Re: The games you love to hate
Add another one to the list for me: Ecco the Dolphin for the Dreamcast. That game is so frickin hard, even after playing through it twice I still get stuck in some areas, but it's fun to play as a dolphin (yes you heard me!) and some of the later levels are spectacular. It's a bit tedious early on, but after the first part it gets so full of atmosphere and has some interesting environments. The graphics are still good even to this day (although the framerate isn't quite as smooth as I remember it and the draw distance is a bit short), some levels have more detail in them than most modern games do.
And it actually has one of the most suprising features that I didn't even realise until now: physics-driven animations. For example when you turn, the front part of your body arcs in that direction first and then the rest of your body kinda snakes along, and it's definatly not a pre-made animation since it's totally dynamic based on the direction and angle you move at. And when one of your fins scrapes along something, it actually moves around it instead of going through it, and it seems like hit detection is VERY acurate (I've never seen any clipping between objects and the environment, which is suprising for a game like this). Actually, you can tell that the physics engine was a little TOO acurate, since when you run into a corner the framerate drops really low while it calculates exactly where your model is pushing into the environment.