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

[Exerzet]

Overlord 2. In the "Last Sanctuary" level, I reach a point in which a salamander-king appears. The game autosaves after he breaks the entrance to the boss area, and I was unlucky enough to end the game before the fight ended. When I reloaded I had NO way of getting back there, and had to restart the game.

On my second try, I was standing on a button (same game) and the button reset, bugging the thing to hell so I couldn't proceed. >_<

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Yeah, Final Fantasy VIII. Ended up in some sort of tower chasing after damsel in distress, unbeknownst to me, once past a certain point in the tower, you can't go back and at the end is a massive boss fight that involves the boss having partially absorbed afor mentioned damsel in distress and keeps draining her for health and if you do area of effect attacks you'll hit her as well, which happened to also be the basis of my play strategy so my regular attacks were piss weak. Oh did I mention this boss liked to spam really powerful attack spells that did massive damage to my entire party? No? Well it does that too. So yeah, I can't get out of this tower, the last save point used was beyond the point of no return, so I can't leave to seek better weapons or anything, and I have no earlier save to go back to. So I finally got fed up with it and said "fuck this!"

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention if the damsel dies during the boss fight it's instant game over.

 

[alabaster456]

Final Fantasy VIII - the last fight with Ultimecia's Guardian Force. When you get the guardian at 50% he does a spell that does 9999 damage. If you don't have either a) A Phoenix Down or b)a Hero Potion or c)Some invincibility spell, the game will not progress. I put the game down for about 6 months because I could not finish it, until I realized I had 1 hero drink, which was enough to allow me to finish the game... Completely broken mechanic.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Due to bugs, it was possible to get Ultima IX into an unfinishable state and then not know about until 20-30 hours of game play later. Fortunately, they released a patch to fix all the plot breaking bugs, but in doing so introduced about 300 new plot breaking bugs.

AND NO THAT IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION.

 

[Panzervaughn]

In Oblivion there was a quest to go to a grove where some ever-flowing water chalice was frozen, so its a grove of ice, full of ice elementals. You're sent to collect the tears of some paladin frozen in the ice. I didn't know these tears were on the ground, radially around this center pillar, so i spent alot of time running around looking up on things and fighting elementals, before finding one. Then i had realized i had kicked every other away while running around. Thanks Physics Engine.

Had to reload and lost 2-3 hours

 

[Savagezion]

The first 3 guys I made on Oblivion. I didn't know about the auto leveling system yet and this is what it took to make me look it up, then soon after trade in the game.

 

[Rylot]

COD:MW on the 'All Ghillied (spl?) Up' level there's a part where you pass a dog and your partner tells you to ignore it and move on. I ignored that and killed it because seriously fuck dogs in that game. A few minutes later I was swarmed with dogs and either my partner or I would die from them, I can't for the life of me time the R3 button. It would always respawn me just before entering the court yard where they'd attack. After rage quitting and leaving the game for a few months I managed another play through and realized that if you don't kill the first dog it doesn't spawn any more...

 

[ParanoidAndroid]

In Mass Effect I got to a door, but I hadn't acquired the skill I needed to open it. I couldn't go back but I couldn't progress either. I had already completed ME2, so the game is gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

 

[SquallTheBlade]

Final Fantasy VIII - the last fight with Ultimecia's Guardian Force. When you get the guardian at 50% he does a spell that does 9999 damage. If you don't have either a) A Phoenix Down or b)a Hero Potion or c)Some invincibility spell, the game will not progress. I put the game down for about 6 months because I could not finish it, until I realized I had 1 hero drink, which was enough to allow me to finish the game... Completely broken mechanic.

I have played that game over dozen of times and thats not true. Maybe you were just too low level?

 

[ChupathingyX]

This battle went on for over an hour, non-stop, neither of us gaining any ground, before I finally called it quits and exited the game. It simply would not end.

That's happened to me many times when playing skirmish with the AI.

As for me...

Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising.

I was playing The Last Stand with two other guys and we got to wave 16 with the dopplegangers. Well our characters had such great health regen and we buffed them up so much that basically it was impossible for us to kill our dopplegangers and also impossible for them to kill us.

We were approaching almost 3 hours when we all decided to quit because it was never going to end.

 

[Heroes and Cons]

A couple of times actually...

1) Final Fantasy XIII - I simply have not built up my characters well enough to get past Fang's Eidolon... even with Fang attacking like crazy and both Lightning AND Hope healing, my entire party dies within 3 minutes. It's just stupid.

2) The first time I played Fallout 3, about 4 hours into the game (during which I hadn't manually saved at all) I went into the Church of Atom and killed the crazy folk. I went back outside... only to be attacked by the entire town. Now at level 4, Jericho is more than just a bit dangerous... yeah. Plus my autosave was stuck at me exiting the church, so I had to restart the game. At least it worked out in the end, since after that I decided to be a good character instead of an evil one.

 

[alabaster456]

Final Fantasy VIII - the last fight with Ultimecia's Guardian Force. When you get the guardian at 50% he does a spell that does 9999 damage. If you don't have either a) A Phoenix Down or b)a Hero Potion or c)Some invincibility spell, the game will not progress. I put the game down for about 6 months because I could not finish it, until I realized I had 1 hero drink, which was enough to allow me to finish the game... Completely broken mechanic.

I have played that game over dozen of times and thats not true. Maybe you were just too low level?

It may have been when she 'merged' with her guardian force. Either way, I remember this very vividly and I was about level 75.

 

[Llil]

I've played the old Sierra adventure games. So yes. In fact, I'd be surprised if someone didn't get those games in an unwinnable state on their first playthrough. Miss an item, walk over a rickety bridge too many times, or use both of the cupid's arrows before you're supposed to; there's so many ways to screw up. I even managed to do it in King's Quest 6, which made it a lot less easy than in the previous games.
I still love 'em, though. Great games.

 

[xchurchx]

dead rising two
basically had 30 seconds to find five parts to build a generator then play a button mashing game to close a huge door.

 

[The Wykydtron]

On TES Oblivion during the Dark Bros questline you are given a poison apple that you can choose to use on your target(s)

It's uncureable and people die after only a few seconds after eating it, I accidentally clicked the "eat" button while hovering over it in the menu... The game then decided to fucking autosave on me.

Fucking lost 5 hours of progress cuz of that wank stain of an apple

Also whenever your healer runs out of SP and you have no SP restoring items during a boss fight in TBC games (specifically Persona 4) you are screwed if they have any tangible amount of life left.

Not an unwinnable state per se but when you spent 40 minutes fighting that boss only for Yukiko to run out of SP and fuck the whole battle up it sure seems unwinnable...

 

[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.

 

[liveslowdiefast]

Fable the lost chapters, ran though the story, did no side quests and got to a point of no return. and the final boss was just impossible.

 

[vectorspyke]

Im not sure if this counts, but I had a save game in the PS1 version of The Phantom Menace which would load within a millisecond of getting killed by Darth Maul, meanign you would just get a glimpse of red lightsabery badness before you were staring at the game over screen.
In hindsight I have no idea whatsoever why I would save there.

 

[CleverCover]

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.