I played Minecraft for over a decade before I bothered going to beat the Ender Dragon
The orphan of Kos in Bloodborne. Could never quite get it right, got so close several times but even with help that crazy bastard is just soo fast and difficult to predict. I tried for like a week, 30 or more goes. It really annoys me because Bloodborne is my favourite souls game.
One thing I adore about the souls games is how everyone has a unique and personal experience with bosses.
A boss that I got on my first try may take you a week of banging your head against it; but, that is no indication that I’m just better because two bosses later I will be banging my head against a different boss that you just breeze through.
Yeah, sometimes your playstyle ends up being a natural counter to a boss. Sometimes a boss ends up being a natural counter to your playstyle. Or one of your first strategy ideas works and makes it easy.
Ugh. My friends and I recently played through “V Rising” . It’s a good game. It’s like Valheim meets Diablo but you’re vampires… Because of our busy adult lives we played together once a week for usually 2-3 hours. It’s took us damn near a year to get to the final boss, and it was just wipe after wipe after wipe. We weren’t making any progress. Like we couldn’t get him down past 75% life no matter how hard we tried. We changed our skills and equipment, same thing. We looked up some guides online and they were basically like “git good”
We never beat him, because we didn’t want to waste any more of our limited adult gaming time just getting crushed by a boss for hours.
It was such a slap in the face because nothing else in the game was that difficult. There were some tough bosses that took us down maybe 3 or 4 times. But this was just hours of getting wrecked without even getting close to winning. It was truly a morale blow.
Sigh… We switched to a different game, and I guess we will just never finish that one.
You underestimate my willingness to lower the difficulty if I’m stuck
That best part of modern games. Couldn’t do that in the old school games.
Prehistoric 2 kicked you out of the game before the final level if you were playing in beginner mode.
What a reference. That’s the first video game I ever played. Somehow it’s still hard af as an adult. The visuals are great to this day imo.
Getting kicked out of the final level on beginner difficulty is a little patronising though. I’d be lucky to even get there on Beginner in the first place, would be a kick in the teeth after all that hard work
I didn’t even know how you could switch difficulties for the longest time!
But there was a demo where where the code for the first level was shown (BBAB, I’m pretty sure), so I was able to start the game on expert that way, and eventually beat it. It’s tough though.
The code for the last level was 46EA, at least for the version I had. Looking around the web to confirm, there’s a lot of conflicting information, so I’m guessing the codes were randomised to some extent, maybe.
My son kicks ass in Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but the original Mario not so much.
The final level of Mario Odyssey.
PS2 Shinobi. That game was brutally hard.
Malileth, the black blade in Eden Ring.
I eventually had to summon co-op players in and just sit in the corner and let them do the work. Fuck that boss…
Well that kinda takes the wind outta my sails for completing the game. I’m kinda stuck at the forge of the giants. And I’m so late that there’s hardly ever coop signs around
Don’t let it dissuade you. See my comment here on this topic: https://programming.dev/comment/23859190
I think at a certain point, a break from the game is warranted before going back in to grind and be specced correctly for a difficult area/boss
I’ve found that sometimes I come back to a game after a long break and end up better at it than I previously was. Like I’ll dread parts that were difficult the last time and then breeze through them when I get there.
Like I was stuck on some room in Doom Eternal, it just kept kicking my ass until I gave up on the game for like a year. I tried resuming the game, realized I couldn’t remember all the controls and decided to start over again and then didn’t even notice when I got back to that room because I cleared it easily and continued on.
I’m not sure if it’s because the other games I’d played in the meantme helped me develop my skills more, if my subconscious optimized the skills I retained from the first playthrough, or if I just avoided picking up some bad habits I had the first time that made things harder for me.
Ruby Weapon in the Final Fantasy VII PS1 game.
I even followed the guide, so I just couldn’t figure it out.
The amount of grinding necessary to beat all of the Weapons was ridiculous. I got tired of trying.
It’s infuriating to see videos of people that have figured out the exact materia combos to beat it in under 5 minutes
I have this really old save file on Mario & Luigi Partners in Time where I basically tried to skip combat as much as possible, and it took me like 5 years to reach the final boss (compared to like two weeks on the other save).
Its been stuck there on the Shroob finale because it legitimately takes you like 40 minutes to clear the first princess and you have basically no one-ups or a useful amount of bros items, so you have to make every hit and dodge count.
I’ve seen several good speed runs of the game so it’s definitely doable, but it requires about 2 hours of perfect inputs, so I probably won’t be finishing it soon lol.
Undine the Undying.
Not a boss per se, but the first Marauder fight in Doom Eternal made me rage quit for a good 6 months.
Pure Vessel in Hollow Knight. I have a file that’s at like 111% and I just need to beat the final pantheon but I’ve never managed it. I don’t even know how bad Absolute Radiance is, I’ve never made it that far.
Abs radiance is worse, but not just because it’s more difficult. It’s also a lot less fun, at least in my opinion. Think buffed Markoth kinda BS (which I just now realized, makes a lot of sense thematically/lore-wise).
Pure vessel was one of my favorite fights despite taking me many many attempts to beat.
FYI the last pantheon isn’t a % point, if you’re at 111 you’re missing something else
He’s talking about the Pure Vessel one before the final pantheon.
Shit, I might have fucked up then. I’ll have to investigate
Practice down below. He’s no harder than NKG. The real final pantheon takes so long I haven’t done it again since getting to radiance and losing. Instead i occasionally try to beat the first two pantheons all binds
I got stuck on Absolute Radiance and my thumbs took a break and haven’t made it back yet. It’s been at least a year.
Same. I think there’s something of a skill cliff here.
Still haven’t gotten past RoboPres in Destroy All Humans
Destroy all humans combat could hit you out of no where!
I’m pathologically stubborn and will stick with just about any game until I beat it, but Isshin the Sword Saint (Sekiro) took me a long time.
Isshin only took me a few days to beat. Owl (father) on the other hand, took me a couple of months.
Owl is a hard fight too. It still holds me up for a while on replays of the game.
He’s a very bad dad.
I love this contrast with the top comment (about lowering difficulty). Yeah, it was a struggle, but we got through, and it felt all the more satisfying for it! It doesn’t feel satisfying to, for example, chop a tree in a game, because there’s no challenge. Something can only really be satisfying if it challenges you (emotionally, intellectually, and/or in ability).
I think an additional undervalued part of not having difficulty settings is that we have a shared experience. Everyone who did it has shared in it. We know what they went through because there’s only one way to do it. We don’t have to ask about settings or anything, only that they accomplished the task.
For me though, the one I remember struggling with the most is O&S in DS1. I don’t think they’re actually the hardest boss FromSoft has made, but I’ve gotten far better at their games since then. Even their hardest bosses now I personally feel like they could be more challenging.
I’m with you. What these games are selling is that feeling you get after overcoming their challenges, and if you modify that, it’s not the same product. It’s like asking an artist to also offer their painting with changes to the colors, scene, or poses of the subjects to appeal to personal tastes - yes, they could do it, but it’s a different piece of art at that point.
And omg yes, O&S. It’s not as hard now after many years of playing souls-like games, but relatively it was so hard on my first exposure to dark souls in DS1. I had no idea what I was doing, my build was jank as hell, and it took ages to beat.
I spent a year stuck on that fight. Not the whole game, just Sword Saint. I don’t regret a single minute of it, and I revisit him at least once a year since. Best goddam boss fight ever made.
Beating Isshin is so dang satisfying! I really wish Fromsoft would bless us with another Sekiro.
God, I hope we see that one day. Maybe the anime will stir up some demand for it when it releases.
Isshin is one of the greatest boss battles in gaming. He’s a brutal, but fair, test of everything you learn in the game. The best part is you get to kill Genechro over and over.
IMO the Demon of Hatred is way harder because so few of your skills are useful in that fight.
I fought Demon of Hatred like a dark souls boss rather than a Sekiro boss. Lots of dodging. I’m sure there was a better way.
Seconding Isshin SS, I’m also stubborn as hell, sekiro is one of my favorite games and that fight took me so many attempts that I almost gave up multiple times. Felt so god damned good when I finally beat him though
No other FromSoft game could have a final fight as challenging as in Sekiro, because in the other titles, they had to consider a range of levels or builds that players would reach the end with. In Sekiro, they could really push the player.
Pivot tables.
Excel is one of my favourite games, but I’ve never been able to completely grok those things.
They seem like a waste of time when it’s much easier to use formulas to construct indirect ranges and work on those.
Excel is like grind, grind, grind. You can level up a little and then it’s even more work. One column after another, then, row, row, row.
I like the sql better.
SQL is nice, but it gets a bit tricky once you get into recursive queries, especially when you’re trying to beat your fastest time record…
Pivot tables are great because they force people to put their data into tables.
Formulas suck. You only need sum. Everything is a sum, if you enter your data correctly in a table.
Want to substract? yes, that is a sum in which one of the numbers are negative. Multiply? Yes that is more sums.
What about IF statements then? No, no, no. Conditions are simply factors in a sumproduct.
Learn the keyboard shortcut for sum. It’s the straight edge and compass of excel math.
Pivot tables are quick. If used properly you can summarize data much quicker than any excel formula. When I use them it pretty much always takes under 30 seconds to get what I want. Imo, there are 2 things every user of excel should learn to use. Vlookup (edit: or xlookup, see below) and pivot tables. Once you learn to use both, you will use them all the time.
Vlookup
Please use xlookup instead.
Forget about lookup, vlookup, hlook-up or index(match()).
Only use xlookup.
No place I have ever worked has had a version of excel with xlookup, so I can’t really comment on it. Im not on 365 or a newer desktop version. We are on Office 2019, as I suspect many offices still are.
Ok, xlookup is better because it doesn’t return false positives and it also doesn’t require the data to be sorted.
It almost does the same as index(match()), only better, easier and faster.
Arrayformula() friendly too
Anyone else constantly looking up tactics with AI? This game is so difficult, you have to memorize a lot of combos and the strategy to use them really takes time to click. I’m getting into this one again after a long hiatus
I’m going to say pretty much every fight in Sifu. People praise it as having some of the best fighting combat and claim that it just takes a while to learn, but I put weeks of time into that game and it never got any easier. I managed to get past the first two levels before hitting a wall I could just not get past.
Oh man, I loved Sifu! I’d recently finished Sekiro and thought “well it can’t be harder than that”. Ultimately, it wasn’t but it took a long time to get the hang of the different combat rhythm.
