Well, I wasn’t playing it on that difficulty level (I tried a couple times and did die in about 10 seconds). On easier levels it’s still hard but more like a normal shooter, and a lot of fun. But as Airk said, it is possible to be good at these types of games.
I’ve played E.T., on an Atari console, and it’s really not that hard. It’s frustrating at first to levitate out of one of those pits only to fall right back in, but unless you have serious short-term memory issues, you quickly figure out where you can go on each screen so that you land on solid ground rather than back in the pit.
Unfortunately for the game, you have to actually read the manual to understand how to play and win. There’s an icon at the top of the screen, in the middle, that changes as you walk around. It shows what kind of “zone” you’re in, and the various zones are scattered around pretty well randomly. There are zones to call Elliot to save you from the FBI guys and scientists, to show you where phone pieces are, to eat Reese’s Pieces for energy, to teleport to the next screen, stuff like that. You just push the button in each zone to activate it if you want to use that ability. And when you finally get the phone assembled, you go to the forest screen, find the “call home” zone, and call the mothership, which then comes to rescue you. Whee. It’s a dinky little game, but not at all impossible to play.
Wow.
The music alone has me at hello. It would be nothing more than Epic Art to beat that difficulty setting on one credit.
Respect Indeed.
And here I am, having tracked down ikaguraga, (SP) and Rez, simply because I heard they where that hard. But, nothing compares to that.
If you like bullet hell shmups and want a decent challenge check out the Touhou series. Like Commander Keen said they’re hard, but really fun. Plus if you manage to perfect clear on lunatic you can walk around as a god among men and be revered at having the reaction time of a fighter pilot on adderall.
Gameplay clip of someone downing a boss in one of the more recent ones without dying or bombing.
FWIW, my understanding is that bullet hell shmup fans don’t use continues or extra credits, the view being that “anybody can beat a game like that.”
One more. Top Gun for the Nes. If I had a nickel for every time I ran an f-16 into the side of an aircraft carrier I would be carrying no student loans. Of course I probably would not have gone to college, since I’d have been rolling in nickels.
My cousin joked that it was a Japanese airforce sim from ww2.
What? That wasn’t hard at all! You just have to know that landing a plane has to happen nose up.
I don’t want to be dismissive, but have you played that game?
Once you figured out the trick to landings, they weren’t all that bad. The trick being : control your altitude with the speed controls, and control your speed with nose angle (AFAIK, that’s also true in real life). If the game says “up ! up !”, increase speed. If the game says “slow down !”, raise the nose.
Using this, I managed to only crash 3 times out of four ! 
It’s more a simulation than a game, but Grand Prix Legends, the 1967 Formula One racing simulation, is very difficult to learn and nearly impossible to master.
Oh, yes, yes I have played Top Gun on my old NES. I remember it fondly. Not nearly as horrid as some of the others.
I’ll agree that Grand Prix Legends is a very technical game. Good call. Great game, from a lethal period in racing, and it reproduces it superbly.
Watch the AVGN review on Top Gun and then watch the review of the Power Glove.
NASCAR Racing 4 was based off of the same engine that Grand Prix Legends used. Just because they were heavy stock cars on mostly ovals didn’t mean it was easy. I’m not sure I ever made a full lap at Michigan without spinning out.
While GPL and other race sims have a steep learning curve (the original GTR was the toughest I ever played), they are learnable with a force-feedback steering wheel. I don’t think I had any real talent for them, but with a lot of practice I was able to lap consistantly and race competitively online.
I don’t know about claiming “master” when there’s people out there doing things like playing two ships by themselves, but I can score Rank S on the first two stages, and have good odds of doing all of Normal difficulty on one credit if I don’t get score-greedy. Ikaruga is a wonderfully well-crafted shmup, but I’m not sure why it’s gotten its reputation for difficulty. Simply surviving through the stages is relatively easy for a shmup once you’ve gotten a grasp on the polarity system and attack patterns of the major enemies, it’s the scoring system that has all the challenge. I think it’s just that the latest gaming generation hasn’t had a lot of exposure to the shmup genre in general, so they don’t have the foundation that the more sophisticated shmups like Ikaruga rely on. It’s like jumping into I Wanna Be The Guy without having played any of the oldschool 2D platformers before…
The old NES Blaster Master and Top Gun I thought were pretty easy. I wound up becoming a flight sim nut, though, so even as a proto-geek I took pretty easily to the carrier landing and refueling bits. Blaster Master, I remember being something like Gradius - once you die and lose all your powerups, the game becomes significantly harder, but it’s not actually that unreasonable to finish it entirely in one life once you know where you’re going and what you’ll be facing.
I’ll cast my vote in for Battletoads though. I only ever finished it twice, back in the day. It’s a long game with a lot of entirely different types of gameplay, and most of it is not very forgiving. With two-player mode imposing its friendly fire and scrolling restrictions, I think a full no-warp 2P clear of Battletoads would be one of the more impressive gaming feats to pull off.
Ah, which reminds of another game. One of the lesser known NES titles was Fester’s Quest. Essentially a Blaster Master clone in a vaguely Addam’s Family theme, it was another one of those powerup-hoarding games, only unlike BM, it was brutal about killing you with cheese attacks. Definitely a nominee for hardest video games.
Dragon Age is reaching the “hardest game i ever played” pretty danged fast.
That would be quite impressive indeed, seeing as it is categorically impossible. If the level “Clinger Winger” is started with both players, the screen won’t scroll, and both players face certain death. Er, not that I know this from personal experience. I could never get past level 3.
I don’t know what class you are or what companions you play with but I’ve found it’s significantly easier with mostly ranged classes. I’m using Alistair as a tank, myself as crowd control/immobilizer and healing, Morrigan as shatterer/damage dealer with some crowd control and Wynne as a healer. I’m not finding the game very difficult but I’m playing on normal this first time through.
Battletoads. I’ve mentioned it before.
Heh! Never knew that; I never managed to get there in 2-player mode, and apparently neither did any of the testers. That’s amusing. Still, I’d imagine you could get around that by having one of the players sit out the race and continue in when the hypno-orb battle starts.