There is a game for the Atari 2600 called 'Bugs'. Released in 1982, it depicts gorgeous, gargantuan, blocky bugs, which crawl rapidly to the top of the screen and kill your ass. Your task is to shoot them before they can do this. But reader, it is hard. Those bugs reach the top of the screen at lightning speed, leaving you very little time to pick them off.
There is just no balance or finesse to the one single gameplay mechanic: moving your cursor around to shoot those things. The cursor moves in this horrible cumbersome way, often snapping to positions just left or right of the bugs' hitboxes, leading to immediate, unstoppable death.
There is also, if this wasn't bad enough, an orb-shaped thing awaiting you just underneath the enemy bugs. This thing will kill you if you touch it, creating an impasse that stops you from aiming at whichever bug is out of reach when you are on one side of the orb. The result? Near-instant death. So far, so consistent.
While I do like the design of this game - those big, juicy bugs and the flashing screen of pink-green-orange-blue horizon - the game is more or less unplayable crap.
This is probably just how Ender of Ender's Game felt. Also, one of the bugs is a lizard.
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