*did I finish any NES game but the Marios ?*

The NES is the frustrating console to begin with :O

Vampires Bloodlines is similar (although doable). They give you entire missions/zones whatever you want to call it that can be 100% stealthed (they even give you bonuses to encourage full stealth gameplay). Then you meet a boss that is immune to stealth and you barely have the tools or abilities to take them on. Ming was pretty rough if you didn't have alot of points put into the correct weaponry.

Sneak, quiet, patience, skills into pickpocketing, silence, finesse, charism, etc... then... BLAM! hope you have a rocketlauncher and can strafe, flip, jump, and 360 AIM shoot!!!! fun, huh? grrrrrrrr

Some of the mini bosses in Divine Divinity were difficult depending on how you specialised your character. And the end one was bugged, I think you couldn't finish the game if you used magic in the final battle.

Are you joking? I cut through Witcher 2 like a knife through butter. Frankly, I see it as another victim of "consolisation".

I do agree with VtM:R. The final boss battle was pretty hard however I had already problems after the certain cliffhanger happened in the middle of game, so I didn't fell sudden nausea :D. I beat him twice back then because I wanted to see the other ending. Aw, memories... I still cringe when I recall the bad pronunciation of Anezka's name.

I have had the biggest problem with final boss battle in Omikron. I played it as a teenager and I actually dropped the game because I tried it many and many times and just couldn't do it. Very steep difficulty change. I wonder if I would be able to nowadays.

The second one is Praetorian in Mass Effect 2. I had really, really hard time and it was probably the hardest battle in whole trilogy. I tried it on Hardcore months ago and I got stuck at the exact same battle for a long time again, lol. But the sense of achievement!

And the last I can think of is the damned cirkus battle in the finale part in Psychonauts. The time restriction was brutal.


Aah, this lady. I so panicked when I ended up in that claustrophobic room with many enemies and her.

I plan on replaying this one soon. I remember having several problems with that game (many of which were DIE, Reload, DIE, reload, Die... etc), but I played in tandem with someone else, and it may be that it would be very different with a fully focused play through and a little more wisdom (this was several years ago) ;)

I meant "regularly" finish ;p
Edit : now that you mention it, I finished Soltice 'regularly' after cheating my way through dozens of times ... but that is another topic.

My biggest issue was the dungeon crawler aspect. So many places yet you spend a majority of time in some multi-leveled cave or cellars. Bloodlines improved a tons on this together with cutting the "Oh my Lord, I'd kill myself if it wasn't a sin" speech and that's why I adored it.

Oh, I didn't know about co-op mod. I have to tell a friend about it. She is trying to find some solid non-shooty co-op game to play with her BF.

Theseus in God of War II. The fight isn't even that bad on normal difficulty. On Titan difficulty however.....goddammit, so many cheap deaths because of one-hit kill spikes that he summons. Arrhhh! It felt so damn good when I finally got to bash his head in with that door. Again, and again, and again!

I didn't either ;) The way we played is that I would play for a bit and someone would watch and then I would hop out of the driver seat and someone else would play and I would watch. There is a chance, the other party may have used up supplies I wouldn't have or got us into trouble, etc. Co-op would have been much preferred ;)

Haha, good for both of us, then. People discuss it in subforum.
I played F.E.A.R this way. I don't like playing scary games but I was interested in the story. So I did action parts and my roommate, who was exact opposite of me, did the spooky ones. And Dune 2 with a neighbour when I was a kid :).

I'd also say just about every boss in Dark Souls.

Ninja Gaiden: Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 had some frustrating ones too.

Demonhead Mobster King from Problem Sleuth ;) More seriously, Dark Gaia from Terranigma, for much the same reason. If you missed the special hidden weapon right at the end of the game (I know there must be one, because I had one open space in my spear collection) then fighting him is a matter of discovering the pattern that lets you survive his attack and then keep hitting him repeatedly for an hour or two. It's challenging at first, but gets incredibly boring.

Neuron from Unepic is irritation incarnate. He's not too strong, but has global unavoidable psychic attacks. If I recall correctly, he starts by creating an effect that makes you slowly lose health until you hit him. OK. Then he has another one on top of that which mixes up your controls. Good combination - that makes an interesting challenge. Then he has another one which compels you to stand still and destroy each one-shot item in your inventory. Naturally, this is a death sentence unless you have enough buffs or few enough consumables to survive, in which case it compels you to use your teleport item to escape the battle (and autosave the game). The only way to beat him is to cheat by emptying your inventory first. This was more than a year ago - the game has had many updates since then so he might work differently now, but that was a blatantly unfair (not hard, just unfair) boss in an otherwise-excellent game.

I found Duriel (angel names traditionally end in "el") simple enough for Paladins and Assassins too. Easier than some of the random special monsters around. It probably depends on if your build just happens to be good for him, regardless of character type.

Now that you mention it I didn't have much trouble with my Assassin either. I don't know if I've ever gotten that far with the Paladin as I find using that character so repulsively boring. The Assassin is so damn fast she makes escape much easier even if she gets 'frozen' she can still out maneuver pretty much anyone or anything. With the sorceress I just use level 2 'Fire Trail' (or whatever is called) and watch the poor bastard burn to death trying to follow me around. XD Good stuff! Gotta go back and play this game again.

It's called "Blaze". I love that spell :D

Paladin can be fun - the class works best if you take risks and throw yourself into danger, with your mana and health constantly fluctuating. If you play them prudently they're ineffective. But one of the problems with DII is the lack of any respec capability, so you get stuck with a combination of abilities that seems good but you regret later. I got bored with it until I took a hex editor and figured out how the save game format, then made an app to reset all your skill points. Then my Lightning/Zeal Paladin who used to just sit there hitting anything that came close became a highly-mobile Sacrifice/Charge with a side of Cleansing and Redemption who kept near-killing himself and quickly bouncing back. Much more exciting.