Stage Select:
1. The Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. It's not the objectively worst level in gaming. I could dig up some real bullshit levels from obscure games dating from the dawn of home video games. It's more that it was a weak part of what was otherwise arguably the single most amazing game of the entire generation. Ocarina of Time didn't have great swimming mechanics, which would have been fine except that this level threw the game's issues with swimming into glaring relief, and Nintendo did a great job with swimming two years earlier with Super Mario 64. Having to switch between the Iron Boots and the regular boots was tedious. Having to repeat the level's mechanics because you missed something was tedious. Putting both of these issues together... ugh.
2. Riovanes Castle at the end of Final Fantasy Tactics Chapter 3, where you had a one-on-one boss battle locked behind a point-of-no-return save. If you weren't prepared properly and also didn't have a backup save on the world map before you started this sequence of battles, you were screwed. As in, you would have to start the game over from the very beginning screwed. The third battle in this chain of battles is no better. You have to protect a AI-controlled girl from being killed by two demon girls with lethal attacks. Unless you positioned your party in a certain way, it was very possible that your protectee would run right towards the demon girls and get herself killed before your first playable character even had a chance to act, thereby getting a game over through no fault of your own. The Angry Video Game Nerd should do an episode on FF Tactics. As with Ocarina of Time, FFT is a great game with one section where they made groin-grabbingly baffling design choices.
3. Any racing or stealth section in GTA games, especially since the fail state for those is a complete failure of a long mission. It's not that I object to stealth or racing, per se, but GTA's engine isn't really built around either one. The cars all handle like old shopping carts, and stealth generally doesn't work great in games that around built around it as heavily as Metal Gear or Splinter Cell.
Cage Match:
I'm not a fan of either of these things. I'm just going with GTA V because it's frankly amazing that Rockstar has pretty much coasted on this one game for almost ten years, in part by turning it into an online casino. Except that a real casino is actually required by law to pay out cash every once in awhile. Who can blame them? It still sells more copies every year than most entire franchises and most publishers do. And I used to get the appeal of these games. GTA IV bored me to death and kind of put me off of the series, though. Also not interested in the Florida retread that the next game is going for. I've always thought that if Rockstar wanted to be truly gutsy, they'd set GTA in Texas and let their imaginations run wild with what Texas gives them to work with parody-wise.
But hey, RDR 2 has horses so realistic, they randomly take dumps, and you can see their scrotums swelling and contracting. That's why you're paying $1600 for a shiny new RTX4090, after all.
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