This one's easy for me.

LOVED Panzer Dragoon Orta - great game.

There was one level (Maybe inside sort of a cube? A lot of enclosed hallways as opposed to open space) that was incredibly tough for me. I can't even recall how hard it was. There was a major baddie at about the halfway point that would almost always destroy me and even when he didn't I still had half the level to go.

I FINALLY beat it... throw my hands up in the air, start to get super excited...

... and my XBox hardlocked at the level completion screen. I think it was probably the only time my then new XBox hardlocked.

I must have stared at that screen for half an hour waiting for it to maybe *maybe* come back, but it never did.

The worst part - never went back to the game. Just too disheartened to do that all over again.

Two things that happened to my mother in that game:

1. Saved with low HP. On reload, an enemy spawned right on top of the PC, causing death every time, forcing her to start over.

2. Saved in a puzzle room, on the other side of a gate that was removed with a switch. After load, the gate was present, making it impossible to continue. She gave up at this point.

One near-catastrophe happened to me in Ys III: Wanderers of Ys. I saved with low-ish health, and on load, an enemy spawned right on top of Adol, killing him. Fortunately, one time I was able to access the menu and equip a Shield Ring, which was enough to save my file and make Adol survive that hit.

Playing defcon on laptop spills orange juice on laptop trying to get the phone that was ringing and lost $1220

And till this day I use a sticky cup holder so my shit don't spill on my fuck! >:(

Would just like to report that Final Fantasy has never given me any problems. :p

Not sure if I'd call it 'catastrophic', but relatively recently I was playing Legends of Eisenwald and enjoying the hell out of it. Beginning of Chapter 8 a glitch occurred where a character that is supposed to accompany you from the previous chapter... didn't. And since you're immediately beset by a group right at the start of Chapter 8, with no chance to avoid them, I was not able to progress (get immediately wiped out every time). Tried to load older saves and still same issues. Replayed the entire previous chapter and still the same issue. Finally gave up.

I think though, that this was more a situation of bad game design than anything. I chose to play a rogue-type character as opposed to a knight and supposedly a knight would have a chance to make it through that battle solo. Rogue is instagib.

Regardless, I haven't gone back to the game and likely never will. Shame, because otherwise it was damned good.

Damn, and I thought I had bad luck having one save and underleveled on the Ragnarok in Final Fantasy 8. :P

First, forgetting you need to save every five minutes on ANY bethesda game. I'd forget for a couple of hours after not having a glitch and then BAM everything is gone.

When I was little we got 7th Guest as a gift; our first CDROM game. Got to the part where you have to go through the maze in the basement. Hours go by. Then days. We could never figure it out; later found out we had a bad disc. Waa-waa. To this day, I can still here the guy say, "feeling lonely?

Damn that sucks, 7th guest is awesome.

Yeah I think so. Several years later I managed to make one explode in an experiment while fiddling with a circuit, and realized it must've been my 2nd capacitor explosion.

I tried to solve Zork.
...
That's it. That's the story.

I played Tibia many years ago. In this game if you die not only do you lose items but you lose actual levels which was one of the things that gave me great grief, just the idea that you could lose months of gameplay in a single moment. It added to the challgenge and whatnot but not good enough, main reason why I gave up along with its ridiculous grinding necessity.

Anyway so I had got some pretty cool gear, having cool gear was one of the highlights in this game. People had houses too, that was very cool and they put out their stuff to display to their neigbours which would cause other players to get jealous and it would basically run the entire game, sort of like how it runs the economy or at the very least Middle Class and up.

I met someone in that game and apparently for some reason he invited me to his house which made me all lyrical, it was such a novelty. Then for some an idiotic reason I would throw down my item in a way to display to myself and him sort of and just when I did he would write a command that immediately kicked me out of the house and I couldn't enter. I was shocked, I couldn't believe it. I asked him why he did it and of course he didn't answer, in fact what he did was profoundly infuriating. He took the items, threw them into some drawers (you have access to all sorts of furnitures) and then went outside the house and just stood there, said nothing, maybe stepped away from the computer. I played on a non-PvP server so I couldn't attack him.

I was literally heartbroken, I think I was 14 or 15 years old. I was so confused, sad, depressed and angry at the same time, probably the worst I've experienced due to a game.

This taught me a great deal though. I'm inherently distrustful of people (not severe degree) but I'm not sure how much that particular experience affected me in that regard but I would say it certainly made believe in the concept of "better alone than miserable in company". I also realized how pathetic I was, seduced to the allure of searching for fancy stuff trying to impress a useless vanity and an appeal for attention in others. I feel great contempt when I'm in the presence of attention whores. Not so much I judge them (we are who we are etc..) but I really, really need to stay away from people like that for the sake of my own sanity. I also severely lost interest in overly shallow multiplayer games particularly MMOs and F2P-kind where the goal is usually survival, fancy stuff and the need to destroy others.

I never regret playing Tibia due to its unique atmosphere and I'm very glad I was relatively young playing it and perhaps most of all that I stopped.

If you think that's bad, you should play the sequel, Fibula.

Started to play Arkham Origins but forgot to make offline account.
Played it for 2-3 days without switching off PC.
I went to college and my room mate switched it off.
Had to restart all over again.

As a kid I used to take tuition.
After school I had to go straight to my teacher.
I used to wait in a shop of our former school senior.
It was a small shop and he used to play PC games in very narrow gap behind his shop.
I used to watch him play games.
One day he was playing Call of Duty and suddenly everything went dark. There was no display
We thought motherboard got fried but when we opened the cabinet a rat size of a small rabbit jumped out of it and one was lying dead inside cabinet.

Ive got a couple:

The first is on pc playing Farcry. I thought I was progressing nicely cant remember how far into the game but I get into one area, a big room with one military tough guy I think he was blond not sure in case anyone remembers this scene. Anyway theres no way to leave this big room until I kill this guy but I cant do any damage to him at all and Im suddenly squishy as hell and he kills me for a few hours until I give up on the game and never go back to it.

Number 2 is on xbox360 where Im super deep into a Fallout 3 playthrough. Finished the main story, one of the expansions, then I go up into the mothership Zetta or whatever and get bored of the experience but you cant leave. For some dumb reason instead of taking a break and going back to it later I uninstalled the game and I guess all my savegames with it. So I could never go back and finish the other few expansions with my badass character unless start over from scratch. And I never have except a couple half-hearted attempts.

Nothing so drastic (being a scientist I'm used to making backups "just in case") but I was really furious when I reached King Yama level in Spelunky (secret final boss) for the very first time and accidently unplugged my external drive where the game was installed. It took me several days to reach that level again.