The hardest part of Ultima Quest of the Avatar was that there were a few places where they botched the translation, and what should be the “correct” answer would actually decrease your virtue, and you were supposed to answer the other way (Like, “Dost thou ever lie to others?”, you’re supposed to say “yes”).
There was an item that’d let you see the map of the dungeon you were on. Poke around in the castle, you’d eventually find the secret walls, and hence the locked door (so of course come back when you have the key). Go down, and you realize that it’s way too easy to reach the bottom level, but notice that the map of the top level has another exit: Obviously you’re supposed to fight your way back to the top. Come out there, explore a bit, touch the balloon and you take off. Just take in the scenery for a bit, and eventually you’ll catch sight of the mountain cave, and realize that this is why a spell to control the wind even exists. Land at the cave, and of course you’ll investigate everything in there. And hey, that’s where the Stone of Spirituality is, I’d been wondering about that! OK, there are a lot of steps there, but all of them are fair.
Ultima Exodus was much harder, if only because so much of it was unintuitive. Like, being low-level is trivially easy, but leveling up makes combat nearly impossible, except you HAVE to level up to at least 3 to get pirate ships, which you need to reach the other world, which was the only place you could actually increase your power (which didn’t require leveling up at all), but you could only do it if you had ungodly amounts of gold, which you could only get in a reasonable amount of time by robbing the townsfolk, except that meant fighting the guards, who were impossibly hard unless you already had all the power you’d get from the gold. And then you have that the combat is just plain stupid, like only being able to use ranged weapons or spells directly vertically or directly horizontally, and then the final boss fight was, not against the serpent in the title, but against the floor, which was of course invisible, so you had to aim blindly.
I didn’t think it was that tough. Then (since my copy of the game was bought on 5.25" floppy) I was downloading the game from an abandonware site. All the reviewers thought it was very hard. What do my fellow Dopers think?
H2G2 had a quirk (well, a lot of them, but this one stuck out) - since the game is still downloadable and playable, I’ll add a spoiler: at some point, Marvin asks you for a particular item to get the door open. The thing is, the location where you need it is so cramped, you can only have one item with you, and unless you figured out how to “see into the future” to know what Marvin will want, he will never ask you for the item you have, making the game unwinnable - but nothing informs you of this, so you keep playing in vain. (On top of that, if you forgot to take your toothbrush with you when you left Earth, that’s the item you need.)
The toughest game I’ve finished is probably Myst, unless you consider Super Mario Galaxy to be tougher (and “finished” means you killed the main boss, as opposed to getting all 60 stars, then playing the whole thing again as Luigi).
… wow, because I figured out early that the Rot spell was the best spell in the game because it reduced guards HP to 1. There was this island city which had a ton of chests and, once I had the spell and a means to get there, I would just grind the hell out of looting and relooting and relooting that one city.
As for my answer, I don’t really play very difficult games and it has never been a goal of mine to see if I could play on the hardest of levels. The best I can come up with was that time at the Gold Mine in Atlanta’s Northlake Mall where I put up 25,000,000 points on Robotron: 2084, difficulty level 7, and I only stopped playing because I hit 256 extra men and immediately got killed when the 8-bit system rolled over to zero.
Yes, and how did you get the Rot spell? You couldn’t get a spell that high-level without spending a ton of money to raise your mage’s Int, and how did you get the money to do that?
Lol, I have no idea. The game is 35 years old. Pretty sure I built whatever magic user (wizard, I’ll say) to the required level as soon as I could, but beyond that, who knows?
Regardless, once I had the rot spell, the game was just grinding, grinding, grinding.
For a purely mechanical skill based difficulty aspect, the hardest would probably be completing the last chapter of Celeste “Farewell” as well as all the B and C-sides.
For a racking my brain type of difficulty, it’s completing all the levels in Baba is You. I like puzzles in general, and this one had some of the hardest and most fun ones to solve I’ve seen in any medium.
I did not finish Celeste. I did finish Super Meat Boy(but not the uber-difficult bonus levels) and Ms Splosion Man co-op, which I consider to be the hardest game I beat.
It was originally in English. I think of these and similar games (Wizardry is another example) as American JRPGs, from back before we ceded the world of turn based RPGs to the Japanese with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and their various successors.
ETA: To be fair, I’m not sure if the NES versions of these games were ported directly from the English originals or translated into Japanese and then back into English.
Wait, are we only counting the ones without the help of a Game Gene or similar device? Oh, all right…
NES: Double Dragon 1 & 2, Mega Man 1 & 2, The Legend of Zelda, Ducktales, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, Blaster Master, The Adventures of Bayou Billy.
Super NES: Uhhhh…WWF Wrestlemania Arcade…The Combatribes…Final Fight 3, I guess…and that other sidescrolling beat 'em up…and that other other sidescrolling beat 'em up…
Neo Geo: Sengoku…uh…Baseball Stars? Look, I was a damn paperboy at the time, it’s not like I could afford a well-stocked library.
Neo Geo CD: Aggressors of Dark Kombat. (Yeesh, you think your fighting game is broken…)
Playstation: Tonka Space Station. Hey, getting the wrench timing on those comet levels was tricky, shut up!
Dreamcast: Power Stone 2 or…Codebreaker…Codebreaker, Codebreaker…yeah, I’m going with Power Stone 2.
Playstation 2: I’m certain there was something!
Playstation 3: Deadstorm Pirates. At least I think I finished it. Most of my memories of that one are getting nailed by something every three seconds.
Back in college my roommate brought a TV and a Sega Genesis, but the only games we had were, oddly, Primal Rage and Tiny Toon Adventures. We played the shit out of both of them anyways. Primal Rage was terrible, but Tiny Toon Adventures actually turned out to be a decent little platform game. There was nothing original about it at all, but it did everything it was supposed to do reasonably well.
Oh, all right…