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Probably one of the most "basic gamer ass" questions I could ever ask, but felt like it anyway since hell it happened to me recently so I figured I'd make a thread.

I was on the final boss fight of Doom Eternal's "The Ancient Gods – Part 2" expansion, got the boss down to his last health bar, and bam the game suddenly crashed out of nowhere. Now thankfully the devs were courteous enough to put in checkpoints at the different phases of the fight so I only had to start over from the beginning of the phase I was on, but man was that still one of the worst spots for the game to suddenly crash at.

Now going back in time for the next related story, back in 2008 when I got my Xbox 360 and a copy of The Orange Box I kept experiencing freezes in the same spot during the Half-Life 2's final level (if you've played HL2, it's the spot where you have to take out a strider at the end of a giant hallway area). Apparently this was an issue Valve did patch, but the problem is when I first got my 360 I didn't have it hooked online yet since I didn't have a spare ethernet cable until a bit later. I was pretty annoyed that this kept happening but I still wanted to see the end of the game so I could play HL2: Episode 1 the following morning so I just looked up the rest of the game online. I did get that ethernet cable a little while later and finally went back and finished HL2 proper, but on that specific weekend I just wanted to keep playing without running out to the store (related: I eventually sold my copy of The Orange Box when I later bought all the games that were on it on PC, though part of me wishes I kept it just because I'm kinda curious how these games look when played on an Xbox One or Series X, and because the 360 version of TF2 is the only way to experience a very vanilla version of TF2 nowadays and I'm curious to see how TF2 would have held up had it never gotten all the updates it got on PC).

Last year I took up playing the whole Bioshock trilogy due to being stuck inside from quarantine, and I have yet to have played any of the games in spite of them being in my steam library for a really long time (probably since 2015 actually, although I have to go back and properly check. Might've been 2014 or 2016). I was once in a long continuous game session in the infamous 'remastered' version of BioShock 2 for the PC, where I reached the point of defeating Gilbert Alexander when suddenly the game crashed on me. I say "infamous" because that version of the game is known to crash on players, but I had yet to experience any troubles (outside of the jank controls). As it turned out, my last save was back in the middle of the previous level in Dionysus Park, which turned out to be especially annoying because I played the game on hard mode from the get-go and was getting my ass handed to me in the ADAM Research Laboratory section of Fontaine Futuristics.

Now of course it was entirely my own fault for not bothering to save and I was being somewhat cocky over fact that, until that point, I was blowing through the game with relative ease. However, I will say it was quite some bullshit that, at any point of the play session, it just so happened that the game crashed RIGHT THERE. And to pour salt on the wound, it was the only time I experienced crashes in that game.

PS: I found the first game to be the best one for me. I liked the other two but they had things that held them back, whereas the first one was as close to an all-round perfect game as it could be.

It's kind of my job to crash 'em at bad spots so yes, frequently. It simultaneously feels like a relief to crash it in testing so it doesn't happen in the field but also like I just lost a lot of progress in my work, as if my computer shut down midway through writing an important doc.

Outside of work though I have a few that come to mind. I was doing a Survival playthrough of Fallout 4, where you can only ever save when you quit or at a bed. I've had SEVERAL crashes there and they are PAINFUL to re-traverse through. Taking vertibirds in the late game is the only means of fast travel you have, but flying them over downtown boston where there's a LOT of things to load causes it to crash more reliably.

In a game of Apex Legends I had gotten level 3 everything, was on my way to making final 3, and had just gotten done wiping a squad. And then boom, I'm sent to the fucking home menu (Xbox One) with no warning.

Tried to rejoin the match but it was too late. To say I was fucking pissed would be an understatement. Oh and this was a comp match btw.

In my Pokémon Black and White playthrough sometime between the years of 2010-2011, I completed Chargestone Cave – and for anyone who has either viewed a play through of the game or have played firsthand, it is basically 'challenge galore'. Arguably, one of the hardest points in the game. I don't distinctly remember what happened, but I recall my game bugging in some manner (I believe it crashed) which led my naive, young mentality at the time to power off the game, as I was unable to save. Autosave wasn't there either. I had to redo the entire sequence allover again, and I recall it invoking levels of rage within me I didn't know was humanly possible.

I think one of the worst examples I had is Final Fantasy VII crashed on me during the cutscene after the Diamond Weapon fight, multiple times (disc was probably damaged), I did get past it eventually though.

Too many times for me to remember specifics anymore.

Sometimes I'd play a game for so long, it crashes and I take that as yup it's time to stop

There's a little incident I remember that didn't involve an internal problem of a console, but rather an external electric issue. The first time I played Star Fox Assault, I remember how I was this close of delivering the final blow to the final boss and then, suddenly, boom, there's a blackout. Some of my cousins who were around me to see the ending, seconds after the initial shock, bursted into laughter, myself included.

Not quite a crash, but it had the same effect – one day, my brother was playing FF XII late at night, with me watching him. Then all of a sudden, there is a blackout. He did not save the game for quite a while. You would think him to be mad about it, but well, we had bigger concerns to worry about.

So yes, that is the beginning of the story of how I lived my first big earthquake experience.

Today. Guild Wars 2

Not the fault of the game though, I bought a used motherboard from ebay as an upgrade since I cannot afford a brand new one, and it turns out to be a dud

I was in the middle of capturing a garrison in World vs World (3 servers fight each other on the same map to capture land and buildings). It takes about 5 seconds to stand on a point and capture the location but graphics drivers crashed halfway through. I restart the computer to uninstall the motherboard drivers to find out that the desktop doesn't boot up any more

I need to reinstall the old motherboard and also test the graphics cards I have to see what's been damaged. Currently using a Samsung tablet in Dex mode to go online and do stuff :/

All the time. But the recent most one is Crusader Kings 3.
On Ironmode the game auto-saves every in-game month, or before any major event. For Ironmode (which is the only way to get achievements) you can only play on one save, so multiple saves are impossible. This is to prevent someone saving before making a bad decision and then loading before they make that decision, the idea is to force the player to live with the consequences.

So, in a massive war with an enemy roughly my size in power (The Byzantine Empire), I was able to capture the Emperor during a siege. The way the game works is that war is effectively concluded if either side is able to capture the main king. This can happen when the king (or queen) is leading an army and it loses the fight, or if the king is present at the city you are capturing, such as it's capitol. This was roughly an in-game year into the war, where we haven't had many pitched battles yet, and the war-score (which determines victory) was low. Capturing the king effectively sets your war-score to 100%, meaning you can enforce all demands that led you to war.

But even if the king is inside a city you capture it's not a guarantee that you capture the king, there is a chance you capture one of the family members, which, although gives you a lot of score, doesn't actually stop the war. So of course as soon as the king is captured, I get the clink sound that I am 100% victorious, the game crashes. I come back into the game, roughly one in-game month before I capture the king, capture the city, but instead of capturing the king, I capture one of the princes. Obviously this doesn't conclude the war, leading me to have to spend an additional 30 minutes of fighting, massive amount of resources spent, nearly losing all my troops, just to win the war.

I was playing digital soul hack, a game where there is no autosave. So an hour of playing I was fighting some common enemies then used bufu and in a cruel irony the game froze and I couldn't do anything, but reset losing all the progress I made.

Needless to say, I took a break from playing it.

I remember turning off my GBA whenever I lose a good Fire Emblem unit, and whataya know? ALL Data gets erased.
This happened in both GBA Fire Emblem games we got, very significant progress. Brothers had saves too in both, which made me feel even worse.

I think my one might come up trumps in the "Infuriatingly Awful" category.

I can only play half of Killzone 3.

Due to Guerrilla Games buggering up their last update for the game, every time I make it to the end of the Arctic stage, just before the rescue mission, the game hard crashes.

Every. Single. Time.

I had to uninstall that patch and all of the previous patches (because you can't pick and choose) in order to play the game the whole way through. Which in itself wasn't particularly stable due to it being the game as it was when it launched on day one.

I had my emulator crash way back when I played FE: The Binding Blade for the first time on the lategame chapter with all the wyvern ambush spawns just when I was about to reach Murdock.
Not only did I lose some good level ups, this was before I knew about warp skipping or other strategies too, so getting through that map was hell and it demotivated me from trying it again for a while.

As some of you already know, most of the gaming I do is of older titles through emulation. Usually if the game runs the worse I'll encounter is a bugged GUI or some stuttering, but there has been one instance where I've been playing a game perfectly fine only for it to quit working entirely mid-gameplay: the PSP version of Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron.

I had played the DS version in it's entirety several times over and it enjoyed despite it being n-Space licensed shovelware. So I was interested in the PSP version and when I started playing it, was enjoying the singleplayer campaign until I reached a spot where the game just froze. And every time I shut down the emulator and restarted the game, it froze at the exact same spot.

After looking around, supposedly if you tweak the emulation settings a certain way and then perform certain actions in-game to avoid triggering a bug, the game will work normally. I tried this and it didn't work, so I'm basically stuck only able to play half of the game. At least the multiplayer lets you play alone against bots.

This usually happened whenever I played games on my Nintendo DS Lite. Mainly whenever I put it in sleep mode. It happened on all the games I played on it and my solution was to simply have the system lie face first.

One example happened during a play through of Pokemon Soulsilver where I was grinding and after closing the system, the game crashed on me due to the system not recognizing the cartridge and thinking it was empty. So I had to grind again.

Having the PC or internet shit the bed when raiding is always fun and has happened on numerous occasions.

Ha, reminds me of a time I was playing Rush'n Attack with my brother while my sister watched. The intro of the game informs you that your mission is to destroy the enemy's secret weapon. About that moment, the NES must've been nudged, the screen turns orange, the sound freezes, and my immediate response is "They've already launched it!"

Good times.

Recalling off three times a game crashed on a really bad spot:

Years ago when Scarface had its own game come out, I was just running through the city, avoiding some cops to get to a bank and deposit my money when the game froze and the cop was just repeating some words. Never will forget him saying "to respect the scum" over and over. Shit moment but it gave me a funny line to remember.

Few months ago before 2021, I was assisting a player in Dark Souls 3 as a phantom against the Soul of Cinder, just as I'm playing my PC just shut itself off. What sucked wasn't the loss or being unable to help the guy, it was knowing my GPU, an RX 480 with a blower style fan, was on its last legs without a deep cleaning. Not wanting to screw up my GPU in a cleaning attempt, I chose to replace it with the regular GTX 1660 I have now.

A couple months ago, finished a mission in Nioh 2 when the game froze once it took me back to the quest selection screen. Thankfully my data was saved and all I missed out on was the quest giver giving post-quest dialogue.

I had a blackout that knocked me back to the Shido fight in Persona 5. It wasn't too bad, but the problem was that the blackout happened three times during that particular night, the first time it happened I forgot to save, admittedly. But the next two happened immediately after beating him.