Games that deliberately troll you.

[sser]

The game started its trolling with giant killer fleas chasing you, IIRC.

 

[Peter]

To me it started a bit earlier, with super boxing powers accompanied by shitty rock music.

 

[mondblut]

Why do you even play games mondblut?

To waste those endless empty hours bereft of sex and booze.

(and I pretty much don't, since lately sex and booze had been good to me )

 

[DraQ]

Now I remember! I felt trolled by the very ending of Azrael's Tear.

The rest of the game was consistently awsum.

 

[20 Eyes]

I just started playing Mountain Blade: Prophecy of Pendor with Warband and it's already trolling me pretty hard.

I've been trying to win this tournament (saves unlimited, yes I'm a coward) and I always advance to the last or second to last round easily. At which point the enemies turn into Neo and start parrying and blocking attacks like it's a Jet Li movie and I get chopped the fuck up.

What really makes me rage is when they give me a bow and that little fucking dagger and my opponent gets a sword and shield. Such bullshit.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I was looking through Pokemons B&W's new pokes. The one based on hip-hop culture (has molten skin resembling a hoodie and baggy pants) is of the Dark / Fighting type. He's the only one with this type, btw.

Oh, Japan, you so crazy

 

[Jick Magger]

One more
Final Fantasy VIII. In particular, the big assassination job at the end of disc one. You've been given a fairly competent plan and all the means to execute it involving one team pulling the gates down, and the other team shooting the target while they're stuck at the closed gate (it's during a parade, and the target is on a huge float, thus is a sitting duck). There are two things that happen...

Spoiler

*First thing is just as the first team gets into position, one of their members spontaneously asks if they could go through with a plan that she just made up on the spot. Consisting of breaking into the palace in which the target (who is an extremely powerful and genocidal witch) and convince her to put on a necklace that she thinks will nullify her powers. The rest of the team calls her out on how retarded that plan is, and she storms off in a hissy fit (she goes on to attempt to pull this off, and fails miserably), then, as the parade begins, the team leader decides to abandon her post to go and apologize to her. Through sheer dumb luck she's able to get back to her position in time to lower the gate.

Second thing happens when the second team (consisting of the MC and a sniper) get into their position. The moment they get there the most mind numbingly retarded thing happens; the sniper says he can't pull the fucking shot off. He fucking freezes up and starts going on about how he always panics before he's able to do these things, despite the fact that I've been using him as a party member for a fairly long time now and he's been perfectly willing to kill things up until this point. His sudden bleeding heart moment basically fucks the entire plan up. By the time he does sum up the courage to pull it off the gates have long since been shut and the witch is wise to the entire scheme and thus deflects the shot easily.

 

[mondblut]

she storms off in a hissy fit...

the team leader decides to abandon her post...

the sniper says he can't pull the fucking shot off. He fucking freezes up and starts going on about how he always panics before he's able to do these things, despite the fact that I've been using him as a party member for a fairly long time now and he's been perfectly willing to kill things up until this point.

That's a JRPG, WTF were you expecting? Some sense and characters doing what the player wants? Wrong genre, mate.

 

[gromit]

Whoops, almost forgot! My sweet, beloved KoTOR2 features:

a) this spiteful old bitty who will contort any situation in any possible light in order to heckle you

b) sheer and utter pontification on exactly how preposterous most of Star Wars is, while blissfully diving face-first into the lore

c) blatant portents of doom shown to the player which remain outside of the PC's knowledge

d) a stunning climax built of several opposing game-long machinations colliding together, which then takes you out of its mouth at the last possible second because it's tired and has a headache

e) a studio independently owned by Black Isle veterans doing a Bioware sequel for console as their debut

 

[Clockwork Knight]

the sniper says he can't pull the fucking shot off. He fucking freezes up and starts going on about how he always panics before he's able to do these things, despite the fact that I've been using him as a party member for a fairly long time now and he's been perfectly willing to kill things up until this point.

Tbh he says he panics when success depends too much on him. He is perfectly willing to shoot people when in a group or if he's on a shit mission, but that was the assassination of an important political figure (perhaps the most important in FF8's world? Don't remember), an it was a really difficult shot to boot.

Kinda like the difference between scoring a goal while playing with your friends in the backyard vs. being selected for the deciding penalty kick in the championship finals.

Spoiler

I'm defending this because the "orphanage reveal" later on is pretty much the biggest trolling moment in FF's history, so Irvine's freaking out can't possibly compare

 

[someone else]

I got trolled when I found the Master in Fallout wasn't really evil.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

I was looking through Pokemons B&W's new pokes. The one based on hip-hop culture (has molten skin resembling a hoodie and baggy pants) is of the Dark / Fighting type. He's the only one with this type, btw.

Oh, Japan, you so crazy

There's also this chap.

Braviary, the American eagle Pokemon with the species "Valiant"! Awesome! Finally, Japan celebrates another culture in a positive and uplifting way.

What's that? He's styled after a native American warrior, but has had the American flag imprinted over his tribal markings...

...and he's only available in White version?

Oops

 

[Jick Magger]

Spoiler

I'm defending this because the "orphanage reveal" later on is pretty much the biggest trolling moment in FF's history, so Irvine's freaking out can't possibly compare

Oh god, that just made it worse.

Spoiler

So Irvine never felt it was necessary to mention to any of the party that the woman they were making him kill was the person who raised them?
None of the mission planners noticed this? Nobody in the gardens realized that the whole plan could fall apart if any of the members gets emotionally compromised and fucks the entire thing up?
I can believe that everyone in my party is a fucking idiot, but a huge mercenary organisation made an error this huge?

 

[Ulminati]

The ending of the original Syndicate. Awesome game all the way through. You finally go and do the last mission in the atlantic ocean, claw your way through and BOOM. Dumped back to the map screen, nothing left to do. GG.

Considering the effort that went into the intro and the post-mission cinematic, Bullfrog had set everyone up for an awesome outtro. Completely failed to deliver.

Considering the amount of attempts it took me to finally crack that last mission, it was one of the most rage-inducing moments of the 1990s.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Oh god, that just made it worse.

iirc, that wasn't completely the writers' fault, it was a requirement of one of the Square higher-ups (for whatever reason - I think it was because

Spoiler

the sorceress didn't get a properly explained origin, so he demanded they found out they were all raised together, and it was up to the writers to find a way to put it into the script without changing everything). That's why it comes out of nowhere, has no relevance to the story whatsoever and no one mentions it anymore after that - they had to shoehorn that somewhere, and "no one asked me, lol" was the better they could come up with.

At least that's what I read once. Don't know if it's true, but it would explain the whole feeling of the scene

 

[saenz]

The ending of the original Syndicate...

Jesus, you just reminded me of XCOM: Apocalypse. Spend weeks, if not months, playing and all you get is a half-assed video clip, voice acted by a batch of dickless Europeans.

It's surprisingly easy to Google as "The worst ending in the history of video games."
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=10463

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Good to see this topic has gathered some replies.

The Kaizo Mario games and any and all versions of I Wanna Be That Guy are games that I cannot consider to be trolling games. Sure, they may have unforgettable trolling moments, but in truth they're all just very complex memory games. Learn the pattern, the game is a cakewalk.

Likewise, games that are ludicrously easy for about 95% of the game, only to have the last level or some extra secret bonus level being bone-breakingly hard... just because. I believe this is called "slamming into a wall of difficulty", and games like Cave Story, Trine, Syndicate and Psychonauts are memorable examples of this. This is not trolling, it's just bad game design, most often used to cover up the fact that your game is shit. At least that's the case in Trine.

One game does this differently, which is mentioned in this thread, and that's the first Oddworld game. In fact, I mentioned this very example in another thread here a while ago. From the first screen you can reach a secret level that's exceedingly hard. It was enough for me to refuse to play the game. As a result, I can not say if Oddworld is a game that trolls the player, or is just a victim of bad game design.

Ghosts 'n' Goblins (and its sequels) does troll you pretty hard by forcing you to replay the game to beat it.

And the old Sierra games... fuck yeah, many of those troll you nonstop. I think Gold Rush is the worst one of them, though.

As for IF games... the only one I can say for sure is deliberately trolling you is Bureaucracy. That is one solid trolling marathon from start to finish.

I do not believe Battletoads, or many other supertough platformers on the (S)NES, are troll games. Most of them were either bugged, their difficulty levels raised to nigh-impossible levels on purpose to "extend replayability", or in a few cases, both.

After reading a few comments here about stupidly stupid storytelling, I seriously cannot say whether they're thinly-veiled trolling attempts, or just blatant stupidity running rampant. Though in the case of FF8 I'm betting it's the former rather than the latter.

Fahrenheit is definetely a case of "Bait and switch", by basically switching out the WHOLE GAME at one point. I have no idea why they did that, as I haven't played the game myself.

XCOM: Apocalypse... It's surprisingly easy to Google as "The worst ending in the history of video games."

Except that it isn't.

It's definetely one of the worst ones (at least on the PC) but I can think of 2 others right off the bat that are worse than X-Com: Apocalypse.

First one is Syndicate, as Ulminati said. Compared to the rest of the game, the Atlantic Accelerator is HARD, and after having slugged through all the other missions, and then beaten the Atlantic Accelerator, it is a proverbial kick in the nuts to get absolutely no reward.

You'd think that with Syndicate being such as it was back in 1993, that an expansion pack would at least include an outro? Wrong. Syndicate: American Revolt is one of the toughest nut-busters around (and just you wait 'till you see the Atlantic Accelerator mission in the expansion) and to this date I've only ever heard of one guy beating it. And he confirms that there's no outro.

The second one is the first Eye Of The Beholder game. You find the Bad Guy, you kill him, and instead of an outro worthy of the quite-good-for-its-time intro, you get a wall of text followed by the DOS prompt. At least Westwood tried to fix this, and patched versions on the Amiga have a nice outro to go with the game. PC users can suck it.

Wait, I got one more: Captive. After dozens of hours of remote-controlling droids to find your prison and then your cell, you're given two choices: "Win" or "Continue". If you select Win, you get a short congratulatory message followed by the DOS prompt. If you choose continue, you get a short animation showing youself being whisked away by a Warden (the baddie on the box cover of the game) to another holding facility. Time to start the hunt all over again...

 

[Ulminati]

The second one is the first Eye Of The Beholder game. You find the Bad Guy, you kill him, and instead of an outro worthy of the quite-good-for-its-time intro, you get a wall of text followed by the DOS prompt. At least Westwood tried to fix this, and patched versions on the Amiga have a nice outro to go with the game. PC users can suck it.

Oooh. That's the one. I couldn't recall which of the Westwood games did this. There was an interview with one of the Devs in a copy of PC gamer many years ago on the topic of crap endings. The Dev explained that the studio had made this huge outtro for the game (probably the one amiga users got), but it was so large the game would need to ship on an additional disk to have room for it. The publisher decided to cut the last disk from the shipped version to save money.

 

[Hobo Elf]

The whole Metal Gear Solid series. Stairways that last for fucking ever and enemies keep attacking you, key card puzzles, Psycho Mantis, Meryl's codec number, underwater escort missions, Raiden, ladders, The End on the hardest difficulty without using pussy tactics or killing him before the boss fight. canon homolust between Big Boss and Master Miller inside a cardboard box (hell, what am I talking about, everyone is fucking gay in MGS), codec calls jesus don't make me go on.

 

[Sceptic]

As for IF games... the only one I can say for sure is deliberately trolling you is Bureaucracy. That is one solid trolling marathon from start to finish.

What, no Infidel? Sure, it only trolls you in the ending... except that troll ending makes it pretty clear in retrospect that the entire game has been trolling you all along, you just didn't know it.

So you get through all the fiendish puzzles (in the best most frustrating Infocom style), some of them quite unfair (a la Bureaucracy), and you FINALLY get to the center of the Pyramid! The ultimate artifact is within your grasp! You reach to pick it up...

... and the pyramid collapses around you, trapping you to die a slow painful death. The End.

And why does the game have to end badly like this? It's karma, you see. Because your char was a bit of an asshole... in the introduction.

Oh sure there's another possible ending, as suggested by Wikipedia: get to the final chamber (thereby achieving the max score), then walk back to the entrance of the pyramid, and quite the game there. Hurray for LARPing.

I still rage a bit whenever I remember this game.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I haven't played Infidel, so I can't comment on that. Unlike some people here, I only tend to comment on games I've either played myself, or know well enough to be knowledgable on.

 

[Hamster]

Killzone 2.
Fucking Rico.
By the end of it you'll be asking yourself why nobody just tied him up and put him in a corner somewhere. He's proven he cannot follow basic orders because of how angry he gets (he botches a fairly simple rescue attempt and sabotage, which leads to your best friend getting ventilated), he's prone to violent outbursts of rage at basically everyone, is completely incapable of defending himself or helping you (half of what makes the final boss so hard is that you've constantly got to get out of cover to find him and heal him), and in the end he pulls the most pants on head retarded decision in gaming history; he blows the unarmed enemy's leader away, therefore martyring the fucker, after he had a 4 minute speech talking about how killing him would, well, martyr him.

Well, he redeemed himself in Killzone 3 ending.

Fucking ending! How i RAGED!

 

[Gragt]

The whole Metal Gear Solid series. Stairways that last for fucking ever and enemies keep attacking you, key card puzzles, Psycho Mantis, Meryl's codec number, underwater escort missions, Raiden, ladders, The End on the hardest difficulty without using pussy tactics or killing him before the boss fight. canon homolust between Big Boss and Master Miller inside a cardboard box (hell, what am I talking about, everyone is fucking gay in MGS), codec calls jesus don't make me go on.

Metal Gear 2 is pretty cool though.

 

[kasmas]

Starlancer

*Group dogfights where you alone fight a group while your wingmen enjoy the view
*25' missions that can fail any time
*Please stop those 76 incoming torpedoes lunched from 50 meters away request from captain
*Mission command never stops screaming at you
*You are NATO fighting against USSR
*Upgrading ships doesn't make any difference
*Key member of your useless squad realises his proletarian background and defects to the other side

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The whole Metal Gear Solid series. Stairways that last for fucking ever and enemies keep attacking you, key card puzzles, Psycho Mantis, Meryl's codec number, underwater escort missions, Raiden, ladders, The End on the hardest difficulty without using pussy tactics or killing him before the boss fight. canon homolust between Big Boss and Master Miller inside a cardboard box (hell, what am I talking about, everyone is fucking gay in MGS), codec calls jesus don't make me go on.

Metal Gear 2 is pretty cool though.

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

Unrelated: Snake's Jayceedenton impression

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYN1yz5lU8A