I hate, hate, HATE not being able to finish a video game. I probably enjoy a strong narrative in a game more than any other aspect, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that being unable to reach the story's conclusion would frustrate me so much. It doesn't help that I'm not the world's most skilled gamer, but that is offset somewhat by the proliferation of multiple difficulty settings in most games these days. So it's a fairly rare occurrence these days that I find myself having reached a point in a given game wherein its demands truly are beyond my reach... therefore making those instances simply unbearable. Admittedly, YouTube can generally be counted to provide a video of the content I'm unable to access but as any gamer will tell you it's just not the same as beating the game yourself.
What follows is a brief tour of my personal gaming Hall of Shame, those shining examples of my incompetence and disappointment:
Phantom Dust - You're forgiven if you've never even heard of this one before. Phantom Dust was a very odd game that came out near the end of the original Xbox's life. Wikipedia describes it as well as I could: "a pseudo-card-based action/strategy game" set on a post-apocalyptic earth with a story about love, friendship, and manufactured reality told in a very distinctive art style. It was pretty crazy, and the story had enough twists and revelations that I was totally hooked... until I got to the multi-stage final boss and could not beat the damn thing after literally dozens of attempts. I read FAQ's, I watched videos... nothing could get me to grasp the strategy/manage the execution of that final sequence. Sure, I caught the ending cutscenes online a few years later, but they felt hollow being so separated from my actual experience with the game.
(Inside joke for fellow gamers: it was published by Majesco in the US, so I probably should have known it was cursed from the beginning.)
Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure - Yes, I'm putting a "kid's" game on this list. If you've played it, you know it's a surprisingly enjoyable and addicting brawler with a collectible figurine component. It had been an especially fun experience for me because my daughter and I played through most of it cooperatively, with her jumping out a few times to let me tackle some of the more awkward movement or combat sections alone. We had a wonderful time with it... right up until the final boss. There are a couple of special frustrations in this fight: first, any attempt has to begin at the beginning of a somewhat difficult dungeon; you can't just restart at the beginning of the boss fight. Second, a large portion of the fight is devoted to avoiding damage from large complex patterns of beams, projectiles, etc... in a game that has sub-par character movement to begin with. So, yes, this brightly colored, kid-friendly game as resulted in one grown man and one young girl being so frustrated they'd rather go outside and play. THE HORROR.
Brütal Legend - I wanted to love this game so badly. One of my favorite game developers in Tim Schafer. A role tailor-made for Jack Black's vocal talents. A wonderfully realized world that both laughed at metal's excesses while loving everything about them. Really, if you listed all the components of the game, I'd be over the moon about them all... except for the RTS stage battles. If Double Fine had left those out and just made an open-world action game with straightforward combat (like Darksiders would feature shortly thereafter), it would be one of my favorites of all time. Instead, I repeatedly ran into my absolute least favorite game play genre over and over again. Probably my biggest gaming disappointment ever.
There are a few others, but those make up the pantheon. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to consult GameFAQs...
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