Games you could never complete

[Mary is not amused]

Is that Valhalla in your avatar, by the way?[nb]D'oh, of course it is, I've just belatedly realised where your username -- which has been bugging me for ages -- comes from.  Christ I feel stupid (and old, and forgetful).[/nb]

Sorry for making you feel that way.

I took that [Valhalla] apart too, at the request of a magazine editor.

Wasn't a surprising proportion of it written in BASIC?

On topic, back as a kid I was so utterly stumped by this game (I think I concluded it was actually insoluble) I wrote an embarrassing letter to Legend (I must have come across about five years younger than I was).  Never got a reply, the sods, but it was around the time they imploded in the Komplex City scamdal, so they probably had other worries.  Fast forward a decade or so, get online and am firmly disabused by the various solutions scattered around the Internet.  It transpires I am fick.

I wuz m4d teen4ge h4x0r l0lz.

I don't know how you people have the patience.  I've probably reverse engineered a few hundreds of bytes in my entire life.  (If you count poring over a function disassembly in the debugger as 'reverse engineering'...)

[quadraspazzed]

There's loads of games I've never finished, especially on the Atari ST. But the ones that immediately sprung to mind when I saw the thread title are Lemmings 1 and 2. It's been nearly 20 years now I guess, so I can't recall specifics, but on both I just reached a level that no matter how hard I tried and thought, I just couldn't figure out how to progress.

Another one was Cadaver, which reached a point where I just became confused and gave up. Many years later I tried replaying it on an ST emulator with the aid of a walkthrough, but I guess I must have lost interest 'cos I still never finished it.

[Famous Mortimer]

Elite.

Got to Deadly but there's one of the missions where loads of Thargons swarm at you, and you have to get from planet A to planet B with some bit of paper or other. Nearly all the way there, I could just escape pod out and avoid any violence, but there was a planet with a too-low tech rating to sell escape pods on the only possible route to the planet in question. I tried and tried, but by god was that impossible.

[glitch]

Gun. That last fucking boss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToquscZowi4

[Puffin Chunks]

Gun. That last fucking boss.

Yeah. That pissed me off. The whole game was an absolute breeze. Too easy, in fact. So to compensate for it they put the most frustratingly impossible to beat end of game boss in. Not so much a difficulty curve, as a difficulty right angle.

Never beat him either. Had a few goes then just went out to enjoy the sunshine, never to play the game again.

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

Just remembered: Conker's Bad Fur Day on N64.  It's one of my favourite games but, once again, when I find a cheat, I tend to abandon linear game play and just mess about on levels I enjoy most.  I'm a bit of a flake.

[Benjie Trufflesnort]

Just remembered: Conker's Bad Fur Day on N64.  It's one of my favourite games but, once again, when I find a cheat, I tend to abandon linear game play and just mess about on levels I enjoy most.  I'm a bit of a flake.

Also, I seem to remember a Rare bastard boss at the end again.

[Treguard of Dunshelm]

Also, I seem to remember a Rare bastard boss at the end again.

Also a computer taking the piss out of your attempts to kill said boss.

[Niall Quim]

Smuggler's Run. I have a save file at the penultimate level, but it's beyond ludicrous. Imagine the final stage of Driver, only longer, with bumpy terrain that can randomly flip your car over, AI vehicles that you have absolutely no chance of outrunning (even if they crash repeatedly) and a dwindling health bar that won't allow any fuck-ups. Since the PS2 days, there aren't many games that I haven't been able to beat given enough time, or by switching the difficulty, but that stage seems genuinely impossible.

Racing games in general often get stupidly hard towards the end. MotorStorm was great fun until you got to Buggy Byway, where the rubberbanded AI would blatantly cheat, meaning you needed to perform flawlessly and get lucky on the final stretch to have a chance at winning. Still haven't beat Burnout 3 for the same reasons.

[Famous Mortimer]

Racing games in general often get stupidly hard towards the end. MotorStorm was great fun until you got to Buggy Byway, where the rubberbanded AI would blatantly cheat, meaning you needed to perform flawlessly and get lucky on the final stretch to have a chance at winning. Still haven't beat Burnout 3 for the same reasons.

One of the Need For Speed games (the one with Emanuelle Vaugier and the bloke from Battlestar Galactica in it) was effectively impossible without spending real money on one of the special cars before the last boss - even the best free car in the game, with the best possible tune-up, couldn't come close. Even with the special car, you needed an extraordinary dose of luck on the last race to beat him.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

On the other hand they can be far too easy. Midtown Madness 2's entire single player missions were over for me in an afternoon. That was the worst of the 3, despite San Francisco and London being on paper much better bets than Chicago, Paris or Washington.

[Borboski]

I couldn't do the end of Killzone 2.  The ending was notoriously hard, just too many waves for me. 

[thecuriousorange]

I never finished Zelda for the Gameboy. I played right up to the second-last dungeon twice.