Scrappy Mechanic / Platform Game

• Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz:
  • The control scheme, with which you tilt the Wii Remote to tilt the game world, is a divisive affair, with some feeling it lacks the precision of an analog stick.
  • The design is a big part of the problem. They make it so if you hold the remote "flat" (so it's parallel to the ground), the ground is neutral. Tilt up, the ground tilts up. Tilt down, the ground tilts down. Sounds logical, but tilting downwards at a sufficient angle is extremely uncomfortable and awkward. A moderate upward tilt should have been the neutral point, or better yet, holding it like a NES controller, which Mercury Meltdown Revolution pulls off successfully. The lack of an option to play with traditional joystick controls hurts as well.
• Pixeljunk Eden:
  • Want to explore the beautiful, almost-abstract art levels? You can't. The whole thing is on a strict timer.
  • The drop attack is mapped to the PS3's motion control function, which almost never registers your input properly.
  • For full completion, you must visit each level 5 times.
• Donkey Kong Country:
  • The animal tokens. The idea is that these golden tokens are found in hidden areas and rewarded for completing bonus levels, and collecting three of the same animal allows the player to play a bonus level to rack in some 1-ups. The main problem, however, is that collecting the third token forces the player to play the bonus level immediately, and upon its completion, sends the player back to the last known checkpoint. Not so bad if the token was won in a bonus level, but if the bonus game is activated in an actual level, the player will be sent all the way back to the halfway barrel, or even the very beginning of the level. Notorious offenders include the Winky token next to the bonus barrel at the end of Trick Track Trek (forcing you to play half of the long, tedious level all over again) and the Expresso token in Coral Capers (which due to a programming error spawns you next to a coral wall, which can leave you stuck if you swim any closer to it). Most players, not seeing 5 or 6 extra lives as worth this hassle, actively avoid the tokens and the effect they have on the flow of the game, and notably the rest of the Donkey Kong Country series does away with the tokens altogether.
  • Winky the Frog. The animal is intended to be a cool mount that can move in an interesting way through levels - in practice, he has the misfortune of being too difficult to control. Due to the way the animal was coded, Winky is incredibly twitchy and can miss a platform or landing, sending either of the player characters sailing into a pit (especially in temple levels). Not only that, but it's downright impossible just to "walk" the mount, as the animal performs mini-hops that are jittery, time-consuming, and likely to make you careen over an edge into a pit if you aren't careful. His bonus level is also at odds with the way the character functions (lots of platforms set up around a cave level). Winky was never used proper in a DKC game again - for comparison, Expresso the Ostrich (which was notoriously twitchy and sometimes moved so fast the screen couldn't catch up with him) was reworked and toned down for the GBA version of the sequel.
  • The rocket barrel. Yes, that thing they brought back in Donkey Kong Country Returns, except it's only in one level of the third game and works entirely differently (yet is still as annoying). You control a rocket, with limited fuel. If it runs out, you die. You have to get through a narrow maze-like level with plenty of walls and ceilings to slow down the vehicle, and in the GBA version you can be hurt or killed by the Buzzes. And the controls are poorly coded.
  • Diddy's Kong Quest introduced bonus cannons, which required you to find a cannonball and load them before they would blast you to a bonus level. That the cannonball was often difficult to even find, let alone actually get to the cannon, was bad enough, but you only got one chance at the bonus level: if you failed you had to backtrack, get the cannonball again, and reload it. In some levels the cannonball would even be before a Point of No Return, forcing you to exit the level and try the whole stage again for another try. Notably these cannons vanished completely in Dixie Kong's Double Trouble.
  • There is one in the Game Boy Donkey Kong Land game. You know the four KONG letters, which finding four in one level grant you a meager extra life and can be so hair-pulling difficult to acquire that it's often not worth bothering? Getting all four of those in Land is how you save your game. This means you're required to track them down as much as possible or forced to trek back to an easy level where you can safely gather them over and over again.
• Donkey Kong Country Returns:
  • The Rocketbarrel. In the SNES Donkey Kong Country games, this is the sort of thing that would appear in one, maybe two levels. But, no, they appear at least once in every other world. It's also got very awkward controls: you can't stop, turn around, or even slow down; all you can do is move up with the jump button (or stop pressing the jump button to descend). Also, touching just about anything kills you, as you are rendered a One-Hit-Point Wonder when in it. There exists a vertically-oriented version of the Rocketbarrel levels with much more freedom of mobility. You can freely steer left and right, and accelerate faster with the jump button. However, this variant only exists in two short levels, one of which is just the approach to the Final Boss.
  • The rocket barrels return in the sequel, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, though they're much more bearable there because you can now take two hits (though 6-4 is still a pain). Of course, this game has its own Scrappy Mechanics, most notably the underwater levels. If you're used to the swimming controls (which are nothing like the ones in the SNES games) and can deal with the Oxygen Meter, the levels can be fun, beautiful, and a welcome new addition. If, on the other hand, you hate the oxygen meter and find the controls to be obnoxious, these levels will become a huge exercise in frustration. And just like with the rocket barrel levels in the previous game, there is one world that contains little else but underwater levels.
  • Returns also has rolling, which requires Waggle. Once you have Diddy you can roll forever but to do so you have to shake the controller up and down to keep rolling. This is fairly annoying at best.
• Dash Galaxy In The Alien Asylum is full of these. First, your only weapon is a bomb, which you can only use on the world map because using it in a level causes "oxygen depleted". You also need to find a detonator separate from the bomb in order to use it or... "oxygen depleted". And the control scheme? Most video game characters turn on a dime; not Dash. This means you'll run into enemies, knocking off your HP/time bar or pushing you into a chasm and... "oxygen depleted".
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • Across all the games the Bounce Crates, the ones that you can jump on multiple times for Wumpa Fruit before they break, are disliked by most players. At best they just slow the game down, making you stop dead in your tracks and bounce on them for the fruit inside as spinning them yields nothing, and at worst they will appear as parts of bridges forcing you to meticulously count out how many bounces each one can take in order to bust them all and still get through. It's pretty telling that, if you watch any Let's Play or walkthrough online, the players tend to sacrifice the reward in them by spinning them just because it's not worth wasting the time it takes to bounce on them. Notably Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped addressed this by having the crate yield two Wumpa Fruit per bounce, cutting the number of times you have to jump on them by half and considerably speeding it up.
  • While opinions of her character may vary, Coco's playable appearances in the games tend to act as a weaker (i.e. less fun) variant of Crash. In Warped she is limited to a few vehicle levels (the majority of which Crash himself can utilize in this or previous titles), with her actual on foot 'platforming' segments being limited to a slow walk all of five steps towards Pura and the level's exit. In Wrath Of Cortex, she can play through whole levels; however, she has fewer abilities and attacks compared to Crash, making her respective levels somewhat more tedious. Either way, she sadly isn't giving Tails or Luigi a run for their money. Mind Over Mutant improves her, making her an equally efficient skin of Crash and able to work as a multiplayer cooperative. However to activate her in one player mode, a player must activate a second controller and then pull out Crash after she appears. This is a needlessly tedious way just to unlock a variant of Crash, especially since it will still drain the battery life of the one player controller not even being used. However, the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy finally rectifies this, making Coco playable in almost any level of the original trilogy, as well as having the same skillset as Crash, including fruit bazooka.
  • Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped: Nitro Switches detonate every Nitro Crate in the level, but the splash effect destroying other boxes doesn't count towards your total unless it happens on-screen, meaning you have to destroy every box ever so carefully, including those conveniently sandwiched between Nitros. And some levels in 3 don't even have the Nitro Switch, instead expecting you to destroy every single one manually with your Wumpa Fruit Bazooka or vehicle weapons. Have fun finding out which levels this applies to on your first playthrough.
  • The ice physics in Crash 2 are notoriously twitchy and you will frequently come to a complete stop against a wall and jump, only to be hurled uncontrollably off a cliff or into a Nitro crate by ice momentum that somehow is still in effect. It means half of the challenge in the snow levels ends up being the player trying his damnedest not to slide into the various traps or Nitros the game will throw at you.
  • Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex:
    • Most vehicle levels. Unless the level itself has a health bar, you're still a One-Hit-Point Wonder even if you're in a submarine and you hit a fish. Most of vehicles are also much clumsier to control and react slower to your commands than Crash - the aforementioned submarine and jeep are especially guilty of this. The sole exception to this are minecart sections and atlasphere levels, which are more fast-paced by comparison.
    • For whatever reason, the monkey bar segments are much slower than in third game. This makes them incredibly annoying in normal gameplay, but they are at their worst during the time trials.
• The bubble gum in Giana Sisters DS and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. You get to use bubble gum to make a bubble so big that Giana can fit inside it and use it to fly around the level. But the bubble is very difficult to control, popping it will drop you into whatever hazards may be below and, like the P-Balloon, pretty much guarantees death, and it is mandatory in nearly every level that has it.
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • Basically all the speedway levels. Even those nostalgic with the games often agree the speedway levels were the weakest part of the original games, for being too tedious (due to a time limit) and not as fun as the normal levels.
  • Spyro: Year of the Dragon:
    • The 5 new introduced playable characters in the game are often criticised by reviewers and fan these days for not being as fun as Spyro and for having downright insane minigames to complete. The most notable one is definitely Bentley the Yeti for not only being the slowest and bulkiest character to control but also because of his infamous boxing challenge in the "Frozen Altars" level. Even Sparx is not very well received as his levels mainly involve top-down shooting parts.
    • The game has really in-depth and really picky anti-piracy and anti-modification protection, explained in great detail in an article by one of the developers for those who are interested in such things. The issue is it's notoriously easy to trip these even on a legit copy with a completely unmodified console if the lens in your console is a bit dirty, the disc has a scratch, if there's a gust of wind outside... As this game's anti-piracy measures are subtle but rather cruel (gone into in great depths under Copy Protection, and this website), it's left many innocent gamers frustrated and wondering why they can't finish the game or where their save files have gone. It's even worse on the Greatest Hits edition where the developers fixed the "Terminated Console" bypass... without bothering to fix any of the things that would trigger the anti-piracy measures on legitimate copies. The irony of course is that it's easily possible to bypass the protection with game mods, console mods, and even good old fashioned Gameshark, meaning you are able to get rid of the anti-piracy/modification protection which is triggering on your legitimate unmodified hardware and software by resorting to modifications and piracy. Seems like the developers didn't think this one through.
  • Spyro: A Hero's Tail: Blink's levels, without question. Its bad enough that you have to play them twice in order to get one of the most important collectables (Light Gems) but his levels are filled to the brim with awkward platforming and annoying enemies, plus his levels tend to drag on. Blink is not very good to control as his jumps tend to be floaty making the platforming even more frustrating.
• For Skylanders, the Merchandise-Driven aspect is both this and the Dancing Bear. Because Skylanders are released in waves, not all Skylanders are available at launch, meaning collectors will have to make several return trips across the span of months to the store and keep track on the internet. (The fact that Activision never actually gives specifics on when they'll be released doesn't help things either.) Certain figures also are simply more rare than others, resulting in some figures that the stores never seem to run out of, as well as figures the stores never seem to have, and collectors frequently buy up all the stock and sell them online for inflated prices. (Ninjini in particular was, at one point, so rare retailers reported that for every Ninjini figure they got, they'd have forty other figures.)
• Banjo-Kazooie: The notes. There's 100 in each level, and you need to collect them to open Note Doors to progress through the hub area. However, you don't actually take the notes out of the level- instead, whenever you die or leave the level, the number you had at that time is saved as your Best Note Score and all the notes reset. Meaning, of course, that if you want 100% Completion, you must get all 100 in one go. In the Xbox Live Arcade rerelease, the Best Note Score was done away with and the notes are collected permanently.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures has the Death Blocks. These nasty little One-Hit Kill traps are absolutely everywhere in the game, and getting by them usually requires some tight maneuvering. One of the game's favorite tricks is putting them in a spot where you have to go, then making them intermittently flicker so that you have to make a carefully-timed jump into the death zone before immediately jumping out. There are probably more screens with them than without them, and they are almost always the number-one cause of death in the game. It's at the point where they make the game's difficulty settings almost cosmetic (the difficulty settings alter your maximum health, lives, and continues, but have no effect on the Death Blocks, which kill you in one hit regardless of difficulty and remain everywhere). In the Updated Re Release, AVGN Deluxe I & II, many of the Death Blocks are removed on Easy and Normal difficulties and replaced by less-deadly spike balls.
• Contra:
  • The use of both screens in Contra 4. In a game series where the player character can't take much punishment, the lack of visible space between them (to see incoming enemy bullets) can hinder things a fair bit.
  • The Hit-Rate system in the PlayStation 2 games. While it's pretty useful for reminding you not to make mistakes again, it does frustrate most gamers that it could prevent them from completing the game without any mistakes. Even worse is, you could get a Downer Ending if you do a slight mistake.
• Kirby: Attacks that knock the ability out of you. It's been a mainstay for most games and can lead to a pretty bad cycle of getting hit over and over trying to recover the star, only for it to get knocked back out. Made worse by the fact that there's never actually any indication as to what will or will not, as even basic enemies can do it with contact damage occasionally. How often Kirby loses his ability from attacks varies by game. Later games have many different enemy and boss attacks programmed to always knock out Kirby's ability, and in Kirby's Adventure, Kirby & the Amazing Mirror and Kirby: Squeak Squad, every means of taking damage will make Kirby drop his ability. This can get truly aggravating when going for the fastest possible times in Boss Rush modes as you can't afford to get hit too much or you'll waste time.
• LittleBigPlanet:
  • The Grappling Hook. Dear God, the Grappling Hook. If you try to swing back and forth to gather momentum, you will end up reeling yourself up into whatever you're hooked onto 95% of the time.
  • LBP3 has level loading. To understand, let's compare it to LBP2; in that game, you can select the level and press X to start loading it. While it loads, you can read reviews and comments and look at pictures taken in the level. If at any time, you decide that you don't want to play it, you can back out with Circle and look for something else. But in LBP3, if you press X on a level, it will immediately take you to the white loading screen, and if you accidentally pressed X on a level you didn't want to play, no amount of mashing Circle will stop it, meaning that you HAVE to load the level first, then leave the level when it finishes, and then wait for the loading to finish.
  • More like Scrappy Lack-Of-A-Mechanic, people were really irritated with the removal of Dive In, an option that lets you look for games to join or people to join you. Averted as of 1.12, which added the function back in and improved upon it.
  • The '3-planes' format can be very easy to stumble with, especially when you try and go up stairs or ramps and keep. Jumping. Behind them.
  • And the automatic plane-selector, which Media Molecule admitted was difficult to program, seems to hate Sackboy, even overriding your manual changes at the worst possible moments. Like falling 'behind' a safe platform and onto an insta-kill floor. Or when running along you smack into a wall that only exists on ONE plane. Or moving Sackboy to be squished by something that could easily be sidestepped. Etc. etc. It can get worse with the third game, where you now also have to figure out how many of the sixteen layers Sackboy will slide to! The rule is actually the same as the other games: no more than two layers in front of or behind Sackboy, unless it's via the aid of objects like Layer Launchers or the Hook Hat. But good luck trying to remember that in a tense death trap scenario!
  • The set amount of lives checkpoint mechanic. Basically, every obstacle in the game comes with a checkpoint and four lives, lose them all and the level must be played over. It doesn't sound too bad on paper but can be utterly infuriating in practice. The checkpoints are close enough together, but levels are often long and complicated with the worst parts (naturally) being near the end. This means that players will often find themselves breezing through a level with few (if any) deaths and then have to restart because they get stuck 10 feet from the finish line due to a single hard section. What makes this especially annoying is the fact that aside from fire, Sackboy is a One-Hit-Point Wonder who dies if anything so much as looks at him funny and losing to bosses sends the player back to the start of the whole level. The ultimate result here is players being forced to endure That One Level and That One Boss with a side helping of Checkpoint Starvation. The sequels are much better about this, thankfully.
  • The lack of localized water. Basically, the only way to have water that players can swim through in your level is to flood the entire thing. That's fine if your level is, say, a city that's a certain height above sea level, but if you just want to have, for example, a pool, you'd have to either make sure no other part of your level is as low as the water level, remove all of the water once the player is out of the vicinity of the pool, or go through some complex rigmarole of setting up logic and a material that looks like water to get the "swimming" impression. LBP3 adds the water material, which LOOKED like it was going to avoid this, but that material doesn't actually ACT like water, it just looks like it, meaning that you have to set up a different rigmarole to get localized water. The SpongeBob SquarePants pack finally adds it in, but it's in a DLC pack you have to pay for.
• The Super Mario World Game Mod ASPE Mario has one, in the Phantom of Mirror level. Basically, imagine you've got a seemingly normal horizontal level, except your current view is actually split in half by an invisible mirror, and despite being able to go anywhere on the screen, things on one side of the screen will have an invisible clone on the other side, which acts the exact same way as them. You also don't scroll the screen by walking, but holding the L and R buttons to make the view go left and right respectively. It's a fascinating concept and it's impressive on a technical level, but as raocow found out, an absolute chore to play because it's simply too complicated for its own good.
• The ability to attack each other when playing co-op in Rayman Legends, knocking them forwards or backwards. It can result in hilarity, but can also lead to many an unnecessary death. What is especially unhelpful is the fact that the game is inconsistent as to which levels you can attack each other and which ones you can't. In most Invasion levels, for example, you can't attack each other, but there are some Invasion levels where you can.
• Castlevania: The Adventure: Ever seen a Belmont without subweapons, loses his whip power when hit by anything and climbs up ropes instead of staircases? Look no further.
• In Tomba!, none of the items regenerate. Not just consumable items like lunch boxes or charity wings that you use from your inventory at your leisure, but even the berries strewn about that restore your health. Once you use an item it is gone, which renders even the simplest of health pickups to be Too Awesome to Use. Fortunately, the sequel fixed this up and made most items that are required for a quest or something else spawn indefinitely, while the berries will respawn if you die.
• In Jazz Jackrabbit 1, many jump pads launch Jazz upward much faster than the screen scrolling speed limit, making any attack or evasion in midair purely a matter of luck. Jazz will often, by the time it reappears on the screen, have already suffered a hit from some kind of enemy, spikes, etc.
• In Jersey Devil your character automatically jumps when he comes to a ledge, and not even a full jump but the kind you'd get if you just tapped X as lightly as possible. This makes a lot of the platforming more difficult than it needs to be and forces you to be very deliberate and methodical in your jumps, as if you're not the character has a nasty habit of hopping unexpectedly when trying to line up a jump which can easily catch you by surprise and cost you a life.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Ratchet & Clank (2002) had a very weird and impractical way of handling strafing. To even be able to do it, you needed to acquire Thurster Pack for clank, and then you could only strafe while hovering mode was active. The later games thankfully scrapped this away - Ratchet just strafes on his own when corresponding button is pressed, and it can be combined with lock-on mode if your current weapon has it.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando: starship battles may count due to clunky controls which were at their worst during optional space races against Ace Bunyon, which also involved Pass Through the Rings challenge and you couldn't miss a single one if you wanted Titanium bolt at the end of race.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal: The Hacker segments, the most unholy example of Padding in history of gaming. In previous games hacking segments that opened next door/activated something were either a puzzle (Tresspasser, Infiltrator) or required precisely timed actions for a brief period of time (Electrolyzer). Hacker is essentially a shooter segment where you grab green blobs by a harpoon, shoot red blobs with a gun, and you must prevent red blob from reaching your end. The green blobs are much scarcer than their red counterpart, you may need to grab 10-25 green blobs before given stage of the segment ends, and the segments for doors in last levels usually have 4 stages. This essentially means you can wipe an army guarding the door in a minute with your weapons only to take 5 minutes by unlocking the door itself, needlessly breaking action and killing the pace of the game.
• Jak and Daxter:
  • All races in Jak II: Renegade. All of them are done on hovercars which have different dynamic and control than cars (think WipEout). However, in this game they are especially unforgiving as they have very strict time limits to win them and almost impossible time limits to get 9 precursor orbs. Circuit races have 5 long laps, 7 other racers that will block you, steal speed boosts you need from you and push you into the walls and shortcuts that are hard to pull off in regular manner. City race is done in a city with tight corners, slopes before turns and civilians getting in your way and swaying you from your path while you have to do Pass Through the Rings challenge at the same time.
  • Rail shooter segments on Drill Platform are also infamous due to turret's clunky controls that make it hard to aim, the fact it can overheat with continuous shooting, slowing its fire rate down to a crawl, and an annoying habit of throwing a dozens of enemies at you that crawl out of every possible hole in the level.
• Rascal has a number of flaws, but in most categories it is somewhere between "okay" and "very good", with its graphics and atmosphere in particular being highly praised. However, one single issue turns it from what would likely have been a decent, if forgettable 3D platformer, into what's sometimes regarded as the worst game ever released on the PlayStation: Executive Meddling enforced the use of Tank Controls late in development, despite that control scheme being on the way out during its development, and the entire game having been designed with Super Mario 64-style analog directional controls in mind. This causes many of the levels to be almost unplayable, especially when you have to jump on moving platforms with no way to alter your trajectory in mid-air.
• Earthworm Jim 3D:
  • The boss fights, which all used a minigame called "pork boarding", were a big factor in the game's negative reception. The goal is to ride a pig around an arena, collecting marbles before the boss can. A combination of slippery controls and having to precisely grab 100 tiny objects proved to be a nightmare for many players. Not helping is the barrage of homing rockets that are tricky to dodge, and the fact that you have a health bar to worry about, while the boss doesn't.
  • Granny herding, in which you have to steer 4 old women into a pen like sheep, is vastly more difficult than it sounds. As you move into them, they move away in a radius, making it very hard to keep them together. And if you're away from a granny for just one second, she'll quickly run back to her starting position. Combined with Jim's slow running speed, trying to keep all 4 of them under control is asking way too much. It demands absurd precision in what feels like a desperate attempt to pad out the last stretch of the game; so much so that you have to beat it twice!
• Disney's Aladdin in Nasira's Revenge:
  • The lack of analog stick support. Aladdin can only move in eight different directions, which causes a lot of problems for a 3D platformer. Fortunately, this is averted with the PC port.
  • In order to get the Golden Ending, you'll have to collect a Blue Genie Gem for every possible level, which in turn can only be obtained by collecting three Red Gems in a level and then completing the Bonus Stage after finishing said level. However, if you fail at the bonus stage, you are unable to simply retry immediately. Instead, you have to replay the entire level all over again (and collect the three Red Gems again) to get a second chance.
• Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee has the "mimic other Mudokons" mechanic in the prelude areas to Scrabania and Paramonia areas. It gets grossly overused, to the point these areas could most charitably be described as "Simon Says with occasional boring platforming", it's not interesting or challenging but merely repetitive and time-consuming, and every single one is longer than the last. Worse, is while some of the ones you need to mimic merely force you to try again, others outright kill you for messing up. It's definitely remembered as the lowest point in the game by players and developers. Something similar is done in Exxodus in certain Slig segments, where you have to repeat the sequence of sounds given by locks to open them, but these are much more tolerable as the only penalty for screwing up is having to start over.

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