who actually cares about tactical team composition but more nightmarish... If that's even possible
 

DaHero

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Skyrim did this as well as Oblivion. In Skyrim things felt too easy until I would get to that one draugh that one shot killed me every time...forcing me to go back to Adept mode just to barely survive.
 

Kayevcee

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lacktheknack said:
I guess I'm the only guy who adored the Meat Circus? ;_;
I saw the ZP review before buying it so I know what I was getting into, but the section with the curved, flaming nets still kicked my arse till I was wearing my buttocks as a hat (to quote another video).

Another severe buttock-repositioner? Dragon Age Origins. Even on normal, it seems like I end up wiping in every serious fight- and wiping several times on every boss battle. If I lose track of what one character is doing for longer than a second they usually wind up dead. It's ridiculous. It's a pretty brutal challenge from the get-go, but by the time I got to Ozrammar something changed. I think it's because the bads level with you and gain access to the same abilities you do, and they're all ruthless twinks that I can't counter because I frivolously blew the occasional skill point on trap detection or diplomacy. I'm literally beaten at my own game.

-Nick
 

Trippy Turtle

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May 10, 2010
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I have no idea how a game can be too easy. If its easy then I can have fun playing god.
I sometimes enjoy hard bits in games unless is a time limit thing. I enjoy trying to work out better strategies and things but time limits ruin it.