Cannot agree more!

I hate all games with QTE's

I also hate games that are timed or too damn long a.k.a. Fallout 4 survival difficulty where you have to TRAIPSE around because there is no fast travel and no way to save your game only when sleeping and no mods because mods kill the achievements!

Fallout 4 took me on survival difficulty five (5) YEARS to complete never a-fucking-gain and the walking speed HOLY F*CK Americans must be VERY VERY unhealthy if that is their walking speed.

Gyron for the ZX Spectrum, and the Adventure game Uninvited.
But that was back in the 1980s. I can't recall any games from the more modern Windows era that was so hard I couldn't finish them.
It's funny, but I used twice as long time (20 vs 40 hours) to complete the mouselook version than the original. I was quite surprised, but I guess being 20 years older have made me slower.

That's what I consider to be getting heroes right. If a really high level hero isn't an one-man army, don't consider them a hero, and find the game just frustrating. (Yeah, the much weaker heroes of AoW:SM pissed me off.)

The enhanced version is much better, as it incorporates many features from the fan made system shock portable version. If you want I have a contest giving away a copy of that game in the general forums. ;)
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To be fair many of us during the westward expansion era and similar took a good amount of time to get around before cars and such came on the scene, so that might be close to being accurate. o.0
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Or maybe you liked going through it sloe to enjoy it as long as possible? That is also a good answer and an acceptable reason to go through stuff slow imo. :)

To each his own I guess :)
Yeah, it's glorious when an FPS does it right. Defense of the hill in Vietcong comes to mind, as well the bunker map in AvP.

You might like the Stronghold series then? Troop placements doesn't matter too much there. It's more like: "put a blob of archers of here, and a blob of crossbowmen over there". Trouble, if memory serves, it's a difficult game regardless. I think Crusader is easier though.

Elminage Gothic's final bonus dungeon. Here's what you're up against:
* 20 dungeon levels, each, I believe, as large as a level from Wizardry 1 (which had only 10 dungeon levels for the *entire* game).
* The teleport spell does not work. There are shortcuts to levels 5, 10, and 15, at least.
* The encounters are downright unfair at times. For example, there are some archer enemies which get something like 2 actions per round, each of which includes 4 attacks for something like 300+ damage each, and which are much faster than your characters can possibly be. That enemy isn't even as strong as a similar enemy appearing later in the dungeon. This enemy (which often appears in groups) has been known to wipe out high level parties.
* Resurrection has side effects; it ages the character and lowers Vitality. Reloading a save also has side effects; your party will age a certain number of days each time, and the level will reset, causing placed encounters to respawn.
* The game actually expects you to reach about level 400 by the end (and you will likely enter the dungeon at double digit levels); even at such levels, the game can and will kill you.

(At least this dungeon isn't difficult to navigate, unlike some other dungeons in this game.)

(Also, at least I don't remember being teleported into solid rock; in the first floor of the first bonus dungeon, I had a certain enemy ambush my party and teleport everyone into solid rock, which causes the entire party to be lost forever; reloading is the only reasonable course of action in this situation.) I've beaten Cave Story, but not the bonus dungeon because of the boss fight at the end where the camera rules change (the camera follows the boss instead of you). Haven't played it, but my understanding is that you can still junction spells to your stats and use those to kill the first boss there; it's a better choice than leveling up (and you can leave the final dungeon to draw more spells). Once you kill it, you can get some of your skills back (the choice you make should depend on your play style and what you've found to be useful).

Leveling up might actually be counter-productive.

You can try roguelikes with meta-progress mechanics, like Tangledeep or even Shiren the Wanderer.

Or, of course, some of the other Mystery Dungeon games (like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon) technically qualify as roguelikes (albeit without permadeath), but are much easier.

The idea is this:
1. Practice.
2. Beat the game using continues, and then try to beat the game with fewer continues each time, until you get the number of continues down to zero.
3. If the game has a practice mode (Crimzon Clover does, for example), take advantage of it, and practice the parts where you find yourself losing lots of resources.

(I haven't beaten a game of this type, but then again I haven't made any serious attempts. (Well, actually I beat Jamestown on a laptop that couldn't run the game at full speed, if that countes.))

Funny thing is, this sort of game design (where a game can become unwinnable if you miss an important item) actually works in Wizardry 4, surprisingly. (It helps you that the game tells you when you're about to pass the point of no return.)

I detest that term as well, as that term implies that saving (and reloading) is rather bad, and I feel it encourages the bad habit of not saving.

Actually, the stance I take is this:
* If a player abuses save-reload, that's not a problem, and is not something that needs to be "fixed". In particular, a game developer should not take measures to prevent this.
* On the other hand, if the game design encourages save-reload, then the game design is flawed and really should be fixed. (Examples of offending gameplay elements are random stat gains on level up (particularly if there's a level cap and you aren't guaranteed to max stats by that point), resurrection failure chances (with harsh consequences on failure, including permanent character loss), and random treasures that don't respawn (Icewind Dale and Wizardry 8 are examples of games with this issue).)

I remember playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne on hard difficulty, but ended up quitting for two reasons:
* The combination of instant death attacks used by enemies, the main character's death being instant game over (even if you have another party member with a revive ability), and the fact that you can only save in certain spots and have to reload after each game over.
* The music in that game was giving me headaches.

I have this problem with stealth sections. While I have beaten Ocarina of Time more than once, I probably won't replay it ever again because of those unfun insta-fail stealth sections.

(With that said, apparently there's a randomizer for this game that has an option to remove the stealth sections. Also, perhaps I should mention that my favorite dungeon in that game is the Water Temple, but the boss of that temple is not fun, particularly since when you get hit, you lose control for way too long.)

It occurs to me that, while playing Tangledeep, I have never once been instantly killed; it seems that mechanic just doesn't actually exist.

(Of course, I play on Adventurer mode, where death simply makes you lose half your gold and return to town, but that still doesn't change the fact that instant-death attacks don't seem to exist in that game.)

There is defense mission in Winter Assault, where you play with Imperial Guards and cover Eldars from Orks?
What stuck in me, when I've played it years ago, is the mysteriously slow resource generation. For example with +125 Requisition you can pump out basic infantry units, one after another.
But in that particular mission even with twice that value of generated Req you had hard time building infantry.

Copying from another thread, the reason why I (for now) have quit Wonder Boy in Monster World (which otherwise isn't that hard a game, except maybe the final boss in the US version):

laying Wonder Boy in Monster World on my Sega Genesis Mini, and I encountered a case of awful game design. (This is in the second to last level, I believe.)

* Two rooms of mini bosses. This isn't the part that is bad game design (though I *hate* the fact that offensive magic seems to do no damage to bosses and mini-bosses in this game).
* After the second mini boss, you go through a door.
* Immediately on the other side of the door, you are on platforms that will dip down if you don't immediately jump; there's no chance to study the room at this point, as there's no solid ground you can use to get your bearings.
* When you fall (which you inevitably will if it's your first time playing and you aren't familiar with the room), you have to fight the second mini boss *again* before you can go back and retry that tricky platforming section again.

That's mean game design. (At least troll games aren't that mean, as they aren't going to require re-fighting a mini boss every time you fail the way this game does at this point.)

Wasteland 2 as a loner

I already own System Shock Enhanced Edition, but having to constantly switch between controls is still very clumsy. I stopped playing because of it. At least with a game like Descent and its sequels, you just need a joystick alongside the keyboard and you're fine.

I'm pretty bad at strategy games, so I never finished the GDI campaign in Command & Conquer or any campaign in Red Alert. I'm also terrible at platformers, so I have never finished any platform game, ever, going back to the original Super Marios Bros.

Joystick? When you can play with a mouse?