GameSided Roundtable: Our Hardest Moments In Gaming

Mytheos Holt (Twitter)

While I faced a lot of gaming challenges in my childhood that left me practically weeping at the difficulty, and cheering when I ended up defeating the level and/or boss involved, one experience stands out above all the others as distinctive in its sheer, unworldly difficulty. I refer to the experience of trying to defeat the song “Raining Blood” in Guitar Hero III.

Let’s be absolutely clear: I was trained as a pianist. My fingers can move very, very quickly and can achieve combinations of notes that require quite a lot of dexterity, seeing as most of what I learned to play was classical music of the type composed by Bach and Beethoven. But “Toccata and Fugue” by Bach, and probably even some of Beethoven’s work, are walks in the park compared to the experience of trying to defeat “Raining Blood” on Expert.

The reason is that the mechanics of the controller in Guitar Hero III make it such that if you accidentally hit a wrong note, it doesn’t just break up the flow of notes, but because you’re required to rely so heavily on hammer-ons and pull-offs to defeat the hardest section of this song, it also means that the game won’t even recognize that you’re hitting other notes unless you time your next correct note perfectly. If a piano went mute the instant you hit a wrong note, and wouldn’t make sound until you mentally figured out how quickly to play a future measure, and did it perfectly, there’d be a lot fewer concert pianists out there.

Fortunately, the designers of “Guitar Hero” modified this issue with the controller in future reissues of the product, which makes the floods of notes required by songs like “Raining Blood” a bit more manageable. But the lines “raining blood from a lacerated sky” will probably always provoke horrified memories of lacerated fingers and lacerated pride.

Keith Myers (Twitter)

Completing the entire .hack series back in the PS2 era. The games themselves weren’t difficult, but slogging through four games worth of awful combat that never evolved was downright painful. Surviving the entire experience with permanent psychology scars from the monotony is something that i’m rather proud of. 

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