Have you ever gotten a game into an unwinnable/unfinishable state?

[lollypopalopicus]

Diablo 2 act 2 when you needed the staff to blow a hole wall, i dropped and couldn't find it, my brother saved and quit so it disappeared off the face of the earth and i could no longer progress.

also in warcraft 3 in some sort of mod thing or something I died and saved instead of loading so i literally had to watch my guy die over and over again hoping to find a way around it until i finally just gave up

 

[Arafiro]

In Black & White 1 there was some kind of quest where (if I remember correctly) you had to heal this village of skeletal/ill people. This was required to complete that map, however I kinda accidentally murdered the entire population of the village before realising this. No matter what I tried, I couldn't continue.
Perhaps there was a way around it, it was a long time ago and I wasn't all that good at games back then.

 

[Vibhor]

Fallout 3
Every god damn NPC vanished out of existence from megaton and rivet. Also, since this happened on my first playthrough, I didn't know what to do.

 

[Logic 0]

In RE2 I ran out of ammo and when I reached the final boss I was screwed.

 

[Darks63]

In the original Dead space i borked up so hard that i ran out of ammo and was not able to continue with that game without a restart.

more recently panzer general 2 i lost to many vets in a major russian battle and wasnt able to win the next scen with the newbie forces i had.

 

[TheDoctor455]

Yeah... after grinding all of my skills for an hour in Oblivion, I leveled up to around level 12...
and suddenly I couldn't kill anything before it killed me.

That, and also I couldn't get the real ending for Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within because there was a life upgrade which you can't get again after you've finished the game, and I didn't want to replay the game, so I watched the ending on youtube. Also, I almost got stuck a load of times in half life because of awkward auto save timing. Mostly it was just because I had low health and/or very little ammo (mostly at the start of the game), but one time, I jumped off the cart and landed on the electrical tracks (taking damage), and the game auto saved just as I jumped. It took me like 1 hour to get past the level (due to heavy damage from the rails, and I didn't have very much health in the first place).

Edit: Also, I can't seem to get Prince Of Persia 2008 to work since it crashes on the first cut scene (where Elika's dad cuts down the tree) every single time. I don't know if its my computer or the game, so I'm not sure it counts.

No, you can get the life upgrade... you just need the sword that breaks through walls... and then you have to do A LOT of backtracking. No less stupid though.

Actually, there's this one life upgrade which if you go back to, gets you stuck in a place where you can't leave, I tried to get back to the throne room for two hours, then I checked a walkthrough and found out that you couldn't get it after you pass the area...

If you go through the throne room yes. But before that, it is entirely possible to backtrack and get to it. I got it, and so did a bunch of other people. So either you just haven't gotten the trick to finding it yet, or your copy is bugged. Take your pick.

 

[Soulfoodman]

Jak 3. I think it was one of the missions where you were reentering the city. I died after progressing to an auto-save point without collecting all the stuff I needed in an earlier part of that level. When I respawned, the earlier part of the level had simply disappeared. Couldn't go back to proceed. It is the only time I have been happy that Jak 3 is so short.

 

[8bitsuperhero]

In the Persona PSP remake I couldn't get past the second form of the final boss due to lacking specific personas. At that point I couldn't go back to try to recruit more demons.

 

[Maximum_Power_Cheese_Supreme]

Not really, but there is the infamous Magikarp* vs. Metapod** trainer battle moment. Where all your other Pokemon just fainted (from poison or something), and you only have that one weak attackless shit that you only wanted to level up so you would have something strong on your team.

Or Metapod vs. Metapod, Magikarp vs. Magikarp, Kakuna** vs. Kakuna, or any combination of the three. Where you can't flee because it's a trainer battle. You could reboot your Gameboy but then you loose that Pikachu you finally caught.

Now you are stuck having to use Splash or Harden, 20 or 35 times in a row, and you wish you had turned off the battle animations in the game settings (and set the text speed to fast, you idiot why would you have it set to slow?), and once that crap is over you have to hope you have enough Potions to keep your weakling alive whilst it hurts itself with Struggle. This is even more longer and painful if you're versing a Metapod or Kakuna, and during the time you've been reducing your only move's PP to 0, it's been maxing out its Defense.

(Then when you finally win, your battery just dies before you can save.)

*Level 14 or lower (i.e.: no "Tackle")
**Where they only know the move "Harden"

 

[Kakashi on crack]

Well, I've had tons of these moments.

I guess one that kinda counts but not really is an nwn module I found one time. It was in two parts, and I had to cheat to get my character past a lot of the challenges cause I was too weak. Loved the storyline and everything despite a few... Occurances that I couldn't avoid to progress the story that didn't agree with my character's personality.

Needless to say part two pissed me off as it claimed I was doing all sorts of things that I never did (poor dialouge and such) and at one point I checked the wiki for this module and found out that the only way to beat the game was to do something completely INSANELY against my character's well... character. So I ended up being unable to finish the module and quit.

 

[Nevyrmoore]

Loom. Forgot to note down the sharpening weave. Got all the way to the Guild of Blacksmiths and was instantly buggered. This is why I now use multiple saves at different points in adventure games.

While it doesn't really count, Quest for Glory II. Imported a thief. A bug gave me a fighter instead. Sure, I could have still completed it...just not as a thief.

 

[Maximum_Power_Cheese_Supreme]

Almost forgot:

I've mentioned this on several threads, but I'll mention it again. The annoyingly painfully callus and cruel and stupid and annoying and fuck you Eidos for outsourcing* the boss fights so that I could end up versing the third boss without the use of any of my augments and a permanent EMP face from an arbitrary (and in heinsight, obviously bad) "yes or no" decision I made 6 hours earlier.

*seriously?! what the fuck?!

I hate boss battles, I think they limit game makers and they limit games, and we would be all the better if we could just do away with them. (Unless they naturally develop from the game, all they do is frustrate the player with a pace-breaking, tone-jarring, and unnecessary distraction from the fun of the rest of the game.)

 

[Windupferrari]

I did this in one of the original Pokemon games once. They were the first games I had ever played, and on my first play-through, I somehow managed to waste all of my money. I literally couldn't afford to enter the Safari Zone to get the Gold Teeth and the HM in there. Had to restart.

The other time this happened to me was my first time playing FO3. Fresh out of the vault, with no real knowledge of how the saving worked, I go into one of the Megaton bars (not Moriarty's, the one everyone ignores). For some reason, I decided to stealthily kill one of the guys there for being an asshole or something. I killed him, but not too stealthily. The other chick in the bar attacked me, so I had to kill her too. With everyone in the bar dead, I decided to just steal everything in there, figuring the rest of the town would have no idea about the burglary/double homicide I just pulled. After taking literally everything, I step out the door and find an angry mob waiting for me. Oh shit. I immediately turn around and go back in the bar. Whatever magic was keeping them out before was now gone, and they swarmed in after me. Armed with only a 10mm pistol and a handful of bullets, I could take down a good number of them before they killed me, but they always did. Then it would reload the quicksave at the door and start all over again. Fortunately though, this was pretty early on, so restarting wasn't a big deal.

 

[Maximum_Power_Cheese_Supreme]

I had huge pile of auto-saves in Half-Life 2, so I deleted them (cause they annoyed me) and kept only one save game.

But lo-and-behold: I had taken the personally liberty of dragging along all of the turrets Alex reprograms with me, but some of them went a little "off" and had shot and killed Eli whilst I was getting the other turrets.

I save over my one save game, came out, saw the NPCs looking at each other with blank faces not saying anything, Eli who's corpse had fallen out of the pod and on the ground, and realised something was not right.

Lucky you can load the last chapter, but I took a break for the day till I came back to it.

(actually I'm not exactly sure how it happened)

Sometimes people don't back up files and they get lost. I on the other-hand, are so careful, I'm more likely to accidentally overwrite a new file with it's older backup.

There maybe a warning pop-up for "would you like to save" but there's no undo button for accidentally clicking "No" instead of "Okay".

 

[zerobudgetgamer]

Now, JUST ACROSS THE BRIDGE to this zone, ALL enemies are in what I can only guess is the mid-30's, with most of them having -ra spells and strength levels that hit for 2-300 damage!

First rule of Oldest-School RPGs: If the enemies in an area are WAY too strong for you, you're not supposed to be there yet. Sadly, they never actually give you a way to find that out without actually dying horribly..

Hmm, just checked a guide for the game, guess you were right, and I had simply ventured a few steps too far off the desired path. But I ask you, WHY would anyone put high-level monsters right next door to the starting area, and/or have their encounters be just a few steps away from the low-level encounters on the same grid of land?

 

[RedDeadFred]

In Oblivion, one of the things I needed to get rid of my vampirism never appeared. The witch I needed to talk to would never talk about, "Hey, you're a vampire. Do you want to get rid of that?" in some fashion. I even tried coming at night or braving the unforgiving sun.

No matter how many times I reloaded, went to other places, loaded the disk onto the console, nada.

SO I kept making a new character, and another one, and another one. Same problem persisted, mostly because I had a hard time doing the necessary mission without being infected. So then I just gave up and chucked the game somewhere.

My brother is finding that he's having the same issue, except its the mages that seems to disappear on him.

Hmm I think I may know the bug you are talking about. It was patched on the 360 and PC versions but returned on the PS3 version. It is the one where the bloodgrass ingredient will just not appear once you've collected it or just be grayed out?
This is the most buggy quest in the game. You'll probably be able to find away out of your situation here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Vampire_Cure#Bugs

 

[RedDeadFred]

I killed the radio DJ (dog something) in Fallout 3.

The next step was basically "continue the search for your dad."

I gave up after about 2 hours of running around talking to people.

You didn't just search the interent....? I did the same thing, went to the internet for literally 5 minutes, found out where I needed to go, and went there...
It's actually possible to skip about a third of the story and just go straight to where your Dad is at the very beginning.

 

[Saulkar]

In the game Borderlands I tried to do the General Knoxx DLC with a level 40 character but I ended up hitting a save post and whenever I came back to life I was instantly killed by a soldier 15 levels higher than me.

In Halo I would often have checkpoints save right before I died or was falling to my death and so it would often happen where I would respawn and shortly die again without hope for recovery.

 

[Jakub324]

I thought I did. I was playing Dawn of War as the T'au, fighting the Space Marines. They destroyed my base, I built a new one. They attacked constantly, and with the units I could spare from fighting them off, they rebuilt their bases (because they started with two, which also meant they could outnumber 2:1 if they avoided casualties until reaching population limit) faster than I could destroy. Then, I saved my game, gathered everything I had and attacked. They didn't attack back to force me to defend, and I utterly annihilated them.