Tom's Hardware Giveaway - Dark Souls III!

[Titillating]

We’re back! It’s been a long time coming but we’re excited to announce the return of our Steam giveaways.

Before we get into it, for those who have taken part in this before, there are some slight changes you need to be aware of.

• 
  ■ These giveaways now span 2 full weeks instead of 1. This means there's more time for you to enter!
  ■ There are now two ways to enter to win! Each person can only win once.
  • 
    1. Enter the raffle via the gleam widget. All we ask for there is a name and a contact email. There will only ever be 1 copy of the game up for grabs with this method.
    
    2. Take part in the discussion in this thread! A discussion prompt will be provided each time. Just answer the prompt to be eligible to win! Eligible participants will be randomly selected to receive a copy of the game.

For this installment, we have three (3) copies of Dark Souls III! One will be awarded via the raffle (found below) and two will be given away to participants in the discussion.

Your discussion prompt: What was your most difficult/challenging gaming moment? What game was it and what made it so difficult? What did you do to overcome this obstacle? Share your fails with us!


[widget="https://gleam.io/piazI/steam-giveaway", 400][/widget]




Contest will run until 12 PM EDT on Friday, April 29. Winners will receive their prize as a Steam gift; a Steam account is required to receive and to play the game. Winners will be selected randomly from among eligible entries. Attempts to cheat the system will result in automatic disqualification.


Be sure to join our Steam group!


We’re always looking for volunteers to write community reviews for games, so if you’re interested, please reach out to me for more details!

 

[spoker]

SC Brood War campaign. i was young and dumb. latest campaign missions was very hard for me. So i replayed them till i won, just like in movie "Edge of Tomorrow".

 

[Billzegun1]

Dark souls, sens fortress... god i hated that place, probably the hardest area for the game for me anyway. I overcame the area, after many humanities lost, by getting the game for a friend and making him help me. Every time i go back to that place i try to summon people, definitely my most challenging moment

 

[Xuebao61]

Most challenging moment... I'd have to say something I did recently. Complete every challenge on every situation in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege on realistic difficulty. Replayed them so many times I remembered where enemies were and how to get headshots on them. Was damn difficult to say the least. The challenge I had the most difficulty with was the "above 50 health" challenge, since enemies have near perfect aim and do 7-17 damage per shot depending on armour. I got it though.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Most challenging moment? Dark Souls... the whole game, got my ass kicked repeatedly, still haven't finished it!

 

[JP0806]

Donkey Kong County: Tropical Freeze on Wii U
Beating the crazy mine cart level in world 2.
This level did not allow a second of error on many of the jumps.
Eventually I finally got the timing down and got through it.

 

[Dasynasta]

Steam Give away ! What more can a man ask for ?

 

[CarbonK]

Shockwave mod for C&C Generals Zero Hour. General Juhziz Challenge.

Topol Launchers, Rocket Buggies, Demo Traps, and the Scud Storm. It took me a while to figure out the solution.

 

[HEXiT]

most challenging game?

Gran Turismo 3

Getting 100% which meant running a clean lap of the nurburgring with a 2 minute handicap penalty, driving a tail happy merc. avoiding the other slower cars that set off at intervals before you... off the track, penalty, bump a car penalty, breath wrong PENALTY!. XD

lets just say it took more than a few attempts

how did i overcome? practice, practice, practice.
then practice summore...

 

[ultraglorious]

My most challenging gaming moment was defeating the Operator on my Witcher 2 Dark playthrough. For those who are unaware, Dark mode has unique armor/weapon sets, one for each act, which you have to wear the entire set or else the armor will actively drain your health. In addition, the game diverges significantly based on a choice the player makes in the end of Act I.

So when it came to Act III and I was trying to craft the final Dark armor/weapon set I found myself with only one way to get the final ingredient, a dragon scale, since I refused to kill Saskia, and that was killing the Operator. If I had chosen the other path I would never of had this issue since there is an easy way to get a dragon scale in that branch of the story.

When I got into the fight my Act II armor and weapon turned out to be woefully under-leveled. I did almost no damage to the Operator and the gargoyles he spawned. I did, however, have some bombs that froze the gargoyles and gave he a good chance to kill them while they were stunned. Despite my best efforts I couldn't avoid getting hit, and while one blow did not outright kill me, it came close; even potions were of little use. If I had the foresight to unlock a skill that gave me a chance to instantly kill enemies, I could have simply retried and retried until I got lucky and insta-killed the Operator, but I did not.

My only salvation was that there was a pillar in the corner I could hide behind so that the enemies could not see me. This allowed my health to regenerate quickly out of combat and gave me the ability to quicksave. There was no honour in my victory, but I cheesed my way to that dragon scale quite quickly after that.

 

[Maarsch]

It took me a long time to take down Dragon Slayer Ornstein & Executioner Smough, but I don't think that was my most challenging moment in gaming (relevant to the giveaway though it might be).

Pressing that ladder button on SC2 has been difficult at various times.

Biggest challenge was probably Molten Core.
Getting 40 people at decent enough level took 3 guilds forming a raiding cooperative and months of instaces, reputation grinding, Zul'Garub, AQ20 allthewhile hemorrhaging members and fighting inter-cooperative sqaubbling.
Got everything down in the end with the exception of raggie . . . .

I remember working hard for twilight vanquisher, firefighter and Illidan. But those were in a single, well-organized (as much as that kind of thing is possible) raiding guild. The challenge was limited to actual gameplay, strats and tactics.

 

[mrface]

Daikatana
Playing the game and what made it so difficult? The bugs that would not allow you to finish.
How did I overcome?
Turned it off and played a different game.

 

[nerro120]

Hardest challenges I've had would be completing all the gears of war campaigns on hardest difficulty without dying and of course the gta 5 10mil heist challenge on xbox. Banged my head for hours on those 2 much like raiding in world of warcraft

 

[Maxo]

Most difficult would definitely be making any sort of real progress in Castlevania 2 as a kid that didnt speak/read english, not like anything in that game made sense, up to this day i still havent beaten the game mainly because i lost interest in it but managed to get the flame whip without using a guide before i was done with it.

 

[Greywolf772]

Battle Toads, owned it as a kid & never got very far in it.

 

[Turb0Yoda]

My hardest moment... besides CS:GO competitive?

Flashback to age... 6? Midtown Madness 3 on the original xbox(which I still have and works perfectly!) trying to get the last car, a koenigsegg ccx... It took me about a month before I did it...

Probably even harder were the old Super Mario Games... When I went to India, I would play them off a knock-off retro console... The cartridiges were worse than my experience with a real NES, but I'm not surprised given how cheap it was...

 

[RedJaron]

Kingdom Hearts 1, Platinum Cup at Olympus ( Sephiroth ), on Expert. I was high level and had the Ultima Keyblade and a few other high level items, but I didn't grind to 99 or get EVERYTHING first. Each failed attempt usually took about 10-15 minutes, so it was a few hours in the making. The final successful fight took over 20 minutes with near perfect blocking and dodging.

Getting the unchanging armor, speed run, and no continue trophies at the same time on the KH 1.5 HD version took a few attempts as well.

Demon's Souls had a few tense times for me. Flamelurker was probably the hardest boss for me, though Penetrator was up there too. Then there was that time I died and lost 250K+ souls.

 

[megajynx]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but I've only broken only one game controller after hundreds of tries to beat this hair pulling challenge:

Event 51: The Showdown
Super Smash Bros. Melee

Thankfully with age this challenge has gotten easier, but the first time I had to juggle Giga Bowser, Mewtwo, and Ganondwarf on the super tiny Final Destination platform, I almost just gave up and went to bed right there. I can't remember exactly how I lucked out and won, but I remember taking out Ganon and Bowser, but getting merced by Mewtwo at 70%, while my Capt Falcon was rocking 200%.....

Woosh!
Falcon went out the area....

Ker-Plunk!
My controller instantly after, right into the groud

KaGrounded!
My 13 year old ass for breaking a controller. Will Smith was right, parents just don't understand.


Honorable mention to Jak 2: After being preceded by such a fun and delightful platformer, the games charming story revolves around putting the player through the same hell that Jak went through for two years. There are much harder games, but I felt the game got excessively challenging, punishing almost, at the most abrupt times for no apparent reason.

 

[Jsimenhoff]

Darkest Dungeon is easily the most challenging game I've played in the past year. What a brutal exercise in patience, fortitude, and perseverance. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Overall though, I'd say the bullet hell shmups I used to play in my youth and still play from time to time. Games like Einhander, Silpheed, Ikaruga, etc. Gosh darn those games hand it to me every time, but for some reason I always come back for more.

 

[matthew_nicho2]

Killzone 2... Elite difficulty... Final Boss Fight; Radec.

I made my way through the whole game on elite difficulty and finally got to the final boss; Radec. I tried and tried and tried... I could not do it. I made attempts daily for weeks and just could not do it! Little did I know my brother had started his Elite run of killzone 2 which obviously meant the pressure was on. He progressed as I continuously died.

HE KILLED RADEC ON HIS FIRST TRY!!!

Devastated I still attempted to kill Radec when some force somewhere decided to end my suffering by killing our PS3. Saves gone; hope gone.

I never attempted the Elite run again; my most epic fail.

 

[popatim]

Duke Nukem 3d.
On the final boss, hardest mode as always. I just could not kill it. I woud run around that stadium launching everything I had at him, grabbed more weapoms & repeating, grabbing health as needed.. that boss would just not go down! Then on my 3rd night of trying my 7yr old son asks if he can try. Sure, you cant be any worse then I am. he goes up the elevator, never moves - not even an inch, fires all the missles one at a time: down goes the boss. WHAT!!!!

 

[RedJaron]

Amazing how we overthink things sometimes.

 

[Questcraft]

*Even though a little late* Welcome back Titillating, I hope you and the Tom's hardware crew had a good New Years. Now onto the discussion topic which I might get a lot of flak for, but hey, what is the internet for anyways . My hardest game moment was in a select few of the Nancy Drew mystery games. I have been playing them since I was a little kid and I love the way they give me challenges that I then sometimes have to actually go a few days thinking on it (even through work). I am ashamed to admit it, but there were even some times where I had to use a..... walkthrough *GASP*.

 

[Memnarchon]

My most difficult/challenging gaming moment?
Hmmmm....
Although I was playing single player games since 1990...
I would say...
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Patch 2.4: Sunwell
Pre-any-nerf, M'uru.

 

[Onus]

Most difficult? Trying to pick things up in Gothic 3; I found no way to do it, decided the game was bugged, and gave up on it.
Most challenging? Before the Soul Reaping nerf in Guild Wars, Zilch Zulloch my N/Mo was the only healer in the Thirsty River mission, but succeeded. As long as the party was killing, he had the energy for healing.
Another good one was when while killing the last two towers in the Riverside Province mission, only Oscar Grouch, my N/W, survived a party wipe, but was then able to kite the remaining grnasties and kill them (the group had killed the White Maggots' healers before dying), saving the mission. "What does a Necro do with an axe??!" A: "He kills things with it."