Video game horror stories

What all horror stories have you had playing video games?

Some of mine are:

When I was 11, a friend of mine loaned me Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, which I fell in love with, but one major flaw it had was not being able to pause, which resulted in a lot of frustrating moments for me.
One time when I was home by myself, I was in the middle of a fight when my dad came home. Because the door was locked, he was yelling to me from downstairs, saying he needed to get in. I didn't get in any trouble, but it was a frustrating struggle to explain that I couldn't pause my game.

Yoshi's Island: The number of failed attempts to get a perfect score in Prince Froggy's Castle because of the layout of the boss battle.

Sten in Breath of Fire 2:
In this game, characters in your party only gain experience if they fight in battles, so when Sten joins your team, it is absolutely essential to build up his levels as much as possible before getting to Highfort (which is very far into the game). Because you can choose which party members to have in battle, you could very easily get to Highfort without using Sten that much, and if you were playing through the game for the first time without any prior knowledge, you'd have no idea that you'd be controlling him alone when you get there. Not only that, but it happens after you're allowed to save your game inside and when you're alone, you can't leave the castle. If you didn't build his levels that much, he's not going to stand a chance by himself and as a result, you'll have to start your game over, which I had to do the first time I played it.

Owning Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run for the Super Nintendo. If you were playing season mode, your file would save automatically after each game, but one fatal flaw was on the title screen, where you had the choice of starting a new game or continuing your current one. When the screen came up, the cursor would always be on New Game and because of that, it was very easy to push start first instead of selecting Continue, and if you did that, your current game would erase (it only has one file), now matter how quickly you pushed reset. I had that happen to me before and after that, I chose not to bother.

For those who haven't played the first Grandia game, if you ever decide to play it, I want to warn you that you do have to be patient for the wrong reasons. It has a great story with some excellent gameplay and characters and it deserved to be much bigger in North America, but one brutal flaw it has it its tendency to freeze at random, which makes you have to save more often than you'd have to in any other R.P.G.
When I fought General Baal for the first time, I struggled a lot and kept getting wiped out on several attempts, but on one of them, I was actually kicking some @$$ and felt like I was going to win when the game froze. After that, I gained some levels and he was much easier, but no video game should have this issue.

About 12 years ago, I purchased Final Fantasy Anthology and was playing through FF5, where I had a number of moments where the inventory screen would glitch out and I'd have to re-enter it. On some of those occasions, it would happen two straight times and it did so when I got out of the pyramid with my party drained. After my second attempt, I decided to enter the nearby forest instead and save after that, but what I didn't know was there just happened to be a boss battle. If the inventory screen hadn't kept glitching out on me, I would've already saved my game and restored everyone to full health, but because they were drained I didn't stand a chance. It was especially frustrating given the amount of time it takes to get out of the pyramid after the last save spot.
I was so angered, that I threw the game out and replaced it. Then I found out that that copy did the same thing, so I realized that I just had to be patient when I wanted to access the sub-screen.

When I got Golden Sun: The Lost Age, I had already beaten the first game and chose to put in a password for the second one, so I could have my original party members with all of the same stats when they joined up.
The catch is, the password that you will get is extremely long and entering it is one of the most tedious experiences you'll ever have playing a video game (especially if you put in part of it wrong), even though it's worth it if you get it in correctly. While I was entering my password, I was on-line when a friend sent me an instant message. I had gotten really far put the Game Boy Advance down to respond. After replying, I reached with my right hand to pick up the GBA when I accidentally whacked it off the table. It ended up falling on its front and resetting the game.
I continued talking to my friend and explained to her what happened. She felt terrible and I had to keep explaining to her that it wasn't her fault, telling her that she didn't know I was playing a game and that when I responded, I didn't think I was going to knock it off the table.

The first time in Tales of Symphonia where I was on that moving platform where you had to dodge electric sparks.

Seven years ago, I was borrowing Tales of Legendia and Abyss from a friend when the tint on my TV malfunctioned.
While playing through Legendia, I was going through a few places that happened to be dark and as a result, it was almost impossible to see, unless I turned the tint up to the max. Then I could, but when I went to the inventory, it was too bright and I'd have to turn it down. It got very annoying have to do this all the time whenever I was in a dark place, so I decided to play Abyss instead. When I did that, the issues with the TV made the text in the character skits almost impossible to read. Thankfully, I didn't have to wait that long to get the TV replaced.

I was expecting something different from this thread. Oh well, based on your examples, I can think of a couple.

Both Mega Man X Command Mission and Dark Cloud suffer from parts of your Breath of Fire 2 issue. Mega Man X Command Mission's boss rush section is an area that you cannot leave, and, while it's been a while so I may be misremembering, it doesn't give you much of a hint that you're about to enter a point of no return. I somehow got there way underleveled and all the bosses are super powered-up, the game went from easy to impossible in an instant and I didn't care enough to restart my save. Dark Cloud on the other hand is more manageable because you can leave and grind, but the second form of its final boss can only be hit by ranged attacks...And considering that this game is an action-RPG dungeon-crawler, you probably only focused on the protagonist, who is a melee fighter only. The game tries to make you use the other characters because some dungeon floors force a specific character, but generally you can just avoid all combat.

The only time I think I've ever triggered a saving bug would be in GTAV, and I'm still not sure how it worked, exactly. I had just started my file (so thankfully, nothing important was lost) and completed the first real mission. I decided to replay the prologue mission, and in the same session after that, I made Franklin go to bed, saving the game. For whatever reason, that save from the bed was corrupted and could not be loaded. I had an auto-save and a quick-save as well, from after the replay, and I eventually was able to load them after deleting the bed save, but on that file if I ever saved via the bed, the new save file would become corrupt. I restarted and have never replayed the prologue because of that, and everything seems fine. I reported the bug to Rockstar but I got a generic "if you're having a problem, go here, try this" email.

I saved over my Graces file with my new game plus file....the file I saved over had all the Inn Missions completed and I was going to go for the rest of the trophies from there, I'd even had two of the ultimate armors synthesized and 2 ultimate weapons and almost all the Carta Cards....needless to say I was upset. I got everything back though, I now have all ultimate weapons and half the ultimate armors for my party and my only trophy left is Mixer Maxxed. Never did get my Carta Cards back though ;p

One of my GC memory cards got corrupted, the one where I saved almost everything except Path of Radiance, Kirby Air Ride and F-Zero GX. I fear for the day the card with my F-Zero data cease to function.

The infamous Wiegraf battle in FFT. I think the difficulty was toned down in War of the Lions, but oh god it was a nightmare in the PSX version. I even changed my job to Chemist to equip gun and equipped the best Move+ skill so that I can run away as far as possible, but nooo, he proceed to murder me for the next 10+ tries. I somehow managed to defeat him with sheer luck, but the next fight pretty much crippled me because Ramza was my best damage dealer and I severely gimped him by changing him to Chemist. So yeah, I dieded, decided to screw it all and restart my game.

The second try, I absolutely murder that sonuvabitch.

Also Brave Fencer Musashi, Lumina Finale. What the hell am I suppose to do??? Granted that was before I acquaintained myself with the magic of walkthrough, but man that was depressing.

Getting all the way to the end of FF3us... Only to have the game constantly glitch out and crash in Kefka's Tower. I think back on it now, and I think I must have been hitting the sketch bug without realizing it (or knowing it existed).

Suddenly weird sh** would happen in battle. Graphics would glitch out, characters would be inflicted with weird miscolored status effects at random (like, say, orange or gray poison), swapped character sprites (sometimes swapping in General Leo's sprites)... and all sorts of other weird stuff until the game finally crashed. I'd load back up, get in battle again, same thing. This seriously freaked and even creeped me out, and I eventually just assumed my save file (or even the save slot itself) was corrupt and gave up because if I used a different slot, thus saving over my brother's file he would have killed me. I never beat the game until many years later.



One day years and years ago, loading up Mega Man 3 on my NES it was all glitched out and Mega Man's eyes on the stage select screen were replaced with rotating gears (I think? It had to have been other sprites in the game) and other weird graphical glitches that almost seemed intentional but the game still played fine. To this day I have never reproduced that exact craziness even with cartridge tilting.

My Gamecube used to make weird, demonic noises while playing games like Tony Hawk. I kind of figured that I had played Eternal Darkness so much that ED was taking over the other games. It was pretty damn creepy.

I forgot to save after an hour of leveling up and using artes in Graces (to try and get titles), but that was my own fault.

I played Sonic Adventure 2: Battle until I got all 180 emblems just to unlock a 1-minute stage of Emerald Hill Zone (or Green Hill Zone, whichever it is). I swore that I was never going to erase that file, but then one day the memory card became corrupted.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. I was right before the last boss, but I was missing a health upgrade, so I thought what the hell, let me go back and get it, can't hurt.

Got the upgrade, saved, but then realized that I couldn't get out of the area at all.

f*** that piece of shit game.