HG101 2024 Game FAIL Challenge

[Apollo Chungus]

Welcome to the 2024 HG101 Game FAIL Challenge!

This is a companion piece to the HG101 Game Finish Challenge thread, in which people attempt to finish video games and post about whatever they've beaten. However, this thread will be dedicated to the games that people weren't able to beat on the terms established in that thread. Maybe you gave the game up, or had to beat it using cheats and save states, or you only played one of the scenarios before deciding that was all you really needed. Whatever the reason, this thread will be the place you can go to talk about those games.

There will be far fewer rules because of the nature of this thread (and also because it's still fairly new), but feel free to ask if you have any questions. Rules about certain game types or genres can be read on the corresponding Game Finish Challenge thread, in order to see what counts to complete a game or not.

Basic Guidelines

- A game can be discussed in this thread if:

- You abandoned the game before reaching the end.

- You beat the game using cheats, save states in emulators, or exploiting major glitches.

- Nothing is permanent. You can decide to revisit the game and beat it on its own terms at a later point, so don't worry about this meaning you have to give it up forever just because it's on this thread.

Post Formatting

- The name of the game must be in bold and optionally in red if you failed to beat the game, or orange if you beat the game with cheats, glitches and the like. The platform must also be included.
- Please use the game’s English name even if it is not officially available in English.
- If the game is for a computer platform, use the operating system name e.g. DOS, if the platform can generally be considered a PC. Older systems such as the C64 or Apple II may simply use that instead.
- If the game is part of an official emulated release, please include both the original platform and the platform of play.
- Include whether this was a first time completion or a replay.
- If including multiple games, please put them in alphabetical order. If you are also including some thoughts, this text may break up the listing.

General Rules

- A game must be able to be completed, for it to not be beaten. It must either have a win state such as an ending or a set of challenges such as scenarios. In most cases, getting to the credits is an obvious indication, but this is not always the case.
- A game may only be counted once per person. Multiple people may claim the same game.
- Any difficulty is acceptable.
- Posting a screenshot is encouraged but not required.

Ports/Remakes/Remasters

- Simple ports, remakes and remastered versions i.e. graphical updates do not count separately.
- Games with substantial changes over the original do count separately.

DLC and Expansions

- In order to count separately from the base game, DLC and expansions must be accessible either from the main menu or completely separately and not exclusively in-game.
- New content in rereleases, remakes and remasters may be counted separately if it fulfills the general requirements for DLC and expansions.

Hacks/Mods

- Bug fix and gameplay adding modifications are allowed, but please list any that are used.
- Simple mods do not count separately from the base game.
- Large scale modifications that function as a new game do count separately from the base game.

Looping Games

- Infinitely looping games that consist of a single screen with a fixed level layout e.g the original Pac-Man or a fixed enemy formation e.g. Space Invaders do not count.
- Infinitely looping games with a level progression regardless of length count.
- Fixed or infinitely looping games only require a single loop if difficulty and not content is the only differentiator.

---

This is merely a commiseration thread, to talk about games that we weren't able to beat on its own terms (whether that means giving it up or using cheats). It's called the Game Fail Challenge, but that doesn't mean you have failed. Sometimes these things don't work out as you want them to, and that's okay.

[Apollo Chungus]

Guess I'll get started lol

Crash Bandicoot: Warped (PlayStation; Replay; Gave up around the third world)

Since I'd properly played through the first two Crash games last year, I thought it'd be nice to wrap things up by revisiting Warped, which was the only I'd played a decent amount of after my childhood thanks to grabbing a copy from a retro game shop in my teens. It's a fairly decent game, but one I wasn't as keen on because of all the levels you have to do where you're not playing as Crash. The tiger-riding levels are pretty solid, but the rest range from meh (jet ski and underwater stages) to frustrating (the motorbike stages). I got as far as the motorcycle stage in the third world and it's frankly too tricky for me. I can't weave my way down the hairpin turns, and the lack of a restart option means you have to grit your teeth and ride to the end even you know it's a lost cause. I couldn't be arsed dealing with it anymore. Fine enough game, but by far my least favourite of the original Crash games.

Silent Bomber (PlayStation; First Time; Gave up at Mission 6)

This is the second game CyberConnect2 put out, and one I've been wanting to try ever since I first watched a video The Gaming Brit did on it from 2015 (yipe!). It's a pretty neat action game where you plant bombs, either at your feet or by targeting enemies, and can stack bombs before triggering them to lay on some powerful explosive attacks. There's other items you can plant like napalm bombs to leave lasting damage or EMPs to disable mechanical enemies for a time, and there's even an upgrade system where you can find chips and swap them out in the pause menu to increase/decrease the number of bombs you can plant, your targeting range and defense.

There's a robust set of mechanics here, and the quick and snappy pacing of the missions means there's always something new and interesting coming your way every few minutes. I only got a brief taster of the cutscenes since things are kept fairly light, but I imagine there's some nice stuff going on there too once you get far enough into it. Sadly, I can't because this game's a bunch tougher than I'm able to deal with. I'm not good at trying to plant/target bombs while also dodging the cavalcade of projectiles coming my way (detonating bombs does get ride of nearby bullets so it's not completely sadistic). I just find it's too awkward for me to be capable of not getting swamped to bits, and I wasn't enjoying myself enough to push through when I figured things would just keep getting harder.

It's prolly a good time if you want a challenging PS1 action game, but it ain't for me. Ah well.

[spanky]

I've got a few irons in the fire but I always have time to fail a Genesis SHMUP

Gaiares (Genesis, Never beaten)

Is this the most famous Genesis SHMUP? I feel like it's either this or Thunder Force IV. It has a really cool mechanic where you send a can send out a probe to attack enemies and steal their weapon. You can't fire while it's out so you have to gauge the risk (something I wasn't very good at doing). As with most  games of the genre, it's pretty tough and while I have fun with them, my brain just isn't wired to handle them.

[Snake]

2 Crude/Crude Buster, Arcade

Went WAY over the credit limit to finish this one.  Another Data East game, with muscular Arnold-terminator like cloned palette swapped hereos.  A side-scrolling brawler in post-apocalyptic New York, a fallen Statue of Liberty.  Fighting multiples of muscle-bound men and mutants, and even what seems to be a reference to actor Al Leong.  Despite the destruction of the city, all the Coke vending machines seem to work.  Personally, prefer Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja, but 2 Crude and its end gauntlet of bosses and final boss is a rehashing of tropes that was interesting to see once.  I guess the draw of the game was being able to pick up lots of background objects, from sign posts to beat up cars.  I might have cared more if I was still 10 years old.

[Digitalnametag]

Pokemon Scarlet NS 5 hours (Made it through a couple gym challenges.)

I play a lot of games from smaller publishers. Budget titles. Games that people would not describe as having 'good graphics'. But I struggle to think of a game I have played recently that looks as bad as Pokemon Scarlet. Rune Factory 5 maybe? I did finish the story in that one though.

When the frame rate hits single digits in some of the opening scenes of a major title on a Nintendo console you know something is wrong. Xenoblade 3 or hell Xenoblade 2 looks so much better than this. And it isn't just the frame rate. It's the other little things. The fact that they got rid of the insides of buildings, that shops are just menus and are sometimes the same as the shop right next door. That Pokecenters are a kiosk on the map. This was not done to be convenient. It was developer laziness. The gym challenges are lame and the NPC's look creepy and uninteresting.

I really liked Sword and Shield. And I like some of the game play elements in Scarlet. Seeing Pokemon on the map everywhere is neat and I enjoy the raids. I just wish there was something else on those empty maps and that the game didn't run so poorly. But hey I bought a copy like everyone else.

[excelsior]

Jan 24, 2024 14:52:14 GMT -5 Digitalnametag said:

Pokemon Scarlet NS 5 hours (Made it through a couple gym challenges.)

It was developer laziness.

It's more a case of TPC's unrealistic demands outweighing what any development studio could possibly deliver, and those expectations snowballing across multiple projects. Can we not bring lazy devs rhetoric here please?  Lay the blame where it actually lies.

[Digitalnametag]

Jan 24, 2024 15:18:05 GMT -5 excelsior said:

Jan 24, 2024 14:52:14 GMT -5 Digitalnametag said:

Pokemon Scarlet NS 5 hours (Made it through a couple gym challenges.)

It was developer laziness.

It's more a case of TPC's unrealistic demands outweighing what any development studio could possibly deliver, and those expectations snowballing across multiple projects. Can we not bring lazy devs rhetoric here please?  Lay the blame where it actually lies.

Eh. The developer is the one ultimately responsible for the product. You can blame whomever you want but the developer is the one who made the product. I mean no ill will towards anyone. I am a software engineer myself and one of the earliest things you learn about development is that efficiency and laziness are often the same thing.

So if you want you can swap the word efficiency for lazy in my post.

[excelsior]

Jan 24, 2024 15:38:09 GMT -5 Digitalnametag said:

Jan 24, 2024 15:18:05 GMT -5 excelsior said:

It's more a case of TPC's unrealistic demands outweighing what any development studio could possibly deliver, and those expectations snowballing across multiple projects. Can we not bring lazy devs rhetoric here please?  Lay the blame where it actually lies.

Eh. The developer is the one ultimately responsible for the product.

The publisher bears responsibility for the product in the case that they funded it. They're the ones we buy the game from. The publisher sets budget, time and delivery expectations. Developers work (often inhumane hours) to meet those expectations. Publishers are of course in turn beholden to shareholder expectations. With regard to efficiency, no other industry development studio has met anything like the expectations of the Pokemon brand. This game was reportedly made in 3 years which included a global pandemic causing huge disruption to their operation. No delay was given to their usual schedule to account for said pandemic and 3 years is low for modern large scale game development. The games can certainly be faulted and the technology may be behind - I've seen indication of a move over to Unreal Engine which may make things a little more efficient, but even something like that is an involved decision that takes time to implement. I don't think it's realistic to think it'll be transformational enough for Game Freak devs to meet the increasing requirements of modern game development, though. Not unless more reasonable delivery times are allowed.

[Digitalnametag]

Okay? I understand how the system works. Many industries workers are overworked and underpaid. You ever looked at manga/anime/light novel translators? A lot of those people get screwed.

What I don’t understand is why you care about defending GameFreaks feelings on a dying message board. I have no ill feelings towards them. I like Pokémon. But Scarlet/Violet is a poor showing and takes a lot of plainly visible shortcuts. It is over a year after launch and the game does not run much better than before outside of some bug fixes. If you put two of the exact same shops next to each other to fill space, that was a lazy design move. Fueled by desperation and insane deadlines maybe, but lazy nonetheless. I can only critique from my perspective without knowing what happened. And honestly I don’t really care. I just want to have fun playing games.

Plenty of companies design more functional games with smaller teams and less development time. Gust and it’s Atelier series for example. The first couple 3D open world type games were rough. But they got better. Hopefully Pokémon will too.

[excelsior]

Digitalnametag - The reason I'm defending them is because I believe making personal insinuations like use of the word lazy about the developers is not appropriate and comes off as unpleasant, and that we should be focusing on the games themselves. You can make a very similar argument less personal by using a phrase such 'it's underdeveloped'. And sure, we all make poor word choices, or even bad posts, here and there, but one trait of this forum that I've enjoyed to date is our ability to self-moderate. If anything, the fact that there are so few of us here means that thoughtfulness towards others is of even greater importance, so making adjustments to ensure this is a more pleasant board to visit is worthwhile for all of us.

And yes, I absolutely agree that the Atelier series is a great example of an efficiently designed and developed one, but the scope is far removed from what Pokemon has become.

[dsparil]

Legend of Grimrock (Switch, Dull)

Technically a double fail if you consider the fact that I actually bought the Mac version years ago. This this is a dungeon crawler in the mould of Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder (first person, four member party, grid-based, realtime). I got a few dungeon levels in, but its just so painfully boring. Maybe it gets better later, but it does a pretty awful job of gripping you from the start. The sequel is supposed to be better though, but the developer said to not expect a Switch port.

Transiruby (Switch, Buggy)

A metroidvania from Skipmore, the developer of Fairune among other things. There's a lot to like here, but the controls seem almost hopeless bugged. It has a weird tendency to keep acting as if a direction is held down way long than it actually is which lead to a lot of frustration. It could be the controller, but I haven't noticed anything else having this problem.

[Woody Alien 2]

Violet Wisteria (Steam, too hard)

Does anyone know a game youtuber named Ultra Healthy Video Game Nerd? I used to follow him for a while because he talked about rare retro Japanese games but without too much dumb shit, he's informative and calm, getting to the point but being still informative. It's one of the few youtubers I really enjoyed and I also used his Magical Pop'n video as a partial basis from my review published on the site.

So, when he came out of his hiatus with a new video, he revealed he was going to develop a game under the moniker "Kani Pro". I got interested and decided I was going to buy it whenever it came out, because I wanted to support him.

Fast forward to 2023, the game gets unveiled, it's a homage to Valis and other 80s/90s JP platformers and action titles with the name "Violet Wisteria". I bought it during a sale but for various reasons never touched it until today, also because it's probably the only Steam game I own that is controller only (keyboard not supported) and I was afraid my old half-broken gamepad wasn't going to cut it.

Long story short, the gamepad works thanks to Steam layout, but after a couple hours I had to concede defeat: the game goes beyond "challenging" and becomes pretty much "unplayable", even played at the lowest difficulty level. It has 8 levels and I couldn't even get past the second one! I watched a couple videos on Youtube and other reviews basically complain about this too and from what I've seen of the levels past 2 the game becomes even more bullshit so I'm not even going to try to finish it, even if I'm probably going to try completing at least the 2nd level.

The crux of the gameplay is that the heroine has three different attacks (blue, white and red), but it's not that you have to defeat enemies of the same color with that color attack, it would've been too easy! If you do that, you will bounce off the enemy and get flung around the level, so it's also partially a puzzle platformer, because you need it to get past certain platforming challenges. White defeats red, red defeats blue and blue defeats white. Point is, blue and red attacks have to be performed by pushing the button and moving the pad in a direction so you have to remember that too. It probably would have worked in a "pure" puzzle platformer, but this is an action title through and through, with traps, obstacles, enemies coming from everywhere, bottomless pits, so it's easy to get the wrong attack or accidentally hit an enemy of the wrong color and get flown off the stage or into a trap or another enemy. You also have magic spells of three different colors but they are rarely useful and using it even shaves off seconds from the timer! How nasty is that?

With the color rock/paper/scissor gimmick and the weird control scheme the game never flows well and feels just clunky and frustrating, but even as a regular platformer is too old-school for its own good and needlessly obtuse and sadistic. As if the developer is a "pro gamer" and forgot that you have to sell your stuff to people of average ability too.

I don't know what to say, as a reviewer and general youtuber he's knowledgeable and interesting, but this game goes on to show that it's not enough to be passionate about something to make a copy of it that other people will enjoy. He was proud of it, as I guess every creator is, but I don't think anyone but the most masochistic players out there will find anything worthwhile in it.

[Apollo Chungus]

Daxter (PSP; Replay; Gave up around the final level)

Back in 2010, I had a PSP that worked for about a year and a half before some weirdo issue with the battery meant that I could no longer play it without having it hooked up to the charger. At that point, I left it in the hands of my older brother who briefly used it as a SNES emulator, while I eventually caught the (3)DS bug. Of the handful of games I'd gotten for the PSP during that short period of interest, Daxter was one I remember liking a fair bit and I even played through it a couple times. Now that I'm trying to revisit the system, I thought it'd be nice to get reacquainted with it, find new stuff to appreciate and enjoy the old joys I experienced way back when.

That did not happen.

I'm genuinely stumped at how much I didn't care for Daxter on this go. I remember so little about the game it legit threw me for a loop. Most of the environments, characters, music, setpieces, none of it had left any lasting impression and going to places didn't even trigger the faintest memories. It really did go in one ear and out the other, and going through nearly the whole thing again did nothing to change that. The gameplay's serviceable enough, but apart from a couple of moments (mainly the subway stage where you're jumping across trains and dodging overhead obstacles), it's wrapped up in an adventure that doesn't do a whole lot for me. I like that every stage takes about 10-15 minutes to beat which is good for handheld play, but that's really about it in terms of stuff I appreciated.

I didn't even beat this, despite managing to do it over a decade ago, and gave up somewhere round the final stage simply because I'd had enough of a stupid platforming puzzle. A real shame that my opinion on this has fallen as much as it has, I faintly recall thinking it was excellent once upon a time. Maybe getting a fully fledged 3D platformer on a handheld was part of that, as I was well into the genre at the time and such an idea was still novel enough to me. Guess there isn't much for me when that novelty's gone.

Sonic P-06 (Windows; First Time; This is a demo so it doesn't really have an ending)

This is a fan-game primarily developed by ChaosX that seeks to remake Sonic 06, using the same mechanics and level designs but fixing up the litany of bugs from the original version and adding a great deal of polish. I played through the Silver release (the most recent version), which lets you play through all the major levels for the three main characters. But there aren't any boss fights, finale stages, town sections, or any of the connective tissue that makes Sonic 06 whatever it is.

My thoughts on Sonic 06 go back and forth, which is kinda funny considering I used to love it as a kid and it was the reason I persuaded my family to get us an Xbox 360 back when it came out. Last time I played it was nearly a decade ago, and my thoughts were more or less that it was alright enough, but that fixing any of the technical issues wouldn't magically change it into an amazing game.

This is my first time playing P-06, which is basically that entire concept come to life. Most of the bugs and technical issues are sorted out, character control is hugely improved especially for the side characters, and there's lots of little details and polish added to make for a cooler, more dynamic experience. I particularly dug the in-level cutscenes that add some extra storytelling and the unique times of day added to certain stages like Tropical Jungle and Wave Ocean.

It's a nice enough way to revisit the main stages of Sonic 06, though playing them back to back made me realize how little the levels tended to differ between campaigns. I like (in theory) how the cast plays largely identically, but the linear design of stages means that I'm often replaying the same levels just in a different order. Occasionally you get unique segments (Sonic's entire run of Tropical Jungle occurs in areas only he visits) or you'll get characters who play differently enough that you explore the space in entirely unique ways (Rouge and Silver in Tropical Jungle, wow I keep mentioning that stage).

But it doesn't happen often enough and it makes checking out those stages feel less interesting than they should be. Shadow's campaign in particular feel like a slog with its numerous mandatory combat encounters, in contrast to Sonic's speedy excursions and Silver's psychic platforming and fighting.

Obviously, this project's still in the works (at the time of writing ChaosX is sorting out the boss fights), so I can't quite say this is the best way to play 06 because - as I alluded to up-top - there's still a lot about the game that isn't here yet. That's perfectly understandable, and it's equally impressive and wild that ChaosX and everyone else involved has managed to get the bulk of the game working with this degree of polish and improvement.

For folks who wanna revisit the main stages without the rigmarole of getting 06 up and running (via original hardware or emulation), it's worth a shot. But like how the Sonic Generations Unleashed Project mod doesn't adequately replace Sonic Unleashed for all the stuff it leaves out, I can't currently consider this worth trying over Sonic 06 if you want to experience the full package.

Hopefully that'll be different in the future, if everything works out. I hope it does, and I wish all those involved the best of luck.

[excelsior]

Fire Shark (Mega Drive, First Time, Beat - Looping Game)
Played through this in bed this morning. It's a pretty nice shooter from Toaplan. I just went through the easy difficulty, which truly meets that descriptor. I like the set of weapons on offer since you can become pretty powerful and fill the screen with bullets, though you die in one hit and go back to zero. There's a generous helping of extra lives and bombs to help you through and as long as you're careful this shouldn't give too many problems. I'm not too keen on the audio tracks and the backgrounds, which are pretty basic and repetitive, unfortunately. Still, worth a play.