My roommate and I called it the “What the Fuck?” drive because that’s all you could say. Now I expect it and it doesn’t bother me so much. Except when it’s a close game and I have less than 40 seconds to score.
Civilization on the highest difficulty has always been pretty ridiculously hard, although I’m not sure if that counts.
Well, most games with varying difficulty settings get pretty ridiculous at the highest level, which is to be expected. Arguably, Civ might not count because, like many games, it achieves the higher difficulties by cheating on behalf of the computer, in a game which purports to be symmetrical. It’s not like, say, making Mario more difficult by going from 100 Koopas to 200.
And the EA Sports games have been discussed here many times before. Apparently, it’s a deliberate feature, intended to keep the games close and “exciting”. I’ve heard that the way to beat such games is to slightly trail the AI player for most of the game, and then make a comeback right at the end, so you don’t give it a chance to “balance” things.
This is a dumb game, but NBA JAM for the old XBOX is ridiculous for me. I can win the first two games handily, but I can’t get past the third worst team. It doesn’t matter what I do, or what players I use, or apparently anything else. It may be the Jazz, but I haven’t played in 6 months because I’m so frustrated.
Moria (a nethack successor*) isn’t super difficult, except that it is perma-death. You die, you roll up a new character. And no, you can’t make copies of save file
So you have to be super cautious until level 6 or so.
Brian
- I like it better. I prefer the vendor interface
(Embarrassing confession time!)
I, for the life of me, cannot beat any of the Sim City games without cheating. I can’t budget worth crap and I always spend way too much money in the initial buildup phase, so that by the time I hit 50 years and that old power plant needs replacing, I’m SOL. (And my stupid ingrate citizens were always complaining aobut this, that, or the other. Sometimes I’d just play the disaster scenarios for the sheer schadenfreude of bringing terror and destruction upon the hapless people of Dotville. :D)
(Sim City 2000’s “Double Fund” cheat, how I love thee, let me name the ways… :P)
Here’s how to not fuck up at the most recent Sim City. Let’s say you’ve got a medium block of land to work with. Grid the land with roads. Cover the entire land in 5 by 5 squares. Build a coal power plant and turn it very low. Put farmland over the ENTIRE land. Watch the farms sprout up and get the farmers’ market and the couple other things you get with lots of farmland in a city. This is the fun part. Let the simulation run. Build a fire station when necessary, then bulldoze it when the fire is gone. Watch the cash roll in.
Then, when you’ve got a very nice bankroll, turn the taxes up to 20% for farmland and start zoning residential and industrial. Don’t worry about police, fire, or medical until they start complaining about it. With the roads like this, you get maximum exposure to every spot on the board and you have a million different ways to get to a destination and traffic will be relatively controlled (it’ll only get bad WAY down the road). Turn taxes down for residential and commercial (and high tech industrial) and start zoning where there’s demand. Remember, Sims don’t know when they need something, but if they have something and lose it, they’ll bitch. This means water. When building fire, police, or medical, build small until it gets overrun. Pause the game, demolish, upgrade, then unpause.
Now, you can build bedroom communities. This is good for power, demand, and trash. Get a small tract of land and build a chunk of power plants. Connect that city to the first one and pay to get power from the second city to the first. Do the same for trash. Voila. You don’t have to worry about the pollution from power or NIMBYism from the landfill. (NIMBY - Not In My Backyard). Build water pumps in the first city and sell that water to the second city. Water is more expensive than electricity or trash, so you can end up making money off of just that. Also, because there’s no trash in the first city, it’ll never get polluted. Build parks where appropriate and kick some ass.
I figured out the way through all the Sim City games.
Whatever you do, you should NOT google “Xeno Tactic” and attempt to beat that game, even though it is a free Flash web game. It’s fricking hard.
Sounds like how they build Western Oregon… 
Act of War: High Treason is being so unreasonable to me right now that I started a thread about it but apparently no one else has gotten past level 4 either.
Medal of Honor Allied Assault was pretty stupid at times. I’m pretty sure the level where you have to storm the beach just kills you arbitrarily until you’ve died a set number of times at each point before you can even try the next part. I also loved the endless snipers who could shoot to kill from several miles away and around corners.
Soldier of Fortune on the hardest difficulty is impossible. I can’t even get past the first level.
Okay. Start with first-person shooters. That’s an easy one.
Operation Wolf (arcade) - This is widely credited as the first true arcade FPS. Of course, given that Taito had absolutely nothing to go on, it inevitably would have…flaws. See, the problem was that there was no sight on the screen, so it was next to impossible to get any level of accuracy, and it was easy to take a ton of damage if you didn’t take out enemies VERY quickly. Oh yeah, the only way to clear a stage was to get the required number of enemies…reset if you continue, of course. The end result was a game where roughly 99.999% of the players got absolutely slaughtered in the second stage. I witnessed ONE player make it all the way to the sixth and final…and die, over and over and over, never coming close to beating it.
Lethal Enforcers 2 (arcade; PSX probably even worse) - The successful template was already in place, so Konami only decided to make a few tweaks for the sequel…normal enemies that could take 2 hits or 6 hits, vastly increased speed, and plenty of truly dirty tricks involving the innocents. And some seriously painful bosses. Worst of all, the enemies continually get faster on the draw the longer you go without taking a hit, which means there’s NO way to evnetually avoid taking a hit. I don’t know anyone who was able to get to the end of this without shovelling in tokens.
CarnEvil (arcade) - “Evil” was the right word. A bazillion pop-up enemies coupled with some extremely tenacious bosses and subbosses made getting through economically a lost cause. Oh, and you have a lifebar for it, and you know what that means.
Terminator2 (arcade and Super NES) - About 20 enemies on the screen at any given time, a thousand ways to die (particularly the much-hated truck level), and some majorly diabolical bosses (particularly the overwhelmingly loathed helicopter).
Also like to give a nod to the entire Gradius series, although that’s more “colossal pain in the butt” territory.
Bayou Billy was definitely one of the harder NES games, but I’m not putting it with the real monsters since there definitely were ways to beat all the challenges. Even the goon duo at the very end (who have nothing on The Count). Here’s a hint: Complete all the training exercises. They really do benefit.
More later…still sifting out all the “moronic design” cases. (Currently on the fence about Air Fortress.)
I doubt that it qualifies for most people, but years ago I got a game called Virtual Bart for my sega system. Basically it was a Simpsons game made of of several minigames, each different, all designed to be as unplayable as possible.
Worse yet, you couldn't even select which minigame you wanted to play, they were selected for you. If you managed by some miracle to get through one of these, there was no save function,so next time you plugged the game in, you had to start all over again.Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was was extremely difficult. The fact that it was a crappy game that wasn’t even fun to play didn’t help.
I just played my Game Boy Pocket for the first time in about 10 years today. I had a pretty shitty selection of games, but I found Super Mario Land and Kirby’s Pinball Land and gave them a spin. I was surprised just how challenging those games are, at least when you first pick them up. I must have had some damn tenaciousness back in the day–but even then my Kirby Pinball high score was 397,000+, and I get the impression (from the two zeros in front of it!) that you can go higher. I can’t bust 150k right now.
Huh.
I always had the hardest time with Mr Sandman. He was, by far, tougher than the two (Super Macho Man and Mr Dream/Mike Tyson (depending on what version you’re playing)) after him.
and…
Crap, yes. I NEVER made it off of level one in that game. Owned and played it for about five years and couldn’t get passed the first house you come across.
Arcade games were/are intended to be harder than their console counterparts, primarily because they want you to keep shoveling money in to continue.
The only arcade game I ever actually beat was Aliens, and that was at a nickel arcade. Even then, IIRC I still dropped over a dollar into the machine.
EA’s hockey games have done similar things. If your team’s up too far, past versions of the game simply won’t let you shoot the puck at open nets; your player will always delay the shot until the opposing goalie is back into position.
I can’t say about the current games because I gave up on the series.
2 of my favorite games of all time. I beat Myth 2 on easy without anybody dying the whole game. I can beat it on the regular difficulty. I can beat like 3 levels on legendary. Legendary is freaking insane.
This one just popped in on me.
Did anyone here ever beat Faxanadu?
Yes!
I remember that I got pissed off and frustrated about halfway through it and left it alone for a while. I was digging through the pile of games and found it and took after it like a disgruntled badger.
Faxanadu did fall to my might.