The Escapist Presents: Escapist On: Frustrating Gaming Experiences

[Internet Kraken]

My frustrating moment was back when I played Runescape.

I was a young child. I was undertaking a quest to slay a dragon. The quest is one of the harder non-members quests, but I was a member. I had played the game for a long time and could easily complete the quest. I just never got around to doing it. One day, I finally decided to try completing it.

Before I continue, I should explain the death system in Runescape. When you die, it doesn't give you a second chance. You lose everything except your 3 most valuable items if you die. So obviously dying will really fuck you up as it takes a long time to replace the items you lost. Now this Dragon I had to kill was special. It's fire breath could kill you in one hit. regardless of your defense and HP. That's why you need a special shield to kill it. Now the shield is good against the dragon but piss weak against everything else. So while traveling to the dragon I had my superior shield equipped.

I entered the dragons chamber, charged at it with my long sword, only to fall dead in one hit. I had forgotten to equip the shield.

I don't need to explain what I did next.

 

[Jon Etheridge]

I haven't been that mad in a while thankfully... although the 45 second load screen you have to sit though on Ghostbusters every time you die is starting to really piss me off...

-Jon Etheridge
-Creator of Apocalypse Lane

Wow, that's some junk 360. I've never waited more than 10 seconds.

It's actually a PS3. I was exaggerating on the time a bit, but it's at least a good 15-25 sec. depending on the size of the stage. I think even 10 sec. is waaaay to long IMOA. I don't mind longer load screens between levels... but checkpoints, that's annoying.

-Jon

 

[Stylish_Robot]

wow, who knew Susan was so cute?

my gaming frustration and I'm sure I'm not the only one to bring this up before: Mile High Club and No Fighting in the War Room on Veteran. If you're not cursing and throwing **** around, you're not human.

Also, I'd have to say...which one, Chapter 2 speedrun on Mirror's Edge. The margin for error on that sucker is ridiculously low

 

[kawligia]

Many years ago, when I was a kid and SNES was the big cheese, I stayed home sick from school and played Secret of Mana all day, literally.

This was before I got into PC gaming with the CTD Boogie Monster always lurking around the corner, so I usually only saved my game when I stopped playing.

So after many hours of playing Secret of Mana and just finishing a big boss battle where I realized how much it would suck to have died because I hadn't saved the game in so long, I went to do just that...and then my character got stuck between a cave wall and a stalagmite.

I tried to move and jump around to get free but no luck. Then I started to get pissed. Before long I was practically jumping up and down in fury yelling "LET GO OF ME" while I continued to try to free my character.

Eventually the level of wrath surpassed any hope of release. At that point I ripped the cartridge out of the console and spiked it on the ground like a football. It shattered into more pieces than I ever thought was possible. It was like oversized confetti all over the room.

LOL and that's the most frustration I ever experienced with a video game.

P.S.

The only game that has consistently frustrated me was Counter-Strike: Source. Mostly because I was far away from most servers so my connection sucked. So even when I got off a shot first or ducked behind a wall on my screen, the server disagreed. >.<

 

[RyePunk]

Bionic Commando Rearmed... The challenge missions. I broke a 360 controller over it. Because it is precisely the Mega man problem. You know precisely what you have to do, but they require pixel perfect precision or you die. Instantly. I had not finished the singleplayer story yet and I promptly deleted the game from my hard-drive after roughly 500 fails on one challenge.

Also playing hardcore character on Diablo II was quite frustrating. Getting a lagspike as an lightning enchanted with speed boost rushes you and kills you before you can even quit. Killing off a level 55 you've spent significant time on. Oh yes...

Left 4 Dead brings the rage on a regular basis. Especially when a hunter jumps you and your teammate who is 4 feet away doesnt do a thing because he has bile on him and is a useless retard. Yes bile makes it hard to see friends in trouble. But at least try for god's sake, you can still hear them being mauled to death!

Also Tie Fighter. There was a reason they put the invulnerability cheat in the options menu. And the mission where you get set-up is great for making the blood-boil, wingmen turning on you, mines shooting at you. And loads of more enemy fighter pouring in while you try and inspect cargo containers... Grrrrr. Must cheat...

 

[George Palmer]

Hey George, if it makes you feel any better, as a hardcore raiding healer-class, I made many different non-tanking tank classes who thought they should be able to raid just like everyone else cry .... they were going to know how to play thier character before joining my raid group. Not after.

Well the difference is that I didn't ask to raid as a tank. They asked and begged me to tank for them. So you think they would cut me some slack. And to the guilds credit they did. All except this one asshole. The whole thing ended up being no fun for me. And to me that was ALWAYS the point of playing ANY video game or joining up with a guild: To have fun.

Side note to my story: The guild ended up kicking the asshole out 2 weeks later. Apparently they had had enough of his bullshit. Some people just take WoW WAY WAY too seriously. I still talk to some of my old guild mates, but the whole thing really soured me on raiding and all that. Now I play a lot of solo WoW with the occasional group quests and dungeons. Do I miss the camaraderie? Yes. Do I miss being yelled at by some dick head with all the free time in the world who doesn't understand the meaning of fun? No, not at all.

 

[HobbesMkii]

Escort missions ought to banned for all eternity. It should be included in the Gamer Bill of Rights: Gamers have a right not to have escort missions in their games, or if such missions are included, they should be skippable and have absolutely no bearing on the rest of the game. They either come in two flavors: Impossibly difficult or disgustingly easy. I was playing the expansion to MechWarrior 3 the other day (because every couple of months I play a game that came out 3+ years ago), and I played an escort mission where the mission was to reach a convoy that was in the process of being attacked. I played it a half dozen times before I even managed to get there before it was all blown up and then another half dozen times in order to save just one truck to win the game. What possible reason could there be for designing a mission like that? Do developers assume that all players are secretly sadists?

 

[Eric the Orange]

I had to stop the video I was laughing so hard at the idea of Mr.Pitts using a lamp to "pre-heat" his computer.

I'm a pretty laid back guy so games don't piss me off that often. But I remember in GoW I had got to the last boss on the hardest difficulty and his third form, and I just COULD NOT BEAT HIM. Tried sooooo many times. He has this one attack that has barely any tell thats unblockable and does a ton of damage. so to this day I still haven't beat GoW on the hardest difficulty.

I guess that would be closest to "mega man" frustration.

 

[Incredible Bullshitting Man]

I heard Final Fantasy being mentioned. Now I love FF games, I really do, but there are only so many random encounters one can tolerate. The problem is, every Final Fantasy tends to cross that border of uncomfortable at least once, and keep going farther than is necessary (The same could be said about almost every game with random encounters). It´s especially frustrating in those never-ending dungeons: "WTF! Is there really no end to this place? I guess this is it; Healing items are nearly gone and the party is almost done for...Wait. I think I see the exit. Thank God in heaven! *Battle theme starts playing* NOOOOO!!!!" After that I find yet another room with *twitch* another boss fight.

I still remember the abhorrence that was the final dungeon in FF4, just before Zeromus; a long, winding corridor, and every random encounter was a dragon of hideous strength. Oh, and the last save point was miles away.

 

[VitusPrime]

Know your escort related quest pains, in oblivon that glicthed big time in that a unkillable character got killed. The oblivion fighters guild questline. OH that part where you escort the lizard guy after captureing him glitched up for me, and i fast travel TeleFragged

 

[Stromko]

Frustrating moments with gaming? How about frustrating moments with gaming blogs / sites, like how they like to tuck away so much content in podcasts and videos, which I find mostly impenetrable and not worth the time.

I don't know why there's been this widespread trend toward podcasts and videos where written features could have accomplished the same thing. A story about frustrating encounters in videogaming can be written about very well. Words are very good for stories. They even have really long stories in these things we call novels or just 'books'.

That's not to say there aren't some really great storytellers in the world, or charismatic or openly brilliant folks that are just awesome to behold in interviews, there's many times where a video or audio is far superior to mere written words(like Unskippable or Zero Punctuation, here). BUT, the average gamer, or game writer, is just not that charismatic. I'm no different, my mumbling, too-fast / too-quiet speech patterns when I'm talking about something that interests me has led many observers to ask, "Um, what?" or some variation thereof .. and yet I'm able to get my point across fairly well in text. Obviously, that's a skill that one can hone on the internet. Public speaking and diction, not so much.

Being visually oriented, able to read text and images and decode it much better than audio cues, also tends to go hand in hand with internet usage. I can't see how a video with amateur dialogue from mostly average personalities services this unique perception skill-set. I'm sure they're awesome people in real life, some may have written incredible things that have influenced and informed me, or worked on great featuers that amused me, but nothing really comes across to me in this video.

Subtitles would help. I'm not really able to follow these stories in an intuitive enough fashion to enjoy it right now, and I'm someone who's afflicted with nerdy couch-potato speech defects to the extreme. That I'm a horrible geek is probably part of why I don't get this whole 'video' thing. Right this moment I have a choice as to whether to sit through the rest of this video, or watch/listen to a Carl Sagan special on the Science channel. Now that's a guy that could tell a story with words, and also purdy pictures of galaxies and stuff! Gee, what a hard decision.

That's not to say I don't enjoy it when it's done well. I'm up to Endurance Run 85 of Persona 4 over on Giantbomb. That's about 80 hours of sitting down and listening to two guys who I think are pretty amusing playing the same game, but since if I played through Persona 4 myself it'd probably take 80 hours and wouldn't come with color commentary so I can at least somewhat rationalize that choice. I've also spent much more time than this thread's video took to play, talking about how I don't like this whole trend and that this sad parade of poor speech patterns has been the nadir of my experience with it. So it's not like I had anything better to do.

(e) I also can't fault their bravery for letting themselves get stuck on camera and have to actually TALK about their experiences so they could be posted as a newsletter feature. If someone asked me to do that I'd just refuse. A lot of these folks probably have university degrees in communications or writing or literature or what-have-you, and yet it seemed like a good idea to stick them in front of a camera where their skillset is of little use and make them talk. That's just mean. I couldn't even get through to the second half of the video, schadenfreud's never been something I can stomach in larger doses.

 

[hopeneverdies]

John, I feel your pain man. I was playing PSO on Ep 2. So I am playing Undersea Lab on Very Hard and I leveled up 5 or 6 times during that playthrough. I get to the final boss and I am about 10 shots away from killing him. Suddenly the wind outside picks up. Power is dead for 3 days straight. Luckily for my family, my mom was at school, my sister at a friend's, and dad 2 floors down because someone's head was about to be ripped off.

In terms of actual frustration, doing Submerged Castle on Pikmin 2 with zero deaths is an excercise in controlling the metaphorical fire I was about to breathe, and then when I actually did it, I cursed that cave's name with every swear word I could come up with.

 

[Grand_Marquis]

Awesome stories, I agree with you all. Especially about "Mega Man Patience". I have zero Mega Man Patience. If I *know* how to defeat a boss or complete some part of a level, then I should be able to *actually* complete that part of kill that boss, damn it! I don't buy video games to go pixel matching in order to perfectly time a jump! If I want that crap, I'll go to Dave and Busters and play one of their stupid rotating LED ticket games.

And I second the incredible bullshitting man above me. Random encounters are intolerable. As the game progresses, you start to feel claustrophobic from them. There you are, standing in a sprawling dungeon somewhere, it's "empty", and yet you can't go anywhere - ANYWHERE! - without putting yourself in danger of being dragged into a fight. Even standing still puts you in danger. Why?! WHY??!? The worst offender is "Skies of Arcadia", whose random number seed weighted so heavily on the side of encounters, that they actually managed to make piloting a flying pirate ship through a giant open world of floating cities NOT FUN. It's mind boggling.

I also need to echo Jon Etheridge up there about the Playstation and it's frustratingly arbitrary button symbols. I don't own any playstation platform, but I love the Ratchet and Clank series. So what I'll do is, every so often, I'll buy a ratchet and clank game and then borrow my friend's PS2. Well, the 3rd game has a thing similar to what he mentioned, where you need to tap buttons as they appear onscreen. Except they're just bloody random symbols, because Sony's goddamn retarded! It doesn't even make any logical sense! Why is the bottom one an "X"? Why not the "O" so that tapping it for a yes in a yes/no menu question actually makes bloody sense! But that's beside the point - everyone EVERY-ONE uses the "ABXY" freaking setup except for them! Even the god damn gamecube, and Nintendo shoots up crack before designing their controllers! Stop it! Stop using symbols! STOP! IT! [/rant]

And Stromko, I completely disagree. There are some things words just cannot communicate. As long as video as used to support a blog (rather than entirely subsume it), I see it as only a benefit to the outlet.

 

[Stromko]

Quite fair Marquis, what's good for some isn't good for all, and one man's garbage is ten other's treasure. Or something. In this case though, I think I would've liked a text version of this feature, so for me it is a bit like the vlog has subsumed the blog in this case. Lots of the video features on this here site are amazing, true, but I also enjoy the writing. This video, not so much.

As for frustrating moments in GAMES, the most recent that sticks in my mind is the gunship 'side missions' in Saints Row 2. The cannon, chaingun, whatever on the thing is useless, the bullets fly at about 35 miles an hour. Unless you've landed on top of your target and it's in front of you and below at a 45 degree angle and isn't moving, you won't get a kill with it. The missiles, apparently, require a lock but once you have that they're wonderful, almost never miss unless they strike an overpass or the side of a building. Fun, explosive, reminded me of the first time I sicced a pet on a monster in Everquest 1 and saw it bashed something's brains in.

On my 30th play-through of phase 6, the last phase of that side-mission in SR2, I realized that the missiles tracked my crosshairs even without a lock, and that helped immensely. Oh but guess what, if you hit a skyscraper or are struck in the right manner, your missile-racks can be broken off and you're only left with the chaingun. At that point, you've failed and have to kill yourself so you can try again.

Most frustrating ever? Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I have to admit I was not very patient back then, but starting over from scratch, twice, going through a gauntlet of traps, and trying to beat the first major boss with almost no health left was enough to cause me to destroy two X-Box 1 controllers. They're surprisingly fragile if you mash down on the analog stick with your fist it turns out! The checkpoint system meant I was stuck, each time, having to play that boss fight over an over again with no health, no margin of error, or start from scratch, and I just couldn't do it. I never tried to play it again, because at 40$ a pop for new controllers that game cost me 80$ + 40$, and that may be the most expensive non-subscription game that's ever come along for me.

I rarely ever play console games, but the two most frustrating moments I can recall are from console games. That may have something to do with my playing habits being as they are.

 

[TheEndIsNear5115]

My most frustrated moment was in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I was trying to do the "Take all the pictures to get all the trophies" challenge. Well, for those of you who are familiar with the game, you had to take a picture of each of the little woodland creatures, of whose general name I can't remember because it's been such a long time.

Well, I took a picture of every one of them except this utterly random, completely insiginficant character. I begin looking for him, and I've scoured every island, only to find that, after consulting GameFAQs, that this is the only character that disappears for no reason whatsoever after you complete an entirely unrelated dungeon.

This required me to replay the entire game to get all the pictures. I almost broke my Wavebird in half.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Gameplay is getting more convoluted bad gameplay or just poor gamepaly makes modern gaming worse than film, its abotu time they invent AI played games all you have to do is watch, maybe it would expand the market so much games would be 10-30 a pop....

Without wide and varied Single player cheating or modding you can't make a game better than out of the box and that out of the box experience is getting less and less worth while...

 

[Nerdfury]

I know just how you feel, John - I was at the part where you go along this long, loooong set of two long, loooong roads with two save points, and an aeon battle with a fellow aeon summoner half-way through. I got through mind-numbing random battles, the main battle and more battles, the save point was in sight and ZIP, power surge. I loaded back up, went through it all again, and got to the save point - this time, close enough to press X to save. ZIP, another surge.

And then it happened a third time.

Russ? That level annoyed me SO MUCH as well! Eventually I worked out that there's a road that cuts from one side of the track to the other, and if you take it you get the message that you're going backwards, but then come out near the end and beat everyone. It took me two days of trying to resort to that, but resort I did. I regret nothing!

 

[TwistedEllipses]

Yep, there are plenty of frustrating gaming experiences out there. Susan's is especially true for me.

Most frustrating ever? Prince of Persia: sands of time. I have no sense of rhythm and have delayed reactions, so I tend to avoid platforming games, but I was given this. There's this one bit in the second part, where you have to jump from wall to wall to reach the dagger of time (yes, it's that early on) and I simply could not do it. 5 years later I did it first time and the game wasn't actually that hard from then on...

The other annoying things for me are quicktime events (I constantly fail at them) and not being rewarded for completing a game and getting everything (although achievements now mean that isn't the case as much).

 

[chenry]

Star Wars Force Unleashed. OH GOD. BALARKLASDAGKLJHAkhsakdjhaskjh!!!! I don't know how many times I threw down the controller in a fit. I hated that game so much!

The Star Destroyer bit took forever, I just couldn't frigging pull the ship down. The on-screen prompts were LYING TO ME. I did what they said and it wouldn't work. I ended up just mashing on the sticks and it finally crashed down but oh god. I hated that so bad.