10 Worst Video Game Checkpoints EVER

In an age where consumers have an absurd amount of entertainment options at their disposal within arm's reach, it's more important than ever that video games of all things respect players' time and don't give them the unnecessary runaround.

But of course, we've all slogged our way through games packed with archaic, time-wasting design decisions, and perhaps there's nothing more criminal than a game that doesn't know how to checkpoint.

These 10 games, though mostly brilliant and otherwise polished AAA offerings, each left players fuming with their eccentric if not aggressively antagonistic attitudes towards checkpoint placement.

Whether inconsistently deployed without a clear logic, dropped in front of a long, unskippable cutscene, or just sparingly given out, in each case the result was a fleet of frustrated players feeling like their time was being thoroughly squandered.

While video games are typically very good at creating dynamic and sensible checkpoints these days - to the point that some might even deem them a little too hand-holding - let us not forget those truly bizarre and aggravating checkpoints seemingly intended solely to irritate...

The original Halo's Library is without question the most infamous and widely-despised mission in the entire franchise to date, a soul-sappingly repetitive slog through numerous near-identical floors while battling a seemingly interminable fleet of The Flood.

The Library can take over an hour to clear on higher difficulties, in large part due to the level's legendarily awful approach to checkpointing.

In certain sections, you won't hit a checkpoint until every last enemy in the vicinity has been wiped out, no matter how small, while in others you'll need to effectively brute-force your way through the endless sea of The Flood to cross a checkpoint trigger.

The vague checkpoint logic made an already frustrating mission even more of an exhausting endurance trial than it ever needed to be. Terrible.