Video games these days are for sissies. Real games made you want to destroy the little gray plastic cartridges for your NES. If you haven’t lost at least one TV to controller-through-the-screen syndrome, you haven’t played a REALLY hard game.
We’re talking games with actual endings, here. Not asteroids or centipede or pacman. Here’s my top 5 list.
Excitebike
Ninja Turtles 1
1942
zelda 1
Ghosts n’ Goblins.
Mega Man 1 and the original Ninja Gaiden are both exceptionally difficult and unforgiving. I was quite proud of myself a couple months ago for finally getting through the Guts Man stage.
There was an article I read a while back that had some interesting insights I like to bring up every so often. I don’t know if I could find the article online again, as this was about 4 or 5 years ago, but the basic gist is:
The video game industry based its roots in Japan, whose culture focused more on the journey than the goal. Games were actually created hard to enable replay value; it was the act of getting through a difficult stage that made the game fun, not the prize at the end. As the US got into the industry, more and more gamers preferred goal-oriented gameplay, so the industry shifted to games that were just hard enough to make you feel like you earned the brilliant and/or clever CG ending, but not hard enough that you couldn’t eventually get to said ending.
I don’t know how much of the truth in that depends on stereotyping, but it certainly explains why older games are so incredibly frustrating.
As far as newer games go, the Metal Gear Solid games are insanely hard at the higher difficulty levels, in my opinion.
The shooter genre have some insanely difficult titles, one of them being the notorious Dodonpachi:
But I suppose a certain type of gamer might just find such games stimulating.
Mega Man 1 was difficult for me. Also the Discworld point-and-click adventure was a tough nut to crack.
Ikaruga must find its way onto any such list.
And I loved RE1 (only ever rented it, though, and didn’t beat it), but I gave up on the whole Resident Evil franchise after I rented RE2. You know how the game starts in first person, and you have to kill three (four? five?) zombies, and then you’re in top-down mode and you’re running across the street? It took God only knows how many tries to even kill the zombies in the first screen, then in the second street I just could not beat that fucking ambush from behind the car. That pissed me off bad. I didn’t play another RE until RE4, and that only for a few hours.
Have to agree with that RE thing. The control scheme is impossible for me.
I just read that RE4 was released for PC. YAY!!
Oh, wait, there is no mouse support. No mouse support. You can’t use your mouse when you play the game. No mouse support. Wha…? How…? I… Wha…?
The Getaway. The only game I ever threw away because I knew if I ever picked it up again my blood pressure would skyrocket and I would drop dead right there in my living room. One of the problems is the characters you are occasionally required to team up. Their only reason for being there, apparently, is to screw things up so badly that you can’t succeed. “Hey, Lady… we have to go this way. No… don’t… um, those bad guys are going to kill you if you just walk in and stand right in front of them. Lady… over here… goddammitt!”
But the worst part is that the game literally screws you over. I had made significant progress, despite the fact that the game hates me and wants me to die. So I am at this one point where I have to drive across London to do something. I couldn’t make it there in the time allotted. Every afternoon, after work, I would try again. Several times. I was getting it down. I mapped a route. I go here, I turn, I race down the street, etc. Every day I was getting closer. Then, one day… I am there. I am almost at the destination. What happens? The engine sputters and THE CAR SLOWS DOWN. I don’t make it.
Okay. I must have hit something, damaged the car. I’ll just do it again. Yay! I am almost there. The engine sputters and THE CAR SLOWS DOWN. This happens every time. The game is slowing my car down. I literally cannot reach the destination because the game is screwing with my engine. That’s when the disc hit the trash.
Stupid game. Just thinking about it gets me all pissed off.
In the beginning of Resident Evil 2, you’re supposed to just run to the gun shop without killing any zombies at all. Don’t fight, run run around them. In the gun shop, they break in and you can kill them to get a weapon, or not. Then you only have to kill maybe 2 or 3 zombies on the rest of the way to the police station. There’s a bonus item you get if you don’t kill any at all.
As far as Metal Gear Solid goes, I think I beat it on all difficulty levels. It is very tricky on the hard one because you don’t have the radar. With MGS2, on the Hard level I wasn’t ever able to get past the Tengu fight in Arsenal Gear. No matter what I did, Snake would get himself killed before I coud get through. I haven’t played 3.
Blaster Master on the NES was toughh because there was no save; I never finished it.
Jet Set Willy II . I’m not sure you can finish it without cheating.
The nice thing about emulators is that they have the save state function, which is basically like a save game at any second you want it. This allows even sucky players to finally get a chance to play all the way through. You still have to beat the games of course, but at least this way you get as many tries as you need right at the spots you need.
And Dodonpachi?
Holy crap: how does anyone do that WITHOUT save states? It looks like you need to map out exactly where to be and what routes to follow to get there to avoid all the spreads of bullets. Craziness!
The C64 version of Jet Set Willy had a bug that prevented completion. IIRC the game crashed in one of the rooms on the roof.
I played it on the Amstrad 6128 but I always found it too hard, I don’t recall if there was a bug that prevented completion in this version. It’s been a long, long time!
If you thought the original mario 1 for the NES was hard…
(link disabled for NSFW language)
There are a lot of GTA-clones that are hard simply because the controls are god awful like The Getaway. It seems like every single one I play decides that what gamers really wanted were more realistic car behavior (in a game where smashing through things is going to be common and the trying to zip down narrow streets is a basic element of play…) and more difficult weapon controls (why yes, I did want to have to both drive my car and aim a gun with precision at the exact same time thus requiring performing simultaneous incompatible tasks on the controller).
The hardest recent game I have played where I think it was intentional is Stuntman. There at least the same was supposed to be a simulation where difficult timing was required. It made sense in the context of the game. Of course, I would have made an easier player gradient (maybe had each “movie” be selectable from the start and have its own set of increasingly difficult challenges).
Double Dragon III for the NES. Ridiculously difficult to the extreme.
This is the first thing I found when I searched for it on Google. It’s absolutely perfect.
Ah, Stuntman. Decent idea for a game, but it just didn’t work out right.
sorry for the double post.
EA’s Triple Play series…the AI would fucking screw you over if you started winning too many games during a season. It was obvious too, cause the CPU would all of a sudden start hitting 650 ft home runs like crazy.
I’m not sure that game counts though, so I’ll go with The Adventures of Bayou Billy for NES. Never got past level 5 without using a Game Genie.
Another one: The Arbiter mission in Halo 2 single-player. Yeah, I know, it’s old, but I just got an XBox so I just played the campaign mode for the first time.
You have to kill the zombies on the first screen to get to the second screen. But I believe you that after that you’re not supposed to kill any. Maybe I would’ve known that if I’d watched more zombie movies then, but I was one of those wussy kids who refused to see horror movies or ride roller coasters. (To my credit, I’m dedicating this summer to catching up on the zombie movies.)
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. crew ows me a new keyboard and two mouses. Goddamnit, those military bastards are hard!
Super Monkey Ball for Gamecube.