"The Hardest Games We've Ever Played"

[Deleted]

a lot of those aren't even that hard. and those that are, are just bullshit like iwbtg

[Balazzar]

The Lion King on snes was pretty hard, took me so long to throw Scar off the cliff.

Gonna add Super Star Wars in here too.

[Halicia]

to be perfectly fair, most of the 8bit era (and before) were hard due to lack of things we take for granted nowadays.

LIKE A SAVE GAME FEATURE.

The hardest part of Battletoads at the time was listening to your friend laugh at you cuz you crashed your speeder in one of the easiest parts of the game, losing a life that you'd need when you got to the parts you HADN'T memorized yet.

Sometimes 'hard' isn't in devising the strategy, its in managing to actually execute it when push comes to shove. (kinda like raiding, actually... heh.)

[Jester Joe]

Pft, no Lunatic Mode on Fire Emblem: Awakening.
That game lays the smack down quickly.
And the reward for beating Lunatic Mode is Lunatic Mode+!

[Remilia]

I don't see Touhou or osu!. I am disappointed by this list.

Had to register only for this... Somebody familiar with NetHack?

Heard of, never played.

[Morae]

Had to register only for this... Somebody familiar with NetHack?

I was about to say the same! Nethack anyone?

I remember dying once because at start I was annoyed that a cat was following me. I suppose it was a pet that I had at start, but I didnt like how it blocked paths and ATE food on the floor that I was about to pick up! I abandoned it on some level. Then... later I met this cat again. This time it had gone wild. I can't recall the circumstances at the time, but that cat killed me.

You can die in so many ways... too many ways to be carefull about everything.

[Chinese Bootlickers]

Flappy Bird not on the list. List not legit.

Don't you mean Helicopter Game?
Anyways, I shudder at the thought of doing another damageless Monsoon and Armstronk fight.

[Charge me Doctor]

I dislike this kind of argument, as it's like saying passing an exam isn't hard, as long as you've taken the years of training required to pass it. The fact that it takes time to figure out, or break down what makes something hard so that you can understand it and then apply yourself to surpassing it, inherently makes something hard. Remembering why you died to a creature in Dark Souls does not guarantee you will never die there again, but it does allow you to prepare for the encounter.

Also the logic you apply to puzzle/quest games is exactly the same as that which you applied to the action games; you simply have to figure out what to do in both. King's Quest 6 can be really hard to get to certain points of the game if you don't know what to do, but after you do know, you do it easily every time. In early adventure games, the hardest segments were almost always pixel-perfect maze areas, that required careful movement to not instantly die (Space Quest 2's vine screen anyone? Or Operation Stealth aka The Stealth Affair's maze sections with the rats).

The difference with action games, is that it's not just remembering, you've also got to perform to an equal level every time as well. Once you've got an idea of how a designer's puzzle logic works in an adventure game, you can normally walk through the entire thing quite quickly. After playing Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, Sam And Max's puzzles were pretty straight forwards for example, with only a few bringing me to a halt because I simply hadn't realised an area had a second screen I hadn't found or such. Dark Souls on the other hand, remains challenging even now to me, just because I know that if I screw up even a little I can be set back to the last checkpoint or killed by a boss/another player.

All games are a learning process, from tic-tac-toe to chess to WoW to Ikaruga. The length of time it takes to fully understand and be able to play through a game easily, or at least comprehend the actions and reactions that a game will require are an adequate measure of its difficulty. The more facets that a game challenges at a time or over the course of a game tends to decide its actual difficulty.

TL;DR: If you have to actually take time to learn and practice something to beat it, it's probably hard.

Passing exam isn't hard as long as you pay attention to course and learn shit that you need to learn. If you slack, you will hard times with learning, if you don't, exams are easy.
Yes, it requires time to figure out how to deal with something, but in games this time is not years, or even days right now. How hard was dark souls for me? Well, it was really hard when i turned wrong way and right after first raven trip i went to catacombs and was like "Wtf is it supposed to be that hard?" but then i was told that it was wrong way, and by that time i've farmed dozen of levels and could 1 shot almost everything for a long time.

For my last 2 years of gaming i had only one part of the game that i couldn't progress, it was space rangers planetary mission where you had to play 15 puzzle and finish it in limited amount of turns. I tried to finish it for a week, this shit was randomly generated every time and i had to calculate everything.

Comparing it to how hard it is (at least for me) to finish said dark souls, well, it was very hard, i wasn't able to solve it with "try over and over again until you win".

Basically i agree with you about learn process, but i find it different, in form of how you should use math and logic in a game, or how you should react to certain events on screen. Math, logic, memorization always will be harder and more interesting for me, than watching enemy swing patterns, or relying on my reaction time to shoot people jumped from the corner in the head while not being hit back.

I think that we won't get answer in the way title says, we find different things hard.

By the way, some modern games (i remembered mark of the ninja) are very easy to, well, finish, but they have a lot of options to make your gameplay more challenging, so we basically moving from "hard games" to "you can make this game hard by yourself by limiting your options"

[Deleted]

Hardest competitive multiplayer game in history is Starcraft: Brood War by a mile.
Hardest single player game in history is probably Battletoads.

[dodgerslim]

Have not read through the entire thread, but...

Battletoads.

[Clockwork Pinkie]

That's more like it. And that's still one of the "easier" games of the series, and there are harder danmaku shmups than Touhou in general, if only a few. Still, I love those games.

Shoot em ups tend to be the hardest games, but there is a science to it all that people even beat the game on hardest difficult without dying or getting hit. Most of them can be done by memory. But that's only like .001% of the population

[Tyrgannus]

Rhythm: In The Groove customs. Doing it with your feet will always be harder than doing it with your fingers.

Platforming: I Wanna Be The Guy. Sorry Battletoads...

Easter Egg Hunt: Saving all the Mudokons in pretty much ANY Oddworld game. I'd rather collect all 800 pokemon or whatever ludicrous number it is now.

Overall: Mushihimesama Futari or Touhou, both of them elite caliber shmups. True bullet hell.



Honorable Mention: Soul Calibur 5's Legendary Soul mode. Don't mock me if you haven't tried it, that AI is just ridiculous.










No one has mentioned a rhythm game, really? One of the few genres with limitless and thus impossible difficulty potential. There will ALWAYS be a faster song. Official developers tend to range between tricky and soul-crushing, but customs are just.....shudder....

And yet there is always one person on this planet that can actually do it. I have seen 20 steps per second runs in 4-panel dance games. What the hell.

[Deleted]

WoW heroic raiding is also really hard, only few percent of players are able to clear whole raid on that difficulty.

[Deleted]

For me its a toss up. Either its Ikaruga on the harder modes or its Zelda 3 on super nintendo. Zelda link to the past was a bother because i got the game before i could read or write english, still managed to get through the game somehow.

[Thotor]

FTL, Dark Souls, and Demon Souls are all not difficult, they are just difficult in an age where games are incredibly simple to understand. Really. To compare or put them in the same difficulty list as Ghost n' Goblins is kind of insulting.

Couldn't agree more.

[Kaleredar]

I don't see Touhou or osu!. I am disappointed by this list.

Heard of, never played.

For like, 20 seconds there, I thought you managed to get away with a nipple on your signature banner...




Anyway... it's hard to rate old games in terms of "difficulty" because many of them didn't have things like a save game function (I remember the ones that made you memorize codes to "save" your progress.) You'd die to stupid things and have to start over back at some ridiculous point and grind your way back through.

As for the most "difficult" game... it's hard to say. Most of the old ones, again, came down to just rote memorization of what to expect. A perfect example would be those middle levels of original Contra... think you're going fine and then SPIKE WALL OUT OF THE FLOOR in your face... Oh, and having an overzealous p1 dragging the camera up in that waterfall level...

[endersblade]

Hah you think thats hard?
Check this:

That's almost a non sequitur. Bullet hells are aptly named, and that is their ENTIRE PURPOSE. Just like I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game, which I don't believe should be on that list. They were made specifically to be impossibly challenging. I also don't think DOTA2 should be on there, it's a freaking MOBA. Come to think of it, that list is actually almost pure garbage. Basically it's a list of nostalgic games that people tried to beat as children and just assumed they were overly hard.

Some of them I agree with: Ghosts 'n' Goblins, Jurassic Park, hell, even Battletoads. But then you're crossing the line into intentionally challenging games like I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game, Dark Souls/Demon's Souls. There's a difference between games being challenging because of how they were made (aka Battletoad's speeder stage) and games that were specifically made to BE challenging (aka bullet hells) purely for the purpose of being ridiculous, if not almost impossible to complete.

I actually remember beating Battletoads after many days attempting it. Two-player mode, too. Me and my best friend managed to do it, we felt like studs. Recently we had a retro-gaming night at my place, and we broke out Battletoads. Almost everyone was able to get through the speeder stage after a few tries. Even drunk. it isn't THAT hard. Like anything, it's just figuring the system out. You didn't think like that when you were a kid, at least, I didn't.

[Raiju]

Following endersblade comment, I'll throw in Armored Core 2. That was brutal as I remember it compared to most other games I've played, and had a form of cruelty that demon/dark souls had without even meaning to. It was just being a game, not trying to be an impossible challenge but felt pretty damn difficult regardless.

[Deleted]

For me battletoads in co-op , especial in one of the last levels where you are sliding on rail (or something ) and you have to press at the right time the directional pad in order to follow the rail pattern... I don't know if someone remembers this level , but in co-op I never passed it...

[grimsanta]

Yes, Dark Souls is harder than any other game coming out right now. But to say it's difficult compared to half of the older games out there is ridiculous. If you just go slow and careful, you can easily get through just about any part of that game.

Battle Toads and Ghosts and Goblins? Yeah, that was freaking impossible.