Biggest bullshit in a video game

[Kurtis Trent]

The Great Pyramid level in Tomb Raider Anniversary.
This section is a series of timed jumping and swinging to get to the top, except there's a time limit between the checkpoints, which makes it near damn impossible to beat with KBM, especially if you want an achievement for not dying, because, for some reason, the camera goes full retard whenever you use the grappling hook and you can easily miss the direction where you were supposed to jump. Not to mention, before you start swinging, you have to kill a couple of flying monkeys who can easily stunlock you with fireballs that are hard to dodge on a tiny moving platform and trying to get up by pressing the jump button will trigger Lara's hopping animation that can throw her of the platform... And the most annoying part is this section is technically 3 minutes long.
You can try a shortcut but it's hit-or-miss.

That shit was so annoying, even the official walkthrough site told this game to fuck off

After 2 hours of flipping I managed to finally pass it without the shortcut but I swear it felt like pure luck. It's the only level where I didn't bother with time trials because fuck it!

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

Any game where there's four digit codes used to open safes and what not, but you don't even get a hint as to what they are can go fuck themselves.

Hitman 3's opening Dubai mission is a great example of this.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

Any game where there's four digit codes used to open safes and what not, but you don't even get a hint as to what they are can go fuck themselves.

Hitman 3's opening Dubai mission is a great example of this.

I think it can work if it's done effectively. There's a great bit in Silent Hill 2 where you're trapped in a room full of bugs and the only way to unlock the door is to use a nearby keypad. The code is three randomly selected numbers, but the game softens the blow by having the three keys appear clean and bright while the unnecessary numbers are blacked out. It's easy to guess a three-number code that consist of numbers you know for certain, the catch is you're in a panicky situation so you're probably not thinking clearly.

If it's a code with no hints though, that's just bullshit.

 

[BScCollateral]

I think it can work if it's done effectively. There's a great bit in Silent Hill 2 where you're trapped in a room full of bugs and the only way to unlock the door is to use a nearby keypad. The code is three randomly selected numbers, but the game softens the blow by having the three keys appear clean and bright while the unnecessary numbers are blacked out. It's easy to guess a three-number code that consist of numbers you know for certain, the catch is you're in a panicky situation so you're probably not thinking clearly.

If it's a code with no hints though, that's just bullshit.

I'd be more impressed if the keys in use were rubbed out and the others were bright and shiny, because nobody's been pressing them.

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

I don’t have a specific game in mind, but a pet peeve is a sudden and unneeded spike in difficulty. There’s a difference in “this is difficult bc I’m not supposed to be in this area yet” and “this is difficult bc why the fuck not and let’s make you use powers we just introduced 7 secs before this fight!”.

I'm about to get down voted to shit for this but this is why I just can't get into Soulsborne apart from Demons Souls and Dark Souls. I can understand not wanting to hold the player's hand but I feel the devs are sometimes so focused on that they forget to actually make the mechanics adaptable. Pair that with the super limited amount of save stations, and you have for one tedious and repetitive experience.

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

I'm about to get down voted to shit for this but this is why I just can't get into Soulsborne apart from Demons Souls and Dark Souls. I can understand not wanting to hold the player's hand but I feel the devs are sometimes so focused on that they forget to actually make the mechanics adaptable. Pair that with the super limited amount of save stations, and you have for one tedious and repetitive experience.

A lot of the difficulty problems in the Souls games come from the fact that the game either does almost nothing to tell you what you need to know, or is Dark Souls 2 SOTFS.

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

A lot of the difficulty problems in the Souls games come from the fact that the game either does almost nothing to tell you what you need to know, or is Dark Souls 2 SOTFS.

Oh fuck Dark Souls 2. Way too fucking long and I did not enjoy it at all.

 

[Memento Malum]

Hitman 3's opening Dubai mission is a great example of this.

Dubai had the safe code written on the white board in the same room, and the backstage door code was on a white board in the staff room right next door. They weren't hard to find, but I wish the game would just save them for you once you've found them once because on playthrough 17 (which is was the game is designed for) I do not want to walk around in circles for five minutes to get a code I have already found.

But I liked Dark Souls 2 best, so we obviously have different tastes in games.

To contribute to the thread, in Just Cause 3 the central bases in the regions have giant fuckoff defense weapons so you can't liberate them until you complete story missions. If you're clever or just bored, you can very carefully liberate them anyway, but this doesn't deactivate the fuckoff defense weapons, so you can't ever move through those zones without getting blasted despite there being no enemies in the province.

 

[Reshiram Battle.mp3]

playing monster hunter world, getting glanced once by a monster while youre trying to go in to hit it since you think there's an opening, suddenly youre fucking rolling across the ground or stunned and they take the opportunity to curbstomp the shit out of you before you can even recover. bonus if the glancing blow blighted or poisoned you.
it's funny as fuck but also annoying as hell.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

That was the only time I barfed while playing a video game. Especially the second half of that sequence, something about that gave me vertigo.

Related, I fucking hate fast moving backgrounds in games. The Forest Secret Area in Mario World hurts my eyes if I don’t focus them on Mario. There’s a boss fight like that in Sonic 4 Episode 1 too.

 

[JektheDumbass]

There is one part in Mass Effect 3's Omega dlc that gets on my tits. You're in a relatively small room filled with regular ranged mooks, a group of super fast and aggressive melee enemies, and one big mech type enemy. Your NPC companion at this point tells you to focus on the mech. I died 4-5 times until I remembered "Oh, this NPC is a hard-headed doofus" and ignored the slow, lumbering mech that can't even enter half the room to take out the fast-moving mooks flanking me.

 

[Yaniv’s Hairy Balls]

I'm about to get down voted to shit for this but this is why I just can't get into Soulsborne apart from Demons Souls and Dark Souls. I can understand not wanting to hold the player's hand but I feel the devs are sometimes so focused on that they forget to actually make the mechanics adaptable. Pair that with the super limited amount of save stations, and you have for one tedious and repetitive experience.

I felt that way to for a looong ass time. Now they’re my favorite games and have a spawned a genre all their own. The only thing I can say is one day it just.. clicked. Me and my husband played them together and it really bothered him for a long time until he forgives out that you’re not fighting the mechanics, but the enemies. The mechanics are your tools and if utilized properly the games are child’s play. I caught that a little quicker than he did and I always pass on that tidbit of advice. Keep it in mind if you ever wanna pick it back up, but nbg if you don’t want to. Not every game or genre is for everyone, I suck donkey dick at platformers and am terrible at “walking simulator” type games.

 

[Punished Benis]

Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3. Everything about the character feels like someone's badly-written fanfic:

>Goofy-ass character design, he's a cyborg invisible space ninja in a discount Batsuit with a samurai sword and slanted eyes on his visor in case you forgot he's asian
>On the Citadel, you and your squad just stand there and watch as he lands on your shuttle and STABS IT UNTIL IT CRASHES. You don't hit the brakes, tilt the shuttle, throw him off with biotics, you just pull out a pistol and let him stab your ship for no reason.
>When you confront him on the Citadel, you and your squad surround him and instead of, I don't know, *shooting him*, Shepard shouts "it's over pal!" and Ninja McEdgelord snaps off a "cool" one-liner: "No. Now it's fun." . And then you all stand there and watch as he and Thane have a hand-to-hand fight (despite Thane having a gun, he's decided to fight a dude with a sword hand-to-hand).
>Then on Thessia, he just drops in on you in the middle of a warzone while a whole planet is falling to the Reapers, delivers some lame monologue, and then the "fight" literally consists of you shooting him, him dropping into a ninja pose screaming "I NEED TO RECHARGE" (during which you can't touch him), and once you do this three times it triggers a cutscene where he just casually mops up your entire squad (did I mention he uses a sword?) and then after ordering his gunship to blow up the temple, which causes the floor to collapse and you to fall, just casually walks away, with another lame one liner, because gravity does not apply to Space Sasuke. It's so silly that it ruins what's supposed to otherwise be a really dark moment in the story.
>Then afterwards he sends your character an email that's basically "lol git gud"

The worst part is that the game is trying so damn hard to make him an imposing villain, but he never breaks out of a range of annoying to laughable.

To make it even better/worse, one of the terrible ME novels features a scene where Kai Leng breaks into Anderson's apartment. I can't remember if he follows through or has to leave when he detects someone returning, but his grand plan to infiltrate the apartment of an ex-N7 operative and first candidate for human spectre involves eating a bowl of Anderson's cereal and leaving it in the sink, unwashed.

Also a very incompetent one. In ME1, all you do concerning Cerberus is cleaning up after their experiments that were all horrible failures.

I don't blame ME3 for that though, I blame ME2.
Cerberus was not only able to build their own Normandy, they made a better one.
As a reminder: The Normandy was more advanced than anything humanity alone could offer. It was a revolutionary ship only possible with Turian collaboration.
And it symbolised how important your character was as the first human spectre. Cerberus just building their own one shits all over that.

It's still pretty stupid, all in all, but ME1 established or inferred a pretty large amount of resources behind Cerberus. Between the rachni cloning, various experiments, and (depending on how you view the canonicity of in-game descriptions of weapons normally only wielded by NPCs) the only particle beam weapons at that point other than the geth's. So, lack of common sense, but plenty of material and scientific backing.

ME2 scaled it up stupidly, and 3 moreso, but most of the work on the Normandy was already done. R&D was a done deal, they even admit to having stolen the blueprints. Yes, the turian's collaborated, but whenever it's mentioned in dialogue or codex, it mostly alludes to collaborating on research, design, and engineering. AI was already an existing technology, quantum communicators were, yes, stupid and stupidly expensive, but the base of the normandy was there and furthermore, Cerberus did cut corners in areas they considered unimportant to cheapen it up a bit, according to both on-ship engineers in 2 and alliance techs in 3.

So yes, stupid, but not entirely without precedent.

 

[Squandog Bunglepuss]

The Octo Expansion DLC for Splatoon 2 is definitely harder than the base game's single player campaign and has plenty of bullshit levels, the toughest being Girl Power Station:

You're tasked with defending a sphere until the time runs out while enemy Octolings constantly jump in. They're effectively AI copies of the player except there's only one of you vs. 14 of them. The fact that you must defend a stationary point instead of it being a straight deathmatch makes things much harder than it would be otherwise.
It all comes down to memorizing where the enemies appear from and eliminating them ASAP. A cheese strategy shown in the video is to pick the charger weapon and snipe them before they jump into the arena, but this is tough too because they'll aggro early and jump in the instant your aim moves over them so you need to be fast and precise.

The DLC's bonus boss fight unlocked by 100%ing everything else is also brutal, and not just by Nintendo babby game standards:

Spoiler: Secret Bullshit Boss

The secret fight is a rematch with Agent 3, it's a 1v1 fight against an AI opponent using the same weapon as yours which doesn't seem bad except:

• She kills you in 3 hits while it takes you 10 hits per phase to beat her. Taking cover while you regenerate health means she gets to regenerate too.
• She has 5 phases while you have to restart the whole fight if you die.
• She has unlimited ink for nonstop shooting and bomb throwing whereas you have to manage your own ink supply as usual
• She has a dodge roll ability you don't have. She also has a different spammable special weapon for each phase while you have none.

At least the battle music kicks ass. And the reward? A golden toothpick:

 

[Juke and Jam]

I've been playing System Shock: Enhanced Edition for the sake of nostalgia and ooh boy, it brought back memories all right. I'm amazed how well I still remember where the hidden panels are and what to do to reach certain out-of-the-way items. One thing I didn't have back in the day was Steam achievements, so I thought I might as well go for them. Enter "Can't look at you, Hacker." This requires you to reduce the stations security rating to 0% across every level. Simple enough, if you take your time. So I bashed and shot out cameras and nodes. One level refused to complete and it was driving me crazy, so I did something else that wasn't really an option before; went online to look for help. Turns out that one security item looks like a table. A goddamn table.

 

[ditto]

Related, I fucking hate fast moving backgrounds in games.

There's one level in Doom 2 with animated walls that legit made me threw up back in the 90s.

 

[Table Country]

I played Sniper Elite v2 Remastered sometime last year. I don't know if the original was terrible or if there's something wrong with the remaster but holy fuck, fuck this game.
In a lot of stealth games, even later Sniper Elite games, you don't need to kill everybody in a level, you can just sneak past in order to get closer to your quarry. Apparently v2 doesn't work like that.
In one of the early missions you have to cross a street crawling with german soldiers with a sniper on overwatch in a tall building. My strategy was to move across, discreetly killing nazis out of the sniper's sightline, slowly advance to the sniper's position to take him out in close quarters. The game had other ideas.
See, just when I was about to reach his vantage point I'd always get spotted, despite having cleared most of the street and being high up in a building. Granted, I was on a high difficulty but still. Being the autist that I was and wanting to do a stealth run I'd go back to the last checkpoint and try again, clearing out more of the Wermacht as I once more approached the sniper nest, and again I got spotted and gunned down in short order.
On my fourth try I figured out that it was a sniper on an adjacent building who'd spotted me every time I tried to climb up to take out the first sniper. I decided to fuck stealth and shoot the second sniper. After alerting every still-breathing nazi to my presence I ran up to the sniper's nest and lo and behold, not only was the sniper nest unreachable, the sniper had despawned.
In a later mission I cleared out a train yard before going into some kind of bunker only for the base to immediately go on alert and some random schmuck would spawn out of nowhere to man an MG42 and swiss-cheese me. This made me realize that not only did the sniper in the previous level despawn after some kind of unseen level transition, the second sniper had likely appeared out of thin air after the same level transition.
I get adding in new threats to shake up your stealthing but come the fuck on.

Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3. Everything about the character feels like someone's badly-written fanfic:

>Goofy-ass character design, he's a cyborg invisible space ninja in a discount Batsuit with a samurai sword and slanted eyes on his visor in case you forgot he's asian
>On the Citadel, you and your squad just stand there and watch as he lands on your shuttle and STABS IT UNTIL IT CRASHES. You don't hit the brakes, tilt the shuttle, throw him off with biotics, you just pull out a pistol and let him stab your ship for no reason.
>When you confront him on the Citadel, you and your squad surround him and instead of, I don't know, *shooting him*, Shepard shouts "it's over pal!" and Ninja McEdgelord snaps off a "cool" one-liner: "No. Now it's fun." . And then you all stand there and watch as he and Thane have a hand-to-hand fight (despite Thane having a gun, he's decided to fight a dude with a sword hand-to-hand).
>Then on Thessia, he just drops in on you in the middle of a warzone while a whole planet is falling to the Reapers, delivers some lame monologue, and then the "fight" literally consists of you shooting him, him dropping into a ninja pose screaming "I NEED TO RECHARGE" (during which you can't touch him), and once you do this three times it triggers a cutscene where he just casually mops up your entire squad (did I mention he uses a sword?) and then after ordering his gunship to blow up the temple, which causes the floor to collapse and you to fall, just casually walks away, with another lame one liner, because gravity does not apply to Space Sasuke. It's so silly that it ruins what's supposed to otherwise be a really dark moment in the story.
>Then afterwards he sends your character an email that's basically "lol git gud"

The worst part is that the game is trying so damn hard to make him an imposing villain, but he never breaks out of a range of annoying to laughable.

Stabbing him with my omniblade was one of the most satisfying renegade actions in the entire series.

 

[FaramirG]

Cerberus taking over the Citadel in ME3 is so stupid. They went from a mysterious organisation who operated in the shadows to one that had the power to launch a direct assault on the centre of galactic civilisation, which had fought off the Geth and a Reaper only a few years prior.

Everything about them in ME3 is stupid. A "covert" paramilitary/terrorist organization assembled a fleet and army on par with the Council, with no explanation. It reminds me a bit of how in KOTOR there's the mystery of how a handful of rogue Jedi+some Republic defectors assembled a fleet capable of challenging the Republic, but the difference is that
1. That was mentioned in-game repeatedly, there's none of that speculation in ME3
2. The mystery actually had a fucking answer, and it was the superweapon that the whole plot revolved around.

For some reason somebody at Bioware/EA has a massive boner for Cerberus, you spend more time fighting and chasing them than the Reapers.

 

[M3xus]

Video game modders that think they're clever for inserting current-year political stuff into their mods. I don't mind so much if it were for "modern" settings, but seeing it in a fantasy or sci-fi setting is very jarring. Not only do the references not fit the setting, it's always handled with all the grace of a drunken elephant.

I will admit, though, that it is very satisfying to smash a fleet of ships unironically named stuff like "Antifa Supersoldier" and "You have Nothing to Lose But Your Chains".

 

[EmpireOfTheClouds]

Dubai had the safe code written on the white board in the same room, and the backstage door code was on a white board in the staff room right next door. They weren't hard to find, but I wish the game would just save them for you once you've found them once because on playthrough 17 (which is was the game is designed for) I do not want to walk around in circles for five minutes to get a code I have already found.

But I liked Dark Souls 2 best, so we obviously have different tastes in games.

To contribute to the thread, in Just Cause 3 the central bases in the regions have giant fuckoff defense weapons so you can't liberate them until you complete story missions. If you're clever or just bored, you can very carefully liberate them anyway, but this doesn't deactivate the fuckoff defense weapons, so you can't ever move through those zones without getting blasted despite there being no enemies in the province.

What's weird is that later in the game, in the China mission there's a password where you literally learn it by going where you need to, because someone is outright saying it out loud.