Tomb Raider makes me nauseous.

Mass Effect 2 is driving me crazy with the flirting. Yes, I can choose not to pursue romance, but the horrible cheesy in your face flirt info from the NPCs is jarring sophomoric awfulness. I spend a lot of time scanning planets.

Are you talking about the "soup" contest? You can totally beef that and Alya eventually gives in.

I remember loving Pool of Radiance when it first came out. The hard copy documents were actually kind of fun to read alongside the game. Now, I wish it was all just integrated. That in addition to the wonky controls... Next time I'll be prepared.

Ooooh love the topic!

None are jumping to mind right now, but I KNOW I've had this happen to me more than a few times.

It's always so aggravating - nothing worse than burning out on a game I'm really enjoying or want to enjoy because X just sends it south in a hurry.

That hasn't been my experience. Many times, I would get stuck there for quite a while.

(Yes, it is that part that I am talking about.)

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The leveling system in Morrowind and Oblivion was beyond screwed up, full of perverse incentives to use skills that have no relevance to your play style in order to boost the stats you needed. Morrowind at least had enough loopholes that you could basically ignore its problems. Oblivion fixed almost all the loopholes without fixing the egregiously broken leveling system. Skyrim went way too far simplifying everything, but I still find it more enjoyable to play than worrying about keeping my multipliers high in Oblivion. The broken leveling system just killed the game for me, even though I liked both Morrowind and Skyrim in spite of their obvious flaws.

Just now actually, Beyond Good and Evil. Got it from HumbleBundle.

I was trying to go into the options to remap the keys but even upon going to the main start menu before you start the game, I was unable to find any option to remap the controls.

I'm going to research this to see whether there is any way and in case I'm unable to find anything, I might just go back to playing MegaByte Punch or try Far Cry.

You are my twin. That same thing ticked me off about that game. I am going to play it again but that boss fight is the thing I'm dreading. I absolutely deteste QTE in any game unless it's done right and I have yet to see it done right.

Time limits are also something I absolutely despise. I have enough pressure in my life without having it be in my virtual life.

Edit: I found how to change them.

Try games like Eador where, if you're lucky, you might be able to afford bringing across a couple of your hero's items to the next scenario. Not the hero himself of course - that would be way too expensive.

I remember that section. I'm not sure what I do right but I never had a problem with that after playing it through like 2 or 3 times (10-15 now haha). Now what really bothered me was the necessity to time wall jumps to reach higher places before space jump, even worse there's a secret section with a missile I believe where you have to time jump and at the last section crawl down to morph ball in the jump. I managed to learn this once but ugh... skills like that you could engage so much time and never really get it other than sheer luck.

As for space jump in general, it's rhythmic. You can't spam it and you can't wait too long. Not too hard to learn but with quick sand you have to press faster which means the time window is smaller.

You could try to avoid them as best as possible. The real danger is quicksand + annoying enemies you can't defeat that are off screen, I don't recall how common this is but there a few rooms in Maridia that has that before meeting the stage boss.

Last time I replayed the game was on an emulator with a Steam Controller and added some nifty macro that allowed me to shoot continuously without holding a button and I also recall I managed to get space jump even more convenient. Cheaty in a way but whatever, I've already beaten the games so many times now I just replay for nostalgia.

I was about to spew a litany of titles at the screen, but in reality it's really not that much. Usually bad design pops up in multiple parts of a game and it seems rare to have a really strong game with only one misstep that's significant enough to mar the entire experience. That said, there are some that might fit the criteria.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
The time limit strikes again. It's hard to call this bad design, because the two minute runs are very integral to the game and everything works as intended, yet I always felt unnecessarily rushed while free skate mode felt completely inconsequential. It's really personal preference, but I was much more comfortable with later entries that ditched timed runs for a quasi open world approach.

Far Cry 2
That respawn rate.
Now this is generally not a game that's considered anything close to a classic, but I really enjoyed large portions of it. Just exploring that map and hunting for diamonds was great. There was a certain wonder what you'd find next, even if it's just a nice vista, and the bleak ordinarity of the setting played right into that. Then you backtrack just a little and the same guys you disposed of three minutes ago open fire on the same crossroads you just passed and it takes you right out of any type of immersion you might have had. Got really tiring rather quickly.

Puzzle Quest 2
There's more than one problem here, but the big one is steering items and skills almost entirely from board manipulation to flat damage effects. At that point you might as well throw dice and I have no idea why that decision was made, but it sucked any feeling of mastery the first game gave you right out of the mix.
Might be reaching a little, since at no point I was close to loving the game. However I adored the first game and knew what the sequel could have been and it just ... wasn't.

Borderlands 2
Not completely borderline unplayable, the problems come up during the New Game+ modes where the gameplay design revolves around deliberate use of the Slag mechanic if you want to stand a chance. Don't pretend to offer RPG mechanics when you're offering 2 viable builds tops per character. Still a pretty decent game, just stop after your first run on Normal difficulty.

R-Type
Specifically 4th level, Classic Game Boy version. For the younger audience; R-Type was a side-scrolling Shoot'em Up and that particular level a maze-like construct you had to commit to memory in order to avoid the pathing of borderline indestructable enemies. In modern gaming terms this would be roughly like having to beat a mid-game Super Meat Boy level to progress in Deponia (and having to replay the entire game from the start again, if you don't).

Reminds me:

Gradius, Zero Wing, and some other games:
In these games, you can power up your ship, and your ship gets gradually more powerful as you progress, but the enemies become more dangerous as well. The problem is, when you die, you lose all the power ups that you've obtained. This would be as if an RPG-ish game would, whenever you die, let you continue, but put you back at level 1 fighting monsters not meant for a level 1 character. Essentially, this means that either you beat the game in one life or you're not realistically going to beat the game at all. (Some later SHMUPs, like the Touhou series, made it so that you lose only some of your power on death, which is a lot more reasonable.)

Classic Castlevania games have a similar issue, but the issue tends to be not so much your power, but rather your subweapon. Die on stage 11 or 12 and you won't be able to get Holy Water before the stage 12 boss, which is nearly impossible to beat without it. There's also the problem of random subweapon drops; since you can only carry one subweapon, getting a random axe drop on stage 11 and you're screwed. (Fortunately, it seems that random subweapon drops only occur in CV1 and CV3; by the 16-bit era, Konami learned their lesson and got rid of random subweapon drops. With that said, I seem to remember one of the metroidcania CVs having an enemy with a subweapon drop.)

Enter The Gungeon

Would have played the crap out of the game, if I had more control over what weapons to use. Being stuck with some gimmicky gun I hate is not fun, and the game rarely gives you the option to sell it off. Ideally, there'd always be the option to trade weapons in for others of the same value. Absolutely not a game to play if you're fussy and have strong preferences.

Project Zomboid

Give me something to do besides survive indefinitely. A robust list of achievements would do so, so much to get me playing again. But without an objective of any kind it alls feels ephemeral and ultimately pointless. How will I die? Probably in some stupid way that makes me instantly regret the last thing I did. But I want something to show for it, dangit.

Tales of Maj'Eyal

One of very few games where the presentation puts me off playing entirely. I should love the game, and I probably would if it were up to snuff with something like Sword of the Stars: The Pit or Dungeons of Dredmor. It doesn't have to be a technical marvel but when a game clearly treats its graphical assets as representative rather than something you'd *want* to look at, that puts me off.

Endless Space

Good god, that combat system. Why so obtuse? I don't even mind that it's real-time and you don't individually control your units, but if you go down that path, you better make sure the mechanics are easily understood, which they absolutely are not.

It's really weird design, isn't it?
"You have trouble at this part with half a dozen power ups? Try again with none of them."
Makes perverted sense in an arcade environment, but in retrospect it feels like that school of design stuck around way too long.