Was Rastan on the NES? That game is insanely hard.
Did anyone ever beat Rygar? I got to final boss but got stuck there without enough power left to win, then never played to the end again.
I played Rygar, but never finished it. I think my cousin, who owned the game, might have. But I’m not certain.
I haven’t thought about Battletoads in forever, but as soon as I read the OP I nearly started to cry thinking about how impossible and frustrating that game was.
Curse you, Battletoads!!!
Leah M - Yeah, that’s kinda what I’m getting at. Which games gave the NES such a fearsome reputation? It couldn’t have been just Battletoads (the franchise never went anywhere anyway). Good point in mentioning weird controls due to hardware limitations (Athena is the perfect example).
You want to differentiate between unplayable, tough to get to the end, frustrating, cheap (“Nintendo Hard”), go right ahead. It’s an open discussion.
Tom Scud - IIRC, Marble Madness was the first game with a definite ending; Paperboy and 720 also had them. Of course, with no continues in the first two and extremely limited continues in the latter, only a real pro ever got them. Anyway, the concept of a finite number of distinct levels with a definite finishing point isn’t a new one, and Japan embraced eagerly as it became clear that that was simply where arcade gaming was headed.
fusoya - I wish. I pulled it off at least twice, and I never came within a par 5 of completing Air Fortress or Final Fantasy with a Game Genie. (I came agonizingly close with The Punisher, but that damned Kingpin was a bulldozer.)
pulykamell - Wait, now I’m confused…the problem was that you didn’t have enough lives? Well, for starters, checkpoints are in place, so at some point you have to get it together no matter how many chances you get. Also, you do know that there’s a trick to get lots of lives (just don’t go over 127!) SMB1? Check any FAQ, it’s been common knowledge for ages. Other than that, getting through the last levels is simply a matter of steady nerves and good timing. I will say that SMB2 is an unusual experience (mainly because it used to be a completely different game, as has been well-documented), but not that hard for me to get used to. I’d put SMB1 and SMB2 about equel. SMB3, with all the powerups and enemies and scrolling levels and places to fly to and tips and tricks and secrets…ugh. Never cared for much. I guess Bowser is a pushover once you get to him, but the disappointing final boss isn’t that uncommon (Gradius, anyone?).
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Rampage is ridiculously easy. Surreally easy. If it weren’t for the mass demolition and partaking of sentients, it’d be a children’s game. The NES just doesn’t have the power to properly handle a game like this, the result being that you hardly get attacked, and food items are so plentiful, you can easily make up any damage. Even better, you get a free full life restore every week. The only challenge is 2-player; if you’re destroying cities on your own, it’s a walk.
Shinobi was an extraordinarily beautiful, detailed, and nuanced game for its time, and the corners Tengen had to cut for the NES port did it no justice whatsoever. Most of enemies have been simplified, and that made the game on the whole much easier. I think I breezed through it on my second attempt. Even the bonus stages are much easier.
Kid Icarus is just plain weird. It starts out absolutely murderous and gets steadily easier the further you get through it. It can take you literally dozens of attempts to get through the Underworld, but once you get your health bonuses and upgraded arrows (and even better if you can get the special weapons), it gets a lot easier. The second run through the game is pretty easy, and everything after that should be an absolute cakewalk. I’ve never seen any other game with such a completely backwards difficulty progression. (Oh yeah, you know, haggling for lower prices? The less likely you are to need it, the more likely it is to succeed.)
R.C. Pro-Am starts out really easy and gets steadily more painful the further you go, and annoyances like oil slicks, pop-up walls, and dash strips become more frequent. Even novices should have no trouble with the first 4 or 5 races. Since there’s no “ending” to this game, “hard” is a strictly relative term.
Rush ‘n Attack, because of the NES’s limitations, lacks what made the arcade version a real bear…i.e. lots and lots of enemies attacking at once. Nonetheless, Konami manage to slip in some sneaky ways to take your lives, and with a total of 7 stages, reaching the end definitely isn’t a breeze. The toughest part is the end of stage 6 with the three paratroopers attacking at once. This is also one of those games that’s a lot easier in two-player mode, mainly because it allows you to start each new life right where the last ended instead of getting thrown back to a checkpoint. For one player, I’d put this in “mildly challenging” territory.
(Seriously, though, am I the only one here who played Xenophobe? Talk about toning it down for the kids…)
When I think about the difficulty of NES games I think about Wizards and Warriors, which had IIRC two almost impossible spots.
In one spot you had to make a very difficult jump, which even with practice I could do maybe about 5% of the time. Fortunately, if you missed the jump you just fell down a few feet and could try again. In the other, you had to wait for a bubble to appear at exactly the right place so you could jump on it. It could appear in a few seconds or not appear for several minutes. Those two places were killers. I can’t tell you how many times I turned off a game after fifteen tries at jump #1 failed, or after I’d waited ten minutes for the bubble to appear. They just wrecked the flow of the game and served no real purpose other than to annoy (or, as The Angry Video Game Nerd would say, to be a shitload of fuck).
Other than that, the game was actually pretty easy, just time-consuming and frankly a little dull in places. As far as NES games go, Wizards and Warriors was no Ghosts and Goblins. But damn did those two spots embody Nintendo Hard at its stupidest.
I haven’t played the game since there were things like FAQs, and I don’t remember learning of any of these tricks through Nintendo Power or friends or anything. (unless you’re talking about the turtle shell trick–that one I remember being aware of, but not being able to consistently pull it off. Even when I did, I died so many times on level 8, I just shut the game off.) My favorite games in that series were SMB3 and SMB2. SMB1 was just an exercise in frustration for me.
When the Nerd did an episode about Battletoads, I was surprised that the focus of the episode was not the game’s fabled difficulty, but rather the dickishness of the two-player mode.
Marble Madness came out in 1984, relatively late to the “games with endings” scene. Adventure for the 2600 (mentioned in this thread) came out in 1979, Colossal Cave in 1976… even just limiting it to arcade games, Dragon’s Lair has an unambiguous ending, and came out a year before Marble Madness.
It might be the same spot, or a different spot with a similar issue that I’m thinking of with this same game (Wizards and Warriors), but I recall one spot you could only reach if you let an enemy knock you up onto a ledge, because you ‘bounced’ when the enemy hit you.
Wizards and Warriors was one of the first games I finished on the NES, and I was only 5 when we got one. Apparently I had way more patience back then, because I was playing the same game recently and got really agitated with it fairly quickly.
RC Pro-Am was infuriating. It had the most blatant cheap-ass AI rubber banding of any racing game before or since. I remember the map on the bottom of the screen on the later races. You would hear “PEWOOOO…” and see the dot moving amazingly fast around the track to catch up and beat you.
I fucking hated that game.