This topic came to mind when I was thinking about games, which I often do

The hardest games I´ve ever played are all for the classic NES, Gameboy, Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) or just about any other console on which for the most part you cannot save wherever you want and come back to it another day. The only choices you had in order to see the later stages was either to put in a code or to sit through the whole game every time you wanted to make a try for them. For one thing I never bothered to sit through it all only to get to the hard parts where I would be too tired to succeed and secondly, I´ve never been good at timing. I hate games that only rely on timing your jumps n stuff.


So, what are the hardest games you´ve ever played?

Edit: I realize not being able to save isn´t what makes a game hard. I should have pointed out hard in terms of gameplay like the first stage in Back to the Future 3 on Sega Genesis, or games where one hit can knock you back into a pit like in Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden. Sorry for not being more clear

No offence, but that doesn't really strike me as hard, that just strikes me as pointlessly obtuse and time-consuming.

For me, it would have to be Metro 2033/Last Light on Ranger Hardcore difficulty, where you've got to be dead careful with your ammo and really think your way around firefights, or Dark Souls, which is often just a case of pattern recognition.

I'd have to agree on that front.



Hmm, I might have to look into those.



Up until you lose focus for half a second and get killed. Or it just kills you to make sure you're still paying attention. I love that game.


I'd have to say Oblivion, in all honesty, just because of my lengthy list of dead characters. Though I suppose playing Dead is Dead means it's self inflicted difficulty.

Dragon's Dogma; for the postgame bit where everything goes dark and evil. That was hellish.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask; that 3 day time limit.

My definition of hard as "not being able to save" maybe wasn´t fair in all honestly. I just tried to make a point

Many of the NES games really are hard in terms of gameplay. Many jumps requires you to stand on the absolute edge of the last pixel or otherwise you won´t make it. And some games combined hard gameplay with only three lives and no continues which is too much for me even today

Try out Street Fighter 2010 and tell me that game is easy

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. Oof. Getting not too bad, but man, those freaking bosses.

Just google for "Nintendo hard" - says it all. Some games were intended for arcade machines, and had ways to prevent you playing too long without "putting in another coin".

I'm with you. Although the hardest part of Metro Last Light was when I beat it on Ranger Hardcore and didn't get the achievement. Accepting that a tech glitch hosed me out of my online merit badge for playing through the most challenging game I've ever played was pretty difficult.

Still love the game and Metro 2033 did the same thing to me. I ended up randomly getting the achievement like two weeks later while I was playing something else.

Mario. It'll always be the hardest [censored] game in existence lol


Assasin's creed was pretty hard too.

Well, it doesn´t make it easier that the princess is always in another friggin castle!

Shadowgate (NES) was pretty hard, at least for me. Figuring out where to find and use everything and how to fit the pieces together wasn´t so easy first time. And anyone without prior knowledge of the game who tells me they´ve played through it and not died once is a liar, pure and simple!

Ultima VIII.

It was exceedingly hard to muster the will to continue to play it with all the bugs and stupid jump action (think jumping onto moving platforms hovering over lava with controls that only let you jump in one of four directions with a purely random jump length).

That aside, I'd say Deus Ex. Depending on how you play it, it can be forbiddingly difficult.

Really? It does have a few hard moments but I never found it to be hard. Did you do a non-lethal playthrough?

Haven´t played it myself, but Dragon´s Lair for the NES. Insanely hard!

Counter,counter,counter,counter,counter,counter,counter,hide,wait.

Yeah,that's not that hard.

Well, there were those moments when the sometimes dodgy camera angles and the occasionally overly-finicky controls decided you weren't pointing in quite the right direction(0.1 degree out) and launched you off in completely the wrong direction, possibly to your doom.

But outside of that, yeah, challenge wasn't one of it's strong points.

Considering that I just spent a good chunk of the last hour and a half being massacred by Geth, I feel that I should probably add Mass Effect 2 on veteran difficulty to this list. Damn, but that Colossus boss fight is tough...

Yup, this. Those old-school games were harsh in terms like this. Kids today don't know how easy they've got it.

My answer: Tomb Raider III.

I for one am glad that those days are over. I remember leaving my Nintendo on for days at a time in order to keep it from resetting all of my progress.

I´m definitely with you on this! It´s not about difficulty per say however and I shouldn´t have opened up this thread with that

I´ve mentioned that I have Mr Gimmick, a rare NES game. What I haven´t said is that it is a very, very difficult game to play. It requires good timing and mastering some very tricky moves. The monsters come after you (they don´t just wander around like goombas) and if you want the good ending you need to collect six different artifacts. All are hidden very well and to find them isn´t easy at all. Oh, and if you die and use the continue feature even once, you cannot get the good ending even if you get all six artifacts!

New challenge: I dare anyone to play Silver Surfer on the NES. If that´s not a hard game for you, you definitely have my respect!

Oh, and no turbo controller!

Pshhht. Try out Fester's Quest. Then when it breaks you and makes you wish it didn't exist, remember that I've beaten it. This horrid playing and excruciatingly challenging game was part of my childhood.

Oh, yeah. Fester´s Quest is another abomniation And you´ve beaten it!!?? Damn, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, man

Now go and play Silver Surfer, the game where you have no life bar and where you´re not allowed to touch anything

Or why not play Ghost n´ Goblins? Not a too easy game either

Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde on the NES

Oh, yeah!

Some games really are too much, especially for little kids!

I'm 13 for pete's sake!

Sigh. Once again I didn´t mean anyone here. I meant some games are way too hard considering they´re meant for kids (from 7 and up), I didn´t mean you specifically.

Sometimes I think I should just stop making posts here. Everyone seems to think I take shots at them all the time and that I´m being serious

My mistake mirocu,please forgive me.

That´s ok

Nobody leaves. I will hunt anyone down that attempts to exit these forums and drag them back. Except for almost everyone who leaves.

Anyways this thread has inspired me. I think I need to buy an old school NES system (mine gave out years ago) and play some of these games over again. My NES collection is like 40+ games.

40+ games!??

You gotta, oh please you gotta give me a full list!!!

I still have my original NES console in full working condition. Surprising really, considering how many games me and my brother have played on it!

I never had Silver Surfer or Dr Jekyll and mr Hyde but I´ve seen footage on youtube and those games are not kind ones

My dear Mirocu, I'd NEVER think that!

To answer your question, yes I tried a non-lethal playthrough. I do know it's possible, but it is hard. It would be easy if you had unlimited bio energy, you could just get an invisibility mod (IMHO beats the radar cloak, especially if you can just snipe off cameras) and you'd be good to go. But of course it doesn't work like that. And getting close enough to people to knock them out can be difficult. And if you should them with one of the rare tranq darts, they do take a while to drop. But I have to admit I occasionally enjoy the challenge

To be fair part of them are duplicates because my brother had a NES as well. They're all in storage because I haven't had a working system in so long. Unfortunately there are several small parts that stop working inside them that lead to power flashing off/on and or randomly cutting out/freezing. On a console that you can't save your game on it is more than a little annoying.

Also, I just read that there are over 700 titles on the NES. I never would have guessed there were so many.

How much does a NES go for now anyways?

It varies alot depending on condition and such of course, but a good one here can go for about 400-500 up to over 1000 crowns. Don´t know what that is in dollar, though...

The Castlevania games. What makes these games so hard is one simple thing; when you get hit you fly backwards like ten feet and there´s always a pit behind you nullifying your full health bar

I´d like to mention the Point Lookout DLC. What makes it hard is the enemies that deal much more damage than anything in the Capital Wasteland. The DLC itself may not be that hard but the enemies make it hard to survive at least. I´ve never spammed so many stimpaks as when I got to that place!

And also, Arena. Since your character start out so weak it can be very difficult to survive in the beginning. Haven´t played it through since I´m concentrating on leveling up so I can´t say if the MQ is difficult or not. I´ve heard though that some dungeons can be somewhat hard to find the right way through.

I got the same impression from that DLC.

Can´t believe I haven´t mentioned Shadowgate for the NES. It´s simply the greatest game I´ve ever played on this system, it has an atmosphere that´s undiscribably good.

But it´s also very hard and it´s so easy to die in this game. You think that sword is your primary weapon? Try and use it and think again Unless you know exactly what to do at any given moment, you´re gonna see the Grim Reaper. Some puzzles are pretty hard to solve and sometimes you just have to figure out by trial and error what works and what doesn´t. Though most of the time you can figure it out if you examine the items and environments closely enough.

Very good game but also very hard, at least it was for me. Though as long as you remember the whole game you could probably go through it without dying once. But stay on your toe, the slightest slip of your mind could mean your last!

I seriously hate the jumping control and landing detection in the Simpsons games...

So hard to make the mark and those platforms are so tiny!

Another game with a very bad jumping and platform landing detection which makes it hard to play is Ice Climber. Fun game but oh god, is it hard to make a jump! Funny enough, apparently the same guys who coded that game also coded Super Mario Bros which had great jumping.

The clouds on the higher levels also move so fast and the jumping being so bad doesn´t really help then But it´s still a fun game

Tried to play through Days of Thunder, frustratingly hard game even now. Made it through second to last stage but by that time I had not won a single race and my sponsor pulled out, i.e Game Over. Last stage would have been the first stage again though.

I was placed third in total so that´s something anyway and finally I had made a serious effort to play it through. Never did that when I was a kid so it was due

NaissanceE. In particular, the third map, 'Breath Compression'. Trying to time a race through a linear set of rotating fan blades and commutators so that you get to safety before the air currents pick up and suck you to your death. Over. And over. Again. I ended up using the cheats to get past that one.

Actually, on reflection, NaissanceE was terribly disappointing. It promised us ('Going Down') a huge and strange world to explore and get lost in, but you ended up being railroaded through just a sliver of it.

Dead Space.

However, I may have brought that on myself. There's an achievement if you go the whole game with only the gun you get in the beginning. I decided I wanted it on my first play through. That was a very bad idea, though I did finally get that achievement!

Wasn´t that challenge better suited for the second playthrough?

It would have been. I got so mad. It took me ages to beat it and my husband finished in under a week because he was using the better weapons. >.>

Dark Souls. Got it because they gave it away free on Xbox Live. Definitely a difficult game. To the extent of not being any fun. Entertaining for a brief time perhaps but it gets annoying getting repeatedly killed by 1-2 enemies while trying to progress a level. Even the training (ringing the bells in the first map) is so brutal it takes hours to complete and it is a relatively small area.

Kid Icarus for the NES. I just can´t get past the first level!

Playing Starcraft in my laptop.

Without a mouse.

G'yeah, boy, wassup wit y'all.

Lol. You just changed the way you play

This. So, so, so this!

This speaks to me on a spiritual level

That is my exact experience with Dark Souls ahaha. After a while you just lose the will to try again.


State of Decay is pretty difficult. If a character dies then you better hope you have some other high level backups, especially later in the game when there are loads of really tough zombies. Fantastic game though

Agreed on State of Decay. Great game all around and IMO one of the few zombie games worth playing.

Tetris is kinda hard when it speeds up...