The 6 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Video Game Design

No matter how hard a video game is, what's important is that it's fair -- it lays out the rules, you agree to them, and away you go. But every now and then some malcontent designer adds a feature that pulls the rug out from under you and laughs when your ass hits the floor. Until the PlayStation 5 comes with an extendable middle finger, this is the closest designers have come to telling gamers to go fuck themselves:

#6. Shadow of the Beast Is Nonstop Dicking at Every Turn

Psygnosis

When Shadow of the Beast was released in 1989, it was praised for its ground-breaking visuals and haunting atmosphere by the three people who managed to finish it. The game is ostensibly an open-ended platformer, but it has to be completed in a very, very specific order in what we hope was just an incredibly misguided way of padding the length of the game and not the product of developers who held stock in monitor manufacturers and anger-management clinics.

Psygnosis
"... to Hell."

You start in the middle of a field with no instructions, so like any conditioned gamer you head right. You soon find a well you can sloooowly climb down, but the bottom is locked. All you can do is climb back up and keep moving.

Psygnosis
Everyone's least favorite part of gym class, now in 16-bit form.

You come to a castle where you can go left or right. If you go right you'll fight your way through hordes of enemies and your reward is a one-way drop to a boss you can't kill.

Psygnosis
Look on the bright side: at least it isn't the sequel.

Did we mention that there are no save points? So you die and start all over, and this time when you enter the castle you go left and find another fork in the road. One path leads you to a gun that can kill the boss ... in a room that traps you with an electric field.

Psygnosis
"This gun would look pretty good against my head."

Assuming you don't quit and go for a relaxing nature walk, you restart and take the other direction at the fork. Down this road you'll find that the castle's stalwart defenders are protecting a wrench that's just lying around for no good reason.

Psygnosis
The final boss is guarding a half-empty Mountain Dew and some Cheetos.

OK, now everything's falling into place. You get the gun, use the wrench to turn off the electricity, use the gun to kill the dragon ... and have your quest stopped dead by a locked door, the key to which is waaaaay back to the left of where you first started the game (that locked well you thought we forgot about was the exit). If you're wondering why the front door of the castle isn't locked, the only answer we can come up with is that the developers are a bunch of floppy dicks.

Psygnosis
Eldritch horrors? No problem! Wooden doors? Shit!

By this point you've probably head-butted your computer out the window, but if you persevere you're rewarded with the final boss: a giant foot that's defeated with the subtle strategy of "mash the attack button and hope he dies before you do." Congratulations!

Psygnosis
And then you face a bonus boss: the realization that you could have been doing something productive with your time.

#5. Fable III Speeds Up a Crucial Deadline -- by Months

Microsoft Studios

Time is kind of a funny concept in games -- in most open-world games, the main story mission will be some urgent quest to save the land, but you can then spend the next five years wandering around the countryside and finding creative new ways to set innocent villagers on fire. If a game ever has an urgent mission and really means it, you'll get some kind of timer on the screen (as in, "Escape the headquarters before the reactor overloads! We have four minutes!"). Imagine, then, if a game gave you just such a timer, then spontaneously detonated the bomb with a third of the time still left on the clock. That would be a serious dick move, which brings us to Fable III.

Microsoft Studios
The all-time king of rushing you through to the end.

Most of the game is about organizing a rebellion to overthrow the evil ruler, Logan. But once you take the crown, there's a twist -- Logan reveals that an evil primordial slime monster is going to attack the kingdom in a year, and the only way he could prepare for that was by acting like a huge dick. It isn't clear why he didn't just say, "Hey folks, I've got to raise taxes a bit because an ancient evil is coming to annihilate the very concept of humanity, k?"

Microsoft Studios
He could have at least shaved his "I'm obviously evil" beard.

Anyway, you, the player, are the new king, so the monster is now your problem. The gist of the plot is that you're supposed to decide between pissing people off to raise money and save their lives or making everyone happy but also ripe for the slime monster to pick off like Skittles.

But because the clock ticks down only when you complete story missions, the smart/cheap player who doesn't like moral complexity can buy a ton of rental properties, play the game until the day before the attack, then just sit around for hours while the treasury rakes in sweet, sweet landlord money to fund the kingdom's defense. So imagine your surprise when the game tells you that you have 121 days left until the attack, then suddenly shunts you to the final battle. Surprise!

Microsoft Studios
Apparently, they forgot to add "hibernate."

That's right -- the game immediately skips ahead four months and stops time with the monster on your doorstep, preventing you from making any further preparations. If you didn't raise enough money because you had this weird idea that you still had a third of a year to do it, you get to eat shit while the monster slaughters your people.

Your year as king does feature other time jumps -- you shift from having 365 days left to 339, to 294, and so on. But 121 to zilch is a big damned jump, especially since the game gives you absolutely no warning. It's like they realized how lame it was that you could bypass the entire moral dilemma with investments and patience, and rather than find a creative solution to that problem they responded with an even bigger dick move of their own.

#4. Dark Seed: Only Clairvoyants Need Apply

Cyberdreams

Dark Seed is an adventure game based on the artwork of H.R. Giger, and never have constant dicks been so appropriate. You play as Mike, an everyman who has to stop a race of aliens from taking over the world. Let's set the tone: minutes in, you discover that your home has a balcony. If your first instinct is to tie a rope to a gargoyle and climb down instead of using the perfectly functional front door, then this is the game for you, assuming your asylum allows computers.

Cyberdreams
"I was going to install a fireman pole, but that seemed too impractical."

You see, the next day Mike steals a gun from a police station and becomes a wanted man, because people don't usually steal guns to sell for charity money. If you didn't have the foresight to create a back door into your own home to elude the police after you committed a crime you had no reason to expect was coming, you get arrested, run out of time, and doom the world.

Cyberdreams
That'll teach you to take the stairs.

The whole game is like that. Early on you run into a neighbor who invites you over later. If you don't show up, perhaps reasoning that there will be time enough to watch this guy play fetch with his dog after you save the world, you'll miss your one and only shot at acquiring a stick. Much later you'll be trapped by a monster dog, unable to distract it without the only stick in the universe.

Cyberdreams
Because that thing would obviously love to play fetch.

Actions in Mike's world affect the "Dark World" you shift into, but you'd have to be psychic to know that opening a door on Day 1 unlocks a path on Day 2. If you try to figure it out by trial and error, you'll run out of time. Time is critical because, as people are wont to do, Mike falls asleep on the spot when it gets late. In the Dark World he just dies, but in the normal world all his stuff gets stolen, presumably by kleptomaniac hobos. That makes the game unbeatable, and it lets you keep playing only to mess with you. So every game day is a desperate race against Mike's narcolepsy.

We could spend all day listing examples of Dark Seed's dickery. You frequently need to find tiny objects in cluttered screens, like this bobby pin.

Cyberdreams
You know the one.

Don't see it? Here, let us circle it.

Cyberdreams
"Oh, now it's obvious."

The pin is of the utmost importance, because of course it is. Late in the game you get arrested by the Dark World Police (great band name), and they confiscate all your shit. To escape you need to get arrested in the normal world and hide three key items under the cell pillow so they'll magically appear in the alien jail. It should come as no surprise that there's no indication you should do this, and if you don't pick the right items it's game over.

There's one extremely obtuse hint about leaving behind a key, but did you guess that the pin would be used as a lock pick, thus making it a key? Of course you didn't, because you've eaten something other than LSD in the past three weeks. Honestly, you might as well just give up and let the aliens run things, because they can't be worse than the people who designed this.

And while we're on the subject of impossible adventure games ...