Worst mini-game you’ve played in a video game

So I just took a dive into the Ocarina of Time randomizer (highly recommend it, by the way). Every minigame in OoT is hot garbage. This includes, but is not limited to: the shooting galleries, horseback archery in Gerudo Valley, and most of all, that minigame where you have to follow along on the ocarina with the two skull kids in the Lost Woods. That game is otherwise amazing, but now I remember why I never played any of those minigames as a kid.

"Meat on the Bone"

In Boktai 2 if you borrow too much solar energy from the bank without paying it off it locks you in a dungeon where you have to walk on a treadmill by doing circles on the directional buttons to generate energy. That was quite annoying. I used to get my sister to do it for me.

maybe more so a mechanic but, that little frozen needle stab thing in the new God of War. What an arbitrary thing... and yes I know you can disable it but someone spent all day coding and animating that shit just to have it disabled in the menu. Whatever aha I'm too mad about this dumb thing

The Oblivion thing requires you to look at the person's face. You need to mitigate what they hate while maximize the things they like. The largest slice has a bigger impact, so you want the small slices to be negative while the big slices are positive. It is kind of cool like the lock picking system once you get the hang of it, but can get tedious. Oblivion lock picking is great because you can do it with no security skill, you just have to listen carefully.

Lock picking gets real tiresome after a while, so I recommend getting the skeleton key when you can. You just smash the auto-attempt button until it works since the skeleton key never breaks.

I suppose a mini game I hate would be one that I need to do constantly like the Oblivion lockpick or the Deus Ex HR hacking or the Bioshock pipe game .

God, the mini-games in DR2 are so bad. They're like the already bad mini-games from DR1, except they're worse, and you have to do more of them!

@kblosnack said:

Okami is a great game brought down by some of its minigames.

The ones that come to mind are the mole thieves and the blockheads...

I’m gonna go ahead and add SMT Nocturne’s block puzzles to my list of minigames I don’t like. I actually enjoy them in Catherine just not this block puzzle.

Not sure if this counts as a mini-game but the Rise of Furia platforming thing in Paladins going on right now is ridiculously terrible.

I love love LOVE Prey (2017) but the hacking mini game wore out its welcome almost immediately. Just let me hit a damn button and pass the skill/upgrade check.

Everything in this video but specifically the Monkey Feces minigame...

@facelessvixen:

I know you posted this six days ago, but funny enough, I was having such a bad time with that game for the 20~ hours I played that I distinctly remember REALLY enjoying the Sudoku puzzles, I must have been in a huge minority that actually wanted more of it.

I would like to throw my support behind my fellow Jeff and say that Blitzball fucking sucks. It's so bad. I love FFX, it was the first Final Fantasy I got into, but fuck... Blitzball... is so bad. So bad.

As for other crappy mini-games in games, any card game in any RPG is not fun. Pazaak from KOTOR is my touchstone. I have a lightsaber and I play Sith in KOTOR. If I want your money, I will not play cards, I will just kill you and take it. Fuck your intergalactic poker.

I actually liked Blitzball, but I’m a psychopath that enjoys sports sims so maybe that is why.

I absolutely hated the forklift section and library book organization mini games in Shenmue. Absolutely actrocious.

I've been playing a bunch of Mad Max lately and I will never understand their thinking with how you clear the minefields. It is so goddamn tedious to use one specific vehicle just because the dog rides in it. I think the damn dog can fit in my regular car. And why do I need to get out and defuse them? I understand if it was optional to get ammo or scrap, but why can't I just shoot them to set them off like every other videogame ever made?

The fact that the rest of the things you need to do (Scarecrows, snipers, etc.) are really easy and fun to clear out (just whip out the grappling hook and hook them while you zoom down the road) makes it even worse.

The final Test Your Might challenge in Mortal Kombat X. Sweet Mama June on a riding mower, I nearly destroyed my thumb and the DS4 trigger on that fucking thing. If a minigame causes physical pain and the risk of property damage, maybe dial it down juuuust a notch, NRS.

Beaver. Bother.

I don’t think it’s the worst, but I’m getting tired of the hacking mini-game in Fallout. After multiple playthroughs of 3 and New Vegas, having it pop back up in 4 was disappointing.

But clearly, the right answer is every mini-game in Final Fantasy. The numerous mini-games in VII were all terrible, Tetra Master and that card game in VIII were awful. I’d actually take Blitzball over those because you only need to score and hide behind your goal to win (although you have to wait 4 minutes for the half to end).

@alexl86: Tetra Master is often a bunch of total nonsense but Triple Triad is just a legit good card game.

@kingpk: yes. I would just drive through the fields with the magnum opus when my armor was strong enough, hoping I would hit some of them.

Computer hacking in fallout 3/nv/4 was really annoying because of how long it takes and how often you need to do it. At least lock picking is fast.

Agree with the Fallout hacking being bad, but I REALLY hate the hacking minigame in Mass Effect 2. The fact that a mod exists to remove all minigames from those games made them so much more playable for me than they would have otherwise been. The Deus Ex HR hacking minigame is maybe tied with Fallout

Any lockpicking or hacking mini-game in every videogame ever.

@haneybd87: So much this. I did it just enough to get my two free chests, then vowed never to waste another 5 minutes of my life on the damn thing. I hate that it never even bothers explain what to do, that the jumping sucks ass, that you can't skip the cinematics, and that at the end you're left in a 5 on 5 with randomly selected characters in the most boring arena in the game. So bad.

Sam and Max: Hit the Road had a totally pointless driving mini-game. I also remember the turn based battle sequences of Sid Meier's Pirates!(2004) being really slow and boring (and i really love turn-based strategy). Also the Fish flushing puzzle / mini-game in Toonstruck is terrible.

Fallout 3/NV/4 hacking pisses me off so much and is probably the worst offender I can think of in recent memory.

Pretty much any minigame from FFVIII would be a winner for me, but the train one immediately leaps out at me as hot garbage. The tutorial was longer than the actual game, for fucks sake.

This probably doesn't count because it's an entire game, but it's in a franchise that's otherwise, generally a superb third-person horror shooter, which is the entirety of Dead Space Ignition. That is the lowest point of that series to me, and it's made up of all mini-game pretty much.

It’s neither the worst, nor bad, just pointless...

Any Street Fighter bonus stage. As a kid playing SF2 in arcades, taking down the car, stack or barrels, or (later on) falling barrels was kinda cool and some free time to mess with moves.

These days, it’s an optional round I forget to turn off.

Bringing the Star Destroyer down was awful in the first Star Wars: The Force Unleashed because of the unresponsive controls that were poorly described to the player. It’s a shame since that scene was used to promote the game and became somewhat iconic if I remember correctly.

Block pushing, scrambled tiles, knights move type puzzles. I play a lot of old school adventure games and mysteries, so I come across a lot of these. The CSI games are the worst for bad mini games. Match this hair under a microscope to the three possible options etc.

As a huge TES fan, I understand the dislike for the lockpicking, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Skyrim’s is better than Oblivion’s. But I normally make a point of getting a skeleton key, lots of lockpicking training or items that help make it easier, then I just spam the auto lockpick button.

I can't stand those tile-moving things where you have to make a picture from a grid where only one out of 15+ tiles is empty.

But overall I really don't like any out-of-place mini-game in a game that tries to be serious. Video games don't have the best stories, and I feel like they're just making it worse by including puzzles for things like hacking. Having to play an easy clone of an old arcade game in a serious situation really breaks my immersion.

I think the worst mini-game that comes to mind are the puzzle rooms from new Donkey Kong games. While they at least don't try to shoehorn a different genre game and are still platforming experiences, in both Return and Tropical Freeze there are maybe 5 variations of them in the entire game, and you usually see 1-2 puzzle rooms per level. They're your usual "collect all bananas in 30 seconds", so they don't even feel different from each other. Now every time I replay those games I try to actively avoid secrets, which doesn't seem like a good thing.

The top 10, 20, maybe 30 worst mini-games ever can all be found in Donkey Kong 64. I would figure out what the worst one is, but I don't want to ruin my own day by dredging up any of that shit.

I do seem to remember one (in the forest level, I think, where you race the rabbit? fuck that whole thing, by the way) that was supposed to be skill-based but was, no exaggeration, clearly impossible to win skillfully. Every guide I looked at just said to flail randomly until you luck into winning. So I did. Took about an hour. What a fun video game!

[Okay, after further consideration, which I very much regret, the worst one is where you race the seal. It was hard to imagine a worse race mini-game than the turtle race in Angry Aztec, but they did it. Congratulations, Rare.]

Oh god this brings me back to a dark time. I had a broken ankle over the summer that year and DK 64 was my go to. I managed to collect everything in the game, but those last few mini games really made me question my sanity.

I came to love Gwent in The Witcher 3 once I realized how it all worked after 30+ hours.

The dice poker in The Witcher 1 and 2 was 100X worse than Gwent ever was in my opinion. I must've played Foltest 100+ times in the first game.

Blitzball was pretty easy, just really boring.

But stuff like getting the postman cap in majoras mask, I did not know about the bunny hood so to "hit exactly 10 sec minigame" was something I would never return to.

I don't know if I would say this is the worst, but i really hated the minigame in the first Jak and Daxter where you're shooting rats in a swamp.

The Monochromon's Shop mini-game from Digimon World 1. It was the only way to get Monochromon, the game's best merchant. It was located in the ass-end of a monster-filled area, so it's not like getting there was some easy jaunt. Then once you get there, it's a long mini-game that's mostly RNG-based and requires both RNG being perfect and you not making a single mistake. And barring getting Monochromon from a perfect score, the rewards aren't worth the time investment of doing it. So you end up just grinding away at this uninteresting mini-game in hopes that RNG lines up in your favor, all the while your Digimon is desperately trying not to shit on the ground because there are no public toilets near-by and you forgot to pack enough portable toilets on the way there.

It's just the WORST.

Conversely, DW1 also had one of the best mini-games in the form of the curling mini-game.