Terrible Sections In Great Games
[List] Those levels, moments or areas in great games that make you think twice about giving it a replay.
I’m sure you know the feeling.
You spot one of the classics in your Steam library or sitting on your shelf and you click on its page or pluck that box out from your collection and dust off the cover art. As you look at past screenshots or maybe rifle through the manual (if it’s old enough to still have one) fond memories come back and you think to yourself. “That’s my weekend sorted.” So you hit the Install button or put the disc in your console. You watch the progress bar crawl up or listen to the laser in your console travelling back and forth along its rail and suddenly, a flood of repressed memories come crashing in.
“Oh no… I’ll have to replay that part, won’t I?” This list is dedicated to those tedious openings, those insane boss fights and those painful levels that remind you why you don’t replay this one quite as often as your other favourites.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - Gravedigger Fight 1
I’m beginning this list with the inspiration for this entire article: the first encounter with Gravedigger in the original Resident Evil 3, also known to me mentally as “That bit with the fucking worm.” I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of replaying this particular section on my PSP this week.
Some way into Resident Evil 3, you’ll have gathered all the parts to repair the tram and escape Downtown Raccoon City but Jill and the other survivors’ scavenger hunt and the resulting gunfire and explosions have attracted worse monsters to the area; in that typically Resident Evil-style of escalating tension, the streets begin to fill with Brain Suckers (guess what they do) crows, the Cerberus dogs and of course, Gravedigger.
Your first fight against the monster sees Jill activating two switches to lower a ladder in order to escape the arena, simple enough… on paper. Juggling tank controls, annoying camera angles, trying to safely activate these switches and handling Gravedigger’s massive damage makes this section extraordinarily frustrating unless you practice standing in the specific, diagonal spot that allows you to trigger these switches from further away than usual.
Without fail, I always die at least twice on this part and I’m a seasoned player of this franchise.
Dark Souls (Original Release) - Blighttown
Today, on modern versions of Dark Souls, Blighttown is a bit of a difficulty speed bump for newer players but otherwise? It’s relatively unremarkable: the obligatory From Software poison swamp area. Watch your step and enter from The Depths side instead of the Toxin Blowdarter-infested shortcut beneath Firelink Shrine and you’ll do fine… but for those of us who played Dark Souls back in the day, on the Xbox 360 and PS3, this area is infamous.
Blighttown’s agonising framerate on the 360 and PS3.
Blighttown was a horrendous, stuttering onslaught of dark walkways, instant-death pitfalls, poison damage and quite frequently, PvP encounters for those with the cajones to tackle this death trap in human form or without online mode turned off. For my 12 year old self, playing Dark Souls when it was new, Blighttown was the bane of my existence: an unclimbable, rickety mountain which I time and again failed to summit.
Blighttown’s saving grace is that on modern hardware with stable performance, it’s quite a fun area to explore and sexy spider lady: Quelaag is one of the more enjoyable fights in the game. Once you get down into the swamp beneath the wooden walkways, you can claim a Dragon Scale which can be used to upgrade the legendary Drake Sword noob weapon, gain access to a Pyromancer in a game where that branch of magic was seriously overpowered and should you choose to, you can even veer off the main path and go exploring the secret Ash Lake area which takes you far below Lordran into the most ancient part of the world.
Shout out to Maneater Mildred.
Super Metroid - Maridia
Super Metroid is one of those retro Nintendo titles that I feel very comfortable calling a masterpiece: the soundtrack and atmosphere are chilling, the gameplay is tight and easy to pick up with a high-skill ceiling due to hidden movement options and it laid the groundwork for a genre that, in my opinion, still hasn’t managed to step out from under its shadow.
My one complaint with this game is that controlling Samus is rather stiff and fiddly, this isn’t a deal-breaker for most of the game… except in Maridia.
Maridia is an underwater maze of sinking sand, grapple hook sections and high-damage enemies that’s annoying to traverse, confusing to navigate and thanks to an eerie soundtrack oppressively lonely and claustrophobic in feel. This is a sewer level and a maze at the same time, great! Most experienced Super Metroid players will know either the layout of Maridia or the wall jump technique that makes this area significantly less painful but for a first time player, this can sometimes be the end of the road; I was enjoying Maridia so little the first time I played Super Metroid that I put off playing it for days between sessions while I was there and I had a friend who even dropped Super Metroid over this area.
I’m very good at the wall jump these days so Maridia doesn’t bother me but I can’t deny that my gut still sinks a little when I arrive there.
Halo: Combat Evolved - The Library + Two Betrayals
Bungie’s original Halo game built the Xbox brand and was the next step in the evolution of console FPS games after GoldenEye; the perfect mix of narrative, exploration, next-gen presentation and great gunplay make it an enjoyable classic to this day. Those of you who know Halo will also know that Combat Evolved’s second half is much weaker than the first and this 2 mission stretch is the culprit.
Bungie introduces The Flood: a grotesque, fleshy, cosmic horror enemy type that consists of the reanimated corpses of both Human and Covenant soldiers… then gets you sick to death of fighting them immediately. The Library is CE’s longest mission and takes you through an onslaught of Flood in the same handful of copy and pasted corridors over and over, fighting until you never want to see them again.
After The Library you have Two Betrayals which takes a similar approach: it’s the earlier Assault On The Control Room mission but backwards and with, as you probably guessed, more Flood added, including the notorious rocket launcher Flood who can murder you in one shot with pinpoint accuracy from long range.
In my opinion, Bungie never quite managed to get The Flood right in the Halo trilogy: in Combat Evolved they weren’t fun to fight, in Halo 2 they were too tough, especially on legendary difficulty, which is a herculean task to beat in Halo 2 and in Halo 3 they were too easy but this is their worst version.
I adore Halo 1 but to be perfectly honest? I often don’t bother with the second half of the game these days. Shout out to Peter Anders who suggested Cortana from Halo 3: a level with a similar premise and issues that would’ve made the list if I hadn’t imposed a limit of 1 per series.
LoZ: Majora’s Mask - Great Bay Temple
Ocarina Of Time isn’t just one of the most popular Zelda games, it consistently ranks in the top 3 of the best games ever made too and was one of the top-sellers on both N64 and 3DS, as such, the maligned Water Temple has become the poster child for hated Zelda dungeons… but Majora’s Mask: Ocarina Of Time’s enigmatic sequel, has the worse water-based dungeon, in my opinion.
Great Bay Temple: Majora’s 3rd out of 4 dungeons and explored mostly in Link’s fast-swimming Zora form is an ugly, confusing maze of underwater currents, bolted sheet metal and coloured pipes. To top it off, the boss of this dungeon: Gyorg, on the original N64 version, is utterly infuriating to fight and I distinctly remember it prompting a rage quit from me when I first played this game.
Steps were taken to make this dungeon less confusing and irritating on the 3DS but I can’t vouch for that version since I’ve never played it. Coming off the Great Bay, which was my favourite area in the game, I was really disappointed with this dungeon and it remains one of the key reasons why I’ve never managed to finish a second playthrough of Majora’s Mask… I know it’s been requested though so maybe this year.
That funky, fish bone guitar you get as a Zora is awesome.
Super Mario Bros. - The Castles
Super Mario Bros. is probably the most important game ever made. When console gaming looked to be on its last legs and PC gaming outside of Europe was extraordinarily niche, Nintendo created what was supposed to be the last hurrah for their cartridge based games before shifting to the Famicom’s new disc system, instead, Super Mario Bros. became their beachhead into the US market and the NES revived the North American games industry; today, they are known for stubbornly holding on to the cartridge format where others abandoned it long ago.
As fun and as iconic as this title is, there is one part of it I think we can all agree is bullshit: the castles!
Early in Super Mario Bros. the castles are enjoyable, tricky platform challenges with spinning bars of fire, pools of fire and fire-breathing Bowser at the end of each fiery fortress… did I mention there’s fire in the castles? As you progress through the game’s 8 worlds, mini-puzzles are added to each of them and by ‘puzzles’ I mean long, trial and error sections where you have to guess the correct jumps and paths to take through the castle, otherwise the timer runs out and you lose a life; the only way you get through is by constant repetition, a good memory or by pausing the game and looking it up on your phone.
Time to call Nintendo Power.
Super Mario 64 - Top Floor
I’m going to keep this list to one entry per-franchise but I tend to consider 2D and 3D entries in long-running IP’s to be their own series, so that’s why you’re seeing Super Mario 64 here.
It’s hard to overstate the importance and seismic impact of SM64 on the industry: it set the bar for 3D platformers and a new standard for 3D video games as a whole, it carried the sparse, early Nintendo 64 on its back as new titles were slow to release and third party developers defected to Sony’s PlayStation; while the dated camera system and stiffer movement can be a pain today, Super Mario 64’s levels are still a treat to play… until the last few, anyway.
The top floor of Peach’s Castle is home to the two most insipid levels in Super Mario 64: Tick Tock Clock, which is a tricky pain in the ass with unforgiving, long falls and an annoying gimmick and Rainbow Ride which is a course I have some fondness for but it generally ranks among the least-favourites for its difficult 100 coin challenge and tedious carpet rides. The hidden Wing Cap level up here is also infuriating and failing it dumps you back in the courtyard outside.
Let’s a-not go!
Metal Gear Solid - Nuclear Warhead Storage Building
Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil are permanently locked in a mortal struggle for my position as #1 favourite franchise: Metal Gear Solid has a consistently higher quality but it also never experimented or had quite as many spin-offs as Resident Evil has; I’ve replayed Resident Evil more and think that those PS1-era Resi games have aged better than MGS1 but the nature of MGS as a narrative-focused series sort of guarantees less replay value… I could debate this forever, the point is I’ve played MGS1 many times and I still love it… except for this specific room.
A little while before the famous Psycho Mantis boss fight, Solid Snake finds himself in a room where dismantled nuclear warheads and other radioactive material are being kept. Over CODEC you are informed that shooting these hazardous materials will trigger an incident and kill everyone in the room… so just be careful, right? Wrong. You will not be allowed to equip and use any weapons in this room but the enemy guards will.
If Solid Snake is caught, the enemy will fire on you, triggering the radiation and forcing you to watch Snake die a slow, painful death to radioactive gases; you cannot escape the room after shots are fired and retreating to safety doesn’t stop the gas.
The stealth in this warehouse isn’t difficult but the consequences for failure are rather irritating on repeat playthroughs.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker - Zadornov Escape Missions
I know this is another entry in the MGS series but… damn it, I’ve broken the rules, I really wanted to mention this one though.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is my second favourite game in the entire franchise, this PSP title -ported to consoles later with the HD Collection- is a direct sequel to the Metal Gear Solid you’ve never heard of: Portable Ops. and an indirect sequel to MGS3, set in 1974. Peace Walker follows Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller as they establish their own PMC: Militaires Sans Frontieres: an inexplicably French-named unit based on a disused oil rig off the coast of Costa Rica. Peace Walker sees Big Boss and MSF tangled up in the Cold War espionage of Latin America and Snake’s continuing efforts to come to terms with the events of MGS3.
The management elements, fantastic gameplay, bite-sized missions, fun boss fights and online CO-OP make this an essential MGS title… but the final act is ruined by these damn Zadornov missions.
MSF Captive Vladimir Zadornov keeps escaping the brig and it’s up to Snake to bring him back home over and over and over again, this leads to you trying to find him hidden across a plethora of reused levels until finally, you trigger the requirements for the game’s final boss. So tedious.
Sonic The Hedgehog - Labyrinth Zone (Mega Drive/Genesis Version)
The original Sonic The Hedgehog trilogy + Knuckles and Sonic CD (yes, I will be defending that game, thank you very much) are a set of titles I think all gamers owe it to themselves to play and every time I pop one of these into my Mega Drive -or Master System, the 8-Bit versions are great too- I can’t help but feel the sting of what we’ve lost in regards to Sega’s exit from the hardware business.
Or perhaps the company’s near-collapse was deserved retribution after subjecting us to Labyrinth Zone?
The original Sonic The Hedgehog’s fourth zone takes the blue blur to a flooded labyrinth where you have to battle treacle-slow movement, irritating spike traps and a limited air supply in order to succeed. This slow, meandering gauntlet is tricky, unforgiving and worst of all: boring and tends to rank among the most disliked zones in all of 2D Sonic. The only saving grace is that, as usual for a Sega game, it has a great soundtrack.
The tragedy of Labyrinth Zone is that it didn’t have to be this way. If you play the Sega Master System version of Sonic The Hedgehog then the Labyrinth, while not one of the better levels, is much less tedious.
Sonic Adventure - Big The Cat’s Campaign
![Sonic Adventure (Dreamcast) - Big the Cat's Story [Playthrough]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GR03!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F58a61970-dcc7-4273-986c-c1336ec550bc_1280x720.jpeg "Sonic Adventure (Dreamcast) - Big the Cat's Story [Playthrough]")
3D Sonic has quite the tumultuous history seeing both the dizzying heights of the Dreamcast days where Sonic Adventure was -and thanks to its botched GameCube port remains- a compelling reason to own Sega’s sleek white machine and seeing widespread mockery both from critics and players; even the once-beloved Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 fell victim to the internet’s ire but I want it to be known that the Dreamcast version is superior and that I love both of these games.
At least, I love Sonic Adventure besides Big The Cat’s campaign.
Sonic Adventure sees you playing as a whole cast of different characters with each of them giving their own perspective on the wider story and providing a unique gameplay style, not every campaign is a hit but they’re so short (about 2 hours each) and the idea so novel that it makes the game feel consistently fresh. For some reason, Sega decided that a campaign based around fishing was what the 3D rendition of their 2D platforming mascot needed. As Big The Cat you will go level-by-level catching his missing frog with a fishing rod… and it’s as fun as it sounds.
I played Sonic Adventure extensively during that formative 6-10 years age bracket so unfortunately, I can’t hate this big purple monstrosity, his fur looks too soft and his manner is too affable.
Jak II - Racing Missions
Jak II: the second entry in the Jak And Daxter series is a notoriously difficult video game and is generally considered the hardest PS2 game that doesn’t belong to an obscure genre. I grew up with Jak II and yes, of course I never beat it; I think my childhood disc is broken but I still own it, I need to put it through my resurfacing machine and have a go at Jak II as an adult.
This whole game is tough but what takes the cake for me are the racing missions. These damn things gave me a phobia of the whole racing genre which didn’t leave me until a friend convinced me to play Forza Horizon 4 with him and I got addicted to it.
Vehicles in Jak And Daxter are -mechanically and literally- floaty: they’re rocket-powered flying bikes and cars, this makes them both hard to handle and completely unlike the cars you’ll drive in a genuine racing game, on top of this, traffic density is quite high, you can swoop down to the ground to get past this but that usually results in Jak splattering a pedestrian which gets the Krimzon Guard on you: this game’s equivalent to GTA’s police.
To quote the AVGN, my thoughts on Jak II are simple “Good game, but holy fuck is it hard.”
Donkey Kong Country - Mine Cart Carnage And Mine Cart Madness
Donkey Kong Country is probably my favourite SNES game: it’s the only one I played during my formative years where the SNES was before my time, it has unbelievably good visuals for the hardware, one of the greatest soundtracks ever composed and a perfect balance of challenge and fun; I’ve never beaten the second game because it became such a brutal, difficult slog to play that I ran out of steam, yeah, yeah Scanlines is a scrub.
I like every level in DKC… except for its two outliers: the dreaded minecart levels.
As tight and as brilliant as DKC feels to play, I think most players would agree that hit-boxes and platforming can sometimes feel a touch off, thanks to the large sprites and visual style, this makes the minecart levels intensely difficult; unless you jump at the very last pixel on some of these pits, you will phase through the edge of the upcoming platform and die. Combine this with high-speed, surprise enemy encounters and twisty, curvy track layouts and you have a recipe for 10 lost lives.
I once played DKC cooperatively with my mum… it became a solo endeavour after world 2-2 where the first minecart level appears.
Half Life - Zen
Zen is the quintessential shitty FPS level: the green-orange stain at the end of an otherwise fantastic shooter.
Half Life’s most outstanding feature is perhaps its atmosphere and how well-crafted the narrative is; in a game with 3-armed extra-terrestrials, the government murdering innocent scientists and a potential invasion of the planet Earth on the horizon, Half Life manages to make the player feel consistently trapped and claustrophobic, pitting you against a plethora of alien baddies without ever feeling campy or losing its grounded tone… until the end.
The final stretch of Half Life takes you to Zen: a separate dimension filled with tedious platforming, crap boss fights and a confusing layout that grinds the pace of the finale to a screeching halt. By this point, Half Life has exhausted all its ideas and for an FPS game the shooting in Half Life has never been all that spectacular, so what follows is hopping platforms and dumping ammo into enemies you’ve already killed a hundred times until you come up against the dreadful final boss.
I’m in the minority of people who prefers Half Life to the -dare I say it- obscenely overrated sequel but Zen is indefensible.
The Last Of Us - Chapters I-IV
A few months ago, having failed to get into the game a number of years ago, I played and finished The Last Of Us for the first time. I broadly enjoyed my time with the game but I didn’t think I had much to say about it so I didn’t write a review; this entry on the list, roughly speaking, will outline why I bounced off it so badly the first time.
From Pittsburgh onwards, The Last Of Us represents a near-perfect meld of technology, storytelling and gameplay in a way that only our medium can achieve and this game pretty much single-handedly pushed the PlayStation 3 ahead of the Xbox 360 in the waning months of the 7th generation of game consoles. My issue with The Last Of Us, however, is that it just takes so damn long to get good.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I didn’t care when Joel’s daughter died, or when Tess died and the gameplay of The Last of Us is nothing spectacular, so for those opening chapters I mostly found myself restlessly running through things as fast as possible and wondering if my second attempt at appreciating the game was a lost cause. I turned out to be wrong, thankfully.
The Sims - Being A Brokie
Much like Gen Z, early on in any The Sims game, your only chance at being able to live in something larger than a shoebox is shacking up with a tribe of fellow bottom tax brackets and slumming it together in a property that’s more student flat than a good home. While this arguably helps to drive the meme-worthy carnage the series is known for it can also be quite tedious.
With nothing but a basic career in place, not enough money to really make your house a home or to go out and do things other than cover the basic needs of the household, the early Sims can have a tendency to become an endless quest to scrape together what meagre funds you can get.
Child me once had to be off school for over a month after a surgery and I spent most of this time on the original Xbox playing The Urbz (someone please comment if you’ve played it, I’ve never met another person in my life who’s played this version of The Sims) grinding away at the motorcycle shop mini game for cash and having Glasgow showers in the sinks of public toilets while working towards furnishing for my in-game flat.
Art really does mirror life.
Every Fighting Game - Labbing/Learning Combos
There is a certain sub-section of the fighting community I like to call the scientists. If you’ve ever been in the FGC then you’ve met the type: the sort of guy/lass who has 1000 hours on the game but a low rank and never leaves the lab, the sort of player who can nail all the hard combos but has zero fight IQ, the sort of player who can tell you the properties and frames of every move in their character’s arsenal but can’t break grabs. For these people, learning combos and labbing new ones is the best part of the game but for the rest of us? This is tedious, boring busywork.
I’ve had the privilege of facing some competitive-level Tekken players in my time and I always got the same advice: your defence is good and your timing is tricky… but you have the worst combos ever. I really could not be bothered to go and learn this stuff; what they don’t tell you about getting good at fighting games is that you need to spend double the time you play online matches rinsing and repeating combos ad infinitum and it is mind-numbing.
If you’re a ‘scientist’ then I have massive respect for you.
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Good list, fun to read! I'd say the worst part of any game from around 2000 are the mandatory stealth sections they always put in there. The worst offender being Jedi Outcast, where Kyle Katarn randomly decided that the number of stormtroopers in one particular level is too much for him to handle and you have to sneak to get through. Of course it's an insta fail if anyone sees you, and there's no way of knowing when or how anyone can spot you. Hate this forever!
I’ll give the number one slot to the Zen level in Half-Life.
That game was so, so great when it came out. As terrific as games are now, you don’t really get to have that “whoa” feeling any more now that you know pretty much everything about it before you sit down. But Half-Life was intense and original and an absolute blast from the first moment.
But Zen? Wow. I actually hadn’t realized how mediocre the shooting was in the game until the last level when I was doing those lazy jumps and realizing that there was no way to dodge or duck or hide from the snipers(?) shooting at me from the ground.
And 100% agree that Half-Life was vastly superior to its overrated sequel. You are not alone. Fuck the gravity gun!