5 most infuriating moments in otherwise great games
Number 5. X-Men Origins: Sentinel Boss Fight
Up until the Sentinel fight in the 2009 video game titled X-Men Origins Wolverine, the game hadn't been that difficult. You faced countless enemies, mini-bosses and a few actual bosses that could be taken out relatively easy. However the fight with sentinel, if you were like me was your breaking point and made you never come back to the game. I can handle difficulty, but this fight was difficult for all the wrong reasons. It goes mostly smoothly up until the end where at least on the PS3 you are required to hit the O button in a quick time event so fast that my finger was sore after two attempts. I tried this section over and over before I finally gave up on it which is a shame since the rest of the game is such arcadey, hack and slash fun.
Number 4. Sly Cooper and the Thievious Racconus: The Racing Level
Sly Cooper was an interesting and (for the most part) fun game. It came out in 2002 for the PS2 and involved a mixture of platforming and stealth to get to the end of the level which usually involved stealing something of interest. The story was about a legacy of raccoon thieves that used a book called the Thievius Raccoones to learn the master art of stealing stuff. Sly's job is to find the book and steal it back from whoever took it. I don't know how the story ended though because I didn't want to put up with the horrible racing section the game threw at me early on in the game. The appeal of the game is the tight platforming and thoughtful level design. The opposite of that design philosophy is exactly what makes the race sections a complete disaster. The tightness of the platforming in the main game is directly proportional to how loose the car controls in the driving section. You steer and move forward with one analog stick and you seem to not get anywhere unless you collect every nitro power-up. Even if you do collect every power-up and play strategically, you'll still be hard pressed to come in first. It's just annoying. I want to play the game and beat it, but I really don't want to dedicate more time than I already have to a badly designed racing level.
Number 3. Red Dead Redemption: Most of Bonnie's tasks
Red Dead Redemption is one of my favorite games of all time. I don't think I need to go into detail on what is fantastic about the game because I'd be here a long time. What's not fantastic though is the tedious missions you have to take from Bonnie in the beginning of the game and similar ones (without giving away any spoilers) at the end. The missions involve walking slowly to find animals, breaking horses, but mostly herding cattle which is the most boring of them all. The games above this one had sections that were needlessly hard, but this one is needlessly tedious. Later in the game you have similar missions that don't even come close to capturing the excitement of the shootouts that this game has. I get that these missions were to set up character interactions, but I can't help but feel that there was a better way.
skip to 3:40 to get straight to the mission.
Number 2. Sonic the hedgehog: Water Levels
Sonic was such a huge hit on the Genesis back in the day for two reasons. 1. For tight platforming and 2. for large amounts of speed. I have to question the developers thought processes when it seems they tried to come up with a way to neuter both selling points. That's what we have with the water levels in what seems like every 2D sonic game. When underwater, not only is your speed dramatically reduced, it also makes jumps incredibly floaty, thus making platforming less than thrilling as well. If that's not bad enough, it makes dying easier than on land because rings will not save you when you run out of air which is based on a pretty short timer. All in all, when most people think of their favorite Sonic levels, I'm sure a water level never springs to their mind.
Number 1. Max Payne: Nightmare levels
With Max Payne 3 coming out this May, allow me to tell you about one of my favorite games; Max Payne. The game was incredible, especially for the time. The main hook for the game was its stylish, slow motion gunfights that resembled a john woo fight. There is one sequence though that brings the whole game to a halt. In one part of the game Max gets drugged and starts having nightmarish visions about his family that got murdered. You control Max as he works his through a distorted version of his house. Eventually he comes to a door that leads to a bottomless black pit. The only thing in this room besides the hole, is a trail of blood a couple inches across that has many branching paths. You actually walk on this trail and its not exactly linear. It's a confusing maze where if you barely walk too hard to the left or right, you'll fall off and have to start over again. It's tedious, boring, and drags on way too long. The other problem is this might not be so bad if Max didn't control like a tank. When he's in gun fights and diving around, there's no noticeable problem, but trying to make small movements on a razor thin path, is a whole 'nother story.