What's a moment in a video game where something happens and you're left staring at the screen, not in disappointment, but in surprise.

For me, it would be in Half Life 2 when you're in Ravenholm. You've experienced your first fast zombies, got your shotgun and you're in a room where you need to summon an elevator up to your level. Zombies are climbing across the rooftops and ready to follow you into the room, so me, thinking i'm a genius, I close the door in their face. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself, then all of a sudden, several of them burst in through the skylight! I ended up surviving, but I couldn't stop thinking just how unfair that was.

The most unfair thing is trying to get the acheivement "get some grub" in HL2: Ep2, its freggin impossible.

Much as I love Shadow Dancer and Revenge of Shinobi on Sega Genesis, I can't recommend them today. They make Ravenholm look a cakewalk.

SeiferHyperion:
Zombies are climbing across the rooftops and ready to follow you into the room, so me, thinking i'm a genius, I close the door in their face. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself, then all of a sudden, several of them burst in through the skylight! I ended up surviving, but I couldn't stop thinking just how unfair that was.

I did that exact thing. Probably in Half Life Opposing Forces when you're trying to get to the helecopter and suddenly the G-Man shuts the door on your face. I knew something was gonna happen like that, but come on!

Fallout, trying to get to the Gunrunners meant you had to fight through Deathclaws and getting there by the skin of your teeth to ask for their help mean you had to go back and kill the mother, and by this time they had all respawned.

In a game of Civilization realizing you're on a continent with Isabella, Shaka, and Montezuma.

The inexplicable ability of the rare moment when people shot by a missle launcher/stepped on a mine/ on an exploded grenade survive without damage and somehow manage to kill me with an inferior weapon in Star Wars Battlefront. This is even more emberrasing when the target is an NPC. Of course this only happens in online multiplayer, thank goodness.

The part in HL2's Ravenholm when you come into that big open square with a deactivated chopper (the wire-cart-thing is overhead), and various varieties of zombies come at you from friggin everywhere. You, naturally, run to turn it on, thus saving yourself from the onrushing horde of regular, fast, and poison zombies. the blade spins for a second or two, before breaking and flying off in a random direction.

Funny as all hell, but still frustrating. gregori needs to keep his traps in working order.

This isn't for any one game in particular, but any time I spend twenty minutes looking for a solution to a puzzle or key item, only to find it was sitting under my nose the hole time.

Mine was getting Zombie Genosider Achievement in Dead Rising,,,, play the game for 6 hours running over legions of the undead and get an ending,,,,,,, needless to say I got it with time to spare but i spent like 5 solid hours,,, just,,,,,

JUST!!!!

To get a slightly better gun to kill zombies with,,, not that there's any thing wrong with it but it sure does rack up the time

MagnetoHydroDynamics:
The most unfair thing is trying to get the acheivement "get some grub" in HL2: Ep2, its freggin impossible.

I missed 5 on my latest run through D:

The first time someone killed me and then camped my spawn point on Everquest's pvp server. I went through constant deaths and loading screens for a straight twenty minutes before exiting and canceling my EQ account.

Far Cry: When you get captured and promptly dumped from a helicopter at the top of a waterfall without any weapons. You just get an M16 with 10 bullets to get past dozens of trigens to the next checkpoint...

MagnetoHydroDynamics:
The most unfair thing is trying to get the acheivement "get some grub" in HL2: Ep2, its freggin impossible.

Little Rocket Man is worse....

Cheeze_Pavilion:
In a game of Civilization realizing you're on a continent with Isabella, Shaka, and Montezuma.

*winces* bad memories...bad memories

Went for FoxHound rateing on Metal Gear Solid 3 in my terms "Not Possible" got 6.5 hours and thats what left me to say no fair.

mario kart on the snes. When you were toad or koopa, and bloody donkey kong would come out of his line and knock you into a river on donut plains 3, after which he would carry on like nothing happened.

I can't think of any specific examples, but I can absolutly guarantee one of them came from Devil May Cry.

The last level of Stuntman for the PS2 (the James Bond themed movie for those who know what I'm talking about). The whole exercise, to put it nicely, was f'ing impossible because it demands a type of perfection that can only be found in some future evolution of uber-gamer. I got $3 trade-in credit at EB and considered that a good deal for the misery that thing put me through.

In the last UEF mission of Supreme Commander, when the little Monkey Lord brigade shows up on your island.

For those unfamilar with the game, the MonkeyLord is one of the faction's super-weapons, and probably the signature unit of Supreme Commander. It's very large, fairly fast, amphibious, has a lot of armor and sports a variety of weaponry, including the Microwave Laser which would do somewhere on the order of 12,000 damage a second (enough to kill any unit aside from other super units, SCU's, or upgraded Commanders in under a second). It was a very cost effective and threatening Experimental.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/supcom/images/thumb/e/ed/Monkeylord_insitu.jpg/800px-Monkeylord_insitu.jpg

But anyway, the whole mission is defending an island (technically half of it, since the other half is out of view) and things aren't that bad. The mission is mostly fending off large air and sea attacks and launching a sea based attack on an enemy islands, so I ended up with essentially a U shaped defense network of SAMs and Torpedo launchers, with the very north fairly open. Then comes a very large attack lead by a number of MonkeyLords from the north part of my island.

There was no reason to defend that area with anything, let alone ground defenses that could hold off multiple Experimentals. I was just dumbfounded, it was outside of my box of thinking, it wasn't something I was expecting or at all prepared for. Just left me stunned.

They ran though half my island as I proceeded to nuke-spam my own island, since I had virtually no ground assets to actually combat them with. I stopped them before they destroyed my defense objective, but lost most of my economy, most of my defense structures and most of my SCU's that were doubling as builders and resource generators. Disastrous.

Murian:
Far Cry: When you get captured and promptly dumped from a helicopter at the top of a waterfall without any weapons. You just get an M16 with 10 bullets to get past dozens of trigens to the next checkpoint...

MagnetoHydroDynamics:
The most unfair thing is trying to get the acheivement "get some grub" in HL2: Ep2, its freggin impossible.

Little Rocket Man is worse....

You'd think so wouldn't you, but you'd be wrong.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep2/achievements.php

How about just the entire Ninja Gaiden for XBOX. That game in and of itself was unfair, due to its high difficulty and learning curve.

Ever played EvE? I was on the unfair side, but still. Fight outside a station, our alliance entrance is being camped. My and a few corpmates undock, engage combat. Once we've got em locked down, we give the team-mates in station the go ahead and a frickin great carrier undocks and pastes them. that was fun.

&^%$*@"£ blue shells

'nuff said

In Call of Duty 4, i was shooting someone in the head with a G3 and they turn around and kill me with a pistol. its sucked. it happens all the time now.

Ever played Persona 3? After beeting forms 0-12 the final boss goes into his final stronger form, and when he had one hit before his death, he charmed one of my characters who happened to have a full healing spell...and she thought that the smartest thing to do would be to fully heal the final boss...

Playing Resident evil 4, I got a bit too close to one of the guys with chainsaws.. Didnt expect it to actually cut off my guy's head!

Let me set the scene: You're playing an online FPS... you spawn... some dick with a sniper rifle ventilates your forehead after half a second. You then wait an age for your time to come again only to spawn... and get your head blown off by the same guy in the same place who's racking up kills like it's the last day of the sales. This situation was made worse by Counter Strike, when you could randomly join a game and find that whilst your team had no cohesion or direction to speak of, you were up against a highly trained death-squad who all had full armour and the AWP by round three.

Add to this list any little snotbag who says "he's going easy on you" as your introduction to the game, when he's obviously already weighted it to be impossible if you're you.

In Dawn of War, there's a territory where you get some kind of benefit if you beat it. The benefit is that you can have a base on any territory you want to attack. The thing is that for stupid reason you can't build, so you start with a massive army.

How's this unfair you say? Well, in that game for every heavy weapons upgrade you make, you need plasma and the only thing you can construct are Listening Posts (They produce the normal type of resource). The problem lies that you have to destroy every any structur and this map is controlled by a high difficulty Ork army that, unlike you, can build structures.

This probably ends in a lost battle.

DMC, the original. Fighting Griffon and him using his hard to avoid "energy bars" attack...
And the goddamned camera switches to a 2D perspective, putting your survival chances from "low, but if you're good you'll make it" to "pure luck. you're fucked, baby"
Half of the last boss's attacks fit too, since it's basically 100% luck if you're gonna die a horrible death or avoid it completely (there's rarely an in-between).

System Shock 2, no specific pre-made moments but ones made by yourself. (You're low on ammo on your soon useless handgun, and the goddamned Many gloats and explains how you only have your hatred and individuality left, and you haven't even SEEN their most beautiful creation yet. That felt unfair. It wouldn't be so bad if my ammo WASN'T running low and my weapons WEREN'T failing me, damnit!)

My wife adds that to her, it was Aeris dying because she had spent a lot of time making Aeris her best party member because she honestly liked the little flower girl, just to have all of it ruined in an instant. (Me, I didn't care much for Aeris, wimpy attacks equals no party slot IMO)

Majora's Mask

The damn time cycle always leaves me thinking I have enough time when I don't. And I have to do everything all over. I swear I'll never be able to beat that game.

Playing any of the Guilty Gear games on the harder settings.

The original Mortel Kombat's last fighters, considering they seem to know all your moves before you do.

In Skate, that one Rob Dyrdek challenge where you have to perform two ridiculous moves on a bench while Big Black walks by and punches you off. It's hard enough to do the moves, but I promise you, when you're about to do it successfully, on the 100h try, tears already forming in your eyes, Big Black will be there to uppercut your spirit out of your body.

Murian:
Far Cry: When you get captured and promptly dumped from a helicopter at the top of a waterfall without any weapons. You just get an M16 with 10 bullets to get past dozens of trigens to the next checkpoint...

God I hated that part, it got even worse when you got to the vulcano. Terrible leveldesign that was.

Mortal Kombat had unfair AI, but I think the most unfair moments are when you manage to do something you're not supposed to be able to do and get nothing for it ~~

Like in SC, the mission where you're supposed to survive for 30 minutes. When I first bought it that mission was really challenging, but now I can clear out the Zerg base with plenty of time left on the clock... and you get nothing for it! Unfair! : P

Call of Duty 4. Playing online until Barret M82 .50cal is finally mine. Then shooting someone in the chest with it and they don't even slow down. Nothing like the biblical power I was expecting.

Dawn of war campaign mode, within about 4 turns every enemy racks up a gigantic honor guard without the territories to back them up. Meanwhile the 4 honor guard units you've acquired fair and square are mowed down mercilessly as those opponents attack at will.