12. No Saves Or Checkpoints - Hitman: Codename 47
IO InteractivePerhaps we're just spoiled in today's world of gaming, where the game knows to save every time we reach a new area, and typically, death doesn't result in losing any more than 3-5 minutes of progress. The original Hitman game, Codename 47, however, was brutal even for classic video game standards: it featured no mid-mission checkpoint or saving options, and would only store your progress after you completed each mission. In addition to this, you do have an extra life should you die, but any alert statuses you have will remain when resurrected, rendering it pretty much useless for the most part. As you can imagine, with a game that relies on as much trial-and-error as Hitman, this all made the game keyboard-smashingly difficult, and even avid fans of the franchise may well confess that they never finished the first game. When some of these missions could take close to an hour depending on your play-style, it wasn't exactly ideal, and having to start the whole mission again because of a tiny mistake feels needlessly unfair. Simply, if you're an adult with a busy life, games like this just won't do, as much as you might want to play them. Most of us just don't have time to spend endlessly replaying sections of games that substitute real difficulty for cheap challenge.