It’s entirely possible for creators to miss the target when it comes to game design, such as by omitting a vital mission lesson, leaving out a crucial door, or making an enemy too powerful for players to overcome. These annoyances can permeate the whole game, even influencing the creators’ decisions. While the games themselves may not be terrible, they often fail to satisfy the very players they were designed for. These 10 games will give you a taste of insanity if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be at your wit’s end.
FIFA 22
Usually, the FIFA series is on the up-and-up, with just enough tweaks to gameplay and squads each year to keep fans coming back for more soccer action. An alleged dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) mechanism was created to make certain players on the pitch fail so that games would be closer after you joined online play. Expect your entire squad to trip over their own feet while your goalkeeper chases butterflies if you’re ahead in an online battle until the score is level. It doesn’t matter how good your team is, they’ll always mess up when they’re up in the game. Users are noting strange incidents that magically tie up the matches, and Electronic Arts keeps denying reports that DDA (which they filed a patent for in 2016) is active specifically in FIFA Ultimate Team.
King’s Quest V
While you look at some of the first games, like King’s Quest 5, you might wonder how we ever managed to finish them when the industry was still in its infancy. Without any hints from the story or the characters, the player would be completely lost until consulting the gaming oracle in their area. Many consider King’s Quest 5 to be a low point in Sierra’s glory days due to its several late-game locks that may activate if certain early-game situations weren’t handled precisely. There was no warning that the player had been soft locked until well into the game, thus forcing them to start over with a new guess.
Kid Chameleon
The premise of Kid Chameleon is brilliant: a virtual reality game’s artificial intelligence boss starts kidnapping players, and it’s up to him to rescue them. Maybe you’re interested in checking it out on Steam if the premise reminds you of the first season of Sword Art Online. Only until you find that there are 103 levels in the game and you can’t use passwords, save your progress, or even quit. You either win or lose in one swift motion of playing it. The game’s modern incarnations have the good sense to include an external saving system, but that doesn’t make up for the game’s first disappointments on the Sega Genesis. The game was fantastic, but it didn’t value players’ time very highly.
Superman 64
It’s neither an airplane nor a bird; rather, it’s a superhero in mortal peril who needs to locate something substantial to crash into several times before it will stop. Superman 64 was a game based on a video game that was actually titled Superman: The New Superman Adventures but was labeled by the public as something else due to its sluggish controls. One may argue that this game is one of the worst ever made, yet the situation really amps up the tension. As Superman: The Animated Series smashed television ratings in that era, hundreds of thousands of new fans flocked to this game the day it was released. Shortly after the game’s initial release, Titus Interactive lost its Warner Bros. license.
Rick Dangerous
In 1989, the Atari and MS-DOS could run a version of Spelunky called Rick Dangerous. On a mission to find a vanished tribe in the Amazonian jungle, Rick Dangerous finds himself embroiled in the usual array of adventure-driven case-spelunking, which has been noted by some critics as being frighteningly close to Indiana Jones. That was great until you started playing and had to walk excruciatingly slowly to avoid a slew of surprise traps and devices. Players inched across the screen slowly the world’s slowest adventure, as Rick Dangerous gradually transformed into Rick Cautious. There was very little time to respond to the traps, so taking it gradually was the best strategy.
The Simpsons
Although it’s probably cheating to point out that arcade games are supposed to be frustrating in order to keep quarters dropping into their trays, The Simpsons took it to an absurd extreme. In this four-player brawler, players battled a wide variety of foes all throughout Springfield in an effort to rescue Maggie from Smithers. Sadly, nearly every foe could stun-lock players, so taking even one hit could mean instant death. Some boss encounters required numerous quarters if players were having a particularly hard time of it, and the frequency of this mechanic grew naturally as players drew closer to the end.
Takeshi’s Challenge
Takeshi, the main character of the Japanese manga that inspired the game Takeshi’s Challenge, was the inspiration for one of the most outlandish video games ever made, published by Taito. Enjoy the Game Over panels whenever you fail to hit the correct NPCs, master the right instruments, or divorce your wife at the right time as you follow the daily life of a salaried office worker as he hunts for riches. Getting the dreaded Game Over screen every time you try to find the treasure is fun, because most of the time players won’t know where a failure occurred.
The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble
A post-apocalyptic point-and-click adventure in which most of the text is designed to be illogical. Not in the sense that it’s written in a foreign tongue, but rather because the creators deliberately made up their own language and refused to provide any additional context through in-game glossaries or anything like. This is a challenging game in both its riddles and its narrative, as both require a significant leap of reasoning. This ruins what could have been an interesting and unusual experience by forcing the player to waste time trying every imaginable made-up term on an NPC whose dialogue makes as little sense as their own.
Dwarf Fortress
Famous games typically excel because their designers zeroed in on a handful of core gameplay elements. That was a huge opportunity squandered by Dwarf Fortress, which instead chose to try to simulate as much life as possible without taking into account the fact that most people would benefit from any sort of user interface or instruction. It should be made obvious that one should not spend many hours poring over guides, tutorials, and walkthroughs before playing Dwarf Fortress. You won’t get very far before your clan collapses, and you’ll be frustrated that you couldn’t fulfill a simple mechanic, like making farmable soil below earth, to keep everyone alive. When you get it, it’s amazing, but getting there is a lot of work.
Diablo Immortal
Famous for driving home the point that free-to-play games are frequently the most expensive titles known to humanity, Diablo Immortal is the mobile adaptation of the Diablo franchise. You can’t reach the late game without spending hundreds of dollars on microtransactions that, at most, give you a chance to acquire the necessary items. It’s like to gambling, only there’s nothing concrete to show your partner afterward. Blizzard has made back all of their initial investment and more because to the rise of mobile gaming and the resulting distancing of players from studios and publishers.
