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 Ten

Even great games can have bad levels, areas, or sections in them. That's been true of a lot of the levels and games featured on this long-running SuperPhillip Central segment, Bad Levels in Gaming History. These levels can be a chore to play through, suffer from poor design, or just annoy the hell out of players. Once you have checked out the five newest bad levels in this entry, feel free to bring up your own examples. Then, check out all past volumes with these convenient links:

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Four

Volume Five

Volume Six

Volume Seven

Volume Eight

Volume Nine

Atlantica - Kingdom Hearts II (Multi)

We begin this volume of bad gaming levels, stages, and whatnot with an entry from Kingdom Hearts II. In the original game, The Little Mermaid's Atlantica was a bit troublesome as Sora, Goofy, and Donald needed to not only battle foes but do so while swimming, something that slipped up players with its atypical controls (at least from the rest of the game).

Even still with those niggles, it was much better than what the Atlantica world offered players in Kingdom Hearts II. Taking its Disney influences quite greatly, Kingdom Hearts II's Atlantica turned the world from a dungeon crawling experience to a rhythm-based mini-game musical. There's no better hell in Kingdom Hearts II than having to listen to Sora and the gang sing dopey lyrics as well as dance and swim around. Fun this is not. Good this is not. It's just something that blends in with the Kingdom Hearts series' mini-game style, and that style is being obnoxious to play. (And in this case, obnoxious to hear.)

Lily Pad Ride - Super Mario Sunshine (GCN)

Super Mario Sunshine is hardly a bad game, but to me it's by far the worst 3D Mario game currently out. There are so many poorly thought out or just plain annoying segments in the game that the whole experience is dragged down. From sections where Mario has to survive inside a giant pachinko machine to dealing with the camera inside the Ferris wheel of Pinna Park, there's a lot to not like about Super Mario Sunshine despite it still being a competent game.

One of the most aggravating levels in Super Mario Sunshine comes in the form of one of Delfino Plaza's secret Shines, the Super Mario 64 Power Star equivalent of Sunshine. Not only is the trek to this dreaded bonus stage a massive annoyance, but the trip is a pain, requiring Yoshi, lots of patience, boats to slowly ride, and plenty of possibilities to ruin your trip by falling in the water, thus forcing you to redo this long and drawn out ride.

When you finally use Yoshi to spray away the gunk blocking the pipe into the bonus stage, you would expect your reward, but NO. The development team laughs at you, taunting you with one of the most sadistic sections in the entire Super Mario Sunshine experience, the Lily Pad Ride.

This ride has you riding on a giant lily pad across a stream of poisonous water that will kill Mario instantly if he touches it. Your goal is to collect eight red coins along the ride while using Mario's FLUDD to guide the lily pad into the coins. Good luck with this because the ride is turbulent and the tides will send you floating off course rather easily. It's a horrid level and quite possibly the worst that Super Mario Sunshine has to offer.

75m - Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii), Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (Wii U)

A Super Smash Bros. Brawl stage that is a perfect representation of the third level of the classic Donkey Kong game, 75m isn't one of Brawl fans' favorites, especially for competitive players. It's not even a favorite of mine, and I'm a usual lover of crazy stages.

What makes 75m bad, at least in my opinion, is that there's too few wide enough platforms to have serious fights on, and the only one that is worthwhile to have these types of battles on is at the very top. Unfortunately, this section of stage routinely gets hammered by trampolines that interrupt the flow of battle.

Then there's the fireballs that climb up and down the ladders in the middle and right portions of the stage. Really, it's more about evading all of the stage hazards rather than being able to punish your opponents with epic smashing showdowns. It seems cruel then that the stage made a return in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. Things like this are why people jokingly (and sometimes not jokingly) yell "SAKURAIIIII!!!" (the director of the series).

Blighttown - Dark Souls (Multi)

Since its conception, Bad Levels in Gaming History has generally considered bad levels bad because of poor design. Dark Souls' Blighttown actually doesn't suffer from that. Instead, its problems come from a purely technical standpoint.

For this uninitiated, Blighttown is a massive, murky, and poisonous swamp that slowly drains your warrior's life as they slog through its yucky water. The continued muck to move through is but one thing to worry about in the level. Other bothers include flies and foes that use either melee attacks or fling projectiles.

Here is where the problem of Blighttown comes. With so much happening in the level and all of the lighting involved, Dark Souls' frame-rate would drop severely, almost like a player's health when facing Ornstein and Smough for the first hundred times. If some of the bosses in Dark Souls didn't cause players to suffer from nightmares, the frame-rate in Blighttown most certainly would.

The Crystal Tower - Final Fantasy III (Multi)

Final dungeons in RPGs are meant to take your team of heroes who have weathered battle after battle, boss after boss, and dungeon after dungeon, and pit them against an ultimate challenge. Final Fantasy III (not to be confused with the SNES game that was numbered III in the West when it originally release but is actually VI) does give players' parties an ultimate challenge for sure, but it's on the side of excruciating and ridiculous rather than challenging and fun.

The Crystal Tower is the final dungeon of Final Fantasy III, and why it's such a bad level is that it's an insane time investment and endurance run. You practically have to go through multiple sections of dungeon just to reach the final boss. Okay, that doesn't TOO bad, but here's the kicker-- through the massive and time-consuming dungeon areas you fight enemies and explore, there is NO save point to speak of. At. All.

This means that if you reach the final boss and die, you have to do the entire dungeon all over again. So if you're the type to hunt for treasure, you'll be making multiple trips back to the entrance of the Crystal Tower just to go outside and save your data. When you finally feel you're ready to take on the final boss, be hopeful that you're able to survive so you don't have to redo a significant amount of time.

Bad Levels in Gaming History - Volume Five

Good/bad level design, like many things in life, can be a very subjective thing. However, I am pretty sure that my picks for this fifth volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History can be considered by most to be pretty bad, whether it's in its design, its repetitiveness, and so forth. Games on this volume include The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Sonic Adventure 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Donkey Kong 64, and Darksiders.

If you've missed a previous volume of Bad Levels in Gaming History, check them out with these links!

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Four

The Temple of the Ocean King - The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (DS)

Dungeons are generally a fantastic part of The Legend of Zelda line of games. I'd even go so far to say that they're my favorite part of each game. Big thing to say, right? Phil sarcastically asked. Anyway, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass had some interesting dungeons in it, but it also bestowed onto players one of the most aggravating and tedious dungeons in series history, The Temple of the Ocean King.

The main issue with the Temple of the Ocean King is just how it is set up. It is essentially a timed stealth dungeon, requiring you to avoid Phantoms that will chase after you if they notice your presence. The titular Phantom Hourglass pours sand from its top to its bottom. If the sand empties from the top and fully fills the bottom, it's game over. The aforementioned Phantoms take away thirty seconds of time if they catch you.

What makes matters worse is that you are returning to the Temple of the Ocean King basically after every dungeon. This means you will have to AT LEAST go through the dungeon six times or more, and that's not including failed runs. Each visit allows you to venture further down the dungeon's thirteen total floors. Don't like repeating puzzles for no reason but to pad the gameplay experience? That's unfortunately too bad. That's exactly what you have to do in this dungeon.

The sad fact is that the Temple of the Ocean King isn't a poorly designed dungeon per se. It just requires the player to retread the same ground, solving the same slow puzzles over and over again, and it forces you to do so more times than should be allowed. Just half of the visits to the Temple of the Ocean King would have worked better than what the final product in the game was.

Crazy Gadget - Sonic Adventure 2 (DC)

Let's face what I perceive to be facts, shall we? Early 3D Sonics were hard enough to contend with due to their poor cameras, sloppy controls, and frustrating bugs and glitches. Factoring gravity shift mechanics into things makes for one mess of a level. That level is Sonic's penultimate stage in the Hero Story of Sonic Adventure 2, Crazy Gadget.

Crazy Gadget is devised of various gravity switches that change the flow of gravity, pulleys that rappel Sonic up large shafts, and of course, everyone's favorite enemy in the game, Artificial Chaos. These blue blob boobs can attack Sonic from afar with their huge extending reach via a pair of thin blue tentacles.

The problem with these obnoxious beings is that the lock-on mechanic to homing attack these enemies doesn't always work. Sometimes you homing attack them and their tentacles somehow wrap around and take you out. Then there's those Chaos that explode into dozens upon dozens of little Chaos orbs, which the player can only take out by slamming on the homing attack button, praying that the game actually locks onto each foe instead of sending Sonic straight, prone to injury and a resulting loss of all of his rings. Bye-bye, A rank!

Crazy Gadget exemplifies the early 3D Sonic series's grandest control and camera problems, making for a mighty frustrating level that was hard to love when I had more patience as a young high school student, and is now impossible to love now that I have less patience for wonky design.

Killer Croc's Lair - Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS3, 360, PC)

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a roller coaster ride from the very beginning of the game up to close to the end. Then the ride screeches to a halt when Batman enters Killer Croc's lair, a section of the game where slow and steady wins the race for survival, but loses in the contest for fun. The lair itself is a long, pitiful, repetitive sewer maze (even the combination of words to describe the place evokes feelings of tedium) where Batman must tiptoe his way across floating wooden planks.

Meanwhile, Killer Croc leaps out of the water so many times in attempt to scare you that it quickly becomes "the Croc That Cried Wolf." It stops being alarming or intense after about the fifth jump-scare out of around thirty or so. Each time Croc leaps out of the water, a simple throw of an automatically-targeted Batarang knocks old ugly back into the murky drink. Killer Croc's lair is a blight on what is otherwise a near-perfect action game.

Crystal Caves - Donkey Kong 64 (N64)

Donkey Kong 64 is arguably an immensely and overly bloated collect-a-thon that took the amount of objects and trinkets to gather that Banjo-Tooie had and ratcheted that number exponentially. That's a big part of why the game is so understandably overwhelming to many players. Another part of that is definitely the level design. While most of the levels are indeed large, they're at least designed well. Crystal Caves, one of the last areas of Donkey Kong 64, does not follow such a trend.

The problem with Crystal Caves is that so many areas look so similar to one another, and this is thanks to the abundance of brown and blue walls that fill the cavernous complex. It makes trying to navigate yourself around the level a chore. That's not to mention gigantic stalactites falling from the ceiling intermittently, though this is only upon the Kongs' first visit to the level. Not only all of this, but Crystal Caves easily has some of the most arduous and, dare I say, unfair challenges for Golden Bananas within the entire game. This all adds up to one very annoying and irritating level that despite its awesomely chill tune is anything but enjoyable.

The Black Throne - Darksiders (PS3, 360, PC)

It stands to reason that one of the most difficult dungeons in an action-adventure game like Darksiders would be near the end of the game. That is remarkably and definitely true for Darksiders' Black Throne dungeon.

The dungeon's aim is to use the area's special item to redirect a trio of beams of light in the dungeon's central chamber. This can have you gnashing your teeth, pulling your hair out, and smashing your controller against your knee (perhaps that's just me) as you try to wrap your head around the convoluted portal puzzles being presented to you. Don't feel bad if you need to consult a guide or walkthrough just to make it through these puzzles.

Even then, a guide will only help with the puzzling aspects of the Black Throne. There's still plenty of ridiculously powerful foes to contend with, a lack of health pick-ups to nab, and an unrelenting amount of checkpoints. There's a point in a level where its challenge goes from fair and difficult to cheap and agonizing. The Black Throne goes beyond the point of being the former and dives directly into the latter.