Ultima for the NES:
I remember a nifty way to play through that game without ever leaving the safety of being Level 1. See, the game had a wonderful feature that allowed you to create characters, then create the parties from those characters, pretty much at whim. Make a fighter, play the fighter through one party, then swap the fighter into a different party later, and so on.
Now, the only reason you ever needed to leave level one (if I recall correctly) is to get the boat, which you can only get from pirates, who don’t appear until you hit level five. What to do? Advance a party to level five, kill the pirates, snag a boat. Then start a new party with all first level characters, except for one of the level five characters with the boat. Now this party will have the boat, too (equipment sharing was rather bizarre). Play a bit, then kick out the fifth level character, and swap in a first leveler. Presto, all first level characters, all easy monsters, and a boat. Woohoo! Blaster Master for the NES:
Dear God, that game was a pain. Mostly due to the fact that there was no freakin’ way to save your game. You had to play through the whole thing in one sitting. And this wasn’t a quick game - it was like Metroid. Whoever came up with that brilliant idea should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. Metroid for the NES:
Speaking of which… I recently unlocked the original NES Metroid using Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion, and played for a bit. Ye gods, that game was tough. Two things made it especially difficult: First, you always start the game with 30 life. Even when you have 6 energy tanks. (Okay, this was more annoying than difficult.) However, the really tough thing was the conspicuous lack of a map, combined with a world that was as convoluted as any Metroid game to date. At one point in my youth, I was able to roam around from memory. No more, alas. Sweet game, though. MDK 2 for the Dreamcast
Holy. Freakin’. Cow. That was a controller-thrower if ever there was one. The last boss took me an eon. And immediately after beating it - but before the ending started to roll - the power went out. I sold the game in disgust two days later. Final Fantasy on the NES
Yeah, the first one. You had to wander around leveling up for an hour just to be able to survive the first dungeon. It took several battles to save up enough money to buy a freakin’ potion in the beginning. And everything in that game was expensive. Lots of leveling up. Oh, and of course, there’s the wonderful experience of spening 30 minutes fighting the last boss, knowing he’s gotta be within an inch of his life (and you being within an inch of your own), and seeing the bastard cast Cure4, thus completely healing himself. F**ker. I did beat it, though. Eventually. Rayman for PlayStation
Beautiful. And hard. Not necessarily in that order. Made the second one look like a cake-walk. Super Monkey Ball for GameCube
Every single level after about the 15th on Normal Difficulty makes you wanna cry for your mommy.
One thing’s for certain - the games of today ain’t got nothing on the games of yesteryear in terms of sheer tear-your-hair-out difficulty. Nothing says “newbie” like some gamer claiming Resident Evil 2 was the hardest game ever made.
Jeff
I’m finding Metroid Prime much tougher. First sticking point was that Chozo ruins plant boss. Ye gods… why is the first boss usually the hardest you encounter until about half-way through the game? Now I’m stuck in the pirate mines… To make it to the boss, you’ve really got to have a very good fighting strategy (especially if your reflexes aren’t lightning quick). Then once you kill the boss, you’re still nowhere near a save station (well, not close enough for me)…
My room mate gave up after being unable to escape the frigate at the beginning of the game. He’s got an issue with doing stuff over and over again. I feel the same way… it gets to feel a bit like practicing the piano… but it hasn’t stopped me from playing.
Blaster Master is why emulators were invented. I still have a saved game where I’m wandering around the last level - every surface is a spike! I literally can’t leave the tunnel without dying!
My hardest one would be Star Voyager for the NES. It takes about a tenth of your energy to move from one sector to an adjacent one. Each sector is infinite - you can only change sectors by hyperspacing, which involves accellerating in a straight line. If you hold your speed at just under warp, you can power up the jump, which lets you move more than one space (though you still use up a tenth of your energy per square, you don’t have to stop and speed up again). Run out of fuel and die; it’s that simple.
There are a bunch of space stations and planets to land on. One planet will have a super laser upgrade, and another will have a better shield for you. If your ship takes a major hit, the only space station that can fix you is way up in the top left corner of the map. If you lose your life support, you’re screwed unless you’re within one jump from that station. Even then, you’re probably still screwed because while you run back to base to get fixed, the enemy will spread across the solar system.
Oh yes. The enemies. Entering an enemy-held territory will cause you to be under constant attack by dinky little ships from every direction until you warp out. Being hit will cause you to slow down, so you’ll waste about three times as much fuel just trying to get out as you would on a normal jump. There are also other ships which don’t attack, but float around. My brother and I thought that these were motherships or something, and if we could just shoot those, the others would go away.
I never found out. As far as I can remember, we never even cleared a single sector of bad guys. I’m looking around for a controller to throw just thinking about this game.
Depends on your party. On a lark, I once went with four fighters. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to overwrite my previous save, so I kept on postponing going to the inn. After I killed Garland with no casualties, I decided to roll with it. And even if it did take a long time to level up, once you were high enough level, it was trivially easy. Of course, seeing Chaos occasionally cur4 himself when he was at 3 HP was made up for by also occasionally seeing him cur4 when he was still at 2000. True to his nature, Chaos chose his spells randomly. There were also actually two versions of Chaos, which used different spells.
And I’ve beaten the Doom II final boss without cheating, on Ultra-Violence. I never worried about the timing of my rockets, just loosed a continuous stream of them as the platform was rising. I mean, you get 63 rockets on that level alone, plus however many you came in with. As for repeated saves, I’m currently working through restricting myself to one save per level (at the very beginning), and 100% kills/items/secrets. It’s still not incredibly hard.
Final Fantasy on the NES
Yeah, the first one. You had to wander around leveling up for an hour just to be able to survive the first dungeon. It took several battles to save up enough money to buy a freakin’ potion in the beginning. And everything in that game was expensive. Lots of leveling up. Oh, and of course, there’s the wonderful experience of spening 30 minutes fighting the last boss, knowing he’s gotta be within an inch of his life (and you being within an inch of your own), and seeing the bastard cast Cure4, thus completely healing himself. F**ker. I did beat it, though. Eventually.[/QUOTE}
I tried this myself, and didn’t find it that difficult most of the time. The trick was using a small area (anyone that played the game knows where this is) that has monsters of a far higher level at that point. After some cases of “fight one set, run to inn, repeat”, eventually you get powerleveled very, very quickly, as well as quite rich.
My party was Black Belt, Fighter, Black Mage, White Mage if you are interested.
Actually the first boss is so easy it’s not even funny. Just walk right in and kill Garland. It’s surviving walking around the dugeon that requires leveling up.
And Chaos can be beaten in 3 turns, easy. Depends on the level.
I’ve found the game was pretty damn hard until you finish the Marsh Cave, then got a little better, finally being fairly easy by the time one gets the airship(The Ice cave is a damn pain though).
I have Super Monkey Ball on my cell phone. I thought I couldn’t get past the second level because the buttons are too small but maybe it’s because the game really is that hard? How many times has it been mentioned here already, 2 or 3?
[qupte] I know how to do it in theory. If you managed to hit that target, twice, without cheat codes, with all those monsters popping up behind your back shooting fireballs at you and having to run through the poison every time you missed… well, kudos to you.
[/quote]
You have to hit it three times. However, there’s a trick to doing it without cheating.
Surviving the toxic waste and the ever-growing horde of demons is tough enough; doing it while standing still long enough for the platform to rise, three times, is just asking for trouble.
One must time the rocket launch so that the demon’s brain is hit as the platform is rising, then walk off the platform when it’s at its full height and send a second blast into the brain as you fall. Then you only need to survive the environment one more time, instead of two.
Beating that game on ultra-violence without any hints or codes was frustrating but worth it.
At least it didn’t have that annoying “get pinned by an enemy; randomly push buttons until the game randomly decides to let you go” feature of the arcade game.
I’ve never seen a version of original TMNT that wasn’t broken in some way. I had a legitimate copy for a 286 PC years ago where level four (which is level three on the NES version) consisted of a single black screen which you had to navigate in a certain way to beat as random characters floated through the air.
All the ROMs on the web seem to be copied from an original that’s defective, as the game stops working right when you find the correct door to get to the Technodrome in level 5. However, this could very well be an error in the cartridge, as I don’t know how anyone could have gotten so far without either a legitimate save game feature in the PC version or save state in an NES emulator. If levels 5 and 6 really are missing from the NES cartridge, would anyone know?
Anyway, plugging away at such a crazily difficult game when I was 8 really built character. Despite the bug in level 4, I did eventually beat the whole thing. Boy, was I proud.
You want difficult? try beating the facility level in under 2 minutes for the invulnerability cheat. Jebus. At least its not as bad as Perfect Dark. Some of those cheat times were designed to be only possible to unlock by plugging the gameboy version in. a cheap tactic if I ever saw one.
2 games i found particularly fiendish:
Red Alert 2. the last level of the Soviet campaign. I rolled over the sovs as the allies. i crushed the Allies as the Soviets, but the last level pits you against an opposing Soviet faction with better weaponry, more factories, and nukes. Allies vs Soviets are totally balanced, but Soviet vs Soviet is ungodly difficult. it nearly reduced me to tears. I never did finish that f*cker off.
and
Ghostbusters 2 for Pc
Is this game even possible? I can get past the first level in the courtroom, i can sometimes make it with the swinging into the windows of the psych hospital, but I can’t make it past the goddamn orderlies. Pissed me off to no end. Almost made me swear off gaming totally
Currently though, Max Payne New York Minute Mode is a real bitch sometimes. Killing those guys quickly is hard to do whilest surviving and trying to get to the exit in under a minute. Bullet time is not always your friend.
I’ve never actually been able to MAKE it to Chaos. I can get into the time-warped dungeon, but my cure items and White Mage spells always run out quick, and I always have to leave. Which resets the frelling thing.
(The fact I always get to the time-warp without my characters upgrading might have something to do with this, I suppose…)
I beat the last level on Doom II without any cheat codes – a lot of retries, but no cheats. Can’t remember if it was HMP or Ultra-Violence, though.
The odd thing is that I’m not a big FPS player. The only versions of Doom I eveer played to completion were the Atari Jaguar version of Doom and the Macintosh version of Doom II.
Oh, good, it’s not just me. I enjoyed TR1 on the PlayStation, so much that I gritted through TR2 and gave myself a pat on the back for doing so. But TR3 was just so annoyingly ridiculous to navigate that I gave up on it after two hours.
IIRC there was a game out for the Spectrum called “Murder at the Mansion.” I could never win because in the middle of a town, in England, unless you found food and water lying about somewhere you die of starvation or thirst
