I remember never being able to land on Top Gun on NES. I didn't own the game, but remember playing it at a friend's house for awhile. We never could get the landing down.

Refueling was a biyatch too.

I can't even beat Ghosts and Goblins with a Game Genie! This is the hardest game to date.

It seems most of you have had problems with some truly hard games... And here I was going to complain about Zelda Ocarina of Time's Water Dungeon.

Hmmm I remember beating both versions. I remember beating the one where the last guy is an enormous bastard sitting on a throne and you have to shoot upward. That was on Genesis I know. And I think the other one was on NES? And the last guy was that Lucifer bastard, a real tall guy with two faces or something?

Nothing for me was more satisfying though beating Zelda when I was in 3rd grade. When I got to Ganon I paused it and waited for my brothers to come home so they could watch but I got impatient and did it anyway.

The old school games pretty much had to be near impossible. The biggest NES games had about as much data as a Gamecube Memory card (4 megabits). Most games got their longevity by giving you no continues, so you had to restart from the beginning of the game if you got killed.

Don't let retrogamers fool you. The vast majority of "classic" games should be fondly remembered, but not played under any circumstances.

Landing sucked, I think I did it once.

I had a pretty hard time with the water dungeon the first time I played through, but that was mainly because I was a dumbass and didn't find the blue suit until afterwards. If you want a challenge, try beating the game w/o picking up any extra heart containers; I've gotten as far as the skeletons after you beat Ganondorf.


Most games nowadays get their longevity by throwing in cut scenes and other useless crap. Games back then were actually difficult, which is why the occasional Super Monkey Ball is a refreshing change. And the majority of video games suck, period, and should not be played under any circumstances.

I actually beat Ninja Gaiden two years ago after playing all day. ABSURDLY hard.

Did anyone ever have E.T. for Atari. Good lord that game sucked. You had to collect pieces of stuff and then get him to the spaceship, honestly I can't remember much of it. I just know I never got very far.

As far as NES goes, I would have to say JAWS. I could always get to the end but never stab JAWS with the front of the damn boat! Man that game sucked! Not only cause it was hard, but also because it was just a dump game.

Another I always had a problem getting far with was "A Boy and His Blob". Where you had to feed a blob flavored jellybeans and he would turn into different things. One of the few I never finished. One of the many I should never have even wasted time playing. -rolleyes-

Friday the 13th for NES.
I got easier as you found items and did things like light fireplaces, but it took me forever to figure that out and I spent many hours having Jason kick my ass. Never did beat it.

How about Indiana Jones for the Atari. I had to use the cheat sheet for that one.

I remember having a tough time with Out of This World for the PC. My friends and I could never get all the timings right. Frustration.

Some of the missions in X-Wing were excruciatingly difficult.

I actually beat Friday the 13th but all you get is this stupid text screen. That too is one hell of a hard game.

Man - going to have to argue with this one - Boy and His Blob was a blast to play.... actually this is one of the games i would love to see a next generation sequel to. I mean does it get much better than feeding a blob a root beer flavoured jellybean and it turning into a rocketship. Or banana flavoured and you get a ladder... ahh memories...

Actually they should team up with the Harry Potter license just to use those Bernie Botts jellybean things - endless possibilities ;)

BATTLETOADS FOR THE NES. I do not believe there is any game more difficult than battletoads

Man oh man. Zelda 2? Cake. Mega Man? Beat 1-5 in a single weekend. Contra? Beat the whole game on 1 man. Ghosts and Goblins? A joke.

Now I routnely get my ass handed to me in every multiplayer DC game I own. And it's MY DREAMCAST!!

It never occured to me before now, but clearly the NES was my forte. Now if only I can get my friends to give up the DC in favor of the ol' Nintendo, maybe I can win a game for a change...

Another vote for NES Ghosts and Golblins here. I still to this day have yet to even get to the final level, let alone beat the game.
I still whip it out every once in awhile to see if I can somehow beat it, without sucess of course.

my first post in months........

Amped is the first thing I thought of. I'm at 115 and really have no desire to try any more. Who thought having someone taunt you would be a nice feature? Yeah, that makes me want to keep trying. I don't think I'll get my $20 out of this one.

As previously mentioned, once you build up your ability the game becomes a lot easier. I'll take it off your hands for $10 though if you want.

Surprised no one mentioned GunValkyre on the XBox, a sweet looking game that would be much better with a different control layout.

I've also grown to dislike those old school 2d shooters with a zillion bullets on the screen. There's so many bullets its laughable that you'd make it through without dying. Two games that come to mind are Giga Wing and Gunbird 2. Radiant Silvergun also had this late in the game, when you fight Jesus.

:lol:

I really think there are some people who are just better with 16-bit and below games. My friend can routinely hand me my ass in Street Fighter II Turbo, but in any Dreamcast fighting game I can blow him away. He blames it on too many knobs and buttons on the controller.

Face it -- <i>you're past your prime</i> ;)

I grew up in the heyday of video games, so I'm past my prime. The six buttons on Street Fighter II boggled my mind for a long time (though I challenge you to beat me at Championship Edition). I'm also much, much better at any game with a proper joystick in my hand. I've never really gotten used to the d-pad (curse you Nintendo!)

That said, Ghosts and Goblins sticks out in my mind as one of the few games I couldn't beat, either now or back in the past. Sometimes I re-visit some of the old games, and I'm amazed at how easy they are, and how hard I remember them being. Ghosts and Goblins is one of the rare ones that's consistently harder than I remember it. I even tried winning with one of the slow-motion NES joysticks and couldn't do it that way (though I saw the final level!).

However, everyone's mentioned that one. Here's some games I remember being fiendishly difficult.

NES: The Simpsons : Bart Vs The Space Mutants - God, was this game ever hard. I don't remember much, except there were a ton of puzzles, and lot of riding around on a skateboard, painting a bunch of stuff purple, and more frustration than any one person should have to endure. I can't even remember if I ever made it past the first level. Of course, this was back in the day before the internet, and if you and your friends couldn't figure it out, and you'd missed the issue of Nintendo Power with the tips and hints in it ... well, you were out of luck. I hated this game so much, I haven't even looked for the ROM file.

SNES: Super Turrican -- A great game actually, and one I wish I'd kept. Lots of fun, but got very hard very quickly. I was the only one in my group of friends who actually played the game long enough to get to the last boss. I couldn't defeat him, but at least I got there.

PC: Darkseed - Very cool looking game, and way ahead of it's time when I purchased it in 1992. The Geiger artwork was very nice to look at as well. However, the day I realized the tool I'd been looking for was a 2 pixel x 2 pixel dot on one of the many overly detailed and overly noninteractive (think Myst) displays was the day I quit playing the game. I never really did figure out what was going on, or how I was going to stop the alien parasite from eating my brain, and the fact that the game was timed, and required almost perfect play to win made this game my all time impossible game.

I'll agree with happypants in saying the Gunvalkyrie is soooo frustrating...I haven't given up on it yet though

Yeah, i forgot about Darkseed. That game I kept on getting stuck on. Another game I could beat but couldn't beat was Maniac Mansion but I couldn't beat iit with Jeff and Syd on my team. Everyone else I could but these two were rather difficult for me at the time. Then again, that was 10 years ago so I should revisit that game if I can put together my Nintendo from taking it apart to see if I could add a 3D card from a few years back.

Man, how could I forget about that one. It wasn't just hard, it was almost impossible. I never got past the board with the giant wheels that chase you.

RC Pro-Am comes to mind. You spend hour upon hour playing this game, then get to a particular board that uses up any continues you have left. My favorite game, but I have yet to conquer.

My vote is for Castlevania 2. I can't remember what part it was but I almost wound up with my fist in a cast from punching the wall out of sheer frustration.

For that matter, Castlevania 3 is no cakewalk either. I probably put in a couple hundred hours into that game and never finished it. Didn't play CV2 much, because I didn't care for the RPG aspect of it -- just wasn't a Castlevania game to me.

I agree with both of your nominations! I could have thrown SMB in the yard by now.

Impossible Mission on the C64. I mean what the hell was that game even about??

Also some of the Lucasarts games like Escape from Monkey Island and Grim Fandango have stupidly dumb puzzles in them. So very hard to complete without a FAQ guide.

I really thought the LucasArts games were fairly easy, and I've done pretty much all of their adventure/puzzle games since Indiana Jones and the Secret of Atlantis.

The best thing about LucasArts is that they don't punish you and won't ever trap you. The puzzle may be difficult (or illogical), but you'll always have everything you need to solve it, and the area to explore is usually artificially limited. Generally, there isn't a time limit either, or a severe penalty for making wrong choices or decisions. It's very, very rare to die in a LucasArts adventure game.

If you think Grim Fandango was hard, you should pick up a copy of Darkseed, and see what hard and illogical really means.

On the topic of Impossible Mission, I'll concur, that game was pretty difficult, and I never did figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Along the same lines was a C-64 game that no one but me has played called "Paradroid". I had fun with it, and played it a lot, but I never did figure out what I was really doing, or how to win the game.

On another note classicgaming.com has an article on the "fiendishly difficult" Ghosts and Goblins. It's worth a read, and after reading it, I'm glad I never beat the final boss. Apparently, when you do, you find out it was all a ruse by Satan and you have to go back to the very beginning and win it a second time with the difficulty cranked up before you free the princess. No, I'm not kidding.

That's true for the most part, but buy their classic pack, with their original set of adventure games, like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. Maybe you couldn't die very easily, but you could definitely get to a point where you couldn't finish the game (for instance, where all your characters are captured). They were more difficult than their later adventures, and there were always people chasing you. I remember playing Maniac Mansion as a kid and being really paranoid about getting caught.

:lol:

I remember that game. I never did get past the 2nd level.

Two others I remember:

Crash Bandicoot - trying to collect all the gems or whatever they were (perfect on every level). It seemed like the longer you play the worse you got. The worst was when you finally thought you got it and miss the last jump and have to start over.

Gaeires (genesis) - There was this one part I could never get past. You have limited continues and stuff, so I play 20 minutes to get to this one point and die. Never did get past it.

You do know that there's a way to escape from the dungeon in Maniac Mansion, right?

I did play some of the earlier games, like Maniac Mansion (hey, they had character they modeled after Tori Amos, I had to play) and Day of the Tentacle. However, the ones that stick in my mind are the Indiana Jones adventures, Sam and Max hit the Road, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and the Monkey Island series. Maybe I just enjoyed them more, and that's why I tend to think of those games over admittedly classic LucasArts games like MM.

I remember reading in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis that they tried really hard to keep you from killing yourself or ending up stuck. Not that you couldn't do it, Indy was a "dangerous guy", but you had to be pretty bone-headed to do so. I thought this was greatly preferable to similar games where you were dying every fifteen or twenty minutes and were severely punished for not doing things in the right way or right order.

I still remember a game (castaway?) I played as a youth on the C-64 that was the most punitive game I've ever played. You wake up on an island, and you have no idea who you are. You struggle to get off the island, then struggle to find out who you really are and why you were on the island. At the climax of the game, you have to present an item that you were supposed to pick up on the island. By this time, you can't go back to the island, you've got hundreds of hours invested in the game, and on top of that, the item was hidden, so it wasn't obvious that you needed it or that it was even there to begin with. I almost broke my C-64 over that one. And no, I never finished it.

Some good quotes from the Ghosts and Goblins article:

Yeah, but I never figured it out as a kid. When I played through it later, I found it out from a FAQ. :lol: Even now I don't remember what it was exactly.

In Zak, you had to have someone rescue you. Meaning you couldn't have the items needed to rescue you in the possession of the character needing rescued. So you could, legitimately, be stuck in that game.

Well, there's no question that LucasArts got better as time went on. Day of the Tentacle was far superior to Maniac Mansion.

Yeah, it was their game design policy (in contrast to Sierra) to not punish players for exploring or trying the "funny" answers. I wonder how many ways there were to die in the King's Quest series? I would save my game and then try dumb stuff just to see a new death in those, but I wish they would just reload you to the point right before you died instead of making you load your game each time.

In fact, I loved the gag in The Secret of Monkey Island where Guybrush is thrown into the water. The first time I played that I was panicking, trying to grab something to get out of the water. Then I a) remembered he could hold his breath for 10 minutes, and b) picked up the rock he was tied to and sauntered out of the water. I thought that was a pretty good gag.

:lol: Nice