Bad Levels in Gaming History - Volume Twelve

After over a year's absence, Bad Levels in Gaming History is back on SuperPhillip Central to deliver to you even more of those obnoxious areas, sections, missions, racetracks, etc. (I use the catch-all term "levels" to describe them) that frustrate and annoy. These can be overly frustrating due to poor or unfair design, bad AI, or a plethora of other reasons.

On this twelfth volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History, we delve into a combination of modern and classic gaming with titles like Luigi's Mansion 3, MediEvil, and GoldenEye 007, to name but a few. So, read on and you'll see just some of the more insidious levels that gaming has unfortunately bestowed on to players.

Check out past volumes of this long-running SPC article series with the following links:

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Four

Volume Five

Volume Six

Volume Seven

Volume Eight

Volume Nine

Volume Ten

Volume Eleven

B2: The Boilerworks - Luigi's Mansion 3 (NSW)

The above accompanying screenshot to this level isn't just there because it's adorable--it's also there because it's the reaction a great deal of players had to a certain floor of the Last Resort hotel in Luigi's Mansion 3, a game that was part of SuperPhillip Central's Top Ten Games of 2019. While the Boilerworks, the bottom-most floor of the aforementioned Last Resort, is a creatively designed level, it features a section that is maddening for first-time players (and for many veteran players as well). While a lot of the game is designed around trial and error gameplay, it's mostly done with a safety net or in non-dangerous areas. The section of trial and error gameplay in the flooded floor of the Boilerworks does not occur in a place of safety at all. In fact, it's hazardous as heck.

In the Boilerworks, there are parts of the floor where you must ride in a rubber raft as Luigi. The controls here take a lot of getting used to, having Luigi's Poltergust G-00 vacuum needing to suck air to move forward and blow air to move backward. This is in addition to aiming the nozzle of the vacuum in the right direction to move correctly. It takes a great deal of practice to get the hang of it, much more to even competently do under pressure.

The issue here is that the controls aren't the most intuitive (read: they're not at all), and you don't get much time to learn them either before the game throws some unwanted challenges your way, such as a line of shark-like specters that can pop your raft in a jiffy. Better, clearer instructions on how to control the raft with Luigi's Poltergust would have been greatly appreciated and would help players not get so stuck and frustrated during this easily infuriating portion of the game. That's not even talking about the Boilerworks boss that incorporates the raft as well, with a flooded chamber surrounded a spike-rimmed wall. No wonder so many players shout profanities that would spook even King Boo when playing this portion of an otherwise impeccably designed game.

Ghost Ship - MediEvil (PS4)

Continuing our spooky and haunted theme with this edition of Bad Levels in Gaming History, we delve into a late-game level in MediEvil, which was terrible in its original PS1 version, and it's even more terrible in the PS4 remake. It's the Ghost Ship level, a sky high airship complete with rolling barrels, cannons to dodge, undead pirates, and risky jumps aplenty.

The latter is the most annoying and infuriating part of the level, due to the sloppy and near broken collision detection in it. There's a part where you have to bounce along nets to reach a higher platform, and if you fall into the chasm below, you have to make your way through a deadly obstacle course of cannonballs being blasted out at you.

Each time you fall down the chasm, you have to go through this minute-long, highly hazardous section of level, and it will happen more than you want because of how poorly designed the platforming is in the game. Further, even if you manage to cross over the obnoxious netting of platforms, there's still another chasm to cross, sending you even further back in the level if you fall down those. The Ghost Ship is by far the more frustrating and unfair part of MediEvil, a game that isn't exactly the friendliest in difficult to begin with.

Guard the Freight Train Cargo - Daemon X Machina (NSW, PC)

This mission from the rank C section of missions in the newly released on PC Daemon X Machina is one of the worst types of missions in gaming. It's an escort mission, and it immediately separates the proficient Arsenal pilots with the ones that should just stick to watching episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam.

The mission starts out simple enough with the need to destroy a number of small fry enemies in order to reach the second, more important part of the mission where the freight train needing to be babysit chugs into the scene. It's here that not one, not two--but three enemy Arsenals, all ready, willing and seriously able to deliver devastating amounts of damage to the train in no time at all, arrive on the scene.

It's quite easy for the freight train to go from 100% strength down to just half that in less than 30 seconds, and it's even easier for the train and its valuable contents to be destroyed before you even have a chance to understand what's going on. This mission is a tremendous jump in difficulty, and it oftentimes feels like an unfair one. It's more focused on luck with whether you can lure the three attacking Arsenals away from the train so it can reach its destination safely than anything else. Plus, escort missions just stink in general, as we'll see shortly with another example.

Wrong Side of the Tracks - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Multi)

But while we're on the subject of trains, let's begin with a game that is no stranger to this series of articles with a mission that generally ends for many players with the line, "All you had to do was follow the damn train, C.J.!" Well, it's not like we were just popping wheelies for the hell of it, Big Smoke! Wrong Side of the Tracks is an early-ish mission in gaming mega-hit Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It asks of you to control protagonist C.J. and have him ride a motorbike with Big Smoke in tow on the back, pursuing a train under control by the Vagos gang.

The aim of the mission is to stay towards the front of the train, on its side, and allow Big Smoke to fire rounds from his gun to kill the Vagos on the train. This is easier said than done due to the various hills and side paths, as well as how unclear it is the exact position you should have the bike in relation to the train. It says something negative about the mission when a good amount of players use various "alternate" methods to complete it instead of the intended way.

Control - GoldenEye 007 (N64) 

Continuing off from the idea that escort missions are for the most part terrible, we have one of the most infamous early examples of that with Rare's otherwise terrific GoldenEye 007. There are four missions where James Bond is tasked with protecting computer hacker Natalya Simonova, and by far, for me, the most awful of these takes place in the Control mission. The escort character AI is notoriously dumb, known to run directly into enemy fire as well as in the line of sight of the player's gun.

Control ratchets that up to a ridiculously frustrating degree by requiring you to protect Natalya from enemy gunfire as she slowly tries to re-calibrate and put an end to the GoldenEye satellite. And I do mean slowly, as she must also be trying to log into her GeoCites web page to take the proverbial piss on players as well. That's the only other explanation Regardless, it's a breeze for Natalya to perish in this mission, resulting in players having to restart from the very beginning and contend with the escorting carnage all over again. No wonder this mission was a roadblock for many, resulting in them simply returning to the multiplayer to get out their frustrations on other players of the game.

Bad Levels in Gaming History - Volume Eleven

Bad Levels in Gaming History is back to kick some less-than-stellar level butt! "Levels" is simply a catch-all term used. As you'll see with this volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History, "levels" can mean stages, courts, dungeons, areas, race tracks, and more. "Bad Levels in Gaming History" is just more elegant of a name than "Bad Levels, Stages, Courts, Dungeons, Areas, Race Tracks, etc. in Gaming History", wouldn't you say?

This volume features a handful of classic franchises with most being all-star characters that see modern takes on their respective series. Such franchises represented this time around include: Crash Bandicoot, Mario Tennis, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy, and even a bit of a precursor in some ways to Grand Theft Auto, the Driver series.

If this volume of Bad Levels has you yearning for more, check out the ten past installments conveniently linked to below:

Volume One
Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Four

Volume Five

Volume Six

Volume Seven

Volume Eight

Volume Nine

Volume Ten

Road to Nowhere - Crash Bandicoot (PS1), Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy (PS4, XB1, NSW, PC)

One of two of the most challenging levels in the already difficult original Crash Bandicoot (and the game itself is occasionally difficult for all the wrong reasons), Road to Nowhere is forward-scrolling trek across a seemingly endless amount of bridges. Simple enough, right? No. Not at all. The bridges are practically hanging by a thread with loose planks that quickly fall to the abyss below once Crash steps on them, meaning you have to move, move, move! Many of the jumps require pinpoint precision as they are only one plank surrounded by gaps. Add in some slippery sections of the bridges, and you have one recipe for frustration.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if Crash Bandicoot's perspective wasn't so bad in this level. Not only do you have limited sight distance thanks to the thick fog permeating throughout Road to Nowhere, but the perspective of the camera makes it tricky to see where Crash is going to land. Mistiming jumps and just completely missing planks in general are common occurrences in Road to Nowhere, so much so that many players have found the easiest way to get passed the arduous jumps in the level are to completely avoid doing them. It's as "simple" (since again, you're a slave to the camera perspective and difficulty to see where Crash is going to land) as landing on one of the rope railings on either side of the bridges and crossing them that way. You don't miss out on any boxes, as they are all located on the islands sprinkled throughout the levels in between bridge crossings.

Still, just knowing that so many use this exploit just to get through an otherwise messy level to get through due to design problems with Crash Bandicoot as a game itself, Road to Nowhere got the first honors of being skewered on this volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History.

Savage Sea - Mario Tennis Aces (NSW)

Since Mario Power Tennis on the Nintendo GameCube, the Mario Tennis series has been no stranger to various themed, fun, gimmick courts. When I say "gimmick", I mean that the courts have special hazards or obstacles on them to impede upon an otherwise normal (well, in normal in the Mario Tennis sense) match of tennis.

Mario Tennis Aces has these as well, and thankfully, for the most part, you can turn off hazards on courts if you desire. In a game with limited options, it's fortunate that at least the ability to turn off court hazards is available to players. Well, that is except one particular court in the game, which has by far the most obnoxious gimmick in Mario Tennis history, Savage Sea.

Don't be fooled by the bright sunshine and colorful and calm ocean waters that surround this ship-themed court. Here within all this beauty and wonder belies one truly tricky and annoying obstacle that makes for a difficult challenge whether playing on it in Adventure Mode or Free Play. The deck of the ship where the action takes place houses a particular annoyance right in the middle of the net, a mast, which bounces balls off of it in sometimes unpredictable ways. These are such ways that sometimes it's simply impossible to get to the ball without the foresight needed to do so. Furthermore, unlike the rest of the hazards in Mario Tennis Aces' courts, there is no way to remove the mast for a traditional Aces match. What it amounts to is a court that would otherwise be at a climactic and enjoyable setting turned into a complete and utter aggravation.

Iron Fortress - Sonic Forces (PS4, XB1, NSW, PC)

How does one screw up a 2D Sonic level after essentially getting them down pat in previous games? As Dr. Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park would say, "Sonic Team... finds a way." The 28th stage of 30 within Sonic Forces is Iron Fortress, a level situated inside Dr. Eggman's gigantic tower where the final events of the game take place.

Iron Fortress is home to annoying red missiles that launch from boxes, electrified portions of level, wheels that spin Classic Sonic around in all 360 degrees, and one of the most frustrating and shoehorned parts of Sonic Forces, an auto-scrolling section placed directly above a bottomless pit. First of all, there's really no rhyme or reason for there to be auto-scrolling in the first place. There is nothing chasing you--no Death Egg Robot, no wall of instant-death spikes--nothing. Instead, you just get pushed and possibly crushed by an invisible wall.

Couple this with all of the obstacles and level mechanics I previously mentioned and Sonic Forces' clunky jumping, where letting go of the analog stick means that Classic Sonic's midair momentum instantly stops, and Iron Fortress is an annoyance of a stage entirely. It's not impossible; it's just harder than it needs to be due to several bizarre design decisions and Classic Sonic's midair handling, which unfortunately affects the other two characters in Sonic Forces as well, Modern Sonic and the custom avatar.

Karnak Castle - Final Fantasy V (Multi)

We have a lot of classic franchises represented on this volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History, and that continues with Final Fantasy getting representation tonight. This particular bad level, or in this case, area comes from Final Fantasy V, a Super Famicom game that initially skipped the West. This was thankfully rectified with a PS1 release, and now Final Fantasy V is available on a whole wide range of platforms currently.

The area of Final Fantasy V that is especially troublesome is Karnak Castle. This castle has you facing a 10-minute countdown, which you are tasked with escaping before it is destroyed along with you. Quickly you find out that 10 minutes isn't that sizable of an amount of time, as time keeps on ticking through every thing you do in the game--movement in the castle, collecting treasure, dialog, battles, and yes, even a final fight in order to escape Karnak Castle against a powerful boss.

While all this already seems a bit troublesome to take on, Karnak Castle is further the aggravation due to having a dungeon previously and immediately before it. After completing the prior dungeon that leads to your party's transportation to the castle, there is no option to save your data. This means that if you don't make it out of the castle in time or you perish in battle, you have to start over from the previous dungeon. Not exactly the most time-considerate section of Final Fantasy V, but it's for sure one of the most irritating in the game, and possibly the series on the whole.

Tutorial Mission - Driver (PS1)

Crash Bandicoot, Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy--these are definitely classic franchises that have proven to stand the test of time. While Driver is a classic franchise, it hasn't exactly lasted in gaming. The first game was pretty rough for beginning players, and one would think a tutorial mission would assist in getting players' feet wet. After all, a tutorial mission should teach you the basics, get you comfortable with the controls, and then let you move on easily.

This was definitely not the case with Driver's tutorial mission. Instead of teaching, Driver simply told you to do a checklist of driving maneuvers with little input into how to actually do them. To add insult to injury, for a game that proudly prided itself on having a big driving playground to explore in its metropolis, you were stuck in a dingy parking garage until you finally completed the series of tasks required of you. Many players never got to see the outside of the parking garage due to how difficult the driving checklist was to complete.

In a cruel taste of irony, after the tutorial mission was finished, the rest of the game--outside of the last mission or so--was a breeze to play through. It's easy enough when you've spent 12 hours (might be some slight exaggerating here) learning the basics and trying to escape that wretched parking garage by doing some inane, asinine checklist of parking maneuvers!

Bad Levels in Gaming History - Volume Nine

You can have a nearly flawless game-- great action, great set pieces, great combat, great narrative, great characters, great gun play (if you're a shooter), etc., but if your level design is poor, your game is going nowhere fast. While the games featured on this volume's list of Bad Levels in Gaming History generally have fantastic level design, there are some sections, areas, levels, or whatever that do nothing but annoy, whether they be poorly designed, a slog to go through, or what have you. After you've scoped out my picks for bad levels in this ninth volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History, list your own in the comments section.

And if you want to catch up on past installments, look no further than these links:

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Four

Volume Five

Volume Six

Volume Seven

Volume Eight

The Drowned City - Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS4, PS3)

For my first "level" pick, we find treasure lover and dashing gentleman in his own right, Nathan Drake and his female accomplice Elena aboard a jet ski in a flooded ancient city setting. While Drake drives, Elena has a grenade launcher to fend off enemies. Sounds fine enough so far, right?

Well, that's until you factor in the usually cramped channels filled with explosive barrels that if Nate and Elena's jet ski touches them, they'll get blown to smithereens. This is all the while having to navigate very carefully through the water to get the perfect viewpoint on oncoming enemies that await in the various architecture of the ancient city.

It's all too easy to accidentally run into a barrel or drive too far ahead, getting filled with enemy lead, because most of the enemies, whether hiding on rooftops or within the architecture of the ruins, can be very hard to spot until it's too late. Add into the fact that jet ski doesn't control the best, and you have a recipe for frustration that is the Drowned City chapter of the original Uncharted.

Great Bay Temple - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (3DS, N64)

When most players and fans of Nintendo's historic series think of a water-themed dungeon in a 3D Zelda game that is highly annoying, they tend to think of the Water Temple from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. For good reason, as in the Nintendo 64 original, having to pause the game constantly to equip and remove the Iron Boots was highly annoying. Thankfully, this was amended in the Nintendo 3DS remake.

However, a dungeon in the 3D Zelda games that I find irritating to play without the help of a guide comes from Majora's Mask. It's the third dungeon of the game, and it's none other than the Great Bay Temple. This waterlogged dungeon's main claim to fame is that Link has to push switches to change the flow of water in the dungeon. This makes the current go absolutely crazy fast, making it difficult to swim to the desired room.

Couple that with a labyrinthine design full of rooms that can only be reached by making the flow of water move in the correct direction, and the Great Bay Temple can make you crazy in a jiffy, especially when you have impending doom coming with a moon in the sky that doesn't care if you don't finish this complicated dungeon on time.

The Labyrinth Zone - Sonic the Hedgehog (GEN)

We seem to have a theme here of aquatic themed levels so far with this edition of Bad Levels in Gaming History. Well, this continues with a classic zone from the original Sonic the Hedgehog, the Labyrinth Zone. Sonic the Hedgehog's first outing has a pattern in its zones. The first, third, and fifth are faster experiences, while the even numbered zones are much slower affairs. The Labyrinth Zone is the fourth zone in Sonic the Hedgehog, so yep, it's quite a slow slog. ...And quite the annoying one at that!

The Labyrinth Zone isn't just a maze like its name suggests, it's also a massively underwater zone that requires slow trudging movement through the water that permeates throughout the zone's three acts. Filled with obnoxious enemies, traps like spears that poke out of walls, and the constant need to be near an air supply or else hear the wrath of this immensely intense jingle,

While the Marble Zone is also slow going, the fact that there is so many easy ways to drown, annoying traps, and ways to die, makes the Labyrinth Zone my pick as most annoying zone in the original Sonic the Hedgehog.

Frozen Factory Zone 2 - Sonic: Lost World (Wii U)

Poor Sonic. Bad Levels in Gaming History just seems to keep picking on you! Nevertheless, a competent game overall, Sonic: Lost World isn't an overtly bad game per se. In fact, many of its levels and ideas are quite good. Frozen Factory Zone 2 borderlines on good, but it ends up being bad overall.

The concept of this level is that Sonic is trapped in a snowball and must navigate the narrow platforms and pathways of the level or risk falling off into the abyss. While this is a novel idea, the execution leaves something to be desired.

You see, the snowball moves very slow and has clunky movement. It makes moving around with any kind of perfect accuracy just a daydream. Factor in enemies that can blow you away just from touching them, and you have a recipe for disaster, and that's what a good portion of this second level in the Frozen Factory is, a disaster.

Chapter 21: Chaos Vortex - Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS)

A chapter the near the end of Kid Icarus: Uprising, Chaos Vortex is a two part level which has a first part that is perfectly fine. It's the game's typical on-rails flight level that has our protagonist Pit following the creature that controlled Palutena for several chapters, causing havoc unto the world.

It's the second portion of Chaos Vortex, Chaos Island, that is one of the weakest parts of the game. It has Pit on a singular island combating enemy after enemy in wave after wave. It's not the most fun experience in Uprising, and it feels like it goes on for an eternity.

There's nothing like going through multiple waves, upwards of a dozen or so, only to take too much damage and fail the level. This is especially easy to do when the Orne enemy shows up, a foe that if Pit touches, it's instant death. Thus, the second part of Chaos Vortex brings the entire chapter down, and makes it one of my least favorite chapters to play. I appreciate the need to mix things up, but here the idea didn't work out so well.

Bad Levels in Gaming History - Volume Eight

Level design is something that has always fascinated me. Its importance in making a game fun to play cannot be spoken enough. In fact, level design can be the difference between a solid game and a poor one-- no matter how good your gameplay actually is. Of course, even some of the greatest games possess a level that make you think the intern got to design it on the main designers' days off. That is what this series of articles focuses on-- those poor levels in games that are either poorly designed, just plain boring, tedious, annoying, frustrating, hard for the wrong reasons, or a combination of several of those ideas. Once you have looked at the examples provided, feel free to chime in with your own picks for bad gaming levels.

For a look at past installments of Bad Levels in Gaming History, look no further than these links:

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Four

Volume Five

Volume Six

Volume Seven

The Library - Halo: Combat Evolved (XBX, 360)

Whether you're playing the original Halo: Combat Evolved on the O.G. Xbox, or playing the remake in the Halo Anniversary Edition for the Xbox 360, one level that stands out as a slog no matter which version of the game you play is the Library level.

You get an NPC, 343 Guilty Spark, as your guide, and your job is to walk the master of unlocking (move over, Jill Valentine) to various locked doors that need opening by said guide. When you aren't dealing with the ever-annoying Flood enemies as you progress through the level, you're trying to survive in various firefights against Flood of various shapes and sizes (and weapons in the case of the rocket-toting variety).

All of it is an immensely slow and admittedly boring going of it through a level full of Halo's most annoying enemies. It's not well designed, it's certainly not fun, and it wasn't really made better with Halo Anniversary Edition.

Grannies World Tour, 8-Bit Edition - Rayman Legends (Multi)

Rayman Legends' predecessor, Rayman Origins, gave players who strove for 100% completion a wonderful final level to play. It was a hard-as-nails, but fair platforming challenge known as the Land of the Livid Dead, unlocking once all ten skeleton teeth were collected from treasure chase levels.

It seemed that Rayman Legends had a lot to live up to in giving the player a great reward for making it to the end of the game, a true platforming challenge. Instead, Rayman Legends was a loud fart of a final bonus level. In fact, the entire bonus world was pretty lame, but most notably the final bonus level, Grannies World Tour, 8-Bit Edition stunk the most.

The bonus world featured the popular music levels in the base game. Only this time different graphical effects got in the player's way as a means to sabotage their run. Such things included making the player play the level on an upside down screen, pixelating the screen to massive proportions, static and fuzz a la old CRT sets, and having a 4 x 4 display of miniature screens of the level.

What tricks does Grannies World Tour, 8-Bit Edition have under its sleeve? Why, it puts the player through all of these visual and graphical magical tricks to make going through a level where timing and precision jumps are necessary to survive next to impossible. Yes, jumping to the beat of the music is important, but when you have no visual in a section where you're running up a shaft filled with spikes on either side of the wall, this becomes mighty tricky, and frustratingly so. It's not a hard level because of its design; it's purely because of the cheap graphical tricks in action that makes the level so unnecessarily and aggravatingly difficult. That is not good or fun level design, no matter how you slice it.

Demolition Man - Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2, XBX, PC)

We mentioned Supply Lines from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in a previous volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History. Now we look at San Andreas' predecessor with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and its ultra annoying mission Demolition Man. A key difference between Supply Lines and Demolition Man is that the former is an optional mission, although incredible unfair, while the latter is a mandatory story mission.

What does Demolition Man entail? Well, actually the demolition here comes from a miniature RC helicopter which protagonist Tommy Vercetti is forced to pilot through a multi-story building being constructed. The goal is to drop bombs at several key locations, and this is all the while workers take potshots and attack your hard-to-control toy helicopter as you fly it through the construction site.

Not only is the helicopter a pain to move around the tiny, cramped spaces offered by the building under constructed, but the goons trying to bat your copter down are quite persistent. Plus, did I mention you have a limited amount of time to do all this? What all this adds up to is a mission that is worth praising for trying to keep Vice City's mission variety fresh, but one that fails in being anything close to fun.

Mos Eisley and Beggar's Canyon - Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (N64, PC)

With it being exactly one month until the North American release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it seems like the perfect opportunity to dig deep into the Star Wars series of games, particularly Shadows of the Empire. Now, this game was a fantastic early 3D Star Wars game for the Nintendo 64, releasing the same holiday season as the system itself. A PC port released the following September in North America.

While the opening level is indeed one of the game's best, a different vehicle mission holds some notoriety in these parts of SuperPhillip Central. It's the mission that takes place in Mos Eisley and Beggar's Canyon, a speeder bike run through both locales. It has Dash Rendar chasing after several bikes, having the player attempt to careen through the tight and narrow spaces of the course while trying to smash into the bikes, jostling them into walls.

This level is, dare I say, fun in some regards, but it's also a nightmare in others. The controls aren't the tightest, and the narrow passageways that you have to go through and tricky turns make for a ride that is less than fantastic. It's a problematic level in many forms of the word, but thankfully, it's just one rough level in an otherwise enjoyable early 3D Star Wars game.

Death Mountain - Zelda II: Adventures of Link (NES)

A bad level can easily be well designed or at least designed competently. However, in Death Mountain's case from Zelda II: Adventure of Link, the area in particular seems to do more in the way of being designed to frustrate and aggravate the player rather than make them feel fairly challenged.

Death Mountain is a labyrinth of caves that offer the game's hardest regular enemies as well as troublesome platforming challenges. Throw in many dead ends, as a maze is wont to have, and you are dealing with a truly difficult area of the game in an already difficult title to begin with.

To have a chance of surviving Death Mountain, your Link needs to have a fair amount of health, magic, and other attributes that most likely need to be grinded to high levels just to stand said chance. It's too annoying of a place to pass as anything but bad by level standards because if you need to grind in an already grind-heavy game to stand a chance of survival, then you know your level isn't very good. At least this is the argument that SuperPhillip Central presents. Do you agree?

Bad Levels in Gaming History - Volume Seven

WARNING: Mild spoilers for the following games:

• Unreal Tournament (Multi)
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (GEN)
• Mega Man X6 (PS1)
• Whomp 'Em (NES)

Besides technical problems like screen tearing, poor performance, clunky controls, and a host of other issues, another problem that games can suffer from is bad level design. It usually isn't even the level design of an entire game, perhaps just a level itself. As you'll see with this edition of Bad Levels in Gaming History, even some of the better games out there can suffer from one or two annoying, tedious, or just not-fun levels. 

Ocean Floor - Unreal Tournament (Multi)

With the alpha of Unreal Tournament's newest incarnation available for PC players to fool around with, it seems like a smart chance to talk about the first UT game. Assault in Unreal Tournament is a fantastic mode which has one team serving as the attacking team and one team serving as the defensive team. The attacking team has to complete a series of objectives, usually to encroach on the defensive team's turf or destroy something important. Meanwhile, the defensive team obviously enough has to prevent the attacking team from accomplishing their goal(s). Both teams get a chance to serve on both sides, and the team that completes the attacking part of the mission the fastest is the one that is determined as the winner.

Nearly all of the maps of Assault in Unreal Tournament are well designed for this type of setup. All but one, in my opinion, and that's the Ocean Floor map. Even if you're just playing against the AI, you can easily get wrecked regardless of what side you're on.

The attacking team starts in a base overlooking the underwater complex which houses a series of four terminals that must be destroyed. You have to leap into the ocean, swim through the depths, and reach one of two entrances into the complex where auto-turrets and most assuredly your enemy awaits. Die, and you have to spawn all the way back at your base, being forced to slowly swim back towards and into the underwater compound.

On defense, the offense from the other team can be instant. Facing the AI, you can quickly find yourself with all of the terminals destroyed before you get a chance to blink. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but that's what it feels like. Ocean Floor is one of the only maps in Unreal Tournament that feels heavily lopsided in favor of the attacking team over the defensive team. It's what makes it a disliked map of mine that otherwise has a cool setting and architecture.

Water Temple - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)

Now, now. Weapons down, ladies and gentlemen. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is without a doubt my favorite video game of all time. It is just a ticket to masterful game design... well, except one place in the game, and that's a dungeon that even the director of the game has apologized for.

Yes, I'm referring to the Water Temple, a dungeon within Ocarina of Time that suffers from two annoyances that pop up multiple times throughout Link's journey through its depths.

The first is the need to raise and lower the water level of the dungeon on various occasions to make the floating platforms rest where they need to. A bigger pain in the rump was the need to constantly switch between having the Iron Boots equipped and having them unequipped to Link. This process was further made aggravating by having to enter the pause menu to equip and unequip respectively. When you're being forced to equip the Iron Boots so much to sink down into the watery depths, the time wasted adds up.

Both of the Water Temple's main problems were rectified in what I consider the definitive version of Ocarina of Time, the Nintendo 3DS remake. Not only are the paths to the places where the water can be raised and lowered displayed with color-coded lines leading to them, but now the Iron Boots are like any other item that can be put on and taken off with a tap or touch of a button. Now, that's progress! It makes what was an otherwise overlooked part of Ocarina of Time's Water Temple design no longer an issue.

Carnival Night Zone Act 2 - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (GEN)

While Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is one of my favorite entries in the Blue Blur's long line of video games, there is one particular sour spot that gets my girdle bunched up. THIS:

It's an ugly note in an otherwise near perfect gem of a Genesis game. Carnival Night Zone as a whole has a multitude of red and white barrels throughout it. However, the only one that is absolutely necessary to pass is near the end of Act 2. Nowhere in either act does the game display how to pass them. What occurs, then, is that players will try an assortment of tactics to pass by this dreaded stopping point for many a-player. The most popular is to jump up and down on the red and white barrel. Seeing a tactile response in the barrel beginning to bounce up and down, it only makes sense to continue this strategy.

However, one who continues this practice will cruelly never get that their incessant jumping on the barrel is for naught. It's simply not the right way to get passed this obnoxious obstacle. Instead, what you're supposed to do, as part of one of the most counter-intuitive gameplay mechanics I've witnessed, is hold up on the d-pad and then hold down, alternating between the two.

Few ever solved this unassuming puzzle on their own. Instead, they called a Sega hotline for game tips. I'm quite certain the developers of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 intentionally made the solution to the red barrel of doom so obscure and obtuse just to get extra money from suckers like me who called their $1.00 a minute hotline! Okay, maybe not, but it was indeed a place in the game that was needlessly vague in helping the player learn how to pass the obstacle on their own. A simple design decision like throwing a sign in the background would have made this preventable problem go away. Then again, as they say, hindsight is 20/20...

Gate's Laboratory - Mega Man X6 (PS1)

Instant death. That's what the final stages of Mega Man X6 award its players with after eight long stages that were just as awkwardly crafted and sometimes designed in such a way that are just offensive flat out.

Gate's Laboratory is a series of three stages that fill players with nothing in the way of fair difficulty, instead going for total cheapness. It's as if the developers and designers of Mega Man X6 had to be coaxed into creating the game kicking and screaming, and their ultimate revenge for this dishonor was making Mega Man X6 hellishly difficult in a myriad of unfair ways.

Spikes lining the walls, requiring pixel perfect jumps to avoid them? Got 'em. Enemies just placed at random locations and in great numbers? Got 'em. Blind jumps that only a psychic would know about? Got 'em. Finally, multiple challenging bosses that don't give you any sense of accomplishment in beating them? Yep, you guessed it. Got 'em.

It says something about Gate's Laboratory 2 when it's actually quite possible to be unable to progress in the level if you're the wrong character in the wrong armor. There is a jump that many call a leap of faith that is impossible to make if you're playing as X and you're not equipped with the correct armor. That alone speaks the loudest about Mega Man X6's problematic level design, and Gate's Laboratory stages are a crash course in bad design.

Final Level - Whomp 'Em (NES)

NES games are known for being something called "Nintendo Hard", and up until the final level in the Mega Man-inspired Whomp 'Em, the difficulty of the game is rather fair. When you reach the final level that our Native American hero has to deal with, you'll be asking for a dreamcatcher to catch this nightmare of a level so you won't have to ever contend with it ever again.

Let's start where we should-- the beginning. You're in the sky with several clouds serving as the platforms of the first part of the level. Some of these are storm clouds and will unleash on our hero a shock to his system. That's not all, however, as there are columns that must be maneuvered around, too. Oh, and don't forget the enemies that can come out of nowhere and pass through these otherwise solid objects.

After a vertical section of scaling small and short cloud platforms, the second floor of this final level is made up of columns of ice, more clouds, and more enemies that can quickly come out of nowhere to damage you. To add to the player's misery, falling down at this section of the level means you have to start from the first floor, going through that hot mess all over again.

By the time you reach the third floor of Whomp 'Em's final level, the game throws in an entirely new gimmick with no time for preparation given to the player. You have to immediately learn how to propel yourself with the protagonist's primary weapon, a staff, through an area with no gravity. This is all the while defeating or completely avoiding enemies. Very hard to do when you haven't mastered a totally brand-new game mechanic that is thrust onto you.

Then, there's the final boss, which is weak only to one weapon which takes off a bar of health each and every time you use it. If you don't decide to use the boss's weakness against him, prepare for an incredibly difficult battle, as the boss will use near impossible attacks to dodge.

No matter how you slice it, Whomp 'Em's final level is a blight and a horrid note to end on for an otherwise competent and capable Mega Man clone. It is marred by poor design, unfair challenges, and a mechanic that comes out of nowhere for the player to be forced to somehow master.