Tomb of the Giants, yo.
Would fights in fighting games count? Technically you are advancing through levels. If so
Alpha 152
Yes, he seemed to be deliberately slipping up on that 5-5. At least it illustrated the difficult "key rush" part, which I constantly failed at due to clumsiness. I certainly remember the 5-10 stage as being annoying too. I think there was a similar level to that in the Rocky Valley or the Tower. Glad to see someone else who played the game though, I had to go back and remind myself of all through the catchy music!
Another level I constantly got stuck on was 'Evo's escape' in Space Station Silicon Valley (N64).
Not counting fan made games and broken mechanics I can think of a couple off the top of my head that I remember being a challenge (from more "classic" style games):
-BattleToads for Game Boy: Instead of Turbo Tunnel there would be these levels in these space ships where you needed to shoot down enemy fighters while dodging barriers that would appear at an every increasing speed, I vaguely remember this being harder then the infamous tunnel from the NES game. Also the last level of the BT arcade game was pretty hard.
-Comix Zone: the entire game I thought was pretty challenging, not the hardest game out there but definitely one of the most difficult on the Genesis/Mega Drive. Also Battle Mania Daiginjō on the Mega Drive was pretty challenging as well in some parts.
-the original Rayman had some decently hard parts to it.
-MegaMan & Bass: IMO this is probably one of the hardest games in the Classic/X series. Others I could see getting close to it are the original NES games except for 1 and 5 on the "Difficult" setting, MegaMan 8 and maybe some of the early X games. I have heard 9 and 10 are pretty hard but I don't like download only games so haven't played them yet.
-Contra: Hard Corps: US version: IMO the best Contra game and also probably the hardest. Japanese version gives you a health bar of sorts where as the western version uses the standard Contra-1-shot-ur-dead system.
-Plok and Jim Power in the Lost Dimension on the SNES.
-the entire Ghosts N Goblins/Ghouls N Ghosts/Gargoyle's Quest series.(except maybe the Maximo games if you consider them apart of the series)
-Metal Slug Advance: to me this is the hardest game in the series. Other contenders may be the NeoGeo AES versions of the original 5 arcade games and some of the console ports since they use a set number of lives system.
-Rocket Knight Adventures: I forget what Sparkster and Rocket Knight 2 were like, but I remember this one having the trademark Konami difficulty all over it.
-Swagman on PS1: I remember certain parts of this game to be god awful, mainly boss fights.
-Kid Icarus: The Reapers....dear god.... To a lesser extent the GameBoy sequel also, I remember the bosses in it taking forever to kill.
-Sunset Riders: a decent challenge in the same vein as Metal Slug and Contra.
-pretty much any version of Cybernoid 1 and 2. I would mention some more Commodore 64/Amiga/classic computer games but I feel the majority of the hard ones fall under the "broken" difficulty setting.
-lots of arcade games made by Midway: Smash TV/Total Carnage, NARC, Robotron, end game levels of various Gauntlet ports/versions.
-this one isn't a game with really any "stages" but I need to give a shout out to the difficulty of Art of Fighting 1 and 2.
-The Fidgets: I have this game somewhere in my GameBoy collection and haven't played it in many years, but I remember the entire game pretty much being Satan in cartridge form.
None of these are really super omfg I am going to kill myself hard(except maybe The Fidgets if my memory of its horrors is accurate), but I can imagine being considered pretty ball breaking.
Last edited by Mechazod; 2013-01-21 at 04:43 AM.
Touhou 8 stage 4 boss Reimu. For some reason I just get really frustrated by it, even when it goes well.
A Wormfull of Deamons in Heroes of Might and Magic VI.
One wrong move and you've pretty much lost.
I'd say that if you have to know literally everything about a game to beat it easily, it's hard by definition. Having to reach that level of information on a game means it's hard. If you have to try things over and over again to get timings and patterns down, again, that's hard by definition.
Compare that to something that is actually very easy, say Modern Warfare 1. It became artificially hard on the toughest difficulties by having enemies one shot you if you even glanced around corners. The game itself was incredibly easy, but, even though you could know everything about it, it became hard due to this and nothing else. Learning and practice sometimes just didn't matter - it'd just kill you because it was programmed to.
To me, that's not a hard game. A hard game makes you learn and rewards perfect execution of its intended design.
I came here looking for the Speeder Bike level of Battletoads and was not disappointed. Fark that level, seriously. I played that game, what is it? 20 years ago now? And I can still remember that damn level. I never did get past that stage before I had to return the game rental. Which always made me snicker at the Nintendo Power game guide for Battletoads, because I thought to myself "theres no way anyone ever even got to the rest of these stages..."
My undoing was always that "triple air ramp" where you had to jump to launch off a ramp halfway in the air to propel you towards the ceiling and bounce off 2 more ramps just hovering up there. Did I mention that all 3 of these were over a bottomless pit, naturally.
I stop right there. It wasn't difficult nor hard. Just really tedious and prolonging. The only time the game gets hard is when you go on the Internet. Aside from that, it's probably the easiest game in the Smash Bros. series. Everything else in that website's list is too subjective since they're mostly Nintendo games with one Sonic game in it. And Sonic games tend to have buggy gameplay, regardless of the difficulty for the stages. No Ninja Gaiden/Dark Souls/Mushihime-sama Futari? I played Sine Mora and I know it has some really difficult crap in there.
Last edited by Renwin; 2013-01-21 at 02:39 PM.
It's not a matter of reaching that level of information because you have to, it's simply about what happens if you do. To use Dark Souls as an example; it's completely possible to beat it on a blind playthrough without much difficulty, but if you do know everything about it, it becomes incredibly trivial. Artificial difficulty is something I already addressed, and I don't like it either. Though MW1 is also the perfect example of what I was talking about. You think it's hard because you don't know everything about it. You can beat most of MW1 on veteran without firing your gun if you simply know the correct places to stand to trigger certain events. When you do have to actually kill something, the game gives you plenty of time to react unless you enter the wrong area. For example, the first enemy in Mile High Club, if you run to the right, he one shots you, if you run to the left, you can easily shoot him.
Anywho, that's not really the point. The point is that you have to look at all relevant aspects of difficulty. You're saying, if you have to know everything about a game to do good, then the game's hard. I'm saying, if you do know everything about a game, and that alone trivializes it, then the game wasn't hard to begin with, because it's now easy regardless of the other components of difficulty, such as useful APM and reaction time.
I'm not gonna call a game "the hardest game of all time" if one simple thing can trivialize it.
I so agree with Eggmanland, atleast the werehog section, the normal sonic part isn't that bad, but with so few checkpoints in such a massive stage and also forcing you to switch between werehog and normal is just cruel and inhuman punishment. The game could have been the next big sonic game for me if it wasn't for the werehog crap
where is dark souls?
Here are my votes :P
Useful APM and reaction times are just individual difficulties and not based entirely on the game itself. For a guy who can react instantly to anything, all games are therefore easy by your reckoning. Personal skill level does not define if a game is hard overall. That's like saying getting a world record in the 100m sprint is easy, if you can run that fast. Sure, if you're Usain Bolt or the like it's easy, but that doesn't mean it's actually easy.
Wowowowowow. Old post, I know, but I can't really ignore this. Firstly, Battletoads have been out for over 2 years, Ninja Gaiden 2 hasn't (Note how the fastest runner says he loved playing it as a kid). Secondly, Battletoads is a beat 'em up, Ninja Gaiden 2's gameplay doesn't catter to speed runners. Thirdly, Ninja Gaiden 2 is much longer, that doesn't necessarily mean that its harder, because while it is hard as shit, it is on par with the original Ninja Gaiden for the NES. Fourthly, speed runners like these guys does nothing but practice all day, there's a lot of prestige in beating Battletoads as opposed to Ninja Gaiden 2. Last but not least, learn what TAS means when talking speed runs, it's going through the game frame by frame to make it perfect, that's what BY FAR most speed runners do.