10 Infuriating Video Game Levels You Forgot You Hated

With an industry increasingly focussed on sales and ensnaring wider demographics with every new release, it's only natural to provide more instances of hand-holding, checkpoints and death mechanics that essentially mean nothing more than losing your rings in Sonic - a temporarily annoying setback that doesn't really impede your momentum.

It's all well and good when done fairly, but the fact is, one of the many things that makes gaming the passionate medium it is today comes from the idea of testing your mettle against any number of infuriating creatures, levels or bosses.

Therein lies the rub, as sometimes these instances can totally make a game worth recommending, provoking many discussions around that idea of what it was like surviving something like Dark Souls' Ornstein and Smough boss fight or Super Meat Boy's alternate dark levels - the flip-side being those other times where you just know with every fibre of your being that you are never, ever voluntarily doing a certain section of a game again.

These are levels that kill their games' replayability, the ones that come back into view just when you're thinking about giving something another shot, and although there are certain candidates that pop up time and time again - your Water Temples, Battletoads' speeder bikes or Driver introductory license tests etc. - this time it's worth presenting a selection of controller-snappers that are yet to get so torn apart on such a massive scale.

Well, it's about time they were...