So what IS the most frustrating video game in the history of video games?

[AmdEmAll]

Street Fighter

Oh yeah and lately Gran Turismo 4 has been pissing me off. Damn driving missions! :|

 

[nj]

Batman for NES slayed me. Took me a long time to finish it.
PGR for Xbox was the last game that made me throw my controller across the room.

 

[acemcmac]

Originally posted by: chcarnage
Marathon Infinity.

I second that. Vidmaster's challenge FTW.

 

[MrChad]

Ninja Gaiden - beat it once in college, just an incredibly frustrating game. You need perfect timing to beat the final level/boss(es).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - poor controls and a difficult game all around

Blaster Master - I agree with everyone's sentiments

Zelda II - Without a map, the Great Palace is a tremendous pain in the ass.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Originally posted by: chcarnage
Marathon Infinity.

WTF? Unless you're playing on Total Carnage difficulty, that game was teh easy. Fun, but easy.

Originally posted by: acemcmac
I second that. Vidmaster's challenge FTW.

Vidmaster's Challenge as in the secret levels or Vidmaster's Challenge as in the seven requirements of being a vidmaster? The secret levels were pretty easy.

 

[AbAbber2k]

Nothing since the NES seems to have been challenging enough to remember (thanks to save games mostly).

That said, some of the hardest games I remember are Kid Icarus, Punch-Out, Bionic Commando, Top Gun, the Ghouls and Ghost games, TMNT (the original), Blaster Master, original Metroid.... all I can think of right now.

Contra was easy... mostly because I played it CONSTANTLY when I was little. So much that I got to the point I could cruise through it in like 30min without a scratch. My poor childhood. Mega Man games were moderately difficult. I always hated Heat Man's stage in MM2 with the disappearing blocks... MM1 is the only one I never beat. 3 was my favorite and I played it whenever I wasn't playing Contra, so naturally I got pretty good at it. They only got easier after that though. Games today are too much about providing non-linear gameplay and less about providing real difficulty. Just once I'd like to see a next gen platformer where you get hit once and die/lose a life and have to start over. No saving, no passwords. Those factors are what glued me to the screen for so many hours.

 

[JonathanYoung]

Shadow of the Beast for Genesis

 

[RadioHead84]

MARBLE MADNESS..

One of the only few games I TRIED to beat and actually couldnt do it.

 

[Whisper]

Well yeah, if we're talking about frustration rather than difficulty, my vote shifts to Master Blaster. The fact that you couldn't save or use passwords, much like with Castlevania, made its piss off potential ENORMOUS.

Rush 'n Attack was pretty frustrating as well.

Actually, just about any non-saveable game on the NES was a PITA. Even Super Spike VBall was hard. I mean come on, it's volleyball, give a guy a break.

btw: did anyone ever beat...what was it called...the NES game based on the original Dragonball? I made it through once, but that was after cheating to ridiculous degrees with my game genie.

 

[I Saw OJ]

Originally posted by: PaNsyBoy8
did you guys play metal gear on nes? maybe i was too young and stupid but i couldn't last more than 5 mins on that game, i jsut gave up after a while, of course i was also like 7 or so.

Originally posted by: Zap Brannigan
Anyone ever play Wizards and Warriors? That one was a bitch too.

We had both those games when I was little in the house. When you would get bored with your regular games that you always played, you would pop those in, play em for 10 minutes, then realize how much of a B**** they were and put them in the back of the pile where they belong.


Seth

 

[alareau]

I remember I once rented a game based on the Dragon Lance book series. On the first level, the first area, there was a door and a pit. I never figured out how to go into the door or jump over the pit. Even after emulating it, 10+ years later, i couldn't figure it out. What kind of game makes it so hard to go through the first door!

 

[kitkit201]

Ninja Gaiden was easy. Battletoads was easy and so was Mega Man 1-8 on NES. I was the master in those timing/action genre games when i was young. Ninja Gaiden on Xbox is tough!

 

[Kev]

Originally posted by: GoodRevrnd
oo ooo let's see if anyone remembers this one
Jetfighter II
try being like 10 and being requried to do 3 successful carrier landings before even being allowed to truely play the game. now that was some bullsh!t right there. :|

that reminds me of top gun for the NES. i was never able to make a landing, and i don't know anyone who was.

i remember NARC being frustrating - I think I fought the last guy for an hour and ahalf before giving up...

 

[ebaycj]

kid icarus, no question. I don't think anyone ever beat that game.

 

[SupaDupaCheez]

The INTARWEB

 

[techtonics]

Did anyone ever play the original Ghostbusters on NES? That game confused the crap out of me. Climbing those stairs to get to Zool(sp?) was crazy hard. I could climb like 4 flights. I then got my hand on a pro action replay and an invincibility code and found out there are like 30 flights of stairs! There's no way anyone can climb those stairs without a cheat. I hate that game to this day. Just thinking about it makes me want to punch something.

 

[LordMorpheus]

Originally posted by: jbourne77
Top Gun for NES was a bitch. Specifically, landing.

landing in a real flight sim is much much easier than landing in that game . . .

 

[Megadeth]

Originally posted by: weirdichi
Remember, this is the most FRUSTRATING, not the most difficult game.

Originally posted by: Megadeth
Deadly Towers - nes
Jim Power - snes

Oh god! Deadly towers! I just got lost and there was no point in that game at all!

Originally posted by: StevenYoo
Ninja Gaiden

I can beat that game in 15 minutes. I should do that this winter break and put up a clip.

Yep, I know exactly what you mean on DT!

 

[flot]

E.T. for the Atari. Worst game of all time.

Snopes link...

If one game cartridge could be selected as the symbol of the sudden demise of Atari's golden goose, however, it would have to be the ill-fated E.T. The head of Warner Communications made a deal with Steven Spielberg to produce a home video game version of Spielberg's blockbuster E.T. film. Basing a video game on a movie rather than an established arcade hit or a tested game premise (and expecting it to sell simply because of the popularity of the film) was a questionable enough decision, but the sheer awfulness of the finished product was unprecedented. Atari rushed E.T. through development in a matter of months to get it onto the market in time for Christmas, and the result was a virtually unplayable game with a dull plot and crummy graphics in which frustrated players spent most of their time leading the E.T. character around in circles to prevent him from falling into pits. Atari produced five million E.T. cartridges, and according to Atari's then-president and CEO, "nearly all of them came back."

 

[SagaLore]

Originally posted by: ebaycj
kid icarus, no question. I don't think anyone ever beat that game.

Who needs to? There is a code that brings you right to the last level.

I really enjoyed that game though...

 

[DarkKnight69]

Originally posted by: eelw
Ikaruga

QFT, omfg!

 

[bNeta86]

ecco the dolphin for sega - or maybe I was just young when I played it.

 

[Matthias99]

I usually stay out of OT, but too many good memories in this thread.

(Old) Consoles:

Ninja Gaiden on the NES was very hard. Not a lot of extra lives available, and some of the levels are extremely tricky. The last couple bosses are pretty torturous as well. I did beat this back in the day, but it took months. Maybe the top of my list in terms of frustration, but you always felt like you were *that* close to making it through.

Castlevania I don't recall being *that* hard (it was hard, but not impossible); I seem to recall spamming holy water against a lot of later bosses FTW.

Ditto for Kid Icarus; it's a fairly long game, but beatable. If they didn't have passwords, it would be very tough. With passwords, it's doable.

Mega Man 1 is insanely hard. It's the only Mega Man game I can't breeze through. The later ones got a *lot* easier, along with the Megaman X series (still a lot of fun, just not impossibly hard).

Battletoads (both on the NES and SNES) was quite tough to beat. You have to get *really* good at the jetbike levels to not burn all your lives/continues there, and the only way to learn the timing is trial and error (and it's halfway through the game, so it takes you 20 minutes to get back there if you run out of continues ). I'm not sure I beat the NES one until I played it on an emulator and was able to save/load images.

(Mike Tyson's) Punch-Out on the NES is also very hard, but boils down to learning the patterns and timing for each fighter. Passwords make the game much less frustrating than it otherwise would have been.

Blaster Master I don't think I ever beat. I definitely got the wall-climbing ability (which is pretty far along), but I don't think I ever got all the way through.

A couple people mentioned newer games:

Ikaruga isn't that hard to *beat* -- but getting A (or S, or whatever the top one is) ranks on all the levels at arcade difficulty is probably one of the hardest video game challenges available. You have to be incredibly fast and precise, and never die (since it messes up your chains and you won't get enough points). Not dying against some of the later bosses while killing them in under 30 seconds is *really* hard.

The hardest 'new' game I have played has to be Devil May Cry 3 on the PS2. I made it through (eventually!) on the 'easy' difficulty setting, but I generally died very quickly on even 'normal' (which, to be fair, was the 'hard' mode in the original Japanese release). I have some healthy respect for the hand-eye coordination of anyone who can beat it on 'Dante Must Die!'. I don't have an XBox, though, so I haven't played the new Ninja Gaiden all the way through (I did try it at my friend's house, and I died. A lot.)

In terms of sheer frustration, trying to get gold on all the medals in any Gran Turismo game is way up there on my list (I've still never gotten all golds in any of them, and just getting all the licenses is a bitch).

Anybody try to get all the cheats/medals in Goldeneye on the N64 (or to get all the medals in any of the Timesplitter games)? I never managed to get the Invulnerability cheat in Goldeneye, which required you beating the second level in some insanely low amount of time (like 60 seconds or something). VERY frustrating.

Arcade:

I recently picked up Capcom Classics Collection on the PS2, which has (among many others) Ghosts&Goblins, Ghouls&Ghosts, and Super Ghouls&Ghosts (so I've played them all fairly recently). All are incredibly difficult. Unlimited continues in the repackaged version helps a lot.

Several people mentioned not finishing Rampage -- I'm almost certain the original arcade and NES versions just keep going forever.

The first Dragon's Lair was very frustrating, since you only rarely got hints about which way to go (so it devolved into a lot of trial and error until you memorized all the scenes). Dragon's Lair 2 and Space Ace were more manageable (though still difficult). You can actually get these on DVD now!

Marble Madness was, indeed, very frustrating. I never beat it in the arcade. I got through it in the Midway Arcade Classics collection, though. In that same collection are a number of VERY hard Midway arcade games (like Smash TV, Total Carnage, NARC, RoadBlasters, and Robotron:2084).

A number of people mentioned text/graphical adventure games that were annoyingly vague (Myst) or required you to make logical leaps that most people won't figure out (like some of the old Infocom text adventures, especially Hitchhiker's if you haven't read the books). This is almost a different category than most of the other action-oriented games.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Originally posted by: jewno

Originally posted by: quakefiend420
battletoads for nes

i beated that game. :laugh:

I hope you weren't cutting English class to play it.


I agree that BattleToads was one of the most difficult and frustrating games of my childhood.

Honorable Mentions: Ninja Gaiden series, TMNT, Top Gun.

Bionic Commando was difficult in places, but it wasn't frustrating because it was so damn fun!

 

[pm]

Nethack. Takes literally days to weeks to play a single game (an hour or two at a time), requires literally months of playing to figure out, and any one stupid mistake (and even plenty of not-so-stupid mistakes) will end the game instantly, undoing everything you've worked on.

If you play Nethack as it was intended to be played (no cheating), and win, it's actually quite an accomplishment. Heck, just getting a character past level 10, is hard. I have to play about 20 games just to get one character past level 10 - although I take a lot of risks in the earlier levels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nethack