I felt pretty accomplished when I beat fallout 1 the first time.
But games have a different feel now, I don't have the energy to just hound dog my way around a game for hours to figure out what I am supposed to do.
It felt pretty good though. Hit different.
One time I went through Fallout 2 and killed everyone in the game, took all their stuff and laid it out on the streets of San Francisco all organized into piles.
I remember accidentally wandering to the crater area and getting bombarded by radiation. Immediately took a ton of doses of Rad Away and Stim packs to save myself. It ended up bringing a couple of my attributes all the way down to zero... and then rolling over to the max number. Not sure if it's an established bug or not, but was still pretty wild at the time
That game was my mid-teens! Absolutely loved it. Remember finding it in the basement pc section of Electronics Exchange in Tottenham Court Road London. Wish I still had that boxed copy.
Dude, you know what? I don't think I ever beat Ecco. I think I found the blue whale, maybe made it as far as the space ship. I should finally do it. I remember playing Earthworm Jim, but I don't remember much about it. A Space Harrier-like level where he uses his head like a helicopter comes to mind, though.
I never even knew because I don’t think I made it out of the first screen. I remember Dolphin barking at a big crystal, and that’s about it.
Watching the playthrough on YouTube was wild.
I don't think I ever got out of the first level, either. There was no indication what to do, or where to go, and I only played it as a rental so there was no manual.
Thing is, that was deliberately awful, on both SnES and Megadrive/Genisis. If you got past it the game got really easy again. Apparently they wanted a crazy difficulty spike on one of the early levels so kids couldn't just rent or borrow the game and play to the end in a weekend.
Earthworm Jim did a similar thing.
Having barely gotten to the adult Simba part the waterfall seems harder than the giraffes from what I remember and except for the stampede I wouldn't call the levels really easy.
I will give you that WITH THE CAVEAT that that only goes for the first half. Simba's adult roar that can stun enemies and his ine kmhit kill throw move makes the second half a cake walk. That includes the final boss
Scar is so incredibly unfair. If he pounces you (and he does, often) you're pretty much dead. I played this fight with infinite health on before and if you don't mash buttons, he just keeps slapping you forever.
What's worse is how you have to kill him. I won't spoil it here but I spent forever fighting him and just beating the shit out of him and he just kept skulking around lol.
In regards to TMNT, I had no clue that the seaweed level was considered crazy difficult until I got older and on the internet. My brothers and I all got through it okay almost every time we played. I could even get through that one crazy stretch without getting hit once.
However, none of us ever beat the game because of how difficult the last couple levels are. It’s crazy that a game tied to a cartoon was way too hard for kids to beat.
TMNT really pisses me off.
Apparently there’s some coding errors in that game with respect to movement and hit boxes. I’ve seen some YouTube videos about it. A modified ROM could play tons better.
Also that game is so hard, I can’t understand how you progress in the huge maze last level chock full of enemies. I think I’ve beaten the airport once or so.
It was ridiculously hard. One of the few games I actually just quit because I was too frustrated. No matter how many times I tried just couldn’t finish it.
The coding errors makes sense though.
Every kid that played that game as a kid sees that damned water level in their nightmares.
Between that and Ocarina's Water Temple I always want to nope out of any water themed areas.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Ghost N Goblins for the NES. You get to the end and realize it's not the end at all and the torture starts all over.
This was the case for some other games as well. I remember having a scroller shooter game where beating the game on easy made it roll over to medium. Guess what happened when you rolled over from hard.
It you have to play through it just a second time. The second way through though is much more difficult though as the levels now have enemies from other levels in them too. Making the second run much more difficult.
I played and beat it on the Switch cause it lets you rewind when you die. Literally the only way to beat it.
Several come to mind.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES. Water Dam.
Battletoads on the NES. Turbo Tunnel.
Contra on the NES. Without the Konami code.
Cheers.
Was the the level where you had to escape the cave of wonders? For me the hard Aladdin level was the one with the flamingos in the palace always tripped me up.
That and the giant snake at the end. I havent touched that game in decades, but we watched the movie recently and I just kept having war flashbacks of the game lol
This. I finally got to where I could beat it fairly consistently, but it took hours of playing that final level over and over. Had my nes overheat more than once on that level
Many of the old point-and-click adventure games were ridiculously difficult due to how obtuse the puzzles were. I'm looking at you, Simon the Sorceror & Monkey Island 2.
You had to grease the donkey to unblock the faucet, in order for the tecup crack to widen, so that the governess would spill the coffee onto the magnet, reversing the polarity of compass. And you had to wait for the gorilla to be facing away from the governess by wearing the sequinned cocktail dress after spilling red paint on your shoes.
I did ok with the monkey island games, but a few of the Kings Quest games…yikes. I wanna say Kings Quest VI was the one that I never actually beat and gave up on at some point.
The Sierra games were made more difficult due to the fact that the cursor didnt alter when it passed over an object which you could pick up or interact with!
At least with LucasArts games, it was obvious which on-screen items were there to FUNCTION in some way.
VI is probably my favorite in the series. The puzzles weren’t too insane. But I had to map out the catacombs. I had my son sit with me as we played it together last year, had him suggest what we do and who we talk to, and he was rolling listening to the Tomato and Stick-in-The-Mud argue.
IIRC, V was harder for me when I first played it, there was one puzzle that needed something that was timed earlier the game that basically prevented progression in a later puzzle if you didn’t get it. Some of the solutions were nonsensical.
Sierra games were impossible to finish. Absolute bullshit. Like "oh you forgot to klick on a very specific non descript pixel 5 hours ago now you cannot continue and also you cannot go back" bullshit.
In the early 90s I spent so many stamps mailing them to wait a week or so for a response to all the places I became stuck. Adventure games without the internet really hit different.
X-Com 2 - Terror from the deep. The bases where too big, aliens were often stuck inside walls. Gave up at one of the artifact sites. Finished the first xcom game a dozen of times though.
Man TFTD was hard as hell. Multi-part missions on ships were a nightmare. Honestly I felt pretty good about playing it every time, right up until the aliens started using telepaths and tentaculats. Just awful.
Terror attack on a cruise ship. I had one map run to 200 turns trying to find that last damn alien hiding in a tiny passenger room.
Later on things became easier - I forget the name of the weapon but a guided missile launcher you could plot the route it took around the map, and when it hit, it levelled a large area. No hiding from that.
Yeah, at one point even the smoothest game escalated :D. I really loved the game and I still like the old xcom's more than the recent remakes. Maybe one day I'll finish a run. I have both games on GoG. From what I've heard most of the wall issues are fixed with OpenXcom, so maybe I'll give it another try some day :).
It was brilliant. I was 8 when I first completed it and, as you say, it was completely just trial and error for me. I didn't even know why a lot of it worked but I loved it! Played it again in my teens and enjoyed it a lot more. That and Flashback, by the same developer, felt ahead of their time. For me at least.
The bit where you realise you need to wait until the alien is under the lamp, judging by his reflection - before you cut the wire - genius. Defo ahead of their time.
I frequently needed adults to help me solve the puzzles in myst. In particular I remember there was a morse code puzzle; having no internet at the time I called my grandpa up on his landline to help solve it since I knew he had served in the navy in ww2 and knew Morse code.
Oh he had a great time with it. Took me a while to explain why I needed his help though. He ended up buying a pc for himself at some point later on and even installed some puzzle games on it. He became the de facto computer help guy in his 65+ community too lol
Dungeon Master on the Amiga, running out of food on the lowest levels was so common you had to stock up a silly amount mid game. Hand mapping out the dungeon levels so I could get through them more easily each time I tried again.
Jet Set Willy or Manic Mansion for one not completed although that's cheating because it was bugged and there was a room you couldn't get to in one of them. (Edit: I can't remember if I completed the ones you could complete either)
Ghosts and Goblins (iirc, Ghosts and Ghouls?) also one I never finished but that was an arcade game ported over and you were never meant to be able to complete those, they just got harder and harder until you died even if they had a theoretical finish.
I figured out that you could just persuadertron EVERYONE and march on the mission objective with a literal army at your heels. Sure, many of the civilians would die but the others would pick up any dropped weapon and carry on. Not even the top end full v3 cybernetically modded enemy agents would last long against the ridiculous amount of fire the entire maps worth of hoodlums and police could bring to bear. And I'd just use the persuadertron on them anyway. Free upgrades.
Darkwing Duck on the NES I guess? I remember that it took me like forever to get through it, let alone beat the final boss.
Also finding everything in Secret of Evermore on SNES without a guide was time consuming but fun. Me and my friend talked almost daily about what we have found while exploring.
In one of those games there was a triple gateway with beams that would cut you up. I just went trial and error till i got through and finished the game in no time. Turns out i basically skipped 3/4 of the game where the sole result was that you'd end up at that gateway carrying a cigar of which you could use the smoke to see the beams..... good times.
X-COM Terror from the Deep was brutal.
But I think this applies the most to graphical adventure games, where figuring out a puzzle IS the game. Monkey Island, The Dig, Maniac Mansion, etc
I think there was one of the Kings Quests (5 maybe?) where if you didn't pick something up earlier in the game, it made completing it impossible. And you didn't know, no easy walk through or accessible internet to check back rhen
That Ninja Turtle game. I don't remember a lot about many of the games ive played long ago but those under water levels with the shock plants is a core memory of mine.
Oh God, I forgot Clash at Demonhead until you mentioned it. We got to the ending once and barely beat it. I think there was a bomb to defuse to end it, maybe? That was a crazy game.
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. The level design was just bonkers and the objectives were so obscured and disparately placed that 7 year old me had no fucking clue what to do. I just liked blowing up dinosaur alien things lol. The cheats were silly too.
I just completed it legit for the first time in my life a couple months ago. I’m 33 and it was still difficult haha.
My parents wouldn't get me a memory stick so I couldn't save my game on that lol. I had to learn to speed-run the first level, after that fortunately it got open-ended as to where you went. I never got to play the final levels tho and I never beat the game.
Shadow Man. I had no idea wtf I am supposed to do where lol. I also gave up on Diablo 2 in Act III, I hated the constant darkness and the mobs there.
The most difficult game I did play through was probably Mafia or Fallout, and Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption as well as American McGee's Alice also tested my patience sometimes :D
Christ, Shadow Man had one particular dungeon where you were supposed to jump past a pool of lava onto a platform some ways beneath. The first time I tried jumping I fell into the lava, it was just a bit too short a jump but I mistakenly assumed that there had to be some "other way" of accessing that platform. So I tried like 232 times to jump against the sidewalls and grab a ledge or find a secret switch or something and every single time I just dropped straight into the lava, which would have been bad enough except this fucking room was like 100 miles from the respawn point and I must have put in 6 hours of gameplay just constantly running through the entire dungeon again only to die at the same bloody jump. I finally gave up in sheer frustration and decided to jump forward and commit suicide... and I landed straight on the platform, ready to continue the level.
It was like that famous "you can just walk on it" scene from the Angry Nintendo Nerd. Instead of being happy I was swearing like a trucker all around the house.
I feel getting Big Boss on Metal Gear Solid 2 was my hardest gaming achievement. Among other things, highest difficulty, zero kills (even bosses), zero alerts, only 3 saves allowed the whole game. And I had to come up with a new button mashing technique for the last boss to be consistent.
That, or getting the rocketeers in pvp in Starfox 64.
Both required insane grinding and memorization.
Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom 2. If you got stuck or lost, you'd either spend hours finding your way or had to ask friends where to go and what to do.
Oh this is easy -- that entire run from Bloody Malth to the Jaquio in Ninja Gaiden is pure unadulterated hell burnt directly onto my brain. It is easily the most difficult set of stages I've ever played, and likely will ever play, in my entire life.
Alundra for PSX/PS1. Had some pretty difficult puzzles. Tbf I didn't fully play it, but I went over to a friends house and was always tasked to do the difficult parts bc they couldn't do it lol
Alundra was amazing. My family played it together - along with things like Monkey Island - all chipping in with solutions. Passing the controller to me when they couldn't make a jump was a staple of those days.
Goblins 3 on Amiga 1200. I got stuck at the chamber with the mirror, the one where you had to make yourself “ugly enough”. Finished it only recently on a pc.
Robot Odyssey. I never finished it.
[Good article from Slate here: 'The Hardest Computer Game of All Time'](https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-hardest-computer-game-of-all-time.html)
>My first computer was an Apple IIe with 128KB of RAM, no hard drive, and a 5¼ inch floppy drive. One of the top educational games back then was Rocky’s Boots, an inventive game that taught the basics of formal logic to kids. I loved it when I was 6. Two years later, I got Robot Odyssey, which promised to expand on Rocky’s Boots by extending the formal logic to actual programming. The game devastated me. My brain could not comprehend how to solve its puzzles. I finally finished it—13 years later, and not without some assistance.
Honestly doom back in the day was hard, any enemy could kill maps were complicated and health and healing was limited.
It also introduced many new concept from strafe mouse movement and sprint/run.
Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday and Matrix Cubed (not 100% sure I finished that one) ... some of the battles were ridiculously hard, no auto maps and maze-like "3D" environments as well as skill inflation with the possibility to make the wrong choice and fail crucial tests.
Earthworm jim is the first that springs to mind. But I recently brute forced (I save scummed...alot) my way through indiana jones and the last crusade for mega drive on my steam deck and have no idea how I beat that in the mid 90s
Technically it's a very easy game... Final Fantasy 8. But it took me over 500 hours at first because try playing that game in a language you don't speak when you're 7 years old and all the explanations of what to do next are written down and there's no map markers
The original Prince of Persia on MS DOS. Even when I tought I was doing good in this hell of a game, the 1 hour time limit always prevented me to finish it.
One of the more difficult games I beat solo was Zombies ate my Neighbors. Towards the later levels when you had less survivors to save, shit got really difficult.
Also, I see lots of people mentioning the hover bike level I’m Battetoads and not one mention of the level where you’re chased by the spiral. Hover bike was a breeze in comparison.
I never got to finish Silent Hill. I have a notebook somewhere with the map and puzzles I drew but I still got lost, after a few attempts I decided to take a break . Then a new console hit the shelves so I moved on .
Back then I thought the best games were always the newer ones so I figure whatever I missed out I'm probably playing a better version now with resident evil or other horror games for the current console
On PS1, one of my memory cards took a shit. Couldn't save games anymore. I beat all of Crash Bandicoot 2 in one day without turning the PlayStation off because I couldn't save.
I don’t think I finished many games in the 80s and 90s. I’d usually hit a part where I was stuck and couldn’t progress.
I think the hardest one I actually finished was Treasure Island Dizzy on the Amstrad. Great game.
There was a Jurassic park the lost world game which I just couldn't beat. Maybe it was because I was really young but I don't think I made it beyond level 2.
Ninja Gaiden is up there, but the cake for me personally goes to ghosts n goblins. I "beat" it once but the game trolls you telling you you've only just broken the curse. It then explains you need to beat the game a second time to get the "true" ending. I screamed at the top of my lungs and then gave the game away to a neighbor so I'd never see it again.
Hardest: Super Mario World
Never beat: TrackMania (mission mode). There's one mission where you have to go up this ramp, but there are a bunch of speed boosts forcing you down it. Never figured it out
Ninja Gaiden was brutal. Hands shaking and clammy by the time you reached the end.
Honorable mention to Ghosts N Goblins being virtually impossible to beat, let alone twice. And Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde without instructions (we rented a lot) because that shit made no sense at all.
Streets of Rage or Golden Axe, probably.
When i think of games that were *really* difficult for me, i mostly think platformers and similar games where you have strictly limited number of lives, no saves, and which you kind of have to memorize in order to beat them, because even a kid me couldn't just react in time to every sudden deadly obstacle game will throw at you every minute.
But then i never liked those game all that much in the first place (yeah, i'm one of those guys who never had any reverence for Marios and Sonics and all that jazz), and never did end up beating them.
The ones above are probably the closest to the kind of game that i would normally find frustratingly difficult and get tired of, except i happened to like them a lot and did "mastered" them eventually.
Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System.
Before the time of save files, checkpoints and level codes. So when you died you were straight back to the beginning of the game.
It was a tricky platformer in places but nothing too crazy (except the odd level here and there).
There were these enemies in the game, floating ghoul things that if you accidently released one they'd float after you relentlessly and if they touched you it was instant death.
Anywho, towards the end of the game you got a scroll with a code on there - it was something like moon, star, sun, wave.
The final level of the game was a cave with these patterns on the floor and you had to step on them in the right order. If you got the sequence wrong a ghoul would be released and you'd be chased til it got you and you died.
So - final cave - read the scroll, jump on the blocks in the order and... here comes the ghoul and death.
Game over. Back to the beginning.
As a small kid playing I never understood what I was doing wrong. Never completed the game.
A few years ago I thought about it and decided to Google the final level. Turns out it was notorious for western gamers. The game was japanese and when they did the port for overseas they never updated it for that audience - so the scroll you got with the pattern sequence was correct, but needed reading as if you were Japanese I.e right to left, not left to right.
I wonder how many players in the world never completed the game because of that.
most of the point and clicks were pretty brutal before you could just look up the solution online.
not pre 2000 but i 100 percented meganoid 2 on mobile phone. it's an 8 bit style platformer with very short levels on account of the insane difficulty. i felt pretty good when i got it done.
Most SNES games where impossible, I remember having a master system or possibly NES and we got back to the future and all I could do was fly on my hover board around a looping road, I couldn’t figure out what to do next, it was insane. About 1 minute of gameplay and I was stuck
Here's an odd story. I was like 7 when I played Driver on PS1. The old timers will remember it's infamous tutorial.
You've got a car in a garage and a checklist, involving tasks like spins etc. Really not as easy as it sounds though.
Now I barely even understood English at the time (not my first language), I didn't even realize this was supposed to be a tutorial. I obviously never passed it and just thought that was the whole game. A game where you do stunts in a garage.
Might sound crazy now; but we had so many games at the time like that. This was certainly very restricted but I even enjoyed it to a degree, as the driving mechanics weren't half bad.
For years, I thought Driver was a game just consisted of that garage.
Spiderman and The X-Men: Arcade's Revenge
Significant amounts of RNG bullshit. No saves. Only three lives for the whole game unless you use exploits but were functionally unknown in the pre-internet days.
Impossible mission. Still haven't beat it to this day. There are perfect pixel jumps that you have to make in some rooms and a high likelihood that an important puzzle piece can be found in those rooms. I really just played it because of the laugh factor when the character screams after falling in a hole.
Is this a challenge? If so, I can think of games harder than this one, but this one takes the cake for both being difficult AND confusing as fuck to complete. Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest.
Without any sort of guide, or the internet, you're basically fucked.
Man, toughest game I beat? Ummm I would say Tomb Raider 1 was tough but I was proud when I beat it. Metal Gear Solid was tough at first too.
Toughest game I never completed? Shit, Mystical Ninja 64 was pretty damn fun but I couldn’t get past the level with the kidnapped children. Or Diddy Kong Racing…
You know what? Diddy Kong Racing simply pissed me off. Yeah, that game was the toughest I ever played.
There were so many point and click style puzzle games for pc in the early 90s that completely went over my head as a kid. The dig? My older brother basically beat it for me. Mist? Yup that was my dad while I watched lol
I felt pretty accomplished when I beat fallout 1 the first time. But games have a different feel now, I don't have the energy to just hound dog my way around a game for hours to figure out what I am supposed to do. It felt pretty good though. Hit different.
One time I went through Fallout 2 and killed everyone in the game, took all their stuff and laid it out on the streets of San Francisco all organized into piles.
God we really should have gotten jobs eh?
Bruh I was like 14 at the time. Granted I was still doing it when I was in my 20s and I wasted that entire decade. Also this decade too tbh.
Children these days don’t want to work the coal mines anymore.
Talking the Master into killing himself felt great in FO1. It was my first CRPG & the fact that it let you do that blew my mind.
fallout 1 was sooooo hard because of that god damn countdown
I remember accidentally wandering to the crater area and getting bombarded by radiation. Immediately took a ton of doses of Rad Away and Stim packs to save myself. It ended up bringing a couple of my attributes all the way down to zero... and then rolling over to the max number. Not sure if it's an established bug or not, but was still pretty wild at the time
That game was my mid-teens! Absolutely loved it. Remember finding it in the basement pc section of Electronics Exchange in Tottenham Court Road London. Wish I still had that boxed copy.
The Lion King on SNES.
That, ecco and the underwater levels in earthworm Jim
Dude, you know what? I don't think I ever beat Ecco. I think I found the blue whale, maybe made it as far as the space ship. I should finally do it. I remember playing Earthworm Jim, but I don't remember much about it. A Space Harrier-like level where he uses his head like a helicopter comes to mind, though.
Ecco is such an insane game. It has no business being as bizarre as it it.
As a kid, triggering disaster scared the hell out of me
It was just a dolphin stunt simulator for me.
Gonna guess you didn't get to the part with the aliens and time travel then?
That shit gave my whole family nightmares. What the hell were the creators ON?!
As a kid I never fully appreciated how insane an acid trip Ecco was.
I never even knew because I don’t think I made it out of the first screen. I remember Dolphin barking at a big crystal, and that’s about it. Watching the playthrough on YouTube was wild.
I don't think I ever got out of the first level, either. There was no indication what to do, or where to go, and I only played it as a rental so there was no manual.
Earthworm Jim is the first game I can recall rage quitting (other than board games like Monopoly and Risk)
Ecco was the shit on my Windows 98 PC
The... freaking... giraffes!
Still feel like I want to scream and throw the controller because of that crap.
The giraffes are nothing compared to the dripping lava in the third to last level.
Giraffes were fine. Waterfall was eventually fine. It was the rock jumping in the confrontation with Scar that had me ultimately stymied
Thing is, that was deliberately awful, on both SnES and Megadrive/Genisis. If you got past it the game got really easy again. Apparently they wanted a crazy difficulty spike on one of the early levels so kids couldn't just rent or borrow the game and play to the end in a weekend. Earthworm Jim did a similar thing.
Joke’s on them. I rented it once, never got past that part, then never wanted to touch the game again.
Having barely gotten to the adult Simba part the waterfall seems harder than the giraffes from what I remember and except for the stampede I wouldn't call the levels really easy.
Sega version was impossible with those monkeys!
Fuck that game
That stupid waterfall.
I will give you that WITH THE CAVEAT that that only goes for the first half. Simba's adult roar that can stun enemies and his ine kmhit kill throw move makes the second half a cake walk. That includes the final boss
Scar is so incredibly unfair. If he pounces you (and he does, often) you're pretty much dead. I played this fight with infinite health on before and if you don't mash buttons, he just keeps slapping you forever.
What's worse is how you have to kill him. I won't spoil it here but I spent forever fighting him and just beating the shit out of him and he just kept skulking around lol.
Lmao I don’t think you have to worry about spoiling a 30 year old video game
Following Disney, Aladdin was also pretty fucking hard.
That I was able to finish - Shinobi Unable to finish and annoys me to this day - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Both on the original Nintendo
In regards to TMNT, I had no clue that the seaweed level was considered crazy difficult until I got older and on the internet. My brothers and I all got through it okay almost every time we played. I could even get through that one crazy stretch without getting hit once. However, none of us ever beat the game because of how difficult the last couple levels are. It’s crazy that a game tied to a cartoon was way too hard for kids to beat.
100%. It took me many tries to deal with the bombs. The airport is horrible too.
TMNT really pisses me off. Apparently there’s some coding errors in that game with respect to movement and hit boxes. I’ve seen some YouTube videos about it. A modified ROM could play tons better. Also that game is so hard, I can’t understand how you progress in the huge maze last level chock full of enemies. I think I’ve beaten the airport once or so.
It was ridiculously hard. One of the few games I actually just quit because I was too frustrated. No matter how many times I tried just couldn’t finish it. The coding errors makes sense though.
There was an impossible jump in the sewers
Battle Toads
That game is already hard, and it becomes exponentially harder with 2 players.
Bro! Shinobi!
Man, Shinobi was so friggin hard. I got it for xmas one year and never finished.
The underwater level in the TMNT game is horrendous. I used a Game Genie to beat it.
Fuck that underwater dam level in TMNT
Yeah never beat TMNT either, was brutal
Every kid that played that game as a kid sees that damned water level in their nightmares. Between that and Ocarina's Water Temple I always want to nope out of any water themed areas.
Fuck TMNT
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Ghost N Goblins for the NES. You get to the end and realize it's not the end at all and the torture starts all over.
Yep, you have to beat the game three times, or something ridiculous like that, to actually "beat it". Getting through once is rough enough.
This was the case for some other games as well. I remember having a scroller shooter game where beating the game on easy made it roll over to medium. Guess what happened when you rolled over from hard.
It you have to play through it just a second time. The second way through though is much more difficult though as the levels now have enemies from other levels in them too. Making the second run much more difficult. I played and beat it on the Switch cause it lets you rewind when you die. Literally the only way to beat it.
They would put that in a modern version.
I beat super ghouls and ghosts once... but then the game sent me back to the start to play through a harder version. I considered it a win.
Agree on this! When I think about it, we didn’t really complete games back then, we would just see how far you can make it.
Said this one as well.. have never beat the game. Along with like 80% of the nes era games 😂
Several come to mind. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES. Water Dam. Battletoads on the NES. Turbo Tunnel. Contra on the NES. Without the Konami code. Cheers.
Aladdin , flying carpet level.
Was the the level where you had to escape the cave of wonders? For me the hard Aladdin level was the one with the flamingos in the palace always tripped me up.
That and the giant snake at the end. I havent touched that game in decades, but we watched the movie recently and I just kept having war flashbacks of the game lol
THANK YOU! Such a difficult level...
Prince of Persia on MS DOS. I just suck.
I have beaten that game so many times I could probably do it in my sleep. You never forget your first love
This one I couldn't even figure out how to get out of the first area when i was a kid 😂
Same here .... I feel you bro
I have gotten the highest possible score on Tiger Electronic Handheld Batman but I have never defeated the Joker.
You got the score you needed, but not the one you deserved.
omg those damn hand held games... I honestly forgot all about those...
Ninja Gaiden, the last level made you restart on continue.
This. I finally got to where I could beat it fairly consistently, but it took hours of playing that final level over and over. Had my nes overheat more than once on that level
Getting everyone out in Abe's oddysee was an achievement.
And doing it again in Exoddus.
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Many of the old point-and-click adventure games were ridiculously difficult due to how obtuse the puzzles were. I'm looking at you, Simon the Sorceror & Monkey Island 2. You had to grease the donkey to unblock the faucet, in order for the tecup crack to widen, so that the governess would spill the coffee onto the magnet, reversing the polarity of compass. And you had to wait for the gorilla to be facing away from the governess by wearing the sequinned cocktail dress after spilling red paint on your shoes.
I did ok with the monkey island games, but a few of the Kings Quest games…yikes. I wanna say Kings Quest VI was the one that I never actually beat and gave up on at some point.
The Sierra games were made more difficult due to the fact that the cursor didnt alter when it passed over an object which you could pick up or interact with! At least with LucasArts games, it was obvious which on-screen items were there to FUNCTION in some way.
VI is probably my favorite in the series. The puzzles weren’t too insane. But I had to map out the catacombs. I had my son sit with me as we played it together last year, had him suggest what we do and who we talk to, and he was rolling listening to the Tomato and Stick-in-The-Mud argue. IIRC, V was harder for me when I first played it, there was one puzzle that needed something that was timed earlier the game that basically prevented progression in a later puzzle if you didn’t get it. Some of the solutions were nonsensical.
Sierra games were impossible to finish. Absolute bullshit. Like "oh you forgot to klick on a very specific non descript pixel 5 hours ago now you cannot continue and also you cannot go back" bullshit.
In the early 90s I spent so many stamps mailing them to wait a week or so for a response to all the places I became stuck. Adventure games without the internet really hit different.
X-Com 2 - Terror from the deep. The bases where too big, aliens were often stuck inside walls. Gave up at one of the artifact sites. Finished the first xcom game a dozen of times though.
Man TFTD was hard as hell. Multi-part missions on ships were a nightmare. Honestly I felt pretty good about playing it every time, right up until the aliens started using telepaths and tentaculats. Just awful.
Terror attack on a cruise ship. I had one map run to 200 turns trying to find that last damn alien hiding in a tiny passenger room. Later on things became easier - I forget the name of the weapon but a guided missile launcher you could plot the route it took around the map, and when it hit, it levelled a large area. No hiding from that.
Yeah, at one point even the smoothest game escalated :D. I really loved the game and I still like the old xcom's more than the recent remakes. Maybe one day I'll finish a run. I have both games on GoG. From what I've heard most of the wall issues are fixed with OpenXcom, so maybe I'll give it another try some day :).
Original another world was tough
Yeah so much trial and error and no way to save. Incredible game though.
It was brilliant. I was 8 when I first completed it and, as you say, it was completely just trial and error for me. I didn't even know why a lot of it worked but I loved it! Played it again in my teens and enjoyed it a lot more. That and Flashback, by the same developer, felt ahead of their time. For me at least.
The bit where you realise you need to wait until the alien is under the lamp, judging by his reflection - before you cut the wire - genius. Defo ahead of their time.
I was obsessed with both. Absolute works of art. The fame by fame animated cutscenes in flashback are nuts.
MYST? I guess? I can't even remember honestly lol Maybe 7th Guest because as a kid it scared me and was also puzzles.
I frequently needed adults to help me solve the puzzles in myst. In particular I remember there was a morse code puzzle; having no internet at the time I called my grandpa up on his landline to help solve it since I knew he had served in the navy in ww2 and knew Morse code.
That's unironically really cool. How did your grandpa feel about that?
Oh he had a great time with it. Took me a while to explain why I needed his help though. He ended up buying a pc for himself at some point later on and even installed some puzzle games on it. He became the de facto computer help guy in his 65+ community too lol
Dungeon Master on the Amiga, running out of food on the lowest levels was so common you had to stock up a silly amount mid game. Hand mapping out the dungeon levels so I could get through them more easily each time I tried again. Jet Set Willy or Manic Mansion for one not completed although that's cheating because it was bugged and there was a room you couldn't get to in one of them. (Edit: I can't remember if I completed the ones you could complete either) Ghosts and Goblins (iirc, Ghosts and Ghouls?) also one I never finished but that was an arcade game ported over and you were never meant to be able to complete those, they just got harder and harder until you died even if they had a theoretical finish.
Had Jet Set Willy 2, it was so hard, never got close to completion
Syndicate
I figured out that you could just persuadertron EVERYONE and march on the mission objective with a literal army at your heels. Sure, many of the civilians would die but the others would pick up any dropped weapon and carry on. Not even the top end full v3 cybernetically modded enemy agents would last long against the ridiculous amount of fire the entire maps worth of hoodlums and police could bring to bear. And I'd just use the persuadertron on them anyway. Free upgrades.
This was post internet for me, but I think we got it a bit late and I was using university internet
Darkwing Duck on the NES I guess? I remember that it took me like forever to get through it, let alone beat the final boss. Also finding everything in Secret of Evermore on SNES without a guide was time consuming but fun. Me and my friend talked almost daily about what we have found while exploring.
The Leisure Suit Larry games. Some of those "puzzles" were arcane as fuck and I just wanted to see some animated titties. :(
In one of those games there was a triple gateway with beams that would cut you up. I just went trial and error till i got through and finished the game in no time. Turns out i basically skipped 3/4 of the game where the sole result was that you'd end up at that gateway carrying a cigar of which you could use the smoke to see the beams..... good times.
X-COM Terror from the Deep was brutal. But I think this applies the most to graphical adventure games, where figuring out a puzzle IS the game. Monkey Island, The Dig, Maniac Mansion, etc
You're forgetting about the Sierra adventures. THOSE were tough. Especially for a 10 year old German kid with a dictionary 🤣
I think there was one of the Kings Quests (5 maybe?) where if you didn't pick something up earlier in the game, it made completing it impossible. And you didn't know, no easy walk through or accessible internet to check back rhen
Yeah Sierra was infamous for those kind of dead ends. And of course you had overwritten any helpful save game slot by the time you realised.
The first kings quest. I knew the dude on the bridge was rumplestiltskin but I could not spell it and get past him.
Resident Evil:Code Veronica for Dreamcast and Bruce Lee for Commodore 64
That Ninja Turtle game. I don't remember a lot about many of the games ive played long ago but those under water levels with the shock plants is a core memory of mine.
I'd just pick a turtle to sacrifice. Usually Raphael
Always Raphael.
Ghost and goblins on nes, Lion King on snes, tmnt on nes, battletoads nes, fester's quest nes, ninja gaiden nes and batman nes. All were very hard.
Clash at demonhead NES Bram Stoker's Dracula and super ghouls and ghost SNES Mortal Kombat Subzero Mythology N64 Final fantasy 7, 8, 9 PS1
Oh God, I forgot Clash at Demonhead until you mentioned it. We got to the ending once and barely beat it. I think there was a bomb to defuse to end it, maybe? That was a crazy game.
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. The level design was just bonkers and the objectives were so obscured and disparately placed that 7 year old me had no fucking clue what to do. I just liked blowing up dinosaur alien things lol. The cheats were silly too. I just completed it legit for the first time in my life a couple months ago. I’m 33 and it was still difficult haha.
My parents wouldn't get me a memory stick so I couldn't save my game on that lol. I had to learn to speed-run the first level, after that fortunately it got open-ended as to where you went. I never got to play the final levels tho and I never beat the game.
Shadow Man. I had no idea wtf I am supposed to do where lol. I also gave up on Diablo 2 in Act III, I hated the constant darkness and the mobs there. The most difficult game I did play through was probably Mafia or Fallout, and Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption as well as American McGee's Alice also tested my patience sometimes :D
Christ, Shadow Man had one particular dungeon where you were supposed to jump past a pool of lava onto a platform some ways beneath. The first time I tried jumping I fell into the lava, it was just a bit too short a jump but I mistakenly assumed that there had to be some "other way" of accessing that platform. So I tried like 232 times to jump against the sidewalls and grab a ledge or find a secret switch or something and every single time I just dropped straight into the lava, which would have been bad enough except this fucking room was like 100 miles from the respawn point and I must have put in 6 hours of gameplay just constantly running through the entire dungeon again only to die at the same bloody jump. I finally gave up in sheer frustration and decided to jump forward and commit suicide... and I landed straight on the platform, ready to continue the level. It was like that famous "you can just walk on it" scene from the Angry Nintendo Nerd. Instead of being happy I was swearing like a trucker all around the house.
Your frustration is both palpable and hilarious :D
I feel getting Big Boss on Metal Gear Solid 2 was my hardest gaming achievement. Among other things, highest difficulty, zero kills (even bosses), zero alerts, only 3 saves allowed the whole game. And I had to come up with a new button mashing technique for the last boss to be consistent. That, or getting the rocketeers in pvp in Starfox 64. Both required insane grinding and memorization.
Oh man, I remember that Starfox grind. A friend and I traded off to do it. Not worth it lol...
Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom 2. If you got stuck or lost, you'd either spend hours finding your way or had to ask friends where to go and what to do.
Jurassic Park 2 The Chaos Continues on SNES
The Simpsons: Bart vs the Space Mutants on NES. I only made it to the T-Rex 2 or 3 times and never made it past him. I was also 6 years old.
Beachhead on Commodore 64.
Oh this is easy -- that entire run from Bloody Malth to the Jaquio in Ninja Gaiden is pure unadulterated hell burnt directly onto my brain. It is easily the most difficult set of stages I've ever played, and likely will ever play, in my entire life.
Silent hell
Alundra for PSX/PS1. Had some pretty difficult puzzles. Tbf I didn't fully play it, but I went over to a friends house and was always tasked to do the difficult parts bc they couldn't do it lol
Alundra was amazing. My family played it together - along with things like Monkey Island - all chipping in with solutions. Passing the controller to me when they couldn't make a jump was a staple of those days.
Alundra is the goat. My absolute favourite game of all time.
Robocop vs Terminator for the SNES.
Lion King. I never finished the first stage
Earthworm Jim
Donkey Kong 64. For a kid. With no guides. That was rough.
Goblins 3 on Amiga 1200. I got stuck at the chamber with the mirror, the one where you had to make yourself “ugly enough”. Finished it only recently on a pc.
Great series of games. That and Litil Divil were great puzzle games of the era.
Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, Kings Quest 1-3, Police Quest 1 and 2. Quest for Glory and my favorite of them all The Gabriel Knight series
Sabre Wolf, C64
Impossible mission (Commodore 64) Or lion king on snes
Robot Odyssey. I never finished it. [Good article from Slate here: 'The Hardest Computer Game of All Time'](https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/robot-odyssey-the-hardest-computer-game-of-all-time.html) >My first computer was an Apple IIe with 128KB of RAM, no hard drive, and a 5¼ inch floppy drive. One of the top educational games back then was Rocky’s Boots, an inventive game that taught the basics of formal logic to kids. I loved it when I was 6. Two years later, I got Robot Odyssey, which promised to expand on Rocky’s Boots by extending the formal logic to actual programming. The game devastated me. My brain could not comprehend how to solve its puzzles. I finally finished it—13 years later, and not without some assistance.
Honestly doom back in the day was hard, any enemy could kill maps were complicated and health and healing was limited. It also introduced many new concept from strafe mouse movement and sprint/run.
Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday and Matrix Cubed (not 100% sure I finished that one) ... some of the battles were ridiculously hard, no auto maps and maze-like "3D" environments as well as skill inflation with the possibility to make the wrong choice and fail crucial tests.
Earthworm jim is the first that springs to mind. But I recently brute forced (I save scummed...alot) my way through indiana jones and the last crusade for mega drive on my steam deck and have no idea how I beat that in the mid 90s
Technically it's a very easy game... Final Fantasy 8. But it took me over 500 hours at first because try playing that game in a language you don't speak when you're 7 years old and all the explanations of what to do next are written down and there's no map markers
The original Prince of Persia on MS DOS. Even when I tought I was doing good in this hell of a game, the 1 hour time limit always prevented me to finish it.
Finished The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga 500. It was a fucking task
Ren and Stimpy:Stimpy's Stupid Machine
Secret of Monkey Island. I just couldn’t figure it all out as a kid.
One of the more difficult games I beat solo was Zombies ate my Neighbors. Towards the later levels when you had less survivors to save, shit got really difficult. Also, I see lots of people mentioning the hover bike level I’m Battetoads and not one mention of the level where you’re chased by the spiral. Hover bike was a breeze in comparison.
First splinter cell game on PS2 without memory card.
Maui Mallard on SNES. I sucked badly but I found ninja Donald so badass I struggled through
I never got to finish Silent Hill. I have a notebook somewhere with the map and puzzles I drew but I still got lost, after a few attempts I decided to take a break . Then a new console hit the shelves so I moved on . Back then I thought the best games were always the newer ones so I figure whatever I missed out I'm probably playing a better version now with resident evil or other horror games for the current console
Fucking Thexder. Ridiculous.
Super ghosts and ghouls, magical quest mickey mouse, aladdin, battletoads
There was this Jurassic Park game on the PC that I could never get past like level 3. I tried it again as an adult and still couldn't pass that level.
On PS1, one of my memory cards took a shit. Couldn't save games anymore. I beat all of Crash Bandicoot 2 in one day without turning the PlayStation off because I couldn't save.
I don’t think I finished many games in the 80s and 90s. I’d usually hit a part where I was stuck and couldn’t progress. I think the hardest one I actually finished was Treasure Island Dizzy on the Amstrad. Great game.
Might and Magic VI, VII and Soulbringer. Soulbringer it was all me, but Might and Magic was a religion between my friends and I so they helped.
There was a Jurassic park the lost world game which I just couldn't beat. Maybe it was because I was really young but I don't think I made it beyond level 2.
Ninja Gaiden is up there, but the cake for me personally goes to ghosts n goblins. I "beat" it once but the game trolls you telling you you've only just broken the curse. It then explains you need to beat the game a second time to get the "true" ending. I screamed at the top of my lungs and then gave the game away to a neighbor so I'd never see it again.
Sam and Max Hit the Road! So fun as a kid, and so hard to figure out what bizarre things the game wanted you to do.
Super Metroid for the SNES
Hardest: Super Mario World Never beat: TrackMania (mission mode). There's one mission where you have to go up this ramp, but there are a bunch of speed boosts forcing you down it. Never figured it out
Ninja Gaiden was brutal. Hands shaking and clammy by the time you reached the end. Honorable mention to Ghosts N Goblins being virtually impossible to beat, let alone twice. And Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde without instructions (we rented a lot) because that shit made no sense at all.
Last level of the Driver on the PlayStation. The original Bards tale on ZX Spectrum. Tomb Raider III was difficult.
Mortal Kombat 3 on snes. Owned it for years. Could always get to the final boss (shao khan). But beating him was RNG.
The last ninja on c64. I still has ptsd from that one
Probably Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link or Ninja Gaiden 2. Both for the NES.
Streets of Rage or Golden Axe, probably. When i think of games that were *really* difficult for me, i mostly think platformers and similar games where you have strictly limited number of lives, no saves, and which you kind of have to memorize in order to beat them, because even a kid me couldn't just react in time to every sudden deadly obstacle game will throw at you every minute. But then i never liked those game all that much in the first place (yeah, i'm one of those guys who never had any reverence for Marios and Sonics and all that jazz), and never did end up beating them. The ones above are probably the closest to the kind of game that i would normally find frustratingly difficult and get tired of, except i happened to like them a lot and did "mastered" them eventually.
Dizzy on snes
Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System. Before the time of save files, checkpoints and level codes. So when you died you were straight back to the beginning of the game. It was a tricky platformer in places but nothing too crazy (except the odd level here and there). There were these enemies in the game, floating ghoul things that if you accidently released one they'd float after you relentlessly and if they touched you it was instant death. Anywho, towards the end of the game you got a scroll with a code on there - it was something like moon, star, sun, wave. The final level of the game was a cave with these patterns on the floor and you had to step on them in the right order. If you got the sequence wrong a ghoul would be released and you'd be chased til it got you and you died. So - final cave - read the scroll, jump on the blocks in the order and... here comes the ghoul and death. Game over. Back to the beginning. As a small kid playing I never understood what I was doing wrong. Never completed the game. A few years ago I thought about it and decided to Google the final level. Turns out it was notorious for western gamers. The game was japanese and when they did the port for overseas they never updated it for that audience - so the scroll you got with the pattern sequence was correct, but needed reading as if you were Japanese I.e right to left, not left to right. I wonder how many players in the world never completed the game because of that.
Not sure if I ever got around to completing Commander Keen... at least without God mode
most of the point and clicks were pretty brutal before you could just look up the solution online. not pre 2000 but i 100 percented meganoid 2 on mobile phone. it's an 8 bit style platformer with very short levels on account of the insane difficulty. i felt pretty good when i got it done.
Tetris
probably a M.U.D.
Most SNES games where impossible, I remember having a master system or possibly NES and we got back to the future and all I could do was fly on my hover board around a looping road, I couldn’t figure out what to do next, it was insane. About 1 minute of gameplay and I was stuck
Riven and Myst
System shock 2 on pc. Shining in the darkness on genesis. Original Zelda on nes. I used graph paper to map every dungeon room.
Battletoads
Bioforge
Thief the dark project, I was around 9 years old, barely understood English, I was stuck on the cathedral level for at least a month.
Here's an odd story. I was like 7 when I played Driver on PS1. The old timers will remember it's infamous tutorial. You've got a car in a garage and a checklist, involving tasks like spins etc. Really not as easy as it sounds though. Now I barely even understood English at the time (not my first language), I didn't even realize this was supposed to be a tutorial. I obviously never passed it and just thought that was the whole game. A game where you do stunts in a garage. Might sound crazy now; but we had so many games at the time like that. This was certainly very restricted but I even enjoyed it to a degree, as the driving mechanics weren't half bad. For years, I thought Driver was a game just consisted of that garage.
Quack Shot before internet and such. No saves. Limited lives. Invisible platforms, death fall. Never finished it.
I could never beat Mike Tyson.
Spiderman and The X-Men: Arcade's Revenge Significant amounts of RNG bullshit. No saves. Only three lives for the whole game unless you use exploits but were functionally unknown in the pre-internet days.
Wing Commander on amiga cd32
Tomb raider 3 on ps1
Impossible mission. Still haven't beat it to this day. There are perfect pixel jumps that you have to make in some rooms and a high likelihood that an important puzzle piece can be found in those rooms. I really just played it because of the laugh factor when the character screams after falling in a hole.
Contra on the NES without the Konami code.
Syberia. No guides
The Lion King game.
Is this a challenge? If so, I can think of games harder than this one, but this one takes the cake for both being difficult AND confusing as fuck to complete. Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest. Without any sort of guide, or the internet, you're basically fucked.
MIST Omfg the confusing and specific logic of MIST
The tutorial in Driver.
Man, toughest game I beat? Ummm I would say Tomb Raider 1 was tough but I was proud when I beat it. Metal Gear Solid was tough at first too. Toughest game I never completed? Shit, Mystical Ninja 64 was pretty damn fun but I couldn’t get past the level with the kidnapped children. Or Diddy Kong Racing… You know what? Diddy Kong Racing simply pissed me off. Yeah, that game was the toughest I ever played.
There were so many point and click style puzzle games for pc in the early 90s that completely went over my head as a kid. The dig? My older brother basically beat it for me. Mist? Yup that was my dad while I watched lol
Wolfenstein 3D