Most FRUSTRATING Amiga game ever!!!!!!!!

[captainxod]

OK, so were there any games that brought out the worst in you? made you curse out loud, slam your fist into your Amiga keyboard, hurl your joystick out the window, take it out on your siblings or the family dog--that kind of thing?

I think the most excruciating thing is when you die and it isn't your fault. For instance, a bug in the game or an unreliable joystick/mouse. Or when your sister's screaming at you from down the hall telling you to do your chores when you're facing off against the End Boss and you forget the pause button or there is none.

(yes, my blood's beginning to boil. steam is already rising from the top of my scalp as I recall more and more of what really got my back up while gaming on the Amiga.)

ahem

Now, to the games themselves. I've gotta say the games which made me go ballistic are the hardcore ones, the unforgiving ones, the ONE SHOT DEAD ones, the Go Back To The Very Beginning If You Die Ones. (These days games have gone to the other extreme, and you have an energy bar that spans the length of the screen, but I digress).

Anyway, for me RAINBOW ISLANDS was by far the most psychosis inducing. It is an elegantly conceived, cutsie and a seemingly harmless platform game with a delightful jingle playing innocently in the background--- but underneath that exterior is a vicious, merciless beast just waiting to demoralise you and perhaps even send you to the funny farm.

It was a ONE TOUCH/SHOT DEAD game. Every level was timed, and when the siren went off all the enemies became aggravated and accelerated (which naturally means the player does too). Water would rise from the bottom of the screen threatening to drown you. It was extremely stressful gaming. On Monster Island (the third level) the End Boss was insanely difficult. You could play to perfection to this point (getting all the Diamonds in order--I can't express how difficult that is) and yet lose ALL your power-ups AND lives on this oversized/overpowered Dracula Boss. The designers of this guy must have been sadists. I eventually worked out a fail-safe way to kill him quickly (but I lost a lot of my precious sanity in doing so and will never get that back). And that was just the THIRD level boss. The levels just got exponentially harder from that point (as did the bosses, but Dracula remained one of the toughest) and required lightning speed reflexes and quick thinking in order to survive. A half-second lapse in concentration and you were DEAD. During some levels, there were no points at which you could take a breather, and even though it's a platformer some levels didn't even have platforms AT ALL (you had to use your rainbows for that, and they'd disappear after a short time). very, very demanding.

Suffice it to say I never did defeat that game, it defeated me. But I got pretty close to the last boss. It is the most frustratingly difficult game I've ever played in my life, but also one of the best.

Now I would like to hear the comments of others.

[s2325]

1. HOI
2. Gold of Aztecs
3. Yolanda
4. Alien Breed (only when self destruct sequence is on)
5. Inferior

[BinoX]

I have to agree on the rainbow islands front (I have the pc version now and still just as annoying)

But more annoying was the adams family... That game was just far too big! Too much to do... but flying around with that fez on was funny

[Muzkat]

Prince of Persia had me pulling hairs out in frustration. And one day I got so pissed off at that game that I formatted the bastard! Killed it! I felt so satisfied afterwards.

[DamienD]

Just a quick one for me without too much thinking... Shadow of the Beast series for their insane difficulty level and fact that if you do a part slightly out of sequence or die you have to go back to the start again
*** though I do love them for nostalgic reasons ***

Other annoying games to follow later...

[RickyC]

Sleepwalker....im recording it now and its all coming back to me D:

and maybe streetfighter II on any difficulty over 4ish near the end!

[Bolch]

Gold of the Aztecs, indeed. I eventually finished that game without cheating - and I'm very proud of that! -, but don't ask how many strings of hair I pulled out during the process.
Smash TV from the recent past... I found it totally hopeless to play without using the "save state" feature in WinUAE.
I know that many people regard it as too easy, but for me, Agony was a nightmare on the last level. The swarming enemies - almost undistinguishable from the background - and the fact that losing a life almost surely meant losing the game drove me to madness. And if I died, I had to start again the overlong, ridiculously easy first five levels with the monstrous loading times.

[Ironclaw]

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis!!

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Ironclaw

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis!!

Kidding pal ? nah indy 4 CANNOT be stated here as a frustating game.

It's one of the most wonderful game out there !

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Kidding pal ? nah indy 4 CANNOT be stated here as a frustating game.

It's one of the most wonderful game out there !

Frustrating doesn't necessarily mean bad...

[Photon]

Shadow of the Beast was just terrible. Reviewers lied about the game and the screenshots promised wonderland, but when you fired it up it was basically a scroll demo.

I don't think much of the game designer. All the puzzles and enemies are repeated over and over with different palettes. Most of them have to be shot repeatedly. Some of the puzzles require knowing, even when you get there the first time, where to stand. There's nothing along the ground to tell you where your mark is, but if you're not pixel-perfectly placed, enemies kill you in a second. Back to the multiloader and repeat from the top...

All this would be fine if it were a joy to move about. Kung-Fu Master on the C-64 had better movement. Slow, unresponsive, stupid waits. "We can't put too much playability code in there, cos the gfx artist has drawn all these frames of gorgeous graphics, you see, and we have to show them all."

Once you've discovered the tree and well, there are no real 'excursions' but a linear course that you go every time you play the game until you happen to die. This course is strewn with OBSTACLES, the only reason the bunch of 2 meter eyeballs (etc, Etc, ETCETERA) are there is to MAKE YOU DIE. I don't mind enemies, because enemies attack you and can be attacked (and feared/hated). But obstacles are just boring.

I think SotB did more for turning people on to cracked, trained games than any other game.

[Graham Humphrey]

In general....

shoot-em-ups where you lose all your weapons after you die get on my nerves.

Platform games that use up to jump, or racing games that use up to accelerate annoy me immensley, more so if they're actually CD32 games.

Big games without level codes or a save game function.

High-score tables that you can't save.

I'm sure there are plenty more, but that will do for now.

[Ironclaw]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Kidding pal ? nah indy 4 CANNOT be stated here as a frustating game.

It's one of the most wonderful game out there !

No, I LOOOOOOOVE the game, one of the best Adv ever.... but I got stuck in one place for 1 year!!!.... was trying to find a gear the size of a pixel, and almost same color as the ground it layed on!

Played it for months.. got to that spot.. knew it would be there as I read a hint somewhere (internet were new back then, so had no walkthrough)... I couldn't find that damn gear... tried so hard... so put the game on the shelf. then a year later, loaded it up.... located my savedisk, loaded it up.. and IMMEDIATELY I found the damn 1x1 pixel gear....

[Dastardly]

Cadaver has been the most frustrating game for me.

I got a stuck on a puzzle on lv4 about 13-14 years ago. I fired up my old save game recently and was amazed it still worked. I finally managed to solve the puzzle and immediately got stuck again.

Wonder if my save game disk will still work in 2020 :/

[Legerdemain]

Shadow of the Beast II.

1. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Cut-scene. Cut-scene. Cut-scene. Cut-scene. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Play. For tvo minutes. Die. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Ending picture. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load. Load.

2. Goto 1.

...but then, I also have this question to ask: not being the biggest fan of the Amiga port of Rainbow Islands since it without any problems could have been almost identical to the arcade version (at least they could have bothered with smooth scroll... but I'm not going into that once again)... but, still, what I never have come to facts with: does it include ALL of the levels? That is, if you take all the diamonds in the correct order and skip the final boss by passing the door instead of beating it, will you reach the rest of the levels (the bubble bobble level included)?

[Graham Humphrey]

I'm no expert on Rainbow Islands but... wasn't there an extra 3 worlds in the arcade version? I think they were left out of the Amiga version due to memory limitations, if that's what you mean.

[Legerdemain]

Originally Posted by Graham Humphrey

I'm no expert on Rainbow Islands but... wasn't there an extra 3 worlds in the arcade version? I think they were left out of the Amiga version due to memory limitations, if that's what you mean.

Ah, that's a shame... even though the game holds up on its own even if one just plays it through, the regular levels, that is, from beginning to end without bothering about the secrets and the good ending... but those extra levels added a rather nice twist to the game; if you are hard-core enough you got to play those extra levels and if you were insane you would even get the 'perfect' ending. An ending very few knew that it existed, back in the days.

[Graham Humphrey]

Apparently Graftgold had to leave them out to get them to fit into 512K... if it was a 1MB only game they would have actually fit in there I think. Presumably this was before 1MB was a common amount of memory to have on an Amiga.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by Graham Humphrey

Apparently Graftgold had to leave them out to get them to fit into 512K... if it was a 1MB only game they would have actually fit in there I think. Presumably this was before 1MB was a common amount of memory to have on an Amiga.

I've never bought that memory excuse. Each level is loaded from disk, only the last one played stays in memory. Therefore to have 10 levels on the disk vs 7 requires no extra memory.

It was not that they were out of disk space either, even with the most basic compression techniques approximately 50% of the disk is unused.

I bet the real reason was they were urged by the publisher to just get it finished ASAP. I can't imagine a different team (perfectionists like Ocean France for example) would have left out several levels just to bow to the whims of some suit in charge that doesn't give a stuff about the consumers.

What Graftgold did was brilliant, just sadly not all there!

[Graham Humphrey]

That does seem quite feasible actually. A real shame if that was the case. And anyway, even if they were out of disk space (which seems unlikely judging by what you've said), it's not much effort to use a second disk, is it?

It wouldn't surprise me really, after all it's not exactly uncommon for publishers to pressure developers into getting a game finished so they can get it out there is it?