S/D: when Games stress you out

i have a soft spot for the original TR. i got stressed out at the last level, when my cheapass memory card lost all its save info.

TMNT for NES underwater level had both impossible difficulty and the aforementioned timing, and is one of the all time most stressful.

I find very high difficulty levels more stressful than timing. Particularly ones where a very small fuck up punishes you very badly (also why I am not a Rogueist).

contrast this with more of an exasperated "You know what? FUCK this" kinda reaction from certain set pieces in something like "Dino Crisis."

Games with high difficulty levels don't stress me out, they just turn me off, and then I turn them off. This is the same whether it's a result of me being dumb (Advance Wars 2) or the camera making it impossible to play (X-Men Legends).

inside the whale in ocarina of time

only two games I can remember transcend the usual frustration:

ICO (not wholly); and,

resident evil 4 (not wholly)

Don't the GTA games have some annoying escort missions? Or are those "escort" missions?

I think Laura hit the nail on the head here as to how I feel about a lot of games and films, but there are some suspense games and horror films which I love and I'm not sure what makes them different to others.

Some of the time a bit of fear and suspense can be good to help me forget about things which would be going through my head if I weren't playing the game, and give me something else to worry about. The Resident Evil series, for instance, I love because it's scary and tense enough to make me forget about anything that's bothering me, but also chilled out enough to let me take things at my own pace without having to worry about strict time limits and the like.

I'm not really a big fan of racing games because you'll have the stress of having a time limit or being behind hanging over you for a whole race, which really raises the stress levels, but some games pull this off so well. The Sega AM2 arcade games like OutRun and Super Hang On have the perfect balance of time limit vs playability because the sections are so short that if you piss it up too badly it'll be over soon enough not to bother you much. There's also something about them which seems to remind you that it's only a game, and the fun is in the playing rather than the winning.

This is a bit of a ramble, as I know I have something really appropriate to say about this thread, but I don't know what it is at all.

"get there already"

Leisure Suit Larry and the other early Sierra games are guilty of this too, with his ridiculously slow walking from one point to another.

Ultimate Hulk is occasionally frustrating in that the military are always chasing after you and if you fight back they send a giant posse of robomen to try to kill you, but then again, that's a fairly realistic depiction of the life of the Hulk. LEAVE HULK ALONE PUNY MEN etc.

xpost - Police Quest II. Halfway through and you die because your sights are off, if you haven't been run over first.

GTA was a special case in this area. It managed to stress me out like no other game could, I'm talking about GTA3 and Vice City mainly, but the rewards and wanting to see the rest of the game were just so over-powering I still remained addicted.

There must surely be ways to make games long-lasting and satisfying without making them insanely frustrating and difficult?

D: The end bossfight in MGS3. (I just realized that works on two levels, I hated both "The End" and The End Boss.) The End was awesome conceptually, and apparently there are ways to skip it, won't spoil 'em. I didn't have any light-coloured camouflage at the end of the game and died for days on end until I would just switch off in frustration. I stopped playing for three weeks, realized that if you used L1 you could move while shooting (something not very useful for most of the game), and beat it in 5 minutes.

Great game, horrid fights.

Also escort or preserve your vehicle in any game is shit. c7n puts it so much better than I could.

Car Driving Lessons (getting gold):
Parallel parking
burn and lap
city slicker
and the one where you had to roll in mid air over some cars and land

Zero:
shooting down the rc planes

NRG mission on San Fierro

Car Street Race 'Freeway' (on Los Santos)

Trucking, the final mission

Stress missions:

Mad dogg's House - took me the most tries of any mission. Only passed it when I redid whole game with new controller.

NRG - Have failed so many times. Ditto BMX and Chilliad.

City Slicker - Never got gold in the schools. Never saw the point really. Bike school was surprisingly easy!

Starting Gang wars and then the police start on you. Bastards.

Funnily enough, I can't remember individual missions that well. To me the problem really is the racing, I don't like the whole pressure thing ;)

If I could go back I'd like to do the one in Area 69 again and the russian mafia one with Smoke; basically any mission where you got to shoot the living shit out of things. Nice.

Underwater section with the moving platforms. Swim, swim. Get pushed along and die. Restart. After a few times it asks if you want to switch to easy mode (will only affect combat)--well that's useful.

The levels I hate the most are what I call 'glug glug' levels, where you have to swim somewhere and you have limited oxygen, and drown a million times. I like to take things slowly and explore every inch of a room before moving on, and the glug-glug levels force you to do just the opposite, and I end up feeling like there were lost atlantises full of treasures down there under the water that I missed because I had to swim by too fast.

MGS2 had the ultimate shitty combination: An Escort + Glug-Glug sequence

Ste a while ago we discussed Oysters, well you'll be happy to know I'm stuck on 49. Haven't a clue which one I missed. Blast you me on a couple of beers playing this weekend!

okay i'm up for that, maybe i can find the last couple of horseshoes and tags while i'm at it. i'm positive that tags are harder to see on the xbox version.

See the funny thing is I am 99% sure of where I've missed but when I go there it's not there but I know it's there somewhere even though I can't be sure I haven't been there before but then I'm nearly sure it must be there somewhere! Twould make a man weep...

Horseshoes were surprisingly hard for such a small area. Jetpack baby, it's the only way of doing it.

This game is supposed to be cartoony and fun, not frustrating!

I remember running out of shotgun ammo a couple times, but never out of handgun ammo.

(I'm just kidding, I only want to use the shotgun too.)

!!!

Ah, that takes me back! Yes, that mission was a bastard. I'm just about to get onto the second island in GTA:LCS though, and I'm looking forward to being back there. The thing with GTA games is that the world is so dynamic (read: random) that sometimes even fairly simple missions can COMPLETELY KICK YOUR ARSE REPEATEDLY just because you get unlucky a bunch of times in a row.

I think it's fooked on xbox, it constantly crashes on the save point on the second island.

Stress: Trying to start a gang war and biker cops appear out of nowhere. They're not on the radar and shoot enough of them and the choppers start! *grinds teeth*

bump

Curious what spawned that bump

thread hadn't been updated in 7 years, and I randomly found it linked to on another thread.

Ah I see

I used to yell profanities at Wipeout that were audible from the street.

The fucking boss fights in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Grrrr.

Anyone else feel intense stress/pressure when someone else is watching you play a one-player game?

i am usually fine with stress in games and i can enjoy it as part of the experience, but my kyptonite in this regard is platformers. somehow missing the same jump over and over on og super mario for ex used to send me ballistic, i think because it was so dumb and i wasn't enjoying it in the first place. this is def why i feel so strongly about any platformy elements in 1st person perspective, that is simply taking the piss

just getting started on Starcraft 2 multiplayer, and at the moment it's 20 mins of project management stress with about a minute of panic, then I surrender.

and this is against the easy computer, lord knows what it'd be like against someone who has a human emotion to beat me.

An old flatmate of mine once left a fist-sized dent in the kitchen wall after punching it in frustration when he kept getting killed during the fight against multiple Mear Gears at the end of MGS2. Good times.

Shitty platforming sections stress me out eventually, but they're part of a general thing where I dislike anything that seems like a dick move made by the developer and/or something the developer has put in or done to create artificial difficulty. Example: in the ancient 8 bit era top down castle explorer game Ravenskull, the second magic scroll you get kills you when you use it. That's all it does. It has no other purpose. No warning, no hint that this pointless item has been put in the game apparently just to mess with you. Also, same game, the limited area around your character shown by the top down viewpoint, which results in you having to learn about the position of enemies and hazards not by skill, but by blindly running into areas and getting killed over and over again.

I wonder which console had the most per capita destroyed controllers.

I'm thinking NES due to a combination of the age of most players and wack game design

Dark Souls

I only tend to get stressed or frustrated when I think the design of the game is unfair and that's what's keeping me from progressing. Dark Souls is a difficult game but it feels like each death is only a reflection of my own pitiful ineptitude. It's harsh but fair!

An old flatmate of mine once left a fist-sized dent in the kitchen wall after punching it in frustration when he kept getting killed during the fight against multiple Mear Gears at the end of MGS2. Good times.

i know right what a n00b lol

I'm thinking NES due to a combination of the age of most players and wack game design

even just trying to type out my experience of the last bit of metroid (the original NES version) is stressing me out. let's just say i had a missile crisis, and to gather up enough missiles required a bunch of backtracking and standing at an enemy generator for 20 minutes, waiting for it to poop out enemies that would randomly give me missiles. i was running late for a real life event but i really wanted to beat this fucking game. the whole thing just put me in a bad mood, and i didn't even beat the damn game.

persistent cause of stress: falling off ledges in 3D games. i am the king of pulling off an impossibly dexterous series of moves, slicing through the enemy, landing the rare triple-somersault turboboost special move, and then directly walking off the ledge 20 feet away to my death.

yeah my #1 example of this is puzzle platformers. once i get the concept of what i am supposed to do, dont fucking make me do it 70 times because you have it set to some sorta twitch response. fez and portal/P2 are brilliant at never doing this, uncharted and god of war are mostly ok but sometimes a tad infuriating, quantum conundrum is never getting played again in my house thanks to this.

Time missions. Always stressful. Urgh.

Stealth levels in games that don't have a proper stealth mechanic. Games like MGS are fine, but FPSes that are the standard 'shoot everything' type except for one stupid enforced stealth mission really stress me out.

yeah flawed stealth mechanics pretty much enforce me to turn a game off frankly.

I think it's because you're memorising a series of moves (go left here, duck behind the big crates, count to four to leave enough time for the guard to walk past) rather than actually playing the game, and that breaks immersion. Also it kind of reminds me of that thing kids do where they have to walk across a room with a tiled floor in a knight's move pattern, and that stopped being fun for me a looooooooooong time ago.

Race missions, escort missions, missions where AI is involved? These are all horrible.

Saints Row 3: great game, only missions left are escort and snatch. Total mares. I've only 9% left of last island, I don't think I'll get the rest.

Race Missions depend entirely on how good the driving physics are; SR3 and Sleeping Dogs are far better than GTA4 for driving, for example

GTA has always had horrible driving and vehicle controls, somewhat ironically. Who doesn't remember the legendary, awful mission from Vice City where you have to control an RC helicopter laying explosives across a building?

That would be the point where I quit San Andreas and never picked it up again

gta driving is great u nubs