Well, a bit of thread necromancy but i didn't have anything new for a while. but I have been playing digimon world recently and i finally discovered, and experienced that bonus tries are rigged.

bonus tries are a slot machine like minigame that you can play when training. if you win, your training is 2x, 4x, or 10x more effective depending on what symbols you match.

Unfortunately the game is totally rigged and has a chance of not letting you win. Unlike say pokemon slots where it would sometimes randomize the last spin regardless of where you stop it, this game will decide in advance if your allowed to win, and if you get the timing right will just slide the reel one extra spot.

If you can get the timing down, bonus tries are still more efficient than Regular training. as 1 lucky try can accomplish more than an entire day of training. but still, I can't think of many other games that will rig things this drastically.

Well... There's Souls series, right? Those games kinda ignore fundamentals of game design. They might not even do it on purpose, they're just FROM software doing what FROM software does - FROM software doesn't give a shit about conventional game design, who needs it anyway?

It's a game which is perfectly fine with putting checkpoints 15-30 minutes apart (especially when you're playing trough the game for the first time), with hiding checkpoints behind hidden walls - hell, with hiding major gameplay and story elements behind hidden walls too! Several of them! Souls games are not afraid of making gear checks in the form of an insanely tough boss fight. The way you adjust difficulty in souls games is not with a slider - is by which gameplay style you're using. I could just... Go on, FROM software doesn't care. And the best thing is - all of that massively benefits the gameplay.

I actually can think of another example:

Depression Quest is, unlike most games, not intended to be a fun game.

I don't know if this counts, but to me it seems that in order to finish Freespace campaigns in the hardest difficulty ("Insane"), you pretty much have to break the game logic, finding an unconventional way to reach your objectives, in order to avoid fighting etc. Maybe the developers didn't playtest it well on different difficulty levels, or then they are insanely good players themselves.

Sometimes it means trying to keep one enemy fighter alive in order to prevent new enemies from appearing, because killing all enemies triggers a new wave of enemies.

In most bombing missions where you are supposed to protect another bomber wing, it means that those bombers will always fail and can't possibly reach their objective, so you have to become a bomber yourself and do their job...

...but even if you decide to be a bomber yourself, too bad your bombs are pretty much useless because enemy autoturrets will always easily shoot them down if you fire the bombs from a safe distance. Or alternatively, if you go close to the enemy hull so that the autoturrets can't shoot the bomb, then you are probably so close to the enemy ship that the bomb splash damage will cause major damage to your bomber too.

Hence, most "kill the enemy mothership"-missions change from actual bombing missions to "find a cranny in the enemy mothership hull where you can hide from autoturrets and enemy fighters, and shoot the enemy hull with your lasers for one hour in order to kill it bit by bit". I have hard time believing that was really the way of playing that the game designers envisioned, but trying to do it in some other way quite often seems plain impossible, with the game constantly pushing an endless stream of enemy fighters at you (while you never have an endless stream of friendly wingmen for some reason, go figure... Why is it always the enemy who has an endless supply of fighters, not you?), and the mothership autoturrets shooting so accurately at you constantly that you can't even get a lock on it.

Bah humbug! For this reason alone, I personally think Wing Commander Prophecy Gold is a better space combat game. At least there bombing missions were actual bombing missions, in fact normal lasers wouldn't even damage enemy motherships (hence you couldn't even destroy them with your mere lasers), except maybe being able to take down their autoturrets. There was one gun in WCP which I recall doing damage to major ships and their subsystems too, but you didn't always have an access to it.

[Might and Magic 2 puzzle spoilers in this post. Also for Wizardry Gaiden 3 as well.]

I have an example of a puzzle requiring what most players would consider an exploit.

In Might and Magic 2, there are various hirelings you can recruit. The game doesn't let you sleep if you can't afford to pay those hirelings, but the game lets you dismiss them anywhere. When you do this, the hireling will retain any items being carried at the time of the dismissal. (This is unlike monsters in Bard's Tale 2/3 who are not saved if you D)rop (or R)emove) them from the party, allowing item duplication.)

This, of course, leads to what feels like an exploit; if the game will not let you leave an area with an item (like a certain ring that gets you thrown into prison), you can smuggle the item out by giving it to a hireling and then dismissing said hireling.

In order to complete one of the game's major quests, you need to get the Elemental Orb. Unfortunately, once you get it, the orb will deny you exit, and teleportation magic does not work in the area. Therefore, the only way to get the orb out is to give it to a hireling who you then dismiss. In other words, using what a reasonable player would consider an exploit is the intended (and AFAIK, the only) way to get the orb out so you can complete the quest.

Wizardry Gaiden 3 does something similar. There is a place, early in the game, where you can retrieve any important items you dropped. Just go there, and you can pick up the item from a box.

At one point, at the end of a dungeon, there is an orb you can take. Once you take that orb, however, the door is sealed shut, preventing escape. Also, the area is an anti-magic zone (the only one I've seen in the game), so you can't escape with Loktofeit (or Ruby Slippers) or Malor. It turns out that, in order to keep the orb and progress through the game, you *have* to drop the orb and then retrieve it from a chest.

It's also worth noting that Wizardry Gaiden 3 has another design flaw; there are certain points where you have to pick locks to proceed. That would be somewhat reasonable, except for the fact that there are locks that can only be opened by a thief without reaching unreasonable (for that point in the game) levels, so if you took a thief hybrid (Bard, Ranger, or Ninja) instead, you can't progress past that point, unless you train a thief just for this part, or you spend ages reaching unreasonably high levels. Using a spell isn't an option because there isn't any spell that would help; Desto (spell from Wizardry 5 that unlocks locked doors) is not in this game, and it should have been.

Moon Logic still plagues the point and click genre.

Obfuscation does not make for a fun challenge guys.

Oh man, that reminds me Is it even possible to beat Strife on the hardest difficulty setting? I tried it a while back and couldn't get out of the first room. Maybe its because I was playing through a source port...