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.
saenz said:
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...