Doomworld's list of videogames that are just plain unfair

[8088mph]

What are some games that Doomworld finds unfair, whether you're a newbie or a pro? Games with memorization such as the I Wanna games, or quarter-munchers such as Ghosts and Goblins. Who knows, maybe even a competitive game such as Puyo-Puyo-Tetris? Go crazy and list them.

 

edit: this is entirely subjective, pls don't harass someone if they find a game too hard pls

Edited May 27 by 8088mph
minor grammar mistake

[Rykzeon]

Deus in Simulation mode with Hard difficulty. You need to resorting to save-scumming.

[Jayextee]

3 hours ago, 8088mph said:

Ghosts and Goblins

Y'know, I saw the topic title and before I even clicked I thought to myself "someone's going to mention GnG, and so help me if I don't riot over it".

Guess I won't riot today. GnG's absolutely learnable and there's not enough RNG to consistently spoil a run when you have. It's tough, yes. Unfair? No.

[Kinsie]

 

[Master O]

6 hours ago, 8088mph said:

What are some games that Doomworld finds unfair, whether a newbie or a pro? Games with memorization such as the I Wanna games, or quarter-munchers such as Ghosts and Goblins. Who knows, maybe even a competitive game such as Puyo-Puyo-Tetris? Go crazy and list them.

 

 

 

Did I mention this game is 10 levels long?

Edited May 14 by Master O

[8088mph]

8 hours ago, Jayextee said:

It's tough, yes. Unfair? No.

The thing is that it's some blank slate choices to hopefully give someone inspiration, I haven't even played Puyo-Puyo Tetris or beat an I Wanna, it's not my personal selection.

[Jayextee]

Ah, gotcha. I mean, I wouldn't even call PPT unfair personally; but I can see how people would if there's a massive skill gap between them and their opponent.

Anywho. Fighting games in general are unfair by the very nature of combos (you mean because an opponent managed to hit you once, they get free reign to keep doing so? BULLSHIT XD); especially unbreakable ones. It's a large part of their appeal tho IMO (ergo, not a complaint).

[Master O]

1 hour ago, Jayextee said:

Ah, gotcha. I mean, I wouldn't even call PPT unfair personally; but I can see how people would if there's a massive skill gap between them and their opponent.

Anywho. Fighting games in general are unfair by the very nature of combos (you mean because an opponent managed to hit you once, they get free reign to keep doing so? BULLSHIT XD); especially unbreakable ones. It's a large part of their appeal tho IMO (ergo, not a complaint).

 

On the subject of unfairness in fighting games:

 

* What Is SNK Syndrome?

* Beating SNK Syndrome in Art of Fighting 1 and 2

* Beating SNK Syndrome in Fatal Fury 1, 2, and Special

* Beating SNK Syndrome in Samurai Shodown 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 5 Special

* Beating SNK Syndrome in World Heroes 1, 2, 2 Jet, and Perfect

* Shoryugame Youtube Video -- The Top 10 DUMBEST A.I. / CPU Characters In KOF

 

KOF = King of Fighters

 

Each one of the above reddit links has videos for beating SNK Syndrome in early KOF games as well.

 

The comments section in Shoryugame Youtube Video -- The Top 10 DUMBEST A.I. / CPU Characters In KOF is full of ways to cheese the CPU characters.

Edited May 14 by Master O

[DynamiteKaitorn]

Muse Dash - Any 8+ star difficulty track. Some songs go so mental with the amount of notes you need to hit even the autoplay mode looks like it is having a seizure trying to keep up with the game.

 

Amid Evil - From the devs that gave us the amazing Dusk comes a game that happily makes the lowest difficulty a rage-fest. Seriously... how the hell did they screw up the balancing THIS badly?

 

Steven Universe Save/Unleash the light - a cute 2D game about a kids TV show being hard? Yeah, weirdly enough these two are quite unforgiving games! I've completed Unleash and nearly finished save but the biggest issue is the fact enemies can very easily keep up with your character's stats. Unless you grind for near maximum stats, be prepared for your characters to be KO'd a lot.

 

Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion - So from the silly squid-game where you paint the floor and walls with colourful ink we get the DLC that, jokingly, is nicknamed the "Dark Souls of Splatoon". To date this is the only singleplayer campaign of Splatoon I've never completed all the levels for (not counting 3's After Alterna).

[Sonikkumania]

Action 52 for NES.

[ALilGrayBoi]

Most retro arcade games. Don’t know if I just suck at them but I barely last 6 minutes. Especially on fighting games

[Chow Yun Thin]

Well yeah, that makes sense according to arcade owners. Can't have the players playing too long without putting in more quarters. Some were pretty notorious quarter munchers either by design *glares at the Gauntlet games* or tweaking the difficulty/price per game.

[heliumlamb]

i am always fascinated to see people equating arcade design principles with unfairness. i can understand why people may have the knee-jerk "this game is a shitload of fuck!" reaction to getting absolutely bodied by a tough game, particularly if they're more accustomed to cinema-inspired home console design principles, especially from PS2 era onward. the efficient delivery of 100% dense video game in 5-40 minute intervals has, for the most part, become a lost art with the endangerment of public spaces to play (and often fail at) skill-based video games housed in industrial-grade machines on a per-credit basis. in such an environment, the time a player spends on a machine is minimized by design, dependent on player skill and/or game design. eg: the outrun 2 special tours timer will not go over 5 minutes and 30 seconds, crossing the finish line in daytona usa's dinosaur canyon happens in around 4 minutes, and most shooting games take an average of 30 minutes to clear/loop. even more egregious is when folks jump to decrying all arcade games as mindless, anything that your mind is put toward is by its very nature not "mindless". some are genuinely poorly designed however, but even the most cruel/undercooked of video arcade games still have to retain some element of skill-based play in order to distinguish themselves from their highly-regulated immoral, chainsmoking, whiskey snorting uncle. if you want to look at genuinely mindless and unfair "quarter munchers" where skill is not requisite for success, look at most ticket redemption games, coin pushers, pre-flipper pinball tables or literal slot machines.

 

only person i've ever seen 1CC multiple slot machines was Dougie from Twin Peaks: The Return, and even then it was not without some sort of assistance (call for help).

so, go ahead and put/keep me on your "bozo" "doofus" contrarian shitlist for this if you so desire, but i feel a video's game is at its most unfair when it makes itself easier and trivializes its difficulty after repeat failure states. wii(u)/(3)ds era nintendo was the worst about this, in my experience, with their New Jumping Man Siblings and Jumping Man 3D World/Land games in particular. let my failures be my failures, something to learn from! even games that balance themselves against the player for doing well (yagawa my beloved) are still fair in their own way, often with a completion state that is acquired through obtaining skill and knowledge (which is often obtained through failure). as the cart for the shitty NES euro-port of toaplan's sky shark reads, "Nobody Ever Said It Would Be Easy".

Edited May 22 by heliumlamb
formatting disaster

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

On 5/15/2024 at 5:47 AM, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Amid Evil - From the devs that gave us the amazing Dusk comes a game that happily makes the lowest difficulty a rage-fest. Seriously... how the hell did they screw up the balancing THIS badly?

I never finished AE (didn't really care for it tbh) but I don't remember it being unfair or anything, and I was on at least whatever the medium difficulty is. Does it get like that later on or something? Amid Evil isn't made by the developers of Dusk, it was made by a team called Indefatigable. Both games are published by New Blood, though.

[Sonikkumania]

3 hours ago, Chow Yun Thin said:

Well yeah, that makes sense according to arcade owners. Can't have the players playing too long without putting in more quarters. Some were pretty notorious quarter munchers either by design *glares at the Gauntlet games* or tweaking the difficulty/price per game.

This is what I thought too.

I borrowed this Chinese hack console which emulates also MAME gamez and their difficulty is overwhelming.

Mostly nerfed for home console releases.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

14 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

I never finished AE (didn't really care for it tbh) but I don't remember it being unfair or anything, and I was on at least whatever the medium difficulty is. Does it get like that later on or something? Amid Evil isn't made by the developers of Dusk, it was made by a team called Indefatigable. Both games are published by New Blood, though.

Mainly the final 2-3 chapters become unreasonably brutal.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

18 minutes ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Mainly the final 2-3 chapters become unreasonably brutal.

Ah, I see. I just couldn't get into the game, even though it's well made. I think it's the art style or something, it just feels too abstract and too sterile at the same time. I always planned on trying it again some day, so I appreciate the warning. I'm guessing that frustrating AE combat probably isn't going to be as enjoyable to me as frustrating Blood combat.

[Noiser]

On 5/14/2024 at 9:03 AM, Kinsie said:

(video)

You can't beat Lou Reed, that's factually correct!

[tzen]

Snipertown in MoHAA is sadistic

[vanilla_d00m]

The first Parasite Eve game.  The final boss… I have never save/load state somany times in my life, game takes the cake for me.  Never playing that game again.

[InfinitePossiblities]

......Dr. Jekyll and Hyde for NES. Seriously, watch AVGN play it.

[cybdmn]

Mortal Kombat II. The game is cheating.

[CravenCoyote]

To this very day, I still cannot beat the first level of Darwin 4078

[yakfak]

i made a demo for a puzzle game a few years back and now I can't remember how to beat the second level anymore \o/ so I nominate Stabby Hellion

but honestly, competitive anything looks almost impossible to me. I've beaten a fair number of excruciatingly precise turn-based RPGs with opaque levelling systems and/or dungeons where you have to do a very particular, very daft thing, but in the end, all that kind of thing is casual gaming and I fear people with reflexes

[Grain of Salt]

"Same! Same! Same!" and Tatsujin Ou spring to mind, although I've never seriously attempted them. They're both Toaplan shmups with checkpoints, so if you die you restart like 30 seconds earlier in the level, often extremely underpowered for the enemies in that area, and now much slower than you were before dying -- and, due to this, one death can easily lead to several more, even for the maniacs who do make serious attempts at these games. And iirc they're both cases where a tester told the devs that it was too easy and the devs bumped up the difficulty more than was wise (or maybe it's just samesame where this happened...?). Actually tbh you're spoiled for choice for [arguably] unfair games if you look at arcade shmups. Arcade shmups are like the gaming equivalent of those islands where a species evolved to become much bigger because they had a really specific environment that was unlike their mainland counterparts.

 

Same means shark btw. It's a sequel to Flying Shark, and the title is basically "shark! shark! shark!"

 

More recently I attempted to play Contra 3 and didn't enjoy it.

Edited May 23 by Grain of Salt

[DoomPlayer00]

Rayman 1. Very difficult platformer that requires patience, memorization of level layouts and good luck at times. Add to the fact limited lives, required leaps of faith in certain stages and backtracking (You need 100% completion to beat the game). Still haven't beat the game legitimately after nearly 20 years.

[Master O]

 

The Red Hulk (with an inescapable homing missile) and Class 1 Driller enemies will almost single-handedly be 99% of your lost lives in this game.

Edited May 23 by Master O

[Daytime Waitress]

On 5/23/2024 at 8:39 PM, Grain of Salt said:

"Same! Same! Same!" and Tatsujin Ou spring to mind, although I've never seriously attempted them. They're both Toaplan shmups with checkpoints, so if you die you restart like 30 seconds earlier in the level, often extremely underpowered for the enemies in that area, and now much slower than you were before dying -- and, due to this, one death can easily lead to several more, even for the maniacs who do make serious attempts at these games. And iirc they're both cases where a tester told the devs that it was too easy and the devs bumped up the difficulty more than was wise (or maybe it's just samesame where this happened...?).

 

Yuge has said that Same3's brutality was the result of pressure from arcade operators, not just Toaplan overcompensating for player skill (vid link timestamped; quote will pop up after a couple of seconds of preamble/context from Junkie). I'm as in the dark on Tatsujin Ou as you, though: it appeared to be a bit of a fuck you to hyper skilled players lmao.

 

But yeah, Same3 and Tatsujin Ou always stand out for me because they stand out for Toaplan as a whole. Up until that point, they had really, genuinely nailed an ethos of equipping players with the skills they needed to overcome obstacles, as this quote shows they intended:

 

Quote

"We aimed for a kind of game in which, when a player died and wondered what killed him, he would be able to say to himself “Next time I should do this.”

 

They demonstrated it in games like the original Tatsujin/Truxton and especially Hishouzame/Flying Shark/Sky Shark. In both of those, if you didn't take a hit, you'd be rewarded with greater firepower; but when you died, you'd be placed back a little ways and given a chance to recover. You'd be powered down, but care and attention was paid to where and how you restarted - number and types of enemies you'd encounter, and number and types of powerups you'd receive to combat that. They were extremely fair, and after having put more time into HSZ lately, I think it might possibly be the platonic ideal of fairness.

 

But Same3's original version just amped everything up to the point of irritation. If the density and intensity of projectiles weren't enough, you also had to contend with a power-up system similar to that of Kyuukyoku Tiger/Twin Cobra, where you'd spend an inordinate amount of time dodging weapon swaps to not kill your upgrades. And as I said above, Tatsujin Ou just wanted you dead - it's regarded, with good reason, as one of the hardest shmups by people who regularly spit out 1CCs on difficult games.

 

I feel like I'm cherry-picking by talking about Toaplan, because they were a shining exemplar of "best practice", but I feel like discussing them is important when getting back to what Lamby said above:

 

On 5/22/2024 at 3:12 PM, heliumlamb said:

i am always fascinated to see people equating arcade design principles with unfairness. i can understand why people may have the knee-jerk "this game is a shitload of fuck!" reaction to getting absolutely bodied by a tough game, particularly if they're more accustomed to cinema-inspired home console design principles, especially from PS2 era onward. the efficient delivery of 100% dense video game in 5-40 minute intervals has, for the most part, become a lost art with the endangerment of public spaces to play (and often fail at) skill-based video games housed in industrial-grade machines on a per-credit basis. in such an environment, the time a player spends on a machine is minimized by design, dependent on player skill and/or game design. eg: the outrun 2 special tours timer will not go over 5 minutes and 30 seconds, crossing the finish line in daytona usa's dinosaur canyon happens in around 4 minutes, and most shooting games take an average of 30 minutes to clear/loop. even more egregious is when folks jump to decrying all arcade games as mindless, anything that your mind is put toward is by its very nature not "mindless". some are genuinely poorly designed however, but even the most cruel/undercooked of video arcade games still have to retain some element of skill-based play in order to distinguish themselves from their highly-regulated immoral, chainsmoking, whiskey snorting uncle. if you want to look at genuinely mindless and unfair "quarter munchers" where skill is not requisite for success, look at most ticket redemption games, coin pushers, pre-flipper pinball tables or literal slot machines.

 

only person i've ever seen 1CC multiple slot machines was Dougie from Twin Peaks: The Return, and even then it was not without some sort of assistance (call for help).

so, go ahead and put/keep me on your "bozo" "doofus" contrarian shitlist for this if you so desire, but i feel a video's game is at its most unfair when it makes itself easier and trivializes its difficulty after repeat failure states. wii(u)/(3)ds era nintendo was the worst about this, in my experience, with their New Jumping Man Siblings and Jumping Man 3D World/Land games in particular. let my failures be my failures, something to learn from! even games that balance themselves against the player for doing well (yagawa my beloved) are still fair in their own way, often with a completion state that is acquired through obtaining skill and knowledge (which is often obtained through failure). as the cart for the shitty NES euro-port of toaplan's sky shark reads, "Nobody Ever Said It Would Be Easy".

 

I can't take credit for it, but I have heard this summed up more succinctly elsewhere as the difference between "made to make money" and "made to be a swindle", and there is an absolute gulf there. We're gifted with plenty of contemporaneous and retrospective interviews detailing the struggles that devs had riding the balance between profitability and play-time, between their own expectations of difficulty contra players' abilities, and of outright compulsion from arcade operators and publishers. But I feel that as the relevance of arcades drifts even further into the past, we're only going to see more revisionism from generations that never experienced them, or can only come into those games in entirely decontextualised situations, like the knock-off console full of warez mentioned further up in this thread.

 

And maybe it will eventually boil down from "some ancient shit was predatory and primitive and not worthy of your time" to "all ancient shit was primitive and predatory and not worthy of your time". Which is perhaps understandable from a wider, epochal perspective - but fucking wild to be discussing on this board of all places.

 

Spoiler

Also, despite it being home to Schrodinger's Hitbox, I'mma still occasionally boot up Sky Shark's NES port on the M2 rerelease just because Tim Follin is a beast.

 

On 5/23/2024 at 4:48 PM, CravenCoyote said:

To this very day, I still cannot beat the first level of Darwin 4078 

 

First I'm hearing that the dude from Guniw Tools made a game, so thanks for the rec, I guess!

Edited May 25 by Daytime Waitress

[MrFroz]

On 5/23/2024 at 12:55 AM, vanilla_d00m said:

The first Parasite Eve game.  The final boss… I have never save/load state somany times in my life, game takes the cake for me.  Never playing that game again.

 

I'm also stuck at the final boss, it's rather weird because up until that point the game is kinda easy.

[Mr. Freeze]

Resident Evil 3 Remake, Inferno difficulty, Final Boss Nemesis. Absolute bullshit fight, took me an entire day to beat.