That One Level/Video Games/Party Game

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


It's all fun and games until you get to play That One Level...

  • Incredible Crisis, a minigame compilation/widget game on the PS 1, featured a very annoying level just before its halfway point where the player character has to match the weight of a golden piggy bank with the contents of her shopping bag, Indiana Jones style. Even worse, the player is given less and less time to solve the problem after each subsequent failure, and seriously, who the hell wants to do math in a party game?!
    • Even worse is the "final boss", which requires you to quickly tap the triangle and then X buttons to outrun a crane while using the D-pad to dodge bombs. At first it's just uncomfortable, but eventually it just gets painful.
  • The first Mario Party was infamous for having minigames that required you to rotate the control stick really fast. The worst of these games was Pedal Power, in which you had to use a bike to power up a light bulb to light the room before a boo grabbed you. Even the computer players couldn't beat it.
    • It Got Worse when you consider that the analog stick on N64 controllers could injure one's hands. Nintendo offered free pairs of gloves to some of those afflicted and stopped using rotating the control stick as a control method in any future minigames.
      • According to The Runaway Guys, this is the reason Mario Party 1 has never been released on the Wii's Virtual Console.
    • Meanwhile, on the subject of boards, Peach's Birthday Cake is a nightmare. As if the game wasn't luck-based enough, this board throws in the Flower Lottery. Every time you pass Goomba, you're forced to throw in 10 coins to play a minigame where you pick from 4 seeds planted into the ground. Three of those seeds contain a Toad face, which brings you straight to the star, which costs 20 coins on top of the 10 coins you already spent. So, essentially, you need 30 coins just to get one star on this board, something you're not likely to have at the start of the game. On top of this, if you manage to find a Bowser seed, the Goomba congratulates you for picking the 'correct' seed and sends you to Bowser's Cake, which is packed with Bowser spaces all around, and when you pass Bowser, he takes 20 more coins from you and throws you back into the Flower Lottery again, taking 10 more coins away from you. Worse still, if your opponents managed to reset the lottery by choosing all of the seeds, there's a chance that you could end up choosing the Bowser seed again, or, for the most unforunate, the rest of the game, putting you in an infinite loop of bankruptcy. The two-out-of-three star difficulty rating for this board is a fucking lie.
    • Pirate Land in Mario Party 2. The board was two landmasses separated by a bridge, and nine times out of ten, the star[1] would be on the other side of the bridge. This bridge had three happening spaces on it, and if anyone landed on one, the entire bridge would go down, taking all the players on the bridge back to the start. Then, if that wasn't bad enough, there were Whomps on the other side that fined one coin or higher for the first player, and if the first player gave them more than one coin, the amount the next player would have to pay would be the same amount the first player paid. If the first player had somehow obtained 30 coins, he or she (or it, as the AI for computer players favored this strategy) could pay the Whomp ten coins and still have 20 left over for the star, putting the amount at 10 coins for the rest of the game. This put the three other players in a world of hurt.
  • Some of the minigames in Rayman Raving Rabbids can be annoyingly difficult, or just annoying. Like "Bunnies are Heartless to Pigs", where you have to guide a baby pig to its mother through a garbage dump, in which are hidden Rabbids who will jump out and torch you and the pig with a flamethrower if you run into them. The only thing guiding you is the sounds made by the pig (if it starts squealing, there's a Rabbid ahead of you), and you have to listen for them by holding the Wiimote next to your ear. Oh, and you have to do all this in 25 seconds or less. And later, you play a version with a Rabbid distracting you by blowing into an air horn.
    • Not to mention that the air horn version would often send too much data to the Wii Remote speaker at once and cause nothing but static or silence for... however long until you inevitably failed the minigame.
    • There was also the bathroom-door closing game. A lot of people had enough trouble with just closing the doors, but not me. Up until I got to the redux one.
    • Oh, and did you just so happen to get the PC version? Well, you won't have a problem with those levels listed above (the pig one is actually pretty fun when the sound is run through the regular speakers) but you will have a massive problem with the later, sheep-shearing one! It's either that it's just ridiculously harder with a mouse, or it's that it doesn't cope at all with lag (and it's the most computer-demanding minigame of them all), but it was outright IMPOSSIBLE for me! Also: ANY level that involves shaking the Wiimote is made FAR harder when you're using a mouse!
    • The ones where you have to guide a ball through a maze. Goddamn
  • The Crystal Challenge for the N. Ballism level in Crash Bash. Force fields which you can grab, but rarely spawn in your side (and when they do, someone else grabs it), and N. Gin showing up to shower your goal with balls, and his his ship deflects balls as well, ruining any chances you have of winning.
    • The sky ball level also has an over-the-top crystal challenge, in which there are red balls that kill you instantly if you touch them. They do no harm to computers, who will joyfully keep them in play even though letting them through doesn't subtract points.
    • Good luck getting relics (especially platinum relics) in any of the tank levels in the one-player mode. All three computers will gang up on you mercilessly and only blind luck can save you. Relics also require you to win twice in a row (three times in the case of platinum). The game goes up to Two Hundred Percent Completion for a reason. Fortunately, the two-player mode forces the computer to play on even 2 vs 2 footing throughout.
    • Given there's no such thing as a "That One Boss" tab for this video game genre, there's Big Bad Fox, a "Fox" (that is, tank minigame) type challenge against the Komodo Brothers. The less said about it, the better.
  1. ↑ The items which need to be collected in order to win
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