Every now and then, certain combo decks pop up that are extremely hard to interact with. In the best case, it amounts to playing against a clock - defeat your opponent before turn X or they pull of the combo and it's an auto-win. In other cases, it already comes down to the starting hand they draw - something over which you don't have any control.

Note that in Magic, you can take Mulligans, i.e. exchange your starting hand of cards for a new hand with one card less each time. (The current ruling is that you still draw 7 cards each time, but when you choose to keep a hand, you have to select the number of cards from your hand equal to the number of Mulligans you took, and tuck those away at the bottom of your deck.) The fewer different cards are required for a particular combo, the higher the chance it can already show up in your opponent's starting hand.

All in all, this isn't the worst example, because the option of taking a Mulligan, and the choices you can make in this regard, still add some degree of control to the situation which you don't have in some of the other cases I'm mentioning here. However, you can only make a Mulligan decision for yourself; you can't influence your opponent in theirs. Thus, if an opponent playing a combo deck makes a bad Mulligan decision, you technically rather win through a mistake of theirs than through your own skill.

This game all in all is very well designed with a perfectly motivating difficulty curve: Any time you think "alright, this is the point where it gets too difficult and I'm about to quit", that's precisely when you overcome the obstacle, and this reward hooks you for the next challenge which repeats the process. That's what made this game so addictive and gives it great replay value in my view, even despite some of the terrible "subverting-player-expectations" elements that the developers decided to include as wannabe plot twists.

However, there is a certain bug in the game that can occur randomly with any given boss you fight: A bug which will give them a skill - or rather, powers up one of the skills they naturally have - on such a level that it instantly kills you, irrespective of the number of life points you have. I've seen this happen to the skill "Fireball" (self-evident for any roleplayer) and "Magic Strike" (in German translated as "Magisches Trommelfeuer", i.e. a repeated bombardment of direct magical hits that you can't evade). With Fireball, the issue is that its area of effect also increases with level, so jumping out of the way of destruction is impossible if it already does such excessive amounts of damage. With Magic Strike, the issue is that you can't evade it, period. That already sounds broken enough, but usually these individual hits of Magic Strike do much less damage. It's just that this bug takes either skill completely over the top.

Theoretically, this bug can occur with any boss - that's what makes it a binary win condition: It can either appear or it doesn't, and depending on this, you're either completely screwed or you are not.

But I've heard it reported most commonly for Laiken and Razakel (a Lich lord and his demon friend), Geshniz (a commander of the Black Ring in the flying fortress in Broken Valley), and Ba'al (the demon in Broken Valley from whom you need to get the seal to open the entrance to the Hall of Echoes).
Once you enter said Hall of Echoes, though, which is the realm of the dead, you encounter a bunch of the bosses you previously fought again (because they're now dead and want to take revenge on you), all in rapid succession. This means here the bug can occur on any one of them: Your former Dragon Slayer brethren, Amdusias, Undead Sassan, Ba'al, Laiken and Razakel, and/orLord John and Lady Kara.

There are a few choices you have to deal with this bug:
- Reload an earlier save game, since the bug occurs when you enter the boss's dungeon for the first time. This isn't always viable, though, because some bosses have quite large dungeons before them, so you'd have to replay a bunch of the game and hope for the best when you meet the boss the second time.
- Send your save game in to the developers and have them fix it manually.
- Lower the game difficulty, which lowers your opponents life points and damage output (Can sometimes work, but if the bug is present, you might still just make it by the skin of your teeth).
- If you have the Developer's Cut version of the game, you can open the console and enable God Mode to get through this particular boss fight. In other words: Combat a bug with a cheat. Legitimate in the eyes of many, I assume, but of course still unsatisfying, because you only have the choice between "completely impossible" and "auto solve". Meaning, it's still a binary win condition.
- Find particularly savvy ways to play around the bug - most likely by using broken skills yourself. No, I'm not talking about cheating - instead, you're using skills in a way they probably weren't supposed to be used. One could also say: You backroute the boss fight.

During my current playthrough of the game, I encountered this bug twice:
- Once with Geshniz in the flying fortress in Broken Valley (lethal Fireball)
- Once with Lord John and Lady Kara in the Hall of Echoes (particularly frustrating, because now you have two opponents at once with this instantly lethal skill)

I've also encountered it previously with Ba'al and Undead Sassan. Though I'm not sure this was during the same game. During those previous attempts, all I could do was lowering the difficulty.

This time, I kept the difficulty at its highest, as I had been playing the entire game, and did some heavy lifting to navigate around the bug:
- I used a charge attack to get close to the boss right at the start, forcing them into melee. Since both lethal skills I mentioned are range skills, your AI opponents are less likely to use them in melee combat (even though there's technically nothing stopping them from doing so, see the next point).
- I then immediately used Splitting Arrows - a skill supposed to shoot arrows at several different opponents at once, but since this game doesn't give you any drawbacks for using ranged skills in melee combat, if you use this skill while standing in front of a single opponent, all the arrows will hit the same target, doing a buttload of damage to them.
- You can summon up to two companions in this game - one is an undead "pet" creature, the other one can be an Undead, a Ghost, or a Demon. Occasionally, the boss happens to hit one of your minions instead of you with their instant-kill attack, and then the skill takes a while to cool down until they can use it again. It's hard to influence what they go for first, though, since your minions move own their own, you can't steer them yourself. Once the lethal skill is in cooldown, you gotta take the boss out as fast as you can. You can still deal with their minions afterwards.
- The game is not turn-based, it's in real time - but there is a pause mode for when things get too hectical. You can also choose skills and select targets in pause mode, and then the commands are executed at the next possible occasion once you release the pause mode again. Thus, I've been using pause mode throughout both of these bugged boss fights. A guaranteed way to draw all the fun out of the game.

Of course, all of this only works if Charge Attack, Splitting Arrows, and a bunch of other high-damage output skills happen to be the ones you've skilled during leveling. Stunning Arrows might also work, I haven't tried; turning invisible with "Embrace of Shadows" doesn't work, I've been told. In short: You need to have trained very specific skills, or this last option of playing around the bug isn't really open to you.

You have the option of unlearning all your skills and re-investing your skill points (by paying the trainer at your Dragon Tower to do it). However, once you're in the Hall of Echoes, where you meet a bunch of the former bosses again in direct succession, there is no going back to the Dragon Tower (at least not while you're in human form, only in the parts where you are a dragon, I believe).

This game revolves around podracing and was re-released for Steam recently (it's originally from the beginning of the millennium, when Episode I came out, and the CD version was very unstable). I think there was a patch to make the CD version run on Windows 10, too, but just buying it for less than 10 € again on Steam seemed like less of a hassle. It can still occasionally crash, either at the beginning or (worse) at the end of a race - which, in an execution-based game like a racing game, of course is also a binary win condition, because then you have to play and win the race again. But it's comparatively infrequent. And just like with the previous example, you can debate whether a binary win condition arising from a bug qualifies as a design flaw, because at least it was unintentional.

What was definitely not unintentional is the layout of the race track "Abyss", the second track on the last difficulty rank (the Invitational Tournament / "Elite Class" in German).

Throughout the game, there are shortcuts here and there on various race tracks. This is fine and in-flavour: Podracing is described as a very rough sport with a lot of unfair tactics going on. Sebulba is the established champion in the movie because he's constantly cheating, sabotaging his competitors' vehicles both before and during the race. So people taking shortcuts during the race seems generally fitting. And of course, when you do so as well, you can expect to get a considerable advantage from this.

As the game proceeds, the shortcuts on the race tracks become less and less optional to take, because your AI opponents get better and start using the shortcuts themselves, too. As Lemmings players, we would say the backroute becomes part of the intended solution. (Kind of like on the ONML level "No problemming!") But in contrast to NeoLemmix, just knowing where the shortcuts are isn't enough: You need to get the execution right as well, because it's a racing game, and some of these shortcuts are very difficult to access, even when you know exactly where they are. Plus, every race has three laps, so you want to succeed at this several times in a row.

There is a level which I consider on the borderline of what's acceptable, on the third difficulty rank ("Galaxy Class"), called "Sebulba's Legacy" (named after the Sebulba described above): Right before the finish line, there is a steep curve without a wall on the right side, so if you're too fast, you fly off and fall down to a lower layer, from where it takes you quite a while to get back up again. You can still win if you fall down, though, as long as you've been fast enough during the rest of the race to establish a sufficient lead.

With the track "Abyss", this is not the case: Right at the beginning, there is an extremely tight curve in a tunnel with two layers. If you fall to the bottom layer during that curve - or any time later in that tunnel, because the top layer also has a gap and another curve where you can fall down - you're taken on a detour that costs you at last 30-45 seconds. This means that, if you fall down, even if you deliver your best performance ever during the rest of the race, you're still going to fail. Where all the other tracks measure your average level of racing ability across the entire track across all three laps, this one is a complete "do or die". The curve and the top layer of the tunnel form the binary win condition, and all of your other racing skills you've picked up so far don't matter.

Add to that, basically everyone of your opponents, because they're flying on autopilot, manages to stay on the top layer easily. Thus by means of exclusion, you also have to stay on top, or you're pretty much guaranteed to lose.

More than that, you have to be able to pull it off during all three laps of the race. I saw one guy who fell down during the last round and managed to catch up again with the first guy through some later shortcut and a good deal of luck. But I wouldn't bet on it. Anyways, you have to stay on top throughout the entire tunnel for at least two rounds of the race. And there's a bunch of stuff coming after that tunnel, of course, where you can still screw up additionally, like on any other race. I recently had the track favourite pass me by at the last jump before the finish line, when I had finally already managed to stay at the top layer of the tunnel for all three laps of the race. In that sense, it's almost more of a "binary lose condition" (fall to the bottom and you're done immediately), but there's no guarantee you'll win when you manage to suceed. Thus, any time you succeed on a given round, you're already anxiously looking forward to the next round.

I always manage to beat this track in the end - but I've never enjoyed playing it. And I don't know a single player of the game who does. Fortunately, it's the only track in the entire game with such a binary win condition. But that also means it creates a huge spike in difficulty, compared to what the player gets used to throughout the rest of the game (including the races that come after the track "Abyss").

Similar to the Divinity 2 example, there appears to be a Debug mode in which you can set yourself into autopilot, just like the AI drivers, to get through the curve. However, in this case this would feel more like cheating, because you're not using "God mode" to combat a bug, but to combat a conscious game design decision of the developers.

You have to assign the basher correctly, while facing in the required direction, and do so three times in a row, like on the race track "Abyss" in Star Wars Racer. The lemming turns left and right in such rapid succession that this basically amounts to chance in original Lemmings, without all the framestepping and rewinding. You can't even assign skills while the game is paused, like you can in Divinity 2. (At least you can select skills on the panel in the Mac version; in the DOS version, not even that is possible, though in this case, with only Bashers available anyway, this doesn't matter too much.)

In contrast to the "Abyss" race track, though, at least getting this Basher thing right is the only thing that the level requires from you - instead of adding in a bunch of other stuff before throwing you back into the dreaded obstacle again and yet again.

- You need to be aware that three Builder staircases act like a wall, even though lemmings can walk through single or double Builder staircases easily.
- You need to be aware that Blockers stop being Blockers when they lose the ground under their feet, even though terrain can easily float in the air in Lemmings, instead of "collapsing" when you remove its fundament.

You need to block right under the hatch with a lemming facing to the right, then with the last lemming turning around during bashing, you mine to free the Blocker (who continues walking to the right since that's the way he came out of the hatch), then build into terrain to stop the Miner and make him turn around as well. This is not only hard because of the tightly-packed crowd at release rate 99, in which you have to spot the last lemming facing to the left to make him the Miner; you also have to stop him quickly, because the terrain the Blocker is standing on is only one of these thin pipes from the Marble tileset, with water / abyss right beneath. Contrast this to "No added colours or Lemmings", where the terrain beneath the Blocker is much thicker, you have fewer lemmings, plus you don't need to stop the Miner anyway, he can just continue all the way through.