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

[uzo]

Hmm ... Zero (Fatal Frame for the Americans) ...

... on the hardest difficulty level, near the end. I had to get past multiple sacrificed maidens to get to where Kirie was, and all I had was the lowest blue film (20 exposure something-or-other).

They would always appear *right* next to you, down low, if I recall correctly, sobbing and screaming. As if that didn't scare the shit out of you enough, they would then crawl and grab your ankle, draining your health.

The only way to beat them with the blue film was to hit them with a 'Zero' shot, which meant I had to hold the camera view finder on them, absorbing their essence for a 3-4 seconds, before taking the shot. The problem was, they would appear and strike within 1-2 seconds.

GAAAAHHH!!

Ragequit, started nightmare mode again.

I did finally beat it, knowing full well I needed to save some heavy duty film to take those maidens on.

 

[pubbing]

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

Ha Ha I had that exact same fucking problem. Those tears are so small and the blend into the ground it took forever to find them. Especially once you have kicked them all over the fucking map.

 

[Rockchimp69]

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.

I had to back track 3 missions and even after that I still needed 3 other people for it.

 

[OmniscientOstrich]

Bugs stopped me dead in my first playthrough of HL2. Partly my fault for only using quicksaves the entire playthrough, thus rendering both saves useless due to this bug in Chapter 10 wherein Alyx suddenly went into a state of agoraphobia. Thought I was completely fucked and went into quite a rage before discovering I could simply start from the beginning of Chapter 10 rather than having to return all the way to the begginning, but still rather frustrating.

 

[RetardedKitty]

Halo Reach, Last Map Legendary Solo I think it was Pillar of Autumn ? Nearly at the end of the map when you have to defend against big units of grunts(before giving the 'package' to the Commander) I feel down the rocky cliff in to the chasm but stop somewhere and didnt die, and at this point i got a checkpoint... needed to repeat whole mission again.

 

[bagless_hound]

Resident Evil Code Veronica

When you are Claire you need to use the fire extinguisher a few times well i had pretty much no ammo or herbs so i had no reason to put the thing away in a chest once i was done with it .....well once you switch over to playing Chris he needs it to put out a fire thats in the way.......your supposed to just pull it out of the chest BUT NO Claire still has it stuffed down her tight ass jeans pocket. that's about 3/4 or more into the game (which is crazy long to begin with) and i save over my previous saves so no going back part way to do it right...i had to start all over.

Code Veronica as well, your basic situation also. I didn't stick Claires weapons in the chest and by the time I got to what I believe was the final boss, I didn't have the weapons, ammo or healing items to last until the Linear Canon unlocked. I wasn't able to finish it and for reasons beyond my control I never went back to the game. This was with the GCN re-release of code Veronica so it was 2002-ish.

 

[GiglameshSoulEater]

On the GBC game LOZ link's awakening, the 8th dungeon didn't have enough keys. If you got the order wrong, you didn't have enough keys to open the correct path and you were buggered.

 

[Mistermixmaster]

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.

Skip to 4:47
I found myself finding the tactics for how to defeat a lot of these Eidolons myself, because some seem to only fill up the gauge if you do what it wants you to do. The video description on youtube has more detail if needed.

---

On topic: I've done so once in Dead Space. I ran out of ammo, didn't have any money, and my health was depleting rapidly. I still managed to finish it, but let me tell you, going melee-only/run-for-your-life in that game isn't fun xD

I also cornered myself in FF X, during THAT boss fight on Mt. Gagazet. I had managed to get myself severely under-leveled by using Tidus' "Flee" command too much, as I only wanted the story to progress, not to fight random encounters... Not a good idea.

 

[Superhyperactiveman]

Some crappy first person shooter. I was really low on health. It auto-saved right as this guy shot at me. So I died. and then every time I re-loaded, I would end up right back there with no time to react at all, because the bullet was like... right there as it was saving. So it was just a continuous death loop.

 

[band43seat]

resident evil 4, sold some extra ammo so i could buy a bigger case to carry things, needed extra ammo to progress through a room filled with enemies who u blow off their heads and they gain a tentacle thing to replace it

 

[WanderingFool]

Done this several times. Most commonly in Bethesda's games.

Broke Morrowind by accidently killing a important NPC... like 8 times...

Oblivion, mostly died because of the fucking leveling mechanics.

FO3, broke the game by blowing up megaton without checking the computer in moriarty's (more about the main quest line, really). Focused on energy weapons and science and such, and didnt have any energy weapons for 4 hours of play. Didnt do (or even knew about) Morias qeust which would take me to a dupermarket with a laser pistol. I got so fustrated that I quit the game and started a new.

I had to restart FF8 twice because I didnt do some rather important things (like find all the GFs, get each character their ultimate weapon.

Fucked up in Super Metriod because I neglected several items that I didnt know about (quickly remedied by a trip to my local library and a copy of Nintendo power magazine... what? My town's library had those in the kids section, and this was back in the late 90's.)

Really fucked up OoT with a gameshark code that allowed me to get into adault link without doing the qeusts as kid link (left me stuck with 3 hearts and no way to beat the forest temple...)

In C&C Red Alert 2, in the Soviet campiagn, on the last level, I ended up wasting all my resources and ability to harvest, and kept selling buildings to make blimps to bomb the Chronosphere. Ended up restarting the level, and instead of going striaght for the kill, just destroyed base after base until I had a base around the chronosphere... than I launched several nukes and won...

Thats just what I can think of now.

 

[Mike Richards]

I ran out of ammo in the middle of Lake Yantar in the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Not a good place to run out of ammo

 

[Sean0925]

The first time I went through Fire Emblem 7 which was my first fire emblem game and got to the last chapter. In the last chapter your put against previous characters you've defeated who are all level 20 and have better than tier a weapons,you then face two big bosses who your characters are unlikely to be able to take more than two hits from (the second one is definite).

Unfortunatly by the time I reached this chapter I hadn't level'd my units well at all. I only had one or two level 20's and the unit you gain for this chapter who is really good is fragile and can't really take any hits from physical characters so it was massively difficult to get anywhere.

I eventually just restarted the game and made sure to level the Lord characters who can do more damage to the very last boss and to actually level my team as a whole and managed to beat it.

Its funny looking back now because I had numerous playthroughs using different units and did it much more easily. In the more recent fire emblems they actually prevent this from happening to an extent by making Ike godlike in FE9 once he promotes and gets occult because he can pretty much solo the rest of the game with Ragnell and Aether. In FE10 they just give you a load of units at the end of the game who are all close to max level, have massively high stats and caps and are just outright better than the majority of units you've spent the game using.

 

[Rinky78]

I messed up when I played Witcher for the second time. I solved the investigation in Vizima too quickly or in the wrong order or something - as a result I wasn't able to get the required dialogue from the private eye. Had to start the entire game over as I didn't have any saves left from the previous chapters... Had to go through the bloody barghests again...

 

[Phishfood]

Stalker a couple times, wrong gun choice at one point left me with no money and no ammo. Yay!

The biggie was an old one called "The Thing" based off the movie of the same name. I found a sniper rifle and ditched it. Who the feck uses a sniper when being attacked by swarms of melee attackers? The game forgot to inform me I need the sniper rifle to set off explosives to proceed.

 

[Davey Woo]

Playing Overlord 2 I managed to skip a main quest, I got to a point where I had to use a boat to travel to several islands to place some heavy rocks/boulders on buttons to open up a gate so I could get out, but because I didn't have the quest for that area active, none of the boulders spawned so none of the buttons could be pressed. I had been saving over the top of previous saves and had to restartfrom about an hour into the game.

 

[DaWaffledude]

KOTOR. My first playthrough was a light-side Jedi Guardian. I did not have ANY force powers to destroy Malak's extra sources of health in the final battle. I was annoyed, to say the least as I had no saves before Lv 20.

 

[mental_looney]

Yup resident evil code veronica, at the bit where you are Chris on the island and have to fix some kind of bug/snake boss in underground tunnels, got like no ammo can't kill it to get past it so had to abandon the save