Dark Souls ain't got nothin' on Crash Bandicoot.
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00:00Unlike in previous generations, most video games now are made to be as accessible and player-friendly as possible.
00:06But even though contemporary releases have moved away from design philosophies like limited lives, time restrictions, and manual save areas,
00:13and just let you kick back, relax, and switch your brain off for 10 hours or so,
00:17developers still seem obliged to include moments that make you want to throw the whole console out the window.
00:22These player-hating moments aren't just reserved for your Dark Souls or Super Meat Boys either.
00:27Even in the most kid-friendly games, you still find moments where it feels like you're doing nothing more than repeatedly running into a wall for hours trying to make some progress.
00:36Whether that's because of a difficulty spike out of nowhere, or plain old terrible design that decides to introduce you to new mechanics that don't fit at all with the rest of the game.
00:45Moments like these can completely ruin an otherwise excellent gaming session, and if they're really bad, an otherwise good controller.
00:52I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 Annoying Video Game Moments That Made You Turn The Console Off.
00:59Number 10. Stealth Suicide Bombers in Rainbow Six Siege.
01:03Providing a genuinely difficult challenge either alone or with friends, Siege's terrorist hunt tasks you with using the environment to your advantage to clear out a map full of enemies.
01:13It all sounds simple enough, but the low-health, high-damage gameplay the series is known for is in full effect in this mode,
01:18meaning even one enemy is deadly enough to take you down.
01:22Which would be fine, if ridiculously tough suicide bombers weren't roaming the hallways.
01:27Storming at you as soon as you're in their line of sight, it takes sometimes as much as a full clip or a well-timed headshot to take these guys down, before they blow you completely to smithereens.
01:37Not only that, but they're equipped with regular weapons too, so they can chip away at your health even if they don't get close enough to strike a crippling blow.
01:44Also, if you crank the difficulty up to realistic, then you might as well just wave your sanity goodbye.
01:49Being bombarded by these heavy-breathing horrors is annoying enough on low difficulties, but here a single one can easily force you to restart the session all over again.
01:58Number 9. Battling Fontaine in Bioshock.
02:02The original Bioshock isn't really remembered for the quality of its first-person shooting,
02:06so it's no surprise that the game's final boss fight, which revolves around simply hitting Fontaine with as much firepower as you can get your hands on, is barely ever brought up as a series high point.
02:16In fact, it probably would have been forgotten about entirely if not for how horribly frustrating it proved to be for most players.
02:23Not only does the level bank on you already having plenty of upgraded weapons and a huge stash of ammo going into the fight,
02:29and only reduces your ability to acquire these resources as you continue to lose money from dying,
02:34but Fontaine himself is much faster and much more aggressive than any other enemy encounter in the game.
02:40Bioshock was so good at playing with expectations and delivering a subversive plot,
02:45so it's such a shame that it had to end on such a sour, trite note.
02:49Number 8. Getting Killed Offscreen by an Enemy in Hotline Miami.
02:54Hotline Miami is a purposefully infuriating game at times.
02:57While the top-down shooter gives you the opportunity to pull off ridiculously brutal kills in a brilliantly 80s-inspired world,
03:04it makes achieving these feats of ultra-violence feel earned by constantly killing you over and over again
03:09until you have enemy placement and the map layout completely memorised.
03:13But the top-down presentation of the game can lead to some pretty cheap deaths, especially if you let your guard down.
03:19Getting shot by someone you didn't even know was lurking offscreen can be horrible,
03:23and if you think you've mastered a level only to be clipped by one remaining guy you didn't even see,
03:28well, it could be enough to make you quit out entirely.
03:31You can inflict some outrageous amounts of pain in Hotline Miami,
03:34but the game always has a habit of pushing just as much of it back onto you.
03:39Number 7. Being Forced Back to an Old Save in Dead Rising.
03:43The structure of the original Dead Rising's campaign was pretty unique,
03:46giving you a 72-hour window where you had to balance story missions with free-roaming zombie-smashing fun.
03:52Get too distracted and let the clock run down and you could miss out on entire quests or even the game's ending.
03:57But jump into them unprepared, without the right weapons or skills at your disposal, and you could suffer the exact same fate.
04:04To make matters worse, you can only save at bathrooms located around the game's virtual mall,
04:09and you only had a small number of slots to utilise tactically throughout.
04:13There were no checkpoints, and if you died, you'd be kicked back to your latest save,
04:17meaning you could royally mess up hours of progress with one measly mistake.
04:21Consequently, if you used your saves wrong and didn't leave yourself with enough time to get to the next objective,
04:26you could literally ruin the whole game for yourself, forcing you to restart the whole thing over from scratch.
04:32So whether you lost only 40 minutes of progress or whole hours though,
04:35it always ensured that you wouldn't be touching the game for at least a few days afterwards.
04:44Notoriously considered one of the most frustrating video game levels of all time,
04:48the uniquely nightmarish aesthetic of this creative combat-free sequence from the original Max Payne
04:54wasn't enough to save it from being a complete misery to play.
04:58Taking place within Max's subconscious as he remembers the night his family was killed,
05:02the player is made to follow a series of blood trails in an otherwise pitch black environment.
05:07Not only is it confusing to understand where the hell you're even going,
05:11as you try to get from one end of the level to another without doubling back on yourself,
05:15but taking a wrong turn and following the wrong trail could lead to you falling to your death
05:20thanks to some insidiously placed traps.
05:22The scene is unnerving for sure, but after the 20th death, it becomes horrifying for all the wrong reasons.
05:29Being discovered during tailing missions in Assassin's Creed.
05:33Any game with an insta-fail stealth sequence, whereby being seen by an NPC results in a game over,
05:39needs to be thrown into the f***ing sea.
05:41Prevalent in multiple blockbuster releases over the years,
05:44we can thank the Assassin's Creed series for the rising popularity of this horrible mission type.
05:49Repeating quests that force you to patiently tail potential targets and enemies without being seen,
05:54the franchise is full of different variations on this same gimmick.
05:58But the one constant is that every time one of these missions pops up,
06:02you'll want nothing more than to switch your console off entirely.
06:05Being caught and having to restart a section of a level is one thing,
06:08but when that restart comes after you've had to follow an agonisingly slow character over a huge section of a map,
06:14it feels like a personal slap in the face.
06:16Just walk faster, goddammit!
06:19Number 4. Every Second of the High Road in Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy.
06:24If you're booting up the N. Sane Trilogy for the first time since your childhood,
06:27you're probably going to wonder how you ever got through these challenging platforming games as a kid.
06:32The original Crash Bandicoot in particular is ridiculously demanding,
06:36and a good chunk of its later levels could have easily taken up half the slots on this list.
06:40But it's the infuriating High Road section that had players up in arms when the game released.
06:45Forcing you to traverse a narrow, unreliable wooden bridge,
06:49with pitfalls, trap planks and wild hogs all out to get you,
06:53the High Road shows the true masochistic colours that hide behind Crash Bandicoot's seemingly lovable exterior.
06:59It's a level that was admittedly always hard,
07:01but with this remastered developer, Vicarious Visions opted to use one jumping system across all three games.
07:07And unfortunately, it's not the one that this challenging area was made for.
07:11That doesn't really soothe the pain when you continue to fall, fall, fall, fall, fall to your death
07:17after being certain you should have nailed a jump, though.
07:19And it makes the High Road one of the most infuriating levels ever created.
07:28Even now, the scars earned during Mortal Kombat 9's final boss still haven't healed.
07:34Being able to hit you with the same overpowered combos over and over again,
07:37MK9's Shao Kahn could absolutely ruin an otherwise promising attempt at beating him with one single move.
07:44Every tactic was useless.
07:45Get too cocky and he'd punish you as soon as you overreached,
07:48but try to goad him out and chip away at his health and he could take you apart just as easily.
07:53Even worse is that there wasn't much you could do to cheese a victory either,
07:56except for a couple of unreliable trial-and-error techniques.
08:00And unless you were really lucky or really good, and let's face it, it was probably the former,
08:04you almost certainly had to resort to one of these cheap tactics to avoid being pounded into oblivion.
08:10If you can't beat him, you might as well join him, I guess.
08:13Escorting Emma in Metal Gear Solid 2
08:16About two-thirds of the way through Metal Gear Solid 2, the whole game crashes to a halt.
08:21Sent on a mission to save Emma Emmerich, a vital asset and also your ally Otacon's sister,
08:26the title forces you to literally hold the character's hand as you escort her
08:30around the mostly destroyed and submerged sections of the game's offshore plant.
08:34Because she's stricken with a condition that leaves her barely able to walk,
08:38you have to very slowly help Emma around enemy-infested levels until you can get her to safety.
08:45Leave her alone to clear out an area first, and you risk her being noticed by a guard you missed,
08:49but take Emma along with you and you might end up getting her killed in an unintended firefight if you're not careful.
08:55It's all boring and plodding stuff on its own,
08:57but because it comes in between some of the most challenging and labyrinthine underwater sections in gaming history,
09:03it's enough to make you love the character completely.
09:06But then, and then, after all of this, in the end she ends up being killed anyway,
09:10making the whole section feel like even more of a waste of time.
09:14Thanks for that, Kojima.
09:15Number one, getting flattened by Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls.
09:19Look, no matter how much of a Dark Souls pro you might claim to be,
09:23there's no way that the fight against Ornstein and Smough in the original game didn't completely break your soul.
09:28Dark Souls is at its worst when it forces you to face off against multiple enemies at a time,
09:33often leading to cheap deaths that feel particularly frustrating
09:36because of the game's otherwise tough-but-fair approach to difficulty.
09:40But these encounters are bad enough when it's just regular enemies you're fighting,
09:43never mind two bosses who did a PhD in kicking your ass.
09:47Because it's such an intense game of trial and error,
09:49a good chunk of players probably only completed this section through sheer luck and perseverance,
09:54and honestly, I don't know if I could actually replicate another successful victory if my life depended on it.
10:00It's even worse when you come close to getting that victory, only to be denied it at the last moment,
10:05as the hope is crushed and you feel your own will to live being sucked out just like the Nazis
10:10at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
10:12All of the bosses in Dark Souls are difficult, sure,
10:14but battling Ornstein and Smough is like throwing yourself at a brick wall made of death and misery
10:18until your mangled body somehow slips through the cracks and onto the other side,
10:22and can completely and utterly go f*** itself.