Games that ramped up difficulty and dang near destroyed the experience

[Redryhno]

Warhammer:Battle March

Now I'll admit I'm no great shakes at RTS games but I managed to work my way through the Empire campaign on normal difficulty and was enjoying it until the final battle.Suddenly the game just ramped up the difficulty to ridiculous levels and I repeatedly got my ass handed to me.Annoyingly too there's no checkpoints which means you have to restart from the start every time and considering you can easily be 25+ mins into a battle before defeat it's a pain in the ass having to go back to the beginning.Hell I even tried dropping the difficulty to easy and still couldn't beat the damn thing.It remains on my shelf unbeaten to this day

Were you on the last battle, the one with the city and all?

Yes the one where you have to defend the city of Talabheim(?)

well, if we're both thinking of the same battle, then just buy up as many ranged units as you can, but keep a few high number infantry and a unit of Knights Panther. all you really need to do is keep those meaty infantry up by the barricades, take and keep control of a couple ranged units and kite them back to the city walls where you need to keep your Knights on a side with one more unit of infantry on the opposite side. If you play it right, you should be able to kite their units back and keep them occupied with the other guys on the barricades and flank them with both the infantry and cav. when the final push comes. As soon as one of the ranged units gets down to less than ten, switch to another unit and set the other guys up behind the meaty units, or use them as fodder to keep the Chaos guys back while you mow down the other units as fast as you can.

 

[Robert Ewing]

Well, I tried installing GTA4 on my PC once.

Wait, that wasn't a level? But it was the most difficult and problematic experience of my life! Teaching me that there is no hope for humanity so long as this unholy abomination shalt live!

I still to this day have never played GTA4 on my PC... Sigh... Luckily my trusty 360 was here... I mean... After I bought one... For the sole purpose of playing GTA4...... >;( Curse you Windows.

 

[TheKruzdawg]

Halo 2 on Legendary...my God.

Also, in Mass Effect the fight with Lady Benezia was incredibly hard considering it was one of the first missions. I must have done that same fight scene about 50 times over.

I personally never had a whole lot of trouble with it, even on the difficulty below Insanity. But I usually didn't go there first and spent a decent amount of time completing side quests before tackling the main ones.

Also speaking of Mass Effect, playing that game on Insanity with a brand new, level 1 character - the game is absolutely no fun. I was in combat against the 2 Turian assassins outside of Chora's Den for over 30 minutes (in 1 session) because they have so much health/shields and your weapons are shit at that point. Getting killed in 2 shots, by a shotgun, from across the room is stupid.

 

[TheKruzdawg]

Game that haunts my dreams to this day, Damn you Little Nemo. Really need to beat this game because it's been kicking my ass for years. Always thought it was a hell of alot of fun to play and it has good controls. Pretty much anything made by Capcom back then kicked ass. Even though my memory is a little foggy, there is one level where everything is upside down and it becomes hard as tits. Very hard to get to that point, then it feels like the developers just cranked up the difficulty to the extreme. I have tried to beat this game so many times without cheating. Now I can't cheat because it's me and the game now. Even I was fooled by the box art as a kid, it makes Contra look like a walk in the park.

SNIP

OMG that movie and the nightmarish black void creature thing he has to face in the end gave me nightmares as a child.

 

[MetalDooley]

Warhammer:Battle March

Now I'll admit I'm no great shakes at RTS games but I managed to work my way through the Empire campaign on normal difficulty and was enjoying it until the final battle.Suddenly the game just ramped up the difficulty to ridiculous levels and I repeatedly got my ass handed to me.Annoyingly too there's no checkpoints which means you have to restart from the start every time and considering you can easily be 25+ mins into a battle before defeat it's a pain in the ass having to go back to the beginning.Hell I even tried dropping the difficulty to easy and still couldn't beat the damn thing.It remains on my shelf unbeaten to this day

Were you on the last battle, the one with the city and all?

Yes the one where you have to defend the city of Talabheim(?)

well, if we're both thinking of the same battle, then just buy up as many ranged units as you can, but keep a few high number infantry and a unit of Knights Panther. all you really need to do is keep those meaty infantry up by the barricades, take and keep control of a couple ranged units and kite them back to the city walls where you need to keep your Knights on a side with one more unit of infantry on the opposite side. If you play it right, you should be able to kite their units back and keep them occupied with the other guys on the barricades and flank them with both the infantry and cav. when the final push comes. As soon as one of the ranged units gets down to less than ten, switch to another unit and set the other guys up behind the meaty units, or use them as fodder to keep the Chaos guys back while you mow down the other units as fast as you can.

Ok will give that a try.Thanks for the help

 

[PatrickXD]

My vote is on STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl.
The game is tough, that's one of the key ideas of it. But there are sections of the game that are just too much, I struggle to remember specific points, but I had to walk away from that game so many times before I managed to finally get it completed.
Also, when I was little I just could not figure out the Water Temple in OoT, so I only recently completed that game.

 

[Richard Keohane]

I'm surprised no one has stepped in to nominate Silent Hill 3 on HARD.

The game gives you various infinite ammo weapons and crazy space guns and lightsabers if you do certain things after beating the game, and gives you TEN different unlockable difficulty levels above HARD as well.

However, HARD is available from the beginning. I played on HARD, because I like a challenge. I went through the entire game, collected every scrap of ammo, and did it WITHOUT KILLING ANY MONSTERS. I was trying to earn the pacifism achievement, so I only killed required bosses.

The final boss had more health than I had ammo.

ALL THE AMMO IN THE GAME WAS NOT ENOUGH TO KILL THE FINAL BOSS. It apparently required you to play through on normal and unlock some of the special weapons.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Pretty much when you play Phantasy Star Online on Ultimate mode. That mode is so hard at the start (every time a monster took a swipe at you, the hit is a critial) that I had to retret back to Very Hard mode just to grind up my character level.
Even when I got my level higher, it is still difficult to proceed the rest of the games as the other areas like the Cave and Ruin levels monster are just as tough.

 

[DyranLK]

Some missions in Jak II and Jak 3 were deliberate rage fests, and forced me to postpone completing them for a couple days or so, but after going back in and finally completing them after hours of frustration, it feels pretty satisfying. Besides, it's not like the game's cheating you, or anything (for the most part, at least); whether or not you beat one of their missions depended on whether or not you had the right reflexes and skill to do so, which got frustrating at times, but was reasonable.

Not wanting to brag or anything, but I did beat Jak II in two days and Jak 3 in 3 on my second playthrough, however...

 

[Jandau]

For me, it was Homeworld 2. I didn't know the game scales the enemy fleet to match the size of yours and that it does so quite unfairly. Roughly 2/3 of the way into the game, the missions were getting quite difficult, but I was managing and always built up my fleet to the max before leaving a mission. Then I started one mission and was suddenly faced with roughly 6-10 capital ships closing in on me. Right at the start. And no, I don't mean Frigates, I mean actual capships. I fought them off somehow figuring that that was the mission, only to have the game warp in another wave. At that point I said "fuck that shit!" turned the game off and uninstalled. To this day I can't play a Homeworld game and enjoy it...

Jagged Alliance 2 gets irritatingly difficult as the campaign wears on. The consequences for failure are simply enormous (single shots can kill), and one bad move tends to snowball into another, so you need either to play with almost prescient awareness, or you need to liberally abuse save/load.

To be fair, as the campaign wears on you can snowball out of control as well, with certain team compositions being nearly unbeatable (Night Ops focused snipers picking off entire armies on their own, for instance). There is a difficulty spike when you first meet the elite troops with railguns, but when you get past that (and get railguns of your own) it's smooth sailing to the end.

 

[GiantRaven]

Deadly Premonition definitely would have benefited from shorter, easier or just plain no combat sections at all. The story was interesting/bizarre enough to stand on it's own without much gameplay. The raincoat killer sections can stay though, as they were actually quite tense and fit in well with the rest of the game.

 

[Warachia]

Final Fantasy XII. But to me, it DID destroy the Experience. I loved the game up until I got to a point to where I was getting face-rolled by a boss. You might say "Oh, well duh you're going to get stuck on bosses eventually in RPGs and have to level up a bit!" Well, I Spent the majority of TWO days grinding up to where it was just taking too long to level in my area and the next. I decide to fight the boss again, utterly DESTROYED it, then move on. Next boss: I get smashed. Basically three 'screens' past the last boss and I'd have to spend almost the same amount of time grinding as I did before. I'll get back to it eventually but after like five tries I stopped. Haven't touched it since.

EDIT: I decided to plug in my PS2 this morning and give that boss another try after several months of not playing. The boss is called Elder Wyrm in the Golmore Jungle, right after Tiamat. I see now as to why I got fed up with the fight and stopped. The boss does an ability called "Sporefall" or something similar that puts almost (if not,) EVERY status Ailment on All characters.

I did manage to beat it in one try, however. No, wait it was two tries, the first one I just soft-reset the game when I only managed a three-hit Quckening via bad luck. Unfortunately my strategy to beat this boss was keeping everyone at least above half HP and use my ethers to allow for quickenings or a summon. I'll probably regret using all of those ethers later but I really enjoy the game and didn't want to be stuck on that boss forever lol.

Damn, I remember that boss, I quite the game soon after beating it, the thing that royally sucked about him is every time I got a good pattern going, he's do a random 9-12 hit combo that wrecked my entire party. beating him got down to just luck and nothing else.

 

[Double A]

Halo 2 on Legendary...my God.

Ugh, don't remind me. I remember trying to play co-op on Legendary with one of my friends. Our experience went something like this:

"Okay, here we-" *Sniped*
"Let's try this agai-" *Sniped*
"Any ide-" *Sniped*
"Those goddamn Jackal sni-" *Sniped*

*70 checkpoint reloads later*

"Screw this, let's play something e-" *Sniped*

I have actually never finished Psychonauts because of the "Meat Circus" level. It's a shame too, because I was really enjoying it prior to that.

Ugh. Fuck that level. I hated it so goddamn much I was ready to break my mouse.

It started like, "Hey game, lemme explore." "Nope. Oh, and here's an evil bunny. Have fun."

Then I noticed the knife throwers. They take 1-3 hits, but get right back up in 5 seconds.
The rails were atrocious in every way, I had to use every cheap trick I had to get past them.
The first boss was annoying as hell because I had to use a walkthrough to figure out how to win.
The circus tightrope segment was the most atrocious and difficult platforming I've ever seen.
I figured out how to kill the second boss fairly quickly because it was the same way without the "get on his back" bit, but the fireballs were annoying.
The last boss was easy as hell and made up for half the level because it was so damn satisfying to beat him for the third and final time.

 

[Warachia]

Halo 2 on Legendary...my God.

Also, in Mass Effect the fight with Lady Benezia was incredibly hard considering it was one of the first missions. I must have done that same fight scene about 50 times over.

I personally never had a whole lot of trouble with it, even on the difficulty below Insanity. But I usually didn't go there first and spent a decent amount of time completing side quests before tackling the main ones.

Also speaking of Mass Effect, playing that game on Insanity with a brand new, level 1 character - the game is absolutely no fun. I was in combat against the 2 Turian assassins outside of Chora's Den for over 30 minutes (in 1 session) because they have so much health/shields and your weapons are shit at that point. Getting killed in 2 shots, by a shotgun, from across the room is stupid.

That's why you can only play insanity after you beat the game twice, also, the game warns you about it and tells you not to do it if you are starting out, so it's not like you can blame the game for that.

 

[TheKruzdawg]

That's why you can only play insanity after you beat the game twice, also, the game warns you about it and tells you not to do it if you are starting out, so it's not like you can blame the game for that.

I guess you're right, but I didn't have that much of a problem beating ME2 on Insanity with a brand new character. Just goes to show how different the games are. Although on ME2 I DID use an imported character, which means you don't start on level 1 and you get a bunch of bonus stuff.

Either way, it just didn't seem like it should have been THAT difficult. I expected to have lots of trouble with the bosses and a lot of the larger group fights on some of the side missions, but not those 2 assassins outside Chora's Den so early in the game.

 

[nokori3byo]

Recently, it's been end bosses. DA:O, Dead Space 2, and the Mortal Kombat reboot all tried hard to make me hate them with the final battles. Never mind that the first two examples are actually piss easy if you clue into the correct strategy. I did not.

As for MK, I would say it succeeded in its last-moment bid for my shitlist.

 

[El Pwnz]

Alpha Protocol on Hard.
I was mostly stealth-focussed and that asshole boss in Moscow who turns invincible and runs after you with a knife fucked my shit up. So I decided to do something else to level up more, and I got stuck on a mission where you have to protect a computer from a bunch of guys who rush at you from every direction.
I actually liked that game, too.

Wonderful game, but the difficulty was ridiculous. If you specialized in Pistols, you were unstoppable. If you didn't, good luck!!

At everyone saying the Benzia fight in Mass Effect, I always found the Thorian to be much more diffuclt. Maybe that's just me, I guess?

 

[gorfias]

Dragon Age Origins. It's not that it's hard. YOu just have to know how to play. The problem is that you'll be owning everything in sight and then the next moment you'll be in a RIDICULOUS boss fight that requires just a tad bit of luck to win...the trouble is most boss fights/bigger fights can take upwards of 20 minutes and complete. I don't have the time to retry fights 3 or 4 times to perfect a strategy. That's when I go to easy.

I'm in a similar situation. I usually try to play games that allow you to save often. I never know when I'm going to get called to parent duty.

prototype.

that game's difficulty curve was like a roller coaster. some missions were mind numbingly easy, and other were maddeningly difficult. i never even finished the game because of the final boss.
"kill this dude with a ton of regenerating health, super strong and far reaching attacks, on a small playing field in only 2 minutes."

i normally have a pretty good grip on my temper, after my 20th try i shattered my controller on the ground, took the game out and snapped it in half.

Yikes. That game has been sitting on a shelf since I tried the 3rd or 4th mission and just felt stressed, rather than find I'm having fun.

Friend of mine smashed his keyboard and destroyed his game case when playing Alice Madness Returns. That is such an amazing game, but on EASY mode, it is frustrating. Do these people understand what EASY means?

If you are smashing things, you aren't having fun, and that is the point of these things. You want a sense of accomplishment in gaming? Feel free to put the game into Hard mode. But easy should mean just that (Love Uncharted 2: a VERY EASY mode, that was.)

 

[bassie302]

Titan Quest

playing through the original campaign I became more and more of an unstoppable force, butchering everything that crossed my blades. That is, until I met the final boss: Typhon. This guy hits for roughly half your health bar and has a barrage of special attacks, every single one of which do enough damage to kill you unless you instantly pop a potion and pray to your lucky stars. Add a healthbar that laughs at anything you throw at him and a recipe for frustration is made. And because he spams those moves it's nigh-on impossible to get a single hit in. The only window of opportunity is in one of his special moves because it has a few seconds cast time before landing.

after hours of failed attempts I finally downed the son of a ***** in a 15 minute long nerve-wracking showdown.

 

[William Fleming]

Uncharted 3, mainly because I was thrown off by past experiences and previous Uncharted games.

I've played Uncharted 2 on Crushing, and while fucking annoying, it was still beatable. I turn on Uncharted 3 on Normal and holy shit, I wasn't expecting Drake to be that much of a knockover. In Uncharted 2 Normal, it played like an action movie -- find cover, jump on this, shoot this dude, run to cover, beat this guy up, throw a grenade. And playing co-op on Normal, it's regular Uncharted Normal, Drake surviving massive amounts of shots at once while easily punching out a thug. In Uncharted 3 Normal, it goes -- find cover, jump on this, get shot twice by some guy with a machine pistol from eighty feet away, die.

It's pissing me off, playing half of the game from cover instead of running around like Drake has ants in his shoes while shooting everyone with a shotgun.

Wait till you meet the fire guys, they would be my nomination for this thread.

Whyyyy...? Why did you have to remind me of that part ;_; Those fuckers are straight up cheap.