Weve all played a game that started off as a walk in the park, but then its difficulty suddenly shot through the roof on one particular level, turning it into an impossible challenge requiring the reflexes of a ninja to overcome. When Space Invaders took over arcades around the world back in 1978, it changed gaming forever by inventing the difficulty curve the idea that a game should steadily get harder the further the player got. In Space Invaders, the extra-terrestrial ships gradually sped up as the player blew them out of the sky one by one; climaxing in a duel with the last ship that darts around the screen like a drunk in a brewery. Youd think that game developers would have managed to perfect this simple concept by now, yet they continue to habitually pull stupidly hard levels out of their metaphorical behinds, throwing them into their games at seemingly random points. The following eight levels are responsible for making us rage quit games that we were greatly enjoying, making them destined to remain in our to complete piles forever.
8. Carnival Night Zone - Sonic The Hedgehog 3
Our first entry isn't hard in the traditional sense, but it's a personal one as it's responsible for my very first rage-fuelled fit of swearing at the tender age of 10. Carnival Night Zone has the expected bright lights and pinball tables implied by its name. It's a typical Sonic zone full of robots to kill, paths to speed down and annoyingly-placed springs to send you back the way you came. But then in its second act Sonic's way gets blocked by a weird, rotating cylinder. Jumping on it will lower it for a brief second, revealing a platform underneath. Game logic states that if you did this a few times the cylinder will drop enough for you to reach the platform. Sadly in this case game logic is a straight-up lying. I tried to do this for so long that Carnival Night Zone's music is now forever burned into my memory, causing me to curl up in the foetal position and sob uncontrollably whenever I hear it. So what's the actual solution? Standing on top of the cylinder and using the up and down buttons on the d-pad to move it by gradually building momentum. No jumping is required, which is pretty weird considering the game's genre. The impact of this perplexing puzzle can't be understated. It single-handedly ruined Sonic 3 for countless '90s kids. We couldn't even use the internet to look up how to get past it because there was no such thing. It's a pain that you won't understand if you're under 25.
