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Game Essentials - 20 Difficult Games
Last week, in a discussion of the essentials of game design by John Harris, Gamasutra posted a list of twenty really difficult games. It's interesting not only for the purposes of the article (examining the concept of challenge in game creation) but also simply as a personal scorecard for your own gaming career. My personal albatross: "8. Monkey Ball, a.k.a. Super Monkey Ball. Putting that monkey in the ball may have been a whimsical masterstroke, but don't let it fool you. This game is hard. Design lesson: If you're going to make a super hard game, make it fair. No one thinks Monkey Ball is unfair. There is no randomness. Everything that happens is a direct result of the player's actions, and there are no hidden portions of the level waiting to destroy the player. It's not like a boss enemy with secret attacks the player couldn't possibly survive the first time seeing it. It's not only possible to reach and finish Monkey Ball's Master levels, but it could be done on one's first try. Winning the lottery is more likely, but it's possible." How many have you mastered?
I'm too busy playing in digital playground type games with open endings like GTA: San Andreas. Give me the 5 star code, a bicycle and 100 foot bunny hops and watch me go ET over the national Guard - the best games are the ones you come up with.
Mastering though? Certain courses and cars on Gran Turismo - and I lie about not _beating_ a game of late, recently I knocked out both Super Paper Mario and Godfather: Wii Edition in the last few weeks. And as I sit down to write this I just got done playing Wii bowling for a couple hours after work - I havent mastered it but I rolled a 238 with friends just now and had a much better time than I would have had making speed runs in a basement.
But thats just me.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I skimmed TFA, but I didn't see Ghosts 'n Goblins. Am I hallucinating, or was that game easier than its reputation claims?
It made me sit through eleven pages only to find Ikaruga wasn't on the list. Pah.
It's a Unix system - I know this.
Why no mention of great FOSS games?
Oh... that's right.
Now that game was F'ing hard. I could finish every other game on the NES we had in my youth, except that one. Getting to the technodrome, with it's one hit kills and various baddies was hard enough. Shredder then would proceed to live up to his namesake and spit out a gutted turtle corpse. It wouldn't be so bad if you could restart from where you lost your original turtle, but no such luck. Back to the beginning of the level you went, often with the weakest turtle to fight Shredder with.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Finished all levels of Monkey Ball. Gave up on F-Zero for GameCube. That game was just too difficult to beat.
Ah yes, Super Monkey Ball. Specifically: Expert Level 7. Those who have faced this level will understand the sheer frustration felt.
Another hard game: Project X on the Amiga. It took two of us playing co-operatively to beat it. And this is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up!
Who remembers Ghouls and Ghosts or Super Ghosts and Goblins for the NES and SNES. You want to talk about hard games. I'd say those two are quite a bit harder than Zelda. Those two always gave me so much trouble, I think I have yet to beat the first one.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
TMNT for NES was INSANELY hard....and in a complete opposite direction here, Ninja Gaiden Black is definately up there in the top three hardest games once you get into the higher difficulty levels.
Living With a Nerd
...Duke Nukem Forever Why do you think it hasn't been release to the general population.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
Got to say it did wonders for the heart rate though - no need to exercise, just play Battletoads and watch it go!
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
"The Warriors are so troublesome that Sinistar, while not more difficult than Defender,..."
Did I just step into some alternate reality where Sinistar is the mother of all side-scrolling shooters and Defender is the massively hard top-down shooter where a self-assembling robot demon chases you around screaming "Ron Howard?" I deeply love both games but Sinistar is way harder.
Ghosts n' Goblins wasn't on the list either. I have a GnG arcade cabinet. Me and a friend played the thing for the best part of a day on freeplay, but never quite managed to get past the second run-through.
"Pokey, are you drunk on love?" "Yes. Also whiskey. But mostly love... and whiskey."
Oh for the days, when computer games rewarded ability rather than perseverance.
Computer games used to be about developing a skill, playing it until you got sufficiently good that you were able to complete something on a higher level. Nowadays, it's about who can put the most amount of time into a game. The difficulty level is a gentle gradient if not entirely flat.
Compare modern games to the simplest and most iconic of old games - Pac-man. It only had one level, one playing level. One! Yet the same level played again and again, with increasing difficulty. Faster ghosts, less time on power-pills, etc etc. The only way you would see level 20 was if you were good enough to beat level 19, and that was damn hard.
Compare to games these days, such as the GTA series, Half-life 1 and 2, Halo, World of Warcraft, whatever. The end of these games is not significantly different in difficulty from the beginning. The last levels involve generally the same baddies, but more of them, and you have bigger weapons to handle them. The experience is constant throughout the cycle of the game, so that a little perseverance will reward you with progress.
Why is this? Games are now a much bigger proposition, and the audience is wider. And the audience wants easy gratification and no frustration. Sure, it's meant to be entertainment, not a challenge. But for many of us, the entertainment is in the challenge and ultimately, surpassing it.
I remember spending ages playing Pac-man, Defender and the rest as a child trying to defeat the higher levels. When you achieve something you hadn't done before through your own skill and ability it's far more rewarding than just cruising through it.
Games are about perceived value now, and someone who fails to finish a game will not have gained that full "value" from it. So games are tailored so almost every user can finish it, that Bob the Button Masher will be able to work his way to the end and see all the pretty bits eventually as long as he doesn't run out of Cheetos in the meantime. But this is at the cost of a real sense of progression and challenge, and hence accomplishment, by those of us dedicated enough to put the effort in to get good at something.
Many games used to be open-ended, with just increasing skill levels and no defined end. I guess this got past that problem as every level was a measure of ability and a goal in itself. You can defeat it on level 15? Well I can get to level 20.
Games used to be closer to a martial art (simply in terms of dedication, application and training), now they feel more like a particularly wimpy yoga session, where as long as you can make it through the time, you can say you've completed it.
(No offence to any yogaers out there, you know what I mean)
Yes, what about that great ZX-Spectrum platformer? That game was nearly impossible to finish without either some pokes and peeks, or an emulator with save-states implemented.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
I don't really understand the purpose of this list. At least the author doesn't pretend that these are the 20 hardest games ever, just 20 difficult games. Mischief Makers, even getting all the gold gems, was a bit of a challenge but not an extremely frustrating one. Lolo wasn't that much harder than a lot of puzzle games I've played. A few of the games on the list were only difficult because they suffered from poor gameplay, silly programming decisions or lousy instructions.
Getting laid.
Most people I knew didn't even know how to drive the car at any significant speed (or steering it). I was pretty good at driving myself, but never understood the point of the game.
Whenever i think of hard games i always thing of Legacy of the Wizard for the NES. I haven't actually taken the chance to try it again but at the time, when i was in early jr. high i think, it seemed incredibly complex. It was a dungeon crawling adventure game that made really good use of puzzles that required finding items in the dungeon to solve. Item A would be blocked by puzzle 1, which you needed item B to solve, but that was blocked by puzzle 2... and there were five or six different characters, each with slightly different abilities and who could each use a slightly different set of items. Figuring out the right character to use in which order with which combination of items was nuts. And then of course once you finally figured out the right combination for a particular area you had to actually solve the puzzle while dodging the enemies... I don't think i ever got anywhere close to the end of the game.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Rhythm games certainly do become a test of skill, you're very right. I'd not included them in my thinking.
WoW (as a player too myself), I'd have to disagree, aside from PvP which is only a small part of the game (or, a large part of the game for only a small number of people) - in that, it becomes a test of matching skill against another human as all online games from chess to Counterstrike do, but as the opponent is a human, not due to the game itself becoming harder as it progresses.
This is not an expansion, the change is there - most new games do not get significantly harder throughout their levels like they used to. Some people, including me, enjoyed that.
I enjoyed (and finished) all such modern games I listed in my original post, but as good as they were, I felt they weren't testing my abilities any harder towards their end than they were at the beginning - and that is the point.
We had Defender for our Atari 800. (Actually both on floppy and on cartridge.)
My older brothers and I would play untill we had a bunch of extra lives and smart bombs, then let our younger siblings play for a while while we rested. We could play that game in shifts as long as we wanted. It's kind of fun to use only smart bombs for 5 - 10 levels.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
My all-time favorite game might be the freeware Top Hat Willy, which was based on Jet Set Willy. It was so hard that the creator, Tero Heikkinen, never won it. As far as I know I'm one of only four people in the world who ever completed the game, and I did it twice.
The game was originally developed on the Amiga, but a PC version is also available. It's a very simple, very devious platformer.
The game that made me gnash my teeth the most was Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge for the snes. I still throw that in sometimes and give it a go. I like the fact that they included lode runner for the nes. That was a very difficult game, but it was also very fair. I'd be scared to actually play these two games on the Wii(virtual console) since I might actually throw the wiimote at the TV in frustration :)
I created a game for GTA: Vice City. Get a Faggio, go to the Ammunation on the North side of the third island, and get one star on the way. Back up to the door, and use the wanted level cheat twice to get five stars (remember, you have one already). Now, scream, "Viva La Faggio!" and try (just try) to make it to the airport. Its a straight shot with nothing but FBI cars in your way. I've made it once.
Where's Wizardry IV: Return of Werdna? That was heads and tails the most difficult old-school RPG of that time.
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
I couldn't find the Usenet reference, but I remember some old rgvc conversation about how Sinistar cheats: it doesn't compute things offscreen nearly as much as you'd think, so those little gatherers and warriors can freely fly without worrying about hitting asteroids...
still an amazing technological achievement...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Hardest game I ever gave up on. I was one of those side scrolling, the screen keeps you flying on his board games.. but if you get hit once, you die and start the level over again.. near impossible.
...and it's sequels. Those games were brutal!
How about "In Search of the Most Amazing Thing"? Anyone remember that? I remember finding the most amazing thing and then being killed by one of those monsters-disguised-as-a-fueling-rock on my way back to home base. Jerk.
Dr Scrime's Spook School on the Amstrad CPC. Fiendish game, I'm not even sure if completing it was possible.
When I was a kid, my father and I mapped out all the dungeons and the castle and actually BEAT Deadly Towers (More impressive, we did the same thing and Beat "Back to the Future 2&3"). Deadly Towers isn't HARD... it's just terrible. It's long, ugly and monotonous. Music replays every new screen you enter, you fight the most uninspired enemies and fall in random holes that lead to dungeons. No, Deadly Towers is NOT one of the hardest games I've ever played, just one of the worst. Now... Ask me about Miner 2049er on the Colecovision... and I can't even BEGIN to tell you how many times I threw Coleco controllers on the ground and swore at that machine as a child. I never made it past Level 6.
I can't think of any game I wasted more time on, trying to figure out the solutions for each planet. The primitive graphics of the Atari 800XL didn't help identifying what items you found either.
Boulderdash was outright impossible, especially in the later levels. That said, they were both fantastic and frustrating games.
Nethack is probably THE single most difficult game I have ever played. I don't think I could beat it without reading spoilers, and have often offered $200 to any friend that does. (Never being sure how to check if they were cheating though.)
As I've never owned an XBox, this is news to me.
_ AG.txt ) it seems they are mostly about collecting items or finding secrets, rather than eking out the last bit of skill from their performance? That's what I meant, games like GTA award perseverance and endurance over skill.
However looking through some of the guides you linked to (eg http://www.achieve360points.com/txt/d/Dead_Rising
I agree there's definitely potential in the achievements to have skill-based secondary goals, and I like that idea. Thanks for the heads-up.
...Commando.
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
It IS a freeware game, but it is one of the hardest I've ever played. The final boss and the secret dungeon are really hard.
all difficult tasks require repetition. In terms of the skilled old games, they required repetition to get your skill high enough to finish the harder level, before continuing. For more modern games, they require some repetition to get through the content (and of course, "getting through the content" is a whole lot of fun!), but little to no skill increase.
I'm certainly not wanting games to become more simplistic, single-level repetitive affairs. I'm disappointed that, say, GTA 3 didn't get harder as the game went on, that unlocking content in it is a reward only of time invested, rather than developing skill and ability. I'm just wishing that modern games were also an increasingly demanding test of skill, than just a test of perseverance or more accurately, endurance.
Seeing the title the first game to come to my mind was KGB, an adventure game for the PC. It was so hard, I only reached the 2nd level once or twice.
Hey, any game where bronze-age spearmen can beat a tank is hard in my book!
Seriously though, the amount of skill and thought required for those games puts it on a completely seperate level from any other strategy game. Let's face it, managing every aspect of a world-spanning empire isn't the easiest thing in the world.
Legend of Zelda made the list? That was a terribly easy game; even 2nd quest. I beat that game when I was 8, and I couldn't even beat Super Mario Bros. My record at the time was 8 deaths, but when I was older, I played it again and won without dying once. Even Adventures of Link was a huge increase in difficulty over the original. Actually, I never did beat that one; stupid Link's Shadow got me every time.
Try "No One Lives Forever" on Super Spy (or whatever the highest difficulty was). Wait until you get to that big Scottish boss and spend the next 5 hours screaming at your computer.
I remember seeing an interview with Eugene Jarvis about how the early Defender machines were so tricky that they were wiping out people's ships within a minute. Those people were going and coming back with many more quarters because they weren't going to let the game kick their ass that easily. This is exactly the sort of reaction you want to an arcade machine - put more money in. But you still have to feel you're getting something for it - the home versions of Need for Speed have drag races in which it is possible to burn out your engine on the starting line if you over-rev it. This feature has been removed in the arcade version of the drag races, as paying $1.50 for a credit which lasts all of 3 seconds was not considered to be a valid business decision.
Balancing difficulty and playability must be one of the more tricky parts of game design. How do you reward expert players, and keep them interested, while enabling novices to enjoy the game as well? I could never play Age of Empires, or any of the other management simulations where the computer can do all its resource management in a fraction of a second while I'm still trying to balance how many people should be farming or mining. On the other hand, I was pretty good at Tempest 2000 and Rez, although many people I showed these games to could see nothing but abstract neon splatter on the screen. The article doesn't seem to differentiate between the difficulty of manipulating the controls in the correct sequence and timing (i.e. Ikaruga), and the difficulty of figuring out what you're actually meant to be doing (i.e. Myst). Probably the closest it comes is its description of Sinistar, where none of the separate gameplay elements are particularly difficult in and of themselves, balancing the load between tasks and interlocking them all successfully is pretty tricky.
I never could beat the computer at chess in "high levels" either.
:).
Nuff said
Ninja Gaiden -- that last stage was *brutal* and then if you lost to the bosses you had to repeat it. Needless to say, one of the games that stands out in my head that I've never finished.
... then there was more game. On the moon. Where my health just gets sucked out and I died. Without any way to keep going, I figured that was supposed to be the ending.
RoboWarrior -- such a fan of Bomerman, I thought this game would be the greatest thing ever. Except for the limited number of bombs. And the fact that you couldn't go backwards. And it just made me feel so stupid sometimes, I put it away with disgust.
Amagon -- For some reason this game held a strange appeal to me, yet I could never get very far in it. I must have rented it a dozen times, each time swearing I'd never do so again.
Nobunaga's Ambition -- The kind of game that you'd spend hours strategizing on, coming up with just the right balance, and having it all fall apart because the wind shifted in combat and the fires you started burned your armies to death.
Athena -- Another game that killed because it only scrolled in one direction. I never made it past the mermaid level.
A Boy and His Blob -- For the longest time I thought all the game was, was the first level. Once I made it into space, I was hopelessly lost.
Dragon Power -- I'll never be sure I beat this game or not. I got to the end, made my wish
Mike Tyson's Punchout!! -- It's all cake and icecream until the last fight. Then, WTF. Seriously, WTF.
Castlevania -- The game that turned my NES MAX controller into a boomerang. Thank god it at least had a wire to tether it from smashing into too many things.
But hey, I was one of the first in my city to know about the transmolecular dot in Adventure. I feel avenged!
Most of the games on the list come prior to the SNES/Genesis era. Sure, they made alot of very difficult games back then, but where are the recent games? I think there were only 2 or 3 games from the previous 2 generations (Monkey Ball and Blast Corps). Where are games like Unlimited Saga, which was purposely designed to be the hardest RPG ever made?
To pick a single prominent counter-example: Geometry Wars. A modern game that uses modern hardware to produce something visually exciting, but the design and gameplay are straight out of the 1980s, and I mean that as a compliment.
Sure, AAA blockbusters like Halo and Warcraft won't give you what you're looking for, but that doesn't mean the product doesn't exist any more - it just means you're looking in the wrong place. Games of skill have never been mainstream and never will be mainstream, so looking for them in the mainstream is a waste of time. Games of skill have always been a niche market and always will be a niche market, so, surprise surprise, if you look at niche providers you'll find them still happily supplying the niche market with its niche games.
Yup. I've been playing Simcity for more than a decade now and I can't seem to win. Can't even get those stupid arcologies to blast off.
My brother and I could beat Battletoads for the old NES. As if that weren't enough, we could beat it beat it playing straight through the twelve levels (ie, not warping.) On top of that, we did in two-player mode- ie, if one person failed, we both failed. Well, up until the second to last level that is. (The game cartridge has a bug on the clinger-winger stage where if you are playing two-player, player two loses control.) Looking back, I honestly can't believe we ever did that.
.1 seconds.
Battletoads starts out survivable and fun on stages one and two. Then on stage three, the speed bikes in the Turbo Tunnel, is as far as I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people will ever get. Walls come at you at maybe 60 miles per hour and you have to twitch your way around them. You have maybe a second of lead time.
Ice Cave- Slide around dangerous spikes
Water Surfing- Surf around logs, beat very large and dangerous boss who can flatten you in one hit
Snake Cave- Jump between spikes on giant metal snakes, finding difficult paths through
Jets- Fly between tiny holes in the fire
Tunnels- swim and jump through more dangerous spikes
Rat Race- Race a rat downwards between girders to a bomb at the bottom. If he gets there first you die.
Clinger Wingers- Suction cup unicycles. Outrun a deadly ying yang. If you twitch a corner just right you gain
Twisty Tower- a rotating 360 degree tower. To fall is to die. Climb to the top and defeat the Dark Queen.
I couldn't beat Battletoads today except in an emulator with Quicksave and Quickload. I have NO idea how we did twelve stages back to back where the slightest wrong twitch meant death. It reminds me of doing twelve complicated, difficult and dangerous circus tricks with no net, in game terms anyway.
This is one title I'd really like to see a modern version of. It was a bit like battlebots / robot wars, except you literally built them to be autonomous using a complex wiring system as the programming language. (Think dynamic flow-charting...)
Of course, now that actual robotics are becoming more consumer-friendly, there may not be much demand for virtual robotics competitions when faced with real-world competitions for anyone with a couple-hundred bucks to spend on a Lego Mindstorms or VEX kit.
Still, had Cognitoy waited until now to introduce Mind-Rover, it could have become the next Pokémon or Spore, given enough flexibility.
8==8 Bones 8==8
3 lives, no continues. So many quarters thrown at that damn machine. If I got enough of the power ups I found I could survive for a bit but I still never got past the second level.
If whales learn how to use weapons we're all screwed!
Nice list. I'd add some to this though:
Jetpak
Ys II - Megadrive version
Crystalis - NES version
The Goonies
Kendo Rage
Mention for easy to play impossible to master difficulty:
Dr. Mario
Gran Turismo 4
Honourable mentions for optional irritating challenges:
Alundra - all items, no death
Final Fantasy 1 - White Mage Party
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne - Hard Mode
Devil May Cry - Dante Must Die Mode
Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter - achieving 1/4 rank in 3 game cycles
Final Fantasy V - Defeat Omega Weapon at level 45 or lower
And that's not even getting into the can of worms that is optional bosses. There are some fighting games and RPGs out there that love to stack the odds to near impossible heights against the player. And we eat it up.
By DoD I mean Dungeons of Daggorath.
Not only was it hard to figure out what to do and how to do it, but my fingers are still whacked from typing "A (SPACE) L" a hundred times a second.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Beat it on the Apple ][ as well. Not sure what makes it so difficult -- just time consuming.
Now Championship Lode Runner, that was difficult.
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"I like my tea how I like my women: warm and sweet"
-- Michaelangelo
Surprised Lemmings isn't on the list.
"Lode Runner" wasn't difficult -- just time consuming. "Championship Lode Runner" was tough -- had to have exact timing.
but it seems 80% of the replies I've got miss what I'm actually talking about.
I'm not calling for games to go back to one-level repetitive, simple arcade style games. If I was, I'd be off playing Sinistar right now.
I think that the difficulty progression that went through earlier games was a great thing, and I wished modern games, such as Max Payne as you mentioned, maintained that.
Infinite or near infinite games such as Pac-man are a bad example. Let's say something like Contra, or Green Beret. They had discrete levels (though I believe Contra allowed you to replay the game even harder if you completed it?), and although they were both pretty difficult, the later levels were really MUCH more difficult. Progression through the game was not only down to experiencing it, but being good enough to get through it.
To take Max Payne as an example (a good one for me as I completed that on two difficulty levels. Good game but it still suffers from this problem), the game throughout is about the same difficulty - the first boss and the last boss aren't vastly different. If it took you 2 tries to get down the first boss, it should only take you a similar number of tries for the last boss.
(Forgetting that the game was so cool that you'd go back and take out the bosses again and again just to do cooler bullet-time things)
Yes, Max Payne had varying (and inventive) difficulty levels, but that seems to me a side-step of the problem. Game publishers seem reluctant to give a game a progressing level of difficulty. Why is that? Will players get frustrated and not buy their games again? Do players *expect* to be able to finish a game these days? When my friends and I had Green Beret on our C64s and Amigas, we certainly didn't *expect* to be able to finish it. And the first time we saw the last level, it was a HUGE rush, after spending maybe a week trying to get through there. Max Payne, as great as it was, missed out on that feeling as it had a linear, or flat, difficulty level. Finished it in 2-3 days, if I remember, and there was no sense of anticipation from working hard to defeat some really tough boss or level. My point is that if it had that as well, it would be an even better game, and there would be a sense of wonder at being able to achieve the higher levels.
Yes, developers are coming up with other ways of compensating for this - user-selectable difficulty level, dynamic difficulty, achievements rewards and such, but they all assume that a game that is too difficult for 50% (20%? 80%?) of its players to finish, is a bad thing. I disagree. I'm not the best player in the world, nor am I the worst, but the games I finished that others did not gave me a source of pride and achievement, and likewise the ones others did and I did not, gave me a goal to try to achieve.
... but that is just heartbreaking. I never thought that videogames would make me feel depressed, but you just did it for me. I've always held your sentiments, but never were they expressed in such a sublime way.
I feel a little ridiculous getting emotional about videogames, but I suppose they really are a big part of many of our lives. If I could Mod your post "+1, Depressingly Nostalgic" I would.
Maybe to save myself from redundancy, how do you Slashdotters manage to find games that still challenge you based on abilities rather than investing your lives into them?
Don't cry "Oust Bush," cry "Restore Freedom!" Don't support a candidate who isn't doing anything to unravel Bush's web.
I have no problem with games being difficult, but there's a few ways in which they shouldn't be...
1. Disproportionate final boss. The last boss should be the hardest, but should only be so much harder than a normal boss. Link's Awakening on the GB pushed the limits with the seemingly endless forms of the final boss. Mega Man games can be bad in this regard when the final Wily battle dwarfs any previous battle in the last 15 - 16 levels difficulty-wise. Mega Man Battle Network games are really bad about this. Shadow of the Ninja: the main game FLEW by, then the last boss was insane. Legend of the Unemployed Ninja is similar, until the second to last dungeon there is NO difficulty to speak of. The 2nd to last dungeon is a small chore, then suddenly the last dungeon requires mastery to get halfway through.
2. Inappropriate mini-games. If you buy a game about, there shouldn't be a mandatory mini-game you can't proceed without beating, whose play style bears no resemblance to the main part of the game. Mega Man 8's "jump jump slide slide" sections, in a game where you can normally move at your own pace come to mind. Everyone knows what a Mega Man game is supposed to be, why should you have to waste your time on a snowboard simulator to beat it? All mini-games should be bypassable. Perhaps the bypass should be tough as nails, but it should use the main game engine. I resent hearts being gotten in Zelda through horse-based mini-games, but at least you don't need all the hearts to win.
3. Bad restarts. If you continue in Metroid with full energy tanks, you shouldn't need to refill them from 30 health. There's no challenge in this, it's just tedious. Later games fix this. Legend of the Unemployed Ninja: you can't work from a single save, over and over. If yo die, everything you used in the last attempt is GONE. You'll have to spend more time to build it back up again. The re-building isn't hard, but is needless unwelcome tedium.
4. Bad controls. Resident Evil. Some people may like the controls, but to most games, they were a pain in the butt, and too slow to bother with. One of the main reasons people hated Deadly Towers? Way too slow. RE2 on the 64 gave me the same move-in-the-direction-you-push controls I've used for years and was one of my favorite 64 games. I won't touch RE1. The people behind Contra could have made a level with the left and up buttons swapped (but right and down normal) which would have been much harder... but for no good reason. The CD-I Zeldas requuired strange things like ducking and jumping at the same time to hit the menu, since there weren't enough buttons.
5. Bad game genres.
If you like a series, you want to beat all the games in it. As such, all games in a franchise should be the same genra. Mega Man Soccer just doesn't fit. Mega Man Network Transmission doesn't fit the rest of the Battle Network games. Battlechip Challenge is more of an annoying nuisance than another game in the continuity. Did we really need Bomberman Fantasy Race? (Not that I'm blasting it, I haven't played it, but it's NOT what most Bomberman fans were lusting after.) There are exceptions, Mario is succesful in several genres, but arguably, Mario games aren't really a franchise anymore. These days "Mario games" is an umbrealla term for several franchises: Super Mario, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario RPGs. Panzer Dragoon Saga. Why an RPG suddenly?
6. Bad quality
The Game.Com Sonic game could move fast, but Sonic accelerated poorly. Very poorly. The CD-I Zeldas had cut-scenes that would gag a maggot.
7. Poor speed
This is a mixture of bad quality and controls, but important enough to mention again. Long unskippable cut-scenes and too long intros with no action (IIRC I think "The Hobbit" did well by starting you with a bit of action in a dream sequence, THEN going into fetch quests for the next hour) make people not want to bother with a game. How many times do you WANT to replay FF3/6's last fight with the 30 minute cutscene?