Have You Hit a Gaming Wall?

Stephen Totilo, at MTV Games, has hit a gaming wall. At the newly un-flashed Multiplayer site he talks about the bane of gamers everywhere, what developer Jamie Fristrom calls a 'shelf-level event': a gaming wall that makes it hard if not impossible to complete a game. While a lot of gamers can overcome difficulties to reach the end credits, there are some frustrations that can suck all the fun out of play. He cites the bosses from Final Fantasy X and Super Paper Mario as dealbreakers. I personally am playing through God of War again, and the incredibly frustrating spear trap in the 'Paths of Madness' section of the game never fails to provoke hysterics. Have you run into any such obstacles lately? What game obstacles have caused you toss away a controller in frustration and swear off a game entirely?

Comments

amen!

[MarcoAtWork]

The GameCube version of "F-Zero" includes a race set on a course full of 90-degree turns and expert opponents. I'll never beat it. I'll never see the rest of the game.

same thing happened to me, no way I'll ever be able to beat that mission in story mode, or beat all the cups in diamond to unlock AX, and due to the fact that for some bizarre reason there are NO CODES for f-zero-gx I just stopped playing it, and basically stopped playing my gc altogether due to the huge amounts of frustration f-zero gx caused.

Note to Nintendo: if you sell a game, make sure that there is some sort of code to use to unlock all the game has to offer, or a reduced difficulty level, I paid for the whole game and to be locked out of 1/5th of the tracks (likely among the best ones) and 4/5ths of the story mode does not feel right.

Battletoads

[Deluxe_247]

If you havn't played the little racer levels, then you don't know what hitting a gaming wall is. All this talk about FF games and Gears of War and Doom 3 and stuff?

Please. Fire up your NES Emulator of choice and see how far you get with Battletoads (without cheating of course..)

Warning: You may want to go shopping for a hairpiece first, because you'll look funny once you pull all your hair out.

Re:So.... maybe we need to get rid of the

[cowscows]

It's hit or miss for me. Some games I probably give up on because they're getting pretty hard, and I'm not having that much fun anyways. Some games I have trouble with, but I'll play them until I figure it out, or until I get every item and find every secret room because I just enjoy the game. I'm a pretty casual gamer, I seldom have a whole afternoon to really dig into a game and get in the flow and perfect my technique to the level that some games seem to need.

A good example is the GTA games. I don't enjoy the missions nearly as much as I enjoy just cruising around and exploring the game world. Unfortunately, the missions are required to unlock various things, and I don't have the patience to do all of that. I might just want to spend a half hour blowing up helicopters with a rocket launcher. And so I turn to cheat codes, which GTA:SA fortunately has in spades.

While I respect that some people enjoy things that are difficult just for the sake of difficulty (some people like rock climbing for pete's sake), that's not how I prefer to spend my time, and a game that wants to force that sort of playing on me is not something that I'm interested in. Things like cheat codes can sometimes make a game like that enjoyable and appealing to a wider audience.