Level design failures.

[Idlemessiah]

I'm playing Lego: Pirates of the Caribbean right now and I'm on the island were you dig up Davie Jones heart. Here I experienced some very broken level design...

Jack Sparrow can rope up to a high ledge to drop a ramp down over quicksand so the rest of your party can follow. Bear in mind that Jack is the only character with this rope jump ability.

There is a ledge below this with shiny loot. The loot is very nice, so you drop down to grab it. Bad idea. The ledge is too low to jump back up! No matter, you can always jump back to dry land and then rope jump back up the long way to put the ramp down... nope! The quicksand pool is too large and you fall in every time! You also respawn back on the low ledge each time you die.

Switch to another character. Jack tries to jump back, dies and goes back to the ledge each time. No other character can rope swing up to put the ramp down and Jack still cannot reach it so cue a never ending circle of failure.

Anybody have similar tales of woe to share?

 

[him over there]

This level is the single biggest fuck you I have ever experienced in a platformer, simply put.

 

[scorptatious]

Well Sonic 06 is a pretty good example of broken level design in general.

At the end of the first level in Sonic's story, there is this corkscrew that you have to run through right before the goal ring. The way it's designed however, it makes it so Sonic slowly moves over to the right side of the path he's on causing him to miss the jump pad at the end of the corkscrew and fall into the water. From what I remember, there's actually a trick to getting past that bit, but unless you know ahead of time, there is a very high chance you'll lose a lot of lives trying to get past that one part.

Also, at the end of the Pyramid level for Silver, there's this really annoying puzzle in which you have to push a ball all the way down to a hole at the end of a long hallway that connects with another long hallway. In the hallways there are a couple pits and you have to move the ball around these holes and make sure it doesn't fall into them.

Sounds easy right? WRONG. You can only hit the ball a certain amount of times before it is destroyed and you'll have to walk all the way back to where you started to start this section over. It doesn't help that you have to time how hard Silver hits the ball and hit it at certain angles to get it to where you want to go. I've spent at least a half hour trying to get through it.

In short, fuck you Sonic 06. I'm glad I never finished you and watched the rest of you through Youtube at the expense of the misery of the people who had to put up with it for my amusement.

 

[Skoldpadda]

In Daikatana there was a jump you couldn't make because the designer had stuck a light in the way.

 

[Zeema]

Well Sonic 06 is a pretty good example of broken level design in general.

At the end of the first level in Sonic's story, there is this corkscrew that you have to run through right before the goal ring. The way it's designed however, it makes it so Sonic slowly moves over to the right side of the path he's on causing him to miss the jump pad at the end of the corkscrew and fall into the water. From what I remember, there's actually a trick to getting past that bit, but unless you know ahead of time, there is a very high chance you'll lose a lot of lives trying to get past that one part.

Also, at the end of the Pyramid level for Silver, there's this really annoying puzzle in which you have to push a ball all the way down to a hole at the end of a long hallway that connects with another long hallway. In the hallways there are a couple pits and you have to move the ball around these holes and make sure it doesn't fall into them.

Sounds easy right? WRONG. You can only hit the ball a certain amount of times before it is destroyed and you'll have to walk all the way back to where you started to start this section over. It doesn't help that you have to time how hard Silver hits the ball and hit it at certain angles to get it to where you want to go. I've spent at least a half hour trying to get through it.

In short, fuck you Sonic 06. I'm glad I never finished you and watched the rest of you through Youtube at the expense of the misery of the people who had to put up with it for my amusement.

I just wanted to give you that, >_>

There were points in Castlevaina Lords of Shadow where it really failed

 

[Llil]

Jazz Jackrabbit and Orbitus, anyone?
He's using slowmo, because without that, the level is pretty much impossible.

Such a great game, but that level is just broken.

 

[Shuguard]

One of the Shining Force Neo games had mobs that had the most ridiculous amounts of health regen. The mobs were mostly greater demons, succubus, and other horrible monstrosities. So my strategy for beating them was forcing my PS2 to lag the game with large amounts of animations and abilities until the health regen stopped working and then they died. Then I had to wait maybe 10 seconds after a fight for the lag to go away. I had to do this through at least 20 dungeon floors, lots of exp though. Giant flaw in that one.
Eventually i got tired of that and ran through the last 5 floors and never dealt with that problem ever again.