VIDEO Life's Too Short for this £"!^ - Suicidal Game Design - your top contenders?

Yep, you know what this is - those sections of games that some moron of a game designer thought was a good idea and overlooked that they were utterly stupid and would kill the game completely.

My pair?

Metroid Prime 3 - You have to pull 3 levers and have all 3 down to open a door, but the whole time you're being attacked by space pirates and they can put the levers back up.

Saints Row 4 - The Asha mission where you have a health-regenerating duplicate, who has an infinite supply of henchmen and terminators and you have a pathetic popgun that does bugger all damage.

To hell with the pair of them.

So what are your top moronic examples of truly stupid design?

 

Are we talking unfair difficulty, genuinely bad design, or all of the above?

Because Assassin's Creed 3 had really broken eavesdropping missions. Sneaking around is so much in Splinter Cell and so horrible in Assassin's Creed - Far Cry 3 shows that they're totally fine with sharing core mechanics across their games, so why'd it have to suck so bad in AC3?

 

In effect, it's those times when you can see exactly what you've got to do but doing it is so damn horrible it kills the sense of fun for you completely.

Unfair difficulty would fit, game has been going along at a certain incline then decides to go 1:3 on you fits, as does giving you crap tools to accomplish the goal.

If said obstacle is a total roadblock on the game - you've not going to get past it and even if by some fluke you do, do you really want to keep going anyway?

And if you have a real horror, yeah, all of the above applies.

 

I gave up on The Force Unleashed due to the mindless button bashing needed to kill enemies.

 

I think difficulty is a bit harder to pin down, myself. In terms of actual design I'd say Assassin's Creed 3 is the biggest "I do not want to play this again" game in my books.

Batman: Arkham Origins kept fluctuating between "Hey, this is the same game I've played before, awesome!" and "Okay, you changed the timing of things just enough that it's going to really get me angry." Anyone who's played the other games and got remotely decent at the combat knows how satisfying it is and how it's the only remnant of the original rhythm game concept that Gotham by Gaslight would have been. The problem is everything is just off and it ends up being annoying. The worst part is I can't really explain it or quantify it, save for the shock gloves, which seem like an in-game "We're sorry, have an auto-win button."

 

The bits in Resonance of Fate where they reduce you to two party members. Fine, except combat is optimized around having three people, scaling XP makes grinding a chore, and - oh yeah - even easy fights take a minute or more under optimum circumstances because of how elaborate the engine is. I totally and utterly lost interest in seeing the game through to the end once they pulled it a second time.

Harvest Moon: A New Beginning - having to use blueprints and your own resources to get new villagers. This mechanic would work if you had 10 or 15 people to interact with off the bat. You have three. Oh, and you're not even allowed to start building until an in-game month in (About 5-10 hours real world time). I hear it gets better but I can't be arsed to find out.

 

There was an underground lava filled area in Indiana jones and the Emperors Tomb which, coupled with the idiotic checkpoint save, killed this game for me.

 

Escorting Natalya to the Control Room...

Disarming the bombs underwater...

 

And your posts like this were why I didn't buy it!

 

The Cortana level from Halo 3. Hated it more than Roger Ebert hated North.

 

Cortana is indeed ridiculous, probably the most ridiculous level in a Halo game, besides The Library from Halo.

 

Dark Souls: This is a game I would recommend using in teaching to create good game mechanics, as the game is a masterpiece in design. That is, except for one small detail. The first mimic that you run into in the game is barely signposted at all, with nothing in the immediate area's environment design suggesting to the player that there is danger ahead. Keeping in mind that setting off a mimic in treasure chest form is pretty much an insta-kill at this stage in the game this ends up feeling like a very cheap death. While this is not game breaking in its design it does stick out like a sore thumb in a game that is all about a challenging but fair field of play, where life or death is decided upon skill at the game and not mere chance.

 

Hey, I'm not short!