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1These levels are almost as hard as they are in RealLife...[[ThatOneLevel if not harder]].
2
3* Even ''VideoGame/CookingMama'' has examples:
4** In the Hot Dog and Taco recipes of ''Cooking Mama: Cook Off'', you must catch the ingredients in the bun/taco shell, which would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that you can only hold it on the sides of the screen. And the meat falls down in the middle, so you must time it so that it falls on the bun/taco shell ''in the middle of moving from one side to the other''. Hard enough to ''pass'', ''hell'' to get a Gold Medal on.
5** The Popcorn recipe-- that is, the actual cooking part. Imagine this: there's a bar with a meter that slowly moves right. Shaking the Wiimote moves it to the left some. Getting ''any'' bit outside of the bar fails the part. Sounds easy? Now here's the catch: the bar's acceptable area slowly shrinks, and as time winds down the shrink rate ''accelerates''. Passing normally is extremely difficult.
6* ''VideoGame/AceCombat'' primarily has these in levels where the mission/parameters have nothing to do with the difficulty setting; the "game stopper" is ''VideoGame/AceCombat5TheUnsungWar''[='=]s "Four Horsemen," mission 12b. It's only one of the two paths, but [[GuideDangIt you're given no clue that your answer to a wingman's question in mission 10 will have any consequence]]. Things aren't so bad on the other path (defending a civilian airport from invasion and then bombing enemy bunkers in the jungle while anti-air defenses you can't target fire missiles at you), or even in the other mission on this path (simply dropping special bombs to neutralize a gas attack then trailing a civilian vehicle), while this mission requires you to perform four consecutive timed destructions of radar sites, which means that you have to take into account your weapon's travel time ''and'' your own travel time -- go past the radar site and you fail, while if you get in position too early you'll have to brake/slow down, which can cause a stall or wasted time (especially if you have to turn around to reposition yourself for another attack run), and you have less time between each radar site. Did we mention that your wingmen may mess up ''their'' approaches against their own targets which you don't see and cause everyone to have to abort their attack run and try again? Making things worse, if you want the Flanker line of aircraft or the FALKEN, you ''have'' to play this mission at least once.
7** There are a few other standouts in ''The Unsung War'', particularly "Lit Fuse", which is problematic thanks to its gimmick. You're sent to support a marine force as they move in to take over various enemy bunkers, gradually rendezvousing with each other until they're fully grouped up to take on the final part of the mission. The problem is twofold: one, the dialogue notes that those bunkers cannot be destroyed by your weapons - they ''have'' to be knocked out temporarily by your weapons, then stormed and captured by the ground forces. Two, the dialogue ''is completely lying to you'' - the bunkers simply respawn a set number of times no matter what you do and you have to kill them repeatedly before the ground forces can pass by, [[GuideDangIt which is never actually explained in-game]]. "Fortress" is a lesser offender simply because there are far too many targets for you to take out with just missiles with the amount of ammo the planes available to you at that point in time have; at the very least, its gimmick is being a TimedMission where you tell the allied forces to stop or go at specific points, which is less prone to randomly failing through no fault of your own.
8** All of the 21st-century console ''Ace Combat'' games have a mission that [[AirstrikeImpossible involves flying through a tunnel]], but other than ''04'' and one of the operations in ''6'', there is another complication to make the mission harder to complete than it sounded:
9*** ''VideoGame/{{Ace Combat Zero|TheBelkanWar}}'' has "Valley of Kings" which combines the gimmick with the typical series gimmick of making the air above a canyon instant death, making you brave a gauntlet of AA guns, [=SAMs=] and pillboxes just to ''get to'' the tunnel. Flying above 2000 feet leads to a missile warning: if you don't get below that in time, [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard you'll have a missile launched at you from out of nowhere and automatically hit you]]. Did I mention the bridges in the way? Finally, if you're not using the FAE Bomb or the MPBM[[note]]While taking them seems to be a no-brainer, due to plot reasons you're stuck with the same plane and weapon for the last three missions. This means that, if you do take those bombs, you're stuck with just the regular missiles for the missions before and after Valley of Kings, both of which are pure dogfighting.[[/note]] you'll need to make multiple tunnel runs since you have to destroy all of the joint locks for each V2 controller before the controller itself can be hit. At least if you enter the tunnel through the south, the named ace in the tunnel who appears after you destroy the first two controllers is flying away from you and thus makes possibly the game's easiest non-bomber kill.
10*** ''5'' introduces the twisty-turvy tunnel later used in ''Zero'', but with multiple altitude changes along the way (not just at the entrance and exit of the tunnel), has enemy fighters in the tunnel in front of you headed in your direction, and whereas you can just slow down in all other tunnel missions and use autopilot to stabilize your flight path, here you have an enemy fighter hot on your tail the whole time and so have to go at essentially full speed the whole way or else get hit. Fortunately, it's probably the widest tunnel in the series, so crashing isn't the real issue.
11*** These go back to ''VideoGame/AceCombat2'', which has a similar final mission to ''04''. ''VideoGame/AceCombat3Electrosphere'' has a similar mission, with altitude changes and closing doors which serve to make it a "twisty" tunnel, with the added "bonuses" that, like ''Zero'', you have to fly all of the last set of missions with whatever craft you picked for the first mission in that set, which can be compounded by your aircraft choice (since the export version of the game only unlocks aircraft by A- or S-ranking a mission).
12*** In "Chandelier" in ''6'' you have to travel a ''long'' way to the action with nothing going on before then having a ton of heavy anti-aircraft fire tossed into your face on top of some ships (including ''missile'' boats!) ''and'' the last of Strigon Team, ace pilots one and all; after you destroy all of the targets (which will take quite some time since some require multiple hits and from particular angles) your wingman goes down and even heavier AAA appears in the form of a double-stacked line of gun towers; only after you destroy those can you go after the remaining targets. The very end has you flying into the tunnel, which isn't a tunnel so much as a giant gun barrel that's in the middle of firing, meaning your run can be brought to an end at any point by way of ''[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill cruise missile to the face]]''. And this is assuming that you got this far, as unlike "Valley of Kings" which gives a definite time limit, you have to complete the mission before too many cruise missiles are fired and can hit [[spoiler:Gracemeria]], so you'll have to guesstimate how much time/cruise missile launches you have left based on the dialogue. Fortunately, if you manage to survive the AAA on the way in, there's a conveyor belt underneath Chandelier that carries the cruise missiles to its rear; destroying the cruise missiles before they can be loaded will buy you some time depending on how you're balancing it with destroying the targets.
13*** That's nothing compared to "The Liberation of Gracemeria" and the horrific boss battle against [[ThatOneBoss Ilya Pasternak]]. Even if you're flying the [[GameBreaker Nosferatu]], it's still extremely hard.
14** Missions with insta-kill missiles above/below a certain height are almost always reviled, as are those that force usage of guns only or have radar jamming in play.
15*** The 'don't fly above (insert low altitude here)' missions are annoying, but in some games in the series the missiles don't spawn so close to you. This enables you to outrun them (or at least keep them from hitting you till they detonate) while flying the overpowered [=MiG=]-25/31. Unfortunately, this creates an {{Unwinnable}} situation, since they respawn one after another--so after descending back to an altitude that will let you complete the mission, the speed that's required to outrun the one that inevitably spawns above you prevents you from maneuvering through the narrow confines of the level. That the dragster-like [=MiGs=] were built for intercepting (which requires simply going faster than your target) rather than dogfighting (which involves a lot of quick turning) doesn't help.
16** The first game (''VideoGame/AirCombat'' outside Japan) has possibly the worst canyon mission of any, and a lot of that is FakeDifficulty due to terrible graphics. It's an incredibly narrow canyon, and because all ground is a flat color it is very very difficult to tell the two walls apart without flying close enough to the ground that you can see where the walls are, so every turn is an opportunity to crash due to very poor ability to judge distance.
17** ''VideoGame/{{Ace Combat X|SkiesOfDeception}}'' brings us "A Diversion", where you have to escort six helicopters to a location... but there are infantry-wielded [=RPGs=] along the route that don't appear on radar until the helicopters get close enough, unlike what the briefing says about luring them out. Plus, some of the bastards appear in locations that are inconvenient to target if you stick too close to the helicopters, and trying to stay behind them can backfire if you end up falling too far behind. On top of that, once you actually reach the location the helis need to get to, you find it's also defended by [=SAMs=] and triple-A, so you can't take a breather yet. And you can lose only one helicopter if you want to get a S-rank, with all of them being {{One Hit Point Wonder}}s. Did I mention that if you want to get the ace for this mission, you need to run ahead of the helis to take him down, and almost certainly will lose at least one trying to get back to them?
18*** ''X'' also has "End of Deception II" with the Alect Squadron-piloted Fenrirs, a shitty boss fight if ever there was one. Fortunately, it gets better after they go down.
19** ''VideoGame/AceCombatAssaultHorizon'' seems to ''LOVE'' this trope. From the mission where you need to destroy an ICBM while it's in the air, to the navy mission that requires the usage of attacker aircraft (which have been badly nerfed compared to previous iterations), to the final mission where you take on Akula, it's astounding that the game has actually been beaten on Elite.
20*** And they just get ''worse'' if you go for rank, which requires Ace difficulty for nearly all the missions. You've been relying on regenerating health for the entire game thus far. You don't get it in Ace. Suddenly, the bombers in Dubai are critical threats, the enemy navy is damn near impossible to handle due to the gatling fire, and Hinds are an even ''bigger'' pain in the butt, as if they weren't enough to begin with.
21** All of these levels ''blush'' when compared to ''VideoGame/AceCombatJointAssault''[='=]s ''Grand Flight''. It's a canyon mission where you're flying an airliner, which means you are unarmed and have no means of fighting back against the metric ton of anti-air. If you somehow make it through the canyon, there's also an ambush on the way out. Remember, airliner = no weapons. Oh, and it has the steering of a brick and can't be tuned, either. Good luck.
22** Area 06-D in ''Ace Combat 5''[='=]s arcade mode (Operation Katina). The mission is to destroy 24 air targets (most of them fighters, with one large transport plane that takes a ''lot'' of hits to destroy - thankfully this is optional). Sounds easy enough, right? But you are only given 20 regular missiles and 4 [=XMAAs=] (with longer range). It takes 2 missiles (or 1 XMAA) to destroy a fighter. Usually in arcade mode, there are special targets that you can destroy to replenish your missile supply. In this area, there are none of those targets, so you will eventually run out of missiles before you can destroy every target, which means that you will have to manually aim your machine gun (which has infinite ammo) to shoot down a target. ''All while several other fighters are on your tail, firing missiles at you''. All of which are also highly-skilled and highly maneuverable. On top of that, you start off with a 30-second time limit, which can be extended by killing targets as in every other area in arcade mode, so you need to focus on downing targets as quickly as possible.
23** ''VideoGame/AceCombat7SkiesUnknown'' has '''FOUR''' examples in the base game ''alone'' - A lesser one in the form of "Rescue", which features the same radar minefield gimmick from ''5'' and ''X'', but later opens up into a much more forgiving air-to-ground and later anti-air/escort mission [[spoiler:which fails regardless as Harling's Osprey is shot down, serving as the catalyst to the rest of the game]], to greater examples in "Long Day", "Stonehenge Defensive", and "Fleet Destruction".
24*** "Long Day" is a drawn out air-to-ground assault mission, a series staple, which could already be a turn-off if the person playing already doesn't like that style of gameplay, as it's just a ''slog'' to get through, especially in the early game. "Stonehenge Defensive's" mission objective is simple on paper - defend [[spoiler:[[SuperWeapon Stonehenge]] from the Erusean military, an inverse of ''VideoGame/{{Ace Combat 04|ShatteredSkies}}[='=]s '' twelfth mission, which is about ''destroying'' Stonehenge,]] while Osean engineers get it operational for an attack on one of the Arsenal Birds. Naturally, things do not go according to plan, and you have to slow the Arsenal Bird down by directly attacking it. "Fleet Destruction" is the second of two "Destroy everything" missions in the base game, and like "Long Day", is a slog for new players who probably don't have the more advanced aircraft or special weapons unlocked. Fortunately, the time limit is generous and the points required aren't too high to be completely insurmountable for newbies, and it has good background music, to boot.
25* ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing'':
26** One of the first things you have to do in the first game is introduce yourself to everyone in town. There's no checklist or even a "villagers left" counter, necessitating that you keep track of a bunch of characters you're completely unfamiliar with in a town you're completely unfamiliar with, all of which are randomly generated in any new game. It can be utterly ''maddening'' to find that one last villager you missed, often necessitating that you just talk to everyone again.
27** Collecting all the paintings. Other rare sets can take literally a year or more to complete, but at least you can't forge a bug or fossil. Damn you, Crazy Redd! In ''New Leaf'' you can actually look for the mistakes in the forgeries yourself, making it a little more justifiable, but how many gamers (not to mention the percentage of little kids playing) are masters of art?
28* When you're not struggling with a single tough pathogen in the ''VideoGame/TraumaCenter'' series, there are other operations that are notoriously difficult to overcome in regular gameplay:
29** For ''Under the Knife'' and its remake ''Second Opinion'':
30*** "Awakening" (2-4) has the player operating a patient's large intestine to remove aneurysms. The long process involves magnifying each lesion, shrinking it with a needle, cutting it with the scalpel, extracting it with the forceps, draining the excess blood and finally stitching the vessels together. Eventually, multiple aneurysms start appearing simultaneously, forcing the player to juggle the sedative between them, as it only lasts a short time before the aneurysm swells again. If they're not careful, the aneurysms will burst and cause vitals to plummet. The final wave of four to five aneurysms at once all but prompts the player to use their newly-gained Healing Touch to grant themselves the breathing room to manage everything.
31*** While not unfairly difficult, the last chapter of ''Under the Knife'' is simply uncreative. Having defeated (or, actually, [[spoiler: redeemed through a version of [[WarriorTherapist Combat Therapy]]]]) the BigBad, you have to fight through a BossRush to get to TheManBehindTheMan- the same seven strains of GUILT you've been fighting for half the game, just requiring faster action. A shameless retread which is made more aggravating by losing what forgiveness these missions had previously. ''Second Opinion'' truncates the whole chapter into a one-episode flashback, and replaces it with more variations on GUILT revisits.
32*** "Fallen Heroes" (6-7 of ''Second Opinion'') is a [[SequentialBoss multi-stage GUILT operation]] where you alternate between two doctors. Your first patient has Triti, already an infamously tricky pathogen to treat. The second is a far more straightforward Kyriaki patient. The third is Deftera with a twist — blood regularly pools on the operating field and can obscure and interrupt your treatment attempts. The final is a whole Paraskevi on the patient's heart, and if you let even a single fragment burrow in, it's an instant GameOver.
33** For ''New Blood'':
34*** "Lost in Flames" (2-5), where you're treating a burns victim. The process to treat a burn involves injecting clear skin with culture fluid, cutting the skin loose, placing three pieces of skin onto a burn and securing them with antibiotic gel. However, blood appears frequently and at random spots over the wounds, and will dislodge any unsecured skin. Worse, the burns overlap, making it far too easy to put a piece of skin over the wrong one, which will inevitably be removed once a blood pool forms.
35*** ''Under the Knife 2'' one-ups this with "Hall of Shadows" in its final chapter (chapter 7-5). The burn treatment process is similar with all the accompanying problems. Only this time, you've got three patients... and ''five minutes'' to treat them all.
36*** "Strike Force" (7-2) involves three patients. The first one is infected with Brachion, a PuzzleBoss that eats up a large amount of time. The second operation is a simultaneous Cheir and Soma infection, which is a nasty combination, but can be overcome with the right strategy and a little luck. The final patient is infected with both Soma and Onyx, the latter of which is hidden until it is either spotted with the magnifier or launches a surprise attack while you're treating the former. If you lose, you have to try again from the beginning.
37** For ''Under the Knife 2'':
38*** "Abduction" (5-4) requires extraction of a bullet from the patient's heart, and you have very little room for error — a tight time limit of 1 minute and a max vital cap of 15. As soon as his chest is opened, the patient will undergo cardiac arrest, forcing the player to treat the wounds while the vitals quickly plummet. Once you've treated all the wounds, you have to restart the heart through a heart massage, and the timed prompts to tap the screen can eat up what little time you have left.
39*** "A New Ally" (6-1) has the player treat post-Triti, but with a limited supply of antibiotic gel and no stabilizer, while they have to contend with a mixture of toxicosis and bleeding that's sapping away the patient's vitals.
40*** "Truth Unveiled" (7-3) gives you three brain aneurysm patients to treat, and each patient always has one last wave of multiple aneurysms at the same time. The final patient even throws in pus and tumors into the mix just to make things more complicated. You still only have a single use of Healing Touch to expend among all three, so you're forced to work through at least two barrages of aneurysms without it.
41*** "Hall of Shadows" (7-5) gives you three burn victims to treat but only ''5 minutes to do so''. Each patient also presents with increasingly severe burns and less area for skin culture.
42** For ''Trauma Team'':
43*** Tomoe's mission where you have to locate Cunningham under a huge pile of rubble is difficult due to the multiple branching paths, which, couple with the endoscope finicky controls, can cause the player to become lost.
44*** Hank Freebird's mission "Friends", where the player has to treat spinal ependymoma followed by hemangioblastoma, can also become this as the final hemangioblastoma is soft tissue, which must be pulled off carefully. This alone wouldn't qualify it for this classification if the player wasn't under a quite strict time limit until the hemangioblastoma reattach themselves to the blood vessels supporting them.
45* Any mine in any ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon'' game ever--excluding the ''VideoGame/HarvestMoonAWonderfulLife'' mines, which are just little sites which are extremely easy.
46** ''VideoGame/HarvestMoonDS'' and ''DS Cute'' aren't as bad in the fact that dropping a level doesn't kill most of your stamina. It just gets annoying when you have to drop ONE LEVEL AT A TIME through digging up stairs, like you have to in ''[[VideoGame/HarvestMoonIslandOfHappiness Island of Happiness]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/HarvestMoonSunshineIslands Sunshine Islands]]''. They also just had to have animals trying to kill you, and hundreds upon hundreds of levels. It's especially bad if you want to marry Keria.
47** The ''[[VideoGame/HarvestMoonMagicalMelody Magical Melody]]'' mines aren't that bad.. If you exclude the random times when you go ''up'' instead of down (which happens a lot once you reach a certain point), and the rocks having nasty effects sometimes.
48* ''Blazing Angels'' has Top Secret, where you're flying through a narrow fjord, in a fast (yet thankfully maneuverable) plane, and have to get through the fjord in a limited amount of time. At parts you have other planes shooting at you, and if you hit any of the walls, you're likely dead.
49** Then, in the sequel, ''Secret Missions of WWII'', there are lot of infuriating levels (especially where you have to use a tailgunner), but "Flashlight to a Gunfight" is the most annoying. You have no weapons at all, so you have to use a weapon that blinds enemies and leads to them crashlanding into an iceberg. But the big problem is, you have to practically almost crash into an iceberg for them to even ''think'' about crashing. It basically turns into a LuckBasedMission, and you've got to kill at least 10 enemies with this "weapon". Obligitory mention goes to "Target: Red Square", since it's a defense level that includes an army of enemies, followed by a boss that can easily destroy the Red Square very quickly, and "Rendezvous", where you have to kill 10 enemies while you're under watch, who shoot you if you do anything, followed by an EscortMission with ''tons'' of turrets to take down. [[note]] Taking down the turrets ''before'' you start the escort will make it ''much'' easier for you. At least during the escort, anyways.[[/note]]
50* ''[[VideoGame/MechWarrior2 MechWarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy]]'' has the underwater mission. The water makes everything past spitting distance pretty much invisible, you move incredibly slowly, your usual missile weapons are replaced with a pair of [[PainfullySlowProjectile painfully slow]] torpedoes and you can't even modify your Mech at all as you're given one fit for underwater combat and no other will work. The only good thing is that you're given four [=PPCs=] and being completely immersed in water makes heat management a non-issue, but even that is not a great consolation since among the game engine's [[GameBreakingBug many bugs]] there's one that stops too many projectiles of the same type being on screen, so chain-firing your energy balls results in a lot of misfires. Given that you fight some pretty hard enemies, the handicaps you're forced to live with don't tend to make this mission a fond memory for a lot of players.
51* ''VideoGame/MechWarrior4Mercenaries'' has Talon/Wernke - Night Op. You're meant to pilot a light, fast 'mech, trying to be as stealthy as possible, trying to sneak past several 'mechs that can stomp you in a heartbeat, and there's generally enough enemy 'mechs that it's suicide to take anything heavier. For contrast, there's a ludicrously easy stealth mission elsewhere in the game. Of course, it's quite possible to just load up a badass assault mech and blast your way through the level, but if you're going for the special bonus for not being detected...
52* ''VideoGame/NotForBroadcast'':
53** Day 153: The Tempest. This broadcast starts out tame in the beginning, but in the middle when the Sportsboard event is being broadcasted, nude protestors begin invading between the match which will severely tank your ratings if the camera feeds they occupy are currently selected, even if its for a few seconds. It can be very hard to perfectly avoid the cameras which have protestors in them without either having played this again or having extremely good muscle memory. As if that wasn't enough, in the last segment the storm gets worse which causes your controls to be dangerous and shock you when used. A couple shocks are still fine, but too many in quick succession and you will instantly fail the entire level due to being knocked out cold. Doesn't sound too bad to you? You can have up to 3 or even ''4'' of your controls lethal. God forbid if your censor button gets dangerous, since one of the Advance leaders will swear like a sailor due to his microphone shocking him.
54** Day 296: The Heatwave. During the first half of the level, the valves will constantly overheat, which means you need to take your eyes of the screen and adjust the table fan to cool down the correct valve. However, the valves will constantly keep changing and the table fan will randomly shut down, forcing you to switch it back on ASAP, or else the valve will overheat and the trip switch would've blown, shutting down all your controls. If you're unlucky enough, you may have to deal with the valve as well as the interference while also trying to make the broadcast perfect forcing you to prioritize one thing over the other. [[spoiler: The rest however becomes a BreatherLevel, with no interference or valve overheating occurring, and Jeremy holding the newsroom hostage quickly kicks your viewers joining in to the max even if you did very terribly before. The only hard thing is censoring Jeremy's and sometimes Jenny's and Andy's swears and following the three camera rules. The rest is simply what your moral choices are and who you are supporting.]]
55* ''VideoGame/NotTonight'': The second week of January 2018 has the job shifts at the King's Head, where one simple mistake can ruin your chances of getting an S Rank that you're trying to get (two mistakes can get you a fine, and three mistakes can make you fail the shift). The key word here is "patience" (i.e., not being too hasty), as letting a customer in with a mistake on an ID card (underage, expired [=IDs=], etc.) can throw you off-balance, with the face mismatches (mostly) being the worst offender.
56* The first ''VideoGame/RollerCoasterTycoon'' and its expansions each have one of these:
57** The original has Rainbow Valley, the penultimate scenario. It pales in comparison to many of the expansion scenarios, but at the time, being unable to remove trees or alter the landscape makes it by far the most annoying original scenario, much harder than final level Thunder Rock.
58** Corkscrew Follies raised the bar for scenario difficulty overall, but Fiasco Forest easily takes the cake. Though scenarios where you had to clean up the mess and turn a bad park into a good one was nothing new, the aptly named Fiasco Forest takes it to ridiculous extremes, with a water slide that's about to crash the moment you load the scenario, unfinished path layouts, and for some reason, inexplicably charging for toilets. To top it off, the win condition is to have as much as 900 guests at the end of the first year, and you're not allowed to advertise. Fiasco Forest isn't even among the final scenarios of the expansion.
59*** Even Fiasco Forest is easier than Harmonic Hills, which is pretty much Rainbow Valley turned up a few more notches. You still can't change the landscape at all, but now there is the added difficulty of not being able to build above the height of the trees. Oh, and just to make things ''extra'' fun, this park has the smallest number of starting rides in the game. How many do you get? '''Three'''. ''Three'' measly rides and ''two'' measly shops and stalls, ensuring that you'll have to do a sizable amount of research to get an even half-decent selection. ''[[ThisIsGonnaSuck Good freaking luck]]'' with this one. It doesn't even show up that late in the scenario list (being the 18th of 30), and it's far more difficult and frustrating than pretty well all of the ones following it.
60** Loopy Landscapes introduced several new scenario types to the game, like finishing a set of pre-built, half-finished coasters, or having infinite money but never letting the park rating drop below 700. Micro Park, the very final scenario of the expansion and also the game as a whole, is the only Loopy Landscapes scenario to use the old park value win condition, which means you have to keep your park's value up by building lots of rides and other attractions. This is made harder than usual because Micro Park lives up to its name, being a ''15x15 square of land and nothing more''. Enjoy!
61** Consider the third game, and La La Land. It's not even ''intended'' to be that difficult, falling squarely in the middle of the Vanilla level set. However, due to the way the game handles how Peeps perceive area theming, among other things, it's downright hellish. Consider this: There are two [=VIPs=] you have to impress, both with a themed area they'd really like to see--sci-fi for Clint Bushton, and adventure for Joe Sluggerball. Now, you might ask "How are we supposed to do that?" Well, first, you have to get one or two themed rides (and only themed rides) close to each other, surround them with a fuckload of themed plants, and make sure those [=VIPs=] stay in that area without leaving (which, if you haven't figured out how to [[GuideDangIt make Peeps go to certain rides]], is a crapshoot). It's already aggravating to do it once, but doing it ''twice'' is torturous. All this is ''after'' you've dealt with the awful firework display-making system, which should take you forever to get working, and then another forever to get Clint Bushton to pay any fucking attention to the fireworks even if they're right in front of him. If you think the strong language is unnecessary, then you clearly have never played this map before because it's unbelievably infuriating. It should be noted this is the only map in all three mission sets (vanilla, Soaked!, and Wild!) that requires you to have themed areas or use fireworks displays, and with good reason.
62* ''VideoGame/SimCity'': Despite appearing first in the list of scenarios, Dullsville is the hardest, requiring you to learn concepts of rapid growth on an extremely limited budget.
63* ''VideoGame/TheSims'':
64** ''VideoGame/{{The Sims 2}} DS'' has a mission that requires you to get 5 mechanical skill points. They spawn only once in certain places. Good luck finding them all without a guide.
65** Looking for fireflies in ''The Sims 2 Castaways'' is this to many players. Fireflies are found at random and only appear at night.
66* ''VideoGame/{{Pharaoh}}'' has Thinis, the seventeenth mission. Up until then, things have been slowly building up in difficulty, but then the Old Kingdom crumbles into [[CivilWar civil war]] and you face what is probably the hardest mission of the game: ressources are scarce, spread all over the map, your objectives are upped from the last mission, and you have to defend a small complex in the mountains. Seems pretty easy, except the two fighting dynasties will try to bribe you, and you must choose well. Large Nubians raids happen every few years, as well as huge good requests from pharaoh himself. You must defend from attacks from the north, from the south, and from the river, while also building your city, preserving your rapidly declining reputation (through hard-scripted events), trying to keep your budget positive at least at the end of the year, so that debts don't influence your Kingdom Rating. At some point, Pharaoh asks for military support in a city, and you have to send quite a number of troops to succeed. You're also attacked precisely at the same time, so you must have a large backup force, and a navy is necessary. Finally, if you don't support pharaoh, a trade route closes, which is your only access to a specific resource needed to complete the objective, making the mission unwinable.
67* If you really want a challenge in ''Aces of the Pacific'', volunteer to fly in a US Navy TBD Devastator torpedo plane squadron during the Midway campaign. The TBD is easily the worst airplane in the game: it's very slow, almost totally unmaneuverable, and you have only a single small-caliber machine gun to defend yourself with. Your missions will involve flying into the teeth of the Japanese Navy, hitting one of their ships with a torpedo, and making it back to your carrier without getting shot down by anti-aircraft fire or the swarms of enemy fighters protecting the fleet. Good luck!
68* While ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'' doesn't have levels in the traditional sense, there are areas where building a fortress is much harder (read: more [[HilarityEnsues Fun]]).
69** Aquifers are a common environmental obstacle that turn an otherwise perfect embark site into an undesirable one. The layers of damp soil conceal an infinite reservoir of water, which when dug into [[DisasterDominoes can flood a fortress]]. And to add insult to injury, the pre-aquifer layers are mostly soft soils that give no rocks for masonry. Puncturing the aquifer, draining it, and getting to the rocky layers underneath requires tons of labor and devices.
70** Evil biomes. Any animal that dies while in an evil biome will most likely[[note]]There are non-reanimating evil biomes, but they are rather rare[[/note]] rise up as an undead monstrosity, scaring and killing any nearby dwarves. Even the hair and skins of butchered animals will come back to life in a reanimating biome, meaning having a meat industry of any sort, unless the waste is managed very carefully, is almost suicidal. Evil biomes also come with their own set of animals-- nasty ones like beak dogs and ogres that can quickly rip apart a dwarf. Finally, evil biomes have unique weather. Sometimes it'll be rain made of slime, blood or some other nasty substance. At worst, they can cause some debilitating syndromes like vomiting and dizziness. However, they are a blessing compared to the other form of evil weather-- clouds of scarily-named materials like "hideous gloom" that drift on the wind. These can either [[OneHitKill immediately kill]] any living thing they touch, or transform them into [[ZombieApocalypse ravening monsters called husks/thralls that seek only to kill everything and/or spread the contagion]].
71** Glaciers are a well-known example of a hard location to survive in. They tend to be an extremely thick sheet of ice on top of bare rock, leaving you with the twin concerns of no soil for growing crops (and brewing booze), and no easy source of water. The latter also makes the former worse, as the normal method of making farmland without soil is muddying up rock with water. And finally, there's the obvious risk of freezing to death.
72* ''[[{{VideoGame/IL2Sturmovik}} IL-2 Sturmovik]]: Birds of Prey's'' Hornet's Nest mission. Prior to this, the game ramps up nicely in difficulty. Hornet's Nest tosses you into a night battle seeking out transport planes and preventing them from landing at the airstrip while avoiding the wings of enemy fighters and the A-A guns on the ground. If a '''single''' transport lands, you fail.
73* ''VideoGame/WarThunder'': From 2020, large maps used for enduring confrontation have been added to regular battles with jets. Which is great if you are using supersonic jets that can quickly cover the distance, the problem is that you can get them even if you are using early subsonic jets (even post-war prop planes due to battle rating!), and the travel time becomes really, really slogging and tedious. In certain cases you won't even have enough fuel to reach midmap, such as with rocket propelled aircraft like the Me-163.
74** Ground battles have city maps, which force tanks to close quarter brawlings. Not all players dislike them, but those who do are very vocal.

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