Too difficult to be fun...
 

I'm currently playing Banjo-Kazooie and it is a marvelous game. It has an immersive environment, diverse gameplay, and a fun story. The only problem with it is that it's too damn difficult. More specifically, it's not very forgiving at times. Twice, I've lost more than an hour of my time due to simple mistakes. Now, for an adult who has precious little time out of life to indulge in games, this is incredibly frustrating. How can anyone design a game this way? I thought games were supposed to be fun? Does anyone find wasting their time fun? I felt as though the developers made certain challenges so that only hardcore gamers who have had enough free time to play these games like full time jobs could succeed because they only want the elite few to ever finish them. That's how it felt and I found it insulting and frustrating.

This just reminded me of all the other times a game did this to me.
Ico was another brilliant game and, again, there were times where it was really unforgiving. Am I the only person who thinks that Ico would have been a better game if you never had to fight the ghosts and , instead, just wandered around the castle trying to discover how to advance?
WipeOut was another cool game that was fun to play, as long as you never made a mistake. If your car touches anything, even slightly, your car would completely halt and you'd have no hope of winning the race. So, you either played a race perfectly or you failed. Again, not fun!

The list goes on. Is it so hard to find a fun and relaxing game that an ordinary person can play? Is there no market for such a thing?

Jak II really pissed me off, I had to replay the Escort the Soliders mission about 100 times before I got it, what's worse is that I'd always mess up right before the next checkpoint... Jak II was a fantastic game but the difficulty just spiked way unforgivingly.

However one thing I always find is that if I get my arse handed to me and come back days later to replay that mission/fight I'll win it first try. Don't understand it but I love the feeling.

Mario Sunshne. i never did beat that game. i think i just gave up on it entirely.

I agree -- some game developers can't think of ways to make a game challenging, so instead they make it tedious. It is a failure of imagination and effort on their part.

pikimin suffered from this at times -- you only had 30 "days" to salvage 30 items so if you got to day 12 and only had 8 items you might as well start over -- it's a great game but i think an "easier" setting might have been a good idea.

Yeah, that's one of the rare games that I haven't gotten everything in yet.

I think that Ico and Prince of Persia had too much fighting in them. During those games I kept saying to myself "ok, I've already proven I can kill 100 of these guys without taking a hit, you can quit sending them now" Just the way they conviently spawned in specific areas annoyed me.

Agreed, the Tower of Dawn (I think it was that one) pissed me off, I'd killed dozens of the elite and they kept coming back! Same with in the bath-houses when you're about to make your way out... Still though, was an A-Grade game and had one of the best end sequences e-v-e-r.

This is why I like the Tomb Raider games best even though the graphics aren't as good as in some other games. The emphasis is on solving the puzzles rather than fighting a bunch of AIs.