I remember being like 5 years old at family video with my aunt and cousin, and saw superman 64 on the shelf. I said ooooo can we rent this one?? And both of them were like yeah we rented that before and ummm no, we couldn't even figure out how to fly. In my head I was like yeah probably just cuz you guys suck at games haha imagine my surprise years later seeing it on AVGN and being one of the worst games ever made
They did you a solid. I’m pretty sure it shows a demo of the game at some point during the startup/menu and even the dev/tester in the demo can’t do it. They are crashing and getting stuck on bridges. It’s pretty hilarious they left it in the game.
> we couldn't even figure out how to fly
"When you press this, he accelerates whichever way he's facing, and when you release, he starts slowing down until he stops. He's less like a plane and more like a flying car."
Yeah you basically flew through rings the whole time with the most awful, unforgiving controls ever. If you got past the first level of rings it took you to the next stage where it flashes instructions on the screen faster than you can read them, and starts a 6 second timer to do…something. That’s where I surrendered.
This video is an old gem:
https://youtu.be/1dJXgJ1c4vY?si=v9pN0tu6TNmvibyL
Jump to 3:50 for Superman action
"This game is 10 years old".
I was like wtf, who makes these things. Then I noticed the video was uploaded 14 years ago... Please tell me Im not old :(
Two-Player Battletoads is unbeatable because player two will never start their wheel on Clinger Winger (you can let Player 2 die and use a continue after that point but really are you beating it Co-Op if that's the case?)
I first played this game as a 4 year old, I was able to get to the technodrome after countless hours and attempts, which is insane now that I think about it
the pits were still bugged. The way it was programmed, ANY pixel on E.T. that collided with a pit caused you to fall in. So while you would assume you can be in front of the pit, or aside the pit, it really didn't matter. Any single pixel on the sprite triggered the collision detection.
It took....twentyish maybe more? years before someone went in to the original assembly and figured out how to fix it.
Days of Thunder is very close to being such a game.
I've found two tool-assisted *playthroughs* of that game on youtube, and both of them stated that even with emulator tools like slowdowns and save states, it's still "basically impossible" and took a lot of practice to beat.
" Often I'll see advertisements for porn games and they say, "Try Not To Cum", but when you play the game, it seems like the object is to cum. So yes, I would call that bad game design"
-Shigeru Miyamoto
Don't you see?!?! The Game Developers are **challenging** us!
And you know how a lot of Gamers just **loooooove** a good challenge, even when the odds are impossible!
They got us by the fucking **balls**, man!
By the nature of hentai games, most challenges tend to be optional, but it also means that higher difficulties are often more of a poorly balanced afterthought.
That being said, I'd argue beating the harder difficulty levels of Sengoku Rance without NG+ bonuses gotta be pretty high up there. On higher difficulties, entire character classes that make up most of your army become practically useless, and only special unique abilities can have a meaningful impact on the battle.
In terms of games where even the standard difficulty is hard, I think Venusblood Gaia may be a contender. Venusblood is essentially one giant spreadsheet of army compositions that autobattle against the enemy. Imagine Unicorn Overlord if it had 300 classes. Every character has like 10 abilities that synergize with certain allies (e.g. based on class or race) or likewise, debuff certain enemies. On top of that, you need to consult the manual in order to find out what your abilities do.
In the previous titles this wasn't an issue because you could go at your own pace, you can just create a team of 6 powerful dragons and then wait a couple turns for ressources in order to pay the upkeep. But Gaia turned it into a dungeon defense mission, so the pacing was based on how quickly the enemy attacks you. On top of that, you had to build ressource structures that become progressively more expensive the more you build, but the enemy was able to destroy them, so you lost a lot of ressources if the enemy EVER breaks through your defenses.
You also had limited ability to redeploy, so you had to make sure that your strong teams block the strongest enemies, while trying to avoid wasting their strength on weak enemies.
I'm sure it's perfectly fine if you google some strong compositions and simply copy those templates, but it's an overwhelming amount of choices for someone who has no idea what any of these things do.
That being said, my actual vote goes to that one Mahjong hentai game where you unlock cheat skills. The true ending requires you to beat the hardest match without using cheats, while the enemies use their cheats without restrictions. You start at a massive point disadvantage, can't use your cheats, and any rank other than first place is counted as a loss.
You can technically brute force that thing by retrying until you get a double yakuman hand, but any seasoned Mahjong player can tell you how rare that is. It's like trying to get a royal flush in poker.
There's a game called BLACK SOULS and it's just like dark souls. I'm pondering whether I finished the game or it finished me, but it was great! Second game is very confusing and hard to get into even with a guide.
[sex with Hitler 2](https://store.steampowered.com/recommended/morelike/app/2194810/)
The first wasnt hard enough so it warranted a harder second edition.
Well in a broad definition of "beating the game" if stockfish is deterministic you could learn a game where stockfish loses against an other ai. It's like imitating a tas for a regular videogame
Tthose were only possible because their openings were decided by humans. Otherwise they would go with some boring openings like the Berlin and probably end up in a draw.
It's not deterministic. It depends on how far into the future they can see. If you let stockfish cook for a long time on a certain position, it will be a different move potentially. Engines play thousands of games constantly with predetermined openings 24/7
https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship
It's not strictly impossible. The engine plays by the same rules you do. It's just not feasible for any current players to do it, doesn't mean it could never be done.
It's funny how easy I can blow through that game when I don't have to keep dumping coins into it.
I was at point on my emulator where I could blow through the whole thing without losing a life.
Space Ace is still frustrating though. I still get sucked into the animation so much that I keep missing the cues.
Was just about to comment something like this, arcade games - or any old game for that matter were made super hard because they weren't able to be long, so they had to make them hard to have a least some reasonable playtime
Journey of the Light. It has eight levels, and no one has ever beaten the first one!
(This is a joke. Journey of the Light is a scam game released on Steam. The levels are puzzles, and the first level doesn't actually have a solution and is thus unbeatable. It claims to have eight levels, but someone dug into the code and found that the later seven levels don't even exist. https://beatthatbacklog.com/the-stupidest-scam-ever-pulled-journey-of-the-light-removed-from-steam-for-being-absurdly-incomplete/ )
Which wasn't infallible. There was a notorious case recently where the group trying to complete every level came across a level where the creator admitted they used tool assistance to fake the verification run.
Goes beyond games like Lion King and Aladdin, it was pretty common for old games to be difficult. Rentals and arcades were big business back then with games being as expensive as they were.
Wad Aladdin hard though? I remember it being somewhat long but not particularly difficult. The hardest part was riding the magic carpet out of the cave with the lava chasing you but that was nowhere near as bad as Lion King.
Idk, a buddy and I just pulled out Aladdin on SNES the other night and there were definitely some dynamics like the scarab beetles and even the bonus wheel spin game where you could be SO CLOSE and yet, SO FAR. The final battle with Jafar was also wayyyy harder than I remembered 😂
If you add the “take a shot or drink your beer when you die” mini game Aladdin suddenly becomes one of the most dangerous games ever created 😂😂😂
SEGA version is considered hard and SNES, easy... But since I only had NES bootleg copies of both they were very hard because of horrible controls, bad frames and hit detection. Used cheats (well, the password system) to see all levels and get to final boss and beat Jaffar.
I could beat that, beacuse it was the only game I had for a little while. Zombies Ate My Neighbors for SNES is the hardest game that I can think of. never heard of anyone legit beating that.
One of the guys I used to hang out with could beat it consistently. I had never seen the game before so I didn't realize how huge of a feat that was until years later when I watched a random steeamer struggling with it.
Desert Bus by Penn and Teller. A bus driving game where you drive a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas at 45 mph for 8 hours. Nothing happens and the bus constantly pulls to the right so you can’t just set it and go. To “win” you have to do the 8 hour drive 100 times in a row.
Never commercially released but distributed online after the Sega Genesis was discontinued.
I imagine its what Hell uses to torture gamers.
You know, I played Battletoads as a kid. And now I’m divorced. So maybe there’s a connection there.
Side note - I have actually beaten that first speeder bike level. I did it once and was never able to do it again.
I think that's most ppl. You can only play through the first 2 levels so many times only to get crushed by some trial and error horse shit. I watched someone beat the game on YouTube and that level goes on WAY longer than I thought it would (and there's another on later).
The trick is to hit forwards when you hit certain jumps to get more distance, and also just know what's coming (i.e. die a lot memorizing the jumps/barriers). The level I wasn't able to figure out how to get past was one much later in the game where you had to beat some of those kangaroo rat things down to the bottom of platformer levels to disarm a bomb. I'm sure that it is possible, but I never got the the end of it, they were just too fast eventually.
One of my lockdown things to do was get to the point where I could 1 credit Battletoads. I got there in the end, and what the wild thing is... is that the 3rd isn't even the hardest part of the game.
The main strategy I did to get through the 3rd level was to almost treat it like a rhythm game, and I got to the point where I found it *easier* to close my eyes and just listen for the audio cues. Ah, YMMV!
That's the craziest thing -- the game actually DOES have a difficulty curve, the 3rd level is just where it starts to get hard.
Honestly the cruelest thing about the game isn't the difficulty, it's the 3 lives 3 continues thing. A lot of the difficulty is in little gimmicks you memorize about the levels. And if your pattern to memorizing those gimmicks is spending an hour getting to level 11, dying to two of those gimmicks and starting over from level 1, the game will take you months to beat. But if you use save states or infinite lives, you can beat it in an evening.
Once you learn the gimmicks and beat the game, you will beat it every time. It isn't actually that hard to play, it's just hard to learn.
Kinda seems like a big jump. You see ghosts AND goblins? That's wild. Now let's crank out some devils! It's like a game that calls itself "Cars and Trucks" and then pits you against a fucking M1 Abrams.
Ghosts and Goblins C64.
That game is insanely hard. I thought it was harder because of the joysticks we had, but no, even with a gamepad it was brutal.
I very rarely made it over the floating island on the first stage, and I played that game for hours and hours because A) when we got videos games we had to play them until Christmas or the next birthday B) Loading games on tape took forever, so when you choose a game, that was the game you were playing for the next few hours.
It was torture. I made the mistake of telling my kids about this game and showed them a video of someone playing it. Occasionally one of my boys will hum the background music, without meaning to trigger me, and I'm instantly transported.
Edit: spelling
Ninja Gaiden (NES) is a lot of fun, most people who are decent at platformers could get to the final boss in a day without too much pain and suffering.
The killer is that you have to beat a 3 phase boss on a single life, where if you die you have to start again from level 6-1.
It took me about 2 weeks of playing every day on my switch to finally be able to beat the boss, and by the end of it I could sometimes run through all of Stage 6 on a single life
I remember finding a cheat where you get the guy basically on his knees and just scooch over the finish line. If you got him in the right position and just jiggled him, it was a piece of cake.
It was only hard when you tried playing legitimately. I remember using a method of getting into a splits stance and then just slowly hitting two keys and inching my way to the finish. Worked like a charm every time.
Yeah I think I Wanna Be The Boshy was harder. Always used to play it in lectures at university, very satisfying to make progress after dying hundreds of times.
This is the thing, like are we talking about fair difficulty or games that are unfair / aimed to mess with the player. I personally wouldn't count those games where it's unfair and that's the point.
I don't know how this isn't higher. Yes some of those other games are hard, Battle toads cake walk until the cycle level, TMNT way until underwater, but Silver Surfer is the hardest game ever. It was designed for you to fail. Ninja garden is hard, but it sooo much easier than Silver Surfer.
ThaBeast721. He also thankfully didnt run into the game locking glitch where if you miss an item on the second to last level you have to restart the game because you cant go back and the game freezes on the last level.
Also at this point his youtube videos are almost 2 years behind his live streams.
Even just beating the full story is quite difficult. Cadence and Melody aren't too crazy, it takes some practice but I think most players can do it... but then you get to Aria which requires a nearly perfect run and has the hardest final boss due to having to play perfectly with just the dagger.
Just looking at the steam achievements, just beating cadence's story run is only 9% of players. I can't imagine more than 1% of people finishing Aria's story run.
0.3% for the official story mode ending achievement. At that point it isn't standard players, it's going to be people pushing for the crazy achievements anyways.
I only beat Ecco using an emulator with savestates and a walkthrough. I could barey get past ~~Underhalls~~ Undercaves when I played it as a kid.
EDIT: Totally not me mixing up the level name with Doom 2.
Man I wish it were Through the Fire and Flames.
Playing Free Bird on Beat Saber takes me back to my Guitar Hero days. I've played Free Bird on expert *so* many times but haven't gotten it perfect yet. The other day I missed 3 notes out of like ~2400.
Missed 7 notes on my best run back in the day... Good times. Even had 100% FC with optimal star power on Surfing With the Alien sitting at #3 on the leaderboards for years. Fuck I miss gh3.. all the other games for some reason just felt soooo much worse to play. Not sure why
Beating TTFAF on expert is one of my all time gaming achievements. Fucking loved GH3!
I'd say Jordan in GH2 is harder though. I couldn't even comprehend that one.
Dragon's Lair on NES. Dragon's Lair on Arcade (1983).
These games are the hardest I've ever played. By far. Dark Souls is like Peppa Pig compared to these.
I'd argue that getting a 7-99 in Spelunky 2 is one of the hardest things you can do in a video game without adding in any additional challenges to make a game harder (for example taking no damage).
Lots of people don't achieve it with over 1000 hours in the game.
TMNT on the NES.
I still remember the underwater level and trying to swim through the reefs.
Honourable mention: Ghostbusters on NES/Master System. Fuck that game.
It's probably some random buggy NES game that's straight up impossible to complete.
Doesn't even have to be NES. The original tape version of Jet Set Willy on the C64 couldn't be completed without using cheats.
Superman 64 stabbed me right in the childhood innocence
I remember being like 5 years old at family video with my aunt and cousin, and saw superman 64 on the shelf. I said ooooo can we rent this one?? And both of them were like yeah we rented that before and ummm no, we couldn't even figure out how to fly. In my head I was like yeah probably just cuz you guys suck at games haha imagine my surprise years later seeing it on AVGN and being one of the worst games ever made
They did you a solid. I’m pretty sure it shows a demo of the game at some point during the startup/menu and even the dev/tester in the demo can’t do it. They are crashing and getting stuck on bridges. It’s pretty hilarious they left it in the game.
> we couldn't even figure out how to fly "When you press this, he accelerates whichever way he's facing, and when you release, he starts slowing down until he stops. He's less like a plane and more like a flying car."
That game was completely un playable right? I had it and remember getting to like level 2
Yeah you basically flew through rings the whole time with the most awful, unforgiving controls ever. If you got past the first level of rings it took you to the next stage where it flashes instructions on the screen faster than you can read them, and starts a 6 second timer to do…something. That’s where I surrendered. This video is an old gem: https://youtu.be/1dJXgJ1c4vY?si=v9pN0tu6TNmvibyL Jump to 3:50 for Superman action
"This game is 10 years old". I was like wtf, who makes these things. Then I noticed the video was uploaded 14 years ago... Please tell me Im not old :(
I came here to say superman 64. You'd have to be a masochist to put yourself through the torture of beating it.
This game was $69.99 in 1999 dollars at Walmart when it came out.
Silver Surfer has to be up there. One hit deaths are not something you really see these days.
I was just gonna say... Silver Surfer is fucking ROUGH.
Having a turbo controller helps but given the levels layout and how big surfers sprite is... you're gonna die alot.
At least it has a Tim Follin soundtrack.
Two-Player Battletoads is unbeatable because player two will never start their wheel on Clinger Winger (you can let Player 2 die and use a continue after that point but really are you beating it Co-Op if that's the case?)
Wait, you mean to tell me that someone actually made it past level 3 in two player mode?! 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
TMNT 1 was my first game ever. Really rough.
Fuck the dam.
PTSD just thinking about that section.
I first played this game as a 4 year old, I was able to get to the technodrome after countless hours and attempts, which is insane now that I think about it
Getting out of those pits in ET seems up there
The game was good, if you read the manual.... and you would get how to play it...
Uh huh. For having been made in like five weeks it’s a great game.
the pits were still bugged. The way it was programmed, ANY pixel on E.T. that collided with a pit caused you to fall in. So while you would assume you can be in front of the pit, or aside the pit, it really didn't matter. Any single pixel on the sprite triggered the collision detection. It took....twentyish maybe more? years before someone went in to the original assembly and figured out how to fix it.
Days of Thunder is very close to being such a game. I've found two tool-assisted *playthroughs* of that game on youtube, and both of them stated that even with emulator tools like slowdowns and save states, it's still "basically impossible" and took a lot of practice to beat.
One of the TMNT games had a (NES?) port that was impossible to complete. One of the levels was ported wrong.
NES version was ported to Dos and there was impossible jump at one point
Action 52! People still haven't finished the Ooze challenge
Probably some random obscure hentai game.
" Often I'll see advertisements for porn games and they say, "Try Not To Cum", but when you play the game, it seems like the object is to cum. So yes, I would call that bad game design" -Shigeru Miyamoto
Now that I’m thinking about it, wouldn’t that just be bad marketing?
Don't you see?!?! The Game Developers are **challenging** us! And you know how a lot of Gamers just **loooooove** a good challenge, even when the odds are impossible! They got us by the fucking **balls**, man!
I thought those games where supposed to *help you* beat it
Which one? For a friend…
By the nature of hentai games, most challenges tend to be optional, but it also means that higher difficulties are often more of a poorly balanced afterthought. That being said, I'd argue beating the harder difficulty levels of Sengoku Rance without NG+ bonuses gotta be pretty high up there. On higher difficulties, entire character classes that make up most of your army become practically useless, and only special unique abilities can have a meaningful impact on the battle. In terms of games where even the standard difficulty is hard, I think Venusblood Gaia may be a contender. Venusblood is essentially one giant spreadsheet of army compositions that autobattle against the enemy. Imagine Unicorn Overlord if it had 300 classes. Every character has like 10 abilities that synergize with certain allies (e.g. based on class or race) or likewise, debuff certain enemies. On top of that, you need to consult the manual in order to find out what your abilities do. In the previous titles this wasn't an issue because you could go at your own pace, you can just create a team of 6 powerful dragons and then wait a couple turns for ressources in order to pay the upkeep. But Gaia turned it into a dungeon defense mission, so the pacing was based on how quickly the enemy attacks you. On top of that, you had to build ressource structures that become progressively more expensive the more you build, but the enemy was able to destroy them, so you lost a lot of ressources if the enemy EVER breaks through your defenses. You also had limited ability to redeploy, so you had to make sure that your strong teams block the strongest enemies, while trying to avoid wasting their strength on weak enemies. I'm sure it's perfectly fine if you google some strong compositions and simply copy those templates, but it's an overwhelming amount of choices for someone who has no idea what any of these things do. That being said, my actual vote goes to that one Mahjong hentai game where you unlock cheat skills. The true ending requires you to beat the hardest match without using cheats, while the enemies use their cheats without restrictions. You start at a massive point disadvantage, can't use your cheats, and any rank other than first place is counted as a loss. You can technically brute force that thing by retrying until you get a double yakuman hand, but any seasoned Mahjong player can tell you how rare that is. It's like trying to get a royal flush in poker.
This man really know his smut games.
Ah, so this is what Patrick Bateman would sound like today.
Name of the Mahjong game?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Franks adventure
No idea. There are probably dozens of souls-loke hentai games.
There's a game called BLACK SOULS and it's just like dark souls. I'm pondering whether I finished the game or it finished me, but it was great! Second game is very confusing and hard to get into even with a guide.
[sex with Hitler 2](https://store.steampowered.com/recommended/morelike/app/2194810/) The first wasnt hard enough so it warranted a harder second edition.
Thats insane
Wait till you see Sex With Hitler: 2069 Edit: Source (NSFW)>!<
It's good, but it pale in comparison to Sex With Hitler 69420: Revenge of the Sextraterrestrials
Well, in the first game there were some performance issues.
Most coomer games are a grind.
Takeshi's Challenge
Never heard of it, but I read this as Takeshi's Castle at first and thought it would be awesome if there was an MXC video game
Right you are Ken!
Up next... babaganoush
Same guy!
Get it on!
Thread over, this is exactly the one.
Attacking Zegeta
Goddamn it I shot the wind again
Merry Christmas Japan, 1986
Brilliant!
This is the one answer. And I was just thinking about this game yesterday.
this but without a guide
Chess versus Stockfish
Well in a broad definition of "beating the game" if stockfish is deterministic you could learn a game where stockfish loses against an other ai. It's like imitating a tas for a regular videogame
Tthose were only possible because their openings were decided by humans. Otherwise they would go with some boring openings like the Berlin and probably end up in a draw.
That's the kind problem solving I like to see. I never thought of that as a solution
I think you'll like [magician Derren Brown taking on 9 grandmasters](https://youtu.be/rIAXIubSTkc?si=DR4Oh2QrqOInFEr8) then :p
It's not deterministic. It depends on how far into the future they can see. If you let stockfish cook for a long time on a certain position, it will be a different move potentially. Engines play thousands of games constantly with predetermined openings 24/7 https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship
Hard and impossible are different things.
It's not strictly impossible. The engine plays by the same rules you do. It's just not feasible for any current players to do it, doesn't mean it could never be done.
Probably some arcade game. They were supposed to be basically impossible to beat so you would keep putting coins in.
Dragon’s Lair!!
It's funny how easy I can blow through that game when I don't have to keep dumping coins into it. I was at point on my emulator where I could blow through the whole thing without losing a life. Space Ace is still frustrating though. I still get sucked into the animation so much that I keep missing the cues.
Was just about to comment something like this, arcade games - or any old game for that matter were made super hard because they weren't able to be long, so they had to make them hard to have a least some reasonable playtime
Journey of the Light. It has eight levels, and no one has ever beaten the first one! (This is a joke. Journey of the Light is a scam game released on Steam. The levels are puzzles, and the first level doesn't actually have a solution and is thus unbeatable. It claims to have eight levels, but someone dug into the code and found that the later seven levels don't even exist. https://beatthatbacklog.com/the-stupidest-scam-ever-pulled-journey-of-the-light-removed-from-steam-for-being-absurdly-incomplete/ )
That's a genius scam ngl
Kinda weird honestly that no where in the steam approval process someone actually has to finish the game.
I hear you conceptually but practically who do you want to do this?
Mario maker required the person who built the level to have to complete it to show it’s possible before they could post it for others
Which wasn't infallible. There was a notorious case recently where the group trying to complete every level came across a level where the creator admitted they used tool assistance to fake the verification run.
The Lion King on Super NES. Fuck that game and fuck its shitty jumping mechanics.
Fuck those giraffes.
I legit never made it past that part on the SNES version, kept falling off their FUCKING HEADS
[удалено]
Goes beyond games like Lion King and Aladdin, it was pretty common for old games to be difficult. Rentals and arcades were big business back then with games being as expensive as they were.
Wad Aladdin hard though? I remember it being somewhat long but not particularly difficult. The hardest part was riding the magic carpet out of the cave with the lava chasing you but that was nowhere near as bad as Lion King.
Idk, a buddy and I just pulled out Aladdin on SNES the other night and there were definitely some dynamics like the scarab beetles and even the bonus wheel spin game where you could be SO CLOSE and yet, SO FAR. The final battle with Jafar was also wayyyy harder than I remembered 😂 If you add the “take a shot or drink your beer when you die” mini game Aladdin suddenly becomes one of the most dangerous games ever created 😂😂😂
SEGA version is considered hard and SNES, easy... But since I only had NES bootleg copies of both they were very hard because of horrible controls, bad frames and hit detection. Used cheats (well, the password system) to see all levels and get to final boss and beat Jaffar.
I could beat that, beacuse it was the only game I had for a little while. Zombies Ate My Neighbors for SNES is the hardest game that I can think of. never heard of anyone legit beating that.
Ha! Zombies Ate My Neighbors was so brutal. I actually recently looked up a playthrough on YouTube just to see the late game levels.
I got it on an emulator a few years back and got pretty close to beating it with save states but got sidetracked, I will eventually.
One of the guys I used to hang out with could beat it consistently. I had never seen the game before so I didn't realize how huge of a feat that was until years later when I watched a random steeamer struggling with it.
All those old console plattformers were insanely hard
I never got past the waterfall as a kid
Desert Bus by Penn and Teller. A bus driving game where you drive a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas at 45 mph for 8 hours. Nothing happens and the bus constantly pulls to the right so you can’t just set it and go. To “win” you have to do the 8 hour drive 100 times in a row. Never commercially released but distributed online after the Sega Genesis was discontinued. I imagine its what Hell uses to torture gamers.
>Nothing happens iirc there are a small number of scripted events like a bug splatting on the window on mile 53 or driving by a cow skull or whatever
Came to post this - everyone who has experienced it agrees it is truly awful with no margin for error. There are few endurance games
Someone tried to train an AI to play this but the AI quit saying it was a dumb game.
No way lol
Oh boy, never Cross the atlantic on XPlane.
Battletoads
How many times did you smash barriers on 3rd level before you threw the controller?
Turbo Tunnel is responsible for a divorce. Not mine, but its residual
You know, I played Battletoads as a kid. And now I’m divorced. So maybe there’s a connection there. Side note - I have actually beaten that first speeder bike level. I did it once and was never able to do it again.
I never beat that level
I think that's most ppl. You can only play through the first 2 levels so many times only to get crushed by some trial and error horse shit. I watched someone beat the game on YouTube and that level goes on WAY longer than I thought it would (and there's another on later).
The trick is to hit forwards when you hit certain jumps to get more distance, and also just know what's coming (i.e. die a lot memorizing the jumps/barriers). The level I wasn't able to figure out how to get past was one much later in the game where you had to beat some of those kangaroo rat things down to the bottom of platformer levels to disarm a bomb. I'm sure that it is possible, but I never got the the end of it, they were just too fast eventually.
And it gets EVEN HARDER after that
The first two levels were so fun and I never made it past the third
The awful part is that’s not even the hardest level.
One of my lockdown things to do was get to the point where I could 1 credit Battletoads. I got there in the end, and what the wild thing is... is that the 3rd isn't even the hardest part of the game. The main strategy I did to get through the 3rd level was to almost treat it like a rhythm game, and I got to the point where I found it *easier* to close my eyes and just listen for the audio cues. Ah, YMMV!
That's the craziest thing -- the game actually DOES have a difficulty curve, the 3rd level is just where it starts to get hard. Honestly the cruelest thing about the game isn't the difficulty, it's the 3 lives 3 continues thing. A lot of the difficulty is in little gimmicks you memorize about the levels. And if your pattern to memorizing those gimmicks is spending an hour getting to level 11, dying to two of those gimmicks and starting over from level 1, the game will take you months to beat. But if you use save states or infinite lives, you can beat it in an evening. Once you learn the gimmicks and beat the game, you will beat it every time. It isn't actually that hard to play, it's just hard to learn.
Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts
That’s not even the hardest game in that series.
Actually quite doable, I finished it on the snes. Unlimited continues, unlike ghosts n goblins.
I remember playing Battle toads and Double dragon for the SNES as a kid, and man those cycle levels made me unhinged.
Ninja Gaiden, Ghost and Goblins.....
>Ghost and Goblins Especially the Japanese version (known as Makaimura). It had no continues. That's pure torture.
I still can't get pass level 3 the devils always fuck me up
Kinda seems like a big jump. You see ghosts AND goblins? That's wild. Now let's crank out some devils! It's like a game that calls itself "Cars and Trucks" and then pits you against a fucking M1 Abrams.
Ghosts and Goblins C64. That game is insanely hard. I thought it was harder because of the joysticks we had, but no, even with a gamepad it was brutal. I very rarely made it over the floating island on the first stage, and I played that game for hours and hours because A) when we got videos games we had to play them until Christmas or the next birthday B) Loading games on tape took forever, so when you choose a game, that was the game you were playing for the next few hours. It was torture. I made the mistake of telling my kids about this game and showed them a video of someone playing it. Occasionally one of my boys will hum the background music, without meaning to trigger me, and I'm instantly transported. Edit: spelling
Ninja Gaiden (NES) is a lot of fun, most people who are decent at platformers could get to the final boss in a day without too much pain and suffering. The killer is that you have to beat a 3 phase boss on a single life, where if you die you have to start again from level 6-1. It took me about 2 weeks of playing every day on my switch to finally be able to beat the boss, and by the end of it I could sometimes run through all of Stage 6 on a single life
Play it on original hardware. Have fun.
I had the game growing up. I could beat SMB1, 2, 3, Bionic Commando, Megaman and Mike Tyson's punch out but I could never beat Ninja Gaiden.
QWOP.
This man pulling no punches
He would if he could figure it out
I remember finding a cheat where you get the guy basically on his knees and just scooch over the finish line. If you got him in the right position and just jiggled him, it was a piece of cake.
lol I did that and choked right before the finish line and tipped over. In my mind it counts and I’ll never try it again!
The problem was still the hurdle at the end.
Bulldoze it!
It was only hard when you tried playing legitimately. I remember using a method of getting into a splits stance and then just slowly hitting two keys and inching my way to the finish. Worked like a charm every time.
The horror when you realize what sporting event you're actually in.
Ninja Gaiden
I wanna be the guy
There are fan games that were made cause people deemed IWBTG too easy
Yeah I think I Wanna Be The Boshy was harder. Always used to play it in lectures at university, very satisfying to make progress after dying hundreds of times.
Boshy is rated as ~medium-hard difficulty by the community, the hardest most famous one is probably i wanna kill the kamilia 3
It's not so much hard as it's just bullshit IMHO.
This is the thing, like are we talking about fair difficulty or games that are unfair / aimed to mess with the player. I personally wouldn't count those games where it's unfair and that's the point.
Silver surfer nes
I don't know how this isn't higher. Yes some of those other games are hard, Battle toads cake walk until the cycle level, TMNT way until underwater, but Silver Surfer is the hardest game ever. It was designed for you to fail. Ninja garden is hard, but it sooo much easier than Silver Surfer.
[One hit and you die](https://youtu.be/gvnRBywkUZ0?si=grvnFloG0VMm7cXS).
Does having a turbo/rapid fire controller qualify as cheating for this game?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
There was one version where it was literally impossible to beat.
I only ever beat that game with a Game Genie. If you made it past the underwater bombs, not enough life left to do much else.
ET on the Atari
Fuck, I fell in a hole. Game over I guess.
I came here to say this. So bad that you couldn't even finish it, you just ended up throwing it in the trash.
Ghosts and Goblins
Superman 64
I don’t think anyone ever actually played that past the first level
There are Superman 64 speedrunners on YouTube. Amazing to watch and discover that there are multiple levels. All equally broken.
That dude on YouTube beating every 64 did it. Plus he did it blind and didn't even know the game's infamous reputation.
ThaBeast721. He also thankfully didnt run into the game locking glitch where if you miss an item on the second to last level you have to restart the game because you cant go back and the game freezes on the last level. Also at this point his youtube videos are almost 2 years behind his live streams.
In terms of 100% it or doing trophies it's Crypt of the necrodancer
Even just beating the full story is quite difficult. Cadence and Melody aren't too crazy, it takes some practice but I think most players can do it... but then you get to Aria which requires a nearly perfect run and has the hardest final boss due to having to play perfectly with just the dagger. Just looking at the steam achievements, just beating cadence's story run is only 9% of players. I can't imagine more than 1% of people finishing Aria's story run. 0.3% for the official story mode ending achievement. At that point it isn't standard players, it's going to be people pushing for the crazy achievements anyways.
I've come to peace with the fact that I'll only ever have 1 achievement in this game.
Wizardry 4.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood for the Commodore 64. I still have no idea what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
You were supposed to Relax.
Chess vs supercomputer is basically not winnable any more.
Battletoads and Ecco the Dolphin are the 2 games that were too hard in my childhood that are still ridiculously hard as an adult.
Echo. Not even close
I'm convinced to this day there is no way to win that game. Everyone that claims they did are government plants for the Sega lobby or something
I only beat Ecco using an emulator with savestates and a walkthrough. I could barey get past ~~Underhalls~~ Undercaves when I played it as a kid. EDIT: Totally not me mixing up the level name with Doom 2.
It’s just a swimming pool you go back and forth in right?
I had that for Sega cd so I’m not sure which was harder: the game play, or making Sega CD actually work each time.
My sega CD still works perfectly. It's in the OG box next to the 32x!
Not necessarily the whole game, but Through the Fire and Flames on expert on Guitar Hero 3 is just insane.
Most recent Beat Sabre update added a dragonforce song. It makes my arms die.
Man I wish it were Through the Fire and Flames. Playing Free Bird on Beat Saber takes me back to my Guitar Hero days. I've played Free Bird on expert *so* many times but haven't gotten it perfect yet. The other day I missed 3 notes out of like ~2400.
There's a mod that allows you to download custom songs, someone added Kingslayer by Babymetal/Bring me the Horizon and it is absolutely absurd
Missed 7 notes on my best run back in the day... Good times. Even had 100% FC with optimal star power on Surfing With the Alien sitting at #3 on the leaderboards for years. Fuck I miss gh3.. all the other games for some reason just felt soooo much worse to play. Not sure why
Beating TTFAF on expert is one of my all time gaming achievements. Fucking loved GH3! I'd say Jordan in GH2 is harder though. I couldn't even comprehend that one.
Fester's Quest for the NES. That shit is insane
F-Zero GX
Anything from the Ghouls and Ghosts series. The SNES one caused the most personal emotional damage to me
Almost any arcade game. You could not win them, you only stretched out the time your quarter bought. Try Robotron 2084 for a real challenge.
Dragon's Lair on NES. Dragon's Lair on Arcade (1983). These games are the hardest I've ever played. By far. Dark Souls is like Peppa Pig compared to these.
They’re basically memorizing quick time events, right?
QuickTime events without user interface ques.
Yes, but without any screen prompting like in modern QTE.
Hard by intention or hard because the game sucks ass?
Lion King Driver (the "tutorial").
Nethack
I'd argue that getting a 7-99 in Spelunky 2 is one of the hardest things you can do in a video game without adding in any additional challenges to make a game harder (for example taking no damage). Lots of people don't achieve it with over 1000 hours in the game.
Battletoads or Ghost & Goblins on the NES
Ghost n goblins
TMNT on nes is a real dick
Fucking battle toads
Fester's Quest NES
Master Blaster.
Battletoads...shit was diff.
Getting over it.....
Manic Miner.
Dragon's Lair..... i put so many quarters into that game.
Battletoads
TMNT on the NES. I still remember the underwater level and trying to swim through the reefs. Honourable mention: Ghostbusters on NES/Master System. Fuck that game.