Ryse: Son of Rome.

I play a lot of pretty difficult games, but one thing I *REALLY* suck at is timing parries, and at the very end of that game there's a fight where you *MUST* parry in order to set your enemy off-balance and actually damage them.

After a few dozen attempts at doing this, when I had blown through the entire game with no trouble at all (via blocking or dodging or just powering through and killing them before they could hit me) up until this fight, I just gave up and uninstalled the game.

I don't like the one mechanic, that's totally optional for 90%+ of a game, suddenly being mandatory to progress.

I don't know what it is, but the visuals of 4 just really puts me off. Which is perhaps the main thing that has kept me away from it. Personally I don't mind the heroes hiding behind the troops, because of how large the armies can get. No matter how strong the hero is, I don't think he/she is going to be able to do anything against 50 vampires :P

I suppose now that you mention it :\ A good final boss fight seems like a rarity. In fact I can't seem to think of one right now. Perhaps the first Prince of Persia, or Broforce? Can think of plenty of bad ones in any case.

But even if it's bad, I'll suffer through it typically because for some reason it really bugs me if I don't finish a game that I really tried to finish. After all, it's just the last 1% of the game :)

Shin megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call

The over the top difficulty with some ot the battles and bosses were just too much for me. Some enemies would just completely fuck me over with abilities that would hit my weakness in terms of buffs. Great game but super high difficulty.

Psychonauts - Meat Circus level. I love that game to death until this point. But I simply couldn't save that damn pet quickly enough on the third level (with the wheel-of-fortune jumps). Never. In dozens of tries. Always falling down or too slow. And every fail means starting at the bottom again and doing all that tricky jumping (the fighting is easy) from before again.

In a thread like this it's almost necessary to specify whether or not nintendo/sega titles count. Most, or at least a massive number of those old console games were designed to be incredibly difficult to complete. Seeing as a single playthrough would only take a couple of minutes for an insanely skilled player (without using glitches).

Even if someone payed me a crazy amount of money, I don't think I'd ever be able to beat something like ninja gaiden, ghouls and ghosts or contra on nes. It's just beyond me :P

I think what I don't like about many of them is how they're different from the regular gameplay. They're not like normal opponents, only a bit tougher or trickier to beat, instead they're often like detached mini-games with their own rules. And they often take place in arenas where you're stressfully close to the opponents and have no way of retreat. Plus, they're like bottlenecks or roadblocks, if those terms make any sense here. If you can't beat them or don't feel like beating them just yet, the game comes to a halt. You can't just do anything else and come back later, because they block off further progress on a more or less linear path. And last but not least, not a few of them additionally punish you for failure, be it with loss of something or other, having to repeat the long walk to the boss again or even just having to watch the unskippable cutscenes before the boss battle over and over again. It just takes you out of the flow. For me they are like intermission hoops to jump through so I can continue enjoying the game.

Have you tried gog's version yet, with mouse+keyboard controls? I don't think it's like the original version, because that meat circus level isn't too bad. Which mystified me in light of how infamously difficult I knew it was. It's not that I am that good either. Definitely not :)

I already played the patched version (from disk though) where the level was supposedly easier. Maybe I'm just too clumsy ;-)

It's nice to finish it I guess, but honestly, the game doesn't get any more glorious than the earlier Milkman Conspiracy level :)

Yeah, Meat Circus was terrible. Although I eventually managed to beat it, after I got a new graphic card and noticed part of my issues were due to how choppy the game had run before. XD But it was still challenging afterwards.

Wasn't there an older, bugged version where it's impossible to make a certain jump or grab a certain ledge/ladder? I also spent countless hours on this level, but then I read a tip on the Internet on how to complete it by pressing certain buttons together.

I have never stopped playing a game because it was "too hard" and I felt the challenge insurmountable (well, Blackguards came close), but I have stopped playing games that are "too hard" because I simply lost interest -- the reward of accomplishment didn't seem adequate to the level of aggravation.

Most of the Souls games I have completed to around 90% and then just put them away. I did the same with Nioh and The Surge. I was never stuck... just got bored with the gameplay loop where high difficulty was only one aspect I guess.

The Milkman levels are among the most glorious gaming moments I ever experienced. Pure genius. :-)

You'd be surprised what can be done with a full party of high level heroes. Got them to 30+ by the end of one campaign, was just one battle they couldn't handle and I had to bring in other units for the offense instead of just keeping them for defense and gathering, and that battle had thousands of top tier troops in it, it was insane (if not unexpected, considering how long I had taken to get there). They still could kill most of them even then, if used properly, but I just gathered the troops I had "stocked" till then and swarmed with my own thousands of top tier troops to break through, then back to heroes for the very end.
The only campaign that required armies was the barbarian one, not having magic.

I just wanna check and make sure everyone knows what that code I posted is.
It seems to have upset some people and I'm wondering if they are mistakenly thinking its some sort of political or sex thing.

Paladin said he could never finish Contra, so I posted "UU DD LR LR B A START" which is the code for 30 lives in Contra. It's also a code for all power ups in Gradius though even with that I could still never get very far in that game. Most gamers over the age of thirty-five know that code better than they know their own SSN.

Just want to make sure we're all clear on that. :D