That One Level/Simulation Game

These levels are almost as hard as they are in Real Life...if not harder.


 * Even Cooking Mama has an example: In the Hot Dog and Taco recipes of Cooking Mama: Cook Off, you must catch the ingredients in the bun/taco shell, which would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that you can only hold it on the sides of the screen. And the meat falls down in the middle, so you must time it so that it falls on the bun/taco shell in the middle of moving from one side to the other. Hard enough to pass, hell to get a Gold Medal on.
 * Ace Combat primarily has these in levels where the mission/parameters have nothing to do with the Difficulty setting; the "game stopper" was AC5's "Four Horsemen," mission 12b. It's only one of the two paths, but you're given no clue that your answer to a wingman's question in mission 10 will have any consequence. Things aren't so bad on the other path, or even in the other mission on this path, while this mission requires you to perform four consecutive timed destructions of radar sites, which means that you have to take into account your weapon's travel time and your own travel time -- go past the radar site and you fail, while if you get in position too early you'll have to break/slow down, which can cause a stall or wasted time (especially if you have to turn around to reposition yourself for another attack run), and you have less time between each radar site. Did I mention that your wingmen may mess up their approaches against their own targets which you don't see and cause everyone to have to abort their attack run and try again?
 * All of the 21st-century console Ace Combat games have had a mission that involved flying through a tunnel, but other than 04 and one of the operations in 6, there was another complication to make the mission harder to complete than it sounded:
 * Zero had "Valley of Kings" which made you brave a gauntlet of Anti-Aircraft Artillery, Surface-to-Air Missiles and Pillboxes just to get to the tunnel. Flying above 2000 feet would lead to a missile warning: if you didn't get below that in time, you'd have a missile launched at you from out of nowhere and automatically hit you. Did I mention the bridges in the way? Finally, if you're not using the FAE Bomb or the MPBM you'll need to make multiple tunnel runs since you have to destroy all of the joint locks for each V2 controller before the controller itself can be hit. ('Consolation': at least if you enter the tunnel through the south, the named ace in the tunnel who appears after you destroy the first two controllers is flying away from you and thus makes possibly the game's easiest kill; it's certainly the easier named ace in an Ace Combat game to shoot down.)
 * 5 introduced the twisty-turvy tunnel later used in Zero but with multiple altitude changes along the way (not just at the entrance and exit of the tunnel), had enemy fighters in the tunnel in front of you headed in your direction, and whereas you can just slow down in all other tunnel missions and use autopilot to stabilize your flight path, here you have an enemy fighter hot on your tail the whole time!
 * These actually go back to AC2, which had a similar final mission to 04. AC3 also had a similar mission, with altitude changes and closing doors which serves to make it a "twisty" tunnel.
 * In "Chandelier" in 6 you had to travel a long way to the action with nothing going on before then having a ton of heavy anti-aircraft fire tossed into your face on top of some ships (including missile boats!) and the last of Strigon Team, ace pilots one and all; after you destroy all of the targets (which will take quite some time since some require multiple hits and from particular angles) your wingman goes down and even heavier AAA appears in the form of a double-stacked line of gun towers; only after you destroy those can you go after the remaining targets and the very end has you flying into the tunnel which itself can attack you by firing a cruise missile into your face. And this is assuming that you got this far, as unlike "Valley of Kings" which gave a definite time limit you have to complete the mission before too many cruise missiles are fired and can hit, so you'll have to guesstimate how much time/cruise missile launches you have left based on the dialogue. (Fortunately if you manage to survive the AAA on the way in, there's a conveyor belt underneath Chandelier that carries the cruise missiles to its rear; destroying the cruise missiles before they can be loaded will buy you some time depending on how you're balancing it with destroying the targets.)
 * That's nothing compared to "The Liberation of Gracemeria" and the horrific boss battle against Ilya Pasternak. Even if you're flying the Nosferatu, it's still extremely hard.
 * Missions with insta-kill missiles above/below a certain height are almost always reviled, as are those that force usage of guns only or have radar jamming in play.
 * The 'don't fly above (insert low altitude here)' missions are annoying, but on some games in the series the missiles don't spawn so close to you. This enables you to outrun them (or at least keep them from hitting you till they detonate) while flying the overpowered MiG-25/31. Unfortunately this creates an Unwinnable situation, since they respawn one after another. So after descending back to an altitude that will let you complete the mission, the speed that's required to outrun the one that inevitably spawns above you prevents you from maneuvering through the narrow confines of the level. That the dragster-like MiGs were built for intercepting versus dogfighting doesn't help.
 * The first game (Air Combat outside Japan) had possibly the worst canyon mission of any, and a lot of that was Fake Difficulty due to terrible graphics. It was an incredibly narrow canyon and it was very very difficult to tell the two walls apart so every turn was an opportunity to crash due to inability to judge distance.
 * X brings us "A Diversion" where you have to escort six helicopters to a location... but there are infantry-wielded RPGs along the route that don't appear on radar until the helicopters get close enough, unlike what the briefing says about luring them out. Plus some of these wankers (yes, I went there) appear in locations that are inconvenient to target if you stick too close to the helicopters, and trying to stay behind them can backfire if you end up falling too far behind. Plus once you actually reach the location the helis need to get to, you find it's also defended by SAMs and triple-A, so you can't take a breather yet. And you can lose only one if you want to get a S-rank, with all of them being One Hit Point Wonders. Did I mention that if you want to get the ace for this mission, you need to run ahead of the helis to take him down, and almost certainly will lose at least one trying to get back to them?
 * X also has "End of Deception II" with the Alect Squadron-piloted Fenrirs, a shitty boss fight if ever. Fortunately, it gets better after they go down.
 * Actually... It isn't impossible to shoot them down while they have the cloak. If you're UNBELIVABLY good/lucky, you can shoot down ALL FOUR FENRIRS WHILE THE CLOAK IS UP.** I have to bring up Four Horsemen again for two reasons: you have to play it at least once to unlock the Flanker line of jets, and it also contains one of the hangars you have to destroy to unlock the ADF-01 FALKEN. Have fun.
 * The recent Assault Horizon seems to LOVE this trope. From the mission where you need to destroy an ICBM while it is launched, to the navy mission that requires the usage of attacker aircraft (which has been badly nerfed compared to previous iterations), to the final mission where you take on Akula, it's astounding that the game has actually been beaten on Elite.
 * Collecting all the paintings in Animal Crossing. Yeah, you heard me. Other rare sets can take literally a year or more to complete, but at least you can't forge a bug or fossil. Damn you, Crazy Redd!
 * Trauma Center: Under The Knife, as an Atlus game, is hard- so much so that a previous version of this page listed every mission as That One Level. However, most fall into the "tough but fair" catagory, with two exceptions:
 * Deftera. While most missions are ultimately tests of skill primarily, Deftera is nearly 90% luck. If two pairs of Deftera hit like colors at the beginning of the second stage, you might as well ragequit. Either the tumors will kill the patient outright, or you'll finish with the tumors just in time to fight MORE tumors when like colors meet AGAIN- never having the opportunity to attack Deftera itself.
 * Level 5-2. You know it's going to be a pain, since it's called "Under The Knife", which implies a certain epic climax. Your enemy is the parasite Kyriaki, who is annoying, but usually pretty striaghtforward. This time, however, you have to treat five patients in a single mission, with only ten minutes on the timer. Making matters worse is the fact that getting through a Kyriaki mission requires nothing so much as skill with suturing. The stylus motion for suturing is not only undetected by the game half the time, but it's the first thing you start screwing up when your hands start to get tired. The final insult? That ticking ten minute timer hanging over your head is a god damned lie. When it hits zero, you don't fail the operation- your assistant just announces that backup has arrived and you can finish this patient and take a rest. She notes this after you get the third patient stabilized, but you'll never see it, since you're so concentrated on just the time and the bottom screen.
 * Also, while not unfairly difficult, the last chapter of the game is simply uncreative. Having defeated (or, actually, ) the Big Bad, you have to fight through a Boss Rush to get to The Man Behind the Man- the same seven strains of GUILT you've been fighting for half the game, just requiring faster action. A shameless retread which is made more aggravating by losing what forgiveness these missions had previously.
 * Most annoyingly are the missions 5-9 and 6-8, which are literally impossible to beat if the player uses the Healing Touch at any other time than at the VERY end of the level. Worse still is the fact that if you did use the Healing Touch when you shouldn't have, the game tells you nothing. You just hit that point in the level and if you don't know about this beforehand the game will just "hang" until you fail the mission.
 * While technically Bonus Levels, the X Missions also deserve mention. Though they're not named for difficulty in Under The Knife, they are in every succeeding sequel...under Extreme difficulty. While all of the X Missions are indeed beatable, they all borderline on Fake Difficulty given that you have to have memorized the pattern for defeating the offending disease down to freaking muscle memory.
 * Especially Kyriaki in Under The Knife. (Shudder)
 * "Awakening" is almost evil in its difficulty, especially since it's still in the game's early chapters. Basically a patient has a whole bunch of aneurysms in his intestines, five of which all decided to try and burst at the same time. You're meant to burn a Healing Touch and try to fix him up, but if you're after rank, you have to take all five of them out without it. Unless you balance them just right, at least one will burst, taking the S with it. Basically, an Unfunny Aneurysm Moment in the most literal sense.
 * This one was so notorious that Second Opinion for the Wii simplified it. On Normal difficulty, only four appear at the end. If the patient's vitals are near-max, he'll survive all of them exploding, leaving you to clean up and head out. Your rank will take a hit, but you'll pass.
 * New Blood chimes in with Lost In The Flames, an operation to treat a burns victim. The mission isn't particularly hard in theory, and there's nothing that will lower the patient's vitals apart from gradual attrition and player mistakes, the greatest threat here is the time limit. What makes it tough is the player has to cover a burn with four piece of donor skin to treat each one, when a) the skin is time-consuming to produce, b) if the burn starts bleeding (at random) any skin already there will fall off, and c) it's painfully easy to put a piece of skin on the wrong burn, virtually guaranteeing the target burn will start to bleed before the player can get more ready. It's virtually impossible to let the patient die here, but even a perfect run will run down the clock horrifyingly fast.
 * In Trauma Team, Tomoe's final mission is The way the stage is set up, it's _very_ hard to keep track of what you're looking for, and every time you find one, you get sent back to the start - at which point the level changes shape. It's essentially a 3D maze from hell.
 * Any mine in any Harvest Moon game ever.
 * That excludes the Harvest Moon a Wonderful Life mines, which are just little sites which are extremely easy.
 * DS and DS Cute weren't as bad in the fact that dropping a level didn't kill most of your stamina. It just gets annoying when you have to drop ONE LEVEL AT A TIME through digging up stairs, like you have to in Island of Happiness and Sunshine Islands.
 * They also just had to have animals trying to kill you, and hundreds upon hundreds of levels. It's especially bad if you want to marry Keria.
 * The Magical Melody mines weren't that bad.. If you exclude the random times when you go up instead of down (which happens a lot once you reach a certain point), and the rocks having nasty effects sometimes.
 * Blazing Angels has Top Secret, where you're flying through a narrow fjord, in a fast (yet thankfully maneuverable) plane, and have to get through the fjord in a limited amount of time. At parts you have other planes shooting at you, and if you hit any of the walls, you're likely dead.
 * Then, in the sequel, Secret Missions of WWII, there are lot of infuriating levels (especially where you have to use a tailgunner), but "Flashlight to a Gunfight" is the most annoying. You have no weapons at all, so you have to use a weapon that blinds enemies and leads to them crashlanding into an iceberg. But the big problem is, you have to practically almost crash into an iceberg for them to even think about crashing. It basically turns into a Luck-Based Mission, and you've got to kill at least 10 enemies with this "weapon". Obligitory mention goes to "Target: Red Square", since it's a defense level that includes an army of enemies, followed by a boss that can easily destroy the Red Square very quickly, and "Rendezvous", where you have to kill 10 enemies while you're under watch, who shoot you if you do anything, followed by an Escort Mission with tons of turrets to take down.
 * Mechwarrior IV: Mercenaries has Talon/Wernke - Night Op. You're meant to pilot a light, fast 'mech, trying to be as stealthy as possible, trying to sneak past several 'mechs that can stomp you in a heartbeat, and there's generally enough enemy 'mechs that it's suicide to take anything heavier. For contrast, there's a ludicrously easy stealth mission elsewhere in the game.
 * This is only hard if you are attempting to get the bonus for not being detected. It's quite possible to just load up a badass assault mech and blast your way through the level.
 * The first Rollercoaster Tycoon and its expansions each had one of these:
 * The original had Rainbow Valley, the penultimate scenario. It pales in comparison to many of the expansion scenarios, but at the time, being unable to remove trees or alter the landscape made it by far the most annoying original scenario, much harder than final level Thunder Rock.
 * Corkscrew Follies raised the bar for scenario difficulty overall, but Fiasco Forest easily takes the cake. Though scenarios where you had to clean up the mess and turn a bad park into a good one was nothing new, the aptly named Fiasco Forest took it to ridiculous extremes, with a water slide that's about to crash the moment you load the scenario, unfinished path layouts, and for some reason, inexplicably charging for toilets. To top it off, the win condition is to have as much as 900 guests at the end of the first year, and you're not allowed to advertise. Fiasco Forest isn't even among the final scenarios of the expansion.
 * Loopy Landscapes introduced several new scenario types to the game, like finishing a set of pre-built, half-finished coasters, or having infinite money but never letting the park rating drop below 700. Micro Park, the very final scenario of the expansion and also the game as a whole, is the only Loopy Landscapes scenario to use the old park value win condition, which means you have to keep your park's value up by building lots of rides and other attractions. This is made harder than usual because Micro Park lives up to its name, being a 15x15 square of land and nothing more. Enjoy!
 * Looking for fireflies in The Sims Castaways is this to many players. Fireflies are found at random and only appear at night.