1 yr. ago • 98%

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

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.

91 comments

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.

29
- 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.
  
  2
- Or you only had the shareware? Back then I thought doom was only episode 1.
  
  1
I beat it as an adult but as a kid could never beat the Lion King video game. Spent hours on that game

21
- That game was not fair, so that's valid.
  
  10
Most NES games; those fuckers were TOUGH

20
- Dragon Warrior and Ninja Gaiden were some of the first NES games I owned. I had it rough.
  
  6
  
  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!
  
  5
  
  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.
  
  2
Battletoads

Earthworm Jim

Shit, I'm dating myself.

15
- Oh Jesus. Battletoads is a really good example. Man fuck that hoverbike level. Holy shit.
  
  6
- Fuck battletoads...
  
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- I'm with ya homie.
  
  The Peacekeepers
  
  Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage
  
  Bart's Nightmare
  
  4
- Earthworm Jim 😍🪱
  
  4
I don't know why but we had Myst and it never failed to annoy 8yr old me every time.

14
- The most frustrating thing is that you technically don't need to ever leave the original island to beat the game.
  
  4
  
  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
  
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Loved it but sucked

13
- 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.
  
  2
  
  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.
  
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  It came with it
  
  2
Commander Keen

11
- Shit yeah, that game is still hard!
  
  3
xcom 2

10
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 :)

9
Prince of Persia 3D

Age of Empires II
6
- 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!
  
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  Took me like 15 years on/off just to beat the campaigns on standard and some of those expansion campaigns are borderline bullshit
  
  2
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.

6
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.

6
Battletoads

6
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.

6
- 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.
  
  5
- Every base is a starter base until you put lights and concrete down.
  
  3
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!

5
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.

5
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.

5
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.

5
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 :)

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Permanently Deleted

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Lara Croft tomb raider on Play Station 1

5
Permanently Deleted

4
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

4
Sonic 2

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

4
- 2 is the only one I have finished but getting close on mania
  
  1
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.

4
Tetris.

4
- Was there an actual end? I just kept getting different space ships no matter how high I scored
  
  1
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.

4
Jazz Jackrabbit

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

4
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.

4
Rogue, never beat it, still pay it though...

4
- What's that? Some kind of rogue-like? /s
  
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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.

3
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.

3
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

3
When I was a kid: super pac man, tiny toons adventures

3
Wizardry 1, no save-scumming. I still have a go at it now and again.

3
Rayman. That thing got brutal ( to 10 year old me anyway).

3
- That game was so unforgiving. 10 continues would never fly in 2023.
  
  2
Nina Gaiden and adventures of Link on NES.

So damn difficult

3
I used to play a boatload of Street Fighter 2010. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_2010:_The_Final_Fight)

That game was and still is incredibly hard, but regardless I used to play it for hours at a time as a kid.

3
Super Mario World 3 and Castle of the winds.

3
- Mario World 3?
  
  2
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.

3
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.

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Donkey kobg country

3
ADOM

3
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

2
Super swift on the snes.

2
I’ve never beaten a video game 😞

2
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.

2
- 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
  
  4
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

2
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.

2
- 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.
  
  2
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.

2
- 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.
  
  5
  
  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.
  
  1
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. 😮‍💨

2
- 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
  
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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

1
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.

1
- 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.....
  
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I never did beat pitfall 2 on my own. I think my parents might still have the disc somewhere.

1
Heart of Darkness
Turok
Lion King
UFO Apocalypse

1
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.

1
Mario and Luigi dream team. Loved that game, but couldn't get past beef cloud.

1
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.

1

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