Hm... an entire game where every design element seems to be tailor made to piss me off? I'm sure there were at least a couple, but memory suppression methods seem to have worked too well.
For the time being, I'll just mention that nearly every modern 3rd-person, 3D action game I've tried* has sections requiring timing and precision that the controls and camera just aren't precise enough for. FFS, developers, this has plagued this genre ever since its earliest examples. Either fix it, or admit that it is an inherent weakness that can't be fixed, and quit using such "timing/precision challenges" in your games.
*I haven't tried that many. Specific examples include a couple of sections in the first Overlord, which admitedly added an extra layer of control complexity with minion handling, the bike ride in the snow in Tomb Raider: Legend** and my recent foray into Darksiders, and its fucking spinning drill blades** in the Ashlands.
**Yes, I know they were a joke
after you figured out just how to adjust your mouse/keyboard or gamepad movements to take shitty controls into account. I'm not a noob that needs to lrn2play. I am an elite individual who knows when a developer is trying to pass off shitty design as a challenge
.
Edit: Just as I posted, I remembered a game relevant to OP. Has anyone ever tried or even heard of an "adventure game" called Of Light and Darkness? Gorgeous art direction and graphics for its time, but the gameplay was indeed as if the designer(s) decided to troll the entire adventure gaming community. It should never have been marketed as an adventure game, and was most likely promoted as such because it didn't fit any other genre either. It mostly consists of timed fedex quests, with obstacles in the form of spirits of great/famous sinners of the past, whose appearance and placement were supposedly random, yet somehow always managed optimal positioning for fucking you up, again and again.
To add insult to injury, the few people that managed to persevere enough to see the ending (I am not one of these brave and/or desperate souls) report that it has one of the most incomprehensible, WTF endings of all time.
Edit the Second: And how could I forget Battletoads. I beat it back in the day (yes, in an actual Mega Drive/Genesis, no emulator with
saveslots) and just like Unkillable Cat and his exprerience with Tecno: The Base (pm me torrent link for that turd if you have one, I'm curious but not nearly enough to fork over 10$ for it) I just can't feel like an uber gaming god for it, but like I fell for a bad trolling post that most normal people successfully ignored.
Edit the Third (WTF you want, I'm drunk): I recently replayed the original Zork Trilogy (but making use of notes I've kept all those years ago, making things far easier), as well as a couple of other Infocom adventures I've missed back in the day, like Trinity and The Lurking Horror (I resorted to walkthroughs,
of me) . By today's standards, you can't call any these games anything but the gaming world's most successful trolling endeavors as far as puzzle design goes, but they get a pass, seeing as how they were pioneers in their time.