I’ve started to hate the term “Hardest”.
Give me two months in Unity, and I can make a game that’s “harder” than every game on any one of these lists. It would also be unplayable trash, that would prompt hundreds of “How the fuck are you supposed to XXX” responses due to obscurity. Part of what makes those listed games enjoyable is having a decent difficulty curve, compelling progression of skill demonstration, and a good feeling of reward. They’re getting difficulty right.
Impossiblest? Difficulter? Most hard?
Some of those old games from the NES or even into the SNES era were just outright impossible. IIRC there was a Dennis The Menace game didn’t have the final boss ready for the publishing deadline so they just put an impossible jump just before it so players couldn’t get that far.
Battletoads would like a word
Elden Ring isn’t even the most difficult soulsborne game, by a longshot
Some of you have never Wanna be the Guy and it shows.
I remember wanting to play IWBtG so badly in its heyday but not being able to figure out how to on a mac. I finally watched a playthrough recently and… turns out I dodged a bullet of frustration.
Did you really dodge a bullet though? Or did the bullet stop midair and changed direction to move toward what was up until now the most logical location to dodge to?
Sorry about the PTSD, but…
I watch a streamer who mastered speed running dozens of NES games. He says Battletoads was the hardest game to learn. Just getting through the game, not even pushing for a fast time, was extremely challenging. Much harder than TMNT 1 or Ninja Gaiden.
Yeah, for all the difficulty I had with the dam on NES TMNT as a kid, I saw a streamer do it last year I think (I believe on first attempt?) not realizing it was supposed to be difficult. Blew my mind.
I have never met anyone that could beat this level. It’s like it was made to sell the Game Genie.
My brother and I played the game so much we were able to beat that stage co-op. It gets much worse later. I learned not that long ago that the reason we were never able to beat it co-op is there’s a bug that prevents the 11th stage from being beatable with two players.
You have to memorize the level and jump a bit before that one tricky one comes on screen.
Child me could beat it after hours of repeated attempts and running out of continues.
Adult me went back after a decade. The muscle memory was still there and I beat it on the first try. I probably got about an 80% success rate on first attempts now. But level 4 and beyond I’m terrible.
I only got it by state save scumming in zsnes, and even then it was tough not to save yourself into a corner.
Aww yeah. I’m gonna call Gold and Silver Pawn and see if they have this classic in stock.
Fun fact: that’s one of the easiest levels in the game. It barely cracks the top 10 hardest levels in a game with 12 levels, and only because the first 2 are trivial to lull you into a false sense of security.
I need to find an emulated version of this. Mine was faulty and always glitches as soon as you finished this stage so I never got to see neyond it for more than a few seconds. I’ve always wondered what was there!
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Idk if I’m finally getting old or the real nerds are hiding. Nobody in here knows about Nethack? At least someone said Dwarf Fortress.
One time I died on turn zero failing to mount my horse and hitting my head on the stone stairs.
Yasd material right there.
Dang. I can’t tag you “slime mold” because that’s apparently a paid feature on my app. jdawson, is this what finally makes me switch apps?
Money that app person!
Hello from Voyager! It looks like it doesn’t support tagging either. The voyage continues.
Hello from Enterprise.
Pay yo devs!
Jerboa doesn’t do it either, or else I just can’t figure out how.
NetHack makes most mortals cry. My bones files taunt me.
I played Nethack. I was overwhelmed by my anxiety and depression. I realised I was not good at video games. So I quit playing Nethack and swore to get good at video games before returning. Been, what, at least 15 years? I’ve gotten better I guess. Should I return? Soon, maybe.
(Seriously, though, roguelikes are still a genre I struggle with, so I do need practice!)
Have you tried pixel dungeon? It’s kinda the same thing but dramatically easier and I’ve still never ascended. 🤣
Kinda the thing about it though is that what makes Nethack so good is how the devs thought of everything.
Imagine souls games giving you only three lives before sending you back to the very beginning of the game.
Did we already forget about Battletoads?
I beat Battletoads a ton when I was a kid, we never beat the Turtles game.
I beat both back in the day. I definitely feel like battletoads was the more difficult of the two.
Tbf, tons of nes and snes/Sega games were crazy hard. It hid how short they were. Like, Altered Beast is a game that no one ever beat on the Sega without using like a game genie. The entire game is only like 15 or 20 minutes long, though. Tmnt and battle battletoads were just super popular games you couldn’t beat.
I think they were made to be quarter guzzling arcade games.
Altered Beast absolutely was. Some games never made it to arcades, though.
Battletoads has nothing on Ghosts 'n Goblins! I can at least play Battletoads until the stupid vehicle jumping section. I don’t think I’ve ever even made it more than like 3 checkpoints into Ghosts 'n Goblins
Battle toads was truly the hardest game
Some of us remember!!! Damn you, first level!!!
Elden Ring isn’t even the hardest Soulslike
In fact it’s probably the easiest, in the base game anyway, just due to the huge number of build options. Although DeS had some pretty broken builds.
Youre right, but its the most recent and the one that gets the most exposure. This is us getting old and classics being forgotten
Dark Souls 3 was only 8 years ago
Which is probably about half the life of some users commenting here
Half Life was only 26 years ago
This was certainly the hardest part of the game due to the controls, but it still pales in comparison to actually difficult games of the era that were designed to take quarters first, provide gameplay later
Oh yeah, for sure. Ghosts’n Goblins comes to mind.
Lion King on SEGA Genesis?
Takeshi’s Challenge?
Dragon’s Lair?
Ninja Gaiden?
Marble Madness?
Battletoads?
Fuckin battletoads. WAY harder than turtles.
[NES] Sector Z, Goonies, and others would like a word [Atari] E.T. has entered the chat
Was ET actually difficult or just unclear how to progress? I swear I finished it when I was a kid but the amount of games I’ve finished in my life is extremely tiny, if things get too hard I just go play something else for awhile (looking at every stealth mission shoehorned into non stealth game). So maybe I just misremembered finishing it but I sure played it a lot before I got an NES.
If you managed to finish ET that’d put you in a club of one person I have met in person or online who has done it.
After reading a walkthrough I’m confident I beat at least one round of the game, heh, maybe I misinterpreted that for the game ending screen (he gets on the spaceship at the end of the round for those that don’t know)… If there’re no pits in the first round I believe I made it further than that at because I remember them well.
Though with my memory these days I’m happy when I leave work with everything I intended to so not saying it’s completely accurate I mostly just remember ET getting on a ship.
Silver Surfer for the NES is way harder than TMNT. It’s possible, though I’ve never done it, to beat TMNT. AFAIK , Silver Surfer is actually possible to beat, but basically no one has done it.
I hate hard games nowadays, but when I was a kid I had a high tolerance for them because that’s pretty much all there was. I have a fondness for the Ghosts 'n Goblins series because it was part of my childhood, but I wouldn’t give it the time of day if they came out now.
