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I was cleaning up my room today (new PC requires a new room- haven't gotten it yet, still waiting on the video card to come in) when I was going through some old game boxes.

I found my old copy of the original MechCommander (1998 game).

God, was this game a pain in the fucking arse. Microprose made a really hard motherfucker with this game. I reinstalled it (wow, it works!) and gave it a go. The first mission went fine. The second mission reminded me just why I gave up on this game in the first place. Kept on losing a mech to a single enemy missile launcher, even though I outnumbered him three to one (one Firestarter, two Commandos).

As an experiment, I used the "deadeye" in game cheat to upgrade the gunnery skills of my MechWarriors to maximum.

Did a little better this time round, until I encountered an enemy Commando. I told my super-deadeye Mechwarriors to aim for his head, expecting an easy kill.

The fucking morons kept on missing.

They kept on missing for so long, in fact (over a minute) tat extreme close range, that the ground around this enemy Commando was pitted with craters to the point of being unrecognizeable.

And then I lost my Firestarter.

Stupid bloody game. Microprose really knew how to make bullshit hard games.

Warcraft 3 and Starcraft on "defend the base until time runs out" missions, there one these mission (the one in the Orc campain of WC3 that I've never won without using the cheats)

There's a mission in X-Wing I remember where I had to protect a ship and each time I tried, it got wasted. Seemed nearly impossible to keep it alive...

There was this mission in Wing Commander that involved escorting a captured Kilrathi ship back to base.
Basically the damn ship was made out of paper and the Kilrathi bombers took a huge beating before going down. I killed like one before they destroyed the ship.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri could be a real bitch on higher difficulties if there was too much pollution; planet fungus and mind worm spawns popped up everywhere and raped my cities. Entirely my fault though since I was Planetbuster happy on my rivals.

Cao Cao wrote:Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri could be a real bitch on higher difficulties if there was too much pollution; planet fungus and mind worm spawns popped up everywhere and raped my cities. Entirely my fault though since I was Planetbuster happy on my rivals.

Tenticle Hentai!!!

Anyone remember the 'Commandos' series of games? They were ww2 point and click games with fiendishly difficult missions. How anyone ever completed those games, I do not know.

Dahak wrote:There's a mission in X-Wing I remember where I had to protect a ship and each time I tried, it got wasted. Seemed nearly impossible to keep it alive...

There are several of those.

Ubiquitous wrote:Anyone remember the 'Commandos' series of games? They were ww2 point and click games with fiendishly difficult missions. How anyone ever completed those games, I do not know.

I made a habit of lining up enemies to get splattered by pistol shots as they came around corners, aside from that oddity I sucked at Commandos.

Cao Cao wrote:Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri could be a real bitch on higher difficulties if there was too much pollution; planet fungus and mind worm spawns popped up everywhere and raped my cities. Entirely my fault though since I was Planetbuster happy on my rivals.

There's a bit of a trick involved with that, that most people don't know about. Basically...the ecological protective facilities only give their eco friendly bonuses if you build them *after* you've had your first fungus pop in a base tile from pollution. Any you produce before that give no eco bonuses whatsoever.

Knowing that, I routinely had bases pumping out upwards of 60 minerals a turn by the middle game (of course, the middle game for me is about 2150... ^^;; I transcend on highest difficulty before 2200 now.), without producing any pollution whatsoever.

C&C Covert Operations

Loved it, no less

I actually liked mech commander. Not that I managed to finish it on the first attempt though, it was only when I reinstalled it some time time later that I managed to get very far. It's much better than the other extreme, e.g. c&c generals where you can just build stuff and win most levels on the first attempt.

Rogue 9 wrote: There are several of those.

I remember one where you are trying to protect a freighter and it gets taken out by ion cannons really quickly.

Then there is the frigate Redemtion, which involves you constantly flying from one side of the volume to the other. Anything but the slightest time spent dogfighting would give the next wave time to apear somewhere else and blow up the frigate.

There are bound to be ome more as well.

Another game that was quite hard was timesplitters 2 (when set on hard, obviously). I played that with a friend on co-op,and it took us a very long time. Neo-Tokyo was only completed by one of us shooting the other and exploiting the bug which meant the dead guy drops full ammo for the gun theywere using.

Robot factory was finally dealt with by one person leading things back to a little gun position the other was manning.

Bah, MechCommander wasn't that hard. Certainly it was quite difficult at times, though. I tended to have trouble with a few levels here and there, like defend the farm in Op 1 and the last mission of the game (though I by then I usually have several Atlases, Timberwolves, Mad Dogs, and Summoners).

wautd wrote:C&C Covert Operations

Loved it, no less

I think it was meant to be hard - basically "okay, you've beaten the game, now try something really difficult." In a good way.

Now, the Red Alert "infiltrate the nuclear power plant" missions... ARRRRGHGHG

Prozac the Robert wrote:

Rogue 9 wrote:There are several of those.

I remember one where you are trying to protect a freighter and it gets taken out by ion cannons really quickly.

Then there is the frigate Redemtion, which involves you constantly flying from one side of the volume to the other. Anything but the slightest time spent dogfighting would give the next wave time to apear somewhere else and blow up the frigate.

I found that the Redemption was never actually in danger. The worry is the shuttles and the Korolev, mostly the latter. And the easy way to get around that is to make liberal use of torpedoes on the bombers in the first wave.

I loved Cannon Fodder, but it became a right bitch before I got anywhere near the end.

I loved Mech Commander. It was not that hard. The secret lies in understanding the strategies used in the game. Once you get used to it the game becomes much easier. The main strategy in this game is to capture rather then kill. Capturing mechbays; turret control towers and turning them against the enemy is an excellent tactic. Also dont ignore minelayers. Since they have unlimited mines due to a bug you can lay a huge minefield and win most missions with ease by luring enemy Mechs to your minefield.

If I had to pick a fiendishly difficult game it would be Starlancer. The problem with this game is it is based more on luck then player skills. Often success of a mission depends on how your AI wingmen perform. If they suck its game over no matter how well you do.

I'll seventh or whatever X-Wing. That game was damned hard at times.
There's one mission in the Orc campaign in Warcraft 3 that I haven't gotten past to this day.
I'll chime in and say MechCommander was hard, but not that hard. With the right tactics and a little thought put into logistics the missions were entirely doable. What DID annoy me was the effective uselessness of targeted shots, as Vympel pointed out, and the tendency of killed Mechs to explode 7 times out of 8 meaning you rarely had any Clan mechs to use, and mixing them with IS ones didn't work due to the speed differential. Often it WAS smarter to sell those you got.

I never use targeted shots at all. I just load up each 'Mech based around one or two high-power weapon systems (such as a PPC or two) and then engage at the optimal range for that loadout. Usually each lance will be geared toward one range, i.e., lance 1 will be medium range heavy 'Mechs (relative to inventory and drop weight, not the actual weight class), lance 2 long-range medium 'Mechs, and so on. I've never really had significant problems with killing enemy 'Mechs I outnumber unless I'm ridiculously outclassed.

X-Wing had some ridiculous missions. I hated the fuel limits it imposed on combat.

Also, Homeworld had an astoundingly steep learning curve. Had I not been determined to be good at that game I never would've gotten past the third or the fourth mission.

Master of Ossus wrote:X-Wing had some ridiculous missions. I hated the fuel limits it imposed on combat.

Neither X-Wing, nor Tie Fighter had fuel.

I-War2? The game where your bucket of bolts is just as durable as all the AI, everyone shoots perfectly accurately, and you're always vs at least 3 enemy ships? Ow!

Silent Storm 3: Sentinels is also damned hard. I get /two/ allied soldiers, armed with handguns, no skills, mybe knives or an SMG, versus two full nazi squads who have me surrounded. Ouch.

Master of Ossus wrote: Also, Homeworld had an astoundingly steep learning curve. Had I not been determined to be good at that game I never would've gotten past the third or the fourth mission.

Let's not forget HW2, and the "Your starter fleetx2 + 2 cap ships" system (Which due to my tendency to maximize a fleet for overwhelming force caused the game to be damn impossible for me).

The "Kill the spy with the dogs" mission for the Soviets in RA-1 is my first memory of leaving a game for almost a year due to getting stuck on a mission. (Till I returned and finished it rather easily due to obsessive quick-saving)

Hah. No one who calls I-War 2 hard has ever tried to finish the original. Now that is a hard game...try getting your FTL drive blown out mid-mission and having to manually dock /inside/ a moving fighter-carrier as it's trying to escape under fire...with a 160-meter corvette. In a game with full inertial physics. God that's hard.

X-wing had some nasty missions but some of the missions in the various Tie Fighter expansion packs were much worse.

I seriously destroyed a joystick over that game (granted it was a cheap piece of crap, but still...)

Lord Revan wrote:Warcraft 3 and Starcraft on "defend the base until time runs out" missions, there one these mission (the one in the Orc campain of WC3 that I've never won without using the cheats)

The Starcraft missions were easy

I have to second Homeworld. I had a strategy guide and still had to redo some missions because I wasn't able to finish them on the first try.