Many people in the gaming community believe we are in the renaissance of difficult games. Titles like Dark Souls and Flappy Bird prove that people still love torturing themselves with brutally difficult challenges. For this week’s round of Nerd Wars! we want to hear about the hardest game you’ve ever played!
Here are a selection of games that have truly tested our skills, patience, and generally sanity:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)
[youtube http://youtu.be/hSf6FZ9mmAY]Super Ghouls and Ghosts (SNES)
[youtube http://youtu.be/KBRkqsX-YR8]Dark Souls (Xbox 360)
[youtube http://youtu.be/v9-SUYfi5f4]Contra (NES)
[youtube http://youtu.be/YBMQhKK3Ctk]Super Empire Strikes Back (SNES)
[youtube http://youtu.be/wEQMKADZtvY]Back in the late 80’s early 90’s video games were truly designed to put player’s skills to the test. Completing a game without the dreaded “Game Over” was a huge accomplishment and unfortunately many of them were only conquered by the sweaty and mighty. It seems like in an effort to appeal to a broader audience games have become much easier and many games are often accused of “hand holding.” Is better game design the main reason games seem “easier” or are developers simply sacrificing difficulty for mass appeal?
Feel free to share your love and hatred for the difficult games you’ve played over the years. Don’t forget to share the hardest game you’ve ever played!
What's Your Tag? 
Not gonna lie, God of War has my hatred because I had trouble on the Hydra boss.
Shin Megami Tensei IV is a bitch though. I lost count on how many times I died.
I never played the original God of War, but the third one was a piece of cake. It was super epic, but also super easy.
Kafka is super into the Shin Megami Tensei series, but that is another one I’ve never tried.
Let me put it this way: My friends were giving me shit because I kept telling them I died in my game. Then I told them it was Shin Megami Tensei and got the response of ‘Oh well that’s all right then.’
I’d have to agree with you on Dark Souls. I’ve rage-quit so many times while playing that game…
There were times where I literally had to leave the room because I found myself screaming terrible things at my Xbox.
I finally stopped playing after I beat the Ceaseless Discharge only to encounter a lava pit filled with four Kapra Demons, four giant bull demons, two enormous leeches, and the Minotaur boss from the start of the game. I put the controller down and never touched the game again.
Honestly? I quit for the first time after the first five minutes.
Yes, I was that bad.
The torture hadn’t even begun… At least you left with your sanity…
I can’t say I left with my sanity…after trying to play the game a couple of days later (I got an hour in that time), whatever sanity I still had was cruelly stomped on. Ouch.
It saps the sanity from you rather quickly… Well look at us now. We’re both functioning adults, right? *eye twitches*
The original TMNT.
Oh seriously, man! That game was disgusting. I don’t think I ever remember playing for more than 10 minutes without losing all my turtles.
Hardest villain of all time was the battleship at the end of each level of Top Gun. Impossible to land.
I never played the Top Gun game, but I did play the original Rambo game and that was pretty terrible.
Dare you to go try the NES Top Gun game. It is my sworn enemy.
If I ever get the chance I will absolutely give it a try.
I’m holding you to that. I am my gamer’s keeper. LOL.
Hahaha. Well I’m a man of my word. If I find it for like $5 bucks at some retro game store, I will pick it up and try suffering through it.
Megaman games are the sweet torture I kept going back to. I knew better than to try Dark Souls, I just don’t have the time and patience for super hard games right now.
R-type
I have to say Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800. Long time ago, I was just a kid, but even watching videos now… holy crap that game was long, complex, had a time limit, involved collecting puzzles, and robots that murdered you in a heartbeat.
Oh no… this looks like a can of worms I never wish to open…
First of all, whoever is playing TMNT above is a boss.
NES TMNT is of course on my list, but I have had considerable frustration with Ikaruga, and Super Meat Boy is a special kind of evil.
Yeah that run of TMNT is IMPRESSIVE. I couldn’t even come close.
Super Meat Boy was incredibly hard, but I still managed to beat it, so that’s why it didn’t quite make my list.
My issue with it was as much the controller as the game. With say, a Genesis or SNES gamepad it would probably be a lot more responsive. The old style Xbox 360 d-pad just doesn’t cut it.
That d-pad definitively didn’t make things any easier. I’m so glad the Xbox One controller has a solid d-pad. I’m still waiting for a solid platformer to launch on the system.
You don’t know hard until you’ve played Megaman X6. That shit is impossible.
I played X1 through X4, but I never touched the others. That’s definitely on my list of classic games to try.
I remember I struggled a lot with Revenge of Shinobi on the Sega Megadrive. But I finiswd it after a lot of tears were shed!
I gotta say, I cannot find a harder game than Super Ghouls And Ghost.
It took me several years to even get past the first stage.
Yeah, that’s the farthest i’ve ever gotten.
It only gets worse from there…
That game is BRUTAL! I tried playing through it again a few months ago to see if I could tackle the challenge as a grown man… I failed miserably. I couldn’t even make it past the haunted pirate ship…
I’m gonna go way back to Bard’s Tale. I don’t think my brother and I ever made it out of the 1st dungeon!
That’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time. I remember watching my friend play, but I never had the misfortune of suffering through it.
At one point in my life I was good enough at Contra to not need the Konami Code, but I’m sure I could benefit from the extra help now.
The original Ghosts n’ Goblins for the NES is still the absolute hardest game I’ve ever played in my life. I also rather suck at the later Mega Man releases on the NES. De-Cap Attack on the Genesis gave me a world of trouble growing up and I never managed to overcome the learning hurdles of Brigandine on the PSX. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PS2) and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (DS) are also pretty brutal.
Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls have ushered in a new era of brutality and are probably the only current games I still play for the sheer purpose of being emasculated repeatedly. Dark Souls 2 doesn’t seem to be as hard as the original so far, but I’m still chalking up the deaths.