Pretty much all of them... I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.

I beat it as an adult but as a kid could never beat the Lion King video game. Spent hours on that game

Most NES games; those fuckers were TOUGH

Battletoads

Earthworm Jim

Shit, I'm dating myself.

I don't know why but we had Myst and it never failed to annoy 8yr old me every time.

Loved it but sucked

Commander Keen

xcom 2

Daggerfall. I played that game to death and didn't even make it past the third or fourth quest.
Eventually I'd give up and just wander off to do whatever I felt like. I must have visited every major city and country, but never set foot in one of those annoying dungeons :)

For me its factorio. I always start, get into problems, realize I fucked up the layout and am thinking 'better just start fresh'. So I have a couple hundred hours in the game, but I never completed it.

• Prince of Persia 3D
• Age of Empires II

GTA 3 / Vice City. My brother had a PS2 and would let me play. I never bothered with the story / campaign, I just liked to wonder around, steal cars, and drive. I enjoyed using cheat codes to spawn tanks and get full wanted level and outrun the cops.

All those old LucasArts games (Day of the Tentacle, LOOM, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, &c) and similar adventure games (Kyrandia, King's Quest, &c). My mother played all of them and beat them, and while I watched her play I never really managed to finish any of them without looking up guides.

Battletoads

Jurassic Park SNES. Surprisingly for that era, I never considered actually reading the manual. I played and beat it a couple years ago, it's a gem.

Lara Croft tomb raider on Play Station 1

Was obsessed with Pokemon...

Got to Victory Road

Never found out how the hell to leave Victory Road

RIP in Peace

Did not beat a Pokemon game till Gen 4

2 - Copy of game was stolen from me...

3 - Skipped this generation due to being bullied for liking Pokemon

4 - Beat Diamond!

I could never beat the Harry Potter games because there are parts where you need to trace certain symbols at a certain speed to learn a spell which are required to progress through the game, and trying to get both the hand dexterity and mouse dexterity to follow through is worse than button-mashing levels.

The Water Temple was a nightmare of a level. Easily the hardest point in the game. If you stick with it, the everything that comes after it seems relatively straightforward!

That being said, having finished the game multiple times many years ago, I played through Breath of the Wild then went back to Ocarina of Time, and it felt very dated. Lots of nostalgia, but the control system is that of a very primitive game by today's standard for open worlds.

As for your question though, The Lost Levels in the Super Mario Allstars game. I've never gone back to it after all these years, might be worth trying again now with fresh eyes :)

I'm currently trying to finish the 7th Saga. Every time I think I've made it farther then ever, I recognize something.

I'm also realizing there really wasn't much content in these old RPGs, just a lot of forced grinding.

Vagrant Story was extremely confusing for a kid that just started learning English as second language, but I really loved the character designs and tactical real time gameplay. Now I know there were several systems I didn't understand but also the game itself hides it from you like your weapon slowly switching it's damage type according to what you hit, and also the story is fantastic.

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. My brother and I would play split screen, and we always hit a point where we had no idea where to go

Sonic 2

I beat 1, 3 and & Knuckles, but never 2.

Diddy Kong's Quest for the SNES. I always got stuck in K.Rool's Keep, got frustrated, took a break, forgot the game existed for a couple of weeks/months, and then started over from scratch when I realized that I wasn't used to the controls anymore.

Tetris.

Tazmania for the Sega Genesis. I didn't like the game all that much but I didn't have a lot of choice back then. I don't think I ever passed the mine stage.

Jazz Jackrabbit

The original sonic the hedgehog! I could do green hills blindfolded, but the next zone (marble volcano or something) would always wreck me

Rogue, never beat it, still pay it though...

I'm not a gamer, but I got really into ff8 in high school. I tried a bunch of other rpg games back then too, but I could never beat them. I always got to a point where I wasn't strong enough to win a battle but didn't want to go back and grind, so I'd eventually give them up.

...not sure what that says about me as a person.

Most of them, I sucked at games in the pre-save era. I don’t remember if I ever got to 8-4 in Mario.