Anybody remember the Turbografx16? They had an adventure game on 2 CDs called Ys that was totally and utterly impossible. They also had one of the easiest games ever invented, but also one of the most fun: Bonk. If you’ve ever played it, you know what I mean. Now I’ve got that music in my head.
Me too! and sinistron was on that system too!
another hard game:Super Ghouls and Ghosts
The last guy in Duke Nukem 3D (in the football stadium) was a bastard.
Nope.
I think I remember this one… the name might have been Mace, or maybe that was an item I became so attached to or looked forward to so much that I decided it was the focus of the game.
To add to the list: Ultima: Exodus, for NES. My characters are almost invincible right now (as I still check in and play for a couple weeks every now and then, after nine years), all attacks just show up as curse symbols where damage should be (both for the enemies and for me), so it’s all one-hit kills everywhere and I have the MP/weapons/tactical skill to never get hit, I can walk across the lava to get to dungeons instead of doing whatever I’m supposed to for it to move, and I’ve teleported enough (god bless that infinite MP) that I randomly have appeared in the middle of a mountain range with a castle where there are greater daemons everywhere. I have twenty silver or gold picks and tails and all sorts of crap, but I just can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Not like it would matter, because mapping dungeons just doesn’t work. Trust me on this.
This game is frigging impossible.
Maybe Popful Mail, for Sega CD. It’s not impossible by a long shot, because if you can make any of the jumps in the last two stages using anyone except Gaw, you can beat it without breaking a sweat. OTOH, if you don’t use Gaw, it takes someone who can just barely beat the game about half an hour to deal with any one of them, and that’s essentially all the last level, and most of the Chilly Stage. The four final jumping puzzles were disturbing together. Two of them were no problem for any characters, one was fun with Popful and easy enough with Gaw (20 and 4 or 5 minutes, respectively), and the last one took me three and a half hours, and six cans of Dr. Pepper. I didn’t bother trying it again with any characters. It was just painful. Then I went on to take down three of the last bosses, in succession, no break and no problems, and then I went to the bathroom and lost my groove, so I died and went to bed. The next morning (that afternoon, more accurately), refreshed and awake, I proceeded to slaughter them in one try.
Sven T. Uncommon, the last boss of the most memorable stage by far, was my very definition of “hard boss in a platform game” for many, many years. He had no recognizable pattern in his attacks, said attacks hit no recognizable pattern of places on the platform and could damage you mid-air, and his attacks did 35% of your max HP damage, so you always felt like you were wasting healing items (which go 30-50-90-100% healing), and he had one that did 45%, so you couldn’t feel safe using the 50 thing. I suspect the healing system and defense values were made specifically for this one fight. To top it all off, only one character (Popful) could actually damage him, because Tatto’s shots took a whole cycle of the inpenitrable sword arm to hit him from the one spot the angle was possible (where he could kill you in less time than that, and you had to hold still to aim the shot), and Gaw had no ranged attacks and if you touched him, you would be dead before you could control the character again.
I think I actually enjoyed fighting him more than anything else in the game, really.
I didn’t exactly enjoy this one 3D-plane fighter for Sega CD, either (Star Core?). It took me about three weeks to survive past the level-select, by accidentally crashing into the Hard version (never managed anywhere else), during which I survived approximately long enough to determine that it was, in fact, impossible. Note that approximately means that I had to make a guess, because I never survived long enough to actually see what was shooting at me, I just blew up repeatedly (holding down the special weapons buttons in hopes they’d clear enough to run) until I got a game over.
Doom II wasn’t that tough on Ultra Violence. Took a lot of saving and restoring, but it was definetly beatable.
Dark Castle was a great game. Took me years and years, but I did finally beat it. Dark Castle II, on the other hand, was just straight up evil. I loved that one, too, but I never came close to beating it. (I played both on a Mac, btw, which might have made the difference.)
Nobunaga’s Ambition regularly kicked my ass. If I could get a foothold, I’d do okay, but the first few turns were just freakin’ impossible. I had a friend who was a real wizard with it bring his saved games to school on a floppy, so that I could go home and finish his games.
My vote is for the Raiders of the Lost Ark game for the Atari 2600. It required you use both joystick simultaneously, which was an impossible feat unless you were a baboon. If you don’t recall the Atari controllers, they consisted of a joystick with a square base and a single button in the upper-left hand corner. You held the stick in your right hand, and supported the base with your left, using your left thumb to hit the button. Obviously, this was years before anyone had even heard of “ergonomics.” So even if you had both sticks resting on a table top, it was still impossible to hit either button without letting go of the stick. Which meant you would die. But if you didn’t let go of the stick, you couldn’t do anything, and you’d eventually die. You died a lot in this game, but only from one of two things: falling off cliffs or being bitten by tse-tse flies. There might have been a German involved, too, but I’m not certain.
If it took alot of saving and restoring doesn’t that mean it was tough? Any game is beatable if you can save after each enemy you kill.
Someone took mine. Ghosts and Goblins on NES was hard as shit. I beat the end boss once and then find out that you have to start all over becaue it was a dream or someshit.
Rushin’ Attack was hard too.
Ikari Warriors.
Hey, what about the SwordQuest games from Atari? The ones that you had to play to find the clues–with additional clues from related D.C. comic books, etc…?
If I remember correctly, Atari stopped the contest (there were four games: Airworld, Earthworld, Fireworld and Waterworld) and never produced the fourth game, Airworld.
Those were impossible if you never knew about the contest (which I didn’t–espeically because the 2600 and the accompanying games were hand-me-downs) or the comic books. Plus, hey, it’s hard to finish a game that Atari never actually put out. 
I just remebered the most freakishly difficult game ever: Project Gothom Racing for Xbox. Anyone who says they beat this game is a liar.
Crikey ! :eek: I remember playing this about 15 years ago, never could work out how to get past the door on the spaceship, nobody else in the office could either. Time to have another go.
Tks
I remember those games!! I used to get Atari Age magazine and they had an article about the Tournament of Champions for the first of the Swordquest games. They had a picture of the winner being handed his gold and jewel encrusted goblet by a scantily clad hussy. The guy who won looked like he weighed 350 lbs and had yet to move out of his parents house, though he had relocated from the 2nd floor down to the basement.
Yeah, Atari never produced the last game, because I think that was around the time that the whole ET game fiasco came back to slam them financially.
Hmm… I beat that game. I was sick for a week once when I was in like 7th grade and I played it all day and most of the night when I wasn’t sleeping. Great game. It was very difficult. I remember restarting the game like a million times until I “learned” that you shouldn’t level up. It really does you no good: you get a modest HP and MP raise (IIRC) but the monsters become insanely more difficult. So I spent most of the game at level 2 I think until I got everywhere. Lots of dungeon resets. Lots. Those suckers were tough. And floors and floors of them… ugh.
The boss fight is fucking tragic. I won’t spoil it… you’ll be there some day. Ever consider gamefaqs? They’ve got hints and walkthroughs. Worth it after all this time.
Reading it through now I never realized you could actually play the game by raising levels. I almost want to go play it again.
I see now I had to have been at least at level 5 for some portion of the game. God that game was tough.
I have never ever ever been able to get more than 5 minutes into the original Metal Gear. Yet I kicked Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2’s ass.
I also could not get past the first 5 minutes of Space Quest IV. This spaceship thingy would fly around and zap me for no reason.
Current game? Advance Wars for Game Boy. It is freaking impossible to win the last battle, and if do win you can unlock an even harder mode. I’ve also heard that on the higher levels, Amplitude for PS2 requires almost super-human reflexes.
Oh, and Ethilrist–you need a program called “MoSlow”–it will fix that problem for you. Try googling it.
Yep. Which is why I’d say that any game that lets you save whenever you want is merely “difficult” and not “freakishly difficult.” Freakishly difficult means you have to play for twenty minutes at a stretch without making a single mistake, or you start all over.
I’m playing it right now, and it’s the first time I’ve managed to take the analgesic…
:o
FWIW, if you look at the HTML code for the page with the Java Hitchhiker’s Guide, you can get the address of the .z5 file that contains the game. Download that, and get a text game interpreter like WinFrotz, and you will be able to save your game – critical when you’re coping with the babel fish puzzle.
Going from memory here…
Entire Gradius series. Entire Puzzle Bobble (a.k.a. Bust-a-Move) series. Rolling Thunder. Aggressors of Dark Kombat. World Heroes 2 (Dio! Aaaagh!). Castlevania. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. F1 Exhaust Note. The Guardian Legend. Rambo (what is it with all these NES games that get progressively more and more torturous?). Gran Turismo 3 (my god, have you SEEN some of the things you gotta do to get 100% completion??). Sega Sports Tennis. Contra 3. Paddle Mania. Ghosts 'n Goblins. Ghouls 'n Ghosts. 1942. 1943 (man, some Capcom early games were real stinkers, huh?). Anything and everything named Silpheed. Every RPG ever created. Ninja Gaiden. The Ninjawarriors. Kaiser Knuckle (you don’t know the MEANING of the word “cheap” until you’ve played something like this). Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. Samurai Shodown 3. DJ Boy. Beatmania IIDX 6th Style. WWE Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth. Daytona USA. Lethal Enforcers 2. Every snowboarding game ever created. Ring King. Fightingmania: Fist of the North Star. Ninja Assault. Wrestle War. Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. Fatal Fury 3, Road to the Final Victory. Golden Tee Golf. Athena. Ikari Warriors series. Joust. Bubble Bobble series. Arkanoid series. Bloody Roar 3. Dragon Spirit. Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder 2. Bubbles. Tekken series. NFL Blitz 2001. Xybots. Hang-on. Galaga '88. Pac-mania. Rygar (original). Spy Hunter (original). NASCAR Racing. Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow And The Flame. Pilotwings. Prop Cycle. Operation Wolf. Flight Commander. Myst 3: Exile. Duke Nukem 3D. Mr. Do’s Castle. Cosmo Gang: The Video.
Okay, I guess that’ll do for a start.
See, this is why I use cheat codes and don’t give a damn about honor or fairness or righteousness or any of that junk.
Y’know, I partially agree. It’s a fun racing game, but the whole “kudos” system is bullshit, and the tracks aren’t laid out to be aimed towards “kudos” anyway. Sega GT 2003 is FAR better.
Elevator Action, a old game on the nes. It’s actually a fun game, if it weren’t for the bug that completely fuxxors up the game screen causing the graphics to shift and make your characther be unable to move. I’d get killed more by accidentally jumping off a elevator than by any of the actual enemies.
And I don’t think you could die either when the bug had done all it’s work. I’d keep getting shot by the spies and it never did any damage, just caused me to move a little to the right or left.
Oh, and that Hitchhiker’s game is hard(well, for me it is). I got ‘killed’ when I told my characther to sleep. The Vorlon’s demolished my house and then I had to go to the hospital to treat the wounds caused by them. Couldn’t think of anything to do, other than that.