Your most frustrating moment

One of the most annoying moment in Half-Life 2 was when I tried to
steer the airboat through a series of large concrete pipes. You
know, the ones when you needed to jump up and stay centered in order to
land within the farthest pipe?

I must have tried half a dozen times every time I get to that point in
the game. At least for me, it wasn't fun after the first two
tries. I think it's completely unnecessary to put that in the
game. How's that fun? I can't imagine it's fun for anyone.

And for Far Cry, I hated the part when I had to shoot rockets at
Crowe's helicopter from the deck of a cargo ship. It takes about
a dozen rockets to knock it away, which doesn't make sense at all in
real life. One good shot should bring it down.

And what makes it worse is that the ship you're on starts to sink after
a while, so you're forced to swim ashore while the helicopter riddles
you with machine gun ammo. You can't even fire back because the
game doesn't allow the player to use weapons while swimming. That
sucks big ass!

Why didn't playtesters recommend taking these parts out of the gameplay
during beta-testing? I don't know. Maybe the game designers
take some perverse pleasure about torturing their players.

What would you take out from Half-Life 2?

I don't think I'd take anything out. However, in Ravenholm, I wandered around for at least 2 hours (not exaggerating) trying to get to the next area, when I just needed to climb a ladder that I kept missing...

Really annoying once you find it too...

Yep, I think I know the area you're talking about. It's the open
area with a rotating blade that flies off when you hit the
switch. There is also a shack with a lever that you have to turn
first to set off a small gliding platform. And then you have to
climb onto some boxes to get on top of the rooftop and jump to the
small platform.

Another point in Far Cry was at the Volcano level. There was a
gap in a ravine that I simply could not jump over. I must have
tried five or six times. Then I tried driving over with the jeep,
and I kept falling into the lava. I finally jumped over after the
tenth time or so. I saved the game immediately, after spending an
hour just to get past that point.

Gameplay like that carries no value to the fun. It should be eliminated during beta-testing.

Hmmm...tough parts in FPS games....I can name 1 part in two different games.

1. They hunger: Episode III. The final boss is impossible to beat (That helicopter asshole). I put it on god+noclip+infinite ammo and it took FOREVER to beat him. Without god mode I died after I completely expired my ammo and was left wit ha useless crowbar. That wasn't fun.

2. I have been stuck in Doom3 for about two months. I am stuck where there are like 4 teleporters that all teleport you to another teleporter.....I have even looked up 2 or three tutorials. I am lost and have no idea what to get or where to go. The 4th teleporter just take you back to teleportation area 1. It has become no fun and I gave up.

3. Doom II Final Boss. It is pretty much impossible to do unless you are in God mode. It actually is a bit of fun though.

Final Bosses can't be too looked down upon though...everyone wants a challenge, especially at the brink of beating a game.

4. Life. Life can also have obsticles that are so hard they become unfun. Like remember the time you first failed a test or your parents caught you doing something you weren't supposed to be doing? Man....I HATE not getting to use noclip to get out of those situations. Will someone please enable the cheat cvar?

Splinter Cell on a GameCube. Aiming was horrific and near impossible. I
got as far as the second level before giving up all hope.

Never. Again.

Half life, xen, the Interloper chapter. THAT should have been removed
from the game. It's f**king hard to get to that teleporter, having to
wait for a manta (the xen flying thingies) and then get into one of
those pits and be propelled waaay to high and get crushed wherever you
land, even if on the manta. I managed to get across by sprinting to the
climbing pillar on the left before the fade was even over and by
squeezing myself in the gap to find the hidden cave.

Halflife 2:

I'd go with what you describe - the balancing the airboat on the pipes part.

Farcry:

Right near the end when entering the volcano, you go through blast doors into the volcano's crater. Outside of the blast door recess there is absolutely no cover to use of any note, and a bunch of really tough enemies who all make their way towards the tiny recessed blast door area you're located. There's no retreat, since the blast door closes behind you, and going out into the volcano crater is suicide. Took me forever to get past that part.

GTA San Andreas:

I finished all the missions and generally enjoyed it but one of the f&%?ing mini-plane missions wasn't any fun whatsoever. The minature red baron plane was a total nightmare to control (no option to invert the y axis and no option to change x axis between banking & yawing either). The mission requires killing 5 moving targets which end up half the city away from each other, the plane has limited fuel, and even after killing the targets you've gotta make it back to the start before the fuel runs out. This mission must have taken me several hours and umpteen retries, and even the one time I did it was literally with seconds to spare. Two of my mates simply stopped playing as they just couldn't do it at all. Zero fun.

XIII:

On Xbox I just couldn't get past the boss character (Mongoose or something? I forget). It's set in a large nuclear rocket launching room against a boss character who runs around insanely fast. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I totally struggled with the controller aiming to hit him. Never even got close to killing him and gave up.

You guys call your self gamers? HA! Sound like a bunch of pussies to me.
Learn to play games. With in minutes you should be able to master any game, like me.

Did you ever think that the play testers didn't have any problems through those areas? It's possible.

What the hell is the point of playing any game if there's no challenge what-so-ever? If it takes no skill or any amount of studying: there's no point. The full satisfaction from playing any game is the satisfaction that you beat a difficult obstacle, unless you get satisfaction from beating up 4 year olds, there's no satisfaction. This is why, generally, harder games are seen as ?more fleshed out? or ?better?.

Obviously, there are bounds. Such as: If a game has a fundamental flaw and if THAT makes the game difficult: it's a piece of s**t *cough*Brothers In Arms*cough* But, if something is designed to challenge you: don't bitch about it, beat it and have some sense of satisfaction from this entertainment form you're saturated by.

Personally, I never had any problems in HL2 at all. I thought it was too easy most of the time. The design of the "puzzles" are pretty intuitive, I mean, in HL1 if theres a button/switch: push it; if there's a box: break it.
They're beginning to remove this type of game play (although there are remnants of it in HL2), but, removing these aspects is not a bad thing, it starts creating a unique experience. The difficult thing, for a developer, is to create that unique experience without giving a large percentage of gamers a bad experience.

Don't even begin to bitch about realism in Far Cry. Sure it's not realistic to use 4 rockets to shoot down a helicopter, but it's even more unrealistic to get shot in the head four times and run around looking for a med pack that magically heals you. People only bitch about balance when it isn't in their favor.

I miss some of the old games where nothing was in you favor.
Complete gaming satisfaction.

Halflife 2:
I'd go with what you describe - the balancing the airboat on the pipes part.

FFS, what the heck was so hard in that? Everyone seems to get stuck there but I can't remember being stuck in HL2 at all.

Crono said:
What the hell is the point of playing any game if there's no challenge what-so-ever? If it takes no skill or any amount of studying: there's no point.

Having the challenge of a rising difficulty level as you play through a game is fine, but then there's....beating every mission in San Andreas on one of the first few attempts, then come up to the red baron mission I describe and taking dozens of attempts. That's totally different to a game that's plain hard and a challenge (but beatable) all the way through.

[color=#add8e6]You guys call your self gamers? HA! Sound like a bunch of pussies to me

[/color] That is hillarious. And I completely agree. I hate it most of the time when I watch friends play. All they want to do is use f**king god mode as soon as they die in a part...or sometimes before they even TRY to get past a part.

The airboat part was easy as hell. Nothing about HL2 is hard. Interlopers for HL1 was a bit of a task, but like Crono said...it just gives you that much more satisfaction when getting past it.

Try beating Ghosts and Goblins for NES.

I know what you mean keved, those missions for Zero in GTA:SA are f**king
impossible. I still haven't been able to finish the first, even though
I've finished the story mode for the game. I think you need to complete
those missions to obtain the skills needed to obtain the Four Dragons
casino asset.

I've been playing MOH: Pacific Assault and haven't been able to get
past the second mission yet. The biggest problem is that being in the
dark, in the jungle, which the enemy can see and shoot through but you
can't, manning a Jap mg that is so innaccurate you can shoot at a group
of enemies four meters away and not hit a single one of them. It's
bloody frustrating, made worse by the fact that the game features some
of the sloppiest design and construction I've seen in a while.

On that last bit in FarCry, I found that there was a little recess just
on the right once you go through the blast doors. I made sure I was
fully loaded, then lured the big f**kers in there and blasted em point
blank with the heavy mg. The alcove allows you to hide and not get seen
or killed straight away, because it seems the enemy can't actually get
into the doorway very far.

The ending for FarCry was an interesting experience though, actually
getting to shoot the big bad guy and having him drop like a normal
human. I wasn't expecting that, ran into the room with a deagle, blew
him down in a single shot, then realised who it was I'd just shot. Very
cool, though disappointing cause it was so sudden and I hadn't saved it
before that point, so I couldn't be bothered going through the volcano
again.

Dark Tree said:
I hate it most of the time when I watch friends play. All they want to do is use f**king god mode as soon as they die in a part....

Well, each to his own. People have different skill levels to you and may not want to beat a game for the challenge it poses, but to experience the game, its story, etc without having to spend hours in frustration trying to perform a perfect series of actions to get past a certain part.

Agent Smith said:
I know what you mean keved, those missions for Zero in GTA:SA are f**king impossible. I still haven't been able to finish the first, even though I've finished the story mode for the game

Yeah, I found the controls totally counter-intuitive - like playing through HL2 without my preferred axis setting and with the forward/backward and strafe left/right controls reversed! I imagine it wouldn't have been so bad if the controls were configurable.

how about the end of duke nukem?

you have a limited supply of ammo and the boss keeps killing you no matter what?

i finally figured it out and beat him.. but it took me almost 2 days.. the solution was simple, but 2 days to figure it out was to much.. sometimes games go OTT when they end, just to prolong the agony of ending the game.

i think if a games skill level is set before the end, the end should be on the same par.

BTW, we have a rule in my home. if you break the rule, no more games... you are not allowed to use any cheat codes until you have completed the game at least once. this rule works for me, perhaps everyone should adopt it. shrugs

/ 2 cents.

I agree Orpheus, I always follow that rule. cheating through a part totally spoils the game experiancein my opinion.

That airboat did took quite a few attempts for me not that it was actually tough, just had to be very patient :smile:

One that stick out for me is in ravenholm when you first meet the
priest guy and there is that big fire with all zombies coming along
being set on fire. I didnt know where to go. Turns out there was a door
behind the big fire, just never bothered to look, it was so obvious :biggrin:

Has anyone played Septerra Core? THAT is the most frustrating game in
the world! Most of the action goes on in large mazes. One of them (the
catacombs before the Jinam underground) requires you to press a whole
bunch of switches located at opposite corners of the maze in a certain
pattern. Once you
manage to actually FIND all the switches, the pain begins. For
example, you have to press a certain switch once to raise a bridge to
get across on another ledge, but later you have to press another switch to lower it since
the bridge acts like a door for another tunnel you have to go through
and the second switch you throw closes this gate but openes several
others that block your way and so on. Once you get passed this, you'll
have to do the whole thing again but in the opposite order to get out.

What about any of the viewtiful joe's? Those are pretty
hard. Especially the 52 chambers (or whatever the number was) in
the second game.

Dark Tree said:
2. I have been stuck in Doom3 for about two months. I am stuck where there are like 4 teleporters that all teleport you to another teleporter.....I have even looked up 2 or three tutorials. I am lost and have no idea what to get or where to go. The 4th teleporter just take you back to teleportation area 1. It has become no fun and I gave up.

Heh, luckily I never encountered this because I only played for about 10 minutes before realising the whole game would be exactly the same as the first level.

1. Walk into the room

2. Lights flicker off

3. Panel pops, monster walks out from somewhere

4. Kill monster, walk through

5. repeat

when i was a little kiddie i got stuck in prince of persia
(the
original one) at the place where you needed to jump over the
spikes,
the only thing i remember is that i was damned scared when i fell down
on the spikes, because of the oh so realistic sounds.

Like remember the time you first failed a test or your parents
caught you doing something you weren't supposed to be doing?

Yeah, wouldn't it be nice to quicksave before any big events, like
getting married or having a major surgery? If you screwed up for
some reason, you can reload the last saved position and try again.

But then again, that's why life is so bittersweet.

I understand why a game should be challenging, but there are some
challenges that are simply inane. I enjoy solving puzzles, but
trying to steer something that's difficult to steer in the first place
is just not all that fun for me. But that's okay.
Apparently other gamers enjoyed that.

As far as Far Cry goes for the volcano level (right after you stocked
up at the armory and the heavy door shuts on you), I had a hard time
too. But I loved the challenge. I thought about various
approaches and decided that it's safest to hide in the little niche
between the two sets of doors and just use my shotgun and grenades for
those Fat Boys. I depleted my entire supply of grenades on them,
but it's worth it. I could better deal with those jumping Trigens
after that without worrying about a rocket coming at me.

satchmo said:
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice to quicksave before any big events,

Nah, people would be replaying their first orgasms over and over and then where would we be. :dodgy:

Being stuck with a s**tty GM in a good game of d&d.

And in zelda2 (link) for NES.. when you get to the river town, and cant lower the f**kin bridge!!

Bewbies said:
Being stuck with a s**tty GM in a good game of d&d.

We had a s**tty DM once who thought his whole world was full of lycanthropes.

imagine us, 1st levels and not a silver weapon between us not to mention anything magical.

we died horribly from some were-moles, or lycantrope-beetles or some s**t. :sad:

I have never play D&D. It sounds fun but I don't understand why people associate it so heavily with nerdism.

Spartan said:
I have never play D&D. It sounds fun but I don't understand why people associate it so heavily with nerdism.

I have never thought, nor heard that before. I can see where it might be said, but having played it for 4 years, I cannot think of it as such.

D&D is a game for all mentalities.

Its associated with "nerdism" 'cause the people who defined "nerdism" (stuck up snobs) consider playing games like D&D nerdy

Its no big deal really, being a nerd really boils down to the fact that
you have fun they way you want and its a different type than the snobs

And with the HL2 airboat pipes thing... I don't remember exactly, buty I'm pretty certain you don't have to stay on top of them

Ing ghost recon island thunder im stuck in the second mission, somehow
my sniper seems to refuse to shoot one frickin enemy, so i have to go
in myself, when i leave alpha team alone then stand up and get shot in
the head, bravo shoots back and there iam, 5 enemy's killed and one
team whippped out. even if i take the other route the AI seems to be to
dumb to kill the enemy.

Luckily i almost finishd desert siege, also a fine expansion.

I think half life 2 was fine but the game i have got most <a name="top">frustrated
at is shriek on xbox. It came free with my xbox so i thought i would
play it after all it is a kids game you would think. Well after about 2
levels it was so hard with the stupidist of missons i just left it and
havent tuched it since.

[edit]I dont know whats up with the text after frustrated but its like a hyperlink that doesnt do anything, strange :razz:

</a>

Satchmo-

Your Justice_SP was pretty damned difficult....all the way through. Remember...I beat the game without ever finding crowbar or gravgun (probably making it a touch tougher)....

Satchmo-
Your Justice_SP was pretty damned difficult....all the way through.
Remember...I beat the game without ever finding crowbar or gravgun
(probably making it a touch tougher)....

crowbar?! I ran out of ammo so much. I think that was a good kind
of challange though. You really had to use all your skill to get
by some of that stuff.

This isn't really frustrating, but it does take away from the game a
bit. I remeber in max payn how you could quick save and load
really fast and how the levels were layed out when you would walk down
a hall and no matter when you knew there would be people waiting for
you in the next room. It was so disjoined that I would find
myself quick saving before every room and if I got shot at all I would
just load and try it over and over again. That really took away
from the game becuase it felt too easy and cheap...

That's why quarter guzzling arcade games with their limited lives were
so much fun. You played for the excitement. Nowadays you
play the games for the story and the experience... not as much for the
tension or risk.

Your Justice_SP was pretty damned difficult

I agree, but as DrGlass said, I see it as a good kind of challenge.

Having all those combines swarming me towards the end of Half-Life 2 was kinda gnarly too, but I have no complaint about that. Having a strider shooting at me with its cannon while I run out of rocket ammo is tough too, but you won't hear me bitching about that. Because I consider all these fair game and a nice test of my gaming skill.

Jumping pipes isn't my type of game, but it might just be for some other gamers. I guess I shouldn't judge for everyone.

Oh, by the way, there are many hidden ammos in sp_justice. You just have to find them to benefit from them. There is also a hidden Magnum somewhere in the map, and finding that is a sweet sensation.

If anyone wants to know where these hidden goodies are, just read the walkthrough.

Beat this on hard
mode. Its impossible without using an exploit in the level design.

But I know that area you speak of in the canal, it took several tries
for me. The only game that I have ever gotton pissed at is Armored Core
3, the arena is sooo hard once you get to the top. The bots are sooo
good you can't hit them at all, so I went out and bought a game shark!
(just kidding :razz: )

I've tried the whiteLegion map on normal mode, and that was hard enough. Notice my review for that map? I took off points for being unreasonably difficult.

There are many npc_makers in that map that'll merrily spawn new combines over and over until the end of time. My typical strategy of a defensive gameplay doesn't work, because I just end up running out of ammo if I stay put.

However, I thought that map was very fun though. Gameplay was well thought-out. Just somewhat too challenging.

I've tried the whiteLegion map on normal mode, and that was hard
enough. Notice my review for that map? I took off points for being
unreasonably difficult.
There are many npc_makers in that map that'll merrily spawn new
combines over and over until the end of time. My typical strategy of a
defensive gameplay doesn't work, because I just end up running out of
ammo if I stay put.

However, I thought that map was very fun though. Gameplay was well thought-out. Just somewhat too challenging.

Really there were no npc spawners at all (Ive looked at the source) the
combine either started there in small numbers or a drop ship came in
and dropped them off. There are no persistant spawners either (except
in one area). The reason for the level of diffuculty is because all the
combine soldiers followed well placed assult paths and info nodes.
Really it was hard because they were smart, not because there were many
of them :razz:

i got stuck in a level in that warhammer40k firewarior game, where you
should beat this big evil robot walking around spawning evil magcians
and fast monster things, while shooting homing misiles and laser at you