What game did you play a ton of in the past, that you were never good enough to beat?

ericbomb@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 110 points –

My two:

Very cliché, I played Ocarina of Time a ton as a child, have memories of playing it both on N64 as a wee child and on game cube as a less small child. Never got past water temple even with the game guide.

Yu-Gi-Oh forbidden memories. Played the crap out of that game on play station, constantly playing on free play praying for the cards I would need to get further. I was never able to beat more than 1-2 of the high mages. Watching speed runs on the game it turns out I was never ever going to beat that game as a kid. The final 6 are just disgustingly brutal.

114

Pretty much all of them... I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.

Games were much harder when they only had a few kilobytes of space, the processing power of a cash register and you couldn't just casually search for a video walkthrough to tell you why you were terrible.

That's where the printed hint books came into place. Also, print magazines would attract tons of readers with walkthroughs. Also, many came with CDs full of demos. God, that was good!

Some of us hand-drew maps and wrote all that stuff down because the official hint books and magazines were all from another continent! And we liked it like that...

Or, at least, it was the norm and we had no other choice but to accept games were hard 😅

I have the same memories of playing the Commodore 64. I can't think of a single game I was any good at, but I remember playing the shit out of them.

Or you only had the shareware? Back then I thought doom was only episode 1.

I beat it as an adult but as a kid could never beat the Lion King video game. Spent hours on that game

Most NES games; those fuckers were TOUGH

Dragon Warrior and Ninja Gaiden were some of the first NES games I owned. I had it rough.

haha, I remember bugging my parents to subscribe to Nintendo Power, because they had a giveaway where if you subbed for like 2-3 years, you got Dragon Warrior for FREE. Like, new in box...I actually had two!

I guess that tells you everything you need to know about that game. They literally had to give it away. But I would have loved for a subscription to Nintendo Power.

Lol no way, it was awesome, and the battle music is now playing in my head

Yeah, they had to give it away. They barely sold 2 million copies!

I remember DW being really hard when I was a kid on my NES but I played it emulated on my phone a couple of years ago and it wasn't hard at all.

I don't know why but we had Myst and it never failed to annoy 8yr old me every time.

The most frustrating thing is that you technically don't need to ever leave the original island to beat the game.

Ha! I didn't even know that. Thanks to your comment and this thread, I'm gonna go and try to figure Myst out. Strategy is to think like a Vulcan. That should work, right? Lol

Battletoads

Earthworm Jim

Shit, I'm dating myself.

Oh Jesus. Battletoads is a really good example. Man fuck that hoverbike level. Holy shit.

I did that level so often that you could put in front of me now and I'd pass it.

The only way to beat it is muscle memory.

I'm with ya homie.

The Peacekeepers

Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage

Bart's Nightmare

Battletoads/Double Dragon wasn't too bad. They made that easier than the original battletoads.

Donkey Kong 64

Loved it but sucked

Huh. I could've sworn I never had an expansion pack, but now I'm wondering how I ever played / beat that game. A quick Google search says it was required and nearly capped usage of the additional 8MB, too. TIL.

The story I heard was that the game would crash on the standard N64 hardware, but it worked fine with the extra memory that the dev kit ran. They couldn't figure out why the extra memory made a difference since it wasn't actually using the full amount anyway, but including the expansion pak was an easy solution, so that's what they did.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Absolutely loved that game. I played it constantly. Even when i got a new game, i would always go back to that cursed game. I don't even remember how far i got, but i did not got far at all.

I had to cheat on that one. Never could figure out the planetarium part.

Daggerfall. I played that game to death and didn't even make it past the third or fourth quest.
Eventually I'd give up and just wander off to do whatever I felt like. I must have visited every major city and country, but never set foot in one of those annoying dungeons :)

Majoras mask

Oh I didn't play that until i was an adult, but that sounds like a nightmare as a kid without guides...

I was like 10 it was tough as nails lol barely made it anywhere

You mean 10 year old you wasn't able to tell when the solution to a puzzle was to do the puzzle wrong, get some information/piece of gear, then go back in time and do it properly with the new resources?

Or be able to tell when the reason you couldn't make progress was because you were supposed to show up on day 1 at noon, not day 2? Or because to be able to do a quest on day 3, you needed to do something on day 1?

Like it's a wonderful wonderful time travel game. Without a guide I don't understand how far anyone could have gotten.

I had no guides, but was about 14. A lot of trial and error

Oh man I bet! Especially for the ones that had to be done on day 3 with no speed up mechanic.

For me its factorio. I always start, get into problems, realize I fucked up the layout and am thinking 'better just start fresh'. So I have a couple hundred hours in the game, but I never completed it.

I mean I guess same with rim world and mound and blade warband 😅

But cmon now. All those games have a way to win, but winning isn't the point!

Mine craft is pretty similar where if someone says they have played 1k hours and never killed the ender dragon it's not like a skill issue. Just an inclination issue.

Every base is a starter base until you put lights and concrete down.

Sonic 2

I beat 1, 3 and & Knuckles, but never 2.

Played every sonic game, never managed to beat a single one. The field of view is just too small for the move speed! Same reason Donkey Kong country is impossible.

2 is the only one I have finished but getting close on mania

GTA 3 / Vice City. My brother had a PS2 and would let me play. I never bothered with the story / campaign, I just liked to wonder around, steal cars, and drive. I enjoyed using cheat codes to spawn tanks and get full wanted level and outrun the cops.

  • Prince of Persia 3D
  • Age of Empires II

Oh yeah some of those AOE2 campaigns were WAY too hard as a kid.

I play aoe2 now days and got considerably good, but there were a few where you basically just wanted to win via save scumming. Aoe2 DE is amazing and if you haven't checked it out it's worth looking at!

Took me like 15 years on/off just to beat the campaigns on standard and some of those expansion campaigns are borderline bullshit

I've beaten all of them on hard.

Lemme tell you, there is no borderline. They are bullshit and you must embrace the bull shit to win.

I remember one specific campaign I was stuck until I had the thought to tc drop the ai then won.

Then there was one where you had to like escort 5 different transport ships from the edge of the map to your base, and before each wave came you had to speed run to make a path. I saved after each successful wave so wouldn't have to start over after each fail.

Another one was like "no castles or walls allowed! This is about army" but they didn't block building bombard towers, so....

Woah man that's impressive. I've played through the HD campaigns (their DE versions) and currently am doing the DE campaigns. Everything on standard. I want to do it all on hard but I don't like losing so hard lol

I remember the 5 ships mission. I beat it by blocking the first ship in the starting area with my own ships, so it would never reach the destination. I then slowly constructed a base and defeated all enemies before eventually letting that first ship cross. I never thought about saving between each shipment lol. Would have helped me beat it the "right" way.

Maybe I should shift to hard difficulty. But based on what you say it seems like a lot of pain will be waiting for me that way

If I had thought of your method, I would have done that.

The save scumming method was painful. That mission broke me... and is also what I suggest to people do as a joke to mess with people.

All those old LucasArts games (Day of the Tentacle, LOOM, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, &c) and similar adventure games (Kyrandia, King's Quest, &c). My mother played all of them and beat them, and while I watched her play I never really managed to finish any of them without looking up guides.

Battletoads.

Not even doing a meme, that game was hard as fuck.

The Water Temple was a nightmare of a level. Easily the hardest point in the game. If you stick with it, the everything that comes after it seems relatively straightforward!

That being said, having finished the game multiple times many years ago, I played through Breath of the Wild then went back to Ocarina of Time, and it felt very dated. Lots of nostalgia, but the control system is that of a very primitive game by today's standard for open worlds.

As for your question though, The Lost Levels in the Super Mario Allstars game. I've never gone back to it after all these years, might be worth trying again now with fresh eyes :)

Jurassic Park SNES. Surprisingly for that era, I never considered actually reading the manual. I played and beat it a couple years ago, it's a gem.

I could never beat the Harry Potter games because there are parts where you need to trace certain symbols at a certain speed to learn a spell which are required to progress through the game, and trying to get both the hand dexterity and mouse dexterity to follow through is worse than button-mashing levels.

I'm currently trying to finish the 7th Saga. Every time I think I've made it farther then ever, I recognize something.

I'm also realizing there really wasn't much content in these old RPGs, just a lot of forced grinding.

Was obsessed with Pokemon...

Got to Victory Road

Never found out how the hell to leave Victory Road

RIP in Peace

Did not beat a Pokemon game till Gen 4

2 - Copy of game was stolen from me...

3 - Skipped this generation due to being bullied for liking Pokemon

4 - Beat Diamond!

Tazmania for the Sega Genesis. I didn't like the game all that much but I didn't have a lot of choice back then. I don't think I ever passed the mine stage.

Diddy Kong's Quest for the SNES. I always got stuck in K.Rool's Keep, got frustrated, took a break, forgot the game existed for a couple of weeks/months, and then started over from scratch when I realized that I wasn't used to the controls anymore.

Vagrant Story was extremely confusing for a kid that just started learning English as second language, but I really loved the character designs and tactical real time gameplay. Now I know there were several systems I didn't understand but also the game itself hides it from you like your weapon slowly switching it's damage type according to what you hit, and also the story is fantastic.

The original sonic the hedgehog! I could do green hills blindfolded, but the next zone (marble volcano or something) would always wreck me

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. My brother and I would play split screen, and we always hit a point where we had no idea where to go

What a game. Spies vs. Mercs was among the all-time greats in multiplayer.

This doesn't answer quite what you asked, but what comes to mind is The Legend of Zelda: The Adventure Of Link for the NES.

I had a Game Genie as a kid. And for some reason I could not get past the boulder to get out of the first overworld area.

It wasn't until quite a few years later that I figured out some of the Game Genie codes in the official Game Genie code book could have permanent affects on your save file. I had apparently gotten the hammer (which was what was required to break the boulder), but before breaking the boulder, I used a Game Genie code to swap the Hammer for some other item I wasn't supposed to get until later in the game. So, I was stuck without the ability to break the boulder.

More to what you were asking, The Adventure Of Lolo was a good example. I was pretty young when I first picked it up. Decided it was too hard, and basically never touched it again until adulthood. In adulthood, I loved it.

Hell yeah I had Lolo as a kid and me and my brother liked it but it was hard, dunno how far we got, ill have to find that game somewhere

Wizardry 1, no save-scumming. I still have a go at it now and again.

I'm not a gamer, but I got really into ff8 in high school. I tried a bunch of other rpg games back then too, but I could never beat them. I always got to a point where I wasn't strong enough to win a battle but didn't want to go back and grind, so I'd eventually give them up.

...not sure what that says about me as a person.

Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.

Never completed them, even with maps, POKE cheats for infinite lives etc.

I think the problem was you couldn't really save many games then, so you were always defeated by either dinnertime or bedtime.

I think the same probably applies to nearly every game I ever played on the ZX Spectrum, but those two I think I tried the most.

I came here to post exactly this. IIRC Matthew Smith said his playtesting rule was that, as long as he could successfully complete a room once, no matter how many attempts it took, it went in. Hardly surprising that doing the whole thing, even with infinite lives, was far beyond my eight-year-old self.

Magic Carpet was incredibly fascinating. A whole planet that you could explore and influence and even modify terrain on? Every kid's dream, even given proof by Minecraft's popularity 20 years later. Could never get past the first several levels though.

Finished the game recently after giving it another go, no wonder only the beginning is kid-friendly. The later levels are devilish puzzles in difficulty. If you do not figure out the exact sequence of actions necessary to solve them, you die! Their open-world nature is only a masquerade to trick you into complacency.

Sonic advance 2, I got good enough to beat all the stages but I never got enough SP rings to get a single chaos emerald

Most of them, I sucked at games in the pre-save era. I don’t remember if I ever got to 8-4 in Mario.

Obsessed with Legacy of the Wizard as a kid on my NES. I didn't even realize the goal was to get crowns until I revisited as an adult. I can still hum 5 or 6 different scores from the games soundtrack 30 years later.

Nina Gaiden and adventures of Link on NES.

So damn difficult

When I was a kid: super pac man, tiny toons adventures

Wild 9. Never beat it, but there's something magical about killing your enemies by smashing them back and forth against the walls and floor

None. If I enjoyed a game enough to play it a ton, I will eventually beat it. And not just beat it, but get 100% and all the achievements when possible.

The only games I played a ton but didn't beat are open world games that don't have a set objectives.

That's one way to tell us that you're probably not old enough to have played a good number of original NES games without emulator save states. People like to say that Soulslike games are hard, but some of those games were absurdly difficult.

I mostly played Zelda, various mario bros games and adjacent stuff. But there was a serious time investment into getting 100% runs on many of those.

Little Nemo, Castlevania 2 with anyone besides the pirate. Had to wait till highschool till I 'got good' enough forthe saturday morning cartoon games.

Sekiro and Demon's Souls.

The only two souls games I haven't beaten.

I haven't beaten them in the past, or the present as I continue to try and beat them. 😮‍💨

You got this. Only way to beat ishin is practice each stage until you got it down almost flawless, by the time you finish the fight you will feel like a god.I highly recommend the git gud YouTube channel as it explains what skills you need to build in order to win. You got this

The first two gothic video games. The first one started to crash when I entered a specific area and the second one I don't even know why I didn treat that one

Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Most Sonic games are easy, but Sonic 1 and 2 aren't. Actually, I've beaten it as Knuckles, but never as Sonic (therefore I've never beaten it as it was in it's original release,) I can't get past a specific jump in Wing Fortress Zone.

Minecraft is less that I'm not good enough and more that I get bored around the time I first get to the Nether.

i played a lot of wizard 101 when i was a kid but i dont think i ever got very far i think i just liked fighting the weaker enemies

Mario and Luigi dream team. Loved that game, but couldn't get past beef cloud.

Sega Game Gear Sonic 2. Had a boss that you had to beat with cannon balls that bounced at you down a hill. No instructions or clues, and no rings in the act to save you. Just don't die from the same balls.

Final Fantasy. My friend and I played it cooperatively, and we made our team four red mages. There was a mini boss in the final dungeon we kept getting destroyed by no matter how much we would go back and grind levels. We finally gave up. I couldn't beat Super Mario Kart either, but i didn't actually get to play that as much.

I got a black mage, white mage, red mage, monk combo to work as a kid. However.... it wasn't until recently that I found out that I didn't actually need to grind as much as I did, because I had no clue that the end of each dungeon had a warp back to the beginning, so I was making it from the entrance to the boss, and back out without the use of tents.....

Heart of Darkness
Turok
Lion King
UFO Apocalypse