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.

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 -- you're past your prime

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.