The hardest videogames of all time!

Cafe Society
41

Oh shit oh shit, I can’t believe I forgot to mention:

Myth: The Dark Ages and Myth 2: Soulblighter

the RTT (real time tactics - not real time strategy) from Bungie.

God dammit…those games were so fucking hard it’s insane. Even on the easiest levels, you have to micromanage each troop to succeed. When I first played it I thought it would be like Warcraft. I saw like two small enemy monsters coming, and selected a unit of five or so knights to attack them. All my guys were slaughtered. It wasn’t until later I realized you have to use intricate tactics, retreating, alternating archers and dwarves, constantly selecting and deselecting and moving different units, even in a minor skirmish. The bad guys will lure your guys into traps, the AI will work as a team to confuse and misdirect you. Wow! I could never enjoy a conventional RTS after playing that game. But Jesus, is it frustrating!

42

[QUOTE=fusoya]
Funny, I played through that game earlier today, and was reminiscing on how difficult it was (especially in one player mode).

While The Legend of Zelda is an easy game for everybody who’s beaten it a million times, a friend of mine played through it for the very first time earlier this year via Wii Console, and I dared him to beat it without ANY help. I was actually surprised he didn’t have any trouble finding level 7 (the #1 most asked question in Nintendo Power Counselor’s Corner history) but he never found 2 of the hidden hearts, and got REALLY stuck when he missed the bow in level 1 and assumed that there was only one item per level. And to this day, those friggin red bubbles still make the second quest hell (and you’ll NEVER find all 9 levels without help!)

Mega Man 1 is definitely the hardest of the Mega Mans, but aside from the rock monster and clone bosses, is a piece of cake for me now. Those Gutsman moving platforms used to annoy me so much that I’d play Elec Man’s stage twice just to go back for the magnet beam so I could wizz by that section. Chronos, you’re exaggerating the last boss of Mega Man 2 a bit. The bubble lead actually does a good amount of damage to Dr Wily’s alien, and he isn’t really that hard to aim at, but if HE hits you, you’ll lose 1/3 of your own energy. I remember the first time I beat Mega Man 2, and I was swarming through my entire arsenal trying to find something to hit him. By the time I was trying to use Number 2’s on him, I realized that just MAYBE I missed him with Bubble Lead the first time.

The original Final Fantasy, while definitely beatable, was a challenge in that many of the mechanics of the game were buggy, so that half of the spells didn’t work (which sometimes worked in your favor too) and the so-called Ice Sword didn’t even do any elemental damage. Not to mention that you can a random encounter every 3 steps and you need a lot of luck (or a Thief) to run. Oh yeah, and even at level 50, the max # of times you can cast a spell before going to an Inn is 9 times, and you couldn’t cast LIFE or SOFT during battle. Oh yeah, and anybody who has ever played the NES version has seen the word INEFFECTIVE enough times to drive themselves batty. The GBA remake fixed many of these problems (as well as making the Gas Dragons NOT the most evil enemy in the history of RPG’s anymore), and compensated by giving all enemies more HP. It becomes a much more enjoyable game, in my opinion.

I still stand by The Adventures of Bayou Billy as the hardest beat-em-up game. I dare you to try to beat that game. Battletoads is like the original Double Dragon compared to that game. As far as shooter games go, Legendary Wings was legendary for its challenge. Two games that you’ll need mad skillz just to finish level 1!

I can guarantee that nobody on the face of earth has ever beaten The Mutant Virus.

Sigh. It’s amazing how they just don’t make hard games anymore. I can’t remember the last current game that I was unable to finish out of challenge, rather than losing interest.
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How’s your thread going? Still accepting challenges?

43

[QUOTE=fetus]
When did you first notice this? (IE, which Triple Play game?) I played Triple Play 2000 obsessively when it was new and this never happened to me that I can recall.
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It was either 2000 or 2001, I can’t remember exactly which one. A friend of mine pointed it out to me. He was playing a full length season, and noticed that if he was winning comfortably, the AI would always make a superhuman comeback, hitting freakishly long home runs your comfortable lead was no more. We also noticed it in the “extreme home run derby” (the one where you got points for hitting objects). The length of the home runs were what made us think the game was deliberately making things more “challenging”, they were about as long as when we would use the home run cheat when playing eachother (650 ft or more).

I had the PC version of “Triple Play Baseball” (no year in the title, came out in 2001 I believe) and I noticed the same thing.

44

[QUOTE=Least Original User Name Ever]
God, whatever happened to those historical simulation games?
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KOEI still makes them. I think they’re up to Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI now.

45

I should’ve been MUCH more specific–most of the Arbiter mission is pretty beatable, and pretty fun too. The part that’s killing me is where you actually have to destroy the Heretic Leader, and he has two holograms who can kill you just as fast–and you can’t tell the difference except by hitting one of the two holograms and watching it die.

46

[QUOTE=cckerberos]
KOEI still makes them. I think they’re up to Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI now.
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The problem is that they were in Chinese for a while and only released in that part of the globe (to my knowledge). When it goes down enough in price, I’ll buy a Playstation 2 just for Romance of the Three Kingdoms 10.

If you have a way to get some translated or know something I don’t, please lemme know.

47

[QUOTE=fetus]
I should’ve been MUCH more specific–most of the Arbiter mission is pretty beatable, and pretty fun too. The part that’s killing me is where you actually have to destroy the Heretic Leader, and he has two holograms who can kill you just as fast–and you can’t tell the difference except by hitting one of the two holograms and watching it die.
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Oh my fucking god. That boss is such a pain on Legendary. On Legendary, he spawns the same amount of holograms, and they’re all cocksuckers, but he’ll disappear up into the tubes by the ceiling and come back down. Then he’ll re-fucking-spawn the holograms and you get to do the dance over again. He’ll also run up there and make you redo it all if he gets too damaged, so you’ve got to come out like a crazed wolverine and fuck his world up good and fast.

Last time I played it on Legendary, I think I spent almost an hour on that boss alone.

48

[QUOTE=Just Some Guy]
You can kill Metroids; freeze and five missiles IIRC.
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Yeah, but the Mother Brain was a real bitch.

My BIL loaned me the game after he threw his mega-sized turbo-controller at his living room wall, leaving a big hole. He said it was time to put it away when it made him THAT angry.

My brother put it this way: "Are you sure this thing is called a Mother BRAIN?

49

It weirds me the hell out to play modern games. I’m just conditioned to reload to a previous save if I fail - it took me ages to figure out that I don’t have to do that in, like, Bully - I can just keep trying! Time doesn’t move forward, I don’t really lose anything, I can just try again. Crazy. Kids today don’t know nothin’ 'bout falling down a hole and dying.

50

[QUOTE=Leaper]
For modern games, the action-RPG Odin Sphere is gaining a reputation for being very difficult. Fortunately, it has a very forgiving revival/replay system, but DAMN is it hard!
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I thought it was just that I sucked at video games! I didn’t think I’d ever kill that baby dragon boss, and now I’m just as stuck at the next one.

51

The Atari Impossible Mission was quite literally impossible in the US version. Too bad because the concept was cool for the time (but quite dated now).

52

[QUOTE=Chanteuse]
Yeah, but the Mother Brain was a real bitch.

My BIL loaned me the game after he threw his mega-sized turbo-controller at his living room wall, leaving a big hole. He said it was time to put it away when it made him THAT angry.

My brother put it this way: "Are you sure this thing is called a Mother BRAIN?
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Yep. I stalled out on Mother Brain herself for years before I came up with a strategy that worked. It’s yet another boss that’s incredibly hard until you come up with the “right” way to beat it.

53

I’ll add one from the old days of the Commie 64: Alien. Yep, based on the movie.

Basically, you got the setup from the movie. There are seven crew members. At the beginning, one random crew member is killed by the alien (it’s not always Kane, the first one to die in the movie). So, you start off on a real high note there. After that, your mission is to complete the game in the best way you can manage. The best you can hope for is killing the alien (I never managed it, despite attacking it with lasers and opening the airlock it was in to blow it outside).

Failing that, you have to set the self-destruct and abandon ship. But the shuttle can only hold three people, and it won’t launch if it detects anything alive on the ship (the alien isn’t detected as a living thing), so you’ll have to capture the ship’s cat and wait for three crew members to die. Oh, did I mention that one random crew member is an android (not always Ash) and may freak out at any moment and start attacking the crew? Yeah, there’s that too. And as the attacks go on and they get hurt or frightened, the crew gets more and more panicked, and their hearts race, and they may break from your control and flee to a random location on the ship before you can find them again.

The highest score I ever got was 20%. If the alien makes it back to Earth, you get 0%.

54

[QUOTE=cactus waltz]
Also the Discworld point-and-click adventure was a tough nut to crack.
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The first Discworld game is insanely difficult. Legends speak of the notorious “Babel Fish Puzzle.” Forget about it. In Discworld 1, the whole game is as maddeningly involved as getting the Babel Fish, only you don’t get to do it all in one room. You have to run all over Ankh-Morpork. And the puzzles really are very clever “lateral thinking excercises.”

55

[QUOTE=Secret Volcano Lair]
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.
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A similar thing happens in EA’s football games like NCAA and Madden. It’s especially prevalent if you’re playing low difficulty and blowing the game out by like 60 points. When you get down the last two minutes of either half the AI can turn a team of scrubs into freaking all-stars.
Pass, 18 yards. Pass, 12 yards. Sack. Run, 4 yards. Pass, 34 yards. Pass, 15 yard out-route goes the distance because your safety is sitting with his thumb up his butthole. It’s not like you’ll lose the game but it gets frustrating as hell when your the AI just turns your defense into so many tackling dummies.

56

Oh, certainly there were glitches (none of the specialized swords (Rune, Dragon, Coral, etc.) actually work any better against their supposed targets, not just Ice). But at the time you got those swords, their base damage was still often enough for one-hit-kills. And those Gas Dragons were insane, but they only showed up very briefly, and if you were lucky, you wouldn’t encounter any. As for spells, there was almost never a need to use them, aside from FAST and your most powerful CURE spell during boss battles. There were a ton of items which cast spells, and you could use them as much as you wanted.

Someone mentioned Myth II, and that was mostly just a matter of playstyle. I like playing games like that, and caught on quickly. Plus, if your units survive battles, they get experience, and start needing much less babysitting. Still, though, there were some specific levels that nearly drive me insane. I think that the first time I finished the mission where you recruit the Trow, I was hearing those thudding footsteps in my head for three hours afterwards.

57

Of my collection of games, there’s only two I’ve never finished.

The first was Prince of Persia - Warrior Within, and the second was Prince of Persia - The Two Thrones.

Loved the games, but could never get through the endings. I hated how the ends were designed to be a die-then-reload type of adventure in order to get through the fights, rather than be the style where you might be able to get through it the first time.

58

Gradius III, the arcade version. I’ve played it in MAME and the best I could ever do was get to the very beginning of the second level.

59

[QUOTE=Chronos]
Oh, certainly there were glitches (none of the specialized swords (Rune, Dragon, Coral, etc.) actually work any better against their supposed targets, not just Ice).
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Thank you! I’ve been wondering ever since I played FF on the NES sixteen years ago whether that was just me…

60

[QUOTE=Hung Mung]
A similar thing happens in EA’s football games like NCAA and Madden. It’s especially prevalent if you’re playing low difficulty and blowing the game out by like 60 points. When you get down the last two minutes of either half the AI can turn a team of scrubs into freaking all-stars.
Pass, 18 yards. Pass, 12 yards. Sack. Run, 4 yards. Pass, 34 yards. Pass, 15 yard out-route goes the distance because your safety is sitting with his thumb up his butthole. It’s not like you’ll lose the game but it gets frustrating as hell when your the AI just turns your defense into so many tackling dummies.
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Ah…the “No Fucking Way” drive. Nothing you can do stops them. Zone? Nah. Man? Nah. Zone blitz? Nah. What If I use the playmaker control and bring someone completely unexpected? Nope. They just slowly drive down the field and you get to watch your defense, which was flawless up until now, get obliterated by the Neo-Favre.