Some Dexterity Required / Video Games

Several video games had control schemes where Some Dexterity Required was part of their gameplay in one way or another.

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Examples:

Action Games

• Action 52 has four games where, in order to jump, the player has to move and then tap B very lightly (since the player can't move horizontally when holding the jump button). This makes making precision jumps very hard. And in most of the games, you use B rather than A to jump.
• Earlier Armored Core games are plagued by laggy and complicated controls. They were mostly polished down by the Armored Core 3 series. And then frustratingly changed completely for the last few PS2. Interestingly, probably due to the different gameplay, Armored Core 4 onward is much more playable even while using the same, previously frustrating controls.
• Devil May Cry 4. EVERYTHING is a combination of several button taps and leaning the stick in a sequence of directions that makes more sense in a 2D fighting game than in a 3D game where even facing the right target is tough. Two of Nero's attacks require pressing back and forward quickly on the left stick in order to use while locked on, and the tougher one has to be done in the air, to say nothing of the fact that getting the most damage out with Nero requires pressing another button at the right time with every single attack swing. The four fighting styles Dante uses are assigned to four different directions on the famously inaccurate Xbox direction pad, a fifth style requires pressing the same direction twice, two buttons to cycle through 8 different kinds of ranged and melee weaponry, one ranged weapon requires multiple spins of the direction stick to change attack type. Then there's the matter of advanced techniques. Many advanced combos require you to string together attacks, jumps, and style switches in very quick succession... the list goes on and on. Surprisingly, all the complexity is really rewarding when it works. Luckily, those who play the PC version using a keyboard have it much easier.
• The level select code for the NES port of Ikari Warriors is as follows: Up, Down, A, A, B, Left, Right, A, B, Up, A, Down, Right, Right, Left, B, Up, Left, A, Right, B, Left, Right, A, Left, Up, A, Down, A, Right, Left, B, Start at the title screen, before the demo starts. It was erroneously stated in the book, "How to Win at Nintendo (Games)", that the code has to be done while Ralf and Clark are firing.
• MechWarrior:
  • The game traditionally featured bizarre all-over-the-keyboard controls thanks to the huge suite of controls and the expectation that players would be using a joystick and throttle anyways. In Mechwarrior 2, for example, leg controls were on one side of the keyboard, and directional Jump Jet Pack controls were on the complete opposite side. The controls have gradually been consolidated and moved to more reasonable places, but some oddities remain in the newer titles.
  • In Mechwarrior Living Legends, a number of mechs carry so many weapon systems that players have to use both the mouse and keyboard to fire them. These so-called "schizo" mechs are often considered to be much harder to use, because fire rates, ammo, and range brackets become much more complicated. That said, some are very potent, like the various Shiva Space Plane fighters that carry 4 or more discrete weapon types.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid requires you to press both the crouch and fire buttons at once to be able to shoot while moving — according to the developers, this was done deliberately to emphasize how difficult it would be to do so in real life. That being said, its sequels did change the inputs to be far less tedious.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has this so much. Every button on the joypad seems to be pressure-sensitive in some way or another and pressing too hard is the difference between grabbing an enemy and slashing his throat. Not to mention holding down this button for first person, this to pull out the gun, then this one to lean/tiptoe into view, then if you want to force him to surrender his supplies you have to go out of first-person to circle around him, then back into first person to threaten him and then a slow release of the button to then perform a close quarters takedown^note assuming you're not using a tranquilizer gun, at which point just shoot him in the face and be done with it. Not to mention that some enemies need you to hold them up with something bigger than your pistols, meaning pressing the weapon button too hard (which must be held throughout this ritual) will result in you just blasting the enemy in the face, and pressing it too lightly will result in you lowering your weapon, at which point the guy you're trying to hold up will instantly attack you.
  • Because the Playstation line of consoles are the only ones with pressure-sensitive face buttons, ports of the earlier Metal Gear Solid games required some remapping. To put down or raise your weapon without priming it on the Xbox 360, for instance, you must enter first person and click the left stick in. On the Vita and 3DS, which lack that button, you press Down on the D-Pad.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has the same problem as Snake Eater. You're fine if you just hold someone up with a handgun, but the AK or M4? You'd better have a very light touch with the weapon button. Not normally a problem, but during the sequence when you're disguised as an enemy soldier (which requires you to have an AK equipped), you can hold someone up from the front, as opposed to holding them up from behind and coming around to shake them down for their dog tags. Easier, right? But they'll go into alert if you have a handgun equipped, so you have to use the AK or do it the old-fashioned way.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots completely revamped the Close Quarters Combat system, giving the player a myriad of options and abilities to utilize during any given fight. The system is described in the manual with two flow charts, several paragraphs of text, and lots of icons. Most players stick to ranged combat, which works like any other third-person shooter (one shoulder button to aim your gun and another to fire it).
• Steel Battalion comes with a controller that's bigger than most desks and is, basically, a "vertical tank" (mech) simulator.
  • The actual act of piloting a VT is straightforward, though...unless you want to exploit clip dumping. You have to hold down the main weapon button the whole time and then hit Magazine Change to cancel the reload time at the cost of a spare clip. The problem is that the main weapon switch button is toward the bottom-left of the center block, the magazine change button is toward the bottom-right of the same center block, and the right joystick controls weapon aiming and firing. This means that you will likely use your left hand to hold down the main weapon button...which is also the hand you use for the steering lever and the gear shift on the left block, which any VT pilot worth his salt would be working constantly to avoid being a sitting duck. Hope you have three hands!
  • Even without exploiting bugs, the sheer number of buttons can be intimidating and confusing to first-time pilots. Sure, those 13 switches and buttons on the right are there ONLY for powering up the mech, whoop-de-do. How many of us were losing clip after clip because we didn't know "reload" meant loading the next CASE OF CLIPS, not individual one? Then there's the windshield washers, grapple, etc. etc. Easily a dozen buttons that are either cosmetically interesting but functionally useless, or only used in about 3 out of dozens of missions. Even once you figured out that 95% of the time your hands were just going to be on the joysticks, and thus almost avoiding this trope, then you work in the foot pedals...
  • The sequel Heavy Armor, which uses the Kinect controller, has similar problems and takes a lot of getting used to for many. Some reviewers like Angry Joe claimed that it was broken, though other people on sites like Gamefaqs claim that that's not the case. The controls just happen to be EXTREMELY sensitive and require VERY precise movements in order to perform certain functions( I.E. venting smoke from the mech when it takes too many hits) and moving even slightly too much can result in doing certain things by accident which can cause frustration.
• Star Fox Zero unfortunately suffers from this problem. The game relies on the game pad as a sort of cockpit which the player can use to have more precise aiming. This is controlled through the gyroscope. Unfortunately the ship still needs to be piloted with the control sticks and the main screen is essential in navigating safely. This forces a multitasking between two screens and two different control methods, not a thing one can get used to quickly. Although if one does get used to the controls they can use them to masterfully dogfight opponents. This can be mitigated in co-op mode where one player can focus on the cockpit shooting while the other can focus on the navigating on the main screen.
• Cheat codes in Star Soldier on the NES are surprisingly complex. For an example, a powerup cheat is the following: "At the title screen, press Select 10 times on Controller #1. Then, hold Down + Right on Controller #2. Then, hold Up, Left, A, B on Controller #1, finally press Start 2x on Controller #1.".

Action-Adventure Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: While most controls for standard moves/attacks are relatively simple, some of the expertise skills require an amount of combination between both movement and button combos to be utilized against enemies.
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the NES has jumping and weapon selection abilities unique to this version. But the latter requires pressing Select at the same time as the directional key corresponding to the weapon, and holding a directional key along with the B button is also required to jump any way but down, which is often the worst direction to jump.
• Jet Force Gemini includes a highly intricate control scheme that takes a while to get used to. Push the stick to move around, Z to shoot, C-Left and C-Right make you strafe, C-Up and C-Down to cycle weapons, A for jump and B for crouch. Did you get all that? OK, now there's the matter of shooting something flying over your horizontal line of sight, so forget EVERYTHING mentioned for the next 5 seconds. Hold R to enter a precision over-the-shoulder mode, aim and turn around with the stick, move and strafe with all 4 C buttons, and switch weapons with A and B. Yeah that's the perfect control scheme.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The targeting system can be quite the pain in the ass when you're trying to target the boss and not these pesky little things around him.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: In the original GameCube version, projectile weapons like the bow and boomerang were aimed with the left thumb-stick, and you couldn't move while aiming. The HD remaster changed this, however, allowing you to move backwards, forwards, and sideways with the left stick, and aim with the right stick, just like a First-Person Shooter. Thing is, two of the buttons that you can equip weapons to (X and Y), are pressed with right thumb, making it more difficult and cumbersome to aim and then shoot in quick succession (good luck if you have a moving target). Equipping this kind of item to R works just fine, but if you want to equip more than one of them at a time...
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass states that in order to do a roll, you need to draw a circle near the edge of the screen. Most players were rarely able to pull this off, and discovered that merely doing a quick stroke towards you and then back away will do the roll quite well.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks:
    • The game fixed the rolling complaint by assigning it to a double-tap on the screen, and is fairly good at keeping things simple for most of the game, but there are a few boss fights in which you must guide both Link and Zelda with your stylus in order to expose the boss's weak point. These can be...rather hard on the stylus-hand.
    • Also, playing the Spirit Flute can be a real pain in the ass as it plays a note whenever you blow into the mic (which note depends on which tube you moved to the center with the stylus), meaning breath control is a major factor, especially when you have to go to two notes not next to each other without hitting the one in between.
    • Trying to control Zelda and Link when they're particularly close to one another (as in the fight with Malladus and Cole, where they kind of have to be close to shield one and protect the other) is a pain in the neck, all too easy to switch control or attack by mistake if you're too hasty.
  • The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games are far worse, especially Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon. You have to hit rupees to collect them, you need to duck to bring down the inventory screen etc. which cause problems of their own.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: The motion controls get this complaint from quite a few players, especially because many enemies require Link to swing his sword from specific angles to defeat them.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The "apparatus" shrines that utilize motion controls can sometimes give players grief. A few of them aren't so bad, but others can be an exercise in frustration. Some of the apparatus puzzles require you to turn your controller completely upside-down, which doesn't sound that bad... so long as you're playing on a television screen. But if you're playing the game in handheld mode, you'll need to rotate the entire system away from your face, which means that you cannot see the screen while attempting to solve the puzzle. You may find yourself contorting your body trying to solve some of these shrines. Have fun, Switch Lite players.
• Ōkami:
  • The game can be tricky to get to grips with on both the original PS2 version and the Wii remake. Drawing symbols on the screen is a critical part of the game, so by its very nature the process can be rather hit and miss. Especially when your scribbles can be grouped into "circle type things" and "line type things" that the game can get mixed up. This can get frustrating when, for example, you end up making the wind blow (a spiral shape) instead of reviving a tree (a circle), or worse, making the sun rise when reviving a tree, which use the same symbol. The game helps you out as much as it can (all action/battle is suspended when you draw, and the "holy smoke" effect helps you guide some abilities), but players might still end up resorting to the "scribble and pray" technique with the more complicated symbols like Inferno and Thunderbolt.
  • Many players of the original PS2 version found the "swing the remote" method on executing combo attacks on the Wii remake to be awkward, partly because of Damn You, Muscle Memory!, but mainly because the timing of the swing for many combos has to be exact, rather than just hitting a button the required number of times (to clarify — a heartbeat's pause must be left between swings, or the game will interpret your many swings as one). Glaives and Reflectors have had their effectiveness called into question since, no matter how powerful the weapon, the unpredictability of their combo attacks makes them less useful than the Rosary weapons, which are more forgiving and therefore more reliable. One the other hand, if you can work it out then it can feel quite satisfying.
  • Glaives have their usefulness called into question on the Wii version anyway, where they are charged by swinging the remote up to charge and then sideways to attack (without charging, glaives have the slowest swing and lowest damage of all weapons). However, swinging the remote up can be iffy, sometimes releasing charge too early and then sometimes refusing to swing at all. Swinging down to charge, of all things, seems to be a bit easier — beyond that, do clear, broad strokes and pray desperately.
  • This is made at least somewhat better in Ōkamiden. You can draw the symbol, and if you're not sure the game will recognize it, you can press B to erase everything you've drawn. While they do put a time limit on how long you can be on the celestial brush screen, it's very generous even when halved. Also, the "connect two points with a line" techniques now change the color of the ink, so it's a lot more certain when they will register. The final boss, however, is capable of cancelling what you've drawn with its own brush, so "scribble and pray" is the most reliable method of dealing with it, even with simpler brush techniques. Still manages to be the Best Boss Ever, not despite, but because of this.
• Entering the debug mode in the N64 version of Shadows of the Empire requires the entry of a specific name on the entry screen. Then, pause the game and hold down the L, R, Z, all four C buttons, and Left on the N64 control pad. Got all that? Now move the analog stick left until a confirm tone is heard, then right, and repeat until the menu pops up. If you have managed to pull this off without resorting to doing the analog stick moves with your nose or having someone else do it, we salute you.

Beat 'em Ups

• The SNES and Genesis adaptations of Batman Forever. Combine already unresponsive controls with confusing button combos (example: Select+Up in certain situations activates the grappling hook, though sometimes it causes Batman or Robin to jump.) and you have a bad combination. The Angry Video Game Nerd didn't let this go unnoticed. It's even worse in the Game Boy and Game Gear ports of the game, where its controls are even less responsive and button combos were found by button mashing. Good luck trying to do a 100% Completion run in all four of the levels! This is also true in the Genesis version, due to the game using Mortal Kombat-like controls (i.e., fighting game controls) for a platforming/beat-em-up game.
• The famous Hurricane Kick in Double Dragon II, which requires mashing both the A and B buttons twice (technically, you only need to hit one the second time, but the move is hard enough as it is), with absolute perfect timing. This move is invaluable when surrounded by enemies, but if not done just right, it will result in a plain old jump kick, which will knock one Mook down, leaving the others to beat on your ass as you try to get up.

Driving Games

• Bigfoot on the Nintendo Entertainment System had an unorthodox control scheme during the side-view races. To accelerate, the player had to move the directional pad to accelerate and then press A to shift gears.
• The cheat code system in the Nintendo 64 titles of the Rush racing game series tend to have complicated inputs based around quick combinations of holding down and tapping the four C buttons. This is tricky but merely inconvenient in San Francisco Rush, where the most you can do with it is repeat it to change the tire size and body height of your car. Rush 2049, however, involves combinations for every unlock under the sun, some of them fiendishly difficult and which have to be input fast, but not so fast that the game can't recognize it. Unlocking all the car bodies—not the cars and parts, just the bodies—involves hammering out a C-button combo that takes more than 12 presses and more than a few tries to nail down.

Fighting Games

• Capcom Fighting All-Stars:
  • The cancelled crossover game revealed a pretty big one when its moveset was released in 2016: Ingrid's Finishing Move requires the player to draw an hourglass/number 8 shape and then press a button. Appropriately enough, this move is dubbed the "Sun Octopus".
  • Ingrid's move isn't alone, as almost every character's Finishing Move has some kind of unusual input. Some aren't that bad (Ryu's is just a quarter-circle motion, but requires the player to press all four attack buttons at the end), some are that bad (Strider Hiryu's starts like Geese Howard's "Pretzel" mentioned above and ends with a Reverse Dragon Punch), and some are just plain weird (Akira's requires the player to press the Start Button five times, while Original Generation character D.D.'s involves holding the Light Punch button for twenty seconds).
• Guilty Gear:
  • Instant Kills in the original game. Press punch and kick simultaneously to launch the attack. Then the screen flashes red for a brief moment while your character poses. During this time (roughly a quarter second), all of the following things may or may not happen:
    • If you press quarter-circle-forward plus punch, slash, and kick, you successfully launch the instant kill.
    • If your opponent presses quarter-circle-backward plus punch, slash, and kick, they successfully block the instant kill (if it happens).
    • If your opponent presses quarter-circle-forward plus punch, slash, and kick, and finishes it before you do, the instant kill is reversed.
    • The initial launching attack has no warning and cannot be blocked. The game is incredibly snooty about pressing punch, slash, and kick at exactly the same time. And higher-level AI opponents can pull this off with consistency. And, if successful, an instant kill ends the entire match. Needless to say, the "reduce entire matches to a single Quick Time Event" concept was scrapped in subsequent Guilty Gears.
  • Goldlewis Dickinson in -STRIVE- has eight variations of his Behemoth Typhoon special, which all require a half-circle input from a cardinal direction. This means six out of eight variations require moving the stick in the upper half of the stick, meaning you'll need to buffer it from his normals or perform the motion incredibly fast in order to use the grounded versions of them, and the two easiest versions also tend to be the least useful ones. There's also his Overdrive, Down with the System, which deals full damage if you input it with a 1080 motion (that is, three full rotations).
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The SNES and Sega Genesis ports of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 introduced a finishing move known as a Brutality (which would carry over to Mortal Kombat Trilogy). To pull one off, you have to memorize a long string of well-timed attacks (all starting with High Punch) and if you're successful, the combo will continue on its own and end in an exploding uppercut. And each character has a unique attack sequence.
  • How do you do Jax's multi-hit throw in Mortal Kombat 4? Throw, then (hold) RN+BL+HK > HP+LP+LK > HP+BL+LK > HP+LP+HK+LK, of course.
• SNK is the mother and father of all impossible Fighting Game motions.
  • Back in the days of Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters '94, characters always had impossible controller motions for their Super Moves — the crowned king of which is Geese Howard's Raging Storm, executed as follows: Down-Back, Half-Circle Back, Down-Forward + Punch. In addition, super moves are activated by hitting two attack buttons, which is reasonable in an arcade but ludicrous at home. As of later KOF installments, SNK has gotten much better at this (by KOF '96, most characters have less insane motions for their attacks), but it lapses sometimes — try using Duck King in KOF XI. And until KOF XIV, Geese Howard's Raging Storm had never changed its motion, primarily due to nostalgia.
  • Adding to this is the modern method of performing his Deadly Rave DM. Especially when it can only be used once per round in SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos. The input needed to pull off the move in that game is the following: Roll the stick from forward to downward to back, bring it forward and hit buttons B, C, and D at the same time, wait for Geese to start performing the move, then timing each of the following button presses just as Geese does each attack in the sequence: A, A, B, B, C, C, D, D, and then roll the stick from down to backward and hit C and D at the same time to get a big blast of energy. And no, you can't just mash the "A, A, B, B..." part, because performing it too slowly or too quickly will ruin the move. Oh, and if you screw up at any point after the first B + C + D attack (assuming you don't get attacked or fail to pull off the move in the first place), the move does extremely little damage. Even if you only fail the "QCB + C + D" part at the end. And in the case of SVC Chaos, if you begin executing this move and fail it, even if it's because your opponent attacked you and ended the move prematurely, you don't get to use it for the rest of the round. At least other King of Fighters and Fatal Fury games are nice enough to let you use the move infinitely while a certain meter lasts, or at least grant you the ability to refill said meter. Some even have an easier variation of the move. It's still hard even without requiring a QCB + simultaneous button press at the end, though. If there's anything worthwhile about the move, however, it's that it does extremely high damage if pulled off correctly. Then again, a good number of other characters have moves of roughly equivalent power while not requiring such insane input. Or at least a better damage-to-move-difficulty ratio. This wasn't a problem in its first appearance in Art of Fighting 2 or KOF '98 Ultimate Match, where it's an automatic Ranbu-type DM.
  • Not as ludicrous as the Deadly Rave, but more complex than the Raging Storm, is Lawrence Blood's super move: Down-Forward, Half-Circle Forward, Down-Back, Forward + Buttons. He's not as well known as Geese so his super usually gets overlooked in these discussions.
  • In some games, Athena Asamiya has a super similar to Deadly Rave that requires you to first connect, then press specific buttons in proper sequence and timing until the very last hit. Screw up your button presses at any point, and Athena will fall on her butt, ending her super prematurely and opening her to a counterattack.
  • Samurai Shodown 2 has its share of difficult motions, most of them being for the "Super Deformed Transformation" and certain secret special moves that only a few characters have. Of all those motions, Haohmaru's Ten'ha Fuujin Zan deserves special mention, being: Down-forward, half-circle forward, back, down, down-back plus medium slash and weak kick buttons together.
  • Parodied in a FoxTrot strip. Jason, upon starting to play a new fighting game he just bought, discovers that there is a complex button series needed to throw a basic punch. ... And a fold-out chart showing you how to kick. At this point his brother Peter remarks that the game is actually making real fighting look attractive.
  • It seemed SNK did learn their lesson in Garou: Mark of the Wolves, where the majority of Desperation Moves are performed with two quarter-circles forward and both punch/kick buttons. Later games just won't let go of the more complicated commands because of the players who actually learned to pull them off, or who simply remember the inputs and don't want to bother relearning them from scratch.
  • In Buriki One, all the commands were changed upside down: the buttons are for movement (forward and back) and the joystick is for attack and defense moves. Also, pressing both direction buttons make you block/guard.
• The Soul Series games have plenty of this. Especially when you're playing as Ivy. Rage as the computer uses Summon Suffering on you multiple times in a match, when doing it with human controls takes several hours of practice and generally needs to be worked into a combo to keep opponents from just running away from it. For the icing on the cake, the button combo for Summon Suffering is always a completely different but just as complicated input in every game.
• Street Fighter and other fighting games have an issue with grappler characters. Namely, the biggest problem is what's called a "720" motion. Basically, you have to perform two full circles of the joystick in about a second to pull off the move, faster to do it without jumping. Zangief is the main culprit here, but the reason no one complains about it with Zangief is because it's completely worth the difficulty to finish off a full health opponent in three or four moves, and if you're playing on the defensive, the fact that less than master players telegraph their strategies by hopping around all the time puts them at a tactical disadvantage. Of course, in games that are picky about the diagonals, if you don't have a + arcade stick and are stuck with the keyboard (especially without macros), you will cry trying to pull a move like this off. Some games are pickier than others, BlazBlue being to the point where simply pulling off a half-circle forward is near-impossible without a macro.
• On the 3DS port of Street Fighter IV, the three kick buttons are A, B and R (in increasing strength), and the three punch buttons are X, Y and L (also in increasing strength). Unfortunately, because the L button is right on the other side of the handheld to most of the other buttons some finger contortion is required at first to be able to press all three punches for Gen's Stance System and at least half the Ultra Combos. Even then, because the ABXY buttons are so close to each other it can be hard to tell if you're pressing them all together reliably. The game also gives you the option to play with the 3DS' D-pad as well as its analogue stick... but if you're going to play that way then you'll need these skills to the max to keep up.
  • The In Name Only Street Fighter 2010 has difficult controls to master. For instance, you push down + B to shoot diagonally up.
  • Darkstalkers is notorious for its bizarre motion and button input commands for some of the characters' EX moves. For example, Morrigan/Lilith's Darkness/Luminous Illusion input command is the same as Akuma's Shun Goku Satsu though the former predates the latter's. Anakaris is a repeat offender with his Pharaoh Magic and its variants' input commands.
  • Playing fighting games meant for arcade sticks using normal system controllers can often lead to bizarre hand positions on the controller. For instance, most current-generation systems have four main buttons on the right in roughly a diamond shape. One of the finishing moves in BlazBlue involves holding down three of these buttons and tapping the fourth. This requires you rest your controller on a flat surface, then use three of your right hand's fingers to hold down those three buttons and your left hand (or a fourth right finger) to mash the fourth one.
• Super Dragon Ball Z (a Street Fighter-style DBZ game released for the PS2), has a rare example of a motion that might even trump SNK's infamous Pretzel (see above): Piccolo's super move requires the player to trace a star using the controller: Down-Back to Forward to Backward to Down-Forward to Up, then hitting the attack button.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • The regular controls are notably an aversion, being much simpler than most fighting games (pretty much everything comes down to at most a direction and one of two buttons), but played straight in the more advanced techniques (like waveshining and doubleshining). This was an intentional design choice by the creator of the series, after an incident in which he completely dominated a casual player in a traditional fighting game. This inspired him to make a fighting game with simpler controls that a casual player could more easily grasp, instead of hard to pull off combos that require a lot of memorization and practice. While a casual player is naturally still at a major disadvantage against a pro, the barrier to entry is significantly reduced.
  • The "Quit match" command throughout the series requires holding down four separate buttons on all ends of the controller simultaneously, with the exact combination depending upon the controller model. In Brawl when you're using the Wii Remote + Nunchuck controls - pause and hit Z, B, 1, and plus at the same time. This generally requires either the participation of your pinkie and ring finger or the use of the Nunchuck hand to push buttons on the Wii Remote, and it's rather uncomfortable to accomplish. It was likely designed this way to make it practically impossible to quit a match by accident.
  • Downplayed with Ryu and Ken. Their special moves can be performed using combos like a traditional fighter, but these are limited to relatively simple combos, and they can still be used with the B button like all other specials. The specials do gain increased power if the combo is used however, and even if you don't wish to use them, you must be careful lest you accidentally activate them at a bad time. Terry follows the same principle, but is a little more advanced: he has a charge input, a back special (try not to Crack Shoot away from the stage), and his Desperation Attacks require command inputs.
  • And then there's Kazuya. He has a staggering number of normal moves, and unlike the above examples, some of them require command inputs. He not only has a back tilt, he's got diagonal tilt moves and a double-tap forward tilt move, and some of them have additional button presses to follow-up. He has four different moves that require him to stay crouching (which is not the same as a down tilt), including one that requires you to input it while he's rising from a crouch. He has two command input only moves: Gate of Hell requires pressing down-right, down, down-right, grab, and Crouch Dash requires a Shoryuken motion, and has four different follow-up moves, which includes Electric Wind God Fist. You have to know his inputs while also being aware of his range and sweet spots, just like a Tekken character.
  • The above characters from more traditional fighting games are made more difficult to enter their inputs because Smash Bros. only allows movement with the analog stick, leaving the d-pad as a Taunt Button. The problem with this is that the games in question are made with 8-way directional inputs in mind, so it’s easier to make misinputs when using analog controls.
• Tekken:
  • 10-hit combos. Timing is essential to pull off these combos, often having to press the button for the next attack before the current one is finished. And many of the characters have combos that involve pressing LP + RK or RP + LK (that's Square + Circle and Triangle + X on a PlayStation controller). This can be made easier, however, by programming the shoulder buttons to correspond to the aforementioned button combinations. And if you manage to pull one off, chances are some of the blows can be blocked or ducked mid-string anyway, making them pretty much useless outside casual play.
  • Tekken has many notable moves or techniques that require very tight timing windows and/or input precision, but are well worth the effort of mastering them. The trademark Electric Wind God Fist of the Mishima family is essentially the flagship example of "Just Frames" in fighting games, being a very fast move that gives you a lot of advantage on block, and launches the enemy for a full combo on hit.
• It's a commonly held opinion that Vatista in Under Night In-Birth is one of the hardest characters to use in a fighting game, for this reason. Vatista is a "charge character"; while most of these characters have a few bread-and-butter moves as Charged Attacks, in Vatista's case, this kind of attack makes up her entire moveset. Not only that, but many of them have reverse inputs of the usual commands and many of her best combos (which are some of the longest and most damaging of any character in the game) require you to chain these into each other with very specific timing. Because you often have to hold down a button while hammering other buttons to combo and charge other moves, it is also a common belief that it just isn't humanly possible to play on a standard console gamepad — you need to splash out on an arcade fight stick. Put this way: You never see complaints of Vatista being a Scrappy in the player community because it is so accepted that even a tournament-level player could not use her without making a ton of mistakes in mechanical execution alone. Thankfully (or not, depending on your opinion), BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle ditches her charge commands in favour of more simple quarter circle movements, albeit at the cost of her losing some of her more damaging options.

First-Person Shooter

• Goldeneye 1997 has a code to unlock a bunch of additional characters to use in multiplayer, which requires you to hold L and the D-pad with your left hand, R and some buttons with your right hands, then enter a series of directions on the joystick with your... third hand? Face? And this doesn't save, so you have to re-enter it each time you play.
• Attempting to Rocket Jump can sometimes feel like this. Some games will make it relatively simple understand; the fluid strafe controls of later Quake games or the purpose-made explosive jumping classes of Team Fortress 2 are fairly easy to grasp. It's when you start introducing it for classes that don't provide their own explosive that things get tricky, such as the airblast Pyros of Team Fortress 2. To rocket jump as a Pyro, an enemy Soldier or Demoman (or more rarely, an enemy Sentry Gun) must fire an explosive towards the ground at you. You must, in exact order:
  • Evade the rocket so it doesn't kill you outright.
  • Turn in the opposite direction of the direction you wish to propel yourself.
  • Airblast the rocket into the ground or wall behind you.
  • Jump.
  • Crouch.
  • Turn back in the direction you wish to travel before the rocket explodes.
  • Use the left and right keys (not the forward and back keys) to steer yourself and gain or lose distance in the air.
    
    All told, this is a sequence of between 8-10 keypresses, mouse movements, and clicks that must all be accomplished in under a second to send you where you wish to go, with no assistance in terms of damage reduction or enemy action. Pyros that can pull this off regularly and accurately are to be feared.
• The OICW in Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix has an infamously complicated operation, likely in an attempt to mirror the real OICW's unfriendly ergonomics. To use the weapon's grenade launcher, rather than simply push the secondary fire key as with every other FPS that features a grenade launcher attachment, the player must go in scope view, which brings up a menu with 5 options: the player then has to highlight the "lase" option, select either the "Range +" or "Range -" option to put the laser designator in range of the target and then climb back to the "Weapon" option to switch from the standard 5.56 ammo to grenades and then push the primary fire key (while still in scope view) to launch the grenades. Due to the complexity of the controls, most players just don't bother using the grenades.

Other/Unsorted

• Alone in the Dark (2008) allows for players to switch between first and third person, use a variety of improvised weapons, set items on fire to permanently kill enemies, and mix items together in the inventory to make things like fire bullets, an improvised flamethrower, or a bomb that you shoot out of the air. Problem is, the inventory tends to be extremely finicky (requiring you to use a thumbstick to scroll through Carnby's jacket pouches and stop the stick precisely at the right spot to get what you want), and virtually every button had a specific use that may or may not change depending on what you're doing at the time; even putting away your flashlight and gun can be a pain for newcomers. Melee combat tried to be flexible by allowing for several different swings and precise movements of held objects for pushing items or holding them against a flame, but Carnby moves like a tank and doesn't swing much faster than he turns. And the inventory screen doesn't pause the game, meaning that rapidly building a bomb or fire bullets that will actually kill an enemy or grabbing a healing spray or bandages to avoid death involves fighting the imprecise and complex interface while you try and avoid getting smacked in the face.
• Trauma Center:
  • Trauma Center in all its incarnations takes a bit of getting used to, especially if you're aiming for a high score. Stitching a wound neatly but slowly will generally get you fewer points than drawing a quick, random zigzag that would leave a heck of a scar if any doctor did it in real life. It also occasionally suffers from the "not enough room on the screen" variant, where the item you could have sworn you placed directly on the tray somehow misses it, or you injure a patient while trying to fill a syringe from the bottle that appears on the screen, damaging your score.
  • The Wii versions of the title allow you to use the nunchuk to switch between tools, rather than having to stop and select them on the menu as you do on the DS. This normally makes things move along a little more quickly — provided you manage to hit the tool you were aiming for, and not the one slightly to the left or right of it.
  • A popular method to speed up times on the DS versions is to use two styluses. Doubt the level of dexterity required? Try making precise movements with undersized pens on a 3 inch screen, against the clock.
  • The first DS game has an egregious example in the magnification tool, which requires the player to draw a circle around the area they want to magnify. Having this go wrong even a few times during the first operation in which it crops up means a game over, never mind frustratedly scribbling what you think is a perfect circle maybe eight or nine times before the game zooms in on the wrong area. The real trick to that is to draw a quick backwards "c"... but, of course, that's not really a circle and the game gives no indication that this is the correct way to do it. This is the result of the designers violating the Stock Control Settings on a programming level: most games register any closed, reasonably round shape as a circle and ignore the "tails" where the line crosses over. Trauma Center expects a near-complete circle with no crossing, so a circle with a small gap works, but closing it will make an unrecognized shape unless your tails perfectly overlap the line.
• Darwinia can use gestures for spawning units and selecting weapons. It has a rather odd habit of mistaking "Rocket Launcher" for "Armor". Which could prove rather problematic... later versions switched to a menu-based control scheme by default.
• Black & White:
  • The game can fall victim to this trope, as spell casting is done by drawing runes on the screen with the mouse.
  • As is throwing rocks or villagers or trees. It's not difficult to accidentally throw a villager a few hundred feet instead of just setting them down.
  • Black & White II manages to be worse, largely by adding a second layer of complexity when building or maintaining towns.
• Players of Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble can run into problems when the game demands you use both touch screen and buttons within a short time frame.
• Many first-person games focused on melee weapons. Zeno Clash manages to pull it off to a degree. Sort of.
• Red Steel for the Wii has poorly polished controls, controller latency, and no clear way to distinguish where your own hitboxes are.
• Every PS2 Gundam game with the possible exception of the Gundam Vs Series, which uses a four-button control scheme but takes advantage of the PS2 controller to assign buttons to the simultaneous-press commands (for example the Sub-Weapon command, which is Shoot and Melee combined, is mapped to R1 by default).
• This is hardly a major flaw for the Ace Attorney games, since use of the microphone is purely optional, but it's not unusual to hear someone screaming "Objection" into the DS in an accent/voice that is nothing like the one they normally use. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get a pitch that Mr. Wright will recognize.
• On a similar note, there's the Stroop test in Brain Age (or, for the Europeans out there, Brain Training), for which voice input is not optional — and which seems to have difficulty understanding many people's pronunciation of "blue", as this comic demonstrates. It was a large enough problem that the Stroop test was removed from the sequel.
• Die by the Sword has an amazingly simple control scheme that allows one to perform complex sword movements using your mouse. Except... most people who have played it couldn't get the hang of the mechanics of it and either rely on the "constantly swipe left and right" attack, or use one of the preloaded macro commands.
• Phantom Crash and sequel SLAI both require using as many buttons as possible to control your mech. Thumbsticks control look and movement, shoulder buttons control one of each of the 4 weapons (which is nice as you can actually fire all of them at the same time), and each of the face buttons (the Xbox ABYX or PS2 symbols) are each used, often in the middle of battle: jump, dodge left/right, toggle optical camo (Predator camo). The end result is "The Claw", where your right hand index finger curls up and over the face buttons so you can hit them, use your thumb on the thumbstick, and leave your middle and ring finger for the shoulder buttons — at the same time.
• Doodle Hex, despite being a "casual" game, should not be attempted by anyone with high blood pressure. It suffers from "Ōkami Syndrome", regularly mistaking one rune for another (generally the most useless one it can get away with), and the fact that your opponents never mess up, and somehow seem to be able to repower much more quickly than you can means that you have to be fast. Which means either you have on-the-money dexterity (and even that is no guarantee) or you spend a lot of time swearing at your DS.
• Arx Fatalis has a similar problem, but it's more likely to reject a rune than substitute the closest thing available. One gets the feeling it was designed for a joystick that can only draw at 45 and 90 degree angles, rather than a computer mouse that can do 46, 44, and so on.
• Fahrenheit: Many Quick Time Events require you to press both control sticks in different directions, or a lot of consistent Button Mashing for long stretches of time in order to survive various challenges. It's easy to lose coordination during the control prompts and wear out your trigger fingers while mashing. Prepare to hear "And that's the end of my story" A LOT.
• While it's technically not dexterity so much as timing, the shield in Ferazel's Wand can be extremely irritating. In order to block you must duck, then press the arrow key opposite the direction you're facing. Ducking takes about a second, and if you press the opposing arrow while you're in the process of ducking you will turn around as you duck. Attempting to turn around after having finished ducking will simply make you shield in the opposite direction from the one you intended to, so unless you waited to finish ducking and risked that throwing knife reaching you, you must stand up again, turn towards the knife again, and attempt to duck again, almost guaranteeing it will reach you before you can block it. Good thing you can usually jump out of the way.
• Gun Z The Duel has programming gaps that allow players to do move cancels unintended by the developers, introducing a whole new complex metagame, with the simpler moves like "slashshot" requiring 6 keypresses in less than a second^note jump, dash, slash, switch to gun, shoot, switch back to sword, and land.. Then you've got moves with about 20 keypresses in them, most of which need to be precisely timed, a d-style move that require you to dash and lunge^note extended lunge, tap one of the basic movement keys (cursor keys and wasd usually) then tap the same key along with your lunge key.at the exact same time, and some others that need to be timed precisely against the lag between you and your opponent. Even just getting a hit in when your opponent is doing this qualifies as you'll be shooting at someone who's bouncing all over the place changing directions and blocking half the time. Most inexperienced players just spam their guns hoping to get at least some hits in. Needless to say, this rarely works.
• Silent Scope often requires Improbable Aiming Skills, for example, levels on a moving vehicle. However, on cabinets where the gun is poorly-maintained, the gun may jerk unnecessarily, resulting in less precise aiming.
• Cursed Mountain for the Wii requires you to perform Mudras by waving the Wii Remote, otherwise the angry ghosts will regenerate health instead of being banished. In theory, these are simple slashes performed in sequence, but while diagonals are easy, horizontal and especially vertical require you to have nearly architectural precision, in the middle of frantic combat. However, it is generally accepted that holding the Wii Remote like the pickaxe (upside up) while doing the rituals improves the detection a lot. This was fixed in the PC version by having you simply move the mouse to draw the symbol, a la Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin - and in practice, you only need to touch specific points on the symbol for it to activate.
• Done deliberately in Heavy Rain, where things that are tricky to do in real life require you to hold a bunch of buttons at the same time.
  • Perhaps the worst comes when Norman Jayden suffers another Triptocaine attack while shaking down Mad Jack. Hold down 7-button-combination to not die. This sequence is extremely difficult, because the game asks you to push and hold the buttons in a non-standard sequence (R1, X, L2, Triangle, R2, Square, etc), which means that by the time you reach the seventh button, you're probably out of fingers unless you knew in advance what buttons to push. However, the sequence is entirely justified, as Jayden is trying to give himself a drug injection, while holding a gun on a dangerous criminal with hands that are shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. It would be more surprising if he succeeded (failure does not result in death).
  • Also the second half of the Butterfly trial. Hold down every button on the controller and mash X to not die.
• QWOP is a deliberate example where, in order to move forward, you have to press 4 buttons at appropriate times.
• Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is another example; similar to QWOP (and made by the same person), the player is nothing more than a torso sticking out of a cauldron. They can only move by swinging around a hammer with the mouse, a deliberately awkward control scheme which can easily send you plummetting back down the mountain of trash you're supposed to climb.
• Sin and Punishment's control scheme definitely takes some getting used to, both for the N64 and Gamecube controls. The left control stick/D-pad is actually used to aim, while pushing buttons on the right side makes you strafe back and forth, and the shoulder buttons make you fire and jump. On top of the wacky control scheme, the game makes you pull off some crazy acrobatics in some parts that would be difficult even with a normal control scheme. Fortunately, the sequel switched over to the Wii Remote and nunchuck setup, making the controls much, MUCH more intuitive.
• Shopping in Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars. You can obtain a courier that allows you to buy items on the field, but requires a fair amount of micro especially if you want to buy items at shops that aren't in your base. You couldn't simply tell your chicken to go get item X at shop Y and deliver it to you. Of course, couriers cost gold, so teams were expected to share one courier for the sake of gold efficiency, which makes commanding it that much harder. Some players claimed this is necessary for the game to maintain its already high skill cap for its high profile competitive game pedigree. Dota 2 eventually added specific commands for the courier to deliver items to you and go back or wait at the secret shop and gave each player their own courier at the start of the game to remove the sharing problem. It's even easier in Heroes of Newerth where couriers are always invincible and the secret shop merged with the base shop.
• The controls of the Wii version of Tony Hawk's Proving Ground are rather unintuitive and require uncommonly precise timing.
• This is pretty much the point of Octodad—simple household tasks become a lot more difficult when you're trying to do them with an octopus's tentacles. Notably, the first game's difficult final challenge is climbing an ordinary stepladder.
• Why the Rollerball-in-a-satellite-dish game Pararena didn't catch on: getting anywhere meant mastering diagonal mouse movement while controlling an onscreen sprite that moved like a swinging pendulum. According to the author, fan mail about Glider always seemed to include the aside, "Oh, and I tried Pararena too, but I couldn't score a goal so I trashed it." (Along with the occasional "Pararena was the best game ever written.")
• The arcade version of the first Virtual-ON, with its complex dual joystick controls. The gamepad controls are this to players used to the (digital) twin stick controls, as a bunch of functions that were easy to do and came second nature once you understood and knew the inputs for them (Turning, strafing, jumping and crouching) are now all assigned to separate buttons all over the controller. Later ports of the games amend this by giving you the option to emulate the twin stick controls with the gamepad's analog sticks, but if you want the original experience you better either have good craftsmanship and wiring skills or tons of cash to shell out to import an official twin stick controller from Japan or hire someone to build an unofficial one for you. And then A Certain Magical Virtual-ON had to go and make the controls 100% gamepad-only with no twin stick emulation option...
• Wails For Freedom: The majority of the game's Fake Difficulty comes from the wheelchair being intentionally rough to control. It has problems accelerating, slippery movement, unreliable breaking, and it also turns rather slowly. Many deaths can be attributed to difficulty with navigation as opposed to poor reaction time or getting cornered, and it's common for players to spend their first few attempts merely learning how to move properly.
• Cyborg Justice has a decidedly complicated and unorthodox control scheme due to the game trying to emulate the Fighting Game sensibilities in a Beat 'em Up. For example, jumping requires pressing Up+C and kicking while crouched is done by holding C, moving the D-pad down left/right and pressing A.
• The PSX version of Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. has one of the strangest and most uncomfortable control schemes in any FPS ever. For example, moving backward and foward is done by pressing R1 and R2 (whereas almost every other Playstation FPS more logically uses the shoulder buttons for strafing) and the strafe buttons are mapped to square and circle, making using any other functions while moving diagonally uncomfortable. It's slightly better with the analog controls, but even then, it inverts the "left stick moves, right aims" convention used in other dual stick FPSs.
• Weaponlord is an extreme example, with many unconventional methods for certain moves, many attacks requiring that the player hold a button and then perform a motion, and the general pickiness of the Super NES/Genesis control pads on understanding diagonals.
• The Virtual World BattleTech pods set to veteran mode, ie., every function in the cockpit is activated and will eventually need to be used, especially in emergencies. While screen and control layouts vary somewhat, this◊ is considered an average pod layout. Good luck keeping your hands on the throttle and joystick in the middle of a pitched fight when your systems are going haywire and need to be fixed.
• Stellavanity on Type-S requires six buttons at minimum: Shot/Laser, Slow, Bomb, Delayed Shift / Ethereal Shift, Assault, and Blade. Shot and Laser can be split off to separate buttons, as do DS and ES, allowing you to use up to EIGHT buttons to play the game. Even Capcom fighting games use six buttons at most, to put it in perspective.
• Some of the special move inputs in Aquapazza are pretty ridiculous in terms of charging and direction, particularly Touka's Splash Art.
• The major selling point of the game Receiver was the complexity of the controls involved with manipulating your firearm. For example, to reload the magazine of either of the two semiautomatic pistols, rather than simply pressing "R", you tap E (ejecting the magazine), ~ (holstering the gun, to free your other hand), Z repeatedly (once for each loose bullet being inserted), ~ again (to draw the gun), and Z (to insert the magazine) ... and, if the slide is locked open because you fired the last bullet, T to release the slide and chamber a bullet.
• Operation Flashpoint and its successor ARMA have controls for just about anything you can think of that could be used for a military sim. While many common actions are done via the middle mouse button menus, you can do things like whip out your compass and map, bail out of a car, and adjust the zero or optics to your gun.
• Onward was made with the HTC Vive (and, later, Oculus Rift + Touch controllers) in mind, and just about all of your equipment is physically stored on your character's body. The player needs to know where their various items are stored in front of them in time of need (knife, handgun, spare magazines and a syringe for stabilizing yourself or reviving teammates, to name a few), not to mention that some of the items have unusual controls, such as the syringe requiring a press on the top of the trackpad/stick to use or the knife requiring the trigger to be held to actually do damage. You may not even be able to reach those items if you've gone prone!
  • Then you have to take into account that, like any other VR game, shooting your target requires actual physical dexterity with controllers sensitive enough to pick up shaky hand movements. Players have built stocks to mount their controllers on just to mitigate this and steady their aim physically!
  • And in addition to all of that, reloading has to be done by hand - releasing the magazine (which sometimes requires pulling it out with the other hand), grabbing a new one off your body and pushing it in, and then pulling the charging handle if necessary. It's a lot like Receiver with motion controls.
• The entire Crazy Climber series is built around this, with two joysticks (or reasonable substitutes) used to move the character's left and right arms and legs as they not only have to climb up a building/cliff/some kind of vertical surface, but also quickly dodge to the left and right to avoid enemies and falling obstacles. It can take a bit of time just to learn how to climb, let alone pull off all the evasive maneuvers the game expects you to.
• Although very well avoided in the actual game, in order to delete a save in Nintendogs, you have to press every single button on the DS. At the same time. For about a second. Helps if you have a partner.
• Derek Smart's series of space simulators (Battlecruiser 3000AD, Universal Combat, et cetera) are somewhat infamous for their bizarre control schemes which have changed little since the first release of Battlecruiser 3000AD in 1996. For example, in Universal Combat, the only way to quit is to hold CTRL-SHIFT-Q or press Alt-F4.
• Games where fiddly controls and the hilarious results of inevitably being bad at them are the main selling point are popular among indie developers. Surgeon Simulator 2013 has you playing the world's clumsiest surgeon, presumably with the world's most forgiving boss. I Am Bread, by the same developer, has you trying to control an inexplicably animated slice of bread attempting to toast itself by any means necessary, evading obstacles that would make it less edible, aided by the ability to magically stick to any object by one or more of its corners, for limited lengths of time.
• Mount Your Friends, a game that controls similarly to I Am Bread, where you and a friend are trying to stack ragdoll men in loose banana hammocks to greater and greater heights, by holding down buttons to grip and swinging them around with the analog stick or mouse.
• Rising Thunder is a Street Fighter-style fighting game that very deliberately avoids complicated inputs, instead making special moves and super moves each take a single button.
• The first Distorted Travesty game suffers from this. There's the three basic buttons for moving and ducking, an up button for examining and opening things, a button for jumping and dashing, a button for standard attacks, two buttons for physical and spiritual techs, two buttons for cycling between elements, a pause button, a button for cycling through the spell list for your current element and a button for activating Rave Mode. That's more buttons then you can map on a 360 controller. The game is meant to be Nintendo Hard, but the controls were not supposed to be part of the challenge. The creator admitted having so many controls was a dumb idea and streamlined the system considerably in the second and third games.
• For their second anniversary, Twitch Plays Pokémon took on a specially-made Crystal 251 hack, and since there's a limited amount of box space and Twitch often catches multiple members of the same species, the dreaded releases were going to be a necessity. To make this easier, the devs added an option to release an entire box—and to keep this potentially devastating weapon of mass trolling from being used without the consent of pretty much the whole chat, required you to confirm that you want to do this three times, one of which has the "yes/no" positions reversed, and finally to confirm it by pressing B and Select simultaneously (which in itself prevents it from being used in anarchy mode) a certain amount of time after the last "yes"; waiting too long after it times it out. The necessary command for the final confirmation is therefore "await4b+select". Furthermore, not only must that option get a pluraliy of votes in a democracy session, Democracy needed 90% agreement to activate in Anniversary Crystal.
• In Overcooked!, you must control a minimum of two characters at once to collect ingredients, chop and cook them and then take the finished plates to the clients. Even if you have friends helping you, everyone must focus, manage the limited tools and space and cooperate as much as possible to even get over the minimum score. Several levels also add odd gimmicks and hazards to contend with on top of that.
• A number of Atari 2600 games tried to get around the system's limitations of a single control stick and button by having you use both the Player 1 and Player 2 controllers. Sounds clever - but anyone to have held one of those controllers can probably recognize they were meant to be held with two hands. There's pretty much no ergonomic way to use both at once, so you either have to awkwardly nudge buttons with your knuckles while holding the sticks, or switch back and forth between the two controllers.
• Just about any game that tried to make use of the Playstation 2 or 3's pressure-sensitive gamepad buttons ended up falling victim to this trope, which is why almost every game released for the platform ignored this feature completely. That one notable exception was the Metal Gear Solid franchise is probably why it took Sony until the launch of the Playstation 4 to finally drop it.
• One Finger Death Punch manages to be this trope (albeit in a fun way) despite only using two buttons or keys. Enemies come from both sides and you must tap either button when they're in range to hit them. Attacking at the wrong time makes the protagonist drop his guard. Some enemies must be hit 2 or three times in a specific sequence, while others bring up a list of directions you must press before they leave the screen. Some stages play ay hyper speed, and it is very likely that you'll get bonked once or twice when some stickman comes up slighty off-rhythm.
• The obstacle courses featured in the Unbeatable Banzuke and Ninja Warrior shows weren't exactly easy, what with only 4 people ever conquering the tower climb at the end of the latter. In the licensed games by Konami such as Kinniku Banzuke: Kongou-Kun no Daibouken!, this translates to difficult reflex and button-mashing minigames akin to Track & Field. The aforementioned Spider and Rope Climb in particular is always given the most complicated inputs to perform dozens of times in under 30 seconds.
• FreeSpace series is notorious for its AI wingmen control system, which requires you to remember the full order of battle you start the mission with (to properly address your various squads and individual Space Fighters in them), and to juggle keyboard shortcuts and onscreen menus, often in a hot pursuit or escape from the enemy of your own. It's also absolutely essential for successfull mission completion, because not only there are usually a lot of the aforementioned wingmen, but their AI is rather passive and they tend to just wander aimlessly without your active micromanagement. Once you master it, though, you can basically play the whole battle like a huge organ fuga, with precision strikes from multible directions and finely tuned attack sequences.
• Metro Exodus on console. None of the commands are physically difficult to enter, but there are a lot of them, and every button seems to do at least three different things, depending on context, how long you hold it for, and which shoulder button you are holding at the same time. An example:
  • Tap Square: reload equipped weapon.
  • Tap or hold Square: a wide variety of interactions.
  • Hammer Square: fight off animals that are nibbling you.
  • Hold Square + R2: pump up the Tikhar air gun.
  • L1 then Square: use your lighter.
• Generation Zero: Here are the steps for using a health kit:
  1. Find a health kit (not a rare drop).
  2. Find it in your inventory.
  3. Assign it to one of four slots for using items (D-pad on console).
  4. Exit inventory.
  5. Tap the appropriate slot key, which puts the kit in your hand.
  6. Hit trigger to actually use it.
  7. Hit the "equip weapon" key to go back to shooting.

The game does not remember slots, so if you use all of your health kits, then you have to go through the whole sequence all over again when you find some more. There is also no Menu Time Lockout, so good luck trying to do this in combat.

• Invoked for The Textorcist The Story Of Ray Bibbia, which combines a typing game with Bullet Hell. The movement buttons are either the arrow keys or WASD while holding down shift, so your options are to frantically type with your left hand while dodging bullets with your right, stop moving regularly to type with both, or wonder why you keep typing mistakes while you want to move/move while you want to type. Or you can get another person to type/move for you.
• Neopets:
  • Hot Dog Hero is a deceptively simple 2D side-scroller where important areas in each level are separated by empty space where the player must draw their own path. The arrow keys move the player character, the mouse is used to draw new platforms and aim projectiles, and the space bar fires projectiles at enemies. In order to play the game well (or at all, on later levels) the player must often be able to create a path while moving and defending themself from enemies. This may leave said player with one hand on the mouse, one hand on the arrow keys, and a foot on the space bar.
  • Magma Blaster is a game about this as much as it is about aiming and reflexes. The player must use the number keys on their keyboard to constantly switch their laser between different modes corresponding to different types of flying rocks, and click on those rocks to shoot them. Simple enough on the first level, which only uses 1 and 2, but by the fifth and final level, the game uses 1 through 6.
• Heavenly Bodies ties the movement of your right and left arm to the right and left analog stick, leaving you little control of the camera outside of a single button the re-centers it so your feet face the bottom of the screen. This can make it difficult to precisely control your character if you're sent spinning around or have to swing yourself around, since you can't move precisely move the camera where it would be most convenient for you. As opposed to just using one analog stick to walk, this is a complicated and often unwieldy control scheme that will take some time to master.
• Silver Falls Gaiden: Deathly Delusion Destroyers and Ruby River for the 3DS makes great use of the systems touch screen. However, Deathly Delusion Destroyers requires you to hold the system vertically while tapping or holding down the touch screen to aim and attack waves of oncoming monsters. Ruby River uses a combination of shoulder button mapping, touch screen menus, and the New 3DS's nub stick to move the camera. Needless to say, this takes some getting used to.
• Kero Blaster: A fairly minor example, which isn't strictly necessary to complete the game — while all weapons are capable of fully automatic fire, all weapons, especially when upgraded, can fire a good deal faster when repeatedly mashing the trigger button than when simply holding it down. While this sometimes allows to wear down a boss's health bar more quickly, it can also make it harder to dodge and attack at the same time, especially since you can only strafe^*that is, move backwards without changing the direction you're aiming while holding down the trigger.

Platform Games

• Adventure Island II. There is a long stage select code, which can be like pulling teeth to perform. It can only be put in during a specific portion of the opening sequence, meaning you have to restart if you miss it. It doesn't help that game magazines actually printed an incorrect version of the code. And your reward for inputting it correctly? The ability to skip to any level... with absolutely no weapons, and therefore being virtually Unwinnable.
• The first three Commander Keen games use the combination Ctrl + Alt to fire Keen's raygun. That's not so bad... except that Ctrl and Alt are used separately to jump and to use Keen's pogo stick, respectively. This results in a lot of jumping/pogoing around like an idiot when one intends to shoot, and almost as much accidental shooting when one is trying to pull off a tricky pogo/jump maneuver.
  • It gets worse. To get some extra height while pogoing, hold down Ctrl. So you need to tap Alt to pull out the pogo stick, release Alt, then press Ctrl. If you ever hit Ctrl and Alt at the same time, you fire and un-pogo. No wonder they reassigned fire to Spacebar from Keen 4 onwards.
  • In early versions of Windows, hitting Alt + Space is the command to switch to a windowed mode. Doing this to a DOS program while running in Windows is essentially a kiss of death, locking up most of windows (like the shutdown command) and giving you messages about PIF settings. With Commander Keen, there will always be that one time a finger accidentally strays to that crevice between the Alt and Spacebar, both heavily used keys, usually forcing the user to cut power to the computer to restart. Tech savvy users quickly learned to run it in DOS instead of Windows (and users less so continued to suffer without knowing any alternative).
• Ittle Dew: After a full game where most puzzles can be solved in all the time in the world, and the rest having a quite high tolerance as far as timing is involved, the Master Cave contains several puzzles where absolute precision and perfect timing are necessary (such as puzzles 5, 12 and to a lesser extent 6), which require acting quick before a frozen object reaches its destination.
• La-Mulana, in addition to the stiff jumping, has the grapple claw, which takes some getting used to. Ideally, you release the up button, then hit the button pointing away from the wall, which sends Lemeza sailing over large gaps and right into wherever you want him. In reality, you're going to spend a lot of time sending Lemeza into spikes, lava, water, fireballs, and every other obstacle in the game until you get used to the timing.
  • Even the game's double jump item requires an inordinate amount of skill to use, because you cannot activate it after the peak of your jump. Muscle memory from most other games tells you your window for activating it when you need to make a long jump is much wider than it is.
  • Thankfully, the remake fixes these a bit. Aside from moving the jump from "Up" to its own button, making the Grapple Claw easier to use, you can now double jump whenever you want. The new problem is that if you double jump as you're coming down, you keep all the momentum you had when you started falling, as opposed to it resetting.
• Shinobi (2011) suffers from this. Wall jumping in particular can turn into a virtual luck based affair, because the game explains it poorly. The game states that you wall jump by jumping when next to a wall. That isn't quite the case, and is a borderline Guide Dang It!: There's two ways to wall jump, only one of which works in any situation: a) press jump next to a wall as you start to descend from a previous jump or fall, b) press jump and away from the wall you want to jump off of. What makes this so confusing is that this game requires a lot of wall jumping, probably more wall jumping than any two games in the series before hand. Also, if done incorrectly, a failed wall jump turns into a double jump spin, which doesn't carry a lot of momentum in the direction you want to go if you're already moving in the opposite direction. Now if you just came off of Shinobi 3: Return of the Ninja Master (which this game pays a lot of homage to), you would think that the correct answer is to press TOWARD the wall you're jumping against, since that is how wall jumping is done in S3. If you aren't paying attention, you might think that it works the same way in Shinobi 3DS, since nothing different happens if you jump next to a wall, and press toward the wall as you are imperceptibly starting to descend. This can easily lead to a situation where one thinks that the wall jumping randomly works, as if you press toward the wall at the peak of your jump, you'll double jump and fail, but one-tenth of a second later, you will get the wall jump. However if you press away from the wall (which the game never tells you), you can wall jump immediately after leaving the ground.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog 3 level select code. In theory, you enter Up, Up, Down, Down, Up, Up, Up, Up during just the right time interval on the title screen. However, the code is nearly impossible to use, as the player has less than one and a half seconds to input the code, and over a third of that already small timeframe consists of lag frames, during which the game doesn't accept any controller input.
  • For most of the game, Sonic Rush's controls are a treat, but right at the penultimate boss fight, when you're one hit short of victory, the game abruptly degenerates into an insane dual button-tapping fest that can't possibly lie within the dexterous abilities of the target audience.

Puzzle Games

• Panel de Pon, unlike other "match x blocks of the same color" games, requires you to continue swapping panels while your chain takes place in order to reliably extend your chain, meaning that without on-the-spot planning and strategizing that would make speed chess players proud, you will easily get curb-stomped by competitive players. This was alleviated somewhat with Planet Puzzle League, which allows manipulating the blocks with the touchscreen rather than having to use a cursor controlled by the D-pad that can only move in four directions.
• The video iPod version of Tetris has controls that are easy to learn but maddeningly touchy. The click wheel moves the piece from left to right and down will drop it. However, the slightest of left/right movements while pressing down will shift the piece just as it's dropped. This gets more frustrating the faster you play, as mistakes become more likely.
• Tetris: The Grand Master has Firm Drop, a type of hard drop in which the piece drops instantly, but doesn't lock into place. As the series is arcade-based, this requires pressing up, and then if you want to quickly lock the piece, you have to flick the stick down, and you might accidentally hit left or right in the process, causing your piece to shift unnecessarily. That said, Firm Drop once mastered becomes an extremely useful mechanic for fixing overhangs and performing other advanced techniques.

Rhythm Games

• While most controls for Rhythm and Music games are relatively straightforward (hit a button or two in time to the music), trying to play these games on expert difficulties requires an insane amount of coordination. Some examples:
  • Guitar Hero: Especially the first game, with its unreliable hammer-on/pull-off system. "Bark At the Moon", the hardest song for the first game, took nearly two years to full-combo because players are forced to strum most of the solos to consistently hit the notes.
  • Rock Band: Pro Guitar. Oh, Pro Guitar. It's pretty much the straightest example of this trope in a rhythm game; over 100 positions ^note over 130 on the Squier, and some chords require four fingers. And God help you if it's a song with fancy strumming patterns. A little derailment is possible though.
  • Pump It Up often features charts where the player has to hit at least three panels at once. The obvious solution is to drop down and hit some of the panels with your hands, though the more efficient solution is to place your feet such that they hit more than one panel each.
  • EZ2DJ's hardest Space Mix charts often require crossing the player's hands or hitting effector notes with the fingers and key notes with the wrist to hit certain patterns.
  • SOUND VOLTEX requires the player to spin knobs while hitting notes simultaneously. Sometimes this, again, leads to hand-crossing in order to hit notes. There's a graph called the Effect Radar that gives you an idea of the characteristics of the chart selected; "One-Hand" indicates sections where you may have to hit notes with just one hand due to the other being busy with knob notes, while "Hand-Trip" indicates how frequently you may have to cross your hands or perform other unusual techniques with them.
  • O.N.G.E.K.I. requires the player to manage three different sets of inputs: a series of six face buttons, two side panels, and a single-axis joystick in the center. Easier charts will allow the player to hit buttons on either side to hit notes, but harder difficulties will differentiate between left- and right-side inputs. The side panels exist to force you to hit the face buttons with the opposite hand, thus punishing players who rely entirely on one hand to hit the face button notes. The joystick is used to follow the track, collect bells, and avoid running into bullets and lasers. Yep that's right: you're playing a Rhythm Game and a Bullet Hell game at the same time.
• Certain stages in Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure require drawing circles on the touch screen. As it's a rhythm game, timing is extremely important, and the game only registers the circles as having been drawn when the loop is complete and closed. Not only does this mean you must draw precise circles on the bottom screen while the watching for signals on the top screen, but you must also know exactly how quickly you draw your circles so they close at the correct instant.

Role-Playing Games

• Games in the Dark Souls series take a considerable amount of getting used to - attacks in it are quite slow (and vary in speed and striking style depending on weapon, and whether you're wielding the weapon one-handed or two-handed), there's a sort of strike-and-block dynamic to it, you have a shield you may or may not be using, and the enemies are quite unforgiving. The game has a pretty steep learning curve at first, but eventually the awkward controls make an increasing amount of sense. The relatively slow speed of strikes is a big part of what makes the game difficult, as is the fact that blocking isn't always safe and you can run out of strength, but eventually it gets pretty smooth for the player. Also, very few players would dispute that the jumping controls in any of the games are unintuitive at best, atrocious at worst (the first game being perhaps the worst as it actually prevents you from dodge-rolling while running, since attempting to do so is how you jump).
• While they're not nearly as bad as some of the other examples here, the Mario & Luigi games have some fairly complex Bros. Attacks/Special Attacks. Most of them aren't too bad aside from the ridiculous timing required, but a couple involve pressing A or B at the right time with no way knowing which one to press unless you pay close attention at the start of the attack and have good memory.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Monster Hunter players, particularly those who have played the PSP titles starting with Freedom, use what is called a "Claw Grip" to maneuver their characters, with the left thumb and index finger holding the left side of the handheld in a C-shaped position. The left thumb controls the analog stick used for movement, while the index finger is used to control the D-Pad and adjust the camera. While players can eventually (and naturally) get used to it, it can be quite awkward and cramp-inducing at first. As a whole, the controls in those games are quite complicated, to the point where Nintendo bundled the Circle Pad Pro accessory with Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate during its Japanese release (it was bundled with Resident Evil: Revelations in Europe instead), and the much earlier Tri for Wii also had a special "Classic Controller" bundle.
  • This gets taken up to eleven when trying to master the Charge Blade introduced in Monster Hunter 4.
    • It is widely considered the most complicated weapon in the franchise, but also remarkably versatile and damaging once mastered, while also bearing Guard Points for good defensive options in the middle of offensive combos. It's worth noting that a tutorial video for Monster Hunter: World on how to use the Charge Blade in full takes 18 minutes to cover everything at a rate many viewers find too fast to absorb, and World does away with the Styles and Hunter Arts introduced in Generations that extended the prior video's length even further to cover all the differences! The Charge Blade is a Morph Weapon that, true to its name, is partly about building up a Charged Attack, but it's far more complicated than the Switch Axe. You start in a sword-and-shield mode that builds up charge with each strike until your phial meter glows yellow, and then red, at which point it's time to dump your sword charge into your shield by holding down the right shoulder button and pressing the right face button. You must do this, as wailing on monsters with the sword too much causes it to glow with energy and bounce off harmlessly like you lost too much sharpness.
    • Holding down the right shoulder button or trigger and hitting the top button results in a Morph Slash to move into axe form, which is slow and hard-hitting. Your right button attacks are Elemental Discharge swings, which consume one phial for each press. Where it gets complicated is the Amped Elemental Discharge — a slow, but hard-hitting super attack that can be quickly cancelled into sword-and-shield mode by hitting the shoulder button, which also dumps your remaining phials into your shield for an Element Up charge on the shield. This makes your Guard Points do phial damage, and in addition to that, enables the Super Amped Elemental Discharge, one of the most hard-hitting attacks in the entire game with a full five or six phials. On top of that, World also added the ability to charge the sword to add phial damage and the Mind's Eye effect, where the sword will never bounce regardless of charge or sharpness status.
    • Where this trope comes into play is how to effectively juggle all of this charging micromanagement into combat with monsters that will knock you down flat. You have to know how your attack inputs chain into other attack inputs, akin to a slower-paced Stylish Action game, most importantly because your morph inputs are attacks in and of themselves with very different inputs between modes. Charging phials is R + Circle/A/B, charging shield is Triangle + Circle/X + A/Y + B in axe mode (or the same input three times in sword-and-shield mode from a standstill, where the second input is a shield bash and the third is always an AED after the shield bash) and quickly hitting R afterward so you don't accidentally waste phials on the AED, and remembering that you have to hit R and Triangle/X/Y together to go into axe mode because holding R blocks with the shield, but just pressing R in axe mode goes back to sword-and-shield mode without charging the shield with filled phials.
• In the Ruins of Alph in Pokemon Heart Gold And Soul Silver, you have to rearrange puzzle pieces to form pictures of fossil Pokemon to enter the Unown chambers. The puzzles aren't hard, but rotating the individual pieces requires putting your stylus in exactly the right place and holding it there for long enough for the piece to rotate but not so long that it does it twice.
• Pokémon Flora Sky keeps the Sky Pillar bike puzzle from Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, and it's extremely frustrating to do with a keyboard.
• The "press", "tap", and especially "scratch" controls in Nintendo DS game The World Ends with You. And while we're on the subject, some advice: never have "tap rapidly" pins in the same deck as "touch" pins. Ever.^note Don't even use subslots. Merely having a "tap rapidly" pin in your deck means that if you tap enough that the game considers it "rapidly", it stops activating "touch" pins. And you have to do all those crazy touch screen motions while simultaneously commanding your partner on the upper screen through combo-based button presses. Those are easier to pull off, but doing it while keeping track of Neku's (asymmetrical) battle on the bottom screen can be quite the feat.
• In the early days of Runescape, things like mining and doing other things required numerous clicks to execute and were painful to fingers. Over the years, this has been gradually reduced in most aspects, but still exists in others, most notably combat. In 2012, the game's combat system controversially changed from a simple click-and-wait system to an ability-based system, mastery of which requires practically lightning fast reflexes. Naturally, new bosses designed around this system were also released in the following years, many of which require full mastery of the new system on top of dealing with the boss mechanics and attacks.
• In World of Warcraft, the battle against Magmaw requires the DPSers to jump onto Magmaw's head when he Mangles the tank, then target the spike and press 1 to throw their chains at it, not only having to hit it, but also time it so that they hit about the same time, before the tank dies. This part of the fight is arguably the one that results in the most wipes.

Strategy Game

• Dune II doesn't allow selecting multiple units, nor do the units have much AI beyond "shoot random enemy in range", so attacks require a lot of micromanagement. On the defensive side, factories have a separate full-screen menu for building units.
• Playing LostMagic on the DS will have many people screaming in rage due to the games tendency of confusing (or outright rejecting) the players drawn runes. Considering the difficulty of the game and the amount of runes you have to draw with very little time, this gets old really quickly.
• StarCraft and its expansion have an artificially elevated skill cap due to the large Action Per Minute requirements of certain basic functions (such as queuing mutiple build orders on more than one building). Bad pathfinding also means that players have to babysit units on the opposite side of the map while managing their economy back home. While the sequel streamlined many of these mechanics, there are now specific micromanagement-heavy new ones that can turn a defeat into a victory (or vice versa if used badly).
• The first Warcraft game, when it came out, had a complex control system. Moving and commanding units takes more than twice as much clicks or button presses than they do in later times.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• The drive-by shooting controls in Grand Theft Auto IV and V have been described as this, as using the left stick to steer, the right stick to aim, and the 4 shoulder buttons for gas/brake and aim/fire can get pretty confusing. Justified in that hitting a target from a moving car with a gun without years of training is incredibly difficult in real life (and doing it from a car you're driving is basically impossible), though with a bit of practice it becomes doable in the game.