Nothing can beat galactic vacuum cleaner in Freelancer.

Neverwinter Nights 2. Rocks fall, everybody dies.

You wrap up all your side quests and everything. You rest, you memorize spells, you restock, all your standard last night at the inn business. You go off to fight the big bad. You kill the big bad (and likely some of your friends). Then you fight the big bad's boss. You kill the Boss. The main opponent. Dead as a doornail. And then bam, the temple/cave/whatever collapses and its a TPK. Everybody dies in a cave-in that had zero foreshadowing leading up to it.

It's such a WTF? kind of moment. In fact you as a player are more rewarded if you choose the psychotic chaotic evil path as opposed to the cannon good/neutral path because then at least you get to keep the castle you've been remodeling for the last half of the game.

If you're lucky, most of those games would just throw faster enemies at you and go on and on and on and on.....

=P

And what about Karateka, after defeating hordes of samurais to save the princes she would just :spoiler:! >(

This is especially bad when said games never have their sequels, or when they were originally planned as a single game but, for some reason (in the case of Soul Reaver/Soul Reaver 2, technical limitations -- the game just wouldn't fit a reasonable amount of discs, if they tried releasing it as they planned), they have to cut it in two or more parts, and the developing time between them is way too long.

[EDIT] It's kind of sad that almost no one is mentioning actually badly designed endgames, but rather focusing on the final bosses' difficulty... especially when talking about old games. Well, those games were designed to be hard, they were designed to be games and not the interactive "immersive" movies that today's AAA games tend to be. You had to be good at it to finish it, with no such thing as Steam achievements to show the world how much of a bad-ass you are.

More of a bad endgame closure, which (I believe) wasn't what the TC was aiming for, but still, damn that sucks. I was gonna go into NWN games a lil' later (after FC 3...and Arcanum perhaps) but knowing now it will all end in such a lackluster fashion, makes me kinda want to postpone the whole playthroughs even further.

The expansion picks up from that and makes the ending a bit more palatable. Still, I know that it's a bit like being shot for seemingly no reason and hearing the motive in afterlife.

You don't say. Condemned 2: Bloodshot. For fuck's sake. The first one had a cliffhanger (well sort of) too, and even that was risky. It was a really good game however, and apparently gained enough fans in order to justify a sequel.

And the sequel was good too...until about midway/endgame when they pretty much wrote themselves into a corner (via the power of Street Fighter style vocal Hadoukens), yet still had the nerve to end on a cliffhanger. And guess what? Yup, not even a word of Condemned 3 all this time. I am eternally bitter about this.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Rage yet. Horrible endgame. If it were any other action game, it feels like it would be the part that leads into the climax at the middle of the story. What it doesn't feel like is an appropriate ending point, especially since the game just ends before anything really exciting occurs.

While I had fun with the side stuff in the game, the actual story was just anticlimactic event after anticlimactic event. I was really let down with that aspect of the game. For all the years it took iD to make it, they didn't flesh out the plot or storyline gameplay aspects nearly as much as they should have.

In recent memory: i recently finished cave story + and the ending was terrible for me because it was so hard. I know how this sounds and i hate myself for it (i love oldshool hard games) but a lot of the bosses in that game i beat with the skin of my teeth. But then the ending: 4 bossfights in a row without checkpoints or health powerups. Now that is brutal. I was just about to throw the towel when by some miracle i succeeded.

Also the endings of amnesia and penumbra were a major let down. they know how to make good atmosperic games but they have no idea how to end them (frictional games).

Just playing through Mark of the Ninja.

Been a nice slealthy little ninja, sneaking past traps, creeping up to the bad guys and slitting their throats before they spot me.

Now Im dumped in this QTE sequence with these super-mech-ninja's with perfect 360 degree night vision and instant death laser guns all round me. Only escape is to jump around like a demented kangaroo on steroids in precisely the correct sequence of jumps from plaform to platform.

No, not out of chara\cter for the rest of the game much.

I hope its the end game ... please let it be the endgame.

I had to go and play some point-and-click to calm me down.

I've not played most of the games mentioned here, but I do think a distinction should be drawn between boss fights that are hard simply because the difficulty level is insane and boss fights that are hard because they are badly designed. Now people may disagree about any individual case - about difficulty versus design of a particular endgame boss fight - but I think it is fair to say that some boss fights in some games are simply not well designed and are difficult because of that poor design rather than out-and-out difficulty. If one can back up with rational reasons that a particular end-game boss fight is hard because of bad design, then it is a fair post to make even if not everyone agrees. It's also the case that poor design may make the boss fight easier than the rest of the game or simply so substantially different from the rest of the game's gameplay (and may be easier or harder because of that) that one has to question the boss fight from a design perspective.

Maybe it was a Spaceballs homage?

This reminded me of Ground Control (a real-time strategy, but still). Unless you cock things up terribly, you will have something like four aircraft squadrons (four planes in each, I think) towards the end of the first campaign. Once you unlock the bomber, the campaign is officially over. A bomber squadron annihilates everything faster than the enemy can fire back, reducing the final mission to deploying everything, leaving your ground forces behind, and sending your sixteen bombers to wreck the enemy anti-air units and level their base. This takes no longer than five minutes and can be performed without taking any casualties. It also makes the ending cutscene look ridiculous, with its smouldering allied tanks and wounded soldiers and things.

I vaguely recall a fantasy platformer game on the SNES without savegames where you need to make a choice after beating the final boss.

One is the good choice and one is the bad choice leading to a lousy ending.

As my English skills were not that good at the time, I made the bad choice.

That was on the last day of a two day rental.

That's about the only thing I remember about the game. Ironic isn't it?