Biggest bullshit in a video game

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Neuron from UnEpic is still one of the greatest pieces of ultimate bullshit I've ever encountered in a boss. Psycho Mantis was clever because you dodged his psychic BS by changing the controller port. But Neuron? That oversized brain made entirely of dicks says, "Naw, fam. You ain't dodgin' SHIT."

Neuron straight-up takes control of your character, applies psychic poison, locks you in a looping animation of destroying ALL your resources in order from strongest to weakest, and then makes you teleport yourself clear across the fucking world. The teleport triggers the auto-save if you have it enabled, by the way, so that shit is GONE.

And did I also mention that he reflects all magic and arrows? Because he does, and if he doesn't make you teleport across the fucking world, he'll force you to kill yourself via reflected damage if you have the audacity to enter his room with anything ranged.

So you come back after a reset and dumping everything in the bank, because money and resources are a bitch to grind and you don't want to hunt down the random scavengers that'll snatch your shit if you just drop it. But even that's annoying as shit, because the brainy fuck decided to set up shop out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere past a bunch of annoying knights and shit.

And in his boss room he floats two stories in the goddamn air. So you have to jump and climb your slow, clunky ass up to these stupid zip lines so you can smack him with your melee shit. Oh, and he also likes to reverse your controls, silence you, and apply the psychic poison while you're doing that, because fuck you in particular. And even though his sprite is massive, you can only hit his eye. And you can only hit his eye by letting go of the zip-line and hitting it, ONCE, as you fall past it and back into the bottom center of a room that's just big enough to piss you right the fuck off.

Fuck Neuron. Neuron isn't even hard. He's tedium incarnate, and the dev should be a-fucking-shamed. Because you KNOW that playtesters called that shit out, but the dev said, "lol! fuck your fun; I'm the cleverest ever!"

It was a very long time since I played UnEpic(great game) but I don't remember him being a problem(aside from tedium as you say) after figuring out his thing. I don't remember what version I was playing so maybe that boss got patched to make him more of a dick. Patching a boss really fucked me over in La-Mulana 2, eventually I took to youtube just to see how to deal with a certain moment, and the youtuber said it was the easiest boss in the game, like first try easy so I must be a complete tard. Then I looked at the video and my boss didn't behave like his and the thing that fucked me over every time never happened to him. Turns out it was patched because it used to be first try easy. Being extra salty helped me finish the boss in a couple of more tries.

 

[AnOminous]

On the subject of roguelikes, it's complete bullshit when you literally cannot win because the game's randomness caused you to be unable to beat a challenge regardless of your skill level. The best example I played is FTL, where you can have a run where no store sells the higher grade weapons that are mandatory against the final boss. This just makes the roguelikes a glorified slot machine where you waste half an hour hoping to get the perfect run.

The best players at this game(*) routinely clock over 90% victories even on the hardest mode with the worst ships, but there's definitely some bullshit in this game, and the absolute worst is in Rock sectors. There's an event where you encounter a drone that unavoidably attaches itself to your hull. You can evade it (with a 50% chance of success) but if you fail, you then have to try to defuse it (with a 50% chance of success). If you fail you instantly lose a crewmember. If you chose Engi B, the worst ship in the original game (and still really bad even though worse ships were introduced in Advanced Edition), and you somehow got to Sector 3, the earliest this event happens, without picking up extra crew (an event that happens actually rather often), this is an unavoidable instadeath in a text menu event.

This is notable because it is one of the few truly unavoidable instadeaths, and although it requires a series of somewhat unlikely events, it can easily happen without any mistake on your part (other than entering a Rock sector with Engi B).

(*) The skill curve on this game is high enough that there are really only a dozen or so truly top-tier players and I'm not one of them.

 

[Jarolleon]

I absolutely hated the scaling system in Oblivion. Any game that does level scaling is bullshit, but Oblivion was the worst. You never really feel like you're growing in power or achieving any major goal. Those lowly bandits you were fighting at level one are still a challenge ten levels later because they're all decked out in Daedric equipment instead of fur and leather. Any rewards you gain from quests are leveled, and usually trash or negligible in comparison to what you can craft yourself. Your maxed out destruction or weapon skill still does the same amount of damage to enemies as you were doing at novice rank. Why bother trying to level then? It completely defeats the purpose of playing the game when your character feels consistently stagnant.

Because then the devs don't have to bother balancing the game so that it will consistently challenge you. WoW implemented a similar thing as the playerbase shrunk, ostensibly to allow people to play zones in a different order while levelling alts, but more likely to reduce the number of zones they need to make per expansion. It's slightly more excusable there because by the time level scaling was implemented the levelling process had long since become a trivial hurdle to jump over before the "real game" began at level cap, but it ruined the gameplay loop for that experience IMO.

 

[JamusActimus]

Having to play the games multiples times to see the real ending.
Ghosts 'n Goblins bullshit

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The best players at this game(*) routinely clock over 90% victories even on the hardest mode with the worst ships, but there's definitely some bullshit in this game, and the absolute worst is in Rock sectors. There's an event where you encounter a drone that unavoidably attaches itself to your hull. You can evade it (with a 50% chance of success) but if you fail, you then have to try to defuse it (with a 50% chance of success). If you fail you instantly lose a crewmember. If you chose Engi B, the worst ship in the original game (and still really bad even though worse ships were introduced in Advanced Edition), and you somehow got to Sector 3, the earliest this event happens, without picking up extra crew (an event that happens actually rather often), this is an unavoidable instadeath in a text menu event.

This is notable because it is one of the few truly unavoidable instadeaths, and although it requires a series of somewhat unlikely events, it can easily happen without any mistake on your part (other than entering a Rock sector with Engi B).

(*) The skill curve on this game is high enough that there are really only a dozen or so truly top-tier players and I'm not one of them.

I looked online and you are right, but it seems like the strategy boils down to very specific weapons and charting a course to increase the likelihood of shops. While the latter could be argued to be a common sense strategy, the former is just bad design. Which in itself another bullshit in gaming - if a common sense build can make the game unwinnable, you need to rebalance the game.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Slow battle speeds in turn based RPGs. Wizardry 8 is the worst offender. I love me some turn based RPGs. Japanese, Western, whatever. I hate when one encounter takes an hour to finish.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Having to play the games multiples times to see the real ending.
Ghosts 'n Goblins bullshit

Beating the last boss of GnG on the NES is the closest thing a game has gotten to making me cry. "This room is an illusion..."

 

[AnOminous]

I looked online and you are right, but it seems like the strategy boils down to very specific weapons and charting a course to increase the likelihood of shops. While the latter could be argued to be a common sense strategy, the former is just bad design. Which in itself another bullshit in gaming - if a common sense build can make the game unwinnable, you need to rebalance the game.

It's not really specific weapons. Even the worst weapons can win if you can take down shields. It's specific systems like hacking that eliminate randomness by guaranteeing a specific result. If you can put together some combo of a) removing shields b) staying alive long enough and c) even mediocre damage you can kill the flagship and win. Cloaking and hacking are the two obvious ways of getting a) and b) and all but a few oddball ships start within one decent weapon, like flak (which is ridiculously common) to add up to c). Some ships even start out with enough damage to win the entire game (like Red-Tail with 4 Basic Lasers which can easily beat the flagship if you have hacking).

If you have really weak, i.e. barely enough offense, you need to stack defense heavily, i.e. high dodge, cloaking, drones, whatever you need to turtle up long enough to chip away.

Winning on hard is largely micromanaging absolutely everything and never, ever wasting scrap. The majority of games falling in the middle of the bell curve in terms of rewards are slim enough on hard that even a couple mistakes (mistakes minor enough most people do not even know they are making them) can finish you, and the really bad ones give you no room at all.

About the only thing I'd change if I could would be somehow making it possible to win with a more versatile set of builds. There are more than you'd think but a lot of them fall into "hacking + Halberd Beam + whatever" or "lots of flak and lasers" with the other alternatives being decidedly weaker and you'd only go with them if you got unlucky.

 

[Zaryiu]

Making a player character a damsel in distress multiple times in the same game so first time around you don't know when the character is going to be unavailable and then at the final boss have a twist that remove the character completely from the fight and makes her a summon (I didn't play it but I watched my older brother play Thousand Arms more than 15 years ago and that shit happened)

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

Been playing Dark Cloud recently, and while I'm enjoying the game, fuck the weapon durability system. You can't tell how much wHP you'll lose from hitting an enemy until you hit them (and occasionally you lose 1 point less for seemingly no reason), and striking a blocking enemy costs even more wHP which you also can't tell how much until you hit.

Best stock up on Auto-Repair powder, or accidentely lose that weapon you've been grinding for several hours now because the enemy blocked last frame and it cost wHP that you were expecting.

 

[FuckedUp]

World tendencies in Demon's Souls. I actually read through the game manual and all it said was that it changes if you do things like die or defeat a boss, and the environment might change depending on it. After beating the New Game+ without figuring out how to free the groaning guy in Tower of Latria, I found out I had to have a light world tendency to be able to fucking do it, and all that determined world tendency was dying in human form and beating bosses. I was so pissed because I swept 3-1 and 3-2 at least a dozen times looking for the damn key.

 

[Mooger Meng]

Been playing Dark Cloud recently, and while I'm enjoying the game, fuck the weapon durability system. You can't tell how much wHP you'll lose from hitting an enemy until you hit them (and occasionally you lose 1 point less for seemingly no reason), and striking a blocking enemy costs even more wHP which you also can't tell how much until you hit.

Best stock up on Auto-Repair powder, or accidentely lose that weapon you've been grinding for several hours now because the enemy blocked last frame and it cost wHP that you were expecting.

Thank god they changed it in the second game. Your shit still breaks, but the weapon doesn't just vanish into the ether.
Also, the battle music doesn't make you want to hang yourself, but that's not important for the tread.

 

[UnclePhil]

Resident Evil 2 (original) - Sherry and the goddamned dogs, or that feeling when you're navigating through a cramped space with a pack of monsters that run twice as fast you do. You have no weapons; the only items in your inventory are a picture of your family and a healing item (a First Aid Spray, the one that wrecks your final grade for using it.) That's the only part of the run where I'm really tempted to save. It was designed to be bullshit.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

I actually quite enjoyed Rage, even the driving sections. But there was one particular event, whose name escapes me, that was just complete BS. The idea was that an item appears randomly in the arena, and the first one to drive over it gets a point. The fatal flaw in this idea though was that whoever happens to be closest to the spawn will pick it up. So you'd drive to one side of the map and get the item, only for the next one to spawn at the other end leaving you no chance of grabbing it, making every match come down to pure luck.

 

[Ruin]

Not a gameplay gripe but I was totally stunned when the Dishonored 2 credits rolled after a total playtime of 4 hours 38 minutes. I wasn't intentionally speedrunning and I did all the optional objectives.

It's by far the shortest AAA game I've ever played and the only time I've ever felt ripped off buying a game.

 

[Bender]

Not a gameplay gripe but I was totally stunned when the Dishonored 2 credits rolled after a total playtime of 4 hours 38 minutes. I wasn't intentionally speedrunning and I did all the optional objectives.

It's by far the shortest AAA game I've ever played and the only time I've ever felt ripped off buying a game.

Try Homefront, that's even shorter.

Edit: I don't even know why I picked that game, try Gone Home, you can finish it in less than a minute.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I’m interested in seeing an actual statistical analysis (which I’m surprised I couldn’t find[...]

Found something* - seems it really is rigged in favor of AI.

I actually started keeping track to make sure Im not crazy. Out of 100 turns of me being confused I hit myself 68 times.

*(couldn't access the thread - my browser was being exceptional)

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

Been playing Dark Cloud recently, and while I'm enjoying the game, fuck the weapon durability system. You can't tell how much wHP you'll lose from hitting an enemy until you hit them (and occasionally you lose 1 point less for seemingly no reason), and striking a blocking enemy costs even more wHP which you also can't tell how much until you hit.

Best stock up on Auto-Repair powder, or accidentely lose that weapon you've been grinding for several hours now because the enemy blocked last frame and it cost wHP that you were expecting.

Fuck weapon durability in just about any game, I don’t know why it’s become such a staple that it’s in fucking Animal Crossing now.

Edit: I don't even know why I picked that game, try Gone Home, you can finish it in less than a minute.

Can Gone Home even be considered a game?

 

[Naamaleipuri]

XCOM 2 just after it launched, no patches.
I was literally staring at the clock so I could start playing after finishing the pre-load. I had snacks, beer, vodka and a pizza on the way. My body was ready.
I decided to immediately start Commander/Ironman.
I had a blast and got pretty close to almost wiping a few times, but miraculously I got to Operation Leviathan with a pretty hardened group of elite soldiers. Some careful planning and dumb luck and I was facing the last boss fight.
The fight is pretty tough with constant enemy reinforcements and the enemy Avatar units teleporting away when under fire. I was pretty psyched that I was seemingly going to beat the game in my first try on ironman. That is until the last Avatar bugged out and warped to the very beginning of the map. For context if you've never played it, the map takes around 2 hours to clear even on lower difficulties, and moving a whole squad of soldiers from start to finish even without engaging a single enemy takes upwards of 20 minutes. So there I was, my squad on its last legs, hunkered down in some of the last cover that wasn't destroyed in the battle. A horde of tough aliens in front of them and now I'd have to try and somehow either take the aliens down and leg it or just leg it and hope the aliens don't hit them. Well.. It's XCOM so I got slaughtered while the last avatar stayed far far away from my squad with 4 HP.
Probably the biggest bullshit moment from the top of my head.

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

Fuck weapon durability in just about any game, I don’t know why it’s become such a staple that it’s in fucking Animal Crossing now.

The only time it worked that comes to mind is Dark Souls where it was used to limit how many times you could spam a weapons special attack AND BREAKING THE WEAPON DIDNT VAPORIZE IT.