Most things I give up pretty soon, at least look up a walkthrough or ways to cheat it.
Only games I play hardcore tend to be racing. It's hard to put a number on that as there's often different events to try (unless you're in the very last thing left in the game), so I'll try this for a while, that for a while... But surely there have been many thing's that took at least several hours.
Then again,it took me 15 years to beat the Gauntlet mode of Wing Commander Academy, at least 100 hours of actual play time, but more likely several hundreds.







