The ending to the first Half-Life game. Maybe it's because it's so different from the rest of the game, but when it gets to that point I just stop playing.

Maybe they could've implemented space combat in a point & click adventuring kind of way? Don't ask me how, I'm not a game designer. ;-)

They could have done it through dialogue choices.

That's how point & click adventures turned into visual novels. :-P
(I guess it depends on the implementation)


I'm actually pretty open to many types of Adventure games ... but the "click to continue" kind is not my thing. I want more than the most minimal of 'interaction'...

That's where I started "save via console". It's tolerable, even good, with that. I actually loved that. :-)
Setting Cyberspace difficulty to lowest setting removed the auto-movement which I also found extremely annoying.

Never played Dark Forces myself, but I've watched a playthrough of the game, I know what you mean. :)

Oh, and let's add shitty bgm to the (sewer) list.

And in general, onother thing I hate are unskippable cut scenes.
Who thought a 30 min cut scene was a good idea right before a tough boss battle. I'd love to beat that person with a spoon over and over again... :/
*clears throat* Sorry, just had a Final Fantasy flashback.

Worse graphics because it was based on WiiU, balance is thrown out the door with inclusion of DLC in main campaign, technical issues. There are comparisons out there.

Metro 2033 - the part with the violent green slime. Right near the end of the game and they introduce something that weak.

What game has a 30 minute cut scene before a boss fight? The worst case I am aware of is a boss in Final Fantasy 10 that's proceeded by a 5 minute cut scene that a typical player will likely have to watch (at least) twice on their first playthrough.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Came for 4X, got the Tania puzzle levels.

Pirates! Gold: Naval attack on a fort. You almost always face headwind which elongates your capture of the city.

Are you only talking about the part where you have 10 bullets? Or everything starting from where you fight the heli from the ship? There are good parts between those but the free roaming like in the ship vs heli are gone.

Confession: The first time I had to fight FC1 from the start with the 10 bullets until the next save point, it was like 'Woah! WTF?!' Nowadays it's something I really like because I learned how to get it to the first check point. The completitionist in me regrets there is not enough ammunition to take care of every enemy past the broken gate.

30 minutes is a bit exaggerated I guess, but in Final Fantasy 10 I died during a later Seymor fight (multiple times) and the Yunalesca fight (again, multiple times) due to being underleveled.
All I remember is that I had to watch the cutscene/s prior to the fights a ffew times too many. :P

It's been over 10 years but Shadow Hearts, if I remember correctly, had similar lengthy cut scenes before bosses.

I could probably think of a few but I recently played XIII so that's on my mind. I was cruising along and generally having a pretty good time, even the insta-fail stealth sections didn't bother me. However the last boss fight in the game was such an extreme spike in difficulty that it almost made me dislike the entire game.

I'm certainly not amazing at video games, and that's ok, but that boss was a brick wall on normal difficulty and even when I finally beat it, I never felt like I had a good handle on how to actually fight the boss. It was made even worse by the checkpoint system saving before a lengthy ladder climb that I had to descend in order to reattempt the boss.

Honorable mention goes to the assassination mission in Freedom Fighters, the game works best when leading a small squad against entrenched enemies, so forcing a solo stealth focused mission in a non-stealth game was a misstep. Also, since I'm thinking of IO Interactive games, Hidden Valley in Hitman 2(The first Hitman 2, not the second Hitman 2)

The Yunalesca pre-fight cutscene is the one I timed, from Youtube videos, to be 5 minutes.

(Spoilers for the actual fight (not the cutscenes) follow.)

It's worth noting that being underleveled is not the only way to lose the Yunalesca fight. In particular, the following strategy could result in you losing the fight, at least in theory:
* Go in with a party ready to take on Penance, complete with celestial weapons and suitable armor (never mind the fact that I don't know if it's possible at this point, but let's ignore that issue), Note that the recommended armor for Penance does not include Ribbon, and it may or may not include Break HP Limit.
* Kill the first form in one attack.
* After Hellbiter, cure your party of Zombie. (Doesn't this seem like a sensible thing to do?)
* Kill the second form in one attack.
* Watch as your party gets wiped out by Mega-Death. (Remember, you don't have Ribbon, because it's not needed for Penance.)

(Granted, this strategy assumes things you can't have at that point, and it might not make sense to bother curing Zombie when you're that powerful, but this gets the point across.)

By the way, Final Fantasy 5 and the DS version of Final Fantasy 4 both have a part with a long cutscene and a boss fight (that you could easily lose rather quickly), but at least the boss fight comes *before* the cutscene in both cases. (With that said, the FF5 example includes a story battle where a softlock is possible.)

I was loving Portal up to a level that I simply could not pass. It had a button up in the air that I had to press and I tried for probably hours trying to press it. I eventually pulled up a youtube video showing someone successfully doing what I was trying to do - so I know I was trying the right thing - but I could not complete that step of the puzzle.

So an extremely fun game that I was loving up to that point came to a screeching halt for me. I never got past it.