Biggest bullshit in a video game

The entirety of halo 2 legendary is like chewing on nails for an hour and a half per level as you ceaselessly get fucked. I made the mistake of wanting to redo it after I recalled playing legendary on the old xboxhuge machine with the yaoi-hands-sized controller long ago. Halo 2s shotgun is a weapon that gets thrown in the trash and replaced with the rifle and plasma pistol combo as soon as possible, and everything else in between other than the beam rifle or BMG gets thrown in the trash. The hangar bay invasions on the MAC platform were a slog. After experiencing the endless hell of jackal snipers for hours I rescued every single fucking marine in the covenant prison, and micromanaged them until they all had a beam rifle, at which point I became the jackals, and I repaid them for that suffering in spades.


After gnawing my way through halo 2 legendary solo I was hopping and whipping through co-op levels of halo 3 legendary like I was playing tribes while effortlessly shitting on everything, leaving my friends far and away behind, and having fun doing it. Every single weapon in halo 3 feels fun to use in contrast.
 
  • Like
  • Feels
Reactions: Toolbox, BR55, Smaug's Smokey Hole and 2 others
Whenever a hard boss has a pixel-wide column of health left and you die. To be fair, the opposite happened to me once: when fighting Ornstein and Smough on my first cycle of Dark Souls, I used up all my estus flasks and only had a sliver of HP left when beating Smough for the first time after three hours of attempts because I didn't realize I'd have to fight a giant version of the other one. Went "fuck this, I'm NOT dying to this bullshit" and managed to beat giant Ornstein without taking a single hit.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
  • Feels
Reactions: Fujin Yumi, MoffAlbert, Wych Elm and 7 others
The Bovinian Derivative said:
Requiring DLC to understand what happens in your followup stories, extra bullshit if your DLC is required to understand what's happening in your current story (looking at you Mass Effect 3).
Click to expand...

When it comes to DLC and "looking at Mass Effect", what always pissed me off was the fact that your party simply does not exist outside of ME3's critical* story DLC's, and it's really noticeable given the scale of some of the bigger DLC missions. ME2 was the biggest and most obvious offender, as somebody decided that they wanted to pay for everything EXCEPT party VA's, so while you're doing things like unplugging the Geth autist with Tali - and it takes you right in the middle of a Geth chop-shop - the most banter you're getting is over the radio with the brother, and even then, nobody made a peep but you the moment you landed. In the Shadow Broker DLC, it's basically just you, Liara, and a third wheel, and party member #3 just stares and raises their weapon at the Broker when he talks about whatever cool bounty he's gonna extract off of them, shit, Arrival couldn't even get Seth Green to do some basic "acknowledged" line when Shep requests an evac, and he just silently flies there
 
  • Feels
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: Toolbox, Livecorpse, BR55 and 5 others
The secret rooms in Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee can eat a dick. They're so insanely difficult on their own and if you fuck up during or after them, you're doing it all again. The rooms in Stockyard Escape are especially awful; the first one has that Scrab that chases you and can easily kill you if your timing is just a bit off, and the second one with the sligs on the two floors is ridiculous. The game's slow pace makes it even worse. There isn't a worse feeling than slowly making it past a difficult spot and then screwing up and having to do it all over again. But you gotta do them if you want to save enough Mudokons to get a good ending or go for 100%.
 
  • Feels
Reactions: Smaug's Smokey Hole
Table Country said:
The morality system in in the Metro games. I get that doing good deeds leads to a better morality score but sitting around for an hour listening to optional conversations or watching a whole cabaret show? Fuck off with that bullshit.
Click to expand...
AFAIK that's because it's not supposed to be a morality system, it's a connection to humanity system. Coldblooded efficiency and not talking to others etc lowers it. I heard it was more clear in the original language. So the idea is that you only get the choice to do something different at the end if you've demonstrated that choice would even occur to your character.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Table Country and SIGSEGV
OvercookedBacon said:
Geese Howard? Shin Akuma? Pussies.
Game magazines back in the day outright gave up writing about how to beat General. It took twenty years for someone to beat him legit. (ie. no MAME cheats)
Click to expand...
Reminds of another thing that pisses me off, when you beat a super difficult boss and either unlock the boss to play as or the weapon they used, but it completely sucks ass for you. So far the only one that comes to mind is the Blind from Selen Vinland. The weapon just outright ignores all blocks. When Selen hits you with it, it feels like it just tears through your character. When you use it however, enemies that do block feel like its just chipping away at them and you're better off to guard breaking or baiting them out of defending.
 
  • Like
  • Agree
  • Informative
Reactions: Shield Breaker, Toolbox, OvercookedBacon and 2 others
Table Country said:
The morality system in in the Metro games. I get that doing good deeds leads to a better morality score but sitting around for an hour listening to optional conversations or watching a whole cabaret show? Fuck off with that bullshit.
Click to expand...
It’s bad, I agree, but it has something to do with communing with the Metro’s spirit. It’s just completely out of place in such a linear game.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Table Country
Fighting against Kiryu in Yakuza 4 in the VR game as Akiyama. He hits like a freight train with his counters and because he's AI-controlled he is extremely accurate with Tiger Drop, which takes off like 20% of your health bar. Akiyama does barely any damage per hit, instead he relies on his long combo to stack up a lot of low-power hits, but that just means Kiryu uses Komaki Knockback to interrupt your weak-hitting combo after 2-3 hits and beats the fuck out of you.
 
Qajinima022 said:
Not sure if this counts, but when you defeat a boss character and they die, and you die. But you end up with a game over, which I find to be complete bullshit.
Click to expand...
I remember the first time I beat Castlevania 1, I spent like 45 minutes fighting Dracula. At one point I managed to kill him in his second form but a stray fireball hit me so we both died at the same time. And I had to start the fight over again.

I'm pretty sure the red orbs that appear at the end of the stages are there for this very reason, so you can't just suicide your way to the next level.
 
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Feels
  • Like
Reactions: Shield Breaker, MoffAlbert, Smaug's Smokey Hole and 2 others
Qajinima022 said:
Not sure if this counts, but when you defeat a boss character and they die, and you die. But you end up with a game over, which I find to be complete bullshit.
Click to expand...
Classic Mega Man does that a lot too.
(edit, sucky grammar)
 
Last edited:
Oh god I can't believe I've never brought it up in here, but I tried doing a bug catcher challenge in Pokemon Flora Sky Rebirth... and it was also my first time with the ROM hack. Huge mistake. Takes me forever to even beat a gym leader. First gym? Six pokemon. Fucking Mega Gallade that was an absolute tank. Eventually only won by sheer dumb luck. The other gyms were like that, too, complete with a Wall Chansey in the normal-type gym.

Edit to add: The cherry on top? The mooks were completely fine. It was just the gym leaders that proved to be insanely difficult.
 
Last edited:
I always hated it in a video game when you're fighting a boss and you spend all of your items, health and magic trying to defeat him, and it's only at the end of the fight when the boss beats you that you realize that you were never meant to beat him in the first place. It was pretty much a scripted fight that was supposed to lead to a cutscene where you're lying at the boss' mercy. Well THANKS. Wish I'd a known that it was a fake fight before I spent a half hour of my life trying to beat the guy. Some games are good at telegraphing a Hopeless Boss Fight, but there were plenty of early ones that didn't bother to do that.

I probably mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I hate how the Suikoden RPGs up their difficulty. Not just by introducing permadeath for some of the characters, but by preventing you from saving right after a long, protracted battle, usually so the game can throw you into a sudden-death duel with a villain character. Sure, most of the duels are piss-easy, but you could do as I did once in Sui-V and press the wrong button by mistake, making me lose a duel right after an hour long battle. I ragequit the game right there and never went back. I can't even imagine what a game designer would gain by preventing their players from saving right after a long investment of time. It's like they WANT their customers to be pissed off. A variant of the same thing happened to me in Breath of Fire V (What is it with games with Five in the Title?) where they had a save system with tokens. You needed to have a token in your inventory and to be at a certain save device in order to save. Because finding a save point in a linear game that takes place in an underground tunnel wasn't hard enough, they needed to make sure you had to collect a rare item before you could record your progress and leave the game. Hope your parents aren't screaming at you and threatening to pull the plug on your game console because it's late and you have school tomorrow and you can't save your f**king game!

Speaking of underground tunnels, Suikoden 3 did me dirty by having my character experience a long cutscene in a castle, then escape from it via an underground passage. One hard and fast law in the game up till that point was that castles/towns were places that were free of any enemies. So I was low on health and items figured I could regen and save when I got to the save point right outside of the castle. That was until the game threw tough enemies at me in the underground passage and I died. How the f*ck was I supposed to know that there would be monsters there? How about having another character say "This underground passage has monsters in it, we'd better stock up on some potions before we go?" F*ck Konami.
 
  • Feels
Reactions: BooneHelm, Toolbox, Dumpster dived waifu and 4 others
Pokemonquistador2 said:
I always hated it in a video game when you're fighting a boss and you spend all of your items, health and magic trying to defeat him, and it's only at the end of the fight when the boss beats you that you realize that you were never meant to beat him in the first place. It was pretty much a scripted fight that was supposed to lead to a cutscene where you're lying at the boss' mercy. Well THANKS. Wish I'd a known that it was a fake fight before I spent a half hour of my life trying to beat the guy. Some games are good at telegraphing a Hopeless Boss Fight, but there were plenty of early ones that didn't bother to do that.
Click to expand...
Conversely a boss fight that's such a major difficulty spike that it makes you think you're meant to lose so you don't really try, but instead of a story-progressing moment you get a game over screen and have to sit through a bunch of cutscenes again. That Seymour Flux boss battle on Mt. Gagazet in Final Fantasy 10 can bite my shiny metal ass.
 
  • Feels
  • Winner
Reactions: Puff, Shield Breaker, Slimy Time and 9 others
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back