There was actually a trick on the first level that would let you have unlimited homing fireballs for the rest of the game. You could get to almost the end, then die then do it again until you got over a 100 mana. Then your fireballs became unlimited and the game became more or less reasonably difficult.
I’m surprised at these answers. Battletoads and Ninja Gaiden were difficult, but not impossible. (Not to put anyone down). Except for Krusty’s Fun House (I needed to look up guides for that one) and the Simpsons Arcade Game, I thought all Simpsons games were ridiculously hard and the goals or objectives were never apparent nor made any sense. I always though that using a Game Genie (or other third party device) was cheating. Then, when time became an issue and all these games were out, I changed my opinion.
Zelda…
There is a very simple algorithm for getting through level 9 of the second quest, assuming you have the silver arrow*: From the entrance, if you can go left, then go left. If you can’t go left, go up. If you can’t go left or up, go right, and then up in the next room (because, obviously, you don’t want to go left into the room you came from). This will get you to the upper left corner of the labyrinth, where you can easily make it to Ganon.
- To get the silver arrow, you need to go up from the entrance until you can’t go up anymore. The arrow is in a nearby room. Don’t know exactly where, but I know there are no evil tricks in that area.
I found Zelda’s second quest to be very challenging, but not “stupid hard.” You don’t need to find every hidden secret in the game to beat it, you only need to find the labyrinths, and find your way through them. Level 8 is the only cleverly hidden labyrinth, Level 2 is poorly hidden, and all the others are either near their quest-one-locations, or near a different level’s quest-one-location.
Kudos to the designers for ingenious tricks that keep the players on their toes: walking through walls, hiding the level 4 prize AFTER the boss, leave your money or your life, etc!
In terms of PC games, a few jump to mind:
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X-Com and (even more so) X-Com: Terror from the Deep. The games were wonderful games in many ways by hard in an unfair way, in that you would often lose a battle and have your squad wiped out purely by chance. The level/battlefield design was purely random, so now and then a battle would start, the door of your ship would open, and aliens would throw grenades into the ship and kill all your guys. Battle over. There was no way around it, no skill or tactic you could employ to change that.
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Most RTS games, but the first Age of Empires, simply by not placing the same rules on the computer as it did on you. It was nearly impossible to beat the AoE AI fairly because they appeared to have unlimited resources.
Wow. Good to know it wasn’t because I sucked.
I’m not exactly the most talented gamer in the world so there are those that might laugh at my responses, but:
Super Mario Brothers 2: I could never get anywhere in that damn game. I’ve finished every other version of Mario but that one loses me (I also hate it, so I didn’t really focus a great deal of time on it).
Heroes of Might and Magic V (or maybe it’s VI, whatever the recent on is) - The battle scenes are far better than it’s predecessors but your opponents get ridiculously good ridiculously fast.
I’ll second Kong: When I was a boy, I could never get anywhere (maybe I could finish a few boards)
I’ll third Contra: No chance of me finishing without the code.
–I know I’m forgetting one…
X-Com i never recalled as being TOO hard. Yeah, it was really tough the first 2 times I tried to play it (as I never had the instructions, and had to figure out the game by trial and error for the buttons). But I loved the randomness of X-com, and once you upgraded your weapons to Laser weapons the game became doable. Until you got laser weapons and all you had were basic firearms though- the game was designed to kick you in the butt. But i felt it stuck with the theme of “Superior Alien Technology” and that at first the invasion was swift. It’s only when you’ve played through 2-3x and you KNOW what to expect from the Aliens, that you can focus on trying to BEAT the game since you know which Techs to go after first. That’s still in my top 3 fav. games.
XCom2: That game was a dick.
I totally agree with you- as THIS was the game that would just punch you in the testicles repeated once you got halfway through the game. There would be unbeatable levels, levels where everytime you exited the ship EVERYONE would die thanks to unseen snipers, or the ever popular proximity grenade outside the ship doors. This one I’ve never beaten, and I still shudder when I think of the Aliens having captured a Cruise ship.
But it’s still incredibly fun, you just need to create like 10 save slots for your games, and rotate your saves, because if you save right BEFORE a mission, you’ll be screwed- as if there is an unseen sniper, no matter HOW many times you replay the mission, he’ll still kill you. You’d have to go back 2-3 saves and just call off the mission as you know what’s in store. This game was like 10x harder than XCom 1…
Yet, I still love it. One day I’ll beat it. One day.
How do you play those games? I used to play them.
Odd. I finished Krusty’s Fun House on my first sitting. Took about six hours.
The gorgeous SNES shoot-em-up Axelay was really, stupidly hard - partly because the collision detection was horrible.
I wanna be the guy However… that one is a tribute to so called “stupid hard” games, so it doesn’t really count.
Most games I think of are legitimately hard, like Golden Axe I never did beat that last boss.
Unfortunately I can’t think of anything, personally I’m having trouble finding ones that aren’t just plain bad (i.e. Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde). Maybe Ecco the Dolphin.
Well, to be fair the second quest was probably MEANT to be a bit sadistic, not to mention I find it to be legitimately hard instead of artificially ramping things up like HAHA YOU CAN’T SAVE LOSER! Like some games do.
Bah suck it up, it was the last boss. 
I finally beat that legitimately not less than a year ago (on my old Genesis itself no less). Before that I beat it using debug mode (super sonic v death egg bosses readygo). I never felt it was artificial difficulty, but to each his own.
Sonic 1 is sadistic, but only after you play other Sonic games because of some improvements they don’t have (i.e. if you’re blinking and get hit the blinking doesn’t make you invincible like it does in the other games).
Are we counting turning up the difficulty on games? I can make it about half-way through Myth II on legendary, and that’s with horribly abusing the save and speed system. I suppose I could beat the whole thing that way, but damn, that would be nuts.
Everyone back away! It’s not human!
The main reason that Ninja Gaiden is STUPID HARD is because you CAN NOT die while fighting any of the 3 final bosses, otherwise you will be SEVERELY punished. You get sent back THREE stage sections, to the beginning of the final world (the level with the yellow bricks). It’s bad enough that you have 5-10 minutes of playing catch up to do after that (and the boss is hard enough that you aren’t going to figure out its patterns on the first couple of tries) but if you die within any of the last 3 sections, you only get brought back to the beginning of that section!
I’ve said it before many times on this board, but Contra is NOT that hard. It takes practice, and you need to learn the stages, and there’s no way anybody is going to beat it on their first sitting (or even beat the first stage), but once you learn the game, it’s exactly the same every time though. A game which I can beat without using cheat codes every single time is not that hard. If you sit me down in front of a NES with Contra and a turbo controller, I WILL beat it without getting game over. I can’t say the same thing for Ninja Gaiden, or many other NES games which I still consider myself “good” at.
The very first Mega Man game on the NES. I remember that the disappearing blocks made me go crazy as a kid. It was so frustrating. Even though now the blocks aren’t as bad for me, but the game as a whole is still difficult.
I also know I can’t get far in Nobunaga’s Ambition for the NES. I guess I’m not that good at running a fief/country.
Ah, Ninja Gaiden. I’ve beaten all three legitimately. The second is fairly easy, you just have to be hard headed enough to keep going (you will, after all, die against the last three bosses). The same is true of the first, but the bosses were harder as I recall. The third was obscenely difficult and I didn’t beat it until 2004 (on the very same Nintendo I used to play it in 1991). Luckily, this happened at a party, whereupon I was promptly toasted by all present. My brother was quite proud.
The third was difficult because you had finite continues. I got to the point where I could beat the first four levels without once being touched, just from repetition. No wasted movement, read every situation the programmers throw at you and react appropriately. Pure muscle memory.
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade is like this. In the campaign mode any province with a strength of 6 or greater will be like playing against two players. This means they have two bases, can field double the number of units a single player could, and any “unique” units, they can have two of against you. Even without high province strengths, they get additional squads(honor guards) for free(players have to conquer and control provinces to earn honor guards) regardless of how many provinces they control. You don’t get any structures, especially advanced structures, when you attack a province(unless you have a special ability granted by controlling a specific territory) and they always get structures(often advanced ones) when attacking even if they don’t control the province which grants the forward base ability.
When you attack their home base, they have tons of fortifications and troops already built. When they attack your home base, you start with virtually nothing. and they can walk right over you. It’s pretty grossly unfair.
Enjoy,
Steven
You, sir, are a Ninja. Have you gotten any weird Ninja Dojo recruitment letters?
Not that I’ve ever known, though I imagine finding the letter is part of the initiation test.
No matter how much I play it, I can never do better than 2 or 3 levels in the arcade game Sinistar. Perhaps if I were 12 with a body full of Jolt Cola… perhaps I then would get to level 4. But that fucker is hard. Stupid hard.
Ikari Warriors on NES. The last stage was retarded hard. I swear it was impossible to beat.
Same goes for Commando on NES.