GameCentral readers reveal what game has taken them the longest to beat, from obsessions that have lasted hundreds of hours to over a decade…
The talking point for this weekend’s Inbox was suggested by reader SolidPete82 (PSN/NN ID), who wanted to know the longest period of time you’ve gone between starting and game and finishing it. What was the reason for the long length of time and was it because you were stuck on a particular section?
Whenever there’s a bank holiday weekend we try and pick a topic that we think will stretch to the extra day and just as we thought this turned out to be a very familiar experience for many readers. 23 years was the longest time taken, but plenty of others came close as well…
World’s greatest dad
23 years for R-Type. I started playing on the Spectrum with my mate Boycie back in 1989 – he navigating, me doing the firing and in charge of the ‘Force’.
The furthest we got was to last for about 20 seconds into Level 5, although only the once. It was then, and still is, as hard as nails until you memorise every attack pattern.
Over the years I played it on numerous 16-bit machines and more recently on the Wii’s Virtual Console. It wasn’t until I bought the iOS version with it’s handy save after each level ability that I finally managed to beat it. It was fantastic being able to pick it up and play while looking after my then new-born daughter. I remember the day I finished it; one Sunday evening in March 2012 with a two-month-old baby asleep on my chest. I couldn’t have been prouder father.
Phil303
Serious racing
When I got my PlayStation 3 in 2008 I knew I had to buy WipEout HD, I had played the previous editions and loved everything about them. I soon realised though that unless you turned off Pilot Assist you would always have to settle for only being an average racer: having it on means you very rarely hit the sides of the tracks but at a substantial cost to your speed. Switch it off though and your ship becomes a turbo-charged, wall grinding beast, I found myself smashing into every wall possible making racing so frustrating that I quickly fell out of love with the game and decided it was just too tough for me. Now that was hard to accept…
I sold my physical copy of the game with a heavy heart and only downloaded it again for free as part of the 2011 Welcome Back package following the infamous PSN hack. I dabbled with it occasionally, I would look at my friends who had the Platinum Trophy with envious eyes and I just knew that this was an itch that needed to be scratched. Fast forward to March of this year and I took the plunge and decided to have a go at probably the toughest challenge in the whole game: Beat Zico.
This involves doing a speed lap of 30.82 seconds or under on Anulpha Pass. I gradually whittled down my best time by doing lap after lap (after lap…). Eventually I did beat the time and realised that in the process I had become good at this game! I was deftly tapping the air brakes into
corners and hitting every speed pad available, could it really be possible I could defeat the whole game on the hardest difficulty and get the rare and much coveted (by me anyway) Platinum Trophy?…
Well, to my amazement, after about five weeks of some serious racing I had managed it. My most satisfying gaming achievement. The End.
skyway73
That game again
Sorry to bring this game up again as a Hot Topic answer but mine is DRIV3R. It took me and my friend around two years to finish it, purely because of how difficult some of the missions were, especially chase Catalita. We would go to each other’s house each Saturday and use my save to try and complete the game whilst listening to Derby County play on the radio, when we got too frustrated we would go on free ride (which some would argue was worse than the missions).
Funnily enough I wasn’t even a massive fan of Driver until this friend introduced me to the franchise with Driver 1 and 2, we both then bought into the hype of three so much that we overlooked its bad bits to an alarming degree. I now see that the game wasn’t great but at the time I was hyped and had never experienced a Grand Theft Auto. I still don’t think it was as bad as everyone made out though.
Truk_Kurt (PSN ID)
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Another day
I’ve been working on and off on the ‘Hardestestest’ level of Super Hexagon for a long time now. After buying the game, I got through to the last level of difficulty in around two weeks. Since then I have come so close on a few occasions to completing but cannot get to the goal. On one occasion, getting to 58 seconds and then allowing my thumb twitch (and then fail) caused me to let out a scream that loosened my wife’s teeth.
If I had to estimate the amount of attempts I have had at it, it is in the several thousands. That’s the beauty of it though, I can have five to 10 attempts while stood in a queue. Perhaps one day…
Razzledazzle
Just in time
Easy one: Final Fantasy VIII. So frustrating were Sorceress Adel and Ultimecia and her summon and various forms, and so annoying were the bosses and frustrating turn-based battles where only my summons seem to do anything, that I gave up.
A week just before Final Fantasy IX (I got Final Fantasy VIII on release date) I said OK, I’ll defeat you annoying things (I did defeat Adel prior to my break). So I drew Meteor, Ultima, and Quake, and repeated that when they appeared again after a time in all the spots where they could be drawn from, as they could be used to maximise HP, MP and pretty much overpower the forms of bosses.
So I spent a couple hours of the day farming the high powered magics in positions all over the islands and paired them with all the fundamental stats required and low and behold the hard bosses became enjoyable easy bosses (wonder if the developers put those islands in because they knew the way the stats and menu system mechanics worked were probably one of the worst the series had seen). Final Fantasy IX stats and levelling system was an absolute joy and Final Fantasy X’s too.
Anyway, Final Fantasy VIII completed and the next day Final Fantasy IX was released – just made it.
Alucard
Little help
It’s a toss up between two. Super Mario 64, owned for the Nintendo 64 when I got one sometime in late ’98/early ’99 but never completed until the DS version, which I completed the summer after launch and Sonics 1, 2, 3, and Knuckles which I always loved but never completed until the collection was released on PlayStation 2.
The reason? I’m pretty terrible at games and it was only force of will/a generous save system many years later that helped me get past the many, many bits that stumped or frustrated me and halted my progress all those years ago.
StellarFlux (gamertag)
25 days of life
The game that took the longest for me to finish definitely had to be The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I completed all the quests, levelled up to 50 and collected all the unique items that I believe there was. I was nudging 400 hours on the character I did it with, however, this wasn’t the first character I had used on the game.
If memory serves I bought the game in July 2006 and started playing with a typical knight style character with high strength and endurance stats. I did the Fighters Guild and Main Story Quests and got bored of him.
I decided to try a mage instead and did the guild and story quests and a lot of the side quests but found that I didn’t want to do any more with that one either, got well and truly fed up with it and traded it in.
After I finished most of Fallout 3 in what must of been the spring of 2009 I grabbed another copy of Oblivion, having felt a little pang of regret for getting rid of it and started up with the mage again. This didn’t last long and I started again with a nightblade style character.
I really clicked with this style of character and in between getting married, starting a family, and the occasional interruption from other games I finished what I believe is everything in this title around October 2012. And if I’ve not gone down all the paths I can at least say that I sunk 20 to 25 days of my alive time into it over a period of six years. As I’m wrapping this up I cant help feel surprise that I stayed with it even that long.
Grey Crown
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Almost every one
I think it was early 1993 when a school chum gave me his copy of Monkey Island 2 for the Amiga 1200 (on a whopping 11 discs!) after his own Amiga has been killed to death by a spilt can of Spar Cola – the stickiest substance known to man.
I instantly fell in love with the game. I’d never experienced the joys of a point ‘n’ click adventure before and was totally ensorcelled by the size of the playing world, the amount of characters you could interact with and, most pleasingly, the excellent humour that breathed so much life into the gameplay. I spent many hours exploring Scabb Island and its neighbouring isles and, over the course of seven or eight weeks, managed to progress Guybrush Threepwood pretty far through his piratey quest… until I became utterly stumped for days. Having no Internet to turn to for guidance or any friends who had managed to get as far as me in the game, I reluctantly chucked all the discs into a drawer and gave up. Thankfully it was a big drawer.
Fast forward 11 months and I was at a friend’s house when he happened to mention that his older brother has every issue of CVG magazine ever published. Being easily impressed, I begged him to let me see said collection and so we went into his brother’s bedroom and, lo and behold, under the bed was every issue of CVG ever, exactly as he had described seconds earlier (and no ‘other’ types of magazines whatsoever. Drat!).
I was flicking through the mags at random when I stumbled upon a complete guide to Monkey Island 2! As if the afternoon hadn’t been exciting enough already! The guide was printed over a series of issues, so I found the necessary one and read how to conquer the enigma that had troubled me so much nearly one year earlier. I was the happiest boy in the land!
(For anyone familiar with Monkey Island 2, I was bewildered by a bit right near the end before you battle LeChuck where you have to go through a maze of skeleton doors. The key to the maze was to read the lyrics to the song Guybrush had scribbled down much earlier in the game when visited by the dancing ghosts of his parents in a dream. Seems obvious now.)
I asked if I could borrow the mag (as it also contained a guide on how to beat LeChuck which looked rather tricky) and ensured my pal that I would return it next week. His brother would never even have to know!
So I went home, searched out the discs, and finally managed to finish the game (albeit by cheating a bit) well over a year after I had started it. And the excellent end sequence made it totally worth the wait.
Unfortunately there’s an epilogue of sadness in this tale. My little sister, who was in her terrible twos at the time, got hold of the CVG mag I had borrowed and thoughtfully decided to rip it to shreds. Thankfully (for me) it seemed my friend forgot I had borrowed the mag and never asked for it back. So there may well still be a collection of ‘every CVG mag ever’ out there that, unbeknownst to the owner, is actually missing one issue. Sorry Clive!
Bingo Rose
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