The worst minigames.

[Drathnoxis]

Remember Beaver Bother from Donkey Kong 64? You had to herd beavers into this hole in the ground with an invisible wall around it. It was terrible, I think I spent an hour beating the hardest one! Then there was the one where you have to swat the bugs and all you could do was swat randomly and hope that the strange hitboxes would register a hit. And the one where you need to shoot the little lizard that moves in circles at the bottom of a dark barrel. Actually, I don't think there were any good minigames in DK64, they were all tedious and awkward to play.

What are the worst/most frustrating minigames you can think of?

 

[PapaGreg096]

I flat out hated the part time job missions in No more heroes, to this day I have nightmares of the lawnmowing missions.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Blitzball!!!!!!!

For how cool the intro made it look, playing the actual game is boring as fuck. You're forced to play it at least once, and that one time is made extremely hard to win. And the whole sequence is drawn out with snippets of other events in between.

 

[FalloutJack]

Blitzball!!!!!!!

For how cool the intro made it look, playing the actual game is boring as fuck. You're forced to play it at least once, and that one time is made extremely hard to win. And the whole sequence is drawn out with snippets of other events in between.

I played through it 74 times in order to claim victory. In the end, it was actually a simple change in defense + making sure I knew the damn Jecht ball. I tried later to play, out of curiosity, and it was a shitstorm and I didn't look back.

OT: The worst minigames have to come from the worst games with minigames, right? Should I insert another FF8 low achievement stamp here or try and find something worse?

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

That fucking fishing game in Nier that it demanded you complete to further the story. Too bad for the game I had other more appealing distractions at the time such as life itself.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

OT: The worst minigames have to come from the worst games with minigames, right? Should I insert another FF8 low achievement stamp here or try and find something worse?

Meh, Triple Triad is fairly inoffensive by FF minigame standards, assuming you know how the rule spreading mechanic works. FFIXs Tetra Master is better tho.

At least the mandatory game of Triple Triad is winnable without exploiting AI and having won a previous minigame you couldn't possibly know would matter later, like Blitzball

Speaking of FF minigames, my vote goes to either FFVIIs Chocobo breeding or FFXs Chocobo racing. Both are heinous in their own ways, the former an RNG shitshow, the latter a barely controllable mess.

 

[Kotaro]

Meh, Triple Triad is fairly inoffensive by FF minigame standards, assuming you know how the rule spreading mechanic works. FFIXs Tetra Master is better tho.

I found Triple Triad (the base game, not so much the variant rules) to be insanely fun and addicting. Tetra Master is weird and I didn't like it as much, even though I adore FFIX and don't much like FFVIII (how's that for irony?).

I'm going to add the Grunty races from the first four .hack games, not for the minigame itself, but for how it awards its prizes. You get different prizes for beating the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place record times, and you can race as many times as you want and beat them again to win more of the prizes. Sounds awesome, right? The problem is, your own record times become the new times to beat. Which means that if you blaze through and absolutely dominate, then it becomes nearly impossible to win again. The end result of this is that, if you want to be able to maximize your payout, you need to repeatedly race, starting with 3rd place and working up, clearing the times by as little as humanly possible so that the new times aren't too difficult to beat.

 

[Dalisclock]

Blitzball!!!!!!!

For how cool the intro made it look, playing the actual game is boring as fuck. You're forced to play it at least once, and that one time is made extremely hard to win. And the whole sequence is drawn out with snippets of other events in between.

Yeah, one of my complaints is how Blitzball is made out to be this awesome underwater soccer game(which snippets from the intro look amazing) but when you see it in game it's boring and hard to control.

It also doesn't help at all this is the big tournament Bend...er, Wakka is so obsessed with and after that you literally have no reason to play it but it's also when you actually can start getting good at it.

One would think it would make more sense to let you practice and get good at the mini-game before the big tourney, by placing the competition later in the story. So you have a reason to play it, other then shits and giggles. That's how I would have done it anyway. But I would have also given Tidus better dialogue and voice acting too, told the costume designer to cool it with the belts already and so on.

As for the OP, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Tower Defense mini-game from Assasins Creed Revelations or the Planet Scanning from ME2.

 

[Ironman126]

Planet Scanning from ME2.

That wasn't a minigame. Minigames are supposed to be fun break from the main game. I used to do groundskeeping and maintenance at a school. My shitty, boring, tedious job elicits less bile than that time sink. Under no circumstance did anyone involved in that travesty ever think it was fun. In fact, I would go so far as to say that none of the minigames in ME2 were ever designed to be any fun.

Hell, I'll go further still! EVE Online's minigames are less tedious than the minigames in ME2. Goddamn I fucking hated those minigames. Looking back, I don't really hold ME2 in terribly high esteem. It was, by far, the weakest of the trilogy, those fucking minigames were just the icing on the cake.

 

[Dr. Thrax]

I'll echo Blitzball, but also throw in Sphere Break from FFX-2.

I played X-2 during middle school, and Sphere Break is a game of math that really wasn't explained very well. Needless to say, I lost the Sphere Break tournament, which meant I had effectively lost my only chance at the Lady Luck dressphere. You can challenge the person you went up against again in a later Chapter, but it's a more difficult match. If you can't win either of these matches, you cannot gain the Lady Luck dressphere, which means no 100% for you.

It takes place on a 4x4 board with a core in the very center of the board, the number on the core is the "Core Number", then there are 4 "Entry Coins" which you pay up that surround the core, and those are surrounded by 12 "Border Coins". Each round you have to select one of the Entry Coins first, then you can choose any other coin. If the combined sum of the coins matches one of the Break Multiples (Multiples of the Core Number you must strive for) you achieve a Core Break and that round ends, if not, you keep selecting coins until the sum reaches one of the Break Multiples. To win you have to use up a set quota of Border Coins within a set number of rounds and within the time limit. If you lose, you lose the Entry Coins you put in play.

The real fucking kicker is that the final opponent of the tournament is one of your own crew-mates, who will refuse to hand over the sphere if you lose to him. Even though it's a fucking dressphere and he can't/doesn't use them.

 

[DeadProxy]

So much Blitzball hate...I don't get it, I loved it. Still remember going on a 70+ win streak. However, Blitzball in FFX-2 was utter garbage. You don't even play the game, instead it became a "manager" system where you instructed your team to do stuff, but I never understood it. I would send my team out to practice, and someone would get injured. Go to practice again, someone else gets injured, now I don't have enough people to play or practice. Never touched it again.

Sphere break was also a bunch of rng+math garbage that needed so much thought for no reason. Fuck you, Shinra and your shitty taste in games. Just gimme the damn dress sphere.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Planet Scanning from ME2.

That wasn't a minigame. Minigames are supposed to be fun break from the main game. I used to do groundskeeping and maintenance at a school. My shitty, boring, tedious job elicits less bile than that time sink. Under no circumstance did anyone involved in that travesty ever think it was fun. In fact, I would go so far as to say that none of the minigames in ME2 were ever designed to be any fun.

Hell, I'll go further still! EVE Online's minigames are less tedious than the minigames in ME2. Goddamn I fucking hated those minigames. Looking back, I don't really hold ME2 in terribly high esteem. It was, by far, the weakest of the trilogy, those fucking minigames were just the icing on the cake.

Planet scanning was the worst just killed the pace dead they took out the crappy mako sections from the first and made them 10 times worse. Filler of the worst kind.

Blitzball!!!!!!!

For how cool the intro made it look, playing the actual game is boring as fuck. You're forced to play it at least once, and that one time is made extremely hard to win. And the whole sequence is drawn out with snippets of other events in between.

Its actually pretty easy to win that first match but only if you know what you are doing which you wont the first time you play the game. I ended up playing it a lot to get Wakkas ultimate weapon so got pretty used to it basically all I did to win (on a much later 2nd playthrough) was just pass the ball around my team then only score just before time was up because as soon as the AI got the ball odds are they would score due to how bad your team is in that match so yeah just limit their opportunity to have the ball as little as possible. Although it doesnt really matter if you lose so by that standard its fairly inoffensive.

One in X-2 was much worse imo mechanically but you could ignore it which was great. FF8s triple triad is good but I hate how strongly its tied to the game so in that way its terrible as its hard to ignore. X had some of the worse mini games though with dodging 200 lightning strikes, catch those butterflys and navigate the chocobo maze among others damn they were a chore and you had to do them if you wanted the ultimate weapons.

I seem to remember Mario Galaxy 2 having terrible minigames as well some bomb clearing nonsense which is strange as Galaxy had great ones.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Planet Scanning from ME2.

That wasn't a minigame. Minigames are supposed to be fun break from the main game. I used to do groundskeeping and maintenance at a school. My shitty, boring, tedious job elicits less bile than that time sink. Under no circumstance did anyone involved in that travesty ever think it was fun. In fact, I would go so far as to say that none of the minigames in ME2 were ever designed to be any fun.

Hell, I'll go further still! EVE Online's minigames are less tedious than the minigames in ME2. Goddamn I fucking hated those minigames. Looking back, I don't really hold ME2 in terribly high esteem. It was, by far, the weakest of the trilogy, those fucking minigames were just the icing on the cake.

Planet scanning was the worst just killed the pace dead they took out the crappy mako sections from the first and made them 10 times worse. Filler of the worst kind.

I swear I'm the only one in the whole Universe who actually liked the Mako driving sections in ME1 (shut up, I know I'm never the only one). Maybe it's because I was playing the PC version with mouse and keyboard, but I honestly didn't find the controls that bad. In any case it seems to me the solution would be just to improve the controls not remove the it completely and replace it with boring minigame.

 

[Avnger]

Does the fucking "bring down a Star Destroyer from space" from The Force Unleashed count as a minigame? Because that was honestly the worst thing ever made in any category related to videogames.

 

[Bobular]

Most of the mini-games people are saying they hated I loved and at the time wished they'd make into actual games, especially Blitzball. Kid me would have loved to get a Blitzball game rather than FFX-2.

 

[gigastar]

The smalltalk minigame in X: Rebirth.

Not because its hard or long, but because youll have to do it potentially hundreds of times while sweet talking NPCs to dispense either subscriptions to the stations market or skill upgrades for NPCs in your employ.

 

[Imre Csete]

BioWare sure does love them.

Pazaak, Swoop Racing, Tower of Hanoi, that out of place side-scrolling flyer shooting in Jade Empire, quasar...

 

[Drathnoxis]

I like pretty much any minigame. It's just more content, more bang for your buck.

Does that mean you like Beaver Bother? There's an invisible wall around the hole that you herd beavers into! They won't fall in! Beaver Bother is penance for the sin of playing DK64!

 

[Dalisclock]

Planet Scanning from ME2.

That wasn't a minigame. Minigames are supposed to be fun break from the main game. I used to do groundskeeping and maintenance at a school. My shitty, boring, tedious job elicits less bile than that time sink. Under no circumstance did anyone involved in that travesty ever think it was fun. In fact, I would go so far as to say that none of the minigames in ME2 were ever designed to be any fun.

Hell, I'll go further still! EVE Online's minigames are less tedious than the minigames in ME2. Goddamn I fucking hated those minigames. Looking back, I don't really hold ME2 in terribly high esteem. It was, by far, the weakest of the trilogy, those fucking minigames were just the icing on the cake.

Planet scanning was the worst just killed the pace dead they took out the crappy mako sections from the first and made them 10 times worse. Filler of the worst kind.

I swear I'm the only one in the whole Universe who actually liked the Mako driving sections in ME1 (shut up, I know I'm never the only one). Maybe it's because I was playing the PC version with mouse and keyboard, but I honestly didn't find the controls that bad. In any case it seems to me the solution would be just to improve the controls not remove the it completely and replace it with boring minigame.

For What It's Worth, I honestly didn't get the MAKO hate either. Yeah, it's not the best controlling vehicle in the world but it wasn't terrible either. It did it's job well enough in the story missions where you had to drive. The random planets, OTOH, were pretty boring to begin with.