There's a trail of broken controllers and cracked CD cases that lead into Gamer Hell, and these frustrating moments are what nightmares are made of. Video games are the modern equivalent of The Wide World of Sports, encompassing the ecstasy of victory and the agony of defeat. Sometimes, however, it's not a question of skill or even luck, but just a matter of the game acting like a jerk. The most frustrating moments in gaming history often emerge from unexpected places such as bugs; while others are obvious, like the ubiquitous water level or hovering bats.
Now that video games have been with us for a couple of generations, almost everyone familiar with the medium, gamer or not, is familiar with the following not-so-great moments in gaming. The better part of this list is made up of specific moments in certain games, but most of them have comparable scenarios in others that make up the genre.
10 The Kaepora Gaebora Owl Won't Shut Up (Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)
The little adventure in the Kokiri Forest is cute, but it's little more than a tutorial for the real game. It's an epic moment when the player finally emerges from the dense forest into the light of Hyrule Field only to be stopped in their tracks just as things are getting good.
This is such a notoriously frustrating moment in gaming history that it spawned a million memes, each one another expression of extreme, and often hilarious, frustration. It can get even worse: Choosing "no" at the end of this spiel takes the player through the whole thing all over again.
9 Defeating The Yeti With A Pie Is An Obscure Puzzle With A Confusing Answer (King's Quest V)
In the 1990s, point-and-click games that featured puzzles or riddles as part of character progression were all the rage. This covered whole libraries of games like the Monkey Island series, the Myst games, and included virtually all of Sierra's most popular titles— among them the King's Quest franchise.
This particular game dates from 1990, and although a fairly early adventure game, it foreshadows how this genre went off the rails in later years. Usually, the puzzles in the games would have some sort of logical solution, but to up the ante, developers started to make the answers to the riddles more and more random. Not a single player who experienced this game was impressed with this silly and frustrating yeti who is impervious to nothing but a pie in the face. It's not even a pun, one of the more charming features of this franchise.
8 Trying To Get Those Combo Buttons Right Will Drive Anyone Crazy (Mortal Kombat)
It doesn't matter which Mortal Kombat game you pick up, this is always an issue, although some installments in the franchise are worse than others. In the early days, fewer buttons meant fewer cool moves but less confusion, which is one level of frustration.
Later games made this worse instead of better. The sequence of buttons got to be so intimidating that the payoff wasn't worth it anymore. The pendulum didn't swing back until developers found a balance between form— in this case, a more sophisticated control scheme (and more sophisticated controllers) that helped make the more complex sequences easier to pull off.
7 Guiding Natalya Through The Base Is The Worst Escort Mission Ever (GoldenEye 007)
The escort quest is nobody's favorite no matter what game you find it in, but this early version of one in GoldenEye 007 gave gamers a bitter taste of things to come. The difficulty curve in this game is one of the sources of negative criticism as it is, and this tricky escort quest fairly close to the beginning doesn't help.
The player has to escort Natalya through a segment of the game, and she has a bad habit of suddenly running into random directions and often into the line of gunfire. It's discouraging and time-consuming, to say the least.
6 The Jet-Ski Level Is A Glorified Memory Game That Requires Hours Of Practice (Battletoads)
Battletoads gets a mixed review as a whole, with some singing its praises for the creative designs and others complaining about the random controls. One thing everyone agrees on is how awful the jet ski level is.
Also known as the Turbo Tunnel, this is essentially one long memory game that you can only complete after hours of trial and error. It's one of the most boring and frustrating levels of any game, ever made, anywhere.
5 The Entire Blighttown Level Is A Frustrating Mess (Dark Souls)
It's not always the sewer or the underwater level that drives a player crazy. Sometimes it's a dungeon or a confined area like a house, but in this case, it's a town in Dark Souls. Blighttown is connected to a number of other areas of the game, so the player can't avoid it, and it's a frustrating place for a number of reasons.
Some players complain about the enemies that seem to pop out of the woodwork with no sign or warning, but there are other, even sillier pitfalls here, literally. Since the area is under a perpetual cover of darkness, and there are different platforms in Blighttown, players are apt to fall through gaps and holes that are hard to see. How stupid would it be to survive an onslaught of hostiles only to die by falling down a hole?
4 Escaping The Dream Sequence Is Almost Impossible With These Standard-Def Graphics (Max Payne)
It was an interesting concept, but the execution was too far ahead of its time given the technology that existed when this game was released in 2001.
The dream sequences were an intrinsic part of the plot and story of Max Payne, so the player just has to deal with them in order to progress. Even with decent control and better graphics, the narrow corridors and tiny pathways still would have been tough to get through, not to mention the fact that they took a game that was otherwise one pulse-pounding shootout after another and grinded it to a boring, tedious halt.
3 Everything That Happens In The Course of Any Given Race Can Result In Broken Controllers (Mario Kart)
There are few games more frustrating than Mario Kart, in particular Mario Kart 64. So why is it such a popular game, and why do people enjoy it so much? It seems like a contradiction, but it makes sense to gamers.
For every low in a game, there's also a dizzying high. That Blue Turtle Shell does suck when the player is in the lead, but how sweet is it to be the one to throw that brutal equalizer yourself? But when a player assaulted with a barrage of projectiles, one after another— especially on the home stretch just before the checkered flag of a 1st place finish that just became a 9th place finish— it's hard not to send one of those massive N64 controllers sailing through the air.
2 Lack of Bag Space Is The One Monster In The MMORPG That Remains Undefeated (World of Warcraft)
MMORPGs always had this issue, but what started as a joke in early games like Diablo quickly became a serious issue in World of Warcraft. It was more of an issue in Classic than Retail and was seen as another leveling problem that it was up to the player to solve instead of a design flaw to be fixed in later expansions.
This issue is frustrating on more of a curve since it's really when and how a player runs into this problem. When you're grinding in the wild and don't want to part with any of your precious items, that's bad enough, but when you're in a situation that requires haste, like in the middle of a raid with a time limit, it makes a player want to rip their own hair out.
1 Did You Forget To Save? (Any Game Before The Of Dawn Auto-Save)
Thank you, original Legend of Zelda, for giving gamers a save feature that they would consistently forget to use, and always at the most crucial times as Murphy's Law dictates. The gaming community rejoiced when the concept of saved games was introduced. Progress could be saved now, what possible downside could this have?
It was the ultimate Monkey's Paw wish. Games got longer and more complex, necessitating the need for saving games, but that means there's even more to lose when the player neglects this essential detail. It's one way to make an adult weep like a toddler and it's broken many a gamer.